blackness. The old man struck a match to light a wall lamp. They were in a small, cluttered storage space piled floor-to-ceiling with pasteboard boxes and wooden crates. The old man hauled a battered child’s toy box out into the light and opened the lid, saying, “Look and enjoy. I’ll be out front if you find anything.”
Longarm hunkered down, setting the top layers of mouldering cheap paper neatly aside until, halfway to the bottom, he found a once-garish, now-faded cover that still looked mighty wild. He read the date—November, 1866—and set the old magazine aside until he’d replaced the others, closed the lid, and shoved the box back where it belonged. Then he picked up his treasure, put the lamp out, and rejoined the old man near the front of the shop.
“I’ll take this one, sir. How much do I owe you?” he asked.
The old man shrugged. “Take it. I sell books, not wastepaper. I told you I was going to get rid of all that trash. I’ve been meaning to put it out back in the alley, but my son is away on business and my back is not what it used to be.”
Longarm said, “You have to let me pay you. This has to be one of the earliest pulp books about a real person, so some of it could be based on fact. You see, I ain’t a gent with bad taste in literature. I’m a deputy U.S. marshal, and this dumb old penny dreadful could be serious evidence in a murder case.”
The old man laughed incredulously and said, “Where but in America could such things happen? You need the book, take the book. It’s one less I have to carry out with my aching back.”
“Now, look, the cover says it sold for a nickel back in Sixty-six. What say we settle for that, at least?”
The old man shook his head stubbornly. “I’m an ethical businessman. I don’t cheat customers. I got that whole box of old magazines thrown in, free, as part of the deal I made for a couple of hundred real books I really wanted. How could I charge you for something I never paid for and was just going to throw out? It’s against the law to do a small favor for a lawman?”
Longarm said, “You sure are a stubborn old cuss, no offense. But would you agree one good turn deserves another?”
The old man shrugged. “Do me a favor and we’ll call it square.”
Longarm took off his hat and coat, put them on the counter with the favor the old man had just done him, and said, “All right. You show me where you want things piled, and that’s where I’ll pile ‘em for you.”
“You don’t mean that,” the old man replied. “I got at least a ton of scrap paper to leave out back for the rag picker.”
“We’d better get cracking, then,” Longarm said.
Longarm didn’t think it made much sense, either, by the time they’d finished. The spry old man had done some of the work, of course, so they were both paper-dusty by the time they’d toted all the trash books the old man was too proud to sell out to the alley. As he dropped the last heavy box beside the back gate, Longarm said, “I hope nobody steals all this paper before your pal can pick it up.”
“Let them,” the old man said. “Anyone willing to lift such a load deserves it. We both must be crazy, but for a lawman you’re a nice change. Where I come from, lawmen don’t help an honest merchant. They help themselves to his merchandise. Do you like sweet wine? I got sweet wine inside and we’ve agreed one good turn deserves another.”
Longarm grinned, wiped his sweaty face with his pocket kerchief, and said, “We’re going to have to stop doing favors for each other before we both wind up crippled. Are we square about that old magazine now?”
“Idiot, I told you it was yours to begin with. But I thank you just the same. I can’t wait to write my brother in the old country that here the cossacks are harmless lunatics.”
They went back inside. Longarm gathered up his things and they parted friendly. The balmy dry air of the mile-high city dried him off as it cooled him down. But the combined effects of a hundred and thirty pound gal and a ton or so of less interesting stuff to manhandle had left him feeling exhausted and thirsty. So when he came to a neighborhood saloon, as sedate as such things got, along Larimer, he ducked in to settle his nerves and catch up on his reading.
The place was laid out a lot like Luke Short’s Long Branch in Dodge. Built into a storefront, it was no more than twenty feet wide and ran back about forty. The bar ran the long way, along one wall. Small tables were set along the other wall. The place was almost empty, save for a few regulars and a desperate as well as homely Mex gal lounging against the bar in a flouncy skirt with an organdy rose pinned to one overweight hip. As he ordered a schooner of needled beer at the bar she flashed a gold tooth at him and murmured, “Buenoches, querido. A onde va?”
He was going to a table to sit down. He didn’t answer her with more than a dry smile. As he moved to do so, she started to follow, but the barkeep warned her in Spanish that she was messing with the law. Sometimes it came in handy to be so well known in the rougher parts of town, Longarm thought.
He sat at a table facing the front, drank some suds, and spread his find on the table. It was entitled, “Black Jack Slade, Terror of the Overland Trail.”
So far so accurate.
The Overland Trail, like a lot of stagecoach trails, had more or less died with the coming of the Iron Horse. Rails now ran along parts of it. Other parts were still used as wagon traces by local traffic. Some had just been allowed to go back to seed, mostly tumbleweed. The old Overland Trail didn’t interest Longarm as much as the wild-eyed rascals who’d haunted it back in the transcontinental stagecoach era, and as he read the book, he had to allow the writer had tried to get some of the facts Longarm already knew right. So it was safe to assume some of the things Longarm didn’t know could be based on yarns still fresh at the time of publication.
Trying to make old Black Jack out a misunderstood Robin Hood was silly, of course. Slade had started out decent enough with an honorable discharge after the Mexican War and had been hired as a supervisor by the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Company, posted at Julesburg, where the stage lines forked to serve both the older mining camps out California way and the new Colorado strikes between Pikes Peak and Cherry Creek, as Denver had been called at the time. So he’d had a good job, had he had sense to behave right. Suffering snakes! His name had not started out as Black Jack. He’d been hired as Joseph Slade by Overland, and it was no wonder a half-cracked little bookworm had been struck by the fact they were both baptized the very same way!
Longarm read on about the Terror of the Overland Trail, and old Black Jack Slade had surely been that. He began his job for Overland by commencing to fuss with a French-Canadian fellow supervisor named Belle. The book
