He started to ask where that might leave her sleeping. He decided it was up to the lady of the house to say in front of the others. Two of the men who boarded there were out on the porch now. Before Longarm could ask where that Preston cuss from the Advertiser might be, with or without a Greener, the skinny cuss joined the others up yonder in his bathrobe.
Longarm followed the two gals up the steps. One of the men near the front door said, “Welcome home and see what you just missed!”
Longarm strode into the front vestibule as another boarder raised a candlestick to show him the well-perforated pressed-tin ceiling. You could still smell the gunsmoke. Longarm nodded and said, “Ten or twelve pistol rounds and two shotgun blasts for certain. Have you ever had the feeling someone you’d never done anything to just didn’t like you?”
As he led a sort of promenade up the stairs, the printer from the Advertiser volunteered, “Everyone in town heard you’d made it plain that Pawnee Junction wasn’t big enough for you and Porky Shaw. Isn’t it obvious he didn’t want to leave?”
Longarm swung around the newel at the second-story landing as he replied in a disgusted tone, “Talking like that is talking like kids after school. He tried to back me down at the barbershop. I didn’t want to. I told him I was at his service. I never told him he had to leave town.”
As he led the way into his hired front room and struck a match to light the wall lamp, another male boarder opined, “Somebody else must have told him a man with two guns and a big mouth was supposed to fish or cut bait. Nobody in living memory ever stood up to that bully and made him eat crow. He must have thought we all expected him to clean your plow if he ever wanted to back anyone else down.”
Longarm didn’t argue as he lit the lamp and took in the mess a fusillade of small-arms fire had made of his hired room.
The feather down had settled to the oiled planking all around the bedstead. The rumpled bedding looked as though more than one poor bird had been stood before a firing squad and then dragged off by the heels, still flapping. The ceiling above, papered a plain yellow, had been peppered and torn considerably. At least one slug had ripped up one wall to lay open the floral paper and expose the torn underlayer of railroad and Confederate bonds. Turning to the landlady in the doorway, Longarm said, “I’m sure sorry about this, Miss Mavis. Before you argue, I want you to listen tight. It was an agent of the U.S. Government they were aiming at, and like I said, I get to charge valid expenses to the same. So I’m fixing to have all this damage repaired for you at government expense.”
She said, “Well, I suppose I’ve no choice about the mattress. I just can’t afford a new one and that one’s done for. But there’s no need to get fancy up here, seeing it’s not a room I usually let out to anyone.”
He said, “I thought I just told you not to argue. Whether you hire the room out or sleep in it your ownself, it was shot up because of me and I mean to put things right by you.”
He glanced out the window. The summer day was already dawning in the east, but it was still sort of early. So he added, “I aim to lie down and catch a few winks before breakfast because I might have another long day ahead of me. So if it’s all the same with you folks …”
Mavis MacUlric protested, “You can’t lie down on that ripped-open bedding. I’m up for the day. Why don’t you just nap in the room I’ve been using and we’ll wake you when your breakfast is ready.”
He started to argue, failed to come up with a sensible reason to refuse her kind offer, and in no time at all was stretched out on top of her quilt counterpane in his duds and socks, knocked for a loop by darkness behind a locked door and the clean floral smell of a friendly gal’s Florida water and the lilac sachets she’d tucked under a fresh pillow for him.
Sparky little Ellen Brent came to wake him in what felt like less than five minutes. But he was feeling more wide awake by the time the two gals had him eating buttermilk waffles downstairs. The other men who boarded there had eaten up and lit out for work by then. So he knew they’d let him lie slugabed as long as they’d dared.
Longarm didn’t want to mention his intended visit to the hardware store before he had to. So he allowed he had to see about any night letters at the Western Union, and offered to walk Ellen over to her job at the town library. For some reason that got the Widow MacUlric to dropping cups on her floor again as they lit out together.
Longarm didn’t say anything as he helped the library gal down the steps. Ellen sighed and said, “I hope she doesn’t think I’m trying to steal you away from her.”
“Were you fixing to start your own boardinghouse, Miss Ellen?” Longarm asked in an innocent tone.
The perky brunette giggled and said, “Don’t play shy schoolboy with me, you wicked thing. We’ve all heard what a Don Juan you’ve been with those faster girls of Denver!”
To which he could only reply, “You have my word I haven’t been fast with a single slower gal from Pawnee Junction.” Which was true, as soon as one studied on where Nurse Calder had been from.
Ellen said, “Don’t hurt her, Custis. I know she’s attractive and Lord knows she’s vulnerable. But she was very happy with the one true love of her life, and the only man who’s sparked her since was a brute who was only after her property.”
Talking about other brutes was more comfortable than defending his own weak nature. So along the way he brought her up to date on some of his cleaner recent adventures, and absorbed the sad story of an almost rich widow who’d been about to sign over her heavily mortgaged house to a slick-talking boarder when he’d suddenly had to leave town, one jump ahead of the bounty hunters hired by a far richer gal he’d swindled.
Ellen said, “It seems he’d get lonely widows to sign over their all for him to manage, just before or after they got married. Needless to say, he sold everything they’d signed over and lit out with the cash, whether they were properly wed or not.”
Longarm said he’d heard there were skunks like that. Then he helped her open and air the library, and left the two books he’d borrowed where they belonged in the stacks before he said he’d see her at their boardinghouse later. He didn’t say he’d come by after the inquest later in the day because he wasn’t sure whether he’d be spending another night in Pawnee Junction or not.
As he was walking down toward the Western Union by the railroad stop, one of the townsmen from the saloon earlier fell in beside him to say, “Fox Bancroft is in town. Along with a dozen riders off the Diamond B. Thought you’d care to hear.”
