ever since the stagecoach driver told him about it some hours earlier. By this point hunger and anticipation had merged so that he was salivating as soon as the place was in sight.
“Twenty-five minutes to eat,” the driver, Quentin Cooper, called loudly enough for all to hear. “Twenty-five minutes and then we roll on, with you or without you.”
“Dammit, Quint, it’ll take me that long just to load my plate. I’m that hungry,” Longarm complained. “That’s fine by me, Custis. Stay an’ eat as long as y’ like. You can always take the next upbound coach tomorra.”
“You’re a solicitous old son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Did you just say something bad about me there, son?”
“What? You mean when I called you a son of a bitch?”
“God, no, Custis. Everybody calls me that. And mostly they’re right. What I meant was that other word you used. What was it ag’in?”
“Solicitous?”
“That’s the one. Is that something bad?”
“Not really.”
“Well, all right then.” Cooper chuckled and set the hand brake on the big Studebaker. “I thought for a minute there I was gonna have to whup you.” Down below the other passengers were already piling out of the coach and racing each other for the privilege of reaching the dinner tables first.
“Good thing for both of us it won’t be necessary,” Longarm allowed. “Need any help with the team?”
“Naw. Thanks, but naw. There’s a boy around here someplace to lend a hand. You go on inside before the others clean the place out an’ there isn’t anything left for you.”
Longarm didn’t offer a second time. He hit the ground in one leap, and the door to the relay station in about three more. Lordy, but he hadn’t been this hungry since Methuselah was a pup.
Quick as he was, though, he’d been handicapped by having to make his start from atop the coach while everyone else was near to ground level. All they’d had to do was pile out and commence running. By the time Longarm got inside he was at the ass end of a line of folks waiting to get to the table where the food was laid out. He figured ten of his twenty-five minutes would be used up just waiting for the slow-moving line to reach the chow.
More likely the first twenty minutes would be shot, he realized once the persnickety, nose-high, smoke-hating ma’am came in.
While everyone else, which is to say all the menfolk, had been running to establish the line, she’d been outside taking her own sweet time about things. Primping, preening, whatever the hell it is that highfalutin women do to prepare themselves for their adoring public.
Now, drifting in well behind everyone else, she sailed through the door … and right on to the front of the line as if that was the only possible place she could be expected to put up with.
Longarm quietly seethed while the woman took her time about things, standing there and oh-so-slowly stripping off her ivory-colored, elbow-length traveling gloves one tiny finger at a time so she could handle a plate. She was in no damned hurry, that was for sure.
He might not have minded all this so much if at least she’d presented something interesting to look at. But while he’d been traveling with her since before daybreak—well, on the same vehicle as her if not exactly down inside there with her—he had yet to get so much as a glimpse of what she looked like.
A delicate blossom, he figured. Or anyway she must have believed herself to be. She was dressed ears to toenails in an oversized duster, and wore a hat with a brim wide enough to protect a span of oxen. The hat was hung all around with a thick netting that he hoped allowed her to peer out from, for it sure as hell kept anyone else from looking in.
Until she got her gloves off he couldn’t even have sworn that she was white. Until then he hadn’t seen a hint of skin. And thanks to the loose fit of the voluminous duster, he still had no idea if she was built like a barrel or maybe just a barrel stave.
Not that he particularly gave a damn what this female creature looked like.
What he wanted was for her to get the hell done so he and all the rest of the males in the crowd could get some hot food in their bellies.
But no, not Miss Priss. She had to examine everything. Take a utensil and poke and turn at a bit of meat, even a dab of mashed potatoes. Everything had to be peered at, pored over, and thoroughly considered. Then she might, that is might, consent to place a speck of the item onto her plate. And there wasn’t anything, not any-dang-thing, bigger than would conveniently fit into the mouth of a pigeon. A young pigeon at that. When she finally was done, having already used up a significant percentage of the total time that was available to the passengers, she didn’t have enough food on her plate to satisfy the hunger of a healthy earthworm.
Longarm was disgusted. Also famished. And all the more so when he finally did reach the food line mere moments ahead of Quentin Cooper’s loud call, “Outside, everyone. Drop your forks and move your boots, everybody as wants to make the next leg north. Stage leaves in one minute. You hear? One minute an’ I don’t wait for nobody.”
Longarm believed him. Dammit. He put the plate down, picked up two slabs of crumbling bread instead, and piled them thick with whatever he could reach. Including a molehill-sized heap of mashed spuds. At least a potato sandwich would put something hot and filling into his belly.
But he still would’ve liked to throttle that damned female for holding up the line on them all.
He built a pair of open-faced sandwiches big enough that he should have hired a helper so he could carry them, then turned and loped back out to the stagecoach.
It was just coming dark when Quint snapped his whip above the twitching ears of his leaders and the big coach rocked and lurched into motion again.
Chapter 5
