Longarm honestly replied he hadn’t heard tell of any particular Flint Hill brands. Then he stretched the truth with: “Heard there was this lady hiring help around Minnipeta Junction, a hard morn’s ride from this railroad stop.”
The two local hands exchanged glances. Silent Knight nodded and told Longarm, “We know the Junction’s a good morning’s ride because that’s where we’ll be headed come morning. But we ain’t heard tell of any lady taking on help.”
Lash Flanders muttered, “What about that widow gal who just bought the old Nesbit place?”
Silent Knight laughed lightly, and replied in a dismissive tone that they were talking about a quarter-section homestead claim, confiding to Longarm, “The Nesbits were greenhorns who tried to drill corn into sod-covered bedrock. The widow gal who bought ‘em out cheap keeps a milk cow, pigs, and chickens like the Nesbits should have. She and her daughter run the bitty spread without no hired help. I don’t see how they could afford no hired help if they wanted any. But you can try-“
Longarm didn’t answer, but he meant to. Two strange women on a small claim near that Minnipeta Drover’s Bank sounded just like a lead Bill Vail would expect him to follow up on.
He was tempted to divide at least one cheroot with them, now that he’d established his right to decide such matters for himself. But the night was young and his resources were limited. So he just nursed his own smoke until, sure enough, they lost interest in trying to butter him up and went back to the crap game. Nobody else came over for a spell. It was surprising how much attention jailbirds paid to what was going on within possible earshot.
A hundred years or so later, the turnkey came to let Lash and Silent out, announcing their foreman was out front with a bail bondsman. You didn’t bail out on a morning hearing in a magistrate’s court when you bedded down a hard morn’s ride from it. So the two Lazy Eight riders had been picked up on some charge calling for a more serious circuit court hearing sometime in the future.
Longarm reflected that the hired foreman of any spread would hardly lay his own money out to bail saddle bums who got in trouble on their very own. He told himself he hadn’t been sent all this way to delve into local brand running or stock stealing. Lots of foremen running a lot of big spreads for absentee owners had side interests they ran for fun and profit with some of the boys. It was up to their own county sheriffs to worry about such local enterprise.
A spell after Knight and Flanders had been bailed out, a more obvious thief was thrown in with them by Hard Pan Parsons in person, who warned one and all not to beat up old Sticky Fingers Sam again. Once Hard Pan had gone out front, the sheepishly grinning sneak thief was told to go sit against the wall and stay there lest he wind up with every damned one of his sticky fingers too swollen to stick in anyone’s pocket for the foreseeable future.
A spell later another local pest who rated circuit court was bailed out. Then two roaring drunks were tossed in, warned to simmer down, and hit alongside their heads a few times to calm them some. Longarm was sorely tempted to go over and give first aid to the one whose scalp seemed to be bleeding so seriously. But it was best to be able to say you’d just never noticed when they asked you how come a cell mate seemed to have died during the night.
And so it went for what would have seemed even longer if Longarm hadn’t been able to console himself with the thought that he could get out any time it got too tedious.
During the long, dreary night he managed to strike up casual conversations with most everyone there. For even roaring drunks commence to make sense after they haven’t had anything to drink for a coon’s age.
Only a few of them were as familiar with the Flint Hill range around Minnipeta Junction as Silent Knight and Lash Flanders had been. But one townsman who said he’d only been out there a time or two on business confided, “There’s hardly nothing there but a general store and post office, a bunch of saloons, and twice as many whorehouses. The state of Kansas just voted itself dry. So neither the saloons nor whorehouses are supposed to be there. But you know what Minnipeta means, don’t you?”
Longarm suspected he did, seeing the Kansa Nation who’d hunted the long-gone buffalo in the Flint Hills were considered “Friendly Sioux” by the War Department. But nobody knew as much as a know-it-all who was trying to show off. So he let the Kansas cuss tell him Minnipeta translated roughly as “Firewater.” The local man explained, “Used to be an Indian trading post there, when there were still Indians. The Kansa came from miles around to trade buffalo hides for trade liquor they called minni peta, see?”
Longarm nodded soberly, even though he suspected some white man with a smattering of the lingo had made it up. Some Indians did call strong drink firewater. The ones who drank seriously were more likely to call it minni wakan or “medicine/power water.”
Longarm had already known the simple history of Minnipeta Junction. But he tried to sound green as he asked if there wasn’t supposed to be a business block with doctors, lawyers, a bank, and such in the cattle country crossroads settlement.
His informant shrugged and said, “I forgot about the bank. It ain’t such a big bank. It’s tied in with that Drover’s Trust you can find all over. But about the only time they’re really busy out to Minnipeta Drover’s is the end of each month, when the hired hands and bills are paid with checks the bank will cash for a modest fee.”
“They run that bank to cash checks?” Longarm asked in a desperately casual tone as he mentally pictured the amount of cash on hand they could be talking about.
The local man shrugged and said, “I reckon. They have to make some profit on saving all them cowhands a ride into Florence to cash checks here. Ain’t a cowhand in a hundred with a bank account allowing him to cash a check gratis. Most outfits pay by check these days, to save worry about keeping large sums on hand around their cows.”
Longarm said he knew how such high finances worked. It was no skin off his nose if the average cowhand worked his ass off for just a dollar a day and grub, only to get skimmed by everybody from those check cashers to the barkeeps who jacked up the price of bar liquor on a payday weekend. Longarm had quit herding cows when he’d noticed how little pleasure there could be in getting screwed. His job with the Justice Department was made more interesting by other embittered cowhands who tried to improve their financial positions with community loops, running irons, or masks over their faces.
Nobody he talked to during that endless night had heard tell of any other females who’d shown up around Minnipeta Junction recently enough to matter. On the other hand, nobody kept track of the comings and goings of crossroads whores, and that widow woman who was only known as a widow woman who’d bought the Nesbit place had done so before Miss Medusa Le Mat had been so naughty down in East Texas.
That didn’t mean most anybody couldn’t buy a modest spread in one state and then go rob a bank in another. Nobody had accused Miss Medusa Le Mat of acting predictably, and nobody he’d talked to could give him a tight enough description of either that widow woman or her full-grown daughter for Longarm to decide either way. In the meanwhile, there was that bank, and along towards three in the morning, one old boy with a dreadful headache recalled, encouraged by half a cheroot, that they had invited him to a coming-home shivaree for a Flint Hills rider called Buster Crabtree, but that Buster had never shown up and they’d had to drink to his freedom without him. The helpful drunk didn’t know what Buster Crabtree had been sent to prison for. It was safe to suppose the drunk turned up most anywhere there were free drinks to be served.