“But they don’t mix much with anybody, do they?”

  “No. They just keep to themselves.”

  Longarm chewed pensively on a corner of his mustache. “Hawkins sounds to me like a man who’s used to keeping his plans to himself, and doing what he feels like, come hell or high water. And the Russians ain’t real trusting of folks from outside, either. You know, Ruthie, I might just be here for a while. Looks like I’m going to have to do some digging to find out what I’ll need to know.”

  “Can I help? I haven’t paid much attention to the talk I hear at work, but an awful lot goes on there.”

  “Sure, you can help, if you want to. Anything you hear that fits in with what I just told you, sort of keep it in mind and pass it on to me. I’d be right obliged if you’d do that.”

  “You know I will, Longarm. You didn’t even have to ask me to.”

  “I’ll appreciate it, Ruthie. Because if I can’t find out what’s going on, I might have to open up a crack myself. And I don’t want to do that unless I have to.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand what you mean, I guess.”

  “I mean I’d have to stir things up a little bit. Maybe even a lot. And if I do that, somebody’s apt to get hurt.”

  A smile grew slowly on Ruthie’s face. She said, “I know somebody you can stir up again right now, if you feel like it. I like the way you stir, Longarm.”

  He offered the bottle of rye to Ruthie, but she shook her head. He took a swallow himself and set the bottle down, then went over to the bed. Looking down at her face, flushed now with anticipation, he asked, “Do you want to do it standing up again?”

  “Not this time. I didn’t know how long-winded you were, before. I was afraid you couldn’t hold out, but you’re long in every way that counts. Besides, from the looks of things, I’m going to have to stir you up a bit before you’ll be ready to stir me.”

  Longarm lay down by her, and Ruthie began to arouse him with her professional skills. Once, while she was massaging his growing erection against the already moist warmth of her crotch, she said, “You know, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get worked up again. But look at me! Here I am, shaking like a virgin. I can’t wait any longer to get you inside me, Longarm.”

  “Go ahead,” he told her. “It’ll go in now, and when you lean over here a little, it’ll finish coming up quick enough.”

  She straddled him then, shivering delightedly as she slid slowly with wriggling hips to take him into her, then leaned forward to let him rub his beard-rough face over her breasts. Her quivering increased as his erection grew to fill her completely, and she sighed contentedly when he rolled atop her and began to drive. She rolled her hips to meet his thrusts, and Longarm was surprised when almost immediately she started to writhe and whimper. He increased the force and speed of his strokes, but still she came long before he did. Then he could tell she stayed with him only by an effort of will until he felt her begin to pulse beneath him again, and to respond once more as she had earlier.

  “Oh, hurry, now, hurry!” she gasped. “I’m almost there again!”

  Longarm hurried, pounding hard, racing her to the end. He reached his own climax only a few seconds after the girl shuddered into hers. They lay spent and silent in a tangle of, arms and legs.

  “Now I know you’re a miracle,” she sighed wearily but happily. “Oh, God, Longarm, you don’t know what you’ve done for me. First you kept me from getting killed, and now you’ve made me feel like a woman again.” She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him pleadingly. “You won’t send me back to the saloon tonight, will you? Can I stay and sleep with you? I won’t bother you, honest.”

  “Sure you can.” Longarm rolled out of bed and blew down the lamp chimney to extinguish its flame. He rejoined her, and Ruthie cuddled into his arms. He said, “You sleep now. I need some shut-eye myself. We’ll both feel better in the morning.”

  Chapter 4

  Longarm opened his eyes, instantly alert. He’d awakened earlier when Ruthie had gotten up and quietly put on her clothes in the darkness, then slipped silently out of his room. He’d feigned sleep, then, and when she’d gone, he had gotten up only long enough to lock the door and drain his bladder into the slop jar before going back to bed and falling into a solid, relaxing sleep.

  As always, when Longarm woke, he got out of bed at once. The night’s exertions had washed away in sleep. He stepped barefoot to the dresser and drove the early-morning sourness from his mouth with a quick gulp from the half-empty bottle of rye. His face looking back at him from the mirror reminded him that the day ought to start with a shave; Longarm hoped the local barber had a steady hand. For the moment, he pushed his longhorn mustache into shape with a forefinger; it needed trimming, another job for the barber.

  He performed his morning routine with swift efficiency. Clothes on, stovepipe boots stomped firmly on his feet, he adjusted the gunbelt and holster of his Colt to his liking, then dumped the cartridges on the bed, checked the gun for action, and inspected each cartridge before replacing it in the cylinder. He inspected with equal care the little double-barreled derringer that was attached to his watch chain. Dropping the derringer into his left-hand vest pocket and the watch into its right-hand mate, he slid his arms into the sleeves of his long black coat, set his Stetson at the proper angle on his head, and went out into the morning sunshine.

