“Now you can go to hell, Mister Davis.” Longarm started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” Davis said, putting up his hand. “You never said if you’d figured out how Caster gets one herd through in a week’s time. After coding them with that paint. Paint looks mighty permanent to me. How does he get red paint to turn to green?”
“I never even tried to find out. I told you all I’d been doing. How he does it is a question we can ask him once we got him in jail.”
“Oh? You mean I’m going to get to see him behind bars?”
Longarm gave him a sour look and stepped out into the hall, pulling the door to behind him. Davis had said that he’d taken some guff off of Caster and hadn’t liked it. Well, so had he. He hadn’t mentioned it because there’d been other things to say, but he was going to take some personal satisfaction in putting the spurs to the smart-mouthed Caster. Saying he was an officer of the law. Yeah, he was an officer of the law all right, an outlaw officer.
Jay Caster was wearing sleeve garters. He was seated behind his desk with some kind of a ledger in front of him and a nub pen in his hand. Once again Longarm took a seat unbidden. Caster looked at him silently for a long time, slowly chewing his plug of tobacco. Finally he leaned over and spit in the bucket by his desk, hitched up his sleeves so as to protect his cuffs from the ink on the pages of the ledger, and then went back to his work, all the while not saying a word to Longarm.
Longarm crossed his legs and put his hat on his knee, got out a cigarillo and lit it. His tooth was starting to ache again, though very mildly. He put that down to the upset Austin Davis had caused him. He looked at Caster. The man was wearing a white shirt with a stiff collar and a foulard tie. A gray suit coat was hung over the back of his chair. Longarm figured he had business later that day. Maybe James Mull was coming in to ask after matters. That seemed doubtful, but one thing Longarm didn’t doubt: he wasn’t going to sit there all day and watch Jay Caster scribble figures in a book. He cleared his throat. Caster didn’t look up. “Uh, Mister Caster,” Longarm began, “I reckon you ought to know that I-“
Without glancing up, Caster said, “Hold it, will you? This is important and I got to get it right.”
Longarm subsided, but it put him on slow boil. He sat there smoking and watching Caster. He could bide his time. Hell, if he had to, he could wait on this sonofabitch a week, a month, six months if he had to. But, in the end, Jay Caster would be doing something else besides making marks in a ledger.
Finally Caster put his pen down and, after carefully blotting his last entry, closed the ledger. He sat back in his chair, raised his arms over his head, and stretched and yawned. Then he put his arms down, reached in his desk drawer, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. A glass followed and Caster poured himself out a drink. He made no move to offer one to Longarm. He corked the bottle, put it back in the drawer, then lifted the glass and drank off half of it. After that he belched and put a wooden toothpick in his mouth. Finally he looked at Longarm. “Whata you want, Long?”
Your hide nailed to the barn door, Longarm wanted to tell him. Instead he fiddled with his hat for a moment, then said, “I reckoned to let you know that the money I wired for has come in.”
“You got it with you?”
Longarm pulled his head back. “Walk around with five thousand dollars in this town? Not very damn likely. No, it’s at the bank. Besides, I thought I wasn’t supposed to give you the money.”
“You ain’t. What about yore cattle?”
“Them too. My cattle gatherer come in just after noon. He’s holding the herd in Mexico, down by the river.”
“How many?”
“A thousand head, give or take a dozen. Won’t know until we count them into your pens.”
“You ain’t paid him yet?”
Longarm shook his head. “I ain’t likely to pay him until I see what I got. Would you?”
Caster ignored the question. “You brace him about that proposition he made to me?”
“About raising the price and him taking a piece of the money?”
“Him cheating you. Yeah. You ask him about that?”
“Mister Caster, I don’t know how you do business, but I’ve found it’s a good idea to keep matters friendly until you get what you want. Right now he’s still got the cattle. Besides, what you told me didn’t come as no surprise. I told you I knowed the man before. I wouldn’t be the first one he’s tried to cheat and I won’t be the last.”
“You seem to take it pretty well. You scairt of the man?”
Longarm frowned. “I don’t look at it like that. It’s business. I’ve said I’m not a gunhand, and I’m not. I don’t know whether he is or not. Frankly I don’t intend to find out. Now, tell me how you want to do it about the cattle and the money. Can we bring the cattle over in the morning?”
Caster looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Yep. I reckon you can. I’ll send a man across to Mexico to meet yore contractor and clear the way to bring the cattle over the bridge.”
“What about the money? You want it the same time? I want to get shut of it as quick as I can once I pull it out of the bank.”
Caster showed his brown-stained teeth. “My, my,” he said. “Ain’t you the jumpy one. You must be scairt of yore own shadow.”
Longarm stared at him and didn’t say anything. He did think, however, that Jay Caster was nearly as big a fool as he’d ever met. He certainly had a fool’s mouth.
“Don’t worry about the money,” the customs man said. “When I’ve got yore cattle in my pens we’ll make arrangements about the money. Now go on and get out of here. I’ve got serious work to do.”
Longarm stood up slowly, trying to keep it fixed in his mind that he was a cattle buyer making a crooked deal and worrying about it. “Excuse me,” he said, “but what about Mister Mull? Is he going to be there when the money changes hands?”
