desert with sweet cream. Let me get y’all set down an’ I’ll bring you what you need from the bar.”
As they followed the waiter, Longarm said to Austin Davis, “See what I mean? They not only can produce a glass of goat’s milk, they can remember you.”
Austin Davis looked amused. “Wasn’t my face that they remembered. Was that of Abraham Lincoln.”
“What are you talking about?”
Davis sat down in the chair the waiter had pulled out for him. “That’s the face on the five-dollar bill I gave him to remember.”
“Don’t be so careless with my money,” Longarm said. “I got plans for it.”
“Your money? How you figure that?”
Longarm smiled thinly. “When this job is over, sonny boy, I’m going to send you home with nothing but lint in your pockets and a vow in your heart to never play poker with the big boys again.”
Austin Davis yawned. “In your dreams, Marshal.”
“So how does it fall out?” Longarm asked.
He was in a galvanized tub, soaking the train tiredness out of his bones in the hot water. Austin Davis was sitting on the bed, drinking whiskey out of a glass and smoking a cigarillo.
“Well, Jay Caster is the man we want. He’s the chief customs inspector for all the cattle that cross the border at Laredo. There are other custom folks there dealing in other matters, but he is the honcho on the cattle and the horses and any other kind of livestock that has to be quarantined. He’s got about four other men working for him, but only one of them is a customs officer. The rest are just Mexican hired hands that work the livestock.”
Longarm reached an arm outside the tub, and found the bottle of whiskey sitting there. He poured a measure in his glass, took a sip, and worked it around in his mouth. A tooth had been bothering him lately and he hoped to hell it wasn’t going to get serious. There were damn few things he was out-and-out scared of, but a dentist was one of them. “You reckon the rest of them are in it with him?” he asked Davis.
Davis took a puff on his cigarillo. “They’d have to be.” He blew a smoke ring. “Hell, moving a herd of cattle around ain’t like palming the ace of spades.”
“Well, how does he do it? I mean, does he just get paid off and then clear the cattle right on through without even the show of a quarantine?”
“Naw. Nothing so raw as that. He puts up a front. It ain’t a good one, but it seems to satisfy his superiors. That, by the way, is the crux of the matter. How far uphill does the water run? Caster is crooked. We ain’t going to have no trouble proving that. But he’s got a boss. In Brownsville. And that boss has got a boss. In Galveston. So just how high up the tree are the branches rotten? Boss on top of a boss, right on up to Washington, D.C., I reckon.”
Longarm took another mouthful of whiskey and soaked his tooth in it. After a moment he swallowed and said, “Why don’t we just catch one crook at a time? The whole thing kind of irritates me, anyway. Why doesn’t the damn Customs Service clean up their own messes? Hell, we got other hooligans to gather up.”
“The way I get it,” Davis said, “the cattlemen complained about them diseased herds coming through and infecting their cattle and the customs folks never gave them no relief. Claimed the herds must have been wet, illegal, though any damn fool knows you can’t get twenty miles in this country driving a herd up from the south without proper papers. But the more they complained, the more the customs folks said it couldn’t be none of their bunch doing anything wrong since they was all good boys and put a dime in the collection plate every Sunday.”
Longarm glanced over at Davis. “Reckon they’ve been laying behind the log?”
Davis nodded. “I would reckon. I would reckon they’ve been looking out for each other. Been a little back- scratching going on to my way of thinking.”
“And we got called in how?”
“Cattlemen went to their legislators and asked did they want to keep their soft jobs or get voted out next election. The senators and congressmen got right on to our outfit and that’s how come you’re taking a bath in San Antonio and I’m sitting on this here bed.”
Longarm gave a little bark of laughter. “You do have a way of cutting right to the nub of the situation, Austin. But you ain’t told me yet how this Caster fellow passes the illegal herds through without being so damn obvious about it. Does he just hand out paper giving them a clean bill of health and let them wade on across?”
Davis shook his head. “Even he couldn’t get away with that. The herds have got to come through the port of entry, as they call it, at Laredo. They got to actually cross the International Bridge there. They get a trail brand, or mark, to see them through the border country and on up toward the north where most of them are bound. To the railheads, to Oklahoma, Kansas, wherever.”
“So how does it work? I’ve seen the big corrals around the bridge. Here and down at Brownsville. I guess there’s one up at Eagle Pass also.”
Davis took another drink of whiskey. “Yeah, they get put in the holding corrals. They got a system the way they handle the situation. As you can well imagine they is one hell of a lot of cattle comes in to the quarantine stations. I mean in the thousands. What they do, when a fresh herd comes in, is slap a daub of paint on the side of each head of beef. It’s red paint for them coming in new and getting ready to be penned up for ninety days. After that, they stage the herds. The ones moving up, getting ready to go out in another thirty days, gets a daub of white paint. Then, when those cattle are free and done their time, they get slapped with a swipe of green paint. Maybe you’ve seen that on herds down here in South Texas. It wears off pretty quick, but some of it can still be seen after a time.”
Longarm scratched his chin. He’d shaved while in the bath and the razor had nicked the point of his jaw. “Yeah, I’ve seen that,” he said. “What’s that got to do with us? Looks like a good way of keeping up with the inventory.”
Davis shrugged. “There’s a lot of folks around, watching those herds. Caster can’t just run a herd in, slap it with green paint, and then run it across the bridge. Too many interested parties.”
Longarm stepped out of the bath, picked up a towel, and began drying himself. “So he’s got some sly way of going about it, is that what you’re saying?”
