you’ll excuse us for the time being. Manuel”—he nodded his head toward the servant in the starched white coat —“will show you to your room. We’ll have a chance to talk later.”
“Show me to my room? What are you talking about?”
Asher said, “Well, surely, Deputy Long, you’re not planning on riding back to town this late.”
Longarm thought quickly about the opportunity to be in the house and look around the grounds. He said, “Well, if you’re offering hospitality, I’m not going to be the one to turn it down.”
Asher Nelson said, “That’s fine, Deputy Marshal. We’ll eat dinner at six. I hope you have a good appetite. Perhaps afterwards we can play some four-handed poker. I know that’s a miserable game, but at least it’s better than three-handed.” He smiled. “And besides, you’ll be fresh meat for us.”
Longarm said, “I don’t generally care to play poker against men that have got that much bigger a wallet than I do.”
Asher Nelson smiled. “Oh, we’ll keep the stakes to everyone’s liking. Now, if you’ll go along with Manuel, he’ll see that you’re fixed up. Have a bath if you like. We have running water in the house.”
“I need to see to my horse.”
Claude Nelson said, “Not to worry about that, Deputy Long. He’s already in the barn, eating oats.”
Longarm shrugged. “Well, I reckon I’ll go to my room, as you called it, and knock a little of this travel dust off of me. I look forward to spending the night with you folks. I am much obliged. I hadn’t meant to tread on your hospitality when I came this way.”
Asher said, with what sounded like real sincerity, “Oh, you don’t know how lucky we are, Deputy Long. We don’t get as much company out here as we like. Your presence is very welcome. I’m sure you have many, many good stories to tell about your days as a marshal in this rough-and-ready country. We look forward to hearing them.”
Longarm gave them a half-amused look. “Oh, Mr. Nelson, I don’t reckon I could tell you any stories about the rough and ready that you haven’t already lived.”
He sat on the side of the bed in the big, whitewashed, spacious room with a little alcove off to one side that contained a tub of water and a wash basin with a faucet that ran either hot or cold water through it. It was better than any hotel he had ever seen. But then, he reckoned, you could have just about anything you wanted to pay for.
The servant had brought up his saddlebags, so he was able to take a drink of his own whiskey and have a change of shirts for after his bath. He hadn’t brought a razor, but one had been made available to him, along with a shaving brush and some special soap. It was pretty handy to be rich.
Still, he had a lot of questions in his mind, especially about young Henderson. It was possible, he supposed, that the man had gotten lost in the desolate country, but Longarm doubted it. You didn’t get to be a deputy United States marshal by not being able to find your way around. Something could have happened to him. He could have been bushwhacked by a gang of Mexican banditos on a rampage across the border. He could have had trouble with his horse. He could have been hurt if his horse had fallen.
There were several answers to his disappearance, but all Longarm could keep going back to was the reluctance of anyone in town to give him information about Ross Henderson and the fact that he’d been bound for the Nelsons’ ranch. There was something about the three brothers that worried Longarm, but it wasn’t anything he could put his finger on. By all appearances they were what they said they were, three men who had taken their chances against nature and had won. They were sound of wind and heart, as you said about a good horse, and they looked like they had done their share of hard work in their days. Each one of them was hard-handed and square-shouldered and flat-bellied. They had not inherited their money, they had worked for it. But still, there was a strangeness about the whole operation that worried Longarm.
Finally, he finished his Maryland whiskey, got up, took a bath, put on his clean shirt, and then made ready to go downstairs. It was a quarter to six by his watch. He sure hoped they didn’t expect him to have brought any better clothes with him, but then, they didn’t look like the type that was going to show up for dinner wearing a top hat and a tie either.
For dinner, he had probably the best steak he had ever eaten. It was Claude Nelson who explained that their beef-stock was never put out to pasture on grass. He explained, “Our slaughter animals are kept in a pen and fed the highest-grade alfalfa hay and the highest-grade oats and wheat that we can grow. We can put more tender meat on a beef than anybody anywhere. You can’t get that good a steak in Kansas City.”
Longarm was forced to agree. He was also surprised at the baked potatoes, the sliced tomato, and the fresh green beans. He didn’t know that potatoes could be grown in New Mexico.
Again, it was Claude who answered him, since it was Claude that seemed to be in charge of their ranching operation. He said, “No, you couldn’t grow potatoes in that sand and dust out yonder.” He waved his hand. “But we’ve got about a four-acre vegetable garden where we grow all our own fresh produce. We hauled in over one hundred fifty wagon loads of topsoil from the Sangria de Cristo foothills and had it mixed in. It’s as rich a loam as you could want.”
Frank Nelson said, smiling slightly, “Brother Claude is a farmer at heart, I sometimes think. But even when we were in Africa, he could grow stuff to eat out of rock, it seemed.”
Longarm said, “Yeah, but it don’t hurt to be rich. Not many people could afford to haul in that much topsoil. It must make these potatoes worth about two dollars apiece.”
Asher Nelson said, “Deputy Long, it might surprise you to know that being rich isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.”
Frank Nelson said, “It can be tiring, knowing that you can have anything you want. After a while, there’s not much you do want.”
Claude Nelson said, “It takes a lot of the thrill out of life.”
Asher Nelson looked at Longarm and smiled faintly. He said, “This might be difficult to understand, Deputy Long. But money won’t buy everything. You have to have a lot of it before you understand that. After a time, some of the thrill is gone and you have to search for your thrills. Sometimes they get more and more difficult to find.” He smiled a little broader. “I hope you will remember what I just said.”
Longarm looked back at him. “Should I have occasion to remember that?”
