He sat on the bed, poured himself out some whiskey, and lit a small cigar. He knew Lily Gail hadn’t hunted him up, however she had done it, just to see how excited she could get him. She’d come from the Gallaghers, sure as hell. If she had, he wondered what he was going to do about it. There was, after all, his vacation to think about, and secondly, he was not about to allow her to lure him into another trap of any kind, luscious body or not.
With his mind firmly fixed that there was no way that she could tempt him, he finally finished the whiskey in his glass, snubbed out his cigar, put on his hat, and went out to the lobby. He spotted her immediately; it was impossible not to. Not because the lobby was so small, but by her striking head of golden blond hair and the wonderfully innocent little-girl face and wonderfully seductive big-girl’s body. She was sitting on a small settee against the far wall near the desk where guests registered.
Longarm walked across the tiled floor, his spurs going ching-ching-ching as he walked. She delayed looking at him until he was almost to her, and then, in what he took to be almost a practiced gesture, she jerked her head up to stare into his eyes, put her hand up to her mouth, and said, “Oh, you startled me, Marshal Long.”
He took off his hat and sat down beside her, laughing. He said, “Lily Gail, the last time anybody startled you was when they quit before you wanted them to. How have you been?”
She gave him one of her innocent looks. “Why, Marshal, I have been just fine, in spite of the fact that someone, who will go nameless, blew up my ranch house and my barn and killed half of my cattle and my hired hands.”
He threw back his head and laughed out loud. Lily Gail confused him. He couldn’t determine if she was smartly dumb or dumbly smart. He knew she was an awful lot smarter than she acted, but he wasn’t sure if she wasn’t also as dumb as she acted. He said, “If you will forgive me, Lily Gail, that’s not quite the way I remember it. As well as I can recall, I was chained to a post in your barn for several days, and the only relief I had from the boredom was the prospect of the Gallaghers coming to tear me apart between two horses and the occasional glimpse of you by moonlight.”
She blushed prettily. She said, giving him a slap on the thigh, “Why, Marshal Long, you’re not a gentleman to refer to that.”
“What? Me being torn apart by horses or me getting an occasional glimpse of you?”
Lily Gail gave him a shy smile. “You old silly. You know what I mean.”
Longarm said, “Well, before we go to swapping lies here, how about you telling me how you found me here, Lily Gail? I’m on leave of absence right now. I’m not even working. I’m just drinking whiskey and playing cards and having a rest. How in the hell did you get on to me?”
“Well, maybe I told a little lie,” she said with a sly smile.
“That would be the first one, correct?”
“Now, Marshal, you shouldn’t tease me.”
“Well, all right. What kind of a little lie did you tell?”
“I sort of sent a telegram to your office in Denver, Colorado. I remember many times you telling me that was your headquarters. I said that you were desperately needed on family business and asked where could you be reached.”
“And they wired you back and told you that I was in Taos?”
“Yes, at the Grand Hotel.”
He looked off in the distance. “When I get back, there’s going to be one less clerk in the U.S. marshals service.”
“Oh, you mustn’t mind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had this chance to see you.”
Longarm said, “How come you wouldn’t come back to my room, Lily Gail?”
She gave him an amazed look. “Well, what kind of girl do you think I am, Marshal? Go to a gentleman’s room? In the middle of the day?”
“Oh, I might have known. Of course. The middle of the day. That makes sense to me, too. If it had been night, that would have been different.”
She said, “Well, I certainly am not going to answer that, but it certainly would have seemed more seemly. But to visit a gentleman’s room in the middle of the afternoon like I was coming to bring his laundry or something.”
Longarm shook his head. “Lily Gail, you beat anything I have ever seen in my life. What are you doing these days? Are you still working for the Gallaghers?”
She said, “Marshal Long, I resent you saying such a thing about me. The Gallaghers are outlaws. They’re misunderstood, and yet they are still considered outlaws. I resent you accusing me of having a formal association with them. The very idea!”
He gave her a frank look. “Are you here because of the Gallaghers?”
“As it happens, I do have a message to you from them.”
Longarm said, “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me, Lily Gail. And by the way, where did you get the new name Baxter? Did you make that up?”
She folded her arms. “I’ll have you know, that’s my married name.”
“So you got married again. Who did you marry this time?”
“A Mister Baxter. A Mister Jonas Baxter. A gentleman in trade back in Enid, Oklahoma.”
“What kind of trade? Does he sell dynamite to the Gallaghers?”
“He was in the haberdashery trade, if you must know.”
“Where is Mister Baxter?”
She cast her eyes down. “Unfortunately, Mister Baxter is no longer with us. He met an untimely end.”
Longarm laughed. “Being married to you is about like being married to a black widow spider. Your husbands don’t seem to last very long, Lily Gail. And I can testify that being one of your lovers ain’t all that much safer.”
Lily Gail said, “Oh, you’ve grown cold, Custis Long. You’ve grown cold and hard.”
Longarm had to laugh again. “You hang around with the worse bunch of cutthroats and murderers and back-shooting sonofabitches that this part of the country has ever seen and you call me cold?”
She said, “Longarm, that’s what I’m here to talk to you about. You know, the Gallagher brothers have been done a terrible injustice. They were misunderstood. They’ve been prosecuted and persecuted by the law and it hasn’t been fair. You even killed poor Vern, and he meant you nothing but the best.”
Longarm said, “Wait a minute. Let’s get the record straight, Lily Gail, before you go off on another one of your dreams while you are still awake. Now, the way it was, you lured me out to your ranch north of Wichita Falls, Texas, and then you doped me by putting laudanum in my whiskey. After I had passed out, your hired hand or your lover, whoever he was, chained me out in the barn before he went off to get the Gallaghers, who had every intention of killing me. The fact is that I happened to get loose and set that dynamite off, in which explosion Vern Gallagher got killed. Now, do not represent the Gallaghers to me as anything but what they really are. By the way, where are you staying?”
She said primly, “I have just a short while ago come into town. I have not as of yet taken accommodations. My mission has been to deliver this invitation to you from the two remaining Gallagher brothers.”
Longarm gave her a guarded look. “And just what would that invitation be?”
“They want to meet with you. They want to try to put an end to this terrible persecution that the law has seen fit to visit upon them. They think that perhaps ya’ll can make some kind of a deal. They admit that, from time to time, they have had some terrible people working for them and that they have done some terrible things, and they are willing to surrender these people to the law if ya’ll would just give them a good letting alone.”
Longarm burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He said, “You mean, they’ve found some poor saps that they are going to turn in so as to save their own skins? Isn’t that about the size of it? Where are the Gallaghers right now?”
“They are camped on the Cimarron Strip, not even seventy miles from here.”
Longarm knew she was talking about that part of Oklahoma that bled off at the top of the territory like a string of spilt milk, running across the panhandle of Texas and below western Kansas and eastern Colorado, ending at the New Mexico border.