to smoke a mite as he lounged with one elbow in the saddle. He didn't light up just yet. He had a long ride ahead with a limited quantity of tobacco. He fished some of the carbon copies old Henry at the office had let him have on the little anyone really knew about those Wyoming wildwomen. He'd read through the lot of them already. But he read through them some more as long as he had the time and no draft was fluttering the onionskin paper. By the time the train started up with a plaintive whistle and a rude jerk, he'd decided once again that Billy Vail was sending him on a snipe hunt. He found it tough to believe local, county, and territorial lawmen were party to some fiendish female secret society's evil plot to take over the West. The trouble with vast conspiracies by government officials was that nobody in charge of a whole government needed to behave so sneaky. Men in positions of power had no more call to hide the fact they were running things than a cattle baron or mining magnate had to deny he was rich. El Presidente Diaz down Mexico didn't need to plot against the folk he ruled. He just told them to jump, and if they didn't ask how high, he sent his rurales to shove 'em up against a handy wall and shoot them.
Of course, he told himself, Uncle John Chisum had tried to pretend he had no hand in the series of back shootings remembered as the Lincoln County War. But he hadn't fooled anybody and, greedy as the Santa Fe Ring had been, they hadn't asked New Mexico lawmen to deny a thing was going on down yonder. Lawmen could be bought. It happened all the time. But it cost serious money, and nobody did it without some serious reasons of their own in mind.
'Cherchez la motif!' Longarm tried for, wondering if he had that right from the little French he'd studied in bed with a Metis he sure remembered fondly. He knew that whether he'd pronounced that right or not, neither he nor any other poor but honest lawman was going to be able to come to grips with little more than a slippery bait- can of disturbing womanly whims. To catch anybody really up to no good, he had to decide what in blue thunder they were up to!
Cheyenne lay a hundred miles north of Denver by crow. It took a few extra miles of bends in the railroad right of way as the tracks wound around the higher swells of the rolling prairie in the rain shadow of the Front Range. A low-balling empty rattler naturally took way longer than a passenger varnish or even a highballing freight. But Longarm wasn't upset when they pulled off the main line near Fort Collins to let a more serious train thunder past. He knew that poky or not, he'd get to Cheyenne around noon. That would give him plenty of time for the courtesy call Billy Vail expected him to make at the Cheyenne federal building and still catch the shortline combination up to the North Platte Country. So he was just lounging there on the hay, smoking a cheroot as he leaned against his saddle, gazing out the open doorway at nothing much but rolling grass, when all of a sudden this dirty-faced kid wearing raggedy boy's jeans and long blond pigtails rolled over the sill to almost land on top of him, just as the train was starting up again.
As she hovered above Longarm on her hands and knees, the dirty-faced but sort of pretty kid gasped, 'Oh, I thought this car would be empty!'
To which Longarm could only reply, 'It ain't. Where might you be headed in such a hurry, sis?'
She gulped and stammered, 'Keller's Crossing on the high plains of Wyoming Territory. Please don't hurt me, mister. I'll fuck you if I have to. But you don't have to hurt me to have your way with me, and I purely wish you wouldn't!'
CHAPTER 5
Her name was Daisy Gunn and she claimed to be seventeen. It was tougher to judge such matters when a gal was wearing mannish duds too big for her. By the time they'd established this much, Longarm had broken out a can of pork and beans and opened it with his pocketknife. From the way the barefoot waif wolfed down his trail grub, he surmised she hadn't been eating regular of late. He opened a can of tomato preserves for her to wash down the beans and cut the greasy aftertaste of the same before he took to questioning her serious.
So they were rolling along at a merry clip, with the one opening to the shady side, as he heard her sad but hardly unfamiliar story. There was something about the sound of a railroad whistle in the night to inspire young folk stuck with a heap of chores on a hardscrabble homestead to try their luck hopping freight trains to far places. She said, so far, she'd seen eleven states and been raped fourteen times by 'bos and bulls she'd found herself traveling with. She shyly confessed she'd been scared skinny by the sheer size of Longarm when she'd suddenly found herself in his company with the car already in motion. She said she'd saved her virtue one time by rolling off a moving train and decided never to do anything that painful again. For she was getting used to getting raped, while an ass-over- tea-kettle roll down a railroad bank could tear up a gal and her duds considerable.
