'West Virginia.'
'Parents and family still alive?'
'You ask a lot of personal questions, don't you.'
Lucy leaned back on her haunches. 'I've been watching you, Custis, and I can tell that you are a very methodical man.'
'How so?' he asked, turning a roasting sage hen on a stick over their fire.
'You move and talk slow, but you're pretty quick. I saw that much when you came after me on that horse you stole. You can be a hard man, can't you, Deputy?'
'I can,' Longarm admitted. 'This is hard country and the people I deal with aren't saints. You either have to play as rough as they want, or you don't last very long.'
'Might makes right.' Lucy smiled. 'Is that your credo?'
'I don't know nothing about a credo, Miss Lucy. I'm just telling you the way things are.'
'It sounds very grim. Can't you think of something better to do? Surely you've a few talents besides your ability to kill men and yank women from their horses.'
Longarm bristled until he saw that she was taunting him. 'I like what I do,' he said. 'I like the fact that I'm usually outdoors and pretty much answer to no one except myself.'
'Oh, really? And here I thought you were ordered to escort me to Arizona. Are you saying that in actuality you volunteered to do this?'
'No,' Longarm grudgingly confessed, 'I was ordered.'
'Then you're really just another underling taking orders the same as any clerk or wage earner.'
Longarm jammed the sage hen back into the flames. 'You may think that,' he said, anger in his voice, 'but I look at it a whole lot differently.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm out in the field and there's no one around to make decisions for me. When there is trouble, I have to make the decisions and they have to be right and made in a hurry. I don't ask permission from Denver to do this thing or that. I just act, and then I take responsibility. That's a lot different than being under someone's thumb.'
She studied him across the fire. 'I suppose it is,' she said. 'But won't you be promoted someday and wind up just like that chubby little man who called you his deputy in the street back in Denver?'
'You mean that fella that cut down the bigmouth with one punch to the gut?' Longarm asked. 'Sure. But Billy Vail could leave his desk and come back out into the field. He'd just have to take a demotion.'
'I'll bet he never will,' Lucy said smugly. 'Once a man gets a taste of power in the bureaucracy, he's forever addicted. Your Mr. Billy Vail is going to remain shackled to his desk until he slumps over dead.'
Longarm figured the sage hen was cooked enough. He laid it down on a piece of leather and cut off the drumsticks. They were sizzling, and the juice was pouring out of them like the sweat off a fat man in the summertime. 'Here,' he said.
Lucy took the drumstick, blew daintily on it, and then took a bite.
'How is it?' he asked, watching her.
'A little burned on the outside and raw on the inside,' she said. 'And it could use some salt and pepper and maybe-'
'Just eat,' he growled. 'I swear that you are a fussy lady. I guess that comes with having lived like a rich girl.'
She tore off another hunk of flesh and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment before she said, 'I was raised a poor girl, Mr. Long. About as poor as they come.'
'I heard you were educated at some fancy Eastern college.'
'That's true.'
'Well, then?'
Lucy's eyebrows knit together. 'I was raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the daughter of a poor but very respected doctor. We took chickens, food, sometimes a burro or an old milk cow as payment. My father was not only a doctor, but he was a humanitarian. He was too lax and forgiving and his patients often took advantage of him. My mother died in our two-room shack, and I doubt if Father even had enough money to buy the kinds of medicine that he knew she needed to ease her terrible suffering.'
'Did she die of pneumonia?'
'A tumor.' Lucy sighed. 'She was a fine woman and her passing caused me great sorrow, but it actually broke my father's heart. He began to drink--a rather common malady in his profession. I think I would have watched him die a drunken and a ruined man if the fates had not intervened in his behalf.'
Longarm tore the hen apart and extended more flesh to Lucy, who stared into the flames and her past, lost to the world. Longarm waited for her to go on, but she did not.
'What fates intervened?' Longarm finally asked.
Lucy looked up suddenly. 'Oh. Mr. Albert Buckingham. He was hunting in the mountains nearby with his son, a boy of about twelve. They were from England with a full party and were hoping to get a trophy elk or grizzly bear.'
'But something went wrong?'
