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."

The clerk shrugged and said, "they've wired Santa Fe. Wires to the north have already been cut. But at least they won't butcher the folks aboard that morning coach, and the one coming down from that railroad stop at Chama won't even start, seeing the wire's down in Apacheria."

As Longarm turned to stride out front, the clerk added in an oddly cheerful tone, "The army's got all its spares chasing old Victorio along the border right now. They ain't about to detach even a squadron to chase Jicarilla horse thieves. We have to lose us some hair up this way before the soldiers in blue show up."

Longarm was afraid he agreed. He headed for the Western Union on the corner anyway. Billy Vail had sent him on a wild-goose chase. There were no outlaws holed up in the canyons of that mesa. Not alive, at any rate. But meanwhile, some Jicarilla kids were fixing to get their whole nation in a whole heap of trouble if somebody didn't do something about it before white blood was spilled!

Knowing there was no way to wire BIA headquarters in his official capacity without giving his true ident.i.ty away, Longarm strode into the combined tobacco stand and telegraph office to send a wire east via the line to Santa Fe. But the older gent who sold cigars more often than he sent wires anywhere, morosely informed Longarm he was solely in the tobacco business that morning.

"Apache," he laconically observed, figuring n.o.body but a tenderfoot needed more explanation than that when Western Union shut down for repairs in Apacheria. n.o.body had ever had to explain electricity to any hostiles. All they'd had to hear was that the blue sleeves got word somehow along those singing wires stretched from pole to lonely pole, far from the gaze of any cavalry patrol.

With the wires down in all directions, Longarm felt no pressing need to identify himself as he stocked up on some cheroots instead.

As he stepped out on the walk, pausing to light one of the cheroots, the man in black called Wesley Jones caught up with him. "Where have you been? They just told me you weren't in your room and I've been looking high and low for you."

Longarm finished lighting his cheroot and shook out the match before he said, "You found me here instead because I was running low on tobacco.

What did you want with me, Wes?"

Jones said, "It's Queen Kirby who'd like another word with you. I was asking where you might have been earlier this morning when she first sent me to fetch you."

Longarm blew smoke in the rude questioner's face and calmly told him, "Where I might or might not have been is my own beeswax. When did Miss Queen adopt me as her wayward child? I can't come up with any other reason I'd have to report to her for roll call. Can you?"

Jones said, "I can. You can't ride on to that job up Chama way with Apache on the warpath. Meanwhile she's got as good if not a better job for a man who's not afraid to use a gun on short notice."

Longarm didn't want to seem too anxious. On the other hand, he sure wanted to know why Queen Kirby was recruiting a private army of hired guns. So he shrugged and said, "I'll hear her out. I ain't saying I want to work for any woman, though."

The man in black smiled thinly. "You'll find Queen Kirby as tough as most he-bosses if you cross her. Now that it's over, I can tell you just how close you came last night to finding out how tough she can get.

How come you swapped two fine Arab ponies for bay scrubs up Loma Blanca way, Crawford?"

Longarm was glad he'd picked an alias easy to remember as he answered casually, "I left in a hurry. Would you want to be riding a cream and leading a palomino right after a serious gunfight, Wes?"

The man in black led the way along the walk as he chuckled and replied, "They say you changed your shirt from green satin to rosy cotton, too.

I admire a man who thinks fast on his feet. It's a good thing you never put on a pale blue shirt or swapped those pale ponies for a buckskin or a paint."

Longarm knew exactly what he meant, but naturally pretended not to as they walked on past that saloon and around to the card house, where this morning better than a dozen ponies were tethered out front.

When they went inside, the gaming room was full of tobacco smoke and some hard-looking gents, armed to the teeth and not playing cards or shooting c.r.a.ps. When Longarm commented that it looked as if someone was fixing to go to war, Jones told him he was right.

They went into Queen Kirby's office. A hatchet-faced individual with an old army shirt, shotgun chaps, and an English Enfield .476 six-shooter was leaning against a back wall, arms folded Indian-style. Queen Kirby asked, "You ever meet up with Poison Welles before, Henry?"

Longarm stared, neither friendly nor unfriendly, at what a.s.sumed to be the stranger instead of a desert water hole, and allowed he'd never had the pleasure.

Queen Kirby said, "Fortunately for us all, Poison here knows the famous Custis Long, or Longarm, on sight."

Poison Welles nodded soberly and declared, "He ain't half as tough as they say he is in the Rocky Mountain News. I backed him down in Durango, just about this time of year, around '76 or '77. Thought he could dance with my gal just because he was a famous lawman. But when I told him to fill his fist, he just grinned like a fool and said he'd only been funning."

"I'm sorry I missed that," said Longarm, trying not to sound too sarcastic. He wasn't supposed to be as clever as Queen Kirby, and it was no skin off his nose if she didn't know the town of Durango hadn't been there in '76 or '77, since they'd built it on land the Ute had lost more recently, after that ill-advised Meeker Ma.s.sacre closer to White River. He didn't know why fabulists like Poison Welles made up such whoppers, but he was glad this one had when Queen Kirby said, "We'd already backtracked you enough to feel we were safe in calling you Henry, Henry. But having Poison here a.s.sure us you can't be who you couldn't be means I may as well lay some more cards on the table, face-up. I want you and your gun hand working for me, Henry. I'm paying a hundred a week and found, with a bonus for each and every time you really have to fire a gun. How do you like it so far?"

Longarm quietly asked, "Who might I be fixing to gun for you?"