Caster leaned back and smiled. “Tell you what, Mister Long, You follow me around the whole week yore cattle is in my pens, and you find me doing one thing even looks illegal, I’ll let you take yore cattle through for nothing.”
Longarm frowned. “Hell, Mister Caster, I ain’t interested in your business or how you do it. I done told you my concern is my cattle. But I can’t go no four dollars. I got to make some profit or they ain’t no reason for me to make the deal. I might could go two and a half, but that is my top.”
Caster shrugged. “Then you need to be somewhere else, because you’re wasting my time.”
“Well, I don’t understand that. I know my information is reliable. You’ve done it for two dollars. I know you have.”
Caster got an impatient look on his face. “Look, Long, let’s get something straight. This is my operation and I’ll run it as I please. Maybe I did let a few herds through for two dollars, but them days is over with. That old dog won’t hunt no more. If it wasn’t you sitting in that chair, it would be somebody else. I got cattlemen lined up from here to the Brazos waiting for what I got to sell. You got some idea in your head that I’m taking a risk with the law, and that gives you some kind of hold over me. Well, you’ve been invited to watch me all week and see what you can see.”
“I don’t see why you’re singling me out, Caster, to go high priced. Is it because I mentioned a risk? Well, hell, I’d like to have you explain to me how there wouldn’t be no risk when I hand you several thousand dollars. Wonder how that would set with the sheriff.”
Caster waved his hand as if driving off a pesky fly. “In the first place, Long, you ain’t gonna hand me no cash. You heard me speak of that fellow who works for me, Raoul San Diego. That’s who you pay. And, believe me, he is the last man in the world you want to shortchange. And I ain’t singling you out. I raised my prices for the same reason the farmer raises his. He can get it. If corn is in short supply corn costs more. Well, they is a hell of a demand for Mexican beef right now. I don’t know the why of it and I don’t care. But the price is four dollars a head. Take it or leave it. Like I said, there’ll be somebody else sitting in that chair, either later today or tomorrow or the next day, singing the same song. I can only run just so many cattle through a month and I intend on taking advantage of the situation while it exists. You savvy?”
Longarm took his hat off his knee and put it on his head. He sat back, rummaged around in his shirt pocket until he found another cigarillo, then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. As he was shaking out the match, he said, “Well, Caster, you’ve picked a hell of a time to tell me about your new policy. I’ve hired a man to gather a thousand head of cattle and I’d reckon he’s about near finished. What am I supposed to do with the cattle? I can’t go back on my word to the contractor. But it will cost me money to give you four thousand dollars right off the top. Hell, I ain’t right sure I have got four thousand dollars. Not after I pay the contractor.”
“Who’d you hire to gather your cattle? Deep down in the interior, I believe you said.”
“What difference does that make?”
Caster pulled at the ends of his ample mustache as if to stretch it out a little further. “I’ll tell you why. Was a man come around to me about two weeks ago. Said he was getting up a herd and had a buyer and wanted to know what my rock-bottom price was for sticking a herd through. He was bold as brass. And since you seem to have been talking to every other sonofabitch in Texas about me, I wondered if you wasn’t connected to this hombre. Reason I ask is, he is trying to cheat you.”
Longarm gave him a look. “I doubt that. I’ve known the man a good many years.”
“Man in his mid-thirties? Kind of dandified looking? Wears a soft black leather vest with silver conchos and a black, border hat?”
Longarm looked uncomfortable. “Might be. How was he trying to cheat me?”
“Like I said, he was bold as brass. I’d never seen the feller before but he claimed he’d pushed more than one herd across the border at different spots. Just like you, he was under the impression the price was two dollars a head. He said if I’d give him a half a dollar a head he’d tell you that the price was solid at three and nothing to be done about it. I’d make an extra half a dollar and he’d make the same. Sound like yore man?”
“Well, I’m a sonofabitch,” Longarm said softly, “Me and that gent is gonna have a little talk.” He looked angry, but secretly he was pleased. To Caster, it made both of them look like crooks, and Caster, being a crook, would feel comfortable with his own kind. “He give you a name?”
“Davis, I think. Yeah. Davis. Don’t remember much else, but he said he was gathering a thousand head for some greenhorn from Oklahoma.”
Longarm looked up. “Called me a greenhorn, did he?”
Caster laughed. “Yeah. Beginning to look like you are one, too. He’s gathering cattle you can’t get to market. But after the way he come at me with his proposition, I wouldn’t feel all that bad about just leaving the cattle with him and seeing how he liked it.”
Longarm looked grim. “Well, I ain’t been proved a greenhorn just yet. I got an idea or two. Might be I can handle that four dollars a head after all. A thought has come to mind.”
“Yeah?” Caster raised his eyebrows. “One minute it will break you and the next you can see yore way clear. Ain’t even going to offer me three and see if I’ll take that?”
“I would if I thought you was so disposed, but I don’t.”
Caster smiled wryly. “Sounds like you’re beginning to catch on.”
Longarm let a pause build up and then he said, “In fact I’ll give five.”
Caster stared at him, unblinking. Finally he said, “What?”
“I said I’d give five dollars a head. But I got a condition.”
“Well, if that condition is you run them across the bridge and keep on going, you can damn well forget it because that ain’t going to be. You and me and your cattle are going to spend a week in my pens.”
“That ain’t the condition.”
“Then, pray tell, what is?”
