He rode away from the tracks down a grassy little glade. Once away from the ears of the train man, he patted the roan’s neck and gave him a slight nudge with the spurs and said, “Well, we might as well get on after it. It ain’t going to go away by itself, so shuffle your shoes along.”
Chapter 3
The village of Grit lay in the middle of a big, grassy plain, only here and there interrupted by mounds and buttes and crags and small ravines. The town itself wasn’t much: two lines of buildings on each side of one street. There was a scattering of houses around the main business section, if it could be called that, but Longarm guessed that there were no more than forty or fifty structures in all. As he came into the town, he noted there were several saloons and a couple of churches, but he didn’t see a school.
His first disappointment was that there was no hotel. In the end, he took a room at a large boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Judith Thompson, a handsome lady somewhere between thirty and forty years old. Aside from her looks, Longarm was struck by a certain kind of sadness about her. He would learn later that her husband had been an early victim of the land war, which had been raging for several years.
The boardinghouse came equipped with a stable, but the residents were responsible for their own animals. He’d put his roan up, stored his saddle on the stall wall, got the animal some grain and hay and water, and then went to see what he could do about his own appearance.
Mrs. Thompson had no provisions for baths for her male guests. There was a windmill located out behind her barn and stables and the men were welcome to go sluice themselves off in the stream of water pouring out of the windmill and into the concrete spillway that watered her vegetable garden. A man taking a bath under such conditions was in full view of whoever cared to look his way, but Longarm didn’t much care. He got some soap and his razor and a towel from Mrs. Thompson and, taking all that and a set of clean clothes, went out behind the barn to get himself to where he could stand his own company. Fortunately, it was warm enough for such an exercise, though there was still a hint of chill in the high country’s May air.
He considered the discomfort well worth it after he finally made his way back into the boardinghouse, turned his dirty clothes over to Mrs. Thompson for a wash, and sat down for a late lunch with a shaven and clean skin. Aside from himself, there were only two other boarders: one was a clerk in the hardware and general mercantile in town, and the other was a drummer passing through who sold leather goods. They were both out. Aside from Mrs. Thompson and her two young daughters, Longarm had the place to himself.
He was tired from the long journey and the long nights with Miss Shaw, but he decided that he would go out that afternoon, walk around the town, and see what he could find out about the situation before he went and braced the Myerses and the Barretts. To him, it appeared to be a pretty straightforward job. You put your badge on, you loosened your gun in your holster, you went to see the people involved, and you told them in no uncertain terms what was going to be. If they didn’t like it, you took it from there. He didn’t plan to be diplomatic getting the job done.
Mrs. Thompson served him a lunch of pork steak, mashed turnips, and collard greens. It was a long way from being his favorite meal, but he was hungry, and he cleaned his plate with relish. After that, she brought him coffee and a piece of apple pie which was good enough to make up for the taste of the rest of the meal. He stopped Mrs. Thompson as she was about to leave the room and asked her if there was some kind of law around the town.
She stopped and looked back at him. She said, “No, just the Barretts and the Myerses and their hired killers.”
Longarm had not yet told her that he was a United States deputy marshal, nor had he yet put on his badge. He put down his fork, took the badge out of his pocket, and pinned it to his shirtfront. He said, “Well, there’s law here now.”
For a long second, Mrs. Thompson stared at the medallion on his chest. She said softly with a touch of sorrow in her voice, “I’m afraid it comes too late for me and my children.”
Longarm winced inside. It had been a foolish gesture. He had forgotten that Mrs. Thompson had been widowed by the troubles over the rangeland. He said, “I’m right sorry about your loss, ma’am, but word just now got to us, and I’ve been sent down to do what I can.”
She came back toward him at the table. She said, “One man? You think one man is going to change what is happening here?”
Longarm said, “Well, all I can tell you, ma’am, is that I’m going to do my best.”
She shook her head with a trace of bitterness and said, “You’ll be like all the rest of them that have tried to help the situation. You won’t last ten minutes.”
Longarm smiled slowly. He said, “Well, Mrs. Thompson, I’ve been lasting ten minutes for about fifteen or twenty years now. I just kind of keep stretching it as much as I can.”
That brought a slight smile to her face. She said, “Well, I wish you the best. You seem like a nice man. Will you be staying with me long?”
“As long as it takes to get this job done.”
She nodded. “I expect then that I better increase my grocery order.”
Longarm laughed. It made her smile. He noticed how pleasing her face was when she did not have the mask of sorrow. She would have been a pretty woman except for the sad way she carried herself. She had a trim and shapely figure and her hair was brown and luxuriant. Sometime, Longarm thought, he would find out exactly what had happened to her husband and maybe do something about it. But for the time being, he was just going to aim for every weak spot he could find.
He started with the saloons. It was not his customary habit to wear his badge any more than he had to; very often he left it off deliberately. He only wore it when official duty required, and this was one occasion when he wanted the word spread far and near that a deputy United States marshal was in town and intended to make his presence felt.
The first saloon he walked into was sparsely filled. There were maybe three men at the bar and a few others scattered at tables in the small room. There was a free lunch at a table at the back, and two cowhands were busy there, filling their plates with bologna and sausages and crackers and whatnot. They glanced his way as he came in and he saw that they appeared to be working cowhands in wide-brimmed hats and leather chaps. It was the kind of country where a cowboy would wear chaps to protect his legs. These men wore the narrow-legged kind, not the batwinged sort that were mostly for show.
He took note of the four or five men he could see wearing side arms that their guns were properly set up for
