Constance Farnsworth nodded, but insisted, “Just the same, you made quite an impression on our Miss Dorman, and she’s younger and prettier than some of us.”
Longarm made her blush by quietly saying, “Younger, mebbe. I’ll be the judge of who’d be better-looking.”
The handsome widow hastily served him more cake as she flustered, “Beth Dorman is the one who seems so smitten by you. I warned her I’d heard gossip about the famous, or notorious, Longarm. She said she didn’t believe a word of it. She said she thinks you’re ever so gallant and that even if you were the ladies’ man some say you are, she wouldn’t care.”
Longarm asked if he could have more tea to go with his marble cake. She refilled his cup, demanding, “Well?”
He sighed and replied, “Well what? Are you asking if I mean to have my wicked way with a schoolmarm, ma’am?”
She nodded and confessed, red-faced, that she was.
Longarm said, “I don’t set bear traps for deer mice and I don’t cheat at strip poker with any gal. I’d make a play for your missing maid, or you yourself, before I’d take advantage of that poor little mouse you have running that school, no offense.”
She gasped, got her breath back, and replied, “I’m not sure whether I should feel offended or not. What have my maid and I got that poor Beth Dorman lacks?”
He said, “The ability to defend yourselves, ma’am. Even you keep referring to that schoolmarm as poor little Beth. She wouldn’t know how to say yes or no to a skunk in pants who shot sweet talk at her. It would be like taking advantage of a kid, and afterwards she’d likely bawl like one.
The widow archly demanded, “You mean you’re one of those brutes who love ‘em and leave ‘em, as we’ve heard?”
He shrugged and sipped some tea before he muttered, “I never came up here to brag on my love life, ma’am. I came to tell you what that English engineer might have told you, and I don’t care whether he’d have made a play for you, your maid, or Miss Dorman. He can’t, and I don’t mean to. So we’ll say no more about it and it’s getting late. So I’d best rejoin the riffraff down the slope and see who’d like to be loved and left.”
She rose with him, eyes hurt and confused, and demanded, “Have I said something to offend you, Custis? I was only teasing!”
He said, “It don’t matter. Like I said, I never came up here to play any sort of games, and come morning I’ll be headed down your railroad with that game-playing federal prisoner. So please don’t have your boys turn over any track before we can get out of here! I have seldom had such a simple mission turn out so complicated, and it serves me right for breaking the old soldier’s first three general orders!”
He saw she had no idea what he meant. So he said, “Never be first, never be last, and never, never volunteer!”
Chapter 11
A full moon was shining down on the little mountain town and somewhere a piano was tinkling pretty good as Longarm reached the foot of the slope. He knew that couldn’t be Red Robin, so he went to see who it was. It was that dismal time of a night in a strange town when a stranger just didn’t know what he ought to do before bedding down and to hell with it.
The tinkling rendition of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” led him to a saloon across the way from the one Red Robin had been playing at the night before. As he entered, Longarm saw the place was a tad bigger and hence seemed even emptier. He spied Oregon John and young Deputy Rothstein playing cards in a corner with four others he didn’t know. An oldtimer with a drinker’s nose stood alone at the far end of the bar, talking to something deep in his beer scuttle. There was nobody seated at the piano as it tinkled about Betsy and her lover, Ike. It was one of those player pianos you cranked up and put a penny in. He figured that was why he hadn’t heard anyone but Red Robin the night before. It made no sense to spend hard-earned pennies when a piano was playing free within earshot.
Longarm consulted his pocket watch and swore. The only gal in town he’d ever screwed was at home with her husband and fat in the bargain. Her waitress pal at the hotel, Matilda Walter, would still be on duty. He’d just told Widow Farnsworth why he didn’t mean to mess with that schoolmarm. Breaking in shy spinsters was an awesome responsibility. A thoughtless night of fun with a lonesome gal who read romantic novels could lead to murder, suicide, or both.
As he bellied up to the bar and ordered straight draft just to nurse while he smoked, the barkeep asked if he was that famous lawman who’d come up their way to hunt cow thieves for Granny Boggs.
Longarm finished lighting up and replied with a weary sigh, “Not hardly. I’m only trying to get out of here with a federal want they have over to the jail. I understand nobody but that nice old lady has charged anybody in these parts with stealing stock.”
The barkeep nodded as he slid Longarm’s scuttle across the zinc to him, saying, “Ain’t that many cows to steal since things have got so slow around here. With so many of the mining families pulling out, and those left falling on harder times, there just hasn’t been enough demand for prime beef to keep the smaller outfits in business. Granny Boggs and the lazy three bunch are about the last of the small stock outfits left. Everyone else has been selling off their cows and either switching to barley or leaving entire for other parts.”
Longarm didn’t much care. But they paid him to be nosy. So as he sipped and smoked he extracted a clearer picture of the local beef and barley situation.
It wasn’t all that unusual, or interesting. He’d already been told you had to sell produce in town, to a shrinking market, or ship by rail to the outside world at less profit.
He could see why barley growers such as Colman, who he’d met aboard the train, would manage to hang on and maybe even thrive, since barley grew so easy up this way with those big breweries down in Golden paying top dollar for good barley to malt. But it seemed just as certain the stockmen up this way would be hard pressed to compete on the Eastern market with big outfits such as the Hashknife or Jingle Bob that shipped far more stock at a time from their more conveniently located spreads.
But he listened anyway, just to be polite, and the barkeep confided that one fair-sized outfit had been buying out the smaller ones with a view to the closer Denver market.
Lowering his voice as he pointed his chin at Deputy Rothstein, the barkeep said, “Lots of well-to-do folks of the Hebrew persuasion living in West Denver these days. They only eat beef butchered by some sort of Judas priest, and he’ll only take prime stock, alive on the hoof, so’s he can inspect ‘em good before he gives them a bath and cuts their throats with an extra-clean blade. So old Jed Nolan over at the card table there with Nate Rothstein has contracted with that Judas priest in Denver for regular shipments of fat yearlings, a dozen or so head at a time.”
Longarm asked casually, “By rail?” and lost interest as soon as the local man verified this suspicion. There was no way in thunder a cow thief could shove stolen stock through the town yards and aboard one or two cattle cars without someone as suspicious as old Granny Boggs taking note of the brands. In any case, stealing cows wasn’t a federal offense unless you moved them (dead or alive) across a state line. So it was none of his beeswax whether, say, the Double Seven had its own proper bills of sale on every head it sold within the state of Colorado.
He was Sorry he’d ordered a scuttle instead of the smaller pint-sized schooner of draft. For the barkeep seemed intent on bending his ear on such a slow night, and he didn’t want to let his annoyance show, as it would if he ran off and left his bigger glass half filled.
He was saved from having to gulp more suds than he wanted when the darkness outside was rent by a fusillade of rapid gunfire. He made it four to six shots as Deputy Rothstein sprang up from the card table, met Longarm’s eyes, and cried, “Are you with me?”