So they had parted that way, and now he sat in the same saloon and at the same table he’d occupied on that disastrous day some two weeks past when Mr. Jenkins had begun casting glances his way. He hadn’t planned it as a man would who had started a job and hadn’t completed it and was determined to come back to finish. He had not said to himself, “I’m going to go into that saloon, sit down and have a drink, and catch the train this time. This time, I’m not going to Mexico on some wild-goose chase.”
No, it had been much simpler than that. The train had been reported late and he thought it would be better to be sitting drinking whiskey while he waited, than hanging around a train depot.
Still he did find it funny. He was not much looking forward to getting home to Denver, in spite of the lady dressmaker he was very fond of who lived there, the one who lived in the same boarding house and liked to be taken unawares. She liked to play dress up and then dress down. Longarm was a broad-minded man. If what he was after was at the end of it, he was quite willing to wind through a rabbit warren as cheerfully as the next man. What he mainly dreaded about getting back to Denver was trying to explain this whole mess to Billy Vail and to write the report and, after that, to make out his expense voucher. That was going to be some piece of business. He’d turned his horse back in to the horse trader he’d bought him from and got one hundred seventy-five dollars in return. He figured he could just write that twenty-five dollars off. Billy Vail would say, “Twenty-five dollars to rent a horse for a week? Are you crazy? Do you think the United States government is made out of money?” And of course, there’d been no hope of shipping the horse back to Denver even though it was, technically, government property. Billy would have thrown a fit over that.
Longarm sighed and poured some more whiskey in his glass. It was coming up time to go back over to the depot. He sipped slowly at the whiskey, which may have been the best Laredo had to offer but was nowhere near as good as his Maryland whiskey that he was now out of until he got home. He dreaded the trip, he dreaded the paperwork, he dreaded the kidding he was going to get about being taken hostage by a federal judge. He shook his head slowly to himself. He knew without even thinking hard about it that this was one that he was probably never going to hear the end of. Taken hostage? Him? Longarm? Wrapped up and tied with a red ribbon and delivered to a hacienda in Mexico? He wondered if there was any way he could lie his way out of it, but there didn’t seem to be any.
The saloon was almost as deserted as it had been the day he had been in there with Mr. Jenkins. He suddenly noticed a man standing at the bar, looking at him over his shoulder. The man was dressed in ordinary business clothes. He could have been a merchant, he could have been a drummer, he could have been a bank clerk. Longarm didn’t care what he was. The instant he saw the man looking at him, he threw down the last of his whiskey in his glass, picked up his valise, and walked straight out of the saloon as fast as he could go, heading for the depot. This was one train he wasn’t going to miss.