lady’s bedchamber after sunset!”
He hadn’t been planning to. But he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So he said, “I generally have me a smoke out on the front porch before I turn in. I can’t say what time that might be this evening. But if all else fails there’s always breakfast, and if I’ve found anything out, I can walk you to work tomorrow, right?”
She said that sounded more prudent, as if she was expecting him to share some dreadful secret. She’d have really been pissed if he’d told her he hardly ever shared dreadful secrets with anybody. So he nodded as if in agreement and headed back to their boardinghouse.
He got there well before quitting time for the rest of her boarders. So he caught the Widow MacUlric crying fit to bust in her kitchen when he came in the back way.
She shied like a fawn and tried to pretend she’d only been singing to herself, of course. But he’d heard her sobs and seen the way she’d been standing, head down and elbows braced in either corner of her kitchen sink. The sink was filled to overflowing with pots, pans, and greasy suds. Longarm hung up his hat and gun rig, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and quietly said, “I’ll wash if you’ll dry, provided you let me use some sand from your garden, ma’am. We got our pots and pans looking shiny-new with no more than sand and wood ashes in my army days. But no offense, the water out this way ain’t soft enough for that naphtha soap you’re using.”
For some reason, that really made her bawl, and the next he knew, she was stuck to the front of him, crying all over his shirt and vest as she blubbered, “I can’t! I can’t! There’s just so much to do and so few hours in the day, Deputy Long!”
He said she could call him Custis as he held her in a brotherly way, patting her back as she shuddered and wept against him. He told her he’d just been talking with an Indian Agency official, and asked if she’d considered hiring just one Pawnee gal to help out with the less skilled chores for no more than room, board, and a few coins to rub together now and again.
Mavis MacUlric wet his shirt front some more with tears, spit, or snot, and confessed, “I can’t even afford Arbuckle Brand coffee. I’ve figured my expenses to the bone and it’s just no use. I simply can’t keep up the payments and run this place as a boardinghouse on what I take in!”
He asked why she didn’t just charge her boarders a tad more in that case, adding, “Three dollars a week ain’t as much as I’ve seen many a boardinghouse charge in other parts, Miss Mavis.”
She answered flatly, “I’m not competing with anyone in other parts. Three a week is the going price in Pawnee Junction. My few boarders could get room and board for that, or maybe less, from what I hear about one landlady with a bigger house and no mortgage payments hanging over her. Did I mention the county and township fees, speaking of expenses, and these … God … damned … pots and pans!”
He gently disengaged himself from her as he told her firmly, “You worry about rustling up a simple supper whilst I get to work on these dinner pots and pans. You wouldn’t have so many to wash if you’d learn to cook army or cow-camp style. When you open a can of beans and set ‘em in a pan of boiling water can and all, you wind up with your beans just as boiled and a pan you only have to wipe out with a vinegar-soaked rag from time to time. I can give you lots of tips on cooking, Miss Mavis. But right now I’d best go out and scoop me up some scouring sand, hear?”
There was no accounting for female moods. That got her to laughing like hell for some reason. Then she fussed and said it wasn’t right to make a boarder help with housekeeping chores. So he told her nobody had even been able to make him wash pots and pans since he’d gotten out of the army.
As she simmered down and got to work side by side with him, once he’d shown her how clean garden dirt looked as soon as you rinsed all the worms out with a couple of changes of water, the young widow got less gloomy for the time being. As he stacked the first well-scoured pans to dry, she marveled, “You do know what you’re doing! You say you were once a soldier, like my man Martin? He was a soldier in the war. He rode with Pope at the second Bull Run, and after he was well again, he rode against the Sioux out this way.”
Longarm rubbed harder on the pan he was scouring as he asked in a mildly interested tone, “Do tell? From those Confederate war bonds you used to paper that one wall upstairs, I had the impression you might be Texas folks, no offense.”
She hunkered down to haul out some baking potatoes as she sighed and said, “That was Martin for you, the poor dear. He grew up in Penn State, and I was the girl next door who waited for him while he won the war for us all. Martin MacUlric was never a lazy man. He had his points, and we were very happy until his poor generous heart gave out on him at an obscenely young age. But he was a man for dreaming, and so many of his dreams were … so dreamy. He bought those Confederate war bonds from another dreamer, or a confidence man, who was certain the South would rise again, or at least redeem those bonds at ten cents on the dollar.”
Longarm said, “I may have met up with a similar investment-consulting gent a spell back. We called him Soapy Smith. I was the one who ran him out of Denver over another swindle he’d been pulling. Ten cents on the dollar and he only asked two bits, right?”
She sighed and began to wash the spuds she’d chosen in another pan he was going to have to wash if she didn’t calm down. She said Martin MacUlric, owing steep payments on this house they’d just bought in a railroad town certain to boom, had been suckered worse with those high-face-value railroad bonds.
She said, “The story Martin was sold about those pretty pictures of choo-choo trains involved some tortured rehash of that awfully complicated Credit from Mobile eight or ten years back. Martin tried to explain it to me when they were talking about putting Vice President Colfax in jail, but to tell the truth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the scandalous mess!”
Longarm grimaced and replied, “I doubt poor old Colfax or President Grant could have explained that mess sober. The investigation sniffed in vain in ‘72 and ‘73 for dirty deeds done early as ‘64, when Honest Abe was in the crow’s nest and likely didn’t know what they were doing either. You’re not alone in finding that Credit Mobilier of America a can of worms indeed. You’re saying your late husband invested in those Credit Mobilier of America bonds whilst he was in the service, ma’am?”
She sighed and said, “No. He bought them out here eighteen months ago—at too big a discount to pass up, he said—from a railroad man with a drinking problem and some fairy tale about not having the time left to wait for them to mature.”
Longarm nodded knowingly and said, “I hear that Credit Mobilier scandal left lots of investors with stocks and bonds worth more as wallpaper, ma’am. Took the railroads a long time to get over that crisis in confidence, and some say the country ain’t quite over the Great Depression of the seventies yet. But at least you still have this property, and things are commencing to pick up again. We had us a wetter than usual green-up out this way, and the price of beef and other produce keeps rising.”
She sighed and said, “Don’t I know it! I just had to pay for the groceries you’ll be eating tonight, thanks to your
