less?”
The car seemed uncomfortably small, although there was plenty of room for the horses and the two men. The narrow-gauge railway was simply that; the rails were placed ten inches closer together than normal rail tracks, and the cars were sized accordingly. The mining company used the stock car because they used donkeys, burros, and mules in their mines and they were constantly shipping them around. The train looked smaller only in comparison to the other trains sitting in the depot. The engine, looked, to Longarm, like what the railroad called a switching engine, one that was used around the freight yards to switch cars from one siding to another.
Not long after they had arrived at the train and gotten their horses loaded, a man in working clothes had pulled Longarm aside and inquired if he was the marshal. Longarm hadn’t been wearing his badge, and he had pinned it on for answer. The man had said, “I’ve got your goods in a car up the train. Got them well iced down in a swing cradle. They ought to be all right.”
Longarm had said, “Just out of curiosity, what if they aren’t all right? You said they ought to be all right, but you didn’t say for sure.”
The man had spat tobacco juice reflectively to one side. “Well, that’s the one good thing about nitro. If you make a mistake with it, you’ll never find out.”
Longarm had said, “I can’t tell you how much that comforts me, mister.”
Now the train began a series of slow jolts as the engine moved off and the slack was taken up in the coupling. Longarm said, “Looks like we’re moving.” He took out his watch. It was six o’clock on the button. “It seems the mining company runs their trains on a tighter schedule than the regular lines.”
Fish said, “Yeah, that would be handy if I knew where the hell we were going and what the hell we are going to do.”
Longarm said, “Fish, you play five-card stud, don’t you? Isn’t that one of your favorite games?”
“I put it on a par with draw—five-card draw—it’s all serious poker.”
“Well, what I’m getting to is that you get a card up and then you get a card down, which you bet on, and the others either call or fold, and then you have to wait for the next card, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s what you’re doing right now. You’re waiting for that next card.”
Fisher said, “I have a feeling that this trip is going to wreck my health. You know a man of my age and sensibilities needs to keep to a regular schedule. You done woke me up way early this morning and got my feeding habits out of kilter, and now here we are riding a train through the mountains to some damned town in New Mexico that I didn’t want to be in, and I’ve got a feeling that we are going to get on horseback and ride on tonight. How many other surprises am I going to get?”
Longarm said, “Well, every new card is a surprise, isn’t it, Fish?”
“Yeah, but I can fold my hand if the one I get doesn’t work and I don’t care for it.”
“That’s the difference between this and poker. You’ve got to stay until the end of the pot; you can’t fold this hand.”
Fisher yawned. “Longarm, did anybody ever tell you that you’re a circular sonofabitch?”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s a circular sonofabitch?”
Fisher gave him an eye. “That’s a sonofabitch anyway you look at it.”
The train slowly made its way out of Taos and started winding through the mountains that ringed the valley where the town was located. With agonizing slowness, the train chugged its way up steep inclines and around bends that were too sharp for Longarm’s comfort. Occasionally, the train would rumble, jarring over a patch of rough roadbed, and Longarm’s senses would tingle as he thought of the eight ounces of nitro swinging in the cradle somewhere up ahead.
The roadbed, as it climbed through the mountains, was so narrow that Longarm could lean forward in the narrow stock car and see through the slats in the side to the bottom of the valley a thousand feet below. He said, “Boy, I hope this train is made out of some kind of light material.”
“How come?”
“So when we jump the tracks and fall all the way down, we won’t make such a racket when we hit.”
Fisher said, “That’s a hell of a nice thought. You got any more information that you want to give me?”
Longarm reached into the pouch of the saddlebags and brought out a bottle of his Maryland whiskey. He pulled out the plug and offered it to his friend. Fisher took a small drink, a sip, and handed it back.
Longarm asked, “You never have been much of a drinker, have you, Fish?”
“Never have seen the need. It never did much for me and I could see where it caused some folks a good deal of harm. I ain’t got nothing against it. You appear to enjoy taking a drink, but I just don’t. Have you ever eaten a raw oyster?”
Longarm said, “Yeah, but only once. I was in Baltimore for some kind of trial that I had to testify in, and this lawman got me out to dinner and insisted that I eat one of those nasty things.”
Fish said, “He probably told you that it was something that if you ate enough of you’d like, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the way I feel about whiskey. I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”
Longarm looked out at the snow-capped mountains they were winding their way through, feeling it getting cooler and cooler with every foot they climbed. He said, “You know, Fish. You never really gave me a good reason why you quit the law business. I don’t believe it was because you could make more money playing poker.”
“No, that was never it. It wasn’t the danger, matter of fact, it was the lack of danger. What do you think of your average criminal, Longarm? Not people like the Gallaghers, but just your average idiot that sets out to rob a
