Part 17 (1/2)

He put the cheroot back between her pouting lips as he said soothingly, ”You'd win. I thought you admired rascals, you nicely depraved little s.l.u.t. Be that as it may, everything I know for certain about Queen Kirby smells of popcorn and the tinny blare of a carnival. That might explain her appearing from nowhere with a fast line of patter and a Minnesota bankroll.”

That term was a new one on Trisha, despite her sophisticated Santa Fe background. So Longarm explained, ”Cheap flash. A Minnesota bankroll is a big bill wrapped around a lot of singles, or even newsprint cut to size. I ain't sure why tinhorns are said to do that more in Minnesota.

Heaps of greenhorns there, I reckon. But anyway, once you convince enough folks that you're rich, you can buy heaps of stuff on credit.

What you do then depends on how smart a grifter you may be. A tinhorn moves on, owing everyone in town. We call the smarter grifters millionaires, once they mortgage stuff they've bought on credit to get the front money it takes to buy more, and then more, until they don't have to leave town because they own it.”

Trisha laughed and said that sure sounded like Queen Kirby. When she asked how he meant to stop the old brawd, Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders and asked, ”Stop her from doing what? n.o.body's sworn out all that many warrants on Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, or even Bet-A-Million Gates for grifting their way to fame and fortune.”

She said it hardly seemed fair that big fibbers could get so rich by skating the thin ice just within the law.

He said, ”I only get to arrest 'em when they break through the ice. The only thing I don't understand about Queen Kirby is why she seems so worried about me. The real me instead of the drifter I told her I was, I mean. For unless she's doing something more crooked than what you just said, she'd have nothing to fear from a federal lawman.”

Trisha asked, ”What if she's up to something really down and dirty?”

To which he could only reply, ”That's what I just said.”

Chapter 14.

Trisha had to be on the job when the morning stage from Santa Fe made its breakfast stop in Camino Viejo. So she was up with the chickens, and served him black coffee and orange marmalade on fried bread, while she had him for breakfast in bed. She allowed that a gal waiting tables tended to nibble all day on the job and skipped sit-down meals if she wanted to keep her figure halfway trim.

They agreed it would hardly be discreet for them to stroll hand-in-hand from her cottage by the dawn's early light. So she left a spell ahead of him. Then he got dressed, rolled over a rear windowsill, and emerged from some crackwillow farther along the riverbank, too far for anybody nosy enough to care.

He mosied back to the hotel, saw n.o.body had been searching his room, unless they knew his trick involving a matchstick stuck in the door crack under a bottom hinge, and cleaned all three guns on the bed both to kill some time and to make it tougher for folks to kill him.

It took him some time to decide what was making him oddly uneasy as he listened to the morning sounds outside. He hadn't heard anything odd.

Birds always chirped and boots always clunked on plank walks in the morning. Then he realized it was sounds he wasn't hearing that was odd.

Trisha had said a morning stage was due in from Santa Fe. But here it was going on seven in the morning and where was it?

He moved over to the shuttered window overlooking the street and flung the jalousies wide. Things looked quiet for that hour out front. He left his Winchester by the bedstead, locked up, and wedged another matchstick under the bottom hinge before he went downstairs.

He didn't hand over his room key at the desk in the lobby. n.o.body really wanted him to while he was still staying there. It was a bother for all concerned to fumble keys in and out of pigeonholes whether a guest was sneaking someone up the stairs or not.

But he stopped there anyway to ask the gummy-eyed desk clerk what time the chambermaid usually made the beds upstairs.

The clerk yawned and asked when he was planning to leave town. When Longarm allowed he didn't know how many more days he might be there, the clerk said the maid would change the d.a.m.ned sheets at the end of the week or whenever he left for good, depending on which came first.

Longarm said, ”Don't get your bowels in an uproar, old son. I'd as soon not have anyone popping in and out of my room like a cuckoo-clock bird.

That's how come I asked.”

The clerk said sullenly that they'd never robbed a guest yet, and asked how many stagecoach strongboxes he'd hidden under the bedstead up yonder.

Longarm smiled and said, ”Only one. The coach from Santa Fe seems to be taking her time this morning.”

The clerk said, ”It ain't running this morning. Apache. Where were you when them riders tore through blazing away to raise the alarm last night?”

Longarm thought hard, nodded, and said, ”I do recall what I took for distant thunder along about three in the morning. You say it was something more exciting?”

The clerk said, ”You must have been sleeping like a log. They woke me up and I live two streets over. The way I got it, coming to work, was that the Apache raided the Chandler spread just north of town. Lucky for the Chandlers, the crew at the stage relay up the road heard the whooping and shooting and came to help. But the fool Apache shot out all the window gla.s.s, turnt over the s.h.i.+thouse, and naturally run off all Bob Chandler's riding stock.”

Longarm whistled softly and said, ”I wonder if the army knows as much as we do about all this.”