'Ah, hell, Wing, it's me, remember? I know how you really talk.'
'Oh, yeah. I forgot. Once you get into a habit...' Wing set the tray down on a bedside table. 'I brought you some stew and some coffee. Think you can handle that much?'
'Damn right.' Longarm sat up and twisted around, wrapping the sheet around him. His back was sore, but it didn't keep him from moving. His stomach clenched in anticipation as he smelled the stew. He reached for the tray, and Wing helped him get it situated in his lap.
'What happened to your back?' asked the cook. 'I got those bandages off of you, and it looked like somebody tried to plow a furrow across there.'
'That's what they did,' said Longarm, 'only they used a bullet instead of a plow. It's just a deep crease.'
'Well, you'll have a scar there, that's for sure.' Wing gestured at Longarm's bare torso, which was crisscrossed with dozens of other reminders of past wounds. 'Of course, it'll have plenty of company.'
Longarm shrugged and swallowed a mouthful of stew, then reached for the steaming cup of Arbuckle's. 'I've been knocked around a mite,' he admitted.
Wing picked up a straight-backed chair, reversed it, and straddled it. 'Hear tell that you're a lawman.'
'Deputy U.S. marshal,' Longarm confirmed.
'And you're helping out that Mcentire woman, the one with the timber contract.'
Longarm shook his head and said, 'You're jumping to the same conclusion as everybody else around here. I work for Uncle Sam, not Aurora Mcentire. All I'm trying to do is get to the bottom of all the trouble that the Diamond K and the Mcentire Timber Company have been blaming each other for.'
'You don't think those lumberjacks rustled our stock and poisoned our well?' Wing asked with a frown.
'No, I don't,' Longarm said bluntly. 'And I don't think anybody from the Diamond K has been attacking that logging operation either. I reckon somebody else is behind all of it, for reasons of his own.' He didn't say anything about his suspicions of Ben Callahan.
Wing's frown deepened as he thought about what Longarm had said. 'Maybe you're on to something,' he said slowly. 'Loggers and cattlemen don't get along that well to start with. I don't reckon it'd take much for some outsider to prod a grudge into outright fightin'.'
'That's what I'm thinking too. Kinsman doesn't really want to believe that, though, and neither does Aurora Mcentire.'
Wing chuckled. 'That Mcentire woman sure acts like she's slapped her brand on you, Custis. She was mad as a wet hen when Miss Molly insisted on bringing you in the house after you fell off your horse. Didn't do her any good, though. Once Miss Molly makes up her mind about something, that's the end of it.'
Longarm knew what he meant. He had encountered Molly's stubbornness himself. But Aurora was equally stubborn, and he supposed they were all lucky a brand-new fight hadn't broken out over who was going to nurse him back to health.
That thought reminded him that although his back was still sore, it didn't hurt quite as much as he would have expected it to. When he commented on that, Wing looked pleased and said, 'I put some salve on there. That's what's making it feel better.'
'Some ancient Chinese remedy?'
Wing's grin widened. 'How'd you guess?'
Longarm scraped the last of the soup out of the bowl and drained the coffee cup. He felt pretty much human again, just extremely tired. His weariness was growing by the moment, and he felt his eyelids beginning to droop. 'You best take this tray, Wing,' he said. 'I'm feeling a mite puny again.'
'Get some rest,' Wing told him as he took the tray. 'You'll feel better tomorrow.'
Longarm lay on his side, being careful not to put any pressure on his injured back. Wing turned down the wick on the bedside lamp, leaving only a small flame burning, then slipped out of the room. Longarm heard the door closing softly behind the cook.
Eyes closed, Longarm waited for sleep. As he was drifting on the edge of awareness, something brushed at his brain, a feather-light touch that he knew was trying to alert him to something important.
But before he could grasp it, it slipped away, and so did he.
Longarm spent the next three days recuperating. Plenty of sleep, Wing's good cooking, and the salve that the cook daubed on his back several times a day hastened Longarm's healing. By the afternoon of the third day, he felt restless, ready to be up and around and doing his job again.
The truce between the cowboys and the timber men was holding, at least according to Matt Kinsman, who had come into Longarm's room at midday to see how he was doing. The rancher still didn't have a good word to say about Aurora, but he grudgingly admitted that the loggers had been keeping to themselves.
'They're stayin' on their lease, and my boys are stayin' on Diamond K range,' Kinsman had said. 'I got Joe ridin' close herd on all of 'em, just to make sure none of the young hellions get any foolish ideas in their heads.'
That was a good idea, thought Longarm, and he told Kinsman as much. The cattleman just grunted, his naturally combative nature chafing under this enforced peace even though he had agreed to it.
Longarm's warbag and other gear had been brought into the house from the bunkhouse, and when Molly came into the spare bedroom later that afternoon, she found him standing up and buttoning the hickory-colored shirt he had taken from his bag. He already had his pants and boots on.
'What do you think you're doing?' she demanded, putting her hands on her hips, which were encased in snug denim trousers again today.
'Getting dressed so I can move around a mite,' Longarm told her. 'Fella like me gets cabin fever when he's cooped up for too long.'
