Gingerly, Maidia extended her hand and took the weapon. She almost dropped it when Longarm let go of the gunbelt. “My goodness! It’s a lot heavier than I thought it would be.”
“Part of that’s the belt and cartridges. But a gun’s going to be heavy, got to be. I’ll show you a little bit about it later on. Right now, we better get some grub together before both of us starve.”
“I know there’s supposed to be some food on the pack mule,” Maidia said. “But I’m not sure what kind of food. I told you I’m not very good at camp cooking, but I’ll do What I can to help you.”
Rummaging in the packsaddle together, they found a large chunk of beef loin, a half-side of bacon, a dozen or so potatoes, and several big white onions. In small cloth bags, they discovered flour, sugar, black-eyed peas, ground coffee, salt and pepper. There were also a few cans of tomatoes and peaches, a battered frying pan, and a large tin coffeepot. A cylinder of tattered rags had at its core an unlabeled bottle. Longarm pulled the cork and sniffed.
“Whiskey,” he told Maidia. “Either keg stuff, or out of a still on one of the whiskey ranches hereabout. Might be all right, might not be fit to drink. Well take it along and find out.”
“At least we won’t go to bed hungry,” Maidia said, looking at the food they’d found. “If we can get it cooked.”
“Oh, I can fix it so it’s almost fit to eat,” Longarm assured her. “Just don’t look for anything fancy.”
“I’m so hungry I could almost eat it raw,” she replied. “But there ought to be some plates and cups.”
“I got some tin plates in my saddlebag,” he said, “but I only carry one cup. Can’t seem to make room for two. But we’ll get along all right. And there’s water enough for coffee in my canteen. I’d bet there’s a spring close by, but I don’t aim to go looking for it in the dark. We might as well start supper. While it’s cooking, I’ll spread our bedrolls and rustle up a little wood for a breakfast fire.”
Working together—peeling and slicing potatoes, cutting steaks off the piece of beef loin, fixing them on split branches Longarm cut from a sweet gum tree to broil while the potatoes were fried, passing a casual remark about the food, the amount of coffee and water that would make a drinkable brew—brought a relaxation of the tension that until then had prevailed between Longarm and Maidia Harkness. She proved herself a reasonably adept cook, well able to hold up her end of the work.
In a surprisingly short time, they had the steaks over a bed of glowing coals, with the coffeepot sitting on one side of the coals, and potatoes sizzling in the frying pan on the other side. Longarm picked up the bottle of whiskey and held it to the firelight. The liquor showed a deep reddish brown through the clear glass of the bottle. He shook it hard several times, and nodded with satisfaction when no bubbles formed at the surface of the liquid.
“Whoever made it filtered out the fusel oil,” he told Maidia. “At least that’s how it looks. But we’ll just make sure before we try tasting it.”
He pulled the cork and trickled a few drops of liquor into the palm of one hand, set the bottle down, and rubbed the whiskey into the skin of his calloused palm with his fingertips. When he inspected his palm and sniffed at it, he nodded once again.
“It might burn our gullets,” he said, “but it won’t make us sick.”
How can you tell?”
“Wasn’t any oily scum left on my hand,” he explained. “These bootleg stills on the whiskey ranches don’t always have copper worms. If they don’t, and if they don’t get the fire hot enough and keep it going steady, the liquor’ll come out full of fusel oil, and that stuff just turns your stomach inside out. This ain’t what you’d get at a good saloon, but it’s safe enough to drink.”
He took a small swallow. The liquor was still raw, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d been afraid it might be. He held the bottle out to Maidia, and she surprised him by accepting it. She poured a healthy drink into the tin cup they’d taken from Longarm’s saddlebags. Maidia could see by Longarm’s expression that he’d expected her to refuse. She smiled at him.
“I’m not a blue-nosed reformer, Marshal, even if I am a social worker. I enjoy a drink before dinner at home. There’s no reason why one won’t taste as good here in the woods.”
“I’ll take mine right out of the bottle, unless you object,” he said. “I ain’t too fond of the way corn whiskey smells when I drink it out of a cup. I’m a rye drinker, myself.”
“I don’t object, Marshal. And I like rye better than bourbon, too.”
She took a swallow of the liquor and shook her head. “Oh, my! That’s very potent!”
“Pretty strong stuff, all right.” Longarm looked critically at the steaks, and went on, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re done. I’ll go get our bedrolls and tend to the animals, if you’ll stir the potatoes to keep them from burning.”
During supper, the pair of them found a rising number of things to talk about. Longarm was appalled at Maidia’s conception of the way the Indians in the Nation lived, and the relationships between them and the whites. Like most post-Civil War Easterners, she saw the Indians of the Nation as a new kind of slave to be liberated from the white man’s yoke.
“You don’t really mean the Indians have their own police force?” she asked him at one point, when Longarm mentioned the Indian police.
“y, sure they do, with uniforms and everything. There just ain’t enough of them to cover the whole Nation, that’s all. And the Indian police don’t let sheriffs or town marshals from Texas or Arkansas or Kansas come into their territory, either.”
“But you can, because you’re a federal officer,” Maidia concluded.
“That’s right. U.S. marshals and the army, that’s all the outside lawmen allowed by the Indians into the Nation.”
“But the army keeps the Indians penned up here!” she objected.
“That ain’t quite all the army does, ma’am. Mostly, it keeps the Indian Wars from starting up again. Not against us white folks,” he said hastily, as Maidia was about to break in. “Indians have been fighting each other since way back before history began. But it’s getting to the point now where the Osages will talk to the Cherokees, and a Kiowa won’t try to kill a Cheyenne on sight. Give them a little time, and they’ll settle down like us, to a war every ten or fifteen years instead of just one war that goes on all the time.”
Maidia studied Longarm’s face for a moment, trying to decide whether he was joking or serious. Finally she said, “You really mean that, don’t you, Marshal?”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s the truth.”
“You make the Indians sound so bloodthirsty.”
“I wouldn’t call them that, Miss Harkness. They just don’t put on a lot of false fronts, the way we do.”
“But I’ve always been taught-“
Longarm interrupted her, “I know what you were taught. Most of it was wrong. You’ll see that, after you’ve been in the Nation awhile. No, ma’am, on the whole, there’s not any better people than the Indians. Or smarter, or more truthful. An Indian gives you his word, he won’t go back on it unless you go back on yours first.”
“You’re giving me new ideas, Marshal. I’ll try to remember what you’ve said.”
“You do that. But I reckon I’ve just about talked your ear off. If we’re going to get started at daybreak, we better turn in.”
Longarm busied himself with the fire, banking it for the night, to give Maidia a chance to go off into the bushes without her feeling that he was watching her. He heard her retreating footsteps and heard her returning, and quickly whirled back to the fire, bending to light a cheroot from a twig he picked up from its edge. He held the whiskey bottle out to her.
“I was just about to have my nightcap. You might as well take one, too. You’ll sleep better if you do.”