Longarm quietly observed some Ute and Kimoho folks he knew had said the same thing about recent changes in their Shining Mountains. Then young Joel said he knew all about larkspur lotion because he and his kid sis had been sent home from school with nits more than once.
Flora gasped and protested, “It’s those white trash children from around the silver mines who keep bringing nits to school with them, the unwashed things.”
The Colmans and the little old lady seemed to agree on that at least. Longarm felt sure the wives of the high- paid hardrock miners would say the kids off the surrounding farms and stock spreads were the ones in need of a bath and infested with lice. So in sum, the remote settlement of John Bull was shaping up as a typical company town surrounded by hardscrabble hill-country folk. He wasn’t fixing to write a history of the place, or even mess with Flora Munro here, as tempting as she smelled. For she was a home gal as well as sort of country, and he’d told Henry he’d be back with Bunny McNee before old Billy Vail returned from that conference.
Talking about poisonous flowers had gotten the country folk into a conversation about such country matters as the local climate, like New England in the summer with the winters sort of weird. Way milder than you might expect when a sudden shift wasn’t dumping as much as a dozen feet of snow between your back door and the shithouse. The high peaks all around tended to shelter the intermontane ranges from the bone-chilling wolf winds of the prairies to the east. Colorado liked to call itself the Switzerland of the West. But from what he’d read or heard from greenhorns, he figured they ought to compare it more to that Austro-Hungarian Empire, with some parts alpine while a heap of the Empire was this big prairie called an alfold, complete with cowboys who dressed sort of outlandishly.
He didn’t tell his fellow travelers. He doubted they’d care, and Flora would doubtless be shocked, or think he was bragging, if he told her about himself and those immigrant sisters from Budapest. It had been the blond one who’d told him about the funny pants Hungarian cowboys wore. Folks talked about all sorts of odd things in bed as they were resting up between times.
He knew he was thinking about pillow conversations out of all proportion to the encouragement the auburn- haired Flora had given him so far. She seemed the sort of gal who expected flowers, books, and candy, along with at least a week’s worth of wooing, before she gave in. And once a gal like that did, what did a man have but a heap of trouble and a limp dick on his hands? Flora Munro wasn’t the sort a man could hop on and off, and even if she had been, he’d planned on no more than one night in John Bull, damn it. He figured he’d gotten this horny by wasting that dinner and seven acts of vaudeville on that new gal in Denver instead of a sure bet on, say, Miss Morgana Floyd of the Arvada Orphanage. Such romantic quests for novelty were always getting folks frustrated, or worse. He had to chuckle as he thought back to what a married-up pal had told him about a wild night on the town cementing his marriage.
The poor gent had been sleeping with the same wife long enough to start feeling it was a pleasant but sort of tedious chore. Then she’d had to leave town on a family emergency, and he’d found himself suddenly free to take a heap of flirty gals up on what he’d been sure they’d been offering when he couldn’t take advantage of it.
But it seemed the frisky barmaid at the Black Cat already had a beau to go home with, and the shopgirl who’d been smiling at him so dewy-eyed where he went to buy his cigars had turned out to have myopia. She’d had to put her glasses back on to see who was asking her out, and as soon as she was sure it was him, she’d said not to be so silly.
And so it had gone, for a whole lot of awkward moments, as a man who’d suspected he might be a Don Juan discovered that he was only a man, and that none of the pretty gals he’d thought he was forced to pass up had ever been there for him in the first place. So by the time his wife got back, he’d had time to get horny as hell, and found her a really grand improvement on his own fist. He’d said she seemed to enjoy his hard feelings toward her as well, and that every time he’d found her a mite tedious since, he’d only had to consider how dumb it felt that other way with night coming on, your old organ-grinder hard, and no good old gal to help you out.
Longarm knew that feeling. He was fixing to face it in the near future, although he didn’t get turned down often enough to do anything as desperate as proposing to gals aboard narrow-gauge combinations. Some of that reformed Don Juan’s desperation had been inspired by rusty romantic procedure. Most of the battle was in knowing who you ought to make a play for. Gents forbidden to touch tended to feel for impractical strange stuff with their imaginations. But as soon as you had all the time and freedom it took to grab for gals right, it only took a few dumb grabs to learn you only had so many turns on the old merry-go-round and it made more sense to save your time and pocket jingle for sensible targets.
Nine out of ten times the gal was the one who really determined the final results of the fandango. For while there was no way short of bribery or rape to get a gal who didn’t fancy you, there was not much you could do but run like hell or take your beating like a man when she did. So Longarm usually spent more thought on ducking the dire consequences of romancing the wrong gal than he spent on getting all that romantic with anybody.
A good many miles later they commenced to see first cows and then sprawling log homes and outbuildings where a few fenced fields and lots of well-grazed but green grass sprawled across such flat parkland as there was. Longarm surmised from the way the slopes beyond had gone to aspen and lodgepole that they were now an easy timber-haul from that mining operation. You cut serious trees for mine props. Then he spied patches of logged-out lodgepole and knew they were really close. You cut lodgepole for firewood unless you were an Indian. Aspen was only good for fluttering pretty in the summer breezes.
Then, sure enough, they passed some bigger-frame structures, and slowed down as Colman explained the tracks ran on up to the mining operation after you got off at the town terminal.
That turned out to be a shingled frame structure with wide overhanging eaves, facing both the tracks and the cinder-paved town hall square. Longarm reached down for both Flora’s and the old lady’s carpetbags as their train hissed to a shuddering stop.
So with one awkward thing and another, Longarm and the party he was with took longer to make it down to the platform than that stranger in the suit had. Longarm spied the Englishman’s heavy chest on the platform, and suspected the gent had manhandled it off on his own and then gone to fetch one or more porters. He’d just set the baggage he was carrying aside to help the two ladies down the steps when all hell commenced to bust loose in the middle distance.
Longarm yelled, “Colman, Joel, move the ladies to cover and keep ‘em there whilst I find out who’s shooting at whom!”
Then he was moving along the platform toward the trackside doorway of the depot with his own gun drawn, even as the echoes of that hot exchange of gunfire faded away.
He saw others crowding into the depot, and paused to break out his badge and pin it to the lapel of his own suit as his flared nostrils assured him that the depot was where that brimstone reek of spent gunpowder was drifting from. Lowering the muzzle of his .44-40 to a ready but less threatening angle, he strode on in to spy that Englishman off the train sprawled flat on his back with a puzzled smile on his face as his dead eyes stared up at the pressed-tin ceiling. A big puddle of dark red blood spread across the floorboards from the body to the baseboards of the ticket booth. Bodies drained that way when a round entered the chest from the front and blew lung tissue out
