A man on foot was an unusual sight in cattle country. So country critters tended to act mighty surprised as Longarm trudged on with his Winchester cradled over one forearm, the sun now warmer and the wagon trace dustier than he’d noticed from that saddle.
Small gray grasshoppers with butterfly wings kept popping from the dust ahead of him to buzz like prairie rattlers as they landed a few yards on and waited for him to catch up so they could repeat the process. He flushed more than one jackrabbit from the long grass to either side of the trace, and they lit out and kept going, seeing as he was packing a rifle. He knew any Western schoolkid could tell you jackrabbits only ran about as far as you could throw a ‘dobe if you weren’t packing a gun.
Redwings cussed him from the telegraph wires overhead as he passed weathered pole after pole, at longer intervals than he recalled on horseback. Most of the cows grazing hither and yon in the distance were content to just stop grazing and stare pensively as he passed by. But one frisky yearling lowered its long horns, stuck its tail up, and mock-charged until Longarm got tired of waving his hat and stomping a boot. He let it get close enough to smack across the muzzle with his Winchester muzzle, and when it ran off bawling, he dusted its behind with a shot aimed low to make sure it remembered a man on foot was still a man. Livestock had to be taught their place when they started acting sassy, and some schoolkid cutting across the prairie on foot might not have a rifle next time.
He suspected the sound of his gunshot had carried when he topped the long gentle grade to see that anyone out in the yard of the low soddy ahead had surely ducked inside. But a dozen ponies were regarding him with interest over the sun-silvered rails of the big corral out back.
As he strode down the shorter and steeper slope beyond the crest, the door of the soddy opened a crack and a yellow dog poured out to charge uphill at him, barking and snapping like a rabid coyote with turpentine under its tail.
Longarm didn’t shoot it. Knowing he could any time he really had to put a confidence in his walk, and maybe his smell, that a full-grown yard dog who’d been kicked a few times recognized. So it stopped in the wagon trace a stone’s throw away, but remembered its sworn duties as a yard dog enough to bristle and growl just awful.
Longarm kept the same pace, saying, “Howdy, dog. If you bite me you will never bite another soul. If you treat me right I’ll treat you right. Like the Indian chief said, I have spoken.”
Despite his blunt words, the tone they were said in soothed the snarling dog considerably. So it stopped snarling, and just moved back to keep the same distance between them, wagging its tail uncertainly. Longarm kept talking to it in the same tone as he proceeded toward the unwelcoming soddy, knowing the dog didn’t understand how it was being cussed as long as the tone was firm but gentle.
Anyone who worked livestock learned to talk like that unless he enjoyed getting kicked, gored, or bitten. Few hands who’d ever gentled a bedded herd at night with a chorus of “Lorena” or “Aura Lee” understood why those vaudeville folks with white buckskin chaps sang such wild and woolly “cowboy songs.” For it would only take one serious whoop to start a stampede on a stormy night, and nobody sang to cows as they were whooping them up a loading chute.
He got within pistol-fighting range of the soddy, with the dog now trotting at his side, before the door opened a crack, a shotgun muzzle was poked out from inside, and a worried female voice called out, “Go away! My momma ain’t here and I ain’t allowed to talk to any strangers when my momma ain’t here!”
He’d been told Rose Cassidy had a full-grown daughter. But he’d have taken her for a kid of, say, six or eight if she hadn’t opened wider to peer out at him from the height of, say, five feet two.
He stopped where he was, Winchester aimed at the dust between them, and called back, “I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Maureen. But I only want to see what you look like, and if you ain’t the lady I’m looking for, we’ll say no more about it until your mother gets back.”
Maureen Cassidy, if that was her, demanded in a suspicious little-gal voice, “Are you looking to peek at my titties and play with my ring dang doo, mister? Momma says that now that I’m a woman grown I have to make sure no boys peek at my titties or play with my ring dang do!”
“Your momma’s advice makes a heap of sense,” Longarm replied in a soothing tone, now that he saw he was dealing with either a feebleminded gal or a good actress. He said, “I don’t want to see your private parts, Miss Maureen. Just let me see your face. I hear tell you got a pretty face. Is that the truth?”
The door opened wider. She wasn’t Miss Medusa Le Mat. She was a mighty pretty gal of twenty or more, with the mind of a slow child.
The confused yard dog ducked into the soddy through the partly open door as its mistress stood there barefoot in a flour-sack shift, her wavy black hair unbound and down around her shoulders as she stared like a blue-eyed owl and said, “Don’t you go talking sweet to me now. Momma says that once you let a boy talk sweet to you, there’s just no saying what he’ll want to do next. Have you been messing with that other lady you’re looking for, mister?”
Longarm truthfully replied, “She was the one who acted wicked the last time we met. You say your mother’s off somewhere, Miss Maureen?”
The simpleminded beauty nodded soberly and said, “Trading horses, I reckon. She told me she would be coming back from Florence as soon as she sold some buckers to a Wild West show. Nobody wants to buy a bucker to rope calves, you know.”
Longarm soberly agreed he’d heard as much, and asked when Maureen expected her mother back.
The dim but pretty little thing replied, “I don’t know. Sometimes she comes right back, and sometimes she can be gone so long I start to cry. It’s lonesome out here with just the stock and old Rex. Would you like to stay here with me until Momma comes home, mister?”
Longarm started to say he’d better come back later. Then he had a better notion, and allowed he might stay long enough for some coffee if she had any to spare.
So the next thing he knew he was seated at a table in the kitchen cum dining-and-sitting room of the two-room soddy, sipping a tin cup of fair coffee and enjoying a stale sponge cake as well while Maureen and her yellow dog wagged their tails at him.
He hadn’t wormed his way inside to see how friendly he might be able to get with a cur dog and a half-wit. He’d wanted to make sure she was telling the truth.
It was beginning to look that way, since he could see into the smaller bedchamber, where two bedsteads against opposite sod walls bespoke no more than two souls sleeping there regularly. But there was one jarring note
