Close to midnight, he made the switch in Santa Fe for the short haul down to Albuquerque, where he caught the train heading east that would take him into Santa Rosa. At that hour, he was the only passenger in the coach besides one fat drummer with his sample case on his lap, a derby hat on his head, and a cigar in his mouth. The conductor came through, calling out Longarm’s stop, and he got up, stretching, tired and sore from the long spell of sitting. He got his valise down, and was halfway off the train by the time it pulled into the platform at Santa Rosa.
It was a dark night with very little moon. Longarm walked across the planks of the passenger platform toward the streets of the town. It was, as he had guessed, not much more than a village. It looked to have one main street, with several others branching off. As he went down the steps from the platform to the street level, he glanced across and saw, in the shadows of a building, a tall angular man who looked vaguely familiar. Longarm headed toward the center of town, and saw the man slouch along, paralleling him. It was Lee Gray. There was no mistaking the walk. Longarm had always said that Lee walked like a man whose joints were half asleep. Most people thought that Lee was a touch on the slow side, until they realized how fast he could move when they tried something. Gray gave the appearance of being more than just a little relaxed. In actual fact, he stayed on a hair trigger most of the time.
Longarm didn’t glance his way. He walked down the middle of the dark street, heading for the center of town, where he expected to find White’s Hotel without too much trouble.
He turned right at the next corner, which seemed to be the main street. Gray was just ahead of him. Lee had stopped in the shadow at the corner and stood, leaning against the support post of a porch roof.
As Longarm passed, Gray said in a low voice, “White’s is in the middle of the next block. You’ll pass the jail on the way.”
Longarm acted like he hadn’t heard, and kept on walking. He knew that Lee would let him get a good lead before he came wandering into the hotel. It would seem like there was no connection between the two men.
Longarm stuck to the street rather than walking on the boardwalk as it was broken up. Some stores were fronted by it and some weren’t, so a man would be constantly going up and down as he made his way along the fronts of the stores. He saw the glow in the first block, about midway up, in the window of an office. As he passed, he saw the lettering that said “Sheriff & Tax Collector.” It gave the name of the county, but Longarm couldn’t read it. He saw the vague image of a man humped over at a desk. He passed on by. He wouldn’t be ready for the sheriff until he had some rest and had talked matters out with Gray.
He was fifty yards into the second block when he stopped dead in his tracks. The false-fronted, weather- beaten, wooden stores suddenly gave way to a huge, block-like, three-story stucco building that had a porch in front and big double wooden and glass doors. It rivaled anything that Longarm had seen in St. Louis or San Francisco or Denver. It looked as out of place as the Queen of England would at a washerwomens’ convention. Across the top in neat letters, it said “White’s Hotel.” He didn’t know if it was named that way because the building was blindingly white, or if White was the name of the party who owned it. He didn’t much care. It looked like comfort to him, and that was all he was interested in. He only hoped they had a room. Surely they did. In such a small town, a hotel like that would have plenty of rooms.
He went through the big double doors and into the well-lighted lobby. The floor was marble, and his boots rang hollowly on it in the big well-appointed room. Off to one side, he could see a dining room with white starched tablecloths. There was a young man on duty at the desk, looking sharp and pressed, even at that ungodly hour. Longarm went up and asked for a room.
The young man said, “Yes, sir. Will that be with a bath or without?”
Longarm wasn’t sure he was in the right country. He said, “You got rooms with baths?”
“Yes, sir, we do. We have a reservoir on top of the hotel and we have a method of heating it. Some of our rooms have a built-in bathtub so you can have a bath right there in your room. I must tell you, sir, that the in-room bath is a dollar per day extra.”
“Just how much are these rooms?”
“Sir, your room will cost you three dollars a night on the second floor or four dollars a night on the first floor.”
Longarm said, “Well, I’ll have one on the second floor. But just for the sake of curiosity, I noticed that you’ve got three floors. What about that third floor? Would those rooms be two dollars?”
The young man gave him a thin smile. “All of the rooms on the top floor are reserved, sir, for special guests of the management.”
Longarm was signing the register. He said, “I see. Well, how do you know I’m not a special guest of the management?”
The young man behind the desk gave Longarm a pointed look. He said, “Are you?”
Longarm laughed. “Son, I’m so tired, I don’t even feel like trying to trick around with you. No, I don’t even know the management here.” He signed the register “C. Long” and deliberately bluffed the last name.
The young desk clerk spun the book around, looked, took a key out of the pigeonholes, and then asked, “How long will you be with us, Mr. Lang?”
Longarm smiled. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, two or three days. Do you want me to pay in advance?”
“No, that is not necessary. Do you have any luggage, sir?”
“Just my valise here, son. By the way, are there any saloons open in town?”
The young man shook his head. “No, sir. The saloons around here all shut down at one o’clock. The Indians, you understand?”
“Yeah,” Longarm said. “The Indians. What do they do? Start scalping people?”
“They get drunk, sir.”
“Oh,” Longarm said. He looked at the young man. “So that’s what’s been going on. Every time I wake up, I feel like I’ve been scalped. So it’s the Indians doing the drinking that’s doing the scalping, is it? Well, we’ll have to put a stop to that.”
Longarm picked up his valise and picked up the key, stalling, hoping that Lee Gray would come through the
