by Tabor Evans
“How about a cup of coffee, a steak, potatoes, and whatever else you can cram on a plate?”
“Sure, darlin’!” She leaned over the table so that her massive breasts were straining at the neckline and almost in Longarm’s face. “And I’ll bet a man like you wants his meat hot, juicy, and pink.”
“I like my steak medium-rare and I like mashed potatoes with lots of gravy,” he replied.
“What kind of dessert do you hunger for, mister?”
“What kind have you got?”
“I got pies, cakes, and sweet-tasting me!” She poured him a cup of steaming coffee.
This remark caused the entire café to erupt in laughter. Longarm was embarrassed and angry. He scowled and looked around at the other patrons. “Maybe you boys better wipe those grins off your faces before I teach you some manners.”
“You gonna do that all by your lonesome, stranger?”
Longarm turned to a big man with a busted nose and lantern jaw and replied, “That’s right.”
“Stranger, I think you’re all talk.”
Longarm picked up his hot coffee and hurled it right into the man’s ugly face, causing him to let out a howl of pain. Before the man could clear his eyes, Longarm hit him with a straight right cross that sent him flying out of his chair. The man tried to get up, but when he saw Longarm’s expression, he gave up that poor idea.
“Anybody else think I’m all talk?” Longarm challenged.
No one moved and no one was laughing anymore. Satisfied, Longarm sat down and placed his napkin in his shirt. “Okay, Dolly, snap to it! I’m hungry!”
“Yes, sir!” she said, no longer having fun. “I’ll put the meat right on the fire.”
“Good. But before you do that, pour me another cup of coffee. I seem to have spilled the first one.” Longarm lit a cigar and smoked in silence as he watched the man he’d punched being helped to the door. Once he and his friends were gone, it wasn’t long before conversation returned to the café and things were back to normal.
Fifteen minutes later, Dolly brought him a thick steak bathed in fried onions alongside potatoes and gravy. She hesitated a moment and said, “Listen, stranger, I didn’t mean to tease you so bad. But everyone in Buffalo Falls knows I like to have a little fun and don’t mean nothin’. Not really. And I apologize for any offense I caused you.”
“If this steak is as good as it looks, all is forgiven.”
Dolly smiled and wiped up a little spilled coffee. Leaning close, she said in a low, soft voice, “But mister, you are a handsome sonofabitch, and if you ain’t married or anything, you’d really like my special dessert served in a special place.”
Again, he took a measure of the Dolly’s big tits, and then he couldn’t help but give her a slight smile. “Don’t tempt me. I’ve come here with Addie Hudson.”
“Oh,” Dolly said, not hiding her disappointment. “And next you’ll tell me that you and she get hitched.”
“No. I’m just . . . a friend of hers.”
“I’ll bet you are. Well, if you need another friend, you keep me in mind. All right?”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Longarm cut into his steak and took a bite. It was delicious and when he looked up, there were those huge tits staring him in the face again.
“You like them?” she asked with a sexy grin.
“Yeah, I sure do,” he answered. “And the steak isn’t bad either.”
Dolly beamed and went to serve her other customers.
Longarm was one of the last customers to finish, and he waited until Dolly was starting to clean up behind the counter before he got up from his table and went over to speak to her in a low voice that couldn’t be overheard. “Could I have a few minutes?” he asked.
She wasn’t expecting that and was pleased. “Why, sure! But it’ll take more than just a few minutes if you’re wanting what I’m wanting.”
“All I want this evening is information.”
She blinked. “What?”
Longarm decided that maybe Dolly wasn’t a good person to confide in yet, so he said, “I’ll be back another time.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
She was confused, and it showed by her expression. “Well, don’t wait too long, handsome. I’ve got plenty of choices around here.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said, paying his tab and tipping her generously before he left.
Longarm figured that by tomorrow everyone in Buffalo Falls would somehow know that he was a federal marshal sent from Denver. That being the case, he needed to circulate in the saloons tonight where whiskey and beer loosened tongues and clouded judgment.
