At last the man looked up. Longarm noticed how pale his eyes were. “So you be a Stranger to these parts,” White said. “Don’t know yore way about.”
“That’s right,” Longarm said.
“You be from Oklahoma.”
“Yep.”
“You be in the cattle business.”
“Yes,” Longarm said with a little irritation. He’d said all this before.
“And you want to know how to get some cattle across the border. Do that be it? But you don’t know how to go about it.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Jasper White nodded slowly, then played his eyes over Longarm. “Say you are new to these parts? Say yore name is Long?”
“Yes,” Longarm said, wondering if he’d come to the right man.
White was drinking black coffee. He nodded at Longarm’s beer. “I don’t hold with strong drink.”
Longarm, now more than a little irritated, said, “I don’t hold it any longer than I have to myself. Quicker I can drink it down, the more good it does.” To illustrate, he turned his beer mug up, drained it, and then signaled for the girl to bring him another.
White ignored the gesture. “I take it you want to get these cattle across the border without getting’ ‘em wet.”
“That would be the general idea. But I want to do it as legal as I can.”
“You mean you want papers to say you done it legal. You don’t actually want to do it legal, else you wouldn’t be huntin’ me up.”
Longarm just looked at him silently. The girl brought his beer and he took a sip, waiting for the man to go on.
White said, “Tell me, Mister Long, you are in the business of selling cattle for a profit. That about the size of it? I mean, cattle is yore stock in trade.”
“That would be about right.”
“So you don’t give cattle away. That right?”
Longarm, seeing where the man was headed, said, “Mister White, I had intended to pay you for any information you might supply me. I ain’t here looking for a handout, just the name of the right man to go to.”
“And you figger to pay a fair price fer that?”
“I do.”
White nodded toward the extra chair. “Sit yourself down and let’s see what we can work out.”
Longarm took the back of the light wooden chair, spun it, and sat down astraddle. He said, “I take it you would know.”
White nodded again. “I reckon we better understand one another, Mister Long. You do be talking about keepin’ them cattle dry and moving them right along without no bothersome delays here at the border. That be right?”
“It would.”
White seemed to think a moment. Finally he heaved a sigh and said, sounding almost sorrowful, “Well, that information is worth exactly forty dollars. You got forty dollars, Mister Long?”
Longarm reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his roll, flashing enough of it to inform White that he was pretty well heeled, but not enough to seem extravagant. He peeled off two twenty-dollar bills and laid them on the table between himself and White. “You said that would get me a name.” He stuck the roll back in his jeans.
White looked at the money and then looked up at Longarm. He said, chuckling a little, “Well, Mister Long, you seem like such a nice feller, I’m gonna go you one better. For the price of one I’m going to give you two names. One man is Jay Caster. Works for the customs people. The other is Rudy Thomas. He does the same.” As he reached for the money, White started to giggle.
His fingers never quite picked up the bills. With a swift motion Longarm whipped his revolver out of its holster and brought the barrel down forcibly onto the back of White’s hands. The blow wasn’t hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough that the man jumped and cried out. Longarm kept White’s hands pressed to the tabletop with the barrel of the revolver. White looked at him, his eyes wide and suddenly scared. Stuttering a little, he said, “Da- Da-Damn, mister! That hurts. Cain’t you take a little joke?”
Longarm kept the pressure on the man’s hands. “Yeah, if it was a joke. I got an idea one of them names is the right man. The other would be the wrong man. I don’t like paying forty dollars for the chance to guess right. But I suppose you were just teaching the greenhorn stranger a little lesson in border odds. That right?”
White suddenly jerked his hands out from under the barrel of Longarm’s gun. It scraped off a little skin, and a thin line of blood formed on the back of his hand. He looked at it sullenly. “Something like that,” he said. “Damn, you done gone and cut me.”
“You cut yourself. Now, you just figure I taught you a little lesson in how to make a stranger feel welcome. I’m still willing to do business with you, but we’re going to go outside, where I can be seen talking to you. Anything happens to me, folks are going to notice that me and you had a conversation. You savvy? In fact, me and you are going to walk down to the bridge and take a look at where they hold the cattle in quarantine. Maybe you can point out Mister Jay Caster and Mister Rudy Thomas to me and tell me if there is any difference to the pair.”
White was still looking belligerent. “You ain’t got no call for that kind of acting up. You’re on the border. I was
