“Ayuh
“That’s for the stop at the Cargyle spur. Mind what I told you, though. There’s no regular passenger traffic back into the hollow.” Longarm guessed the conductor would be from Kentucky or possibly some other section in the heart of the Appalachians. Certainly not from the West, though, or he would have referred to the coal rich valley as a gulch, gully, or canyon. Only a mountain boy from somewhere in the South was likely to use the term hollow. “There might be some cuss with a cart come to see can he make a quarter, or you can tap into the wire and ask for someone to come fetch you in. One thing for damn sure, we ain’t gonna stop and back all the way into Cargyle for the sake of one passenger even if he is a deputy marshal.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to do that anyhow,” Longarm said. “You say it’s only a mile or so?”
“Call it a mile and a half or something like it.”
“Hell, that’s no distance. I can walk that easier than having somebody come out an’ get me.” The conductor gave him a look as if thinking Longarm might be slightly daft. But then in this country men weren’t much for walking, not when they could find any sort of a ride. “You do what you want, friend. Say, this is a mighty nice smoke. What brand did you say it is?”
Longarm told him and the man nodded sagely. Longarm did not mention the price. Probably the conductor would not have been quite so quick to nod if he knew that part of the deal. But then Longarm figured a man was entitled to treat himself to something special once in a while. After all, if he wasn’t worth it, who the hell was?
The train rocked and shuddered as the speed fell off and the imperfections in the rail joints became all the more noticeable. Up ahead the engineer gave a long blast on the steam whistle. “I asked Jules to let one go for you. It’s possible somebody back in the hollow might hear and bring a wagon out for you.”
“That’s nice of you, friend. An’ twice I owe you.”
The conductor gave his cheroot an admiring look and winked. Longarm took the hint and gave the man a couple more of the slim, dark cigars to slip into his pocket for later.
Five minutes more and Longarm was standing alone on the gravel ballast—there wasn’t even a platform for the use of main line passengers disembarking for Cargyle—beside a sign reading: CARGYLE, COLO, ELEVATION 4,216 Ft. Underneath the painted lettering a wag had used something, probably a scrap of soft coal, to scrawl an addition: POPULATION ONE TOO DAMN MANY. Longarm wondered what the unhappy fellow had meant by that. That he didn’t want to be there himself? Or that someone he didn’t like was there? It could’ve been either one, Longarm figured as he drew in the last drag on his smoke and tossed the butt to the ground. Standing there wasn’t going to get him very far. He picked up his gear and commenced walking.
Like so many of these coal camps, like Ludlow a few miles south or Collier about eight miles north, Cargyle was in no way scenic. There was dry bunchgrass, prairie and a set of lonesome railroad tracks leading across it to disappear between two fingers of loose rock, the hillsides studded with dark green cedar and, here and there, a little scrub oak and low, spreading juniper. A creek bed, dry now and likely dry most of each year, ran along beside the tracks, as did a wagon road that didn’t appear to see much use.
Longarm was about a quarter mile along the road and just about to get warmed up to the hike when he saw a pale curl of dust rising near the entrance to the canyon—or hollow, if one preferred—where the tracks led. The dust became more and more clearly visible, and soon a buckboard came into view. The wagon was fair flying along. And close behind it a two-wheeled cart bounced crazily, only one wheel at a time touching the earth as the pony between the bars raced to get ahead of the team of cobs that were pulling the buckboard.
The two vehicles seemed an unlikely match for a race, but the price of the entertainment was certainly right, so Longarm paused in his walking so he could enjoy the contest. Wagon and cart careened closer, the driver of the wagon several times deliberately veering in front of the cart to force the red and white pony into the creek bed. The driver of the paint had to either give way or crash. He chose to give way, but he didn’t much like it. As the racing vehicles came ever nearer, Longarm could hear the drivers swearing at each other. They were shouting and hollering about as hard as they were driving. Neither one of them was much more than a kid, Longarm saw once they were close enough. He guessed the wagon driver to be about fourteen, the boy in the cart a year or two younger.
Both of them were dashing hellbent, urging their animals, screaming insults, leaning forward and straining as if that would somehow lend speed to their rigs. The wagon and the cart alike were bouncing high into the air and wobbling from side to side so hard it was an amazement that either boy could remain inside his own vehicle, much less keep any degree of control.
Longarm was so busy watching all this with a sense of detached amusement that it damn near failed to dawn on him that he was standing in the very same road these boys were racing down. Once the realization finally dawned, he had to step lively to reach the safety of the railroad tracks in time to avoid being run over.
He escaped with his life, if not with quite all his dignity, and turned to see, much to his surprise, both boys setting back hard on their driving lines and struggling to turn their excited animals around. Horses and pony alike were fighting the bits and wanting to race on.
“Whoa, you sons of bitches, whoa,” the older boy in the wagon was shouting.
“Me, mister, pick me,” the younger one shrieked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter and seeking to claim a prize he hadn’t exactly won.
Longarm reckoned he had to thank that conductor fella all over again for being thoughtful enough to ask for a toot on the train whistle. It seemed that his transportation into Cargyle had arrived.
Chapter 11
The boys were named Buddy and Rick. Buddy was the younger one with the pony and cart. Rick was the kid with the buckboard. In, about, and through all the yammering, the cussing—some of it fairly inventive considering the early ages of the cussers—and the accusations, Longarm worked it out that Buddy had a mother who was the legitimate owner of the pony and cart rig and that Rick was a sometime employee of the greengrocer who was the true owner of the wagon and team. There was some question, at least in Buddy’s mind, as to whether Rick was officially authorized to utilize the buckboard for purposes of secondary employment. This was not a question Longarm felt qualified to arbitrate, so he settled the matter short of fisticuffs by offering a compromise solution.
“What I’m gonna do,” he told the red-faced and furious combatants, “is hire the both of you. Rick, I’m gonna pay you a dime, hard money, to carry my bag an’ saddle in that wagon there. An’ Buddy, I’m gonna pay you a dime to carry me on the seat of that cart. Buddy, don’t you dare open that mouth of yours till I’m finished talking; d’you think I don’t see your lip floppin’ open? You hush up too there, Rick. Now … if I can finish what I was fixin’ to say here … the deal is this. We’ll do ‘er just like I said or else I’ll walk the rest of the way like I started out to do to begin with. So you each do like I say an’ work together so’s each of you makes hisself a dime … or else you don’t neither one earn a damn thing. Suit yourselves.”
