“He did, and he had two other niggers with him. They dropped the subject when I blew his face off. I warned him twice to drop the knife before I shot him, too, God damn it!” Mendez slammed a fist down on the bar.
“Cool down, old son! You don’t have to convince me. You already got let off by a grand jury. I know you have a rough job.”
“They fired me anyway. Said I’d overstepped my authority. Ain’t that a laugh? They fire you if you let the bums ride and they fire you if you get in a fuss with ‘em.”
“There ain’t no justice,” Longarm commiserated. “I see you had no trouble getting another job out here, though.”
“Oh, a railroad bull with a tough rep can usually get hired somewhere. I don’t get paid as much, though, and the prices out here are higher than back East. If I had it to do over, those three coons could have driven the damned locomotive and I’d have looked the other way.”
Longarm shook his head and said, “I don’t buy that. The roundhouse gang has you down as a good, tough bull.”
“Well, I’ll get tougher if they don’t quit calling me a Mex. I’m from Paraguay, not Mexico, and both MY mother and father were pure white!”
Longarm nodded and said, “I suspicioned as much. How’d you get up here from such a far piece south? Merchant marine?”
“No. Worked for a British railroad down there when I was a teenager. Paraguay hasn’t got that much in the way of railroading, but I liked it better than punching cows, so I followed the trade north.”
“You’ve been here a spell, judging from the way you speak English.”
“Hell, I fought in the War for Lincoln!” Mendez said proudly. “Least I could do to get back at Texas. The first time I was called a greaser was in Galveston and I haven’t learned to like it yet.”
Longarm promised never to call Mendez a greaser and left him alone at the bar. He walked to the land office to use the federal wire. After he’d reported his lack of progress and asked a few questions that nobody in Denver had answers to, he sent an inquiry to the Chicago stock market. As Agent Chadwick came in to join him under the telegraph batteries, Longarm said, “Beef’s up a dollar and six bits a head and one of your battery jars is leaking.”
Chadwick looked at the charred black spot on the blotter next to the telegraph key and said, “Cigar burn. Them wet cell jars are glass. They leak all at once or never.”
“Doesn’t it make you nervous working with all that acid up there?” Longarm asked.
Chadwick shrugged. “The batteries have to be somewhere. That’s a pretty stout shelf.”
“I’d have ‘em on the floor if this was my wire shack. It’s good to have a box of baking soda handy, too. Met a telegrapher who saved his eyes with baking soda, once, when a Sioux arrow shattered a battery jar in his face and spattered him with vitriol.”
You’re a cheerful cuss today. How come you asked the current price of beef?”
“Still a cowhand at heart, I guess. I thought you’d be interested yourself, Chadwick. Seems only natural the land office out here would be abreast of converting grass to dollars.”
Chadwick looked annoyed and said, “Stop pussyfooting around, damn it! You heard something about that trouble I had a few years back, didn’t you?”
“Some,” Longarm lied, adding, “I’d like to hear your side, Chadwick.”
The agent smiled crookedly and said, “I might have known you were using the railroad telegraph for snooping around about us all. Did they tell you I was cleared of the charges?”
“I didn’t suspicion you’d be working for Uncle Sam if he’d caught you with your pants down.”
“Hell, everybody’s pants were down when they gave away all that money to build the railroads West, back in the sixties. They caught Vice President Colfax making money on those watered railroad bonds, but I was only a clerk in those days. I never even got a crack at all they were giving away in the way of land grants and tax money. The only reason I was called upon to testify was that my boss was grabbing land right and left! I came out of it clean as a whistle, and believe you me, they had me on the carpet for days, going over everything I’d had for breakfast for a good seven years! They investigated my bank account and made me show ‘em everything but my belly button. But what’s the use of talking? You likely got my first-grade report cards from Denver when you wired ‘em, right?”
Longarm laughed and said, “As a matter of fact, I never knew you were mixed up in that old financial mess till you just now told me.”
“You didn’t? What in hell are we raking it up for, then?”
“We’re not. You are. Folks are funny that way. They get to jawing with a lawman and next thing they know, they’re telling him about some gal they got in trouble once, or how much they hated their pa for whupping ‘em.. Had a fellow admit to incest once, and I never suspicioned him of more than murder.”
Chadwick laughed and shook his head. “All right, you suckered me into revealing my dark past. Had it been a mite darker, I’d be smoking dollar cigars in my private railroad car instead of trying to live on a piss-poor wage, considering. Do you want the name of the lady I was sleeping with the night Roping Sally was murdered?”
“It ain’t any of my business, but since you brought it up, Sheriff Murphy told me about it. Says you’re likely to get killed if her other boyfriend finds out about it.”
“Damn!” Chadwick exploded. “It’s what I get for staying late! Who told Murphy, that old biddy next door?”
“He said he saw you himself, making his morning rounds. The old biddy next door was watching through her lace curtains when you came through the back yard just after sundown. I don’t hold with small-town gossip, much, but in a way, she might have done you a favor.”
“Jesus H. Christ! You don’t mean you really had me under suspicion?”
“No more than anyone else in the territory. Let’s get back to the price of beef. We’re headed into a cattle boom after the droughts the last couple of years thinned the herds to where the price went up on such cows as are left. Everybody out here seems to want cows bad enough to steal them, lately. I’ve noticed the range hereabouts is getting overgrazed. Lots of spreads are overstocked, but they keep trailing longhorn north just the same.”
“Jesus, are you still gnawing that same bone about someone stealing reservation rangeland from the fool Indians?”
Longarm nodded and said, “Ain’t getting much marrow out of it, either. Seems odd that nobody’s made an offer on damn near virgin range. The Blackfoot have maybe a hundred and fifty head grazing more than fifteen hundred full sections out there.”
Chadwick shook his head wearily and insisted, “That’s the B.I.A.‘s problem. Who would you expect to make me an offer? I keep telling you I can’t sell government land, damn it!”
Longarm said, “You do file claims and issue range permits, though. Yet you say no white man’s approached you with any questions about all that grass going to waste.”
Chadwick cut in with an annoyed snort to explain, “Hell, of course they’ve asked about it. But I’ve told everybody the same thing. Those Indian lands are not for sale, with or without Indians on ‘em!”
“Could you give me a list of everyone who’s interested in spreading out?” the lawman asked.
Chadwick frowned and said, “Sure, if I can remember ‘em all. Let’s go out to my office and I’ll write down those I recall.”
As he led the way, Longarm asked mildly, “Don’t you keep books on such matters, Chadwick?”
“You mean, do I record the name of every man who stops me on the street to ask a fool question? No. I don’t write down the dirty jokes I hear or the names of sons they seem to think I can get into West Point, either. People suck around a man in my position, Longarm. They seem to think I’m Uncle Sam in the flesh instead of his poorly paid hired hand!”