Longarm had run into more than his share of strange things over the years. He had tracked the Wendigo, the mythical beast of the Plains Indians, and tangled with murderous mechanical men. His job had put him on the trail of ghosts, grave robbers, mad magicians, and cannibal Indians. He had heard tales as well about the so-called monsters that lurked in the lonely places of the frontier. Some had their source in the stories of the Indians, like the Wendigo and the legendary Sasquatch. Texans had their own yarns, like the one about the monster of Caddo Lake, over in the piney woods of East Texas, and Longarm remembered hearing about a horrible creature that was half-man and half-goat living along the Trinity River northwest of Fort Worth. Then there was Espantosa Lake, down in South Texas, which was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Spanish conquistadores who had been thrown in by their Indian captors and dragged to their deaths by the weight of their armor.
But those tracks he had found, along with the look on Rainey’s face and the way the prisoner was acting, made Longarm feel about as downright creepy as he ever had. He would be glad when they reached Cottonwood Springs and got back among normal folks again.
The farther they traveled away from the Brazos, the better Longarm felt. Rainey calmed down a little too, and stopped twisting his head around so that he could constantly peer in fright over his shoulders. Instead he sat hunched forward in the saddle, his eyes downcast, not paying attention to much of anything. At least he was quiet and not causing any trouble, and Longarm was grateful for small favors.
When Longarm’s appetite returned, he took out one of the biscuits and used his pocketknife to cut hunks off it. He had to suck on the pieces of biscuit like they were hard candy for a while before he was able to chew them, but they were surprisingly filling. Rainey didn’t nod, shake his head, or even look up when Longarm offered him some of the biscuit. Longarm shrugged. If the outlaw wanted to go hungry, that was Rainey’s lookout. When Longarm was finished with the biscuit, he took a cheroot from his vest pocket and regarded it critically for a moment before putting it in his mouth. The cigar was a little bent from when he had fallen into that grave, but it wasn’t broken. He scratched a lucifer into life, held the flame to the tip of the cheroot, and puffed contentedly on it.
Not long after leaving the vicinity of the river, Longarm and Rainey came upon a wagon road that ran east and west. Longarm nudged the Appaloosa onto the trace and headed east, leading the chestnut with Rainey on it. A couple of miles down the trail they reached a crossroad. Wooden signs nailed to a post informed Longarm that the crossroad ran south to Fort Belknap and the town of Graham, while the northbound trail would have taken them to Cimarron Springs and Archer City. To the west, the way they had come, the main road led to Fort Griffin, and to the east, the direction they were headed, lay Cottonwood Springs. Ultimately, Longarm recalled, this road would take them to Jacksboro, Decatur, Boyd’s Mill, and Fort Worth. For the time being, however, Longarm would settle for Cottonwood Springs, where he could find a doctor to tend Rainey’s wound, then maybe lock the prisoner up in the local jail and enjoy a bath, a hot meal, and a night’s sleep in a hotel bed. Longarm sighed in anticipation at the thought.
The rest of the trip to Cottonwood Springs passed without incident. It was after the middle of the afternoon when the two riders came within sight of the settlement. The first things to be visible were the steeples of a pair of churches, one on each end of town. Knowing how folks in this part of the country felt about religion, Longarm was confident that one of the houses of worship was of the Baptist persuasion and the other was likely Methodist. It had always amazed Longarm how people could almost come to blows over whether it was best to be a dunker or a sprinkler. He subscribed to the theory contained in the old hymn “Farther Along We’ll Know More about It,” so he tended to be tolerant of other folks’ beliefs.
As Longarm and Rainey drew closer, the lawman made out more buildings. He hadn’t passed through Cottonwood Springs during his wanderings in the past few days, so he wasn’t sure how big the town was. It looked to be good-sized, which buoyed Longarm’s hopes of finding the place equipped with both a doctor and a sturdy jailhouse. “Come on, Rainey,” he said as they reached the point where the wagon road turned into the main street of the town. “Let’s get that bullet crease tended to.”
“Damn well about time,” muttered Rainey, and the outlaw’s surly response let Longarm know that Rainey was getting somewhat back to normal. The man had been silent ever since before they had crossed the Brazos.
Longarm hipped around in the saddle to look at Rainey. “You ready to talk about what you saw back there?” Longarm didn’t particularly want to bring up the subject, but his curiosity got the best of him.
Rainey shook his head, stone-faced. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I didn’t see nothing.”
Longarm reined in and frowned. “Hold on there, old son. You mean to tell me you didn’t see something that made you start screaming like a banshee?”
“I didn’t see a thing,” Rainey said stubbornly.
Longarm glowered at the outlaw. “Then why’s your voice so hoarse? I’ll tell you why—it’s from all that yelling you did.”
Rainey shook his head.
Longarm took out another cheroot and stuck it in his mouth unlit. His teeth clamped down hard on the cylinder of tobacco. If that was the way Rainey wanted to be about it, fine. What had happened back there at the Brazos didn’t have anything to do with Rainey and Lloyd trying to murder him, and it didn’t affect the mission that had brought him here, which was to apprehend the pair of outlaws. With a grimace, Longarm turned around and prodded the Appaloosa into a walk.
As he did so, he became aware that there were quite a few people on the streets of Cottonwood Springs, and most of them seemed to be staring at him and his prisoner. The looks on their faces weren’t hostile or anything, just … surprised, Longarm decided after a moment. Like they couldn’t believe a couple of strangers were riding into town, especially from the west.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any other pilgrims on the road this afternoon, Longarm realized, and he would have thought that the road to Fort Griffin would be a well-traveled route. An uneasy sensation prickled along his spine again.
There were no boardwalks in Cottonwood Springs, but several of the businesses had elevated porches built onto the front of the buildings. Longarm veered the Appaloosa toward a hotel called the Cottonwood House. As usual for a small town, several elderly men were sitting on cane-bottomed chairs on the hotel’s porch. Longarm brought the horses to a stop by the hitch rack and nodded to the loafers. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “Can one of you tell me whereabouts I might find the local law?”
The old-timers just stared at him and didn’t say anything.
Longarm swallowed his irritation and impatience. “You do have a sheriff or a marshal here in Cottonwood Springs, don’t you?”
One of the men finally said something, even though it wasn’t an answer to either of Longarm’s questions. “You come here from somewhere around the Brazos, stranger?”
“That’s right. The other side of the river, in fact.”
Two more of the old men looked at each other, and one of them said, “He crossed the Brazos.” From the tone of his voice, Longarm might just as well have hopped down to Texas from the moon.
This time Longarm couldn’t contain his reaction. He snapped, “Look, I’m a deputy United States marshal. Have you got any law around here or not?”