For several seconds, Longarm lay on the rough, gritty earth, trying to stab through the darkness with his eyes, using his ears to hear some giveaway sound that would spot his target for him. Except for the distant chugging of a yard-mule cutting cars at the shunt, there was nothing to hear.
Longarm didn’t waste time trying to prowl the yard. Being the target of a grudge shot from the dark wasn’t anything new to him, or to any of the other men serving as Deputy U.S. Marshals in the unreconstructed West of the 1880s. Longarm guessed that whoever had been responsible for the drygulching attempt had been sitting in another car of the narrow-gauge on the trip up from New Mexico. God knows, he’d stepped on enough toes during his month there to have become a prime target for any one of a half dozen merciless, powerful men. Any of them could’ve sent a gunslick to waylay him in Denver. The attack had to originate in New Mexico Teritory, he decided, because nobody in Denver had known when he’d be arriving.
Brushing himself off, Longarm had hurried on across the freightyard and on to his room. Bone-tired, he’d hit the sack without lighting a lamp, dropping his clothes as he shed then!
On the dresser, the half full bottle of Maryland rye gleamed in the light that was trickling in from the window. Its invitation was more attractive than the idea of staying in the warm bed. Longarm swung his bare feet to the floor, crossed the worn gray carpet in two long strides and let a trickle of warmth slip down his throat. As he stood there, the tarnished mirror over the dresser showed his tanned skin tightening as the chilly air of the unheated room raised goosebumps.
Crossing the room to its inside corner, Longarm pulled aside a sagging curtain to get to his wardrobe. Garments hung on a pegged board behind the curtain. He grabbed a cleaner shirt than the one he’d taken off, and a pair of britches that weren’t grimed with cinders from his roll in the freightyard last night.
He wasted no time in dressing. The cold air encouraged speed. Longjohns and flannel shirt, britches, woolen socks, and he was ready to stamp into his stovepipe cavalry boots. Another snort from the bottle and he turned to check his tools. From its usual night resting place, hanging by its belt from the bedpost on the left above his pillow, Longarm took his.44-40 Colt double-action out of its open-toed holster. Quickly and methodically, his fingers working with blurring speed, he swung out the Colt’s cylinder, dumped its cartridges on the bed, and strapped on the gunbelt.
He returned the unloaded pistol to the holster and drew three or four times, triggering the revolver with each draw, but always catching the hammer with his thumb instead of letting it snap on an empty chamber, which could break the firing pin. When Longarm had returned the Colt to its holster after each draw, he made the tiny adjustments that were needed to put the waxed, heat-hardened leather at the precise angle and position he wanted, just above his left hip.
Satisfied now, he reloaded the Colt, checking each cartridge before sliding it into the cylinder. Then he checked out the.44 double-barrelled derringer that was soldered to the chain that held his railroad Ingersoll on the other end. He put on his vest, dropping the watch into his left-hand breast pocket, the derringer into the right-hand one. Longarm always anticipated that trouble might look him up, as it had in the freightyard last night. If it did, he intended to be ready.
Longarm’s stomach was growling by now. He quieted it temporarily with a short sip of rye before completing his methodical preparations to leave his room for the day. These were simple and routine, but it was a routine he never varied while in civilized surroundings. Black string tie in place, frock coat settled on his broad shoulders, Stetson at its forward-tilted angle on his close-cropped head, he picked up his necessaries from the top of the bureau and stowed them into their accustomed pockets. Change went in one pants pocket and his jackknife in the other; his wallet with the silver federal badge pinned inside was slid into an inside breast pocket. Extra cartridges went into his right-hand coat pocket, handcuffs and a small bundle of waterproof matches into the pocket on the left.
As he left the room, he kicked the soiled clothing that still lay on the floor out into the hallway ahead of him. He’d leave word for his Chinese laundryman, Ho Quah, to pick it up and have it back that evening. He closed the door and between door and jamb inserted a broken matchstick at about the level of his belt. His landlady wasn’t due to clean up his room until Thursday, and Longarm wanted to know the instant he came home if an uninvited stranger might be waiting inside: for instance, the unknown shadow who’d thrown down on him last night. Anybody who knew his name was Custis Long could find out where Longarm lived.
Not only the rooming house, but the entire section of the unfashionable side of Cherry Creek where it stood was still asleep, Longarm decided, after he’d moved on light feet down the silent hallway and stopped to look over the street before stepping out the door. The night’s unexpected snowfall, though only an inch or less, made it easy for him to see whether anyone had been prowling around. He took a cheroot from his breast pocket and champed it in his teeth, but didn’t light it, while he studied the white surface outside.
There was only one set of tracks. They came from the house across the way, and the toes were pointed in the safe direction—for Longarm—away from the house, toward Cherry Creek. Just the same, he stopped on the narrow porch long enough to flick his gunmetal-blue eyes into the long, slanting shadows. He didn’t really expect to see anyone, though. The kind of gunhand who’d picked the safety of darkness once for his attack would be likely to wait for the gloomy cover of hoot-owl time before making a second try.
His booted feet cut through the thin, soft snow and crunched on the cinder pathway as Longarm walked unhurriedly to the Colfax Avenue bridge. He turned east on the avenue; ahead, the golden dome of the Colorado capitol building was just picking up the first rays of the rising sun.
George Masters’s barbershop wasn’t open yet, and Longarm needed food more than a shave. He didn’t fancy the cold free-lunch items he knew he’d find in any of the saloons close by, so he went on past the barbershop corner another block and stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall diner for hotcakes, fried eggs, ham, and coffee. He stowed away the cheroot while he ate. The longer he held off lighting it, the easier it would be for him to keep from lighting the next one.
Leaving the restaurant, twenty-five cents poorer, but with a satisfactorily full stomach, Longarm squinted at the sun. Plenty of time for a shave before reporting in at the office. He walked at ease along the avenue, which was just coming to life. The day might not be so bad in spite of the snow, he decided, feeling the warmth from his breakfast spreading through his lean, sinewy body.
He grinned at the bright sun, glowing golden in a blue, crystal sky. Deliberately, he took a match from the bundle in his pocket, flicked it into flame with his thumbnail, and lighted his cheroot.
Smelling of bay rum, his overnight stubble removed and his brown mustache now combed to the angle and spread of the horns on a Texas steer, Longarm walked into Marshal Billy Vail’s office before eight o’clock. It gave him a virtuous feeling to be the first one to show up, and even Vail’s pink-cheeked, citified clerk-stenographer wasn’t at the outside desk to challenge him. The Chief Marshal was already on the job, of course, fighting the ever- losing battle he waged with the paperwork that kept coming from Washington in a mounting flood. Vail looked pointedly at the banjo clock on the wall.
“This’ll be the day the world ends,” he growled.
