"Cuidado, chica!" the woman said. "Los gringos quieren so-lamente una cosa de mujeres!"
"No hay que tal!" the girl shot back. "Dejame in paz!"
Longarm's rusty and slight knowledge of Spanish kept him from understanding the exchange, but he caught the woman's warning. He thought, all women are alike wherever a man goes. They see a fellow making up to their daughter, they're damn sure all he wants is to get in her drawers.
Lita didn't seem bothered by the scolding, which stopped as soon as her mother saw she was wasting breath. She went back to cooking tortillas, casting an occasional suspicious look over her shoulder while Lita continued to help Longarm eat his dinner.
He wasn't sure which he enjoyed most, the food or the girl's help in eating. He found Lita a delight to watch. She was at that point when a girl has just become a woman, with a woman's awareness of a man. Lita was small, but fully rounded in all the right places. Her full gathered skirt didn't hide a saucy pair of buttocks when she danced from counter to stove, and her blouse was cut low; its rounded neckline gave Longarm a view of the valley between full breasts each time she leaned toward him across the counter. Her cheeks were high in a face that was neither oval nor triangular, but a blending of the best of both. Dark eyes, full lustrous brows, and dark red pouting lips under a straight flared nose completed his picture of her.
"You like?" she asked, when his plate had been cleaned of the last peppery trace of chili sauce.
"Yep. It was real good. Muy bueno."
"You wan' some more? Is plenty on stove."
"No, thanks, Lita. I'm as fall as any man's got a right to be."
"Maybe you come back, some time?"
"You just bet I will. Now how much do I owe you?"
"Ah, quince centavos, Coos-tees. Like you say, feefteen cents."
"It's worth double that." He dug into his pocket and passed her a half-dollar. "Here. You keep whatever's extra, for helping me."
"Gracias, Coos-tees. I think you a nice man."
"And you're a right pretty girl. I'll be back to eat with you again, real soon. Maybe tomorrow."
"I think I will like that. Vaya con Dios, Coos-tees."
There being no place else to go in Los Perros, Longarm went back to the saloon. The place had lost the deserted look it had had in the afternoon. Poker games were in progress at two of the four felt-covered tables, and there was a respectable lineup along the bar as well as a scattering of men sitting at the round tables that dotted the floor. Most of the men had on the clothes that marked them as ranch hands: faded Levi's, boots, wide-brimmed felt hats. He found a place at the bar at the edge of a knot of men and ordered his usual rye. He sipped it slowly while listening to the backwash of gossip from the group beside him.
To Longarm's disappointment, gossip was all he heard. Much of the chatter consisted of complaints: bedbugs in the bunkhouse, hard beans in the cookshack. He listened until he'd finished his drink, then ordered a refill and wandered over to watch the poker games. So far, he'd heard nothing useful.
Rustling had been mentioned once or twice, but casually, not in terms of a major new outbreak. Nothing had been said about either the army or the Texas Rangers.
That wasn't too unusual. Longarm had worked before at picking up cold trails. He'd learned that as time went by, incidents that were prime conversational fodder when they happened were forgotten. Captain Hill had been missing since June, Nate Webster since July. If their vanishing had been discussed then, it had been forgotten by September. Questioning would refresh memories, but Longarm wasn't quite ready yet to start asking questions.
Standing between the two poker tables that were busy, Longarm watched silently. Spud was in the game at one of the tables, and although he'd seen Longarm, he'd ignored him. The game at the other table was uninteresting, a friendly affair with two-bit antes, bets of fifty to seventy-five cents, and raises about as big as the bets. The game at the table where Spud sat was for blood, and small change wasn't being mentioned by any of the players in it.
There was room for six, and all seats were filled. Spud was at the dealer's left, and after he'd begun paying attention to the game, Longarm thought there was something vaguely familiar about the house man. He couldn't associate him with any case he'd handled, or match his face with the descriptions or pictures on any of the wanted circulars he'd looked at lately. He heard the other players call the man George, but that didn't ring a bell, either.
Three of the other men at the table were ranch hands, judging by their clothes. Two were in their thirties, old enough to have cut their teeth on poker in bunkhouse and trail-ride games. The third was a fresh-faced young cowboy who wore the expression of one who'd been sliding deeper and deeper into the hole that waits for gamblers trying to buck a game out of their depth. The remaining two players were Mexicans, dressed in embroidered charro suits; they played with skill, folding when their cards didn't justify a draw, raising moderately but not extravagantly when they stayed in the pot.
There was no friendly banter or "dealer's choice" about the game these seven played. George, who was banker as well as dealer, stuck to five-card draw, the game that demands the greatest skill and judgment from a player. The house man wasn't a fast-shuffle artist, Longarm decided after he'd watched a few hands, nor did he use the standard gaffs such as rubber- or spring-loaded sleeve holdouts, palmed cards, or other devices professionals use to give themselves an unbeatable edge. As far as Longarm's skilled eyes could tell, it was an honest game, for which he gave Miles Baskin good marks. He hadn't expected a straight game in Los Perros.
During the short time Longarm had been looking on, the pile of chips in front of the young cowhand had shrunk steadily, and the young fellow had been getting nervous in inverse ratio to the diminishing of his stake. Now, as the dealer flicked cards around the table, the youth grabbed each one as it hit the felt in front of him, looked at it quickly, and added it to the fan forming in his hand. He'd begun growing tense after he'd picked up the third card; his nerves tightened visibly after he'd seen the fourth, and then he relaxed after looking at the final card.
"Openers?" the dealer asked the table at large.
Shaking his head, Spud put his cards facedown on the table.
The man to his left, one of the charro-suited Mexicans, also passed. The ranch hand who had the next call opened for a modest dollar. "Just to keep the deal from being wasted," he remarked.
Wordlessly, the second Mexican tossed a white chip into the pot. After a moment's hesitation, but before the play passed him by, he added a second white chip.
"Cost you two dollars, Billy-Bob," George announced. "Spud, if you and Gonzales want in, you better be making up your mind."
"Plenty of time," Spud remarked. "I'll see what Billy-Bob does."
Billy-Bob put in his two whites; so did the other ranch hand in his turn. The dealer followed suit; after he'd fed the pot he riffled the depleted deck and looked questioningly at Spud and Gonzales. Both of them tossed their second white chips into the growing pile in the table's center.
"Who wants cards?" George asked.
"It ain't worth it, but I'll take the two I paid to see," Spud said. He got the cards, looked at them, and stacked them on the table in front of him.
"One," Gonzales requested. He threw his discard on the pile Spud had started before sliding the new card into his hand.
"Two for me," said the ranch hand who'd opened. He tossed out his discards, looked at the new ones without comment or change of expression, and squeezed the fanned-out cards into a stack that he cradled protectively in his hands.