and kept their eyes demurely low, but smears of powder and rouge neglected behind their ears told the truth about their profession. Longarm had no interest in either of them anyway. They were both homely as a pair of mud hens. But then, the further out from polite society the uglier the whores. That seemed to be a law of nature.
Of the men, Longarm guessed one of them to be a salesman of some sort, two who obviously were traveling together he took to be lawyers, and the last was likely a laborer, probably a miner judging by his clothes and destination. Those four plus a United States deputy marshal.
They traveled mostly in silence for the first three-hour relay, and completely in silence for the second. It was miserably cold inside the coach—he could just imagine how bad it must be up top—and the constant jolting and lurching did nothing to relieve that discomfort. By the time they stopped for a late supper at midnight, at a rest station roughly halfway along the route, they were all exhausted and out of sorts. Longarm’s bladder was about to bust—at his age he should know better than to drink so much coffee before getting into a stagecoach—and his head was pounding from the effects of the rough ride and unrelenting fatigue.
Still, a good piss, a better cigar, and a steaming bowl of beef stew can do wonders to restore body and spirit alike. By the time they rolled out again he felt damn near human.
And damn near dead all over again by the time they reached McCarthy Falls, the seat of Ross County. That was at four-thirty in the morning, 4:22 to be precise about it, and a light snow had begun to fall. Light as to the number of flakes, that is. But the snowflakes themselves were unusually large, soft, and wet.
Except for one or two falls very early in the snow season, and one or two more very late, snow in the high country is normally very dry, the flakes exceptionally small and without substance. Powder, it is generally called, and powder is what it most resembles. Pick up a shovel full of high country snow and all you feel is the weight of the shovel.
This snow, however, was unusually moist and weighty. If a snow like this intensified or simply continued to fall for a long time, Longarm knew, it could create problems.
“Naw, don’t worry y’self none,” the jehu assured him when Longarm mentioned the weather. “We’ll be safe in Talking Water before anything short of a regular blizzard could bother us.”
Longarm accepted the driver’s judgment, local knowledge being more valuable than any amount of generality, and remained seated while the two whores and one of the lawyers got off in McCarthy Falls.
Normal practice really should have had Longarm leaving the stagecoach there too.
Custom calls for a federal peace officer to give local lawmen the courtesy of a howdy before attending to business within another man’s jurisdiction.
In this case, however, with Sheriff Dillmore balking at the arrest of Cy Berman, Longarm decided the best course of action would be for him to go straight on to Talking Water and take Berman into custody first. Then, but only then, he might consider dropping by to have a word with Dillmore.
A man wearing a bearskin coat—and smelling about as ripe as a bear fresh out of hibernation too—got in to take up the space that previously had been occupied by the whores. All in all, Longarm would have preferred the company of the whores. At least they hadn’t stunk. Still, it should only be a few more hours to Talking Water. Then he could look up this tipster who wrote to Billy, and finally put Cyrus Berman where the cocksucker most properly belonged. Either behind bars or underground. Far as Custis Long was concerned, one would be every bit as good as the other.
The wind-stiff driver and guard, both of them looking like they’d been sprinkled with salt now that the wet snowflakes were beginning to adhere to them, climbed back on top with groans of protest, and soon the coach rocked and jolted into motion once more, taking the road onto the south slopes of Mount Harwood.
Somewhere on the other side of a pass called Goshen there was supposed to be the gold camp of Talking Water. And whatever Longarm would find there.
Chapter 5
It was snowing like a sonuvabitch by the time they reached Talking Water. The big, wet flakes were floating down with virtually no wind to disturb their fall, and at least a foot and a half of the soft, mushy, barely frozen snow had accumulated. Someone had gone to the trouble to build snowsheds in those places where drifts were likely to develop, but with no wind the sheds were not really needed now.
The mules plodded doggedly through, their pace hampered but by no means halted, and Talking Water was reached shortly after eleven a.m., stretching the trip from its normal twenty hours to something approaching twenty-four.
The jehu and his guard looked like walking, talking snowmen by the time they climbed down off the box. Yet oddly, they moved and acted more comfortably now than they had before the storm struck. It took Longarm a few moments to figure out why. Despite the miserable-looking conditions, the temperature was actually higher now, and therefore easier to take, than when they’d pulled out of Bitter Creek the day before.
As for Talking Water, it was about what one would expect of a rough and ready mining camp. The buildings were mostly dugouts or aspen log cabins, which in itself was enough to proclaim the residents’ expectations for the future. Any man who builds with aspen expects a short stay because aspen wood is soft and deteriorates quickly. A man who expects to stay a while will go to the trouble to work with pine and ignore the more plentiful and easily cut aspen.
Even in February, Longarm noticed, there were some businesses with aspen walls and canvas tenting roofs here. It seemed no one expected Talking Water to last more than another few summers. At most.
When the gold disappeared so would all the people, and a few years after that it would be difficult to find any structure standing more than waist high, except possibly for the remnants of a chimney here and there. And even most of those were stick-and-mud affairs that would fall apart soon enough and disappear right along with the cabins they now warmed.
This, Longarm knew, was what passed for progress in the gold country.
As for the name of the town, that became obvious as soon as he stood on the long, narrow street that ran through the camp. Talking Water was situated along the banks of a very fast-moving creek that leaped and burbled its way through a steeply falling valley, a defile deep enough and narrow enough that in many places it would be called a gulch or cut or gully. Or in some places back East, a holler.
Whatever one wanted to term the declivity through which the stream passed, the swift-moving water bounced and bubbled its way over rocks and boulders, and the sounds of its passage left no doubt as to the source of the community’s name. The bright waters did indeed seem to “talk.” And in a most musical and pleasant voice at that.
