“I’ll put him in the wagon bed and see if they’ll bury him for me someplace. Might be papers out on him, somewhere. He took things too seriously for a boy with a clean record.”
“Hot damn! You mean I might get a reward for shooting him?”
“If there’s anything like that I’ll see that you get the money, but you’d best let me take credit for gunning him, Sally. I don’t want any of his friends dropping by to pay you a call some night.”
“Aw, hell, I was aiming to brag on it some,” Sally said disappointedly. “Lots of folks in this county treat me like a sissy!”
“You’re all man, Roping Sally, but let’s not build you a rep as a gunslick if we can help it. It can make for nervous nights. Believe me, I know!”
“I’ll do as you say. Where you heading now?”
“Hadn’t thought about it all that much. I doubt if anyone else is likely to creep into this web tonight. I gave my bed at the agency to a guest of the Durlers. Hmm, I’d best carry you and this jasper back to town and try for some shut-eye at the hotel.”
“You can stay at my spread, if you’ve a mind to. It’s just to the northwest of town.”
“Uh, I figure to get up with the chickens, Sally.”
“Hell, don’t we all? You come on home with me and I’ll fry you some eggs before we turn in.”
Longarm didn’t answer. Roping Sally punched him on the shoulder and asked, “What’s the matter, are you scared of me?”
“Not hardly. But what’ll folks say about it in Switchback?”
“Who gives a hoot and a holler? I don’t keep any hands on my spread. The boys I was riding with before live with their folks in town and I hire ‘em as I need ‘em. Ain’t nobody there but me and a mess of critters. I got dogs and cats, Shanghai chickens, a Poland China hog, and my remuda and herd keeping me company, but not one of ‘em ever gossips about me worth mention.”
Longarm laughed and said, “We’ll talk about it along the way.”
Chapter 7
Roping Sally’s house was a large one-room soddy with a lodgepole roof and a cast-iron kitchen range sharing space with a fourposter bed and enough supplies to stock a general store. They’d stored Fats in the smokehouse and put the mule in with Buck. Longarm sat at an improvised table made of planks laid across two barrels. He smoked as he watched Sally putter at the range with her back to him. He noticed that the seat of her pants was tight and worn shiny between the wings of her flapping chaps, and though she was a mite broad across the beam where she sat a horse, her waistline was as trim as if she’d been cinched up in a whalebone corset. The hickory shirt she wore was tight enough for him to see she wasn’t wearing a corset, or much else, under it. She was one handsome woman—considering she chewed cut plug—but Longarm couldn’t figure her out. He was either getting into something too good to be true, or just as likely, about to make a terrible mistake.
The girl turned with a grin and plopped two coffee mugs and a pair of tin plates down in front of him, saying, “There you go. Wrap yourself around those eggs before you tell me I can’t cook.”
“Uh, don’t we use some forks or something, Sally?”
“Oh, Lordy, I’m so flusterated I clean forgot the silverware! You’ve likely suspicioned I don’t entertain all that much.”
He waited until she’d put some oversized cutlery on the planks before he said cautiously, “You told me, coming in, you didn’t have any fellows sparking you.”
“Hell, there ain’t a man in Montana worth spit on a rock. Present company not included, of course.”
“Sally, you can’t tell me somebody hasn’t tried,” Longarm said skeptically.
“Sure they have. Sissy little things who have to sit down to pee, most likely. I knew they were just after my daddy’s cows.”
“Oh, you got a daddy hereabouts?”
“Dead. Got thrown and busted his neck, summer before last. He raised me to be a cowhand and he likely raised me right, for I’ve done right well here, without him. What’s the matter with the eggs? You ain’t eating ‘em.”
Longarm put a forkful of rubbery, over-fried eggs in his mouth and chewed hard. He swallowed bravely before he shook his head and said, “You got ‘em just right, Sally. I’m a mite tuckered after such a long, hard day, is all.”
“Why don’t we go to bed then? Which side would be your pleasure?”
“Sally, I’d best spread my bedroll out in the wagon bed, out back.”
“What in thunder for? I took a bath last Saturday. Besides, that fellow in the smokehouse tore shit out of your blankets with that old express rifle.”
“Sally, how old are you?”
“I’m old enough, I reckon. My daddy and me ran just about the first longhorns north from the Powder River Range to this here territory and I shot my first Sioux before I lost my cherry!”
Longarm brightened and said, “Oh? I was, uh, wondering how soon we were likely to get to that subject.”
“My daddy said I wasn’t a virgin anymore when I told him about it. He was sore as hell, but there wasn’t all that much he could do about it, since the cuss who cost me my cherry was long gone. You want to hear about it?”
“Not really. Just wanted to know where this trail was leading me. You take the right side and I’ll take the left and we’ll likely wind up in the middle. You want me to blow out the lights?”
