They had slipped only briefly through a corner section of Oklahoma and were now running due south through the northern part of Texas. The train had just stopped at Lubbock to drop off some passengers and take on some new ones. Still, the car wasn’t very crowded and Longarm had had a seat to himself all the way. Usually it was his luck, if he rode the passenger coaches rather than accompanying his mount in the stock cars, to draw some stout old lady who crowded him and objected to his cigar smoke. He knew that lady was waiting at some station between here and San Antonio, but, so far, his luck had held. Outside, the landscape was bleak and arid-looking. Longarm didn’t reckon a man could raise ten cows to a thousand acres. Now and again they passed the cabin of a sodbuster. Usually the wife and children would be standing out in front of the weatherbeaten cabin staring at the train with big eyes while the farmer was out behind a plow hoping like hell to make a crop of wheat or corn or cotton before weevils or wind and rain or hail, or just plain bad luck, took it. Longarm always thought the women, especially, had such a hopeless look about them. He wondered how they felt, alone on a great prairie, no neighbors, no pretty things, nothing but hard work and bearing children and waiting for the next crop to fail so they could load the wagon and move on to another piece of soil in an equally unwelcoming place so another crop could go down and then wither under the killing sun and lack of rain. He guessed that was why they had so many kids. There wasn’t much else to do. And, as the train passed, he could pretty well figure how long a couple had been married by the number of kids they had. The children always stood in a rank, the youngest next to the mother, who generally had a baby in her arms, and then they stair-stepped upwards to the oldest. You could tell that there was usually just about a year between them.
He yawned and took a moment to unplug his bottle of whiskey and take a short drink. He still had a long way to go. Even though they were well inside Texas, it would be about eight hours more before they reached San Antonio. Texas, Longarm reflected, was just too damn big. You could travel and travel and still be in the same damn state. A man liked a little variety. Texas was like making love to a fat woman. More was not necessarily better.
Austin Davis was supposed to meet him when the train got in, but Longarm had his doubts on that score. Most likely, Davis would get captured by a bottle or a poker game or a woman or all three and completely forget about meeting the senior deputy marshal. It made him mad just to think about it.
He had met Austin Davis some fourteen or fifteen months back, in Mason County, Texas. Longarm had been called in to run down a gang that the local authorities couldn’t seem to handle. Davis had shown up with some wanted paper on several of the supposed bandits and claimed he was there doing a little bounty hunting. Given the quality of the local law, Longarm had sworn him in as a provisional deputy. No one had been more surprised than Longarm himself when Davis had panned out pretty well. In a rash moment Longarm had recommended him for the Marshal Service, and then damned if he hadn’t been accepted.
Longarm calculated Austin Davis to be in his mid-to late-thirties. He was as tall as Longarm—a little over six feet—but wasn’t built quite as heavy in the shoulders and arms. He figured Davis was probably a pretty good man in a hand-to-hand fight. He knew he was good in a gun fight, but he reckoned he could also use his fists. The man was deceptively strong. When they were setting up an ambush in front of the mercantile in Mason, Longarm had seen him lift an eighty-pound bag of feed like it didn’t weigh anything. Besides, Davis’s face was virtually unmarked, and for a man with his turn of tongue that was a sure sign he could handle himself. Austin Davis was a smart aleck. No, Longarm thought, reluctantly trying to be fair, that wasn’t quite true. Davis was smart. Plain and simple smart. But he knew it, and he didn’t mind letting folks around him know it. That was where the “aleck” part came in, and that was what irritated the hell out of Longarm. He didn’t mind Davis being right once in a while, but he hated to hear him announce it.
And, on top of everything else, Davis was just close enough to being handsome to be certain that all the ladies were standing in line waiting to get a piece of him. Longarm looked out the train window, brooding on his new partner’s defects. Some things were going to have to change and he, Longarm, was just the man to adjust matters. For a moment Longarm let himself speculate on what Mrs. Spinner would think of Austin Davis, but he quickly banished that line of thinking. Mrs. Spinner, he finally decided, was well above the station of some ride-and-shoot pistolero like Austin Davis, and he would never allow a lady of her accomplishments to come anywhere near a rounder like the junior deputy marshal. He was confident, though, that if she did happen to meet the man, she wouldn’t be fooled by his flashin-the-pan looks or his sassy mouth.
He stretched in the seat, sticking out his long legs and extending his arms over his head. It was a most uncommon long ride. And then, once in San Antonio, there was still the business of getting down to Laredo, which was another two hundred miles. Longarm had not brought a horse with him, but there was a military installation at San Antonio, several in fact, and he could requisition whatever mounts he needed from the cavalry.
The train kept rumbling along. The afternoon had worn down and dusk wasn’t far off. Longarm got out one of his two-for-a-nickle cigars, bit the end off, and lit it up with a big kitchen match that he struck with his thick thumbnail. When it was drawing good, he took a swig of whiskey to sweeten his mouth and then leaned back and blew out clouds of smoke, most of it whipping out the open window by his side. He’d be glad to get off the train and he didn’t care who knew it. He wanted a steak and a bath and a good bed. People said he was crazy, but he would rather sit a horse for twelve hours than ride a train for the same amount. Riding a horse was a whole hell of a lot less tiring as far as Longarm was concerned, but he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him. Some folks claimed they liked to ride on trains. He considered that just plain silly.
It got dark and he ate a few more of the biscuit sandwiches and had another drink or two of whiskey. A candy butcher came through the coaches selling various things to eat and smokes and soda pop. Longarm bought a bottle of strawberry fizz and found it went very well with his corn whiskey, though not at the same time.
He didn’t know a great deal about the job that lay ahead, but that was all right. It seemed there was a customs inspector in Laredo, an official with the United States Customs Service, who had been allowing cattle from Mexico to cross the border without staying in quarantine for the prescribed number of days. The result had been considerable trouble for the South Texas ranchers through whose ranges these herds of illegal Mexican cattle passed. The problem was that Mexican cattlemen did not dip their stock to rid them of the ticks and fleas and lice that could cause half a dozen plagues in clean, American stock. For that reason they were supposed to be held on the border for ninety days to make sure they weren’t suffering from some disease, primarily Mexican tick fever, before they were allowed to cross onto United States soil. But holding cattle in corrals, large herds of cattle, was an expensive business. There was no grass for them to graze off, so they had to be fed hay and grain and feed, and for a herd of any size that could run into a considerable amount of money. Also, standing around like that, the cattle tended to become sore-footed and get on the prod with each other, which meant fights, which meant dead cattle. But the worst thing about the quarantine, for the man who was buying cheap Mexican steers with an eye toward bringing it into the U.S. and turning a profit, was that, just as the quarantine was intended to discover, the cattle might get sick and all of them up and die. When that happened, the U.S. speculator lost all the money he’d spent on the cattle, all he’d spent gathering them and driving them to the border, and all the money he’d spent feeding them before they got sick. The best way around all that trouble was to bribe a customs official to fake your quarantine and give you papers that would let you through in a hurry and legally. The problem was that most inspectors wouldn’t take a bribe because it was too easy to get caught. Smuggling a thousand head of steers across the border was a lot harder than dealing in any other kind of contraband, like gold or weapons.