Longarm gulped. 'Hold on. Old Pru assured me she was a grass widow, divorced from a jealous brute whose name seemed unimportant to me at the time.'
Vail snapped, 'You'll get to know him a heap, and vice versa, if we let him serve you with the papers he's likely having drawn up at this very moment. The gal didn't exactly lie to you. She just left out some truth. Prunella and Paul Farnam are sort of divorced, as of last month. But it won't be final till the end of ninety days.'
Longarm smiled sheepishly. 'She did seem anxious to get on with her, ah, new life. I ain't sure I follow your drift about this ninety-day shit, though. She told me the feelings had been mutual and her ex-husband had been a sport about the house and some mining property up to the Front Range.'
Vail grimaced. 'She meant Paul Farnam has a far slicker lawyer than she hired. Only I see she doesn't know it yet. Farnam figured he might lose a contested divorce, since his wife was far from the only resident of Colorado who considers him to be a total bastard. There's mining camps old Paul can't go to without a four-man bodyguard. So he gets good rates from that detective agency. As I get it from the courthouse gang, he slickered that passionate but dumb brunette by agreeing to an uncontested divorce and handsome property settlement with just one little provision in the small print.'
Longarm sighed and said, 'You mean they have her word in small print that she won't entertain overnight guests of the male persuasion under their mutual roof until such time as the court decrees she's free?'
Vail nodded. 'Something like that. Knowing her nature even better than the rest of us, I'd say he and his lawyer figured she'd never hold out for ninety days. So tell me something about you, Have you ever suffered any serious fevers?'
Longarm blinked, hesitated but a moment, and replied, 'Sure I have. Growing up hard-scrabble in West-by- God-Virginia, we sort of felt left out if we weren't served a dose of any ague going round, and there sure was a heap of 'em. Close to half the kids I started in the first grade with died of one damned fever or another, while the rest of us grew up immune to most. Sink or swim was all the medical science most of our folks could afford.'
He glanced out the nearest window at the busy world outside as he caught himself muttering, 'Old Warts Wilson died at Cold Harbor after living through the pox, and Hank Bronson licked the scarlet fever only to stop a round of.75 with his head at Shiloh. But that's all water under the bridge, and what have childhood agues to do with me getting hauled into divorce court like the fool that I am about frisky women?'
Vail said, 'If you're not in town, you can't be served. If Paul Farnam doesn't serve some fool in less than ninety days and prove him a carnal correspondent in court within that time, your Prunella is off the hook, and more important, so's my senior deputy. I only wanted to make sure you had a sporting chance against the fevers of the Fever Coast. I got a half-failed mission down yonder, and seeing you're only fixing to get in a bigger mess here in Denver...'
'Hold on and back up,' Longarm said with a puzzled frown. 'I know they call that stretch of the Texican shore from, say, Brownsville to Galveston the Fever Coast because it's sort of lethal to man or beast from other parts. I've been down that way a time or two and I'm still breathing. But how can a mission be half-failed, Billy? Seems to me a man ought to carry out his mission all the way or consider it a total failure, fight?'
'Wrong,' Billy Vail replied. 'I sent Deputy Gilbert down to a seaport called Escondrijo, betwixt Brownsville and Corpus Christi. I sent him to pick up and transport a federal prisoner for Judge Dickerson down the hall. Gilbert got there to find his prisoner too sick to move from his cot in the town lockup. They told him it was a spring fever that seemed to be going round. Up to then a good half of them down with it had bounced back. So Gilbert hired a room across from the jail to wait his prisoner's fever out. Last I heard, the outlaw Judge Dickerson wants to hang has recovered his own health, whilst poor old Rod Gilbert's flat on his back with that same fool fever.'
Leaning back in his swivel chair, Billy Vail relit his soggy old cigar. 'To tell the truth, I'd planned on letting Gilbert get better and bring his man in before you got your own fool self in this worse fix. But seeing you have, what say we send you down to Escondrijo to see about getting both old boys back up this way in as much comfort as they both deserve?'
Longarm sighed. 'I reckon it beats being hauled into a damned old divorce court any time of the year, and it might not be too hot in south Texas this early in the year. I'll just tell Henry out front, and tend me a few errands whilst he types up my travel orders and vouchers, right?'
'Wrong,' Billy Vail replied again. 'I've already told Henry what I want typed up for you, Gilbert, and your prisoner. I'll get word to Prunella Farnam later and save you the trouble and considerable risk of running back up yonder to warn her they'll be riding hard on her with spiteful intent. It ain't our worry if she can't hold out till you can help her with her organ some more when her dad-blamed divorce is final!'
Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, 'Well, as long as somebody warns her ... It sure feels spooky working for a boss who reads my mind so good, Billy Vail.'
To which Marshal Vail could only reply with a modest smile, 'I reckon somebody has to do some thinking for you when it comes to women. Lord knows the pretty little things surely seem to confuse the shit out of you when left to study about 'em on your own!'
CHAPTER 2
Longarm spoke enough Border Mex to translate Escondrijo freely as 'Hideout.' So he wasn't too surprised to discover Escondrijo, Texas, was one of those places You just couldn't get to from most anywhere else without a whole lot of trouble.
The Lone Star and erstwhile Confederate State was commencing to attract more settlers and railroad tracks now that President Hayes had called a halt to Reconstruction and let those who best knew the Southwest run it their own way, as long as they remembered who'd won. So most of the Southern railroads had standardized their tracks to the same broad gauge, and Henry had managed to get Longarm by rail to the head of navigation on the Rio Grande. You had to go by steamboat from Brownsville to Escondrijo and beyond in any case. Railroads ran where there was profit to be made, across sensible terrain, and even if there had been enough settlers to matter, it would have been a bitch to lay track across the line of swamps and estuaries between Brownsville and Galveston with the construction methods of the day. So it made more sense to everyone if such freight and passengers as there were moved up and down the Fever Coast by boat, whether sail luggers out on the gulf, or steamers plying the inland waterway a good pilot could follow from lagoon to lagoon behind the sandy barrier islands that lay just offshore--as if to guard the low, swampy mainland from that mean Indian deity Hura Kan.
Longarm had known better than to head for south Texas in a three-piece tweed suit with summer coming in. The paddle-wheel passage down the lower Rio Grande was hot and sticky enough to a gent wearing no more than a thin cotton work shirt and well-washed jeans between his tobacco-brown Stetson and low-heeled stovepipe boots. Nobody along the border got excited by the sight of a sober gent packing a gun on one hip. He only sported his badge when he was up to answering pesky questions about his immediate intent.
He'd been fooled before about whether a lawman on such a routine mission might or might not need to do
