“Me too, dammit,” Leonard Groble mumbled. The expression on his face said that the offer surprised him as much as it did Longarm. “Well, we aren’t any of us going to get out of here unless there’s mules to pull both coaches, right?” he added, almost as if he felt a need to apologize, or at the very least to explain, for volunteering.
The argument was not Particularly sound, of course. There were, after all, fresh mules out in the barn, Burdick’s being a relay station and not merely a rest point. Not that Longarm intended to point that out to Groble, who probably needed little encouragement to back out of his offer to help. “Do we have rubber boots enough to go around?” Longarm asked.
“Plenty enough,” Howard Burdick responded.
“Then bring out the rest of them, Howard,” Jesse instructed. “We don’t want to leave those poor animals stranded any longer than we have to.”
Even so, it was mid-afternoon before the rescue party stumbled back to the security of Burdick’s with the northbound team.
Men and mules alike were liberally coated with mud, and Longarm doubted he’d ever been so completely worn out in all his life.
Jesse was happy—the only one of the six men who was—and busied himself with giving orders to Roy and Charlie about how the mules should be cleaned up and tended to once they were safe in the big, low-roofed barn.
Inside the station the southbound group had had a chance to become acquainted with the northbound passengers and all were mingling together. Longarm felt almost like a stranger intruding on someone else’s soiree. He knew the people who had been with him on the southbound coach, but the newcomers were all completely unknown to him, though they now were relaxing in perfect comfort and companionship with the southbound crowd. He definitely felt a little left out.
Apart from the stagecoach crew, with whom Longarm was by now certainly familiar—albeit not particularly impressed—the new group included two men who might have been engineers or surveyors, a burly, hulking brute of a fellow, one slightly built dandy who had somehow made it through that sea of muck while carrying a fancy Malacca cane With a brass mallard-head grip, a man who looked more cowhand than miner, and a woman whose veil kept Longarm from forming any opinion about her based on outward appearances. All he could tell about her was that her traveling gown was a dark, royal blue velveteen with a wide-brimmed hat to match. And of course the veil, very plain and very dark and imparting an aura of some mystery to her presence. “Who’s the lady?” Longarm whispered to the northbound shotgun messenger, Charlie, who seemed slightly more agreeable than his driver friend Roy.
“Damn if I know,” Charlie returned without bothering to moderate his voice in the slightest. “Ain’t seen nothing of her but that veil. Huh! She didn’t even show no ankle when she got in an’ outa the coach, so I figure she must be a sure inuff lady. Hoors don’t keer an’ regular women don’t know how t’ keep covered up that good. Takes a regular lady t’ get in an’ out a Concord an’ not give a fella at least a little something’ t’ look at.”
The words were loud enough for everyone in the place to overhear. Including the woman in the blue gown.
Longarm felt an impulse to look for something he could crawl under. Something real low would have worked just fine.
“Thank you,” he said dryly.
“Any time,” Charlie responded, Longarm’s tone passing him by completely.
“Marshal Long,” Howard Burdick called out from the back of the big room. “Come have some coffee. It will make you feel better.”
“Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot, Howard.” He walked far wide of the woman in blue on his way to join Burdick. And was pleased to see that the cheerful station keeper had a little something to sweeten the coffee. Something that came in a silver flask and tasted a damn sight better than common bar whiskey would have.
Chapter 24
“Supper. Everyone come to the table now, and don’t be shy. We have plenty enough to eat, folks,” Jean Burdick called out, precipitating a slow and sluggardly drift toward the back of the huge common room.
Longarm, who had been sitting at the front of the station where a little fresh air came through the open door and windows—an indication that the chinook was still very much in effect here; otherwise that breeze would have been chilling rather than pleasant—held back. He had washed up earlier, but still felt gritty after practically bathing in mud and muck twice today. And besides that, he felt a growing urge to take a good, hearty crap. Eating a big meal when he already had to go did not seem a particularly good idea. So instead of joining the others, he slipped his feet into a pair of oversized gum rubber boots and went outside.
There was a rack containing four enameled steel wash basins along the south wall of the building, each with a small pot of soft soap beside it and each with a laundered feed sack hung nearby to serve as a towel.
First, though, he needed to visit the backhouse.
There were a pair of them actually. A two-holer for the gents and a much smaller shitter for the ladies. But then women passing through the station would be relatively rare and there wouldn’t be so much need to accommodate them.
The last glow of sunset was fading behind the jagged ridges to the west as Longarm stepped inside the outhouse and let the door slap closed behind him. Never one to make assumptions he took a moment to strike a match and check the surroundings before he dropped his britches and sat. Lucky that he did too, for some inconsiderate bastard had pissed all over the seat … and recently enough that the wood was still soaking wet. Perching on someone else’s cold, wet urine was not Longarm’s notion of comfort, so he shifted over to the seldom- used second seat off to the side, where it was a long and awkward reach to the paper bin but where things looked considerably cleaner.
No sense wasting a perfectly good match, so he lit up a cheroot and settled in for that most relaxing of life’s tiny pleasures, a nice dump.
Smoke wreathed his head in the stagnant air inside the backhouse, and the heavy but not altogether unpleasant odor of a clean and well-limed outhouse added to his sense of well-being.
Yawning, he finished his principal mission and leaned over to take a handful of the crumpled scrap paper that
