We’ll get you deflowered yet.”
“Well, you better,” she said.
Longarm nodded, and opened the door and slipped through. He closed it so that Melvin Purliss could not see into the cabin. “This better be kind of important,” he said to the deputy.
Chapter 2
Longarm and Deputy Purliss rode through the rough, hilly country, heading west, keeping the brisk little Llano River in sight off to their left. They were pointing toward a place near the Kimble County line some few miles north of the little settlement of Koockville. The country was covered with mesquite, post oak, wild plum, and stunted sycamore and elm. Nothing very big grew on the rocky, craggy hills, not even big trees. But it was rough going. Even at the slow pace Longarm insisted upon, they were constantly dodging and picking their way through the brushy places. It wasn’t really bad country, Longarm thought, but it made him think of something a friend of his had once said upon viewing the badlands of Montana. The man had said, “Hell, it’s passable. You take something heavy and flatten out all these buttes and rock outcroppings and sharp-pointed hills, and then lay about two foot of topsoil over that, and then cover it with grass—good grass, of course—and add in a bunch of good shade trees and some running water, and turn the sun down about twenty degrees in the summer and up about twenty in the winter, why, you might just have you some pretty decent land.” His friend had paused. “Of course, then some sonofabitch is going to go and offer you a bunch of money for it, and you’ll take it and get drunk and then, like as not, you’ll end up married to a woman will make you more miserable than any land did, and you’d do anything if you could only have the old badlands back and give up the wife and the money. So all in all, I reckon we better leave the country like it is, because I ain’t never got drunk or married I wasn’t sorry about it later.”
He wondered what that friend of his would make of Hannah Diver and Gus Home, not to mention Dalton Diver and his crop of daughters. It appeared to Longarm that Diver had hit on the best scheme for making money since a horse trader taught his stock to “home” every time they got loose. That trader had sold a hundred horses, and still had the five he’d come with when he quit the country. To Longarm it appeared that Dalton Diver was doing the same thing, the way his daughters were becoming widows. Four married women and the bulk of them still virgins. He reckoned that was a part of the situation he was going to have to dig deeper in.
But maybe it was all for naught. Perhaps Sheriff Bodenheimer really did have the gang trapped in a cave along the river. Longarm doubted it, but it might be so. And if that was the case, he was just going to have time to deflower Hannah before heading back to Denver and new duties.
At Purliss’s direction, they left the hilly part of the country and headed down toward the river. There they turned west again and rode along beside the little stream. As they rounded a bend, a line of sheer bluffs rose up on the far side of the river. The bluffs were perhaps fifty feet high in some places, and so steep they could only be climbed or traversed by a few outcroppings or ridges that provided scanty footpaths along the faces. Here and there Longarm could see holes in the face of the bluffs, and he supposed it must be one such that Bodenheimer was talking about. They were riding along a little strip of sand that ran beside the river and separated the water from the brush line. Still, the sand was so cluttered with stray stones and rocks that a man had to be careful of his horse, hold the pace down, and keep an eye on the ground. He was riding a horse he’d bought in Austin, a horse that had taken his eye. The animal was a deep-chested bay with long clean lines and a strong, if long, neck. The whole package added up to quick speed when you needed it, with sure signs of endurance in the long lean muscles and the iron-hard condition of the mount. As a deputy U.S. marshal, Longarm could requisition horses from any federal government installation that had them. But he was almost as much a horse trader as he was a whiskey drinker, and almost as much a whiskey drinker as he was a poker player, and almost as much a poker player as he was a man who admired and appreciated good-looking women.
As a consequence he made it a habit, when he was in good horse country, to trade for likely animals, have them shipped to Denver at government expense, and then make a profit off their resale. His boss, Billy Vail, had several times expressed grave doubts about the legality, much less the morality, of such a practice. Longarm had replied that, considering what the government paid him in salary, it was the only way he could afford to go on being a deputy marshal without starving to death. But Billy Vail had said, “If you’d go ahead and take the promotion to chief marshal, you wouldn’t be one jump ahead of the poorhouse. Ain’t nothin’ but yore own stubbornness keepin’ you from it.”
Longarm had said with a laugh, “Billy, I’d have to be like you. I swear, I can’t bring myself to sit behind a desk all day. I’ll just have to keep on like I been going. But I like my job, Billy. Honest to Pete I do. Why, if somebody was to give me a hundred thousand dollars, I’d just go on being a deputy marshal until it had all run out.”
Longarm glanced over at the river now as he rode. It was about fifty or sixty yards wide and about two to four feet deep.
Where it ran into rocks or a sharp downgrade, it roared and spewed foam and turned into white-water rapids. Longarm thought the clear stream was just as pretty as a good many little rivers in Colorado. The Llano, he knew, started from spring-fed streams about eighty miles away. it ran forty miles to the town of Llano, and then on to Burnett, where it emptied into the Colorado River, a much bigger river that was headed for the Gulf of Mexico on the coast in Matagorda County.
He said to Purliss, “How much further?”
“Pretty quick, Marshal.” Purliss pointed ahead. “We go round that little spit of land sticking out up yonder an they ought to be in sight.”
The spit was guarded by a growth of thorny hackberry trees, and Longarm was forced to swing his horse out into the edge of the stream, splashing water, to get around the obstacle. When he’d pulled his mount back up onto the sandy strip, he could see several horsemen ahead, sitting their animals and looking at Longarm and Purliss. After a hundred yards he could see the black, long coat-covered figure of Otis Bodenheimer setting himself apart from the other men.
The deputy said, “Thar’ they be, Marshal.”
“I’d of never knowed if you hadn’t told me, Purliss.” He gave the deputy a look. “Melvin, this is the only county in any state or territory I ever been in where they’d actually give a man like you a gun and a badge.”
The little deputy looked at him, startled, trying to see if Longarm was joshing him. “Well, Marshal, I don’t-“
“Shut up, Purliss,” Longarm said. “I ain’t in no mood to listen to you talk.” Longarm was thinking of Hannah back in the cabin. If Purliss had waited another hour Longarm would now be a very satisfied man.
Then they were coming up on the small party. Longarm counted seven men besides Bodenheimer. His other two deputies were there. The nephew was Claude Botts; the cousin was Earl Bodenheimer. As near as Longarm could tell, there wasn’t an ounce of brains on either side to choose from. If you threw Purliss in, the content might rise a little, but not much.
