Davis put a black queen on a red king. “Let’s see how it goes. I’ll do whatever you think is right. Though I’m damned if I can see how you’re going to get Mull and Caster hemmed up in the same corner. Not from the way you say Caster is acting about it.”
Longarm had been thinking about something. “You know,” he said, “Jasper is supposed to point out Mull, but he could point out anyone getting off that train. Could be a drummer or a banker for all we’d know.”
Davis paused with the deck in his hand, looking down at the cards laid out before him. “That’s true,” he agreed. “But what are you going to do about it?”
Longarm rubbed his jaw. “Maybe you ought to take a quick train ride to Brownsville and take a look at Mister Mull. Just go up there and then turn straight around and get on back.”
“Me see him without him seeing me?”
“Something like that.”
Davis shrugged and put a red six on a black seven. “I don’t see why not. Soon as I get the cattle crossed and counted out and penned. You reckon I ought to try and give you a phony count? Give Caster some ammunition that I’m a crook.”
Longarm rubbed his jaw again. “Let’s don’t complicate this damn mess anymore than we have to. It already looks like a set of mule harness the kids have gotten hold of. Snarled up and tangled.”
“Your tooth bothering you again?”
Longarm grimaced. “It flares up from time to time. I got some laudanum in my room, but that stuff makes you kind of goofy. Raoul San Diego has already got enough advantage on his side with me not knowing what he’s liable to pull. I’d just as soon have my wits about me.”
“How you see it falling out?”
Longarm shook his head. “I ain’t got the slightest idea, to tell you the truth. I’m just drawing all the cards the dealer will give me and waiting to see who raises the pot.”
“But he’s definitely going to put the cattle through in a week?”
Longarm sighed and stood up. “That’s what he said.” He turned to face Davis and pointed his finger. “One thing I forgot. Caster said today that the next time I wanted any cattle gathered in Mexico I’d do well to contact Raoul’s brother, Raymond San Diego. Him, and probably Jasper, are mixed up in this deal in some way. Beats the hell out of me exactly how. But I think we ought to be damn careful about them from now on.”
Davis gave him a look. “I have been. Wasn’t me hired Jasper to spot Mull when he gets off the train. I reckon that one might come back to haunt you.”
Longarm gave him a look. “I’m going out and get some supper,” was all he said. “I reckon it’s best we not be seen socializing together.”
“That your way of getting out of playing me poker?”
“Yeah, Austin. Of course. You just go right on believing that.” Longarm let himself out of the room and walked on down the hall toward the lobby.
Chapter 9
The final count came to 981 head of cattle that Austin Davis had brought across the bridge and delivered into the quarantine pens at the customs station. Jay Caster said, “It’s still five thousand.”
He and Longarm were sitting horseback at the far end of the pens, watching the cattle as they were herded in by the vaqueros hired by Austin Davis and the hands who worked for the customs inspector. Longarm just shrugged at Caster’s words. “Why not?” he said wearily. “Hell, what’s another ninety-five dollars.”
Just then Austin Davis rode up and spoke to Longarm. “Mister Long, I don’t understand it. I swear they was a thousand and eight head of cattle. I got the sales vouchers to prove it. Somebody must have cut them twenty-seven head out when I had them on the grass over in Mexico.”
“Yeah,” Longarm said. He deliberately did not look at Davis, looking instead at the herd. “I’m sure that’s what happened.” His voice was flat and toneless.
“Well, I can’t explain it no other way,” Davis went on. “But I guarantee you that I laid out the money for one thousand and fifteen head and got here with that one thousand and eight. I don’t know what happened to them last nineteen. I told you we lost seven head on the trail and you said that was to be expected.”
Longarm shook his head slowly. He was trying to play the part of an honest man stoically accepting his fate at the hands of swindlers and thieves. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Them things happen.”
“Well,” Davis offered, “I’m willing to split the difference with you. Let’s just say you owe me for nine hundred and ninety head. How’s that sound? Poor as I am, I’ll take the loss on them other ten head.”
Longarm kept looking past Austin Davis. “We’ll worry about that when we settle up,” he said. “Right now I wish you’d get back to the cattle and see that they get settled in. It appears to me that I’m in danger of losing more than just nineteen head to some rough handling. I see a dozen steers fighting, and them damn hired hands in the pens act like they never saw cattle before.”
“Well, it’s not my boys,” Austin Davis said. He gave Caster an accusing look. “They been gentling that herd right along like they was made out of glass.”
“Then how about getting on back and supervising the work.” Now Longarm looked at Davis. “Your job ain’t over, you know. You’re getting paid to get them in the pens in one piece.”
Davis replied in a hurry voice, “I ain’t responsible for the work done by folks that don’t work for me. No, sir. And I ain’t to be held accountable for it either.”
But he reined his horse around before Longarm could speak again, and loped off toward the pens where the cattle were being corralled.
Longarm hadn’t realized how extensive the network of big, wooden-railed pens was. Each would hold about 200 head of cattle and they stretched from a quarter mile of the bridge to the east, at least, he calculated, another quarter of a mile and they were at least that wide. He figured he was looking at somewhere between six and eight thousand head of cattle, crowded in as thick as a busy anthill. He’d seen the stockyards in Chicago, which weren’t a hell of a lot bigger and handled herds of cattle from all over. Of course they did a much faster turnover than the quarantine pens. They’d get cattle in that would be shipped out within forty-eight hours. But still it was a lot of cattle and he said so to Jay Caster.
Caster seemed amused. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Sounds to me like you ought to be worrying about the cattle you’re missing. And them phony bills of sale your contractor is going to hand you.”
Longarm didn’t answer. He was too busy watching the cattle being marked. As each head went single file through a short chute formed by two fences, a worker would slap a daub of paint on the cow’s side. In this case it was red paint, to designate cattle that had just arrived. Jay Caster had told him that in thirty days the paint would have just about worn off as the cattle rubbed up against each other. “That’s when they get a coat of white to show they’re in their second thirty days,” he’d said. “After that they get slapped with green and that’s the end of the line.”
Longarm had wanted to know how his cattle were going to be released in a week if they were still marked with the red paint. Caster had glared at him. “That’s something you ain’t ever going to know.”
“Well, I ain’t setting out on the trail with a bunch of red-marked cattle. I’m sure those ranchers along the coast know all about that.”
“Yore cattle won’t have no red on them. You better learn to keep that mouth of yours shut, Long. Especially when it’s got a question in it.”
Watching the herd intently as it was strung out to be driven into the pens, Longarm had been trying to pick out individual cattle that had some easily distinguishable mark, like an odd color pattern or a twisted or broken horn. Thus far he had spotted five and was trying to keep them in his head while he’d been talked at by Jay Caster and then by Austin Davis. He wanted to remember the marked cattle so he could come back the next day and see if his herd had been worked forward in the milling sprawl of cattle that made up the pens. It seemed like an impossible thing to do, but maybe Caster had some method Longarm couldn’t even imagine. He had to keep reminding himself that he knew a great deal more about cattle thieves than he did cattle. He was a deputy marshal, not a cattle broker.