After kissing him smack on the mouth in front of everybody, the Junoesque doctor told him she'd wired a list of the observed symptoms all the way to the Surgeon General's office, and been assured they sure seemed to add up to Malta or what some now called undulant fever. They'd told her she'd been making sense with the moves she'd made so far, and suggested other, more drastic measures she might take to check the plague till a team from back East could get there to help her.
When she shyly asked whether he thought that meant she'd be in charge, Longarm kissed her some more and assured her, "If it don't, there ain't no justice. But when did they get the wires back up and how come nobody told me?"
She said, "I just found out myself Western Union hasn't been advertising for more business and the backlog is still awesome. I had to buck the line by threatening them with the power of the federal government. But I'm sure you'll be able to break in the same way, citing a federal emergency."
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "I've never admired folks who got in line ahead of me, and there's nothing I have to say that can't wait till things simmer down a mite. I'd rather talk about Rod Gilbert and our sick prisoner, Baldwin. Lieutenant Flynn's offered us a free ride out aboard his steam cutter, and I was hoping you'd be able to tell me they were fit to travel."
Norma favored him with a maternal smile and sighed. "You've no idea how tempted I am to keep the three of you here for a month of Sundays, darling. But if you're asking me in my official capacity, the course of undulant fever is pretty predictable."
She took his arm as if to lead him off to show him something as she explained. "Thanks to your inspired guess about infected goat's milk and, as it turns out, local buttermilk-fed pork, we've stopped any human beings around here from being re-infected. We're not certain how vegetarian cows pass the plague along, but it's tougher for people to pick up. They have to rub body fluids from an infected animal into an open cut, or swallow them in greater quantity. You already know how sick they get within a few days. But it's called undulant because of the way it comes and goes, with each attack both milder and farther apart."
She was leading him out a side door for some reason as she went on. "It's usually the second or third attack that those who die succumb to. It's not as much the fever itself, as the pneumonia or secondary ailments that hit a victim in his or her drained state. Young Gilbert and that dreadful Clay Baldwin have been through the whole cycle half a dozen times. So I'm sure they're out of danger, albeit either may have mighty bad days for as long as a year in the future."
Longarm said he doubted Clay Baldwin had that much future ahead of him, and as she led him up the outside stairs of the building to the north added, "I reckon I can get them both back to Denver sitting down or stretched out aboard public transportation. Where might you be leading me, Miss Norma?"
She giggled sort of dirty and replied, "Down the Primrose Path, or at least up to the new quarters I've commandeered for myself here in town, now that I seem to be the Public Health Service. I had far less privacy as well as a longer trip back and forth at that Coast Guard station!"
She didn't say where she'd be taking her meals, now that she was quartered closer to her fever ward. Longarm didn't really care, once she'd shut the door upstairs behind them and turned with a Mona Lisa smile to confide, "Cross-ventilation too. But now that I have you in my wicked power, in broad daylight for heaven's sake, are you sure I can trust you not to laugh at your poor little piggy?"
Longarm proceeded to shuck his own duds too as he asked her when he'd ever declared her a pig. He managed not to laugh as she proceeded to pop a lot of bulging pink flesh in view, demurely suggesting, "This is the first time we've ever seen one another naked in daylight. I do try to watch my weight, dear, but it gets harder and harder as a girl gets older and... Oh, my God, did you really put all that in me the other night?"
He suggested soothingly that they see if they still fit fine together where it really counted. As he laid her back across her brass-railed bed atop the covers, she bit her baby-girl lower lip and hissed, "Be careful with that thing, Custis!"
But then, a few minutes later, being fickle as most gals about such matters, she was pounding his bare ass with the heels of her high-buttons, demanding he go deeper if he knew what was good for him.
So what with one position and another, with a quick supper shared well after sundown at the beanery across the way, Longarm barely made it back to the Coast Guard station in time to board that steam cutter as it cast off on a falling tide. Like most of its breed, the long white-hulled cutter was mostly flash boilers, powerful engines, and four-pound deck guns capable of catching up with anything its twin screws couldn't.
Chief Tobin told them Flynn and young Devereaux were too busy on the bridge to talk to anyone right now. But meanwhile, they could lock Baldwin in the ship's brig forward, and they'd try to make the two civilian lawmen comfortable in the wardroom, aft and a short length of ladder down from the bridge. Longarm had noticed before how sailors called any sort of steps "ladders," any sort of floors "decks," and so forth. Cowhands liked to confound green hands the same way.
A mess attendant brought the two deputies coffee, and said something about a smoking lamp being lit. Rod Gilbert still said he'd feel far better smoking out on deck instead of there in the greasy-smelling wardroom as the cutter began to pick up speed. For narrow-beam steamers tended to roll far more than sailboats, even across the calmer waters of a sheltered lagoon.
It was a good thing Gilbert felt that way. For they'd barely made it out to where Longarm could see the stars before he saw they weren't headed the way he'd expected.
Gilbert tagged wanly along as Longarm went on up to the bridge to demand why. What they called a bridge on a Coast Guard cutter was more like a glorified pilothouse borrowed from a riverboat. Lieutenant Flynn was posing for a statue behind the enlisted man at their big oak wheel and brass binnacle. It was Devereaux, acting as first officer, who cut them off and said they weren't allowed on the bridge while a patrol was in progress.
Longarm calmly but firmly replied, "That's what we're here to ask you about. How come we're headed south? Ain't you boys assigned to pay more heed to vessels putting in through Corpus Christi Pass to your north? There ain't no way to smuggle anything in off the open sea this side of the Rio Grande, one hell of a voyage to the south!"
Flynn turned grandly and stiffly replied, "As the one and only master of this vessel I don't have to answer to you or anyone else. But I've set a course for Matamoros because that's where you keep saying someone's been picking up quarantined beef. Didn't you also say you came all this way via the Rio Grande and up this very lagoon?"
Longarm sighed, "I did. I thought it would be obvious, even to you, I'd want to compare notes with the Rangers and others I know in Corpus Christi before we headed on back some other way!"
Flynn shrugged. "You should have asked which way we were headed before you boarded this evening. I understand the telegraph wires are back up. You ought to be able to contact all the others you want by Western Union once we put you ashore at Brownsville."
Longarm insisted, "I don't want to give any other crooks that much of a lead on me, Lieutenant. While I'm wasting a whole night aboard this cutter, patrolling miles of doubtless empty lagoon, confederates of Pryce & Doyle will be covering their crooked tracks with heaps of razzle-dazzle!"
It was Devereaux who quietly suggested, "Should the lieutenant so desire, we could put these civilians ashore at Escondrijo. I think I see the lamplight along their quay just ahead, off to starboard."
Flynn snapped, "You're not paid to think, Mister Devereaux. Until such time as they give you your own command, you'll be expected to do just as you're damned well told! Is that understood, mister?"