But big sisters didn’t hold the rank it took to make a nine-year-old boy forgo a seat by the window aboard a moving train, even when the scenery outside was less interesting.
Chapter 3
As they circled Lookout Mountain the conductor got around to punching their tickets, and Longarm asked in a desperately casual tone who that other gent, now smoking out on the platform, might be. The conductor agreed he talked like a lime juicer and seemed interested in American railroading. But that was all he knew about the jasper.
Joel opined he was likely a cow thief. Flora told him to behave himself, but the barley grower across from them confirmed that there had been purloined beef up their way.
The nester, Colman by name, painted the usual picture of a few earlier and hence bigger stockmen not at all happy about that fool Homestead Act, but even more suspicious of the smaller stockmen who’d moved in on their federally owned and hence open range. Neighbors in the business of producing butter, eggs, or barley weren’t as prone to increase a budding beef herd by roping with a “community loop” that included anything that looked at all like a cow.
Colman opined that the few big stockmen in the park were stewing over natural losses on rugged range, or at most, a few head stolen by the trash whites you generally found in any good-sized rural community. When Colman casually asked why Longarm was headed up to John Bull, it seemed wise for a lawman with a certain rep to answer just as casually that he wasn’t in either the beef or barley business. Stealing either was a local offense. But local folks who’d lost any faith at all in a county sheriff’s department were always pestering a federal deputy to hunt strays or adjudicate water rights.
He’d wired ahead he was on his way to pick up the notorious Bunny McNee, who’d been witnessed holding horses for more ferocious outlaws in the course of many a robbery, but had been arrested in John Bull for trying to sneak out of their one hotel without paying. So they wouldn’t have sent him on to the county jail or turned him loose on bail before a more serious lawman could get there. But Longarm knew he’d never be able to return with the rascal before the next train back to Golden built up a morning head of steam, and he didn’t want to spend the evening speculating about less important crooks.
Even Colman’s mousy young wife seemed sure nobody could move any substantial number of cows out of their secluded park without anyone noticing. The lush sod grew thick and springy in what they called an intermontane climate. But once you drove anything with hooves up the wooded slopes, the thin layer of forest duff over usually soft damp sandy loam wouldn’t hide the signs of your furtive drive from your average schoolmarm. So it hardly seemed likely too many cows could be all that gone. Cows were stolen to be sold for money. Nobody had any call to collect cows like stamps. But Longarm still caught himself in the act of asking whether John Bull beef was shipped out by rail or driven to market through all that pretty scenery outside.
The old lady said the railroad they were riding had helped its greedy self to the one practical right-of-way and that she and the other cow folks were mad as wet hens about that.
Colman made some soothing noises, and explained in a calmer tone how the railroad surveyors had had little choice in their route, and if anything, had shortened the original trail considerably with a cut here, a tunnel there, and more than one trestle straight across what had once been a pesky dip indeed. He said, “It hardly costs all that much more to ship beef down to the main line by narrow-gauge, if you add up the weight your cows lose on such a rugged drive. The old way was never more than a single-file trail, and the railroad’s a real blessing to us barley growers. Packing barley that far to market by mule train simply ain’t practical.”
Longarm didn’t ask why. Everyone knew pack critters had to graze for hours on free grass or be fed in far less time on grain somebody had to pay for. To pack, say, two hundred pounds of barley more than, say, sixty twisted miles, and eat as much all the way home, meant a good percentage of said barley rendered into mule shit scattered too inconveniently to gather for your rose garden. So even where farm folk moaned and groaned about rail freight charges, shipping produce more than fifty miles by rail had the dustier ways beat.
Longarm was about to inquire what this line charged by the ton when they suddenly plunged into a dark tunnel and he found it a mite more interesting to consider stealing a kiss from the perfumed temptation seated beside him.
He resisted the sudden impulse, of course. The main difference between a sensible human being and a dog was the ability to control such sudden silly notions. Then Flora was saying, “Oh, how beautiful!” as they came out the far side of the tunnel to view a wide beaver flat under a thick carpet of purple for furlongs in all directions.
Colman’s wife admired the “wild lavender” as well. So Longarm and the old lady just exchanged weary glances. She was the one rude enough to say, “Lavender my foot! That’s larkspur, and I take back what I may have said in haste about this railroad. Where on earth could all that cow-killing larkspur have come from?”
Longarm gently told her, “The old countries across the main ocean, ma’am. The oldtime Greeks and Romans knew better than to let livestock graze on the pretty stuff, albeit they used it to kill lice, and you can still buy larkspur lotion at the drugstore for that. I don’t know how or why larkspur wound up out this way. But as you can see, it surely has.”
The old lady grumped, “I’d like to get my hands on the fool who planted the first Russian tumbleweed in our cow country too. Things were much nicer in these hills before thoughtless folks messed ‘em up.”
Longarm quietly observed some Ute and Kimoho folks he knew had said the same thing about recent changes in their Shining Mountains. Then young Joel said he knew all about larkspur lotion because he and his kid sis had been sent home from school with nits more than once.
Flora gasped and protested, “It’s those white trash children from around the silver mines who keep bringing nits to school with them, the unwashed things.”
The Colmans and the little old lady seemed to agree on that at least. Longarm felt sure the wives of the high-paid hardrock miners would say the kids off the surrounding farms and stock spreads were the ones in need of a bath and infested with lice. So in sum, the remote settlement of John Bull was shaping up as a typical company town surrounded by hardscrabble hill-country folk. He wasn’t fixing to write a history of the place, or even mess with Flora Munro here, as tempting as she smelled. For she was a home gal as well as sort of country, and he’d told Henry he’d be back with Bunny McNee before old Billy Vail returned from that conference.
Talking about poisonous flowers had gotten the country folk into a conversation about such country matters as the local climate, like New England in the summer with the winters sort of weird. Way milder than you might expect when a sudden shift wasn’t dumping as much as a dozen feet of snow between your back door and the shithouse. The high peaks all around tended to shelter the intermontane ranges from the bone-chilling wolf winds of the prairies to the east. Colorado liked to call itself the Switzerland of the West. But from what he’d read or heard from greenhorns, he figured they ought to compare it more to that Austro-Hungarian Empire, with some parts alpine while a heap of the Empire was this big prairie called an alfold, complete with cowboys who dressed sort of outlandishly.
He didn’t tell his fellow travelers. He doubted they’d care, and Flora would doubtless be shocked, or think he was bragging, if he told her about himself and those immigrant sisters from Budapest. It had been the blond one who’d told him about the funny pants Hungarian cowboys wore. Folks talked about all sorts of odd things in bed as they were resting up between times.