Longarm lit a fresh cheroot without offering her one, seeing she seemed a mite young for such bad habits, and told her, 'This rattler won't take neither of us any farther than the Cheyenne yards. You'll need to grab a ride aboard a feeder line out of Cheyenne and you'll likely have to ride the rods because they hardly ever send empties on to any such spur heads. You were going to tell me how come you're headed for Keller's Crossing via boxcar, weren't you?'
Daisy said, 'Another girl in Pueblo told me women have the same rights as men up Wyoming way and that this girls' club is running the whole show in that township. Everywhere else I go, looking for work or just a place to flop, some mean old man takes advantage of me, and I'm getting mighty sick and tired of being slapped around and raped by mean old men.'
Longarm allowed he'd heard they had gals voting and holding public office up Wyoming way. Then he casually asked if she recalled the name of that other gal who'd told her of such wonders.
It didn't work. Daisy shrugged and said, 'I don't recall if she said we should call her Babs or Belle when they were holding us all in that jail. Her pimp came to bail her out around three in the morning. I wound up getting thirty days for vag, making mattress covers and getting passed back and forth by two older lizzy gals. I reckon I'd still be there if this dirty old man hadn't come by to pick out a prisoner of his choosing. He said he'd paid my fine and so I'd have to pay him off in trade, three ways for three dollars. If you ask me, he only bribed one of the turnkeys because my thirty days were almost up, and I don't think it was fair that I had to spend almost a week in a stuffy loft with that dirty old man before he'd let me go.'
Longarm made a mental note that Wyoming might not be the only place some peace officers seemed to be abusing their authority. But since you could only eat an apple one bite at a time he told her, 'I might have another business proposition for you, Miss Daisy, seeing we're both headed the same way.'
She sat up, cross-legged, to smile down uncertainly at his relaxed form as she replied, 'Well, all right. You ain't bad looking, and I've learned to sort of like it when a man ain't cruel or ugly.'
He smiled dryly up at her to declare, 'That wasn't the proposition I had in mind, no offense. For you to understand just what I want, I'm going to have to tell you more about myself and my reasons for going on up to the same country you're headed for.'
He left out a lot, of course, as he explained he was a federal lawman investigating the very situation that seemed to have inspired her own enthusiasm for such a feminist utopia.
He said, 'You have my word I ain't looking to get any innocent ladies in trouble, Miss Daisy. We've had what we call conflicting reports in my line of work. You'll doubtless be pleased to learn that some other federal lawmen have reported favorsome on a cattle country community where women hold much the same political powers as their menfolk.'
She nodded and said, 'That's what I heard in that holding pen. As soon as I get there I mean to search for work, and dast any dirty old man declare I have to fuck him first, I mean to have the law on him!'
Longarm said that sounded reasonable as he tried to decide how he wanted to word his own job offer. Heaps of ladies he admired had a cunt hair crosswise over this womens'-suffering bullshit, and a man had to watch his step lest he put a foot in his mouth whilst saying word one on the subject.
Longarm considered himself fair-minded, and he'd often told the sweet little things it was no skin off his nose if women got the same pay for the same work, got to vote, the same as any male drunk, or got on top in bed, if that was their pleasure. But the gals who took this suffering bullshit serious could be proddy about it as a Holy Roller asked to comment on Professor Darwin, and you had to keep assuring all concerned you weren't in league with the forces of evil, even whilst you were trying to agree with them.
He was about to make mention of her unshod and unkempt state when their casual view of rolling range to the east was largely blocked by the Black Swede, swinging down from the rolling car's roof like a big blonde ape.
The brake bull handled himself well aboard a moving train. After gracefully running nearly the length of the rattler along the catwalks up above, he kipped his considerable bulk in through the open doorway to land astride Longarm's stretched-out boots as he grinned down at the two of them like a shit-eating dog to growl, 'Well, well,
