Longarm felt damn near naked as he stepped off the narrow gauge Plains and Pacific coach at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. He wore his usual .45 and carried a derringer in his watch pocket, but for the first time in a considerable while he’d been forced to leave his Winchester and well-worn old McClellan saddle behind.
Baseball players, after all, have scant need of saddles or of rifles.
Dammit, if there was any way Longarm could have gotten Billy to change his mind … But of course there hadn’t been. Too late for that, the boss said. All they could do now was for Longarm to meet this Douglas McWhortle fellow as planned and hope for the best.
And so Longarm had taken a Denver and Rio Grande train south, a Kansas and Pacific eastward, and then the chuff-a-clunk little Plains and Pacific coach south again and now here he was.
But he still would rather be in Leadville, not that anyone else seemed to care.
Medicine Lodge—he’d been there a number of times before—was an uncommonly pretty town with an air of permanence if not of plenty. The thing was the stores and the homes here appeared to belong to folks who actually cared about them. This was no boom-town that would flower briefly and then die. A body could tell that just by looking around. Which Longarm did for a moment to try and get his bearings.
The downtown consisted of a stone courthouse, a fairly imposing bank made of brick and carved stone trim, a collection of stores selling hats and hardware, groceries and leather goods, plows, pumps, whatever.
There were four saloons and three churches in view from where he stood and, beside the courthouse, a tiny stone building scarcely larger than a backyard shitter that had steel barred windows and a sign over the door reading “Jail.” It was a good thing jail is a four-letter word. If they’d tried to post a sign saying “Calabozo” they’d have had to add an extension onto the place just to have room enough for the extra letters.
Not that a simple baseball player would have any interest in the local jail or in the town marshal who ran it.
One thing that Longarm did not see was a place called the Bradley Arms. Which was where he was supposed to meet McWhortle.
Longarm sighed. The quickest way to get this over with, he figured, was to get it started.
He lit a cheroot, took a fresh grip on his carpetbag, and went in search of the Bradley Arms and of a fellow name of McWhortle.
Douglas McWhortle wasn’t at home at the Bradley Arms—despite the fancy name it turned out to be no more than a large boardinghouse—so Longarm parked his carpetbag there in the care of the heavily mustached proprietors lady named Mrs. Finney—and followed her directions to where she said McWhortle should be busy working.
Longarm wasn’t so sure about it being work the man was doing because all he found in the big field behind the Hope Methodist Church was a bunch of grown men playing at games like so many kids. It didn’t much look like work to Longarm. But then what the hell did he know about baseball anyway?
“McWhortle?” he asked the oldest looking fellow in the bunch.
“That man there,” the oddly dressed gent responded, pointing to a kid who looked like he was still within hollering distance of his teens.
Every one of this crowd of a dozen or so was dressed in flannel. Flannel britches and flannel shirts and ducky little flannel billed caps so dumb looking that Longarm figured they would be a marvel for anyone wanting to get into some recreational bar fights.
The flannel uniforms had thin stripes running vertically through the cloth of some dark maroon shade. It was at least as hot here as back in Denver and the flannel clothing looked about as cool and comfortable to wear in this weather as so many blast furnaces. The ball players acted like they didn’t know any better than to wear flannel clothes in summer. And hell, maybe they didn’t. Longarm was commencing to suspect, as if he hadn’t had the thought twenty times already, that this was not the best assignment Billy Vail ever gave him. Now if he’d just been up in Lead ville …
“You’re McWhortle?”
“That I am, mister. What can I do for you?”
Longarm glanced around at all the ball players, most of whom had sidled over close to listen in on what the stranger among them had to say. “Could we have a word in private, please?”
McWhortle gave his boys a wink and a grin but nodded to Longarm and motioned him off to the side. “Get on with the fielding practice while I see what this gentleman wants. Ted, you take the bat. Hit some slow grounders for the infield and when you get tired of that pop some high ones for the outfield.”
A lanky redhead with freckles and a nose that looked like it got broken on a pretty regular basis picked up a chunk of wood and a bag of baseballs and waved the rest of the bunch out into the grassy field. McWhortle motioned for Longarm to follow and ambled off toward the shade—mighty damned welcome shade so far as Longarm was concerned—of a small oak in the side yard of the church.
“Now what is it I can do for you, Mister …?”
Longarm introduced himself, and McWhortle began to chuckle. “You’re Sergeant Vail’s friend then?”
“Marshal Vail, not sergeant,” Longarm corrected.
“Oh yes, sorry. I, uh,” he grinned, “to tell you the truth, deputy, I mistook you for the local briber.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Of course you wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about, would you?”
“I reckon I could agree with that, Mr. McWhortle.”
“You see, we are a traveling professional club. Good players, really. Not big league-caliber perhaps, but far and away above the level of the local bumpkins we play against. But more often than you might think there is some local bigwig, usually a blowhard but some of them would surprise you, who thinks local honor must be upheld.” The young club manager’s grin got all the bigger. “These gents think so strongly about this that they come around just regular as clockwork and offer to bribe us to throw the game.”
“An’ just how is it that you respond to these offers, Mr. McWhortle?”
The fellow laughed. “We take the money, of course. Whatever they offer. After all, we’re in this trying to make a living. And then just as naturally we play our usual game. And usually win, of course.”
“An’ if the fella who paid you the bribe complains?”
“And admit in public that he paid out a bribe? They won’t generally do that. Besides, we make it a point to get out of a town just as quick as we can once a game is over. Among other things it cuts down on fights between our boys and the disgruntled locals.” McWhortle chuckled. “It’s amazing how testy some of them get after we trounce them on the field. They seem to think a show of manhood is in order. So we’ve learned to schedule our games so a coach or a train is pulling out within half an hour or so of our game being ended.”
“An’ you thought I was one o’ these-“
“No offense intended, I assure you. I just didn’t expect … I mean, I was expecting a ball player, you know. And forgive me if I say this, deputy, but you don’t have the look. You aren’t—how can I put this?—loose enough.. I mean, you look like you might actually take an interest in things other than whiskey and women and baseball.”
It was Longarm’s turn to grin. “I can hold my own with a clear majority o’ those things, Mr. McWhortle. If that makes you feel any better. But as for me bein’ a ball player, well, there’s been a little misunderstanding about that.”
“Hold on a minute, deputy. I have to go chew Caleb’s ass off. You can tell me what’s going on, and what all you need, soon as I get back.”
Longarm nodded and the youngster—he still looked awfully short in the years department but acted like he was damn sure in charge in spite of that—trotted off to first growl at one of his players and then, much more calmly, teach the man just exactly how McWhortle wanted some small point of play handled.
Longarm stood in the entirely welcome protection of the shade and enjoyed a cheroot while he waited for McWhortle to return.