Not only the rooming house, but the entire section of the unfashionable side of Cherry Creek where it stood was still asleep, Longarm decided, after he’d moved on light feet down the silent hallway and stopped to look over the street before stepping out the door. The night’s unexpected snowfall, though only an inch or less, made it easy for him to see whether anyone had been prowling around. He took a cheroot from his breast pocket and champed it in his teeth, but didn’t light it, while he studied the white surface outside.
There was only one set of tracks. They came from the house across the way, and the toes were pointed in the safe direction—for Longarm—away from the house, toward Cherry Creek. Just the same, he stopped on the narrow porch long enough to flick his gunmetal-blue eyes into the long, slanting shadows. He didn’t really expect to see anyone, though. The kind of gunhand who’d picked the safety of darkness once for his attack would be likely to wait for the gloomy cover of hoot-owl time before making a second try.
His booted feet cut through the thin, soft snow and crunched on the cinder pathway as Longarm walked unhurriedly to the Colfax Avenue bridge. He turned east on the avenue; ahead, the golden dome of the Colorado capitol building was just picking up the first rays of the rising sun.
George Masters’s barbershop wasn’t open yet, and Longarm needed food more than a shave. He didn’t fancy the cold free-lunch items he knew he’d find in any of the saloons close by, so he went on past the barbershop corner another block and stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall diner for hotcakes, fried eggs, ham, and coffee. He stowed away the cheroot while he ate. The longer he held off lighting it, the easier it would be for him to keep from lighting the next one.
Leaving the restaurant, twenty-five cents poorer, but with a satisfactorily full stomach, Longarm squinted at the sun. Plenty of time for a shave before reporting in at the office. He walked at ease along the avenue, which was just coming to life. The day might not be so bad in spite of the snow, he decided, feeling the warmth from his breakfast spreading through his lean, sinewy body.
He grinned at the bright sun, glowing golden in a blue, crystal sky. Deliberately, he took a match from the bundle in his pocket, flicked it into flame with his thumbnail, and lighted his cheroot.
Smelling of bay rum, his overnight stubble removed and his brown mustache now combed to the angle and spread of the horns on a Texas steer, Longarm walked into Marshal Billy Vail’s office before eight o’clock. It gave him a virtuous feeling to be the first one to show up, and even Vail’s pink-cheeked, citified clerk-stenographer wasn’t at the outside desk to challenge him. The Chief Marshal was already on the job, of course, fighting the ever-losing battle he waged with the paperwork that kept coming from Washington in a mounting flood. Vail looked pointedly at the banjo clock on the wall.
“This’ll be the day the world ends,” he growled.
“What in hell happened to get you here on time, for once?”
Longarm didn’t bother answering. He was used to Vail’s bitching. He felt his chief was entitled, bound as he was now to a desk and swivel chair, going bald and getting lardy. Desk work, after an active career in the field, seemed to bring out the granny in a man, and Longarm felt that he might bitch about life, too, under the same circumstances.
Vail shoved a pile of telegraph forms across the desk. “I guess you know you raised a real shit-stink down in New Mexico. You’d better have a good story to back up your play down there. I’ve got wires here from everybody except President Hayes.”
“Chances are the word ain’t got to him, yet,” Longarm replied mildly. “Don’t be feeling disappointed. You might get one from him too, before the day’s out. You want me to tell you how it was?”
“No. In fact, I’m not sure I want a long report in the file telling exactly what happened. Think you can write one like the one you handed in after that Short Creek fracas a few years back?”
Vail was referring to a report Longarm had turned in about his handling of another political hot potato that had consumed a month of time, resulted in eight deaths, and upset a hundred square miles of Idaho Territory. The report had simply read, “Assigned to case on May 23. Completed assignment and closed case July 2.”
“Don’t see why not.” Longarm considered for a moment before he went on. “I figured things might be hottening up down around Santa Fe, at the capitol. Some gunslick tried to bushwhack me when I got off the narrow-gauge last night.”
“The hell you say.” Vail’s tone showed no surprise. “You get him?”
“Too dark. He ran before I could sight on him.”
“Well, keep your report short. I won’t have to explain things I don’t know about. Besides, I want you out of this office before that pot down there boils over clear to Washington.”
“Suits me, chief, right to a tee. There’s snow on the ground and a smell of more in the air, and you know how I feel about that damned white stuff.”
“If it’ll cheer you up any, the place you’ll be going to is just a little cooler than the hinges of hell, this time of the year.” Vail pawed through the untidy stacks of documents on his desk until he uncovered the papers he was after. “Texas is Yelling for us to give them a hand. So is the army.”
“Seems to me like they both got enough hands so they wouldn’t need to come running to us. What is wrong with the Rangers? They gone to pot these days?”
Vail bristled. As a one-time Texas Ranger, he automatically resented any hints that his old outfit wasn’t up to snuff. Huffily, he said, “The Rangers have got more sense than to bust into something that might stir up trouble in Mexico. Here’s what Bert Matthews wrote me from Austin.” He read from one of the papers he’d uncovered. “He says, ‘You see what a bind we’re in on this, Billy. If one of my boys sets foot across the border and gets crossways of Diaz’s Rurales, we’d risk starting another War with them. Whoever goes looking for Nate Webster’s got to have Federal authority back of him and can’t be tied to Texas. That’s why I’m looking to YOU to give us a hand.’”
Longarm rubbed his freshly shaved chin and nodded slowly. “I hadn’t looked at it that way. Makes sense, I suppose. What’d this Nate Webster do?”
“As far as Bert knows, he didn’t do anything except droP out of sight somewhere on the other side of the Rio Grande. So did two black troopers who deserted from the 10th Cavalry, and a captain from the same outfit who went off on his own to bring them back.”
“Wait a minute, now. That Rio Grande’s a damn long river,” Longarm Observed. “It’s going to take a while, prowling it all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. I got to have a place to start looking.”
“You have, so settle down. I wouldn’t be so apt to send you if it wasn’t that all four of them disappeared from the same place. Little town called Los Perros. Dogtown I guess that’d translate into. You ever hear of it? I sure as hell never did, but it’s been a spell since I left Texas.”
Longarm shook his head. “Name don’t ring a bell with me, either. Where’s this Los Perros place at, in general?”
“It’s to be close to where the Pecos River goes into the Rio Grande.”
“Rough country in that part,” Longarm said. “if it’s there, I reckon I can find it, though. I aim to circle around New Mexico instead of going there the straightest way. If I show my face in old Senator Abeyet’s country before the old man wears his mad off, I’d have to fight my way from Santa Fe clear to El Paso.”