Longarm took his time about answering, first taking a slow look around the place. At this hour he was the only customer there.
It’s funny, he reflected, how different a saloon looks at night when it’s busy as opposed to the morning hours when harsh daylight points out all the peeling paint and unsightly scuff marks.
There is even a different smell to a saloon at such times. At night the smell is a lively, active thing—tobacco smoke, sweat, beer, and good times—while in the day a saloon smells empty and stale. By morning’s light all the scent has leeched out of the spilled whiskey and beer, leaving behind only a weary stink like a dim memory of past pleasures. Helluva difference, Longarm thought as he leaned one elbow on the bar, standing sideways so that he could keep an eye on the big empty room. Just in case.
“Was there something …?” The bartender sounded a mite uncertain.
Longarm brought his thoughts back to the moment and gave the man a nod and a reassuring smile. “Sorry, friend. I was wool-gatherin’.”
The bartender’s smile looked to be just the least little bit relieved. After all, he didn’t know Longarm—this tall stranger’s intentions—any more than Longarm knew him.
“I’d like a beer,” Longarm said. “And d’you have any good cigars? I favor cheroots if you have them.”
“The beer I can do, but the only cigars I have are these rum crooks.” He reached beneath the counter and brought a wooden box into view. It was a cigar box, all right, but the dark, rum-soaked things that were tumbled into the box hadn’t been packed there by any factory. Or whatever the hell you call a place where cigars are rolled. The crooks were the sort that came shipped in kegs. Cheap. “Three for a nickel,” the bartender confirmed.
“I’ll have the beer then and a nickel’s worth of those”—Longarm grinned—“good cigars.”
The bartender chuckled and drew the beer. He let Longarm select his own handful of sticky, tacky crooks. The grade of tobacco used in such smokes was so bad, so bitter, that the cigars had to be soaked in a syrup of rum and molasses in an attempt to sweeten the flavor and mask the bite of the truly awful tobacco leaf.
Longarm laid a coin on the bar, pocketed his change, and carried mug and stogies alike to a table at the side of the big room. He paused for a moment to look things over, then judiciously moved the table a few feet deeper into the front corner of the building. He took one of the chairs and turned it so the back was close to the side wall, pulled the chair a few inches forward to give himself room to comfortably rock backward, then settled himself into place beside the table without once touching either beer or cigar.
The bartender gave him a quizzical look. And then as quickly looked away as if trying to convince the gentleman that, no, he hadn’t been staring. He sure hadn’t been.
Longarm didn’t give a shit if the man stared at him or not. Before this day was out he figured there would be stares aplenty.
“What are you doing here, mister? Just what the hell do you think you are doing here?”
Longarm took his time responding, first very slowly and thoroughly looking over the clientele that was beginning to drift in for a quick drink over the noon hour, then—as slowly and as unblinking as a lizard in the desert heat—bringing his eyes to bear on the saloon keeper. Longarm’s eyes bored into the man like the blank, gaping tubes of a double-barrel shotgun taking careful aim. “I’m having a beer, of course. And a smoke.” His voice was as slow and deliberate as his stare.
“Jesus God, mister, you been here two, three hours now and you haven’t touched that beer yet. Or any of them cigars. What is it with you?”
“Work on it, Terry. It’ll come to you.”
“But …”
“Even to a man as stupid as you if you work on it.”
There were several patrons close enough to overhear—for sure Longarm wasn’t making any attempt to keep his voice down—and those who did began to pay attention to the conversation that was taking place nearby. They nudged the elbows of their neighbors, and so on down the line until nearly the entire lunch crowd was doing its silent best to eavesdrop on this unexpected confrontation.
“Listen, you sonuvabitch, you get out of here. Right now. You hear me? Out.”
Longarm’s expression never changed. Nor did the unblinking focus of his stare.
Cletus Terry licked his lips and glanced nervously about. He was beginning to sense that this thing—whatever the hell it was—was going beyond his ability to understand, much less to control. And he seemed to sense as well that he was no longer alone with this man, that all the men in the place were listening and watching too.
“Look, uh, if it’s about last night, mister, I, uh, I apologize. All right? I was out of line. I admit that, okay? But there wasn’t no harm done. Right?”
Longarm didn’t answer. And didn’t look away. He continued to sit there, hands folded across his belly and chair tipped lazily against the wall, and look bold and cold into Clete Terry’s nervously skittish eyes.
Anyone looking on was welcome to notice, if he wished, that the position of Longarm’s chair prevented anyone from coming up behind him. And that the casual placement of his arms kept his gun hand within two or three inches of the butt of the .44 Colt revolver that lay in a cross-draw rig on his belly.
“So what the hell do you want here anyway?” Clete Terry demanded, loudly this time as his anger—and possibly some nibbling intuition of fear as well—began to germinate and grow.
Longarm said nothing. He only sat. And silently, coldly stared.
“All right, dammit. I don’t care. You’re done. You hear me? You’re done. Get out. Get out right now.” Terry grabbed up the full but by now warm and flat beer, slopping much of it onto the table. With his other hand he grabbed up the rum crooks, looked at them as if wondering how the hell they’d gotten into his grip, and slammed them down onto the table again hard enough to break them and scatter lumpy bits of blackened tobacco into the previously spilled beer. “Get out, I tell you. Get out.”
Longarm said nothing. He simply watched.
Over at the bar the patrons began to speak among themselves. But in whispers now and with frequent glances in Longarm’s direction.
Going behind the bar Clete Terry, his face red and puffy with fury, hissed instructions to his daytime bartender, then stormed away into the back-room depths of the building.
Longarm sat calmly where he was, chair pushed back and hands folded on his stomach. He didn’t so much as look in the direction of the spilled beer and shattered cigars on the table. He simply … sat. And watched. And waited.
Chapter 21
Longarm watched the pair of plug-uglies slink toward him like a pair of rattlesnakes sidling up to a packrat. The difference, of course, was that he wasn’t a packrat. And these boys didn’t have quite the fangs that they thought they did.
“You boys get it worked out what Terry’s to pay you if you get rid o’ me?” he said in greeting.
“We don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”
“I’ll tell you a truth, friend. The man that don’t know what he’s talking about here is your friend Clete Terry. An’ don’t bother denyin’ what we all know. I seen you over there whispering to him a minute ago. So did everybody else in the bar. The only real question now is whether his offer is good enough to be worth dyin’ over.”
The thick-shouldered coal miner on the right gave his pal a worried glance.
“What’s the matter?” Longarm asked. “Terry never mentioned the possibility o’ dyin’? He should’ve.”
“We just …”
“You just was told to throw some muscle around an’ move me out o’ here, right?”