“Thanks, kid. How, uh, how are the meals downstairs?”
“Best you’ll find this side of Cheyenne, sir.”
“Cheap?”
“A dollar.”
Longarm winced. The boy grinned. “It’s okay, sir. The railroad is paying for it.”
“I didn’t take the railroad’s offer of a shared room.”
“That don’t make no difference, sir. You’re still on the books for Union Pacific layover benefit. They’ll pay your meals and sixty cents a day on your room. Mr. Wiggins has the rest of your room cost on the voucher you gave him.”
“You pay a lot of attention to what’s going on here, Longarm said.
The boy grinned. “My pa has a two-thirds share in this ol’ hotel, Marshal. One of these days it’s gonna be mine. All of it.”
“Y’know, son, I believe that it will for a fact. Now if you’ll excuse me, I better get to my shaving before that water gets cold.”
“Yes, sir. And Marshal, sir, if there’s anything you need, you just ask for me. Jim Jennison Junior. You hear?”
“I do, young Jim, and I thank you.”
The boy let himself out, and Longarm bolted the door closed behind him, then gave some attention to getting dressed and ready to face the day. A shave, a shit, and some groceries first, then off to visit with Clay while he waited for the track to be cleared. Could be worse.
He was not a block distant from the hotel and already Longarm’s ears were deceptively numb. Dangerously numb. If he spent much time like this, he would wind up with frostbite. Damn ears would go white, then blacken with rot and fall plumb off his face. How the hell was a man supposed to keep a hat out of his eyes if he didn’t have ears to prop it up on.
Not that he was wearing his hat at the moment. With a blue norther whistling down the main street of Kittstown, it would have been stupid to wear a hat. Angle your head a fraction of an inch the wrong way and a hat would soar off to Utah or some such lonesome place. Instead he’d wrapped a thin, knitted muffler around his head to try to keep the bite of the wind away. But it turned out that that covering, the best he happened to have with him, wasn’t nearly enough, so he headed into the doorway of the Kittstown Mercantile.
“Mister,” the proprietor greeted him, “you must be near to desperate for whatever brought you here. Personally, I only unlocked the door out of habit. And I wouldn’t have come to work at all if I didn’t live upstairs.” The fellow was a tiny wisp of a man, probably not more than five feet and a half tall, if that, and weighing no more than a good sack of the flour he sold.
“It didn’t seem so bad when I set out,” Longarm admitted.
“What is it I can do you for, friend?”
“Do you happen to have any fur hats or at least some earmuffs?”
“Would some Army-issue coyote fur hats do what you want?”
“Perfect.” The bulky things looked like hell, but the fur-covered earflaps would keep a mule’s floppy ears warm as toast.
The storekeeper rooted through a crate and came up with one likely-looking gray-brown hat, then found an identical item under his counter. He laid the two of them side by side for Longarm’s inspection. “Dollar,” he said, “for this one here. Fifty cents for that one.”
“Why the difference?”
The man grinned. When he did that, Longarm saw that the storekeeper wasn’t nearly as old as Longarm first thought. The man’s hairline had receded halfway back on his scalp so that he looked mostly bald when viewed from in front, and a set of gold-rimmed spectacles lent weight to the impression of age. At first Longarm had assumed he was in his late thirties or early forties. Now Longarm revised that estimate backward, judging the slightly built fellow to be still in his twenties. Twenty-six or -seven? About there. He seemed bright and pleasant enough, though.
“The difference is,” the cheerful storekeeper said, “that both of them come out of a shipment of assorted surplus items. This fifty-cent hat, mister, is one the supplier back in Missouri claims to have treated against lice and other vermin. The dollar hat, on the other hand, is one that I personally fumigated over burning sulphur smoke. Feel free to pick and choose.”
“Ah, yes,” Longarm said with a nod. “Y’know, sir, it occurs to me that the dollar hat there is a particularly nice one. Very handsome.”
“Very,” the storekeeper agreed. “Shall I wrap it for you?”
“Don’t bother.”
“No extra charge.”
“Good of you, I’m sure.” Longarm untied the thongs that held the earflaps high, pulled off the useless muffler he’d wrapped around his head, then tugged the hat firmly on. He felt warmer already. “Thanks.” No sense in being wasteful; since the thing happened to be handy anyway, he took the muffler and wrapped it several times around his neck, and for good measure pulled the collar of his sheepskin coat as high as it would go.
“Before you go, is there anything else I can sell you?” the storekeeper asked. “Think hard, friend. You may be the only customer I get today, and I want to make the most of you whilst you’re here.” The grin flashed again.
“No, there isn’t, I … no, wait a minute there. Maybe there is something else after all. You know Clay Waring, of course. I seem to recall there was some hard candy stuff that he was fond of. Not horehound. It was, uh … oh, I can’t call it to mind at the moment.”
