land. They’re pretty hard-pressed to even let one another get a cow on it, much less anybody else. It’s serious, Custis. I wouldn’t be sending you out this quick if I really believed it didn’t need tending to.”
“You are telling me that there is killing going on over this matter?”
Billy Vail shrugged. “Well, that’s what I’ve been given to understand. I don’t think it’s been anything big thus far, not the way I was describing it earlier. The word I get is that it’s a powder keg with a lit fuse and the faster you get down there, the better off you’ll be.”
Longarm pulled a face. He said with disgust, “Damn it, Billy, I’m give out. I’m as tired as hell, and I deserve a little whiskey and women and some good times. I ain’t taking off tomorrow and I ain’t taking off the day after that. I ain’t going to take off until I get good and rested.”
Billy Vail looked up at Longarm, his washed-out blue eyes going hard. He said, “Naturally, I want you to be as rested as you can be, but I don’t figure you need more than forty-eight hours’ rest. Anybody that needs more than forty-eight hours to rest up don’t need to be working for me.”
Longarm stood up. He said, “All right, you old son of a bitch. One of these days, your sins will catch up to you and I’ll be right there to shake hands with the devil while they shovel dirt in your face.”
Billy Vail sat back in his chair. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Yeah, and from where I’ll be laying, I’m not too sure I can tell which one of you will be the devil. Now, get on out of here and get some work done. Or at least let me get some work done.”
Longarm put on his hat and opened the office door. He gave Billy Vail one last look and then said, “I hope you’re proud of yourself, Chief Marshal William Vail. I was the only friend you ever had. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting damned sick of Texas. I’m going to come back a changed man. By the way, how many guns am I going up against down there?”
The chief marshal shrugged and said, “I don’t know. What do you care? Just take them on one at a time.”
Longarm stared at him for a long moment and then shook his head and closed the door behind him.
A new lady boarder had moved into Longarm’s boardinghouse just before he had left on the long trek to track down the escaped convicts who had fled into the snowy Rocky Mountains. The young lady, who was named Betty Shaw, he guessed to be in her mid-twenties. She was a comely young thing with blond curly hair and a very interesting figure. He had not really gotten to know the young woman before he had left, so he had been surprised the night before when she had knocked on his door only an hour or so after his return from the hard trip. He had been unshaven, dirty, and generally a mess.
It had surprised him to see her standing there in a trim-fitting white gown that had displayed her hips and bosom to an appealing degree. She had come, she said, to welcome him back and to invite him to take coffee with her one evening after supper.
The somewhat forward invitation had surprised him, but it had naturally given him a great deal of delight since Miss Shaw was quite a treat to look upon. She acted demure and modest, though Longarm sensed something more than smoke rising from the embers he detected inside her. He had been told that she had worked for a time for a tent evangelist and then, for reasons known only to herself, had left his employ as the crusade left Denver. He’d never gotten it straight what she was doing for a livelihood while she remained in Denver. But as he walked home from Billy Vail’s office in the late-afternoon sunshine, he decided that it might not be a bad idea to see if the young lady would care to extend the coffee invitation for that evening.
He had planned originally to go to his oldest flame in the town, the lady dressmaker. But she, of late, had begun to hint more and more at the idea of matrimony, a subject Longarm was not too interested in discussing. Besides, Miss Betty Shaw was intriguing in her newness. The one thing that Longarm could not stand was not knowing what lay beneath the contours and materials of a pretty frock. It was like the wrapping on a present. You didn’t really know how valuable the gift was until you got the decoration off.
Miss Shaw answered the door at his first knock, looking as demure and pretty as he had remembered her from the somewhat half-drunken previous night. Now, of course, he was clean-shaven and barbered and bathed and wearing better clothes. He swept off his hat at the sight of her and she smiled pleasantly. She said, “Why, Mr. Marshal Long—whatever—such a pleasure.”
She had a slight southern accent and he believed that she had said, or someone else had told him, that she was from Louisiana.
Longarm said, “Miss Shaw, I beg your forgiveness for the condition in which I met you last night, but I was just back from a long and troubling job of work. I would have certainly been delighted to have taken coffee with you. I wonder if tonight, however, I might have the pleasure of your company at supper. I suggest we not dine here at the boardinghouse, but that we go to one of the finer establishments around town, of which there are several. Perhaps we could then return here and have coffee or such as you care for in your rooms.”
Her bright little face lit up and her cherry red lips opened to reveal sparkling white teeth. She said, “Oh, Marshal Long, that would be ever so pleasant. I would thoroughly enjoy that.”
Longarm said, “Well, ma’am, it’s now not quite half past three. If I call for you at six, would that be convenient?”
She said, “Oh, my. Yes. Thank you ever so much. I am looking forward to a delightful evening.”
Longarm bowed slightly, backed away from her door, and then took the stairs to his second floor room. He didn’t know how he had managed, but he had set the tone of the meeting on a fairly high plane. He tried to avoid doing that with women since it tended to make it more difficult to get matters down to the level he preferred. But the amenities had been observed, and he supposed that he could carry them off for a while longer. He calculated if he could get a few drinks into her, they would begin acting like a man and a woman ought to, and then he would let matters take their course. There was a chance—he had realized it on many other occasions—that sometimes, what he was there for wasn’t what the female was there for, and he very often was left there when the lady wasn’t.
He let himself into his room with a nagging worry. He only had a couple of nights in Denver and he had better take full advantage of them so far as the fairer sex went. He had a pretty good idea that somehow his trip to Texas wasn’t going to be the kind that made pie very available. He had just gotten back from six weeks of doing without, and he was damned if he was going off someplace where the only pie to be had was apple or peach—the kind you baked in the oven.
If Miss Shaw did not show early signs of cooperation, he intended to cut her off as soon as possible and head off to his old standby, the dressmaker lady, matrimonial plans or not. He figured he could get around that and get what he was after—at least over the space of two nights. But he was not willing to walk away from such a sparkling, brand-new little heifer without at least giving her tail a little twist.
