The youth moved clear of the barber chair, keeping his hands well out to both sides as he smiled and answered, “I doubt as you’ve seen me at all, Marshal. My handle is Jack Robinson and I just came up from Texas. I’m riding for the Diamond K, just outside Of town, these days. And that sixgun trained on my middle is making me a mite skittish, dang it!”
Longarm nodded thoughtfully. Then he lowered the muzzle to his side as he asked the barber the price of the cheroots in the open cigar box on the marble counter. George said they were a nickel each, so Longarm said, “Have a smoke on me, then, Tex. I’ll allow we was both still half asleep, so lets part friendly and forget it, hear?”
The cowhand clumped over to the counter and helped himself to a cheroot, saying, “that’s right neighborly of you, Marshal. Am I free to mosey on?”
“Sure. You don’t aim to give me a shave, do you?”
They both laughed, and as Longarm took his place in the chair, the younger man left. Longarm stared after him thoughtfully until his booted footfalls faded up the walk outside. The barber brought a hot towel, but Longarm motioned it away and said, “Ain’t got much time, George. Just run your blade through this stubble and I’ll be on my way. Don’t want to report in late again and I ain’t had breakfast yet.”
The barber nodded and started to swivel the chair around to face the Mirror.
Longarm shook his head and said, “Leave her facing the doorway, George.”
“You still edgy about that young cowboy, Mister Long? He looked harmless enough to me.”
“Yeah. He said he was from Texas, too. I’ll take this shave sitting tall, if it’s all the same to you.”
The barber shrugged and went to work. He knew the deputy wasn’t a man for small talk in the morning, so he lathered Longarm silently, wondering what he’d missed in the exchange just now.
The barber was still stropping his razor when the open doorway suddenly darkened. The youth who’d apparently left for good was back, with the Walker-Colt gripped in both hands and his red face twisted with hate.
Longarm fired three times as he rose, pumping lead through the barber’s cloth from the short muzzle of the.44 he’d been holding in his lap, as the barber dove for cover. When George Masters raised his head, Longarm was standing in the doorway, the cloth still hanging from his neck and the smoking .44 in his big right fist as he stared morosely down at the figure sprawled on the wet sandstone paving in the soft summer rain. Masters joined the lawman to stare down in wonder at the death-glazed eyes of the stranger who’d left his Walker Colt inside on the tiles as he fell. Masters gasped, “How did YOu know, Mister Long?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Didn’t, for certain. He’s changed a mite since I arrested him down in the Indian Nation four or five summers back. He shouldn’t have said he was from Texas. It came to me who he was as he was walking away. He was wearing high plains spurs. That’s how he come back so quiet. Most Texans favor spurs that jingle when they walk. His hat was wrong for Texas, too.”
“My God, then you was waiting for him all the time?”
“Nope. just careful. Like I said, it was a good five years back and I could have been wrong. A man in my line arrests a lot of folks in five years.”
Their discussion was broken off by the arrival of a uniformed roundsman of the Denver police department. He elbowed through the crowd Of People by now gathering around the body on the walk and sighed, “I hope somebody here has an explanation for all this.”
Longarm identified himself and explained what had happened, adding, “here’s what’s left of one Robert Jackson. He’d changed his name bass-akwards to Jack Robinson but he hadn’t learned much since I beat him to the draw a few years back. He’d gunned a Seminole down in the Indian Nation and was supposed to be doing twenty years at hard labor in Leavenworth. I don’t know what he was doing in Denver, but, as you see, he don’t figure to cause nobody much bother.”
“You’re going to have to come down to the station house and help us make out a report, Deputy Long. I hope you don’t take it personal. I’m just doing my job.”
“I know. I got a job to do myself, so let’s get cracking. The boss is going to cloud up and rain all over me if I come in late again this morning.”
The sky had cleared by the time Longarm left the police station and resumed his walk up Colfax Avenue. Up on Capitol Hill the gilded dome of the Colorado State House glinted in the rain-washed sunlight, but the civic center, like the rest of Denver’s business district, nestled in the hollow between Capitol Hill to the east and the Front Range of the Rockies, fifteen miles to the west.
Longarm came to the U.S. Mint at Cherokee and Colfax and swung around the corner to walk to the federal courthouse. He saw he was late as he elbowed his way through the halls filled with officious-looking dudes waving legal briefs and smelling of macassar hair oil. He climbed a marble staircase and made his way to a big oak door whose gold leaf lettering read, UNITED STATES MARSHAL, FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF COLORADO.
Longarm went inside, where he found a new face seated at a roll-top desk, pounding at the keys of a newfangled engine they called a typewriter. Longarm nodded down at the pink-faced young man and said, “You play that thing pretty good. Is the chief in the back?”
“Marshal Vail is in his office, sir. Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Hell, he knows who I am. I only asked was he in.”
Longarm moved over to an inner doorway, ignoring the clerk as he bleated, “You can’t go in unannounced, sir!”
Longarm opened the door without knocking and went in. He found his superior, Marshal Vail, seated behind a pile of papers on a flat-topped mahogany desk.
Vail looked up with a harassed expression and growled, “You’re late. Be with you in a minute. They’ve got me buried under a blizzard that just blowed in from Washington!”
Longarm sat on the arm of a morocco leather chair across the desk from his superior and chewed his unlit cheroot to wait him out. It seemed that all he ever did these days was wait. A banjo clock on the oak-paneled wall ticked away at his life while Longarm counted the stars in the flag pinned flat on the wall over Vail’s balding head.
