Longarm asked about the stable help. He wasn't surprised to learn all but one of them were Mormons who doubtless ate at home whenever the spirit moved them. He sent the manager back to bed with his Lulu and went up to his own room to gather some makings before he went back down to the main room, where the original four others had been joined by a confounded-looking breed kid in overalls. Longarm asked the kid if he was a stable hand. When the kid allowed he was and asked where Uncle Pete Robbins had run off to, Longarm smiled and decided, "You'd know better than me whether they left serious by wagon or light on ponies, old son."
The kid said he hadn't seen them leaving. A Mormon hand had been the first to notice, just a few minutes ago, when he'd stopped by the kitchen on his own way to work that morning. The breed kid said the Robbins family lived on the outskirts of town, and that he just didn't know that much about any riding or rolling stock they might have had handy at home.
So Longarm took a battered coffeepot out of the feed sack he'd brought down from his room and handed it to the young breed, saying, "If you'd like to fill this pot from the pump out back, I got some Arbuckle Brand coffee here for one and all."
Even the snooty-looking British gal brightened up as Longarm dug deeper, producing the canned goods he'd brought down as well. When she asked how much he wanted for a "tin," as she put it, Longarm told her, "Nobody gets a whole can of nothing, if we mean to make ends meet, ma'am. I got some tin plates in here somewhere, and if we share out these pork and beans, bully beef, sardines, and tomato preserves . . . What are you waiting on, boy? Don't you want no infernal coffee with your breakfast?"
The kid lit out with the pot as if he'd been stuck with a pin. The auburn-headed beauty laughed knowingly and said, "One can see you must have been an officer in your recent Civil War. My father served in the Sepoy Mutiny with the Queen's Own 79th, and do you really eat sardines mixed with corned beef for breakfast in America?"
He hunkered down to get to work with the can-opener blade of his pocket knife as he replied in as amused a tone, "Only when we can't shoot a muskrat or a yummy wolverine for breakfast, ma'am. On occasions such as this you eat what you can get, unless you'd as soon just listen to your innards growl till you can find some filet mignon with an amusing wine."
She sucked in her breath and her green eyes blazed a mite as he continued dryly. "As for your other questions, that war don't seem so recent to those of us who run off to it, young and foolish. I disremember which side I rode with, but I'm sure I was never no officer. I reckon I got used to giving orders later. I've been a trail boss in my time, and for the last six or eight years I've had to order others about as a federal lawman. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, ma'am."
She said in that case she'd be Dame Flora MacSorley of some glen and some lady-protecting society of some town in Scotland. Then she introduced a homely little sparrow gal sitting farther from the potbelly as her personal maid, and said the middle-aged gent with the muttonchop whiskers and slate-blue Tam o' Shanter hat was named Angus and was a retainer. The old coot ignored Longarm's offer to shake and said something in either Erse or English.
The other middle-aged gent, dressed more sensibly for riding in the high country, was the guide Dame Rora had hired down by Salt Lake. He was a gentile of the Hebrew persuasion called Rhinegold. When Longarm asked if he was any kin to Johnny Ringo, he chuckled and said he'd heard that other Rhinegold might be Jewish but that they'd never met and that he hoped they never would.
The kid came back with the coffeepot. Longarm told him to put it atop the infernal stove if he expected the water to boil. By the time he'd doled out a mixed dish of canned grub tasting just as good, or bad, cold, he had a better notion why Dame Flora hadn't wanted a Mormon guide leading her expedition up to this end of the Mormon Delta.
Glad to learn Longarm was a federal lawman owing no allegiance to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormans called themselves officially, the auburn-haired lady from Scotland confided she was on a mission for her society. Back in Scotland they suspected Mormon harem masters were keeping young Scotch gals as white slaves after luring them out to the Great American Desert with all sorts of big fibs.
Longarm handed out the last tin plate and rose to drop a fistful of ground coffee in the pot atop the stove as he said, "I buy Arbuckle Brand because it's meant for brewing crude along the trail, ma'am. As for Mormons keeping harems of captive white or even red gals out this way, I thought your own famous explorer, Richard Burton of British Intelligence, looked into that for Her Majesty a spell back, whilst Brother Brigham was still alive and living in dubious bliss
with those twenty-seven ladies who'd msirried up with him, willing."
Dame Flora sniffed in a high-toned way and said, "Black Dick Burton is hardly the one I'd trust to investigate dirty old men, after reading his scandalous accounts of Oriental domestic habits. And didn't that twenty-seventh wife escape from the clutches of Brigham Young?"
Longarm shook his head. "Nope. She left him plain and simple with nobody trying to stop her. Then she wrote a book that was scandalous in its own right, and went on the vaudeville stage for a few years, entertaining folks with tales of her mistreatment by a whole mess of dirty old men."
He checked the coffeepot, saw it had to simmer some more, and added, "So much for tales of Brother Brigham sending his Danites or Avenging Angels after anyone who told tales out of school. That twenty-seventh wife was on a regular vaudeville circuit, with handbills and posters distributed well ahead to let everyone know just where she'd be mean-mouthing the Mormons next. Whether they cared or not they never bothered her, and she still lectures on the tedious topic of a dead man's desire for her fair white body now and again. The public ain't as interested as it once was, now that a second generation of Mormons seem to be running Utah Territory with a tad less zeal."
Dame Flora didn't seem at all convinced, and by the time the coffee had been brewed and drunk she'd told a tale that had Longarm a tad worried as well.
Like other churches, the Latter-day Saints sent missionaries out to save the heathens in outlandish parts of the world. But maybe because they were starting from sort of an outlandish part themselves, the Great American Desert, Mormon missionaries did a lot of converting in the British Isles. There the heathens started out with the advantage of already knowing how to read The Book, and a bemused local government was more likely to send Captain Richard
Burton than a whole U.S. Cavalry column to investigate any problems.
Burton had figured he'd done enough with the publication of his City of the Saints, in which he allowed he'd found the Mormons not better nor worse than most bloody Yanks. But Dame Flora had been sent to follow up on more disturbing recent rumors about the final fates of Scotch spinster gals who'd been recruited by mail as Mormon converts and harem beauties.
When Longarm chuckled at the picture. Dame Flora sternly pointed out that she found it more pathetic than silly, since it seemed all too true most of the women involved were either too long in the tooth or simply too plain to get any Scotchman to look at them. The much better-looking Dame Flora said the new converts had been required to pay their own way over sea and land to far-off romantic Deseret, where they'd be claimed as brides by Mormon planters or ranchers too busy with their vast estates to ride into town to meet gals like everyone else did.