as, 'Afternoon, Longarm. Where you headed?'
Before she could say anything worse in English, Longarm had her by one elbow and they were rushing for the platform doors as if they had a train to catch.
The young whore laughed and gasped, 'Madre de Dios, you must really need some! But that's what we're here for and I'll try anything that doesn't hurt too much!'
He got her out of Homagy's sight as he tersely told her in his own version of Spanish that he was working under an assumed name and didn't want that suspect in the seersucker suit back yonder to know just who he might really be.
Consuela laughed incredulously and replied, 'Pero El Brazo Largo, everyone inside the depot knows who you are!'
She'd made a good point, and damn it, that southbound Billy Vail had advised against was already pulling out a platform over!
So Longarm was running, a lot, as the southbound D&RG cleared the end of its boarding area, picking up speed. He skimmed his envelope through the space ahead of him, and dove headfirst for a grab at the brass rail of the last car's observation deck. A strong small hand grabbed the wrist of his as it was slipping, and he was grateful as hell as he hooked a booted ankle over the same rail. Then the brunette in blue who'd risen from her wicker seat just in time helped him roll aboard, even as she chided, 'Didn't anyone ever tell you that's a very dangerous way to board a train?'
To which Longarm could only reply, 'Not half as dangerous as my staying where I was might have been, ma'am.'
She allowed her handle was Cora Brewster as he bought her some sasparilla soda inside the club car. It seemed the least a gent could do, and she didn't seem to mind when he ordered a schooner of needled beer for himself. They took a corner table near the rear windows, and after that things sort of went to hell in a hack.
She was getting off at Trinidad, for openers, which inspired him to introduce himself as Deputy Gus Crawford. When she remarked they had another such Crawford writing for the Denver Post, he said he'd noticed that and made a mental note she was sharp as well as pretty. Then she said that she and her husband had started the first dairy herd down Trinidad way.
Billy Vail had warned him not to even pass through Trinidad, and he figured he could use some practice at behaving himself around a pretty lady with a firm grip and those trim hips a gal got from a heap of horseback riding. So he never even asked if she minded him smoking. He'd been meaning to cut down in any case, and that helped him, some. It was easier to keep his thoughts about her clean as he sat there dying for a smoke.
The conductor finally came back to their end of the train. Cora naturally had her ticket handy. Longarm started to ex plain how he'd boarded at the last minute without having had the time to pay at the depot. But the conductor said, 'Don't give it a thought, Longarm. It won't break this line to carry you free as far as Trinidad, and as a matter of fact, it feels much safer having you aboard as we pass Castle Rock.'
The intelligent brunette waited until the conductor had punched her ticket and headed back the other way before she asked him with a puzzled frown why that conductor had just called him Longarm.
Before Longarm could reluctantly confess the truth, she added in a knowing tone, 'You don't look anything like that notorious Longarm, Mister Crawford.'
It was Longarm's turn to sound puzzled as he replied, 'Do tell? I didn't know you'd met the notorious cuss they keep writing fibs about in the Post and Rocky Mountain News.'
She said, 'I was never introduced to him when he passed through our town last May--leaving quite a wake, I might add. I only had him pointed out to me a time or two as he passed by, each time with still another immigrant girl. You'd never know it from those stories about him in the newspapers, but Colorado's answer to Wild Bill would seem to be some sort of foreigner.'
He asked who'd ever told her a thing like that.
She replied without hesitation, 'Nobody had to tell me. I heard him speaking Hungarian to a pretty little greenhorn from Bohunk Hill as I was standing in the open doorway of a notions shop across from the Papist church in Trinidad. Hungarians are Papists, like most of the Irish mining folk. They call Hungarian something else, it sounds like Mad Gear. But once you've heard folks talking it you know it has to be Hungarian. It sounds nothing like the Spanish, High Dutch, or Welsh you hear in coal-mining country.'
He said he'd take her word for some cuss talking Bohunk in the merry month of May to the pretty immigrant gals of Trinidad. Then, choosing his words carefully, he said, 'That conductor just now seemed to fancy I was this Longarm jasper. So ain't it likely there could be some resemblance betwixt me and this cuss we're talking about?'
Cora Brewster turned on her club car stool to peer across their small round table more intently as Longarm fought to keep a poker face. The intelligent and apparently sharp-eyed brunette took her time and sounded convinced as she flatly stated, 'No resemblance at all. You're both tall and sort of rangy. At the risk of turning your head, you're both good-looking and you both wear guns and mustaches of heavy caliber. After that you look nothing like one another. I don't see how that conductor could have taken you for that nasty Longarm.
The real Longarm replied, 'He must need new specs. Did this tall drink of water down Trinidad way say right out he was Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, or might it have been someone else's decision, Miss Cora?'
She started to say something without thinking, caught herself, and gained even more respect from Longarm when she decided, 'As a matter of fact, the first townswoman who pointed him out to me gave an outlandish Hungarian-sounding name I don't recall. She was a shop girl from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. But you'd have to ask her if you wanted to know exactly where. She said he was a notorious womanizer and a big bully who took advantage of his fellow greenhorns, knowing his way around the American West better.'
Longarm smiled thinly and said, 'That sure sounds like the West-by-God-Virginia rascal I keep reading about in the Denver Post. But how did his fellow Bohunks uncover his true identity if he started out as one of their own badmen?'
She sipped more soda through her love-grass straw as if to allow herself time to choose her words before she confided, 'It all came out in the Homagy scandal. Trinidad's not half as big as Denver, so a scandal as juicy as that one gets told and retold until everyone has every detail whether they wanted them or not.'
Longarm sighed and said, 'I know this young widow woman back in Denver who'd agree with you on back- fence sass in any size town. I swear that if you drop a jar of olives on Lincoln Street, it'll grow to a wagon load of
