“I wouldn’t. I’d be mad as hell. But I’d do what had to be done to get the job done.”
Davis looked away and shook his head. “Sheeeeet!” he said in a long, peeling burst. “Damnit damnit damnit!”
“I’m sorry, Austin—I don’t see no other way for it.”
Davis shrugged. “It can’t be helped. What you say makes sense. When you want me to clear out?”
“Well, not right away. You still got to move those cattle from the Mexican side over here to the quarantine pens. I reckon that would be in the morning. Can you manage that by then?”
“I don’t see why not. We’re holding them close-herded on some good grass.”
“What kind of shape are they in?”
Davis glanced at him. “What the hell do you care! These ain’t your cattle, Longarm. Remember?”
Longarm laughed slightly. “Guess I got carried away.” He lifted his glass to his lips and took a drink. “I guess the next step is for me to go see Caster and let him know the cattle have arrived. We’re going to have an argument. He’s going to want me to give him the money right now, and I ain’t willing to do it before the cattle are in his pens.”
“He ain’t going to want the money before then.”
“Why not?”
“Because. Once he’s got your cattle in his pens, he knows damn good and well that you have to pay him.”
“I reckon you’re right,” Longarm agreed. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He lifted his glass and finished the rest of the whiskey. He stood up. “I reckon I better get on over and see him.”
“You better watch out for San Diego. Either one of them. I hear that little one who acts like a dandy is meaner than his brother. Raymond? Is that his name? I hear he’s a back-alley bushwhacker. Uses a shotgun.”
“Right now I ain’t too worried about either one of the San Diego brothers. I figure Caster don’t want nothing to happen to me until he’s got my cash in his hands. Say, I got the feeling that the cafe owner, Raymond, and Jasper White are on some kind of dodge. Are they smuggling?”
Davis shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. But if it’s illegal, they’re doing it. I heard they were smuggling gold. But then I also heard they were smuggling peons up to big cities like Chicago and New York City to work as street cleaners at two bits a day. You can get nearly any kind of gossip around this town that you’re looking for. I ain’t really been concentrating on them.”
“I reckon I better get,” Longarm said. He put on his hat and walked across the room. With his hand on the knob he stopped and said, “By the way, what did you have to pay for those cattle? Jay Caster might ask. And if they were my cattle, I’d know.”
“Right close to seven dollars a head, depending on the final count. I spent six thousand nine hundred and some odd dollars for the herd, buying it in different lots, first one place and then the other. By the time I’m through, I’ll have spent about seventy-five hundred of the coastal cattlemen’s money.”
“Are the cattle worth it?”
Davis shook his head. “Not within a mile. They won’t bring them in like they are now, and they sure as hell ain’t going to want to pay to take them through regular quarantine. The only thing they can do is turn them back and sell them in Mexico. They’ll lose two or three dollars a head doing that.”
“It appears they’re buying justice pretty dearly.”
Davis disagreed. “Not when you figure it costs them a fortune when they lose a herd of beef worth thirty dollars a head to Mexican tick fever. We get this operation shut down, or run clean, and it will have been worth the price. Though I do think it is a poor comment on the state of government when a citizen has to go out and pay to have the law enforced.”
Longarm smiled thinly. “You mean you don’t think it’s fair, Austin?”
“Go to hell, Longarm. Just go straight to hell. I hope that half-breed blows a hole through you that a small horse could get his head into. Just get on out of here. Go collect your glory. Go set it up so you look like the hero.”
“Now you can go to hell, Mister Davis.” Longarm started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” Davis said, putting up his hand. “You never said if you’d figured out how Caster gets one herd through in a week’s time. After coding them with that paint. Paint looks mighty permanent to me. How does he get red paint to turn to green?”
“I never even tried to find out. I told you all I’d been doing. How he does it is a question we can ask him once we got him in jail.”
“Oh? You mean I’m going to get to see him behind bars?”
Longarm gave him a sour look and stepped out into the hall, pulling the door to behind him. Davis had said that he’d taken some guff off of Caster and hadn’t liked it. Well, so had he. He hadn’t mentioned it because there’d been other things to say, but he was going to take some personal satisfaction in putting the spurs to the smart-mouthed Caster. Saying he was an officer of the law. Yeah, he was an officer of the law all right, an outlaw officer.
Jay Caster was wearing sleeve garters. He was seated behind his desk with some kind of a ledger in front of him and a nub pen in his hand. Once again Longarm took a seat unbidden. Caster looked at him silently for a long time, slowly chewing his plug of tobacco. Finally he leaned over and spit in the bucket by his desk, hitched up his sleeves so as to protect his cuffs from the ink on the pages of the ledger, and then went back to his work, all the while not saying a word to Longarm.
Longarm crossed his legs and put his hat on his knee, got out a cigarillo and lit it. His tooth was starting to ache again, though very mildly. He put that down to the upset Austin Davis had caused him. He looked at Caster. The man was wearing a white shirt with a stiff collar and a foulard tie. A gray suit coat was hung over the back of his chair. Longarm figured he had business later that day. Maybe James Mull was coming in to ask after matters. That seemed doubtful, but one thing Longarm didn’t doubt: he wasn’t going to sit there all day and watch Jay Caster scribble figures in a book. He cleared his throat. Caster didn’t look up. “Uh, Mister Caster,” Longarm began, “I reckon you ought to know that I-“
Without glancing up, Caster said, “Hold it, will you? This is important and I got to get it right.”
Longarm subsided, but it put him on slow boil. He sat there smoking and watching Caster. He could bide his time. Hell, if he had to, he could wait on this sonofabitch a week, a month, six months if he had to. But, in the end, Jay Caster would be doing something else besides making marks in a ledger.
Finally Caster put his pen down and, after carefully blotting his last entry, closed the ledger. He sat back in his chair, raised his arms over his head, and stretched and yawned. Then he put his arms down, reached in his desk drawer, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. A glass followed and Caster poured himself out a drink. He made no move to offer one to Longarm. He corked the bottle, put it back in the drawer, then lifted the glass and drank off half of it. After that he belched and put a wooden toothpick in his mouth. Finally he looked at Longarm. “Whata you want, Long?”
Your hide nailed to the barn door, Longarm wanted to tell him. Instead he fiddled with his hat for a moment, then said, “I reckoned to let you know that the money I wired for has come in.”
“You got it with you?”
Longarm pulled his head back. “Walk around with five thousand dollars in this town? Not very damn likely. No, it’s at the bank. Besides, I thought I wasn’t supposed to give you the money.”
“You ain’t. What about yore cattle?”
“Them too. My cattle gatherer come in just after noon. He’s holding the herd in Mexico, down by the river.”
“How many?”
“A thousand head, give or take a dozen. Won’t know until we count them into your pens.”
“You ain’t paid him yet?”