few dollars in silver, some crumpled currency, and the usual oddments: a jackknife, a sack of Bull Durham tobacco and cigarette papers, matches, a dollar discount token from a Fort Smith whorehouse, and a gold tooth that he speculated must have come from some past victim. He took off the dead man’s gunbelt and carried it back to the fire.
“You generally carry a bandbox or something like that, don’t you?”
Longarm asked Maidia.
“Of course.”
Longarm handed her the pistol. “Here. Put this someplace handy when you get around to it. Later on, you can swap it for something a little more a lady’s size.”
Maidia pulled back. “A pistol? Oh, not-Why, I couldn’t carry a weapon, Marshal. Even if I felt that I could bring myself to carry one, I don’t know how to shoot it.”
“You can learn. I can teach you all you need to know in ten minutes. The rest is just practicing.”
“No, Marshal Long. I’m sure your intentions are good-“
“Now, you listen to me, Miss Harkness. It’s like you said yourself a minute ago. What you’re used to from back East don’t cut the mustard out here. You ain’t going to find a policeman on every streetcorner that you can look to for help When you need it. Coming right down to cases, you’re apt to be in places where there’s not even any streetcorners for a policeman to stand on. Now, you do what I tell you. Take this Colt and learn which end the bullets come out of.”
Gingerly, Maidia extended her hand and took the weapon. She almost dropped it when Longarm let go of the gunbelt. “My goodness! It’s a lot heavier than I thought it would be.”
“Part of that’s the belt and cartridges. But a gun’s going to be heavy, got to be. I’ll show you a little bit about it later on. Right now, we better get some grub together before both of us starve.”
“I know there’s supposed to be some food on the pack mule,” Maidia said. “But I’m not sure what kind of food. I told you I’m not very good at camp cooking, but I’ll do What I can to help you.”
Rummaging in the packsaddle together, they found a large chunk of beef loin, a half-side of bacon, a dozen or so potatoes, and several big white onions. In small cloth bags, they discovered flour, sugar, black-eyed peas, ground coffee, salt and pepper. There were also a few cans of tomatoes and peaches, a battered frying pan, and a large tin coffeepot. A cylinder of tattered rags had at its core an unlabeled bottle. Longarm pulled the cork and sniffed.
“Whiskey,” he told Maidia. “Either keg stuff, or out of a still on one of the whiskey ranches hereabout. Might be all right, might not be fit to drink. Well take it along and find out.”
“At least we won’t go to bed hungry,” Maidia said, looking at the food they’d found. “If we can get it cooked.”
“Oh, I can fix it so it’s almost fit to eat,” Longarm assured her. “Just don’t look for anything fancy.”
“I’m so hungry I could almost eat it raw,” she replied. “But there ought to be some plates and cups.”
“I got some tin plates in my saddlebag,” he said, “but I only carry one cup. Can’t seem to make room for two. But we’ll get along all right. And there’s water enough for coffee in my canteen. I’d bet there’s a spring close by, but I don’t aim to go looking for it in the dark. We might as well start supper. While it’s cooking, I’ll spread our bedrolls and rustle up a little wood for a breakfast fire.”
Working together—peeling and slicing potatoes, cutting steaks off the piece of beef loin, fixing them on split branches Longarm cut from a sweet gum tree to broil while the potatoes were fried, passing a casual remark about the food, the amount of coffee and water that would make a drinkable brew—brought a relaxation of the tension that until then had prevailed between Longarm and Maidia Harkness. She proved herself a reasonably adept cook, well able to hold up her end of the work.
In a surprisingly short time, they had the steaks over a bed of glowing coals, with the coffeepot sitting on one side of the coals, and potatoes sizzling in the frying pan on the other side. Longarm picked up the bottle of whiskey and held it to the firelight. The liquor showed a deep reddish brown through the clear glass of the bottle. He shook it hard several times, and nodded with satisfaction when no bubbles formed at the surface of the liquid.
“Whoever made it filtered out the fusel oil,” he told Maidia. “At least that’s how it looks. But we’ll just make sure before we try tasting it.”
He pulled the cork and trickled a few drops of liquor into the palm of one hand, set the bottle down, and rubbed the whiskey into the skin of his calloused palm with his fingertips. When he inspected his palm and sniffed at it, he nodded once again.
“It might burn our gullets,” he said, “but it won’t make us sick.”
How can you tell?”
“Wasn’t any oily scum left on my hand,” he explained. “These bootleg stills on the whiskey ranches don’t always have copper worms. If they don’t, and if they don’t get the fire hot enough and keep it going steady, the liquor’ll come out full of fusel oil, and that stuff just turns your stomach inside out. This ain’t what you’d get at a good saloon, but it’s safe enough to drink.”
He took a small swallow. The liquor was still raw, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d been afraid it might be. He held the bottle out to Maidia, and she surprised him by accepting it. She poured a healthy drink into the tin cup they’d taken from Longarm’s saddlebags. Maidia could see by Longarm’s expression that he’d expected her to refuse. She smiled at him.
“I’m not a blue-nosed reformer, Marshal, even if I am a social worker. I enjoy a drink before dinner at home. There’s no reason why one won’t taste as good here in the woods.”
“I’ll take mine right out of the bottle, unless you object,” he said. “I ain’t too fond of the way corn whiskey smells when I drink it out of a cup. I’m a rye drinker, myself.”
“I don’t object, Marshal. And I like rye better than bourbon, too.”
She took a swallow of the liquor and shook her head. “Oh, my! That’s very potent!”
