Longarm on the Thunderbird Run

“Yes, Morey.” Longarm thought she looked a little worried when she left the room, but she did not question her husband’s wishes. Hell of a woman, Longarm thought. For that matter, hell of a couple. He was beginning to wish that his business here was social.

When Eugenie was gone, Fahnwell motioned Longarm into the second most comfortable chair in the room and took another drink, this time sipping the rye slowly and savoring it.

“Come t‘ take me in in chains, young man?”

“Not if I can help it,” Longarm answered truthfully. “Only if I have to.”

Fahnwell gave him a quiet smile. “Might not be so easy, you know. If you decide you have to, that is.”

Longarm smiled back at him and tasted the rye he had been served. It was every bit as good as he expected. Certainly better than anything he could afford on a government salary. “If a man asks for easy all his life, he won’t have much of a life to take easy. Will he?”

Morey Fahnwell chuckled. “Nicely put, Mr. Long.”

“Call me Longarm. All my friends do.”

“Ah, an‘ you’d like us t’ be friends, Mr. Long?”

“It isn’t necessary, Mr. Fahnwell. And it won’t change anything if it does become so. But, yes, I would like that.”

“All right,” Fahnwell said, grinning. “Longarm.”

“You know what I’ve come about, Morey. I’d like to settle this in a friendly way.”

For the first time Fahnwell’s smile faded, and he looked serious. He also looked his age for the first time then, Longarm realized.

“Those red-tape bastards want to nickel an‘ dime a man to death, Longarm. You know that as well as I do. Who was it stood up to the Bannocks in the old days, Longarm? ’Twasn’t any paper-shuffling son of a bitch in Washington, I can tell you that. It was me and my boys. We smelt smoke from the peace pipe and we smelt smoke from our rifles and we cut arrows outa young heifers and we went to bed every night not knowin‘ if we’d be alive to see the dawn. We done that, Longarm—not some damned thief in a government office. Now them bastards want me to pay for what God an’ a Spencer repeating carbine made mine. They want me to pay for what’s already mine, Longarm. I know you can understand that.”

Longarm took another swallow of the excellent rye. “I won’t argue the point with you, Morey. On a personal level, if it came to that, I’d probably have to agree with you. The point is, though, that like it or not, the law is the law. We live with the law or we move out beyond it. We don’t have any other choices.”

Fahnwell laughed again, but this time the sound of it was short and bitter. “I did that already. Problem is, the damned law caught up with me an‘ surrounded me. Worse damn ambush than any of the Injuns ever laid for me, I can tell you.”

“You can fight a Bannock,” Longarm agreed. “There’s no way you can fight a bureaucrat.”

“A man can always fight, Longarm.”

“That kind of fight is for stupidity, not purpose,” Longarm said softly over the rim of his glass. “A man doesn’t build what you have here out of stupidity.”

“But if I damn well choose to be stupid?”

Longarm shrugged.

“You’d shoot me down to take me in if you had to?”

“Over a couple dollars? Of course not, Morey.”

“You’re saying you wouldn’t shoot me down then, Longarm? No matter what?”

It was Longarm’s turn to laugh. “Now damnit, Morey, don’t get so notional. I like you. But I don’t like you or anybody else so much that I’m willing to make promises I might not be able to keep. I thought you were smart enough to know that.”

Fahnwell’s smile returned. “Yeah. So I do. Pity them fools back east don’t understand the worth of a man’s word. Me and the boys would’ve had less Injun trouble these years past if anybody back there understood what a man’s word oughta mean.”

Again Longarm could find no fault with the man’s statement. He kept his silence and had another drink of the rye.

“Let’s peg this in place, Longarm. Just so I know what my choices are. You say you didn’t come here to drag me off in irons. What do you want?”

“I want you to ride into Snake Creek with me tomorrow morning. I want you to take that grazing fee out of the bank, pay it, and put the receipt in your pocket. Then I want you and me to have a drink together before you come back home and I go off to more important business than the collecting of a few cents per head for cows grazed on government-owned lands.” He took another drink. “That’s what I’d like, Morey.”

“Do you know how many cows I got on that so-called government land, Longarm?”

“I got no idea, Morey. Hell, I’d bet you don’t know exactly how many there are. The bureaucrats claim you’re running four thousand head on public land. That’s the number they want to collect on and that’s the number I want you to pay on.”

Fahnwell was almost able to hide the laughter that was rolling inside his belly. Longarm was willing to bet that the old man was running five, maybe ten times that number of beeve on public land.

“Damnit, Morey, if you up and volunteer to pay double what they want, you’d still be getting a hell of a bargain.”

“It’d still be paying for what I already own,” Fahnwell insisted.

“We both know better, Morey. It’s land you civilized, sure, but it isn’t land you own. Not under the law, you don’t.”

“And that right there is the quarrel between you and me, Longarm.”

“Doesn’t have to be any quarrel between us, Morey. That’s what I’m trying to say here.”

“An‘ if I don’t roll over and yip for them sons of bitches, Longarm?”

“Bureaucrats always win, Morey. In the long run they just naturally do. They’re thick-skinned and thick-headed and they just don’t care about right or wrong. They only care about law. You can fight them, but you can’t beat them. Better to pity the bastards their ignorance than to fight somebody you’ll never even see, much less back down.”

“So if I refuse to knuckle under, it comes down to a war between you and me, Longarm?”

“No, Morey. I won’t fight you that way. Not even if you try and push me into it for some crazy, grandiose gesture that’d only end with everybody getting hurt one way or another.”

“You ain’t going to arrest me; you ain’t going to shoot me; you say you ain’t even going to fight me, Longarm. Just what do you figure to do if we don’t take that ride to town tomorra?”

“I don’t want to sound like I’m making threats, Morey. I didn’t come here to threaten you either.”

“Damn, but you’re a hard man to pin down, Longarm. So all right. You aren’t threatening. I’m asking. Would you please tell me?”

Longarm shrugged again. “I’ve given it some thought this afternoon, I grant you. What I decided was that if you don’t want to pay the pittance to the fools back east, I’ll wander over to Fort Washakie. They got a bunch of underemployed troopers over there with no Indians to fight at the moment. I expect they need something to do. So I guess I’d go round up a couple troops of cavalry and put them to work keeping your cows on your deeded acreage and off the government land. I expect that many cows could manage for a time on the land you do own, and everything would be nice and legal that way, nobody hurt. Of course, it’s always possible that some of them troopers can count. If they turn up with twenty or thirty thousand head of livestock where the paper shufflers thought there were only four thousand, well, word of it could get back to Washington. That’d be a shame. Then those silly bastards would be dunning you for a whole lot more than a few hundred dollars they want as it is.” He swallowed off the last of his whiskey. “Mind if I smoke in here, or should I go out on the porch?”

“You son of a bitch.”

Longarm looked up. Morey Fahnwell was laughing again, his belly shaking with it. Longarm grinned at him. “You do reach for the short hairs, don’t you?”

“Just trying to be fair and reasonable, Morey.”