  Junction looked bleak in the glare of the pitiless prairie sun, its lone street deserted. Longarm chose the barbershop first, though his stomach was calling for eggs and bacon, and above all, a cup of hot, black coffee. Food somehow seemed to taste better to him after he’d had a shave.

  * * *

  At the livery stable after he’d eaten breakfast, Longarm asked the lone attendant, “How do I find Clem Hawkins’s place?”

  “Just go out to the end of the railroad spur. There’s three or four sidings beyond the corrals. Just go on to the corrals and then ride north. There’s a cattle trail there that’ll take you right to Clem’s ranch. Can’t miss the place. That white two-story house of his sticks up like a sore thumb out on the prairie.”

  He found the cattle trail without any trouble and turned his roan gelding-onto the wide, clodded swath of partly beaten earth that led vaguely north. For the first two or three miles, there were fenced wheatfields on both sides of the trail, and in a corner or at an edge of almost all the fields a sod house or a makeshift shanty built of boards marked the home of an immigrant. With only one or two exceptions, all the fields were fenced with Glidden wire.

  When the homesteads grew farther and farther apart and the trail entered open range, Longarm studied the country as he rode. There were subtle differences between the prairies of southern Kansas and those of Texas or the Indian Nation or New Mexico, but the sun was the same. It glared from a nimbus of molten brass that shaded into an inverted bowl of light blue sky that descended on all sides to meet the shallower bowl of the yellow-tan horizon. Yellow-tan right at this time of year, he reminded himself. Come another couple or three months, snow would turn it white, and make the sky look a brighter blue than it really was. Then, in springtime, the land would be green and the sky even more washed-out-looking than it was now.

  It’s a hell of a country for women and horses, old son, Longarm told himself as he let the roan set its own pace along the clods and hoof dents that marked the cattle trail.

  Whatever the season, he knew there’d never be any shade except along the streams. Wherever water flowed, there were cottonwood trees, the old ones bigger around than a steer’s brisket, surrounded by small shoots and saplings as thick as grass. On creeks where the flow was too small or too irregular to let the cottonwoods reach any real size, willows clumped in straggly thickets. In hollows and washes where water collected and stood during snowmelt or while the fierce spring rains pelted the usually dry soil, a few bushy bois d’arc trees had rooted.

  Isolated growths of yucca thrust up their long, spiny leaves on a few humps and slopes; in the early days of summer their flowers had been creamy white, but now the flowers had browned to a few dry wisps on top of the shoots. Old-timers on the prairie harvested the yucca, and Longarm supposed the reason there were so few plants was that the new immigrants had learned that yucca—what most homesteaders called soapweed—would provide a gentler soap than that made from lye and ashes. He recalled the times when he’d had to wear underwear and shirts washed in homesteader-made soft soap, and how his armpits and crotch had chafed him until he’d take the garments off.

  Like all prairie lands Longarm had ever seen, the Kansas prairie looked at first glance to be a solid stretch of unbroken, level earth, thinly carpeted with grama grass and the stunted, stickery stems of dwarf sunflowers that grew no higher than a man’s knee. On closer inspection, though, the apparent level uniformity turned out to be illusory. There were creases and gullies that were almost invisible from a distance cutting through the soil. Some were finger-deep and whisker-wide. Some were wide enough and deep enough to be dangerous to riders; small and narrow and invisible until a horse stepped into them, but deep enough to throw animal and rider, and often snap the horse’s leg as well. A few, but only a few, could have swallowed a good-sized house; these yawned as wide as hellgates and were, in midsummer, as hot as hellfire at their bottoms. Any gully that big became a landmark, the equivalent to a crossroads sign in more settled countryside.

  As the liveryman had told Longarm it would, Clem Hawkins’s house stuck up like a sore thumb on the level prairie. He saw the place from a distance, at about the same time that he began to encounter scattered, small groups of white-faced Hereford steers. Few ranchers still bothered with the rangy, cantankerous longhorns on which the cattle industry of the West had been founded. Not just the leanness and ornery character of the longhorn had led to its decline; when the railroads came in and the great long-distance trail drives began to be abandoned, seven Herefords could be packed into the same space that the horns of five longhorn steers required in a cattle car.

  While he was still at a good distance from the big two-story house, he reined the roan to a slow walk and began to take stock of Hawkins’s layout. It was a big one. In addition to the tall main house, there was a bunkhouse, a cookshack, and a haybarn as big as the main house, though not built quite so high. There was also a scattering of working buildings; a toolshed, storage rooms, privies, and a blacksmith shop, as well as a couple of corrals. A windmill spun lazily, barely moving, on its tower beyond the house. The entire array was spread over most of a quarter-section, and made Hawkins’s ranch, like most big spreads, a virtual community unto itself.

