shorthanded and Longarm, being the best and most experienced field marshal, was impossible to replace on the toughest cases. But this June, by damned, he was going on vacation. Maybe to New Orleans or St. Louis or even back to West Virginia where he still had a few relatives.
“Hey, Custis!” Ruben, the shoe shine man, called. “Need your boots worked on today?”
Ruben had been shining Longarm’s boots for years. The old man claimed to be part Apache Indian, and probably was, for his skin was the color of leather. Ruben was a colorful character and liked to wear a red bandanna like Cochise or Geronimo. His hair was straight and black, streaked liberally with silver hair and always bound in a pair of thick braids. Ruben had a great fondness for turquoise and silver jewelry. He liked to talk while he worked and his favorite customers were the frontier marshals that moved in and out of Denver’s federal building.
“My boots look pretty good, Ruben.”
“I can make ‘em look even better.”
“All right,” Longarm said, knowing that Ruben would be hurt if Longarm failed to tell him that he was about to go on a month-long vacation.
“Longarm, you jest sit right down and take a load off these feet. Wanna read yesterday’s newspaper?”
“No thanks,” Longarm said, stepping up onto the chair and resting his boots on iron pegs. “I’m going on vacation next week. Thought I’d let you know so you didn’t think someone out there plugged me this time.”
“A vacation!” Ruben grinned, always an interesting sight because of his missing front teeth. “Where you goin?”
“Haven’t decided for sure,” Longarm admitted. “Maybe New Orleans. Think I’d like to take the train to St. Louis and then ride the riverboats all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Woo-wee! Now maybe you need old Ruben to come along and carry your bags and to keep these boots lookin’ good!”
“I couldn’t afford you,” Longarm said as he gave Ruben the customary five-cent cheroot and stuck one in his own mouth. He lit both and the two men puffed in contentment for a moment before Ruben started dabbing on brown shoe polish, saying, “That sure is a sorry-lookin’ little package you got there, Longarm. What’s in it?”
“Damned if I know. I guess I might as well find out.”
Ruben nodded to indicate he also thought that was probably a good idea. “Where’s it from?”
“Arizona, if I’m reading this smudged postmark correctly.”
Longarm reached for his pocketknife. He was a big man, standing six four and weighing over two hundred pounds. He was still in his prime and cut an imposing figure with his deeply tanned face, broad shoulders, and handlebar mustache. He had a notorious reputation as a ladies’ man, and not without good reason, although he never spoke of his times with women nor did he give them much thought when he was hot on some outlaw’s trail.
Longarm cut the package string. “Ruben, this package is so beat-up it looks as if it’s probably been stomped on by a bunch of your Apache.”
“If it was from my Apache relatives, it’d be wrapped in a white man’s scalp!”
Longarm chuckled and began to open the package. The outer brown paper peeled away to reveal a neatly folded newspaper.
“Yep,” Longarm drawled. “It’s from Arizona. Wickenburg Weekly Press. Exactly a month old to the day.”
“Someone sent you a newspaper all the way from Arizona?”
Longarm spread the paper across his lap. He was surprised to find that there was nothing inside of it, but one of the articles was circled by a wavery pencil mark. Ruben forgot about the shoes and came around behind Longarm to stare at the paper.
“I been in Wickenburg. Hotter’n Flagstaff but not as bad as Tucson. There’s a few Apache and Mojave people there, but none of ‘em belong to my family.”
“Well, I sure don’t know anyone from Wickenburg.”
“Maybe you should read that paper,” Ruben suggested. “Maybe someone you know died there … or got rich!”
“Maybe,” Longarm said. “I suppose that Wickenburg is a mining town.”
“Rough as they come.”
Longarm refolded the paper and smoked in silence. Ruben’s hands and shine rag always made his tired feet feel better and that alone was enough of a reason to pay the man even when his boots weren’t scuffed or muddy.
“I lived in Arizona for twenty-six years,” Ruben said. “My family worked in a silver mine near Tucson, then raised some sheep and we caught wild horses to sell to the same damn army that put us on reservations.”
“Some of you deserved it,” Longarm said. “Although I’m sure that didn’t include your family.”
“Yeah, it did,” Ruben admitted. “My family was bad. Real bad. Most of my uncles and my father were all either shot or hanged. I’d have been too, if I hadn’t cleared out fast.”
“But I thought you once told me you and a couple of brothers went all the way to Washington, D.C.”
“We did. Went there to talk to the Great White Father. We were gonna tell him that the Apache deserved fair and honest treatment. We had been given a treaty, but it was broken by the white soldiers.”
“And what did the President say?”
Ruben removed the cheroot and spat on the ground. “He wouldn’t see us and so we got drunk. Raised hell and killed a couple of people fighting in a saloon. I got away, my brothers didn’t. One of ‘em, Charlie Big Thumbs, is still alive.”
