Longarm was still angry. He made no effort at conversation, but circled the glade at the perimeter of firelight until he found the deadfall log from which the firewood had been cut. Am axe was still buried in the log. He used it as a lever to roll the deadfall up close to the fire, and quickly cleared the log of its remaining branches. He motioned to the cleared log.
“Might as well sit down,” he told the woman. “We’ve got to talk a mite. I’ll cook up some supper and make coffee after a while. I guess you’ve got some grub and your bedding on that pack mule tethered over yonder?”
“Yes.” She sat down on the log. “I gave those men twenty dollars to buy supplies. They told me they’d buy me a slicker, whatever that is, and a set of blankets. I suppose you’ll find them with the supplies.”
“Time enough for that,” Longarm said.
He hoped there might be a bottle of Maryland rye among the supplies, but he knew the best he could hope for, if there was any whiskey at all, was a bottle of questionable origin, probably the watered-down product of one of the illegal stills in the Indian Nation that supplied half the liquor drunk in the towns along its borders.
“You’ve got a name, I guess,” he told his companion. “Mine’s Long. You’ve already seen my badge, so you know what my business is.”
“I’m Maidia Harkness,” she replied. Then, somewhat tartly, she went on, “If you’d explained to me what sort of pressures you were under in stopping those men, I wouldn’t have been so critical, Marshal. But where I come from, the police don’t act as judge and jury. They arrest criminals and take them to jail, and let the courts decide whether they’re innocent or guilty.”
Longarm decided to let that pass without comment. Instead he asked, “Just where do you come from, Miss Harkness? Or is it Mrs. Harkness?”
“It’s miss. And my home’s in Boston.”
“I knew it was one of them big towns in the East,” Longarm said, nodding. “And this is your first trip to the West?”
“Yes. And I must say, my first impressions of it aren’t very favorable.”
“They’d have been a lot worse if I hadn’t come along when I did,” he reminded her. “That is, if you’d stayed alive to get any kind of impression.”
Maidia shuddered. “Yes. I’m still having trouble believing all this is happening to me, though. I keep waiting to wake up and find myself at home in bed. It’s been something of a nightmare.”
“And pretty much your own fault,” Longarm couldn’t keep himself from replying. “But I can understand why you acted like you did. Back where you come from, there’s people underfoot everyplace you turn, all of them living in the pocket of the fellow standing next to them. And a policeman on every corner to look after them and keep them safe.”
“It’s not quite that simplistic,” Maidia said. For the first time since Longarm had seen her, she smiled. Her face changed completely.
She went on, “Perhaps we have come to depend too much on others for protection, though. We’ve gotten to look on it as automatic, something we buy and take for granted, instead of looking out for ourselves.”
“Why’d you come out here, Miss Harkness?”
Longarm was frankly curious. He’d seen all kinds of people during the years he’d been trying to bring civilized behavior to the raw, untamed West, but the Harkness woman didn’t fit any of the compartments others had filled.
She seemed surprised. “Why, to help, of course.”
“Help who?”
“Those who need help the most. The Indians.”
“I see.” Longarm made a business of blowing the ash off his cheroot. “Did they ask you to come help them?”
“No, of course not. But other social workers have told me about their needs, and I decided that I’d be of more service to them than to the people I’ve been trying to help back home.”
Longarm was puzzled. “I reckon you lost me around that last bend, Miss Harkness. Is that what you do for a living? Just go around helping people?”
“I suppose you could call it that. I’m a social worker, you see.”
“That’s just it,” he frowned. “I don’t see. Now, I guess my business is helping folks by keeping robbers and killers and such behind bars, but from the way you were talking a while ago, you’re just as concerned about helping them as you are about trying to do something for the folks they take advantage of.”
“Everybody has rights in life. Marshal Long, even the ones you call robbers and killers. After all, they’re human beings too.”
Longarm grinned wryly. “After some of the things I’ve run into, I might put up a pretty argument that a lot of them ain’t what you’d call good examples of human beings.”
“Nonsense. Why, you must remember the beautiful words Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence: ‘… that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights.’”
“Oh, I know about the Declaration, sure. Only I disremember its saying anything about a body having a right to rob and maim and kill.”
“You’re evading the issue, Marshal,” she said severely. “Take the Indians. We’ve deprived a great many of them of their lives, and now we’re depriving all of them of their liberty, by shutting them up on reservations like the ones here in the Indian Nation.”
“Well, now I’ve been pretty much all over the reservations here in the Nation. I don’t recall seeing any Indians shut up, except a few that’s turned to thieving from their own people, and killing, and things like that.”
