midnight aboard a train from Texas. He must have somehow learned I'd headed there from Fort Sill. I sure wish folks wouldn't gossip when you ask 'em not to.'
She said, 'Nobody can gossip about you out at my place. I just let my help off for the afternoon and all day tomorrow.'
As they walked outside together, Longarm mused, 'That's right. This is Saturday afternoon. So my boss wouldn't be in the office to read a progress report if I wired him one, the nosey old cuss.'
He saw her paint pony and sidesaddle tethered next to his livery mount out front as she repeated her offer to hide him out.
He asked who was going to milk her dairy herd that afternoon and all day Sunday if she treated her hired help that nice. When she said she was only milking forty head and egging a flock of two hundred, he allowed he could help her that afternoon at any rate.
So they rode out of town together, with Cora trying to talk him out of coming back to have it out with Attila Homagy at midnight.
He repeated what he'd told the clerk, and added, 'The poor simp is likely way more anxious to catch up with his wayward wife, for reasons it wouldn't be delicate to go into. Suffice it to say, I have it on good authority that she's the bee's knees in bed and he'd sent all the way to the old country for her before he could have known that for certain.'
She demurely asked if such a loss might not drive a lonely older man to distraction, quietly adding she'd heard being alone, after at least a happy honeymoon, could leave anyone feeling upset.
Longarm replied, 'I just said he might have good cause to miss the wayward sass. My point is that he's been chasing me for many a day, and he must have noticed by now that I just don't have her!'
As they rode on he brought her more completely up to date from the beginning in Denver, not wanting to confuse her with details about other women.
She still wanted to know if he'd messed with that young Indian gal, and he was glad he didn't have to fib. It was funny how easy it was to leap to conclusions when you weren't there watching. When you said newspaper reporter, schoolmarm, or army wife, it didn't sound half as suggestive as a Kiowa halfbreed in her teens packing her own gun.
By this time they'd turned into her farm, and they were too busy to worry about Attila Homagy for a spell as they stabled their mounts, went into the main house, and let her rustle him up the noon dinner he was overdue.
While he put away the steak and fried spuds, she said something about slipping into something more comfortable. But when next she appeared she was wearing a sun bonnet and one of those blue denim smocks artists and farm folks wore when they had messy chores to tend to. He'd forgotten those cows that had to be milked no later than, say, three or four.
She allowed they still had plenty of time as she sat down to have coffee and marble cake with him. He didn't have to say anything about his own tweed suit. She told him one of her hand's fresh-laundered bib overalls would likely fit him and that, seeing they were all alone that afternoon, it wouldn't hurt if he milked cows with no shirt on.
He said that made two folks he'd met that day who could think on their feet. She naturally wanted to know what he meant, and it seemed to upset her when he mentioned old Attila some more.
He assured her he didn't mean to reason with the cuss or shoot him before midnight, and asked to see those overalls.
She led him to her laundry shed out back, and got out the faded but soft clean overalls her tallest hired hand worked in. She left while he stripped naked and slipped the bib overalls on, a denim strap over each bare shoulder. He considered putting his gun rig back on. He decided it looked silly. He unhooked his double derringer from one end of his watch chain and stuck it in the right hip pocket of the overalls. Then, in no more than that and his stovepipe boots, he rejoined Cora in her kitchen.
For some reason her breath caught in her throat at the sight of his muscular bare shoulders. She gulped and said, 'My, you do seem as manly as described, don't you? The cows haven't started to drift in for their milking yet. But we can gather some eggs if you like.'
Nobody liked gathering eggs after the first couple of times. But it had to be done and it did beat forking manure. So he toted some of the baskets for her as they crossed the yard to enter her henhouse.
It was easy to forget the full meaning of the old army term 'chicken-shit,' or why so many farm youths ran off to become cowboys, when you hadn't tried breathing in a henhouse for a spell. Longarm was just as glad his strange hand made her leghorns spook when she suggested he just hold the baskets and let her feel for the fool eggs. For two hundred leghorns laid one hell of a lot of eggs, and shit a lot besides. They both washed up to their elbows with naptha soap at her yard pump after they'd stored the eggs in the damp cellar under their candling shack. Cora said the good ones would be carted into town by her hired help, come Monday.
Unlike beef cattle, dairy cows were only vicious to human beings when they needed to be freshened by a bull. Cows with full udders and no calves to suckle soon learned to seek out human hands at least twice a day for relief. So as early as three, Cora's cows began to come home to the barn and march into their stalls as if driven by invisible prods. The closest thing to that in the beef industry was the Judas cow that lead young and innocent steers up the slaughterhouse ramp. Cows were a lot like humans when it came to easy assumptions.
Longarm hadn't slaughtered or milked a cow recently, and so it brought back memories, pleasant and not so pleasant, as he helped the young widow woman out by milking close to a score of her cows. Cora milked a few more than he did, the experienced little thing. But she still said he milked pretty good for a lawman.
He only told her some of his reasons for coming West after the war as they poured the buckets into the galvanized coolers and got it on ice for the Sabbath. She said they sold mostly raw milk in town of a Monday, with folks wanting more butter later in the week. She asked him if it still bothered him to think about those neighbor boys killed in the war, and what it felt like to kill boys on the other side.
He wrestled the last of the milk into place in the chill darkness as he shrugged his bare shoulders and said, 'It don't feel as bad, or as good, as some would have it. I reckon it would bother me to have a cold-blooded murder on my conscience. But so far, I've never had to gun anyone I could have avoided gunning. The sorry souls who get a thrill out of killing are tougher to fathom. I just don't see what the thrill might be.'
She locked the milk away as she quietly said, 'We had my husband's body on display in an open casket for two
