“You’re wanting a favor, ain’t you?” the man named Jerry said with a grin, obviously taking no offense to the notion but a trifle cautious nonetheless.
“Am I that obvious about it?”
“After giving me one of these expensive smokes, me as hasn’t tasted anything this tender since I last had a virgin? Yeah, Marshal, I’d say you’re being pretty obvious.”
Longarm chuckled. “It’s true. The thing is, the price of these is coming outa my own pocket. It won’t be on the usual voucher.” Which was true enough, or would be in the long run. Longarm expected his expenses on this trip to exceed the hundred dollars he still had in his pocket from what Henry had advanced him, and anything over that would surely have to come straight out of Longarm’s own meager bank account.
Not that he begrudged the spending. Far from it. If this case beggared him and took everything he could expect to make in the next twenty years to boot, it would be well worth the while just so he could come face-to-face with the sons of bitches who’d killed Billy Vail. This was one time when money didn’t matter. Not money nor fairness nor law nor much of anything else, except that he succeed. Billy Vail’s murderers would be brought to justice. To court if that proved convenient, but to justice of a certainty. Longarm figured to see to that.
Jerry raised an eyebrow, but when Longarm failed to offer any explanations, the hostler did not press him about it. “All right. I’ll cut you a deal. You’ve done business here before, and I expect you will again in the future.”
“Count on it, my friend,” Longarm promised.
Jerry nodded. “Come along. If you’ll trust my judgment, I’ll pick out the best I’ve got for you.”
“Trot ‘em out and tack ‘em up, Jerry, for I got work to do and damn-all time to do it in,” Longarm said, sucking pale smoke deep into his lungs, then quickly stubbing out the coal on his cheroot before he followed Jerry inside the livery barn.
Chapter 9
“I’ll take those. And those there, all you got of them. Is that toilet water in those fancy little bottles? Good, I’ll take … I dunno … how many you got of those? Fine, I’ll take ‘em all. What about hairpins? I’ll need a couple pounds of hairpins. An’ sewing needles. Thirty, maybe forty papers of pins. All right, I think that takes care of about everything I need in this area. Now let’s look over here.” Longarm stalked through the mercantile, picking and pointing this way and that.
“Alcohol,” he said. “I need some alcohol. What d’you have, two-gallon casks? I’ll take four of ‘em. An’ molasses. About two gallons of that. Let’s see … some caramel coloring. For sure I want some caramel coloring. What else? Pepper. And salt, of course. Sugar. Say, fifty pounds … no, never mind the sugar. I think I’m building too heavy a load here. Forget the sugar an’ the salt. But I still need some pepper. Two pound of it. And tobacco. Got to have some tobacco. Ten pounds … no, make it twenty. Might as well do this right. How much have I spent here so far?”
The storekeeper bent over the notepad he’d been scribbling on and made some calculations. “Sixty-four dollars and, um, twenty cents. We’ll round that down to sixty-four dollars even,” he said in an outpouring of generosity.
“All right,” Longarm told him. “One last thing then. I’ll need some of these cheroots. You got them in stock?”
“Sure thing.”
“Give me twenty of them, please.”
“That will be everything?”
“I reckon it will have to do.” It was either that or go back to the livery and hire another packhorse, Longarm knew. Besides, this one load would use up just about all his available cash. He made a mental note to find a bank when he left the mercantile. Maybe between him and his badge he could convince someone there to honor a draft against his account in Denver. He hoped so.
“I’ll have my boy package everything for you and bring it out to your horse,” the storekeeper said. “In the meantime, if you don’t mind, I have a few errands to run. Would that be all right?”
“Sure, mister. I reckon your boy can handle the rest of it.” Longarm paid the man for his purchases and stood idling about the store while the storekeeper disappeared briefly into his back room, then emerged once more to remove his apron and put on a suit coat and narrow-brimmed hat before going out onto the street.
The boy, a fat kid in his teens with approximately equal amounts of pimples and peach fuzz on his cheeks, came out and began assembling Longarm’s purchases into small bundles suitable for lashing onto a crossbuck packsaddle.
“Let me know when you’re ready with all that,” Longarm told him. “I’ll want to do the actual packing my own self.” He knew better than to allow a stranger, any stranger, to make up a pack. Some people just never could get the hang of making up a proper pack. In fact, Longarm suspected, most people wouldn’t know how to make up a balanced, durable load, and anything less than correct was a certain-sure recipe for trouble. “Five minutes, mister.”
“That’ll be fine, son.” Longarm stepped outside to wait on the sidewalk out in the clean, fresh air and sunshine.
He wasn’t out there alone for very long, for within a minute or so the storekeeper hustled past, and practically treading on the man’s heels, a fellow wearing a soiled blue coat with copper buttons on it and a black-beaked blue cap, with a six-pointed star prominent on his chest, confronted Longarm.
“Afternoon, Officer,” Longarm said. He reached into his pocket for a cheroot, and couldn’t help but notice that the policeman flinched when he did so, then visibly relaxed when Longarm’s hand came out with nothing more threatening than the cigar. “Is something wrong?”
“Could be. For openers, I want you to keep your hands well clear of that pistol on your belly.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Longarm said mildly. “Just to let you know, I’m fixing to reach into my vest pocket here for a match. Is that all right?”
The policeman nodded. “Do it then, but slow.”
Longarm shrugged, got his match, and thumbed it aflame. He took his time building a decent coal on the
