“One more thing, Longarm.”
“Yes, Henry?”
“Be careful.”
“Henry. I didn’t know you cared.”
“I don’t. But it would be a nuisance having to train someone new. And you will be dealing with the army, after all. One never knows.”
Longarm laughed and winked at the clerkish little man, then ambled out the door and right on out of the Federal Building. He had a train to catch and quite a lot to do beforehand.
He didn’t see much of Julesburg. Not that there was so very much there that needed seeing to begin with, but this trip through he saw even less than usual. It was past dark when he arrived and before daybreak when he left. If the Blackelder Express Company offices hadn’t been in plain sight in the same block as Longarm’s hotel, he probably would have missed seeing the schedule board and slept through the daily pre-dawn departure. That would have cost him a full day. Although in truth Longarm was not sure just how much of a hurry he was in to reach this Camp Beloit and place himself under the command of some colonel he’d never heard of. He supposed it would be best to get this—whatever this was—over with. If he had to start it at all.
And so, yawning and hungry—the damned hotel restaurant hadn’t opened for business yet and he did not learn about that nasty little inconvenience until it was too late to go off looking for an early hours’ cafe—he presented himself in front of the express company office promptly at five o’clock in the morning.
The coach, a full-sized Studebaker with inside seating for fourteen and room for nine more on the roof, was already hitched and ready. The jehu was a lean man with gray in his mustache and brown tobacco juice in his beard. He had one off eye and a mean look in the other one. All Longarm cared about, however, was whether he could handle his rig. Everything else was superfluous.
A hey-boy took Longarm’s carpetbag and his saddle with the Winchester attached and stowed them in the big luggage boot hanging off the ass end of the Studebaker.
“Careful how you handle those, son,” Longarm cautioned when he handed his things over. “I have a telegraph key in the bag, and it doesn’t need to be bounced around.”
The truth was that the key could take pretty much anything short of a direct whack from a nine-pound sledge. Also in that bag, though, was a bottle of Maryland rye whiskey that would not be quite so durable.
“Yes, sir, glad to oblige,” the boy said. And threw Longarm’s gear in a high, looping arc that ended somewhere in the bowels of the luggage boot. Longarm winced, although he did not hear any telltale tinkle of breaking glass.
Longarm wandered forward to glance at the team. He liked what he saw there. They were a six-up, all large and sleek and nicely muscled. Their feet looked carefully trimmed and shod, and their manes and tails were tidy.
“You got somethin’ to say, mister?” the jehu challenged, his eyes narrowing slightly while he shot a stream of tobacco juice just barely wide of Longarm’s left boot toe.
“Yes, I do,” Longarm said. “Fine-looking team there. You take care of them right.”
The jehu grunted loudly. And tried to hold back the beginnings of a grin. Obviously the old boy liked being complimented.
Longarm decided to gild the lily a bit—after all, he would be more or less at this fellow’s mercies for the next four days or thereabouts—and offered the driver a cheroot.
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do. Gotta tell you, though. There won’t be no smoking inside the coach. Got a lady riding this trip. Sensitive, she is. If you wanta smoke you got to ride up top.”
Longarm surveyed the horizon to the west, the direction any weather would likely come in from. The sky remained dark, but so far as he could see it was also cloudless and not threatening. “Thanks for the advice, friend. Reckon I’ll ride there for a spell.”
“Got your ticket, mister?”
Longarm showed him the badge instead. The jehu shrugged. “It’s all the same to me. They pay me the same if I take ten passengers or twenty, so you go on up and pick out a soft seat. We pull out in four minutes sharp, an’ anybody that ain’t aboard can take it up with Toby.”
“Toby?” Longarm asked.
The driver grinned. “He’s the young pup handling the lines of the rig that leaves this same time tomorra morning. Go on now. Crawl up there or I’ll leave you standing here just like I would a paying customer. Maybe quicker.”
Longarm did as he was told and crawled right up there.
Not, however, that he could find a soft seat. There didn’t seem to be any of those available.
Chapter 4
Breakfast was a box affair … for those who’d known to bring one along, which left Longarm out.
Lunch was two cents’ worth of stale biscuits and a glass of buttermilk … for which he had to pay forty cents … served and eaten aboard a decrepit ferry as it pulled across the North Platte.
By supper time Longarm felt fairly sure that if he didn’t soon get a meal in his belly he was going to embarrass himself by keeling over in a girlish faint.
Either that or he was going to drag iron and rob the fat man riding down inside the coach. The fellow traveled with an entire hamper full of goodies, and every couple of miles Longarm would see a well-gnawed chicken bone or an apple core or the like sail out of the window on the side where the fat man was seated. It was damn well frustrating for someone who no longer could remember the feel of food in his stomach and whose only solace was to smoke a cheroot every now and then.
Solace of a more substantial nature might have been available except for the fact that Longarm’s traveling jug, that is to say his bottle of rye, was locked away somewhere in the depths of the luggage boot.
Along about sundown, though, somewhere north of the Platte and south of Chadron, they finally pulled into Moore’s Station, where they would get a change of team and a hot meal. Longarm had been looking forward to this ever since the stagecoach driver told him about it some hours earlier. By this point hunger and anticipation had merged so that he was salivating as soon as the place was in sight.
“Twenty-five minutes to eat,” the driver, Quentin Cooper, called loudly enough for all to hear. “Twenty-five minutes and then we roll on, with you or without you.”
“Dammit, Quint, it’ll take me that long just to load my plate. I’m that hungry,” Longarm complained. “That’s fine by me, Custis. Stay an’ eat as long as y’ like. You can always take the next upbound coach tomorra.”
“You’re a solicitous old son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Did you just say something bad about me there, son?”
“What? You mean when I called you a son of a bitch?”
“God, no, Custis. Everybody calls me that. And mostly they’re right. What I meant was that other word you used. What was it ag’in?”
“Solicitous?”
“That’s the one. Is that something bad?”
“Not really.”
“Well, all right then.” Cooper chuckled and set the hand brake on the big Studebaker. “I thought for a minute there I was gonna have to whup you.” Down below the other passengers were already piling out of the coach and racing each other for the privilege of reaching the dinner tables first.
“Good thing for both of us it won’t be necessary,” Longarm allowed. “Need any help with the team?”
“Naw. Thanks, but naw. There’s a boy around here someplace to lend a hand. You go on inside before the others clean the place out an’ there isn’t anything left for you.”
Longarm didn’t offer a second time. He hit the ground in one leap, and the door to the relay station in about three more. Lordy, but he hadn’t been this hungry since Methuselah was a pup.
Quick as he was, though, he’d been handicapped by having to make his start from atop the coach while everyone else was near to ground level. All they’d had to do was pile out and commence running. By the time Longarm got inside he was at the ass end of a line of folks waiting to get to the table where the food was laid out. He figured ten of his twenty-five minutes would be used up just waiting for the slow-moving line to reach the chow.