So he headed over to the nearest saloon, called the Big Buck, and went inside. He was hoping that he wouldn’t see either Wade Stoneman or Casey, but he immediately saw that Casey was sitting at a table playing poker. It was impossible to miss the white streak in the man’s beard and Addie’s description was very complete.
Longarm went to the bar and ordered a beer. “Looks like there’s a pretty good poker game going on over there,” he said.
“Yeah. Casey is winning tonight, so there won’t be any bodies to bury come morning.”
Longarm pretended to be shocked. “Which one is he?”
“The fella with all the chips as well as an even bigger chip on his shoulder. Stranger, you don’t want to get into that game.”
“Probably not,” Longarm said. “I’m just here for a drink and maybe a little friendly conversation.”
“You’re new to Buffalo Falls?”
“I am. Thinking about buying a ranch.”
“Think twice,” the bartender whispered. “And when you learn a little more about things in this neck of the woods, you’ll want to move on.”
“Is that right?”
The bartender looked around and pretended to wipe a spill. “Don’t tell anyone I said that, but this isn’t the healthiest place in Wyoming these days. And if I wasn’t part owner of this saloon, I’d be long gone.”
“Why?”
“I can’t say any more,” the bartender whispered as a couple of cowboys entered the saloon and called for whiskey. “But just keep your wallet out of sight and your ears wide open. You’ll find out what’s up soon enough.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Longarm said, turning his full attention to Casey and the game of poker that he meant to join just as soon as a chair emptied.
A man could tell a lot about another man playing poker against him. He could tell if he was a bluffer or a foolish risk taker. If he was overly confident or reckless. Casey didn’t look overconfident or reckless and from the way he wore his gun, he looked like a gunfighter to Longarm.
Why Addie’s father had ever hired him in the first place was the biggest mystery of all, and one that Longarm intended to solve before this night was over.
Chapter 11
“Damn you, Casey, you’re dealin’ from the bottom of the deck again!” one of the poker players at the table shouted as he came to his feet and made a stab for his gun.
What happened next took less than a second. While the man was making his play, Casey’s right hand appeared with a bowie knife whose huge blade was a silver blur as it slashed the loser’s neck wide open, almost decapitating him. Blood burst like a fountain from the man’s throat to spray across the poker table, chips, and cards a moment before he fell with his head barely attached to his shoulders.
The killing was so swift, brutal, and shocking that no one in the saloon moved or even took a breath. The dead man flopped around on the sawdust floor for a moment or two, and then was still.
Longarm watched Casey wipe his blade clean on another man’s sleeve and then say as casually as if he were commenting on the weather, “He was wrong about me dealin’ from the bottom of the deck. Did anybody else at this table see me cheating?”
The three surviving players were pale as ghosts and they couldn’t shake their heads hard or fast enough.
“Of course you didn�
��t,” Casey said with a smile. “Bartender, come get this carrion out of here!”
“Yes sir, Marshal Casey!”
It was Longarm’s turn to be shocked. Casey was the town’s new marshal?
Longarm had been thinking about getting into the card game and somehow trying to provoke Casey or maybe even befriending him. Anything that would get the man to open up or reveal his true self. But now that wasn’t going to be necessary. By his swift, brutal knife work, Casey had shown his true nature, and it was that of a cold-blooded killer with lightning-fast hands.
Longarm laid some money on the bar’s top and went outside to clear his head. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen men decapitated or nearly so before, because he had during the Civil War. Yet the cool and casual way that Casey had acted told Longarm that the man was totally without conscience. And how had he suddenly become the town’s marshal? How could that be possible?
“Wade Stoneman,” Longarm said, answering his own question. “Being the mayor of this town, he’d simply have recommended Casey for the job and that would have been more than enough to get him hired.”
Longarm checked the time on his railroad pocket watch, the one whose chain was attached to a hideout derringer. It was almost ten o’clock, and it would take him about an hour to get back to the Lazy H Ranch, where Addie was waiting.
