now.” He let out a high-pitched cackle. “Shore! Hell, you ain’t a U.S. marshal fer nothin’.” Then his face suddenly turned concerned. “Did you say that girl was weak on account of not eatin’?”
Longarm nodded. “Yeah. But I’d already figured that out.”
Higgins protested. “But we offered her a meal. More than once. We shore did, Marshal. Whyn’t she take it?”
Longarm shrugged. “Some people got more pride than they do sense. I could see it in her face minute I laid eyes on her.”
Higgins looked pained. “That makes me feel right bad, knowin’ they was a human being under my roof goin’ hungry. Hell, I thought she was just stuck up and onery. She claimed we owed her a ride back to Phoenix cause she hadn’t used the balance of her southbound ticket. I could see the logic in that, though it’s agin company rules. But I was gonna bend them. I hate it she wouldn’t take a meal with us, though. Hell, breakfast was just over when the coach come through and she got shoved off. My missus wouldn’t thought nothin’ of fixin’ her a meal.”
Longarm stood up. “Let’s get out of this heat, Herman. What little fat I got is starting to sizzle.”
“it is still a mite warm. I don’t seem to notice it so much anymore.”
Longarm touched Higgins’s arm. He said, “Now, Rita doesn’t know I’m a federal officer. You didn’t let that out, did you?”
Higgins looked insulted. “Why, I reckon I didn’t! What you take me for?”
“But you did tell your wife.”
“Well, it so taken me by surprise ‘bout you hirin’ that girl that it jus’ kind of come out natur-” He stopped and stared at Longarm, misery in his face. “Oh, I’m just a damned ol’ fool. Thar I went and broke my word. Aw, hell!”
Longarm patted him on the back. “Doesn’t matter. You’d of told her sooner or later. Wives just ain’t happy until they know everything their husbands do.”
Higgins said, “Ain’t that a fact! You must be a married man yourself, Marshal.”
Longarm said dryly, “Not very damn likely. But let’s just hold that information about me to you and your wife. Certainly we don’t want Miss Rita to know.”
“You reckon her to be a good woman, Marshal?”
“I reckon her to be slightly confused right now. But then so am I.”
“How you gonna run down that outlaw you be after?”
Longarm shook his head. “I don’t know, Herman. I just flat don’t know. Or if I do, I don’t know that I do.”
Chapter 3
Rita said, “What made you so sure I wasn’t a prostitute? How did you know I hadn’t been doing tricks on my back?”
Longarm laughed. “I’ve known a good many ladies in the trade, Rita, and they’ve all got certain characteristics. Mind you, I ain’t running them down. I don’t ordinarily have to pay for it, but I’ve given more than one respectable house a little of my patronage. And been well satisfied, I might add.” He looked over at her with a small smile. “But you ain’t nothing like them. I’m not saying you’re better. Don’t know you well enough to say that. All I’m saying is you don’t play the part very well.”
“How so?”
He laughed again. “Hell, Rita, it’s-“
She broke in. “It’s Rita Ann,” she said. “I’ve always been called that. But the women I was in with thought it a good idea to drop the Ann. Said it made me sound kind of tame. But you ain’t explained how you knew.”
He shrugged. “Hell, it’s obvious. Here you are in the middle of the desert, broke and hungry and not at all sure what you are going to do. Then I show up in your gunsights, the first real prospect you’ve seen. Higgins is out because his wife is right there. The doctor is drunk and probably broke. That leaves the two Mexicans, and you wouldn’t have been ready for them. But here I was, and even if I wasn’t dressed like a swell, I might have enough money in my pocket to get you out of your bind. A real whore would have been on me like a bad case of poison ivy. And as soon as you’d found out I had a few dollars to rub together, you’d have been rubbing yourself all over me and promising me the best time I’d ever had in my life. You’d have said your heart had just gone pitty-pat the second you laid eyes on me an you were still weak in the knees. But what did you do? Hell, you give me a look that would have burnt through saddle leather, and then turned your smart mouth on me when I offered you a drink and a little help. That ain’t the way a whore acts, Rita.”
She gave a little laugh. “No, I guess not.” She thought a moment. “But it’s funny what you said about my heart doing a little flip-flop. When I saw you in the bedroom door that’s kind of what happened to me. You were the best and the kindest-looking thing I’d seen in a long time. You looked like a gent.”
“Must have been the hunger. You damn sure didn’t act like it when you got up off that bed.”
“It was because I had thought them things that I acted like that. Hell, I didn’t know you. The last thing I needed was to get my fingers burned again.”
“What do you mean by that?”
They were walking out in the early twilight, heading down toward the shack the Mexican mule handlers occupied. It was cool now that the sun was nearly down, and the sky had changed from a washed-out blue to an explosion of streaks of yellow and red and even deep purple. She said, tossing her head, “Oh, I don’t know. It just seems like I never had no luck with men.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Rita Ann, you ain’t old enough to be making statements like that.”
She sighed and heaved her shoulders. “Maybe it just seems like it on account of this last little experience I had.”
“Is that what put you in your present position, your last experience?”
