Fisher looked down the street at the people passing by. He nodded toward the windowpane. “Look out yonder at those people taking a stroll through the early afternoon air. There’s not a care in the world for most of them. Wouldn’t you like to change places with them right now?”
Longarm gave him a sour look. “I had forgotten, Fish, that you always have had a way of sticking a knitting needle right in my most tender parts. Hell, yes. I’d love to be one of them right now. That’s what I came here for. I came here to lie around, satisfy a few ladies, win some poker—not your kind of poker, you understand—and get rid of all my troubles and get some relief from all my law work.”
His friend looked at him. “Then why don’t you do it?”
“Because I can’t.”
Fisher stood up and shrugged. “I’m going back to bed. I need a nap. Call on me over there at the saloon when you know what’s up. I ought to be around somewhere for the balance of the day.”
Longarm said, “You still have the underwear on?”
Fisher Lee was about to walk away. He said, “You still not wearing no underwear yourself? Didn’t your mother teach you any better?”
Longarm said, “One good thing about not wearing underwear, it takes you less time to get ready.”
Fisher Lee said, “Well, you may not have to worry about that much longer.”
Longarm gave him a look. “Get the hell out of here. Thanks a lot for that.”
No more than two hours later, Longarm was in his hotel room when the clerk brought him a telegram. He went back into the room and sat down on the bed to read it. He was surprised that Lily Gail had managed to act with such swiftness, but then he reckoned that the people she needed to consult were close at hand in Raton. He ripped the envelope open and took the message out.
It was a straightforward enough message, if you didn’t consider the source. It said simply that the brothers had agreed to the terms and were willing to meet at the Oklahoma-New Mexico border at a point on a line from Quitman, Oklahoma Territory, to Springer, New Mexico Territory. It was signed Mrs. Baxter.
That gave Longarm a laugh. He poured himself a drink of the Maryland whiskey and settled in to do some thinking. He sat there, the telegram in his left hand, a glass of whiskey in his right, staring at the four walls. He was trying to visualize all the possibilities. He knew the country, or remembered it well enough, that the basic layout of it was still in his mind. It covered an area from about fifteen miles inside the New Mexico border and then running on into the Cimarron Strip with flat, featureless, unbroken plains. In the summer, it was a sweatbox. In the winter, the wind blew like there was nothing between it and the North Pole except a bony mule. There was very little cover. A man might find a scrub tree or a patch of brush or a depression in the ground or, if he was lucky, a small hummock, but there was no real way that a man could make the ground into his advantage because it was of equal advantage to his enemy. The only good thing that could be said about it was that whoever you were looking for, you could see a long way off. Of course, the person you were hunting could see you, too.
Longarm got up and began pacing the floor, thinking and mulling the matter over. He knew that he could expect to meet quite a few of the Gallagher gang. He wasn’t fooled for a moment that they intended to surrender anyone to him. His only ace in the hole was that Fisher Lee would have Rufus. With the meeting time for the following day at four o’clock, they wouldn’t have any trouble making such a rendezvous.
The mining company that controlled most of the silver mining ran a little narrow-gauge railway from Taos east into Springer, which was about fifty miles closer. A shuttle train ran almost every two hours beginning at six in the morning. He and Fisher Lee could take that shuttle and leave themselves with the twenty-mile ride in plenty of time to reach the rendezvous by that afternoon. There was a town a few miles inside the New Mexico border. Clayton was its name. He supposed that Fisher Lee could bring Rufus there while he went ahead into the Oklahoma Territory and met with Clem.
In the back of his mind, he wondered if they really thought he was stupid enough to take a dozen of their gang members and promise to leave the brothers alone. But he was quite willing to take the small-fry and quite willing to promise. He just couldn’t believe that they were stupid enough to surrender some of their men to him, no matter how ineffective or useless. It had to be that he was the target of the whole plan.
Nothing else came to mind. Why else had they sent Lily Gail with the message? Maybe they really thought he was also stupid enough to be so beguiled by her charm that he could be lured into a deadly trap. He knew he had a reputation as a man who dearly loved the ladies, but if they thought he was willing to get himself killed for one roll in the hay, they had a very dim perception of how he valued his life.
Longarm kept pacing and thinking. What he needed was some sort of an edge, some sort of backup. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of what that was. For lack of something better to do, and also because there was a piece of business that needed clarifying, he put on his hat, walked the short distance down to the depot, and got off the telegram to Lily Gail confirming the meeting would take place on the border the next day at four in the afternoon. He asked for an immediate answer.
As he walked back, he noticed the offices of the Silverado Mining Company, which was one of the names the big firm that operated all of the mines in the Taos area went under. Without thinking much about it, he went into the office and asked if he could speak to a mining engineer. A hazy thought had been forming in the back of his mind, but he doubted that it would bear much fruit.
After a few moments, a man came from one of the back offices. He was wearing riding pants with knee-high leather boots and a short leather jacket. He had a amiable face and a short, bristly mustache. He looked at Longarm’s badge, and said his name was Simmons and that he was the general manager as well as the mining engineer. He asked how he could help, and invited Longarm back into his office. They sat and talked for a moment about the mining business and how Longarm and Fisher Lee could get their horses on the train. Simmons said he would be happy to give Longarm a note to that effect. “I’m always glad to help out a federal marshal,” he said, “especially in this part of the country. You never know when some real law could come in handy.”
Longarm smiled. “That’s what we’re here for, Mister Simmons, to help folks out.”
Simmons handed him the note with the instructions to give it to the station manager and they would be taken care of. He asked, “is there anything else that I can help you with?”
Longarm inched his chair forward and leaned toward the mining engineer. He said, “I need a weapon I think you have and I think you can tell me how to use it. The only problem is that I have to carry it about seventy miles and twenty of it will have to be on a horse. I’m talking about nitroglycerin.”
Simmons said, “Are you crazy? That stuff will blow you higher than the moon. I won’t say that it is more dangerous than a woman, but it’s damn sure more unpredictable. How much nitroglycerin are you talking about?”
Longarm scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know for certain. How much would, say, a pint blow up?”
Simmons looked at him thoughtfully. “A pint? Oh, roughly half of this town.”
“That much, huh?”
Simmons said, “Marshal, I don’t mean to interfere in your business, but nitro is not something that a body should fool around with if they’re not extremely experienced with its handling.”
Longarm nodded. “Mister Simmons, I appreciate what you’re telling me, but if I didn’t have a need for this, I wouldn’t even consider fooling around with it. I’ve had experience with dynamite and I know how dangerous that stuff can be.”