“I’ll have another beer at a different saloon,” he said aloud. “I need to find out what I can before I call it a night.”
The Red Garter Saloon was smaller, but friendlier than the Big Buck Saloon, where Longarm had just seen town Marshal Casey slash a man’s throat. There was a piano player plinking out a tune on the east wall, and Longarm judged most of the customers to be town folks.
“What’ll you have, stranger?” the bartender asked.
“A whiskey.”
“You got it.”
Longarm saw that there were no card games going on and that most of the men here were just drinking and talking among themselves. Some of them gave him a thorough appraisal when they didn’t think he was noticing, and most of them seemed like solid citizens and businessmen. The only one he recognized was young Rollie Reed, the saddle maker.
Reed nodded to Longarm and started to come over and join him, but Longarm shook his head slightly. Taking the sign, Reed veered off and began talking to someone else as if he hadn’t even seen Longarm.
“How is the cattle business around here?” Longarm asked, sidling over to a bowlegged man in his late sixties wearing spurs and a soiled vest. The man was too old and bent to be a working cowboy, and Longarm pegged him for a small-time cattle rancher.
“You askin’ me?”
“That’s right. My name is Long.”
The cattleman was a lot shorter, but stocky and weathered by years in the saddle and the sun. “My name is Jed Dodson,” the man said, extending a hand so rough and calloused it felt like rawhide. “And you are well named being as tall as you are. Why, you’re as long as a grizzly’s guts.”
“My whole family was tall.”
“Mine was short, like me. Why, my pa was so short he couldn’t see over the top of a swaybacked burro, and my mother, bless her departed soul, she wasn’t ankle-high to a June bug.”
“Well,” Longarm said, chuckling, “tall or short . . . it doesn’t matter that much. It’s what’s on the inside of a man that counts.”
“Amen to that! My folks were short but, Lord, were they hard workers. Both of ’em always kept as busy as one-armed monkeys at a flea farm.”
Longarm burst out laughing. “Mister, you’ve got a colorful way of putting things.”
“Well, anyone in Buffalo Falls will tell you that I talk way too much and think way too little. But I’m no braggart, and I’ll readily admit that most of my life I’ve known times harder than a banker’s heart.”
“I’m in town looking for a ranch to buy,” Longarm said, deciding that this man could shoot the breeze for hours and tell him nothing useful. “Or maybe just a business.”
Dodson studied Longarm for a moment and then said, “Mister, either you’re a cow man or you ain’t. You can’t just be on the fence about ranchin’, Mr. Long. Remember that the fella that straddles the fence doesn’t get nothin’ but sore balls. Have you owned a ranch before?”
Longarm knew better than to lie because, if he did, Dodson would start talking cattle, prices, and grass and it would soon become apparent to the man that Longarmdidn’t know much at all about cattle ranching. So instead of lying, Longarm said, “Well, no. I just always thought it would be good way to live.”
“Shee-it!” Dodson snorted, chuckling to himself. “Going into the cattle business is like droppin’ your pants and tellin’ the world to have their way with your asshole.”
Longarm took a sip of his whiskey, deciding that he had probably picked the wrong man to talk to. When he looked over at Rollie Reed, the saddle maker was watching and trying not to burst into laughter.
“So,” Longarm said, “ranching is that bad, huh?”
“Yep. I’ve been ranchin’ for forty years and I’m still poorer than a toothless coyote. Why, during the worst of last winter, my cattle got so thin I had to wrap them in cowhide to keep ’em from fallin’ apart. I could have made more money driving a stagecoach or workin’ for the railroad. Any damn thing would have been more profitable.”
“If you feel that way about ranching, then why don’t you sell out and try something new?”
“’Cause I’m a cattleman and I am too dumb and too stubborn to quit.” He smiled and finished his whiskey. “And besides that, I am way too mean and contrary to work for another yappy old sonofabitch like myself.”
Dodson began to clear his throat.
