She dimpled at him, and replied she and her two young charges had to catch the same afternoon train up to John Bull. Going to the big town to have your tonsils out or going to the small town to pick up a federal want involved the same tedious layover in the middle-sized town they were stuck in.
The young boy wanted to know what they’d be asked to eat within a quarter hour. Longarm explained, “The two ladies with you will have a chicken and rice dish that ain’t as unusual to their tastes as, say, chicken baked in bitter chocolate, or hot tamales. In view of your own delicate state, I ordered you a sort of hearty dessert made out of fruit preserves and cottage cheese.”
Longarm could see he hadn’t hurt the ten-or eleven-year-old gal’s feelings by describing her as a lady. So he asked her directly what she’d like to wash her grub down with.
The young gal blushed and allowed she’d like some coffee with her grub. The older gal, to her credit, just smiled knowingly and allowed they’d all have the same, with extra cream. Longarm didn’t want to discuss goat’s milk or worse. So he only warned them they’d likely get the condensed kind as he made a mental note to ask the old Mexican gal to bust open a can no matter what it might cost.
By the time the fat lady got back with their platters so he could tell her that, and so he could order caf negro for his own fried eggs with pepper sauce, raw onion, grated cheese, and Lord only knows what else, he’d learned the pretty young gal was the older sister of the two kids. She’d allowed her name was Flora Munro, but that she had no idea why one needed pot holders served with otherwise sensible-looking grub.
Longarm chuckled and explained, “They ain’t pot holders, ma’am. I told you they’d serve you tortillas instead of bread or soda crackers. They’re made something like our pancakes, but out of corn, soaked in lye water before it’s ground up. They taste less like white blotting paper if you dunk one end in your plate before you bite it off.”
The boy, who was named Joel, said he sure liked whatever on earth he was eating and bragged that he’d eaten tortillas before. He said there were some Mexican kids up by John Bull, even though most of the neighbors were Cousin Jacks or New Englanders like the three of them.
Longarm didn’t ask why. The hardrock country was filled with the mining men from Cornwall who everyone called Cousin Jack because you could hardly hire an out-of-work tin miner from Cornwall to dig some American color for you without him saying he had a cousin named Jack back home who could drill granite with his pecker and shatter the face by farting in the bore hole.
While Longarm and the others killed time nibbling and sipping as the noonday sun baked the rail yards outside Longarm learned more than he figured he needed to know about the dinky mining community up at the far end—what Colorado folks called a park. In other parts they call such a flat-bottomed mountain valley a dale, a glen, maybe a hollow.
It came as no great surprise that most of the settlers up around John Bull were farmers or stock folk. A mining camp of any size made a fair market for butter, eggs, and produce, even when you had to freight it. Hardrock miners made three dollars a day and fed them selves and their families properly. So Flora’s family had only been one of the many westbound New Englanders who’d settled in around the silver operation pioneered by that British syndicate. New England farmers were used to plowing up boulders. So they tended to accept the Rocky Mountains in a more philosophical way than some.
Flora said her bunch sold dairy, produce and eggs up in John Bull, but shipped most of their barley down this way, where it commanded a way higher price. Barley didn’t bake into such wondrous bread in a kitchen range. But it surely made swell beer malt. When Longarm asked if they’d heard nobody was allowed to use any other grain but barley in the Rhineland if they aimed to call it beer, young Joel proudly declared the beer brewed from John Bull barley malt was better than any High Dutch brand. Then he added that cow thieves came all over creation to steal the swell beef they raised on the swell mountain parklands.
Longarm didn’t ask the kid to elaborate. Kids were always bragging on how tough their neighborhoods were, and cow thieves were operating everywhere you could raise cows, thanks to the recent rise in beef prices back East now that the depression of the ‘70s had given way to happier paydays. So far, nobody had asked what he did for a living or why he was headed the same way. So he hadn’t said. Jawing about being a lawman could get tedious, even when you lied.
He introduced the three of them to tuna pie for dessert. The kids thought it was funny that you made tuna pie with red tuna cactus fruit instead of fish if you baked Mexican style. Then it was almost time to start thinking about that narrow-gauge to John Bull. So he paid up and they headed over to the loading platform, with Longarm toting the one overnight bag Flora had been hiding under her calico skirts until he’d noticed it. She kept pestering him to let her pay for their share of that cafetin tab. Some few gals were like that. He’d never in this world take their money, of course, but he had to admire a gal for offering.
By the time they’d made it over to the sun-baked platform, a few other fellow travelers had gotten there ahead of them. Flora knew an old lady and a young homesteading couple. So she introduced Longarm all around, and as it turned out, the old lady hadn’t known the younger couple up until then, and was mighty pleased she’d be able to gossip with others instead of riding all that way with nobody to talk to.
Longarm was almost tempted to call out and include the only other passenger waiting for the narrow-gauge. it seemed a shame to leave a clean-shaven and neatly dressed young gent out. But nobody else seemed to notice the obvious stranger among them, and so Longarm hesitated to act forward as he tried to figure out why that jasper in the ready-made suit and Colorado-creased Stetson looked so familiar. The gent’s commonplace face and tall lean build didn’t fit any federal wants of recent urgency. But Longarm couldn’t get it out of his head that the cuss reminded him of some damned body.
Then their diamond-stacked Shay locomotive puffed into view with its brass bell clanging, and Longarm forgot the other man in that three-piece suit as he helped Flora and that old lady aboard. As the bunch of them were settling in aboard the one passenger car of the freight and passenger combination, Longarm heard the mysterious stranger asking the conductor what time they’d get him up to the John Bull mine.
The conductor promised they’d make it before four that afternoon. Conductors were about as honest as a cowhand dancing with a gal who was worried about her reputation. But Longarm was reassured by that lean stranger’s voice, Save for the way shorter Ben Thompson, out of Yorkshire by way of Texas, there were few masters of trigonometry west of the Mississippi with British accents. So it seemed far more likely the well-dressed cuss was on some chore for the owners of the John Bull diggings. He’d spoken more London-like than your average Cousin Jack from Cornwall. So he was likely some sort of engineer. That sea chest he’d boarded with was likely loaded with his drafting tools or chemistry kit. Silver mines were trickier than most. Longarm figured they were joshing when they said you needed a gold mine to operate a silver mine, but he knew they were always having to call in some experts to tell them what in thunder they were up to down there.
The train started with a sudden jerk as if to take a run at the nine-percent grade ahead before it got to it. The results were an unexpected pleasure as the pretty Flora Munro wound up in Longarm’s lap for as long as it took them to untangle, with everybody but the two of them laughing. Flora was blushing fit to bust, and Longarm felt sort of warm around the ears as she asked in vain for young Joel to trade places with her.