As he led the way into his hired front room and struck a match to light the wall lamp, another male boarder opined, “Somebody else must have told him a man with two guns and a big mouth was supposed to fish or cut bait. Nobody in living memory ever stood up to that bully and made him eat crow. He must have thought we all expected him to clean your plow if he ever wanted to back anyone else down.”
Longarm didn’t argue as he lit the lamp and took in the mess a fusillade of small-arms fire had made of his hired room.
The feather down had settled to the oiled planking all around the bedstead. The rumpled bedding looked as though more than one poor bird had been stood before a firing squad and then dragged off by the heels, still flapping. The ceiling above, papered a plain yellow, had been peppered and torn considerably. At least one slug had ripped up one wall to lay open the floral paper and expose the torn underlayer of railroad and Confederate bonds. Turning to the landlady in the doorway, Longarm said, “I’m sure sorry about this, Miss Mavis. Before you argue, I want you to listen tight. It was an agent of the U.S. Government they were aiming at, and like I said, I get to charge valid expenses to the same. So I’m fixing to have all this damage repaired for you at government expense.”
She said, “Well, I suppose I’ve no choice about the mattress. I just can’t afford a new one and that one’s done for. But there’s no need to get fancy up here, seeing it’s not a room I usually let out to anyone.”
He said, “I thought I just told you not to argue. Whether you hire the room out or sleep in it your ownself, it was shot up because of me and I mean to put things right by you.”
He glanced out the window. The summer day was already dawning in the east, but it was still sort of early. So he added, “I aim to lie down and catch a few winks before breakfast because I might have another long day ahead of me. So if it’s all the same with you folks …”
Mavis MacUlric protested, “You can’t lie down on that ripped-open bedding. I’m up for the day. Why don’t you just nap in the room I’ve been using and we’ll wake you when your breakfast is ready.”
He started to argue, failed to come up with a sensible reason to refuse her kind offer, and in no time at all was stretched out on top of her quilt counterpane in his duds and socks, knocked for a loop by darkness behind a locked door and the clean floral smell of a friendly gal’s Florida water and the lilac sachets she’d tucked under a fresh pillow for him.
Sparky little Ellen Brent came to wake him in what felt like less than five minutes. But he was feeling more wide awake by the time the two gals had him eating buttermilk waffles downstairs. The other men who boarded there had eaten up and lit out for work by then. So he knew they’d let him lie slugabed as long as they’d dared.
Longarm didn’t want to mention his intended visit to the hardware store before he had to. So he allowed he had to see about any night letters at the Western Union, and offered to walk Ellen over to her job at the town library. For some reason that got the Widow MacUlric to dropping cups on her floor again as they lit out together.
Longarm didn’t say anything as he helped the library gal down the steps. Ellen sighed and said, “I hope she doesn’t think I’m trying to steal you away from her.”
“Were you fixing to start your own boardinghouse, Miss Ellen?” Longarm asked in an innocent tone.
The perky brunette giggled and said, “Don’t play shy schoolboy with me, you wicked thing. We’ve all heard what a Don Juan you’ve been with those faster girls of Denver!”
To which he could only reply, “You have my word I haven’t been fast with a single slower gal from Pawnee Junction.” Which was true, as soon as one studied on where Nurse Calder had been from.
Ellen said, “Don’t hurt her, Custis. I know she’s attractive and Lord knows she’s vulnerable. But she was very happy with the one true love of her life, and the only man who’s sparked her since was a brute who was only after her property.”
Talking about other brutes was more comfortable than defending his own weak nature. So along the way he brought her up to date on some of his cleaner recent adventures, and absorbed the sad story of an almost rich widow who’d been about to sign over her heavily mortgaged house to a slick-talking boarder when he’d suddenly had to leave town, one jump ahead of the bounty hunters hired by a far richer gal he’d swindled.
Ellen said, “It seems he’d get lonely widows to sign over their all for him to manage, just before or after they got married. Needless to say, he sold everything they’d signed over and lit out with the cash, whether they were properly wed or not.”
Longarm said he’d heard there were skunks like that. Then he helped her open and air the library, and left the two books he’d borrowed where they belonged in the stacks before he said he’d see her at their boardinghouse later. He didn’t say he’d come by after the inquest later in the day because he wasn’t sure whether he’d be spending another night in Pawnee Junction or not.
As he was walking down toward the Western Union by the railroad stop, one of the townsmen from the saloon earlier fell in beside him to say, “Fox Bancroft is in town. Along with a dozen riders off the Diamond B. Thought you’d care to hear.”
Longarm nodded soberly and replied, “I thank you for your words of cheer. They told me Porky Shaw was the boss wrangler out to the Diamond B. I take it this Fox Bancroft is the ramrod?”
His informant shook his head. “Owner. In town to attend the hearing and decide whether you or old Porky was in the wrong, to hear Fox declare it.”
Longarm grimaced and muttered, “I sure wish folks wouldn’t declare such things. They tend to paint themselves into a corner no matter how things turn out, and they never sent me here on any fool fox hunt!”
Chapter 11
Billy Vail’s night letter, wired cheap when the telegraph traffic got slack in the wee small hours, said old Billy was mighty chagrined about Dancing Dave doing that rope dance before he could sing. Then he opined a federal investigation of local vigilante activity could get as tedious as bailing brine against a rising tide unless the local law was willing to level with outsiders.
Longarm wired back the reasons why he had to attend that coroner’s hearing after dinner, and added he’d try for the evening southbound if his investigation seemed ended with the death of Porky Shaw. He felt his boss would settle for a leader of the lynch mob shot fair and square. Billy Vail’s notions of justice were Old Testament. He only demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and since Dancing Dave had been a disgusting cuss in his own right, old Porky Shaw’s fat dead ass likely balanced the scales of that blindfolded statue in Judge Dickerson’s courtroom.
Longarm walked north from the Western Union to the sprawling lumberyard and hardware outlet of the informative Remington Ramsay, who turned out to be a blond giant in his forties with his stomach still flat from hefting nail kegs and two-by-fours around. Old Ramsay got even friendlier when Longarm said he’d read that book about the Ramsay family intermarrying with all those interesting folks before they got around to founding Pawnee Junction.
The hardware mogul bragged less than his privately printed book, and graciously allowed that the U.S. Army, the railroad, and the first herds up to greener grazing had helped him some.
Longarm said he was in the market for a nice sheet of pressed ceiling tin, a couple of rolls of wallpaper—plain yellow, and in that same floral pattern, if they had it—along with some finishing nails, wallpaper paste, and such.
Ramsay nodded, but asked if Longarm had the tools he’d need to use all that stuff, adding, “You ought to make sure you have some paint for the ceiling metal too. Sounds like you’ve cut yourself a big slice of redecorating. Not that it’s any of my business.”