“Are you all right?” Longarm asked with concern.
“Just real thirsty, I guess.”
Longarm knew he’d been had. “In that case, old-timer, I’d better buy you a fresh drink.”
“That’d be mighty neighborly of you. But I’ll have to warn you that I won’t buy you one back. People around here will tell you that I’m so stingy, I’d skin a flea for its hide and tallow.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jed. Just drink up and tell me about Buffalo Falls.”
Jed Dodson seemed more than happy to do that. “What you want to know?”
“I heard that it’s a nice town.”
“Used to be,” Dodson said, his smile dying. “Before a certain someone arrived.”
“That right?”
Dodson studied Longarm a moment, then lowered his voice and said, “Why don’t you bring a bottle over to that far table where we can talk in private.”
Longarm decided that this might be time well spent after all. “Sure thing.”
He paid for a bottle and made sure that he got the cork, because he’d take most of it back to the Lazy H tonight.
“You say you heard this is a fine town, huh?” Dodson asked at the table.
“That’s what I’d heard,” Longarm told the man.
“Well, if I was you, I’d keep lookin’ for another town,” Dodson told him in a low voice as he helped himself to Longarm’s bottle. “’Cause you see, this town is cursed right now by a man named Wade Stoneman. Mayor Wade Stoneman. Him and his hired guns are going to own everything hereabouts lock, stock, and barrel. They’re halfway to doin’ it right now and any ranch you could buy wouldn’t be worth spit, or Stoneman would already either own it or want to own it and both are the same thing.”
“Does he want your ranch, Jed?”
“Damn right he does! And right now I’m feeling about as helpless as a cow in quicksand. But I’m stubborn like I told you and I’m hanging on and hopin’ that someone will kill Stoneman and his men will just go away.”
“What about the marshal of Buffalo Falls?” Longarm asked, fishing for information. “Can’t he help you?”
“Marshal Casey and Mayor Wade Stoneman get along like two shoats in a pigpen! Why, they’re thicker’n feathers in a pillow!”
“I see.�
��
“No,” Dodson said, “I doubt that you do. But you will if you’re dumb enough not to take my advice and light out of this town first thing in the morning.”
Longarm watched Dodson toss down another shot and then he refilled the glass for the rancher. “Listen, Jed. Are you sober?”
“Sober enough.”
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Hell, yes!”
Longarm lowered his voice so that they could not possibly be overheard. “Well, I’m a United States marshal and I was sent here from Denver to put a noose around Wade Stoneman’s neck, and it looks like Marshal Casey is also going to dance on a rope.”
Dodson’s jaw sagged. “You’re a federal marshal?”
“Shhh! Not so loud. People are going to find out about me soon enough, but I’m here tonight to try to learn as much as I can about Stoneman and Casey.”
“What do you want to know? The mayor is so crooked he has to screw on his socks.”
“Mr. Hudson, who owns the Lazy H Ranch, is dead. Addie and I found him shot behind his house.”
Jed Dodson had been about to say something, but now he clamped his mouth shut and just stared into nothing-ness with tears filling his eyes. Finally, he choked out, “Hank and I was friends for a lot of years. He was one of the best men I ever knew and there was many a time we helped one another out. We was close enough that we wouldn’t even have minded usin’ the same toothpick.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”
“Me, too,” Dodson said with a sad shake of his head and a sleeve across his leaking eyes. Then his jaw clenched and he slammed a fist down on the table hard enough to make the bottle dance. “You just tell me who you think punched Hank’s ticket and I’ll fill the bastard with so many bullet holes he wouldn’t even float in brine!”
“I don’t know who killed him,” Longarm said, not wanting this hot-blooded old cattleman to go off the deep end and get himself killed.
“Did Casey take all the slack out of Hank’s rope!”
“I don’t know. Maybe, but maybe not.”
Dodson started to climb unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll bet it was that sonofabitchin’ Marshal Casey! I’ll find him and kill him right now!”
