But they didn't pay Longarm to deal with local killings. So he left the killing of O'Hanlon to the Denver P.D. as he toted his saddle and other possibles over to the Burlington yards late in the afternoon. They allowed him six cents a mile traveling alone. So he came out ahead if he traveled free, and that was easier to work out when a good old boy bought a beer now and again for a certain freight dispatcher he usually found a good quarter mile catty-comer from the regular ticket office off the waiting room of the Union Depot.
That was why Longarm left for Cheyenne aboard the caboose of a way freight almost an hour before the passenger train a greenhorn might have to pay his way aboard pulled out. And that was why a hard-eyed gent wearing a new hat but the same .45-55 failed to spot Longarm anywhere amid the folks boarding almost an hour after Longarm had left town.
Way freights, as their name indicated, took their own sweet time as they poked up the line, stopping along the way. So Longarm's free ride was on a siding near Fort Collins, dropping off some bob-wire and ladies' notions, when the passenger train overtook them and roared grandly by. But Longarm didn't care. He'd planned on an overnight stay in Cheyenne with a certain brunette who dwelt alone, and it was smarter to show up with a sack of gumdrops and mayhaps some flowers after supper time.
He felt he was still likely to beat those Eastern dudes to the rail junction at Ogden, west of the Divide, if the
brunette asked him to stay over for the whole weekend. If he was wrong and the party started north into Indian country without him, he'd doubtless catch up with them in a day or so along the trail, knowing a shortcut or more after scouting in the recent Shoshoni Scare.
So once again, without knowing he was doing it, Longarm escaped a swell ambush they'd set up for him in Ogden.
Trisha, the gal he knew in Cheyenne, would have deserved some of the credit, had either of them known what else she was doing for an old pal as she served him home-cooked meals and other delights in bed for a good three nights and two whole days. When he finally boarded his ride to Ogden, walking a mite funny after all that riding, Longarm had no call to suspect someone might be laying for him up ahead. His reasons for dropping off at Huntsville, a few miles east of Ogden, were less devious. After a good tedious rest aboard yet another way freight he was feeling restless, and so, needing to hire some horseflesh in any case, he toted his McClellan and such over to a livery corral within sight of the tracks to see what sort of deal he might make this far from the bright lights of Ogden, with a population as high as two thousand when the herds were in town.
The Mormons who mostly hired horseflesh to other saintly members of their sect didn't cotton to the notion of hiring Longarm any at any price until they tumbled to just who he was. Once they had, they allowed that a dollar a week a head, with no deposit, sounded about right for a gentile lawman in good with the elders of their main temple in Salt Lake. Longarm had dealt firmly but fairly with a wayward Saint or gentile outlaw out this way in the past and, to the relief of many a Mormon, he'd done so without either low-rating their somewhat unusual faith or pretending to believe every word of it. When he allowed that he'd neither smoke inside their city limits nor throw every three-for-a-nickel cheroot away, they allowed that sounded fair, as long as he didn't teach their livestock to chew tobacco or sip tea on the sly.
When he told them where he was headed they agreed he'd make the best time riding one horse and leading a lighter-packed spare. When they suggested a pair of fourteen-hand geldings, one a paint and one a roan, both with obvious cayuse bloodlines, Longarm almost said he could see they knew which end of a pony the shit fell out of. But he never did, because Mormons didn't hold with rough talk either.
He road down Twelve Mile Creek into Ogden aboard the paint and leading the roan, with no trail supplies as yet. He knew that just as it was smarter to hire livestock a ways out of town, it could be dumb to buy trail fodder and canned goods at a country store that paid extra wagon-freight charges from the nearest railroad.
He knew that whether he'd beaten those others to Ogden or vice versa, it made more sense to ask at the Land Office, where he'd been told they'd all wind up. So he naturally rode into town well clear of the railroad depot, and hence had no idea anyone could be waiting for him there with an innocent expression and a brace of Merwin Hulbert horse pistols.
When he strode into the Land Office a snippy young priss pushing pencils for the Bureau of Land Management demanded to know where in thunder he'd been all this time, as if it was any of his business, and said the dudes he'd been detailed to ride with had ridden out the day before, tired of waiting for him and mighty vexed with him as well.
So Longarm left without wasting more time in useless excuses, and stopped at the first general store he came upon to stock up on trail supplies at outrageous cost, lest anyone get more outraged at him. Then he swapped pack and riding saddles and lit out for Fort Hall the rougher but shorter way he recalled of old. So that was how come yet another dry-gulcher, lying in wait for him atop an outcrop overlooking the stage route out of Ogden with a scope-sighted Big Fifty buffalo rifle, got to wait, and wait, and then wait some more. Meanwhile, Longarm rode up the far side of the Bear River, through willows and worse, in a serious effort
to overtake the government party some-damned-where this side of total disaster.
He wasn't expecting any Indian trouble this side of Fort Hall. He knew it would be a total disaster for him if they got as far as Fort Hall without him, and Billy Vail ever found out they had.
Chapter 5
The only stretch of the Bear River Longarm cared about at the moment ran north to south into the Great Salt Lake. He'd forded to the less-settled west side of the Bear before heading upstream, though the stage and freight route north ran east of the river. For the stage and freight route snaked and stopped at countless crossings as it served the northern end of the aptly named Mormon Delta.
The Mormon Delta was more a long green ribbon running north and south along the aprons of the mountains to the east than a D-shaped patch of irrigated crop and pasture land. Starting a day or so after they'd found their Utopia in the sagebrush wasteland between the Rockies and the distant Sierra Nevadas, the Mormons had commenced to dam and ditch like gophers full of locoweed, until one day there wasn't a wasteland anymore between the foothills and a western border formed by the Bear, the Great Salt Lake, and the drier Sevier, Beaver, and such to the south. Hundred of irrigation ditches, wide and narrow, cut the Mormon Delta into a patchwork of firm to soggy fields it wasn't considered neighborly to cut across. But since a rider found few if any such obstacles on the open sage flats west of the river, Longarm could beeline, making far better time, hitting a bend of the Bear no more often than his ponies needed a water break—and that wasn't all that
often, given stock with cayuse blood in sunny but not too sunny riding weather.
He rode all day, swapping mounts every eight or ten miles, and felt tempted to cut back across the Bear by sundown, figuring he should have overtaken the others, despite their lead, by this time. But then he considered they wouldn't have any confounded lead if he hadn't been overconfident up until then. So he forged on through the gathering dusk, through stirrup-deep sage, till his ponies needed a rest whether he did or not.
He made a cold camp in the middle of a sage flat because of the infernal cheat grass.
The ponies didn't care, once he'd watered them from carefully hoarded water bags and filled their nose bags with the real oats he'd bought them back in Ogden. He tethered them to deep-rooted sage clumps and spread his bedding atop cheat, upwind to the east. The night was crisp but not really bitter, and canned beans washed down with tomato preserves didn't require a fire either. He didn't need black coffee to put himself to sleep, and it wasn't a good idea to smoke in these parts either. It wasn't just that the Book of Mormon frowned on smoking and drinking anything stronger than, say, buttermilk. The former theocracy of Deseret, now Utah Territory, had been turned into a tinderbox by the unwelcome advance of an Old World annual after it had found its true vocation as another pernicious weed of the American West.