So he entered the Pilgrim the sneaky way and slipped up the back steps, where he discovered to his relief that the match stem he'd stuck in his door crack was still in place.
He let himself in, scooped up his load, and let himself out just as sudden after tossing both his and Daisy's keys atop the unmade bed for the chambermaid to carry down to the desk after check-out time.
He slipped down the back steps and out through the stable without a word to anybody. He carried his load the long way 'round to the livery across from the depot and bet a colored hostler they wouldn't store it for him until after dark.
Once he'd lost and seen his load safely stored in the tackroom, Longarm felt free to see what a man might be able to nibble, free, with an expensive scuttle of beer. He caught up with the town deputy they called Culhane at the free lunch counter in the Bullhead Saloon.
Culhane said they'd carried the remains of the late Texas Tom over to the Cheyenne morgue and taken all the credit for him.
Longarm agreed that had been the deal and asked in a desperately casual tone what a man who patrolled Central Avenue a lot might be about to tell him about Miss Covina Rivers at the notions shop.
Wrapping a slice of rye around a twist of jerked venison, Culhane replied without hesitation, "She owns the whole building. Started in Cheyenne after her man was killed in Red Cloud's war up north. He was an army suttler. They jumped him as he was hauling goods up the Bozeman Trail from Fort Laramie. I understand the army surgeon refused to let her view the remains after he'd tried to put them back together without much luck. But old Covina was left enough by her man's lite insurance to start over on her own, and she's done well with the gals here in Cheyenne. My own woman shops there now and again. The prices seem right and the notions seem to be in fashion. I don't know why the gals change the way they dress every season. Do you?"
Longarm shrugged, said he'd been getting away with the same tweed suit since he'd bought it a good spell back, and decided he'd try the boiled eggs and pickled pigs feet.
Once he'd calmed the rumbles in his gut with free lunch and the surer knowledge he'd left little Daisy in fairly safe keeping, he still had time to wire Billy Vail about Texas Tom, unofficial but no doubt of interest to the old paper-pushing fuss.
Retracing his steps to the Western Union, Long picked up a pad of yellow blanks as he casually asked the clerk behind the counter if by any chance there'd been any reply to that wire he'd sent off to Denver earlier.
The clerk suprised him by nodding and telling him, "Your friend just picked it up for you, less than half an hour ago. Didn't he tell you?"
A big gray cat swished its tail in Longarm's stomach, and he was tasting pickle-brine as he quietly asked, "A friend of mine, you say? Might this old pal you handed my wire to have worn a ten-gallon hat and had a gold front tooth?"
The clerk shook his head and said, "Panama suit and a planter's hat. He was sweating just the same as he told me you'd sent him over from your place to fetch any messages. I naturally made him sign for it. I got his name right here in this pad and... let me see, ain't he called Bordon Knox and ain't he riding for the same outfit with you?"
Longarm grimly replied, "I'll ask him when I catch up with him. I reckon we just missed each other back at my hotel."
CHAPTER 9
Longarm returned to the livery and got his Winchester '73 saddle gun before he headed for the vicinity of the nearby Pilgrim Hotel. It hardly seemed likely the sneak who'd signed for another man's telegram had used his own name. But Longarm did know a shady cuss called Knox--they called him Deacon Knox--from a friendly little game of cards in the Nebraska Sand Hills a spell back. That panama suit and planter's hat fit the way he'd have described the shifty tinhorn, too. But a Knox by any first name ought to stand out from tar roofing in white linen and bleached straw. So Longarm made his way along a back alley to another hotel across the way and catty-corner to the older Pilgrim. He broke out his federal badge and pinned it to the lapel of his denim jacket before he found a service entrance opening on the alley and strode on in.
Nobody seemed to care until he'd negotiated a dark hallway and mounted a flight of back stairs to the top floor. That was where he scared a full-blood chambermaid headed the other way with a feather duster. She asked what he was doing up there in spite of the badge pinned plain as day to the infernal front of him.
He hoped he had her nation right as he told her, "Hear me, I am Akicita. That is why I wear this maza on my chest. I have come because I am on a hunblechia and I have to get closer to mahpiya!"
The moon-faced but nicely built young Lakota gal said, "Nunwey. Let me show you how to get up on the roof. Why do you try to talk our way, when I understand your words and you say ours so funny?"
He said he'd been trying to be polite as she led him just down the hall to what looked like a broom closet and opened it to let him see more stairs as she explained, "We don't want guests going up on the roof, drunk or sober. Are you the lawman my people know as the Washichu Wastey? You look as I have always pictured him from hearing others who have known him."
Longarm modestly allowed some Lakota called him Wasichu Wastey, which would sort of translate as Good Trash, when you studied on it, because Wasichu was applied to white or colored folk with the same disdain by Lakota as some whites applied to folk of African ancestry. White reporters liked to translate Wasichu as "American" so that the great chief Wasichu Tashunka appeared in print as "American Horse" instead of "Stallion Stolen from Trash Enemies" as it fell on Indian ears.
He asked the Indian gal's rear what her name was as he followed it up the steep stairs with his Winchester. She said to call her Sue. He wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be a joke or not. Indians didn't laugh out loud as much as other breeds, but they could enjoy a pun as much as anyone.
Whether she'd meant Sue or Sioux, her trim figure was still outlined through her maid's black poplin skirting as she flung open the roof door to catch the afternoon sun from the west.
He told her to stay put. But she followed him out on the tar paper anyway, allowing it was a free country, her hotel, and she'd been set to quit for the day after making all those damned beds in any case.
Longarm didn't argue. He removed his distinctive Stetson in case anyone on another rooftop cared to take them for hotel staff, and when he didn't spot another damned soul on the lower roofs all around he asked her to hang on to his hat whilst he climbed the rungs of the water tower.
She took his hat, but said, "I think you are going to fall off and break your neck."
She didn't sound as if this bothered her.
Longarm had to allow she had a point as he mounted the weathered wrought iron rungs awkwardly, thanks to the rifle he had to carry up with him if his trip was to mean toad-squat.
By the time he'd reached the platform the big plank water tank was set upon, Longarm could see that despite the way it had puckered his asshole, his climb had not been in vain. For from up there he had a clear view of every other vantage point within rifle range of the front entrance of the Pilgrim Hotel across the way, and there wasn't a soul, in any sort of outfit, staked out as a rooftop sniper.
He gingerly made his way back down, it wasn't as easy, and took his hat back with a nod of thanks as he told the Lakota gal, "I know a bad man of my kind knows I'm still checked into the Pilgrim Hotel over yonder. If he wasn't sure before, he found out when he conned a telegraph clerk into giving him a wire addressed to me at my own hotel. So where would you be, right now, if you were laying for me to come back to my hired room at yonder Pilgrim?"
The weya calling herself Sue demurely replied, "I was not allowed to hunt with the boys when I lived on the reservation. That is one of the reasons I don't live on the damned reservation. Is it true you rode into one of our tipi circles, alone, after you had fought us and counted coup on young men you had killed?"