Longarm shrugged and said, “Mebbe.” He had no call to voice all his suspicions to anyone before he had more answers. So he didn’t. He said he meant to sleep out on the prairie after dark, seeing he could eat in town and needed neither a night fire nor more than a ground tarp in such dry summer weather.
Iona glanced at the sky to their west and said, “It’s up to you. But we’re fixing to have a glorious sunset, and I think I heard thunder in the distance earlier.”
He said, “I noticed it’s gotten cloudier. But those few clouds to the west were starting from scratch against sunny blue, and I suspect those Ruggles sisters have been setting off more dynamite to the north. Those corn fields they’ve been paid to rain on ain’t more than a dozen miles by crow, and sound flies as straight across the sky.”
She insisted he had a standing offer covering room and board at her cow spread as she untethered her white pony and let him boost her up to her sidesaddle. She held her head sort of flouncy as she rode off down the street without looking back. He’d noticed she was used to having her own way. He wondered if that was all she found exciting about him.
He cut across the wagon ruts to a corner grocery and bought a bag of staples that would keep until old Helga got around to preparing them. He’d noticed that kitchen was getting sort of sour-smelling since the missing gunsmith’s icebox had gone dry. He knew Dutch folks, high and low, favored sauerkraut and pickled everything else because it tended to keep without ice or smoke. So he hoped she wouldn’t be too disgusted by canned pork and beans, bully beef, sardines, and plain old potatoes and onions in season.
She wasn’t. When he marched in the back door to plant the big bag of vittles on the table she looked like she was fixing to cry. She said she’d be sore as hell if he didn’t have supper with her, and then she did get teary-eyed when she read some of the labels and figured out what they meant in her own lingo.
Then she said something even more cheerful. She told him her own quarters were over Heger’s carriage house out back. He’d let her move in when she’d gone to work for him. Longarm wasn’t as sure it made up for not paying her any wages worth mentioning. Helga’s reason for making supper on the far side of the backyard became clearer once they’d gone that far with the vittles and he’d noticed how much better things smelled.
Helga said her boss had ridden off somewhere with his one pony and two-wheel shay. So it came as no surprise that a certain amount of musty fodder and horseshit lingered in the air downstairs. Up in the converted hayloft it smelled much more like a lady’s well-kept quarters. She’d spread lavender water and fresh-picked wildflowers about, but you could still smell an undercurrent of lye soap and elbow grease. She’d told him she hadn’t much liked her earlier job cleaning house for another gal. But it probably felt different cleaning just as thoroughly for yourself. As she sat him on a cot to bustle with the grub across the spacious single room, he set his hat and Winchester aside and asked if she’d heard the one about Abe Lincoln’s boots.
When she said she hadn’t, he explained how a visitor to the White House had caught the president on the back stairs, putting new blacking on a pair of boots. When the surprised visitor had said, “Surely you don’t black your own boots, Mister President!” old Abe was said to have replied, “Well, sure I black my own boots. Who’s boots do you black?”
She didn’t laugh. It reminded him of that time a real Russian lady had tried to translate a Russian joke into English for him. He felt a slight twitch below the waist as he idly wondered where that sort of warm-natured Russian gal might be right now as the sun declined in the west.
Helga’s cast-iron range ran on coal oil, which she said she was running low on. She said there might be some left in the cellar across the yard. She hadn’t poked about down there because it smelled so bad.
Longarm said, “I noticed. Airing it out only seems to make Heger’s quarters upstairs smell worse. You did say you’d never met that wife of his in the flesh. Do you know anyone in town who might have really seen her leaving with that mysterious stranger?”
Helga shook her blond head with her back turned to him as she replied, “I am nothing knowing about Herr Heger’s troubles mitt seiner Frau. When she in the door walk I would not know her. I don’t think there will be oil enough for coffee also here.”
He got up from the cot, saying he’d go see if there was any to spare in or about the shop. As he was leaving she gave him a key ring and suggested he lock up for the night on his way back.
He said he would and asked about all that stock, only guarded now by some hasty boarding-over. She said she’d left such stock as shells and cleaning fluid to the mercy of any prowlers, but hidden the more valuable guns in a broom closet with her fingers crossed, seeing she had no way to open the vault.
Longarm spied a bucket in the carriage house as he descended the steep steps. So he took it along and filled it with water from the garden pump before he went on over to the back entrance to the shop.
He sniffed uncertainly as he carried the bucket of water and that lantern back down to the cellar. He’d noticed in both the war and some Indian fighting that what folks ate the day they died had a lot to do with how they stunk afterwards. He still recalled the horrid shape a bunch of dead Na-dene had appeared to be in after a shootout down by Apache Pass a spell back. An army surgeon had finally figured out why they’d rotted so strangely. The hungry Indians had been eating desert buckthorn berries, which tasted insipidly sweet and contained a vivid dye that turned your blood vessels the color of black cherries without hurting you otherwise. Those dead Indians had sure looked odd.
Setting the bucket of water down, he rummaged about through cobwebs and old mason jars filled with ominous blackness until, sure enough, he found a square can of that Standard lamp oil of Ohio. He set it on the steps with the lantern before he slowly and thoroughly slopped well water over every inch of the dirt floor. Then he hung the trimmed lantern up, put the oil can in the bucket, and went up to lock the back door and head back to the carriage house.
He left the bucket where he’d found it and carried the lamp oil up to Helga—just in time, she said. He started to warn her to put out her stove burner before she poured more oil. But despite the odd way she talked she was a smart as well as industrious housekeeper.
She served him warm pork and beans and what she called Bratkartoffein at a small table near her dormer window. They tasted like fried spuds to him. They were both hungry enough to let the coffee Catch up with them. As they ate, he didn’t tell her about soaking the dirt floor across the way. It was a trick army looters and Mexican raiders used. But he didn’t think he ought to mention anything buried under a dirt floor while they were eating, and it was going to take a spell in any case. You dug where you still saw a damp patch after the rest had dried. Soil that had been disturbed sucked up and held far more spilled water. But even with the cellar door ajar it would take hours for any such pattern to show down there.
They had coffee with a dessert she improvised from canned tomato preserves, brown sugar, and bread crumbs. It tasted better than her droll recipe. The light inside was getting tricky as, outside her dormer window, the sky to the west was turning ominously lovely.
