Longarm turned in the doorway to say, “If I knew any more than you I’d likely be able to save myself the trip, Chief. You ain’t paying me to guess. As I see it, I’m to go and fetch them two old boys.”
“I’m going to be sweating bullets anyway, until you come back with some reasonable explanation. You said a week, right? What am I to do if you don’t come back in a week?”
Longarm considered before he shrugged and said, “Don’t know, but it won’t be my problem, will it?”
“What do you mean, it won’t be your problem? Are you saying you’ll be back in a week unless you’re no longer alive?”
Longarm didn’t answer. That was the trouble with men who worked behind an office desk. Instead of thinking, they got into the habit of asking all sorts of foolish questions.
Longarm sat alone on a green plush seat near the rear of the passenger car of the U.P. local-combine. Somewhere up ahead the Wyoming sun was going down. He smoked a cheroot and stared out the dirty window with one booted foot braced against the cast-iron frame of the empty seat facing him. The train was climbing the Rocky Mountains, but you couldn’t tell. The sunset-tented scene outside seemed gently rolling prairie, for the snow-clad spine of the Continental Divide dipped under a vast mountain meadow near South Pass. Some accident of geology had left an annex of the high plains cattle country stranded in the sky.
The Indians had found this easy way through the Shining Mountains long before they’d shown it to the mountain men, who’d mapped it for the covered wagon trains and, twenty years later, the transcontinental railroad.
Longarm wasn’t crossing the continent. He was about an hour and a half from the jerkwater stop at Bitter Creek, at the rate they were moving. He hoped there’d be a tolerable hotel in Bitter Creek; he planned on a good night’s sleep between clean sheets, and if possible, a bath, before he spurred a horse for Crooked Lance. He was hoping someone there might know where the fool town was; Longarm had a War Department survey map saying it was one place, while the map he’d asked the land office for had it in another. Either way, it was a good distance to ride on a fool’s errand.
A voice pitched high, with a slight lisp, asked, “Are you a cowboy, mister?” and Longarm swung his eyes from the window to stare morosely at what had climbed up on the seat facing him. It had long blond curls, but was wearing a velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, so it was probably a boy. Longarm remembered seeing the child get on with a not-bad-looking gal in a feathered hat at Medicine Bow, so the sissy-looking kid was liable to be hers. Longarm decided the father had to be damned ugly, if that pretty little thing down at the other end of the car had given birth to anything so tedious to look at.
The prissy little boy repeated his question and Longarm, remembering his manner, smiled crookedly and answered, “I’m sorry, Sonny. But I ain’t a cowboy. Ain’t no Injun, either.”
“You look like a cowboy. We saw some cowboys riding horses back near that last town. My name is Cedric and I’m almost seven and when I grow up I’m going to be a cowboy!”
Longarm’s face softened, for he’d been seven once, so he nodded soberly and said, “You look like you have the makings of a top hand, Cedric. You ever ride a bronc?”
“Well, I used to have a pony, before my daddy had to go away with the angels of the Lord.”
“Oh? Well, I’m purely sorry about that, sonny. It’s been nice meeting up with you, but don’t you think you’d better go back and keep your mother company?”
Cedric pulled his tiny feet up on the green plush, stood on the seat, and shouted down the length of the car, “Mommy! Mommy! Can I stay here and talk to this cowboy?”
Heads turned and a rustling of soft laughter filled the car as Longarm wondered if crawling under the seat might seem too obvious a way to vanish. Only half the seats were filled, this far out on the local run, but everyone on earth seemed to be looking his way.
Before the brat could yell again, the woman seated near the front of the car got up and moved their way, her pretty face mortified under the bouncing feathers of her black-veiled hat. Longarm now noticed that she was wearing black widow’s weeds and that she moved nicely, edging around the potbellied stove in the center of the car. As she came nearer, the deputy rose from his seat, took the cheroot from his mouth and tipped his Stetson, murmuring, “Your servant, Ma’am.”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” she replied, as Longarm tried to decide if she was blushing or just glowing prettily in the red light of evening.
She took Cedric by the shoulder and shook him gently, as she warned him in a low tone, “I’ve told you a hundred times it’s not refined to shout like that, darling!”
“Aw, hell, Mom, I was just talking to the cowboy!”
A few seats away a man tried not to laugh out loud and failed, and this time the woman seemed really flustered. Longarm pointed at the seat across from his and muttered, “Why don’t we all set? We’ll be stopping soon and your Cedric ain’t fretting me all that much.”
The woman hesitated, then took a seat by her noisy darling, not looking at Longarm as she murmured, “I’m not in the habit of speaking to strangers, sir, but… oh, Cedric, what am I to do with you?”
Privately, Longarm had considered a good sound birching as good a way to start as any. Aloud, he said, “I know I’m a stranger, ma’am, but if it’s any help to you, I’m a Deputy United States Marshal, so it ain’t like you’ve fallen in with thieves, should anyone ask.”
Cedric chortled, “Oh, boy, a sheriff!”
More to shut him up than with any idea that it might be of interest, Longarm corrected, “No, sonny, a marshal ain’t no sheriff. You’ll understand it better when you grow up.” He didn’t add, “if.” The poor young widow woman had enough on her plate as it was.
The lady pursed her lips as if coming to a brave decision before she said, “Allow me to introduce myself to you, Marshal. I am Mabel Hanks, widow to the late Ruben Hanks of Saint Louis. You’ve met my son, Cedric, to my considerable mortification.”
