don’t want to get it all screwed up that he was out his jurs’diction.”
Longarm looked off in the distance and shook his head. Otis Bodenheimer was nearly the dumbest man, let alone lawman, that he’d ever met. The sheriff was an overweight, pear-shaped cuss with a jug butt and nothing between the ears. His only saving feature was that he was kin to half the voters in Mason County, who would rather elect him to sheriff every two years than have to take care of him and his family. As a consequence they got the best law enforcement that charity could buy. Longarm said to Purliss, “You say they are about six miles up the river?”
“Yessir, yessir. We are to come quick as we can.”
The handsome little cabin was set along the banks of the Llano River, a clear, cool stream that cut through the rough hill country of southwest Texas. It was two miles outside of Mason, Texas, the county seat of Mason County. Longarm had been there a little over a week and it was, to his mind, the damnedest job of work he’d been sent on since he had joined the federal Marshals’ Service some fifteen years past. For at least two years, requests and pleas for help had been coming into the offices of the Marshals’ Service by various means, all of them complaining about a gang of outlaws who operated out of a small county some one hundred miles southwest of the Texas capital in Austin. Either through connivance with local lawmen, or because of the incompetence of the sheriff in Mason County, the gang couldn’t seem to be caught or broken up. They would dash out of Mason County, commit some depredation, and then hurry back to their hideout, thought to be somewhere near the town of Mason. The gang was described as having as many as ten members or as few as six, depending on who was telling the story. Since the Denver district office was the closest to the area, the requests for help had come there to Chief Marshal Billy Vail. For the most part the complaints about the gang had been ignored. There was too much work as it was without going into a small town and a small county in rough country in Texas to get involved, most likely, with corrupt local lawmen. Billy Vail had often said, “Hell, if the local law down there can’t straighten the mess out, then the damn people ought to vote in a sheriff that can. This ain’t federal business and I ain’t wasting deputies on it.”
But the day had come when serious business had taken Longarm to Austin and Billy had said, since Longarm was going to be so close, why didn’t he go on down to Mason and have a quick look around. However, he had admonished Longarm to give the matter no more attention than it deserved. But there had been complexities to the situation that had intrigued Longarm as a lawman and made him anxious to find out just how deep the corruption ran.
And besides, there was Hannah Diver. She was the sixth youngest of Dalton Diver’s ten daughters. People said that old Dalton Diver raised daughters the way other folks raised cattle, for profit, and that he was doing considerably better than most cattlemen. Diver made no attempt to deny or disguise the fact. He was straight-up direct about the way he went about marrying off his daughters. Hannah had been a good example. Before he would let her many Gus Home, who was considered, but not proven, to be an outlaw, he had made the man purchase a good, comfortable cabin on deeded land, furnish Hannah with a good milk cow and laying chickens, and provide her with a horse and buggy as well as a saddle horse. In addition he was to give Hannah a vegetable kitchen garden plowed up and planted, put five hundred dollars in the bank in her name, and pay Dalton Diver the sum of one thousand dollars.
Gus Home had lived up to every commitment, except he’d been called away right after the marriage, leaving Hannah frustrated and disappointed and angry as hell. She had told Longarm that her mother, before she’ddied, had talked to her about her wedding night. Hannah had said, “Momma told me that a lady gets deflowered on her wedding night. That her husband comes along and plucks her like a rose. That I’m a bud just waiting to flower and that my husband is going to be the one who makes me open up. Well, I ain’t been deflowered and I ain’t been plucked and I damn sure ain’t opened up! My daddy takes good care of his girls, and I’m gonna send him after that damn Gus Home if he don’t get back here and tend to his business!”
Longarm’s correct name was Custis Long, and he had been a deputy United States marshal for a good deal longer than he liked to think about. It seemed that he had been based in Denver, listening to Billy Vail, the chief marshal, tell him where and when he was heading out on another job, for nearly as long as he could remember. He had been shot, he’d been stabbed, he’d nearly been burned to death, he’d nearly died of thirst, of hunger, of bad whiskey, and lack of ammunition. Along the way there had been plenty of women, but there never had been one like Hannah. For one thing, he was pretty sure that she was a virgin and he had never, to use her word, deflowered a virgin. For another, she was married, technically, and Longarm had never knowingly taken another man’s wife. But without splitting hairs, he felt that, circumstances being what they were, he would not be acting against his own code of honor if he helped this young lady out—sort of stood in as a surrogate for her missing husband as it were. He had asked himself if he would have been so eager to do the good turn if Hannah were not quite so delectable- looking, but he had avoided answering the question because he didn’t think it applied. Hannah already had the body she had, and nothing was going to change the way she looked. Besides, he had told himself, there was an excellent chance that she was going to be a widow before anybody deflowered her. And the woman was curious as hell. She was burning up to know what it was all about, and Longarm had never been one to deny a beautiful woman anything that was within his power to give.
He now said to Deputy Melvin Purliss, “Just hang on a minute. Let me step back inside and tell Mrs. Diver-“
“Home. She married Gus Home, you’ll recollect.”
“Home then.” He stared at Purliss, thinking that what made him the best of Bodenheimer’s three deputies was that he was not blood kin of the sheriff. Of the other two, one was a first cousin and the other was a nephew. The relationship showed in both of them. Longarm put his hand on the door latch and said, “You wait here, Purliss. I’ll be back right quick.”
“You want me to tighten the cinch on yore horse?”
“I don’t want you going near my horse. Is that clear? Don’t touch any of my stock.”
The deputy looked sullen. “You ain’t got to be so cranky about it.”
Considering what he was about to have to leave behind, Longarm thought that he had full right to be a hell of a lot crankier than he’d shown so far. He said, “Melvin, this better not be another wild-goose chase, or I’m likely to be of a great mind to put you and Bodenheimer and the rest of your bunch in federal prison. How’d you like to spend some time in Kansas, Melvin?”
Purliss backed away, looking down at the ground. He hacked and spat and said sullenly, “Ain’t no need to take it out on me. I just doin’ what I’m told.”
“Well, now, I’m telling you to stand right there and don’t do nothing. Don’t make no noise and don’t move out of that spot. Understand?”
Without waiting for an answer, he swung the door open slightly and then slid through and closed it behind him. It was a little after one o’clock on a bright, fall day. Hannah had fixed him a good lunch of stew with meat and vegetables and fresh-baked bread. That, along with a bottle of the Maryland whiskey that he favored and the scent and feel of her, had more than filled him up.