  Old son, Longarm mused as the gelding plodded slowly toward the sprawl of structures, Clem Hawkins sure ain’t hurting for much of anything. A man as well-fixed as he looks to be is bound to figure the rest of the world belongs to him too, and that he’s got a right to run it any way he sees fit.

  There was little activity around the buildings, Longarm noted as he got closer. Smoke rose from the cookhouse and an occasional puff burst from the low building close to the corral, which he’d decided must be the blacksmith shop. Two men were working close to the corrals, and once the cookshack door opened long enough for an unseen man inside to dash a bucketful of water out onto the ground.

  Longarm reined in at the hitch rail in front of the house. He’d dismounted and was looping the roan’s reins around the rail when the door opened and a broad, stocky man came out to the veranda. He studied Longarm for a moment before asking, “Looking for a job?”

  Nope. Looking for Clem Hawkins.”

  “Well, you’ve found him. I’m Hawkins.”

  Now it was Longarm’s turn to study the man he’d heard mentioned so often since his arrival in Junction. Hawkins looked to be in his middle fifties; his bared head was balding, and what remained of his dark hair was well-shot with gray. In the style of range lords of the day, it was trimmed close. A thick, bushy mustache hid his lips, but his cheeks and chin were clean-shaven. Up to the middle of his brow, his face was deeply tanned; the upper half of his forehead was dead white where his hat cut off the sun’s rays. He wore a gray flannel shirt with the collar unbuttoned and trousers with narrow-cut legs that squeezed his fancy-stitched, high-heeled boots.

  “My name’s Custis Long, Mr. Hawkins. Deputy U.S. marshal out of Denver. I’d like to talk to you a few minutes, if you’ve got the time to spare.”

  “What’s the trouble? You on the trail of an outlaw, and figure he’s hiding out on my place? Something like that?”

  “Nothing like that. There’s not any trouble, if you want to put it that way. What I’m here for is to see that none gets started.”

  Hawkins frowned, staring at Longarm, trying to read the meaning of his words. Then he shrugged and said, “All right. You don’t make much sense, but come on inside and I’ll listen to you.”

  Longarm followed Hawkins into the house. It was dim and cool. The window shades were drawn, and the varnished wood floor of the main room was bare except for a few Indian blankets tossed here and there as rugs. The furniture was massive: big armchairs, a great oak rolltop desk along one wall, a long table behind a leather-upholstered divan. A gun rack on the wall beside the door held rifles and shotguns. A pair of gunbelts, each carrying a holstered revolver, hung from the bottom of the rack.

  Hawkins indicated a chair and, without waiting for Longarm to sit down, dropped into a deep, wide-armed chair that showed signs of plentiful use. He said brusquely, “Cut your palaver as short as you can, Long. We’re in the middle of the fall gather and I’ve put on a bunch of extra hands. I was just leaving to go out and keep an eye on them, fill in the gaps that my foreman and segundo can’t cover when we got such a big crew to handle.”

  “How many head you figure to handle in the gather?”

  “About eight thousand. Might go as high as nine, by the time the hands finish working out to the edges of my spread.”

  Longarm said thoughtfully, “You’ll be shipping right on three thousand, then, I’d guess?”

  Hawkins nodded. “Something like that. Sounds like you know a little bit about ranching.”

  “Not much. Only what I’ve picked up while I was handling cases in cattle-raising country. I do know enough to figure but that you’d need a lot of range to carry a herd that size, forty or fifty sections. The way the grass looks to me, you’d need two, maybe three acres a head to winter a six-thousand herd.”

  “That’s close to being right,” Hawkins agreed.

  “And to handle a gather,” Longarm continued, “you’d’ve had to put on maybe fifteen extra hands, give or take a man. That right, Mr. Hawkins?”

  “Not that it’s any business of yours or the federal government’s, if you’re asking an official question, but I took on fourteen to see me through the gather and the shipping. Why?”

  “Oh, I’m just curious. Making conversation, you might say. You ship out from Junction, I guess?”

  “Now that’s a damn fool question, Long. Of course I ship out from Junction. It took me three years to convince the Santa Fe that with me and the other ranchers around here shipping twice a year, a spur up here from Dodge would pay.” Hawkins snorted. “Then, as soon as the damn spur was built, the railroad played us a dirty trick by loading up the country with a bunch of foreign nesters.”

  “You’ll be shipping in maybe a month, I’d say?”

  “Unless a spell of bad weather hits and slows us up. The rancher was getting impatient. “Look here, Long, what’s a U.S. marshal doing here, nosing into my affairs? You say you’re not after a fugitive or an outlaw. Just what in hell are you after?”

  “I’m a mite curious about those extra hands you took on, Mr. Hawkins. How many do you hire regular?”

  “Sixteen, give or take a drifter who’ll stick around for a month or so and move on. Now listen here, I don’t mind answering any legitimate questions you’ve got, but all this is a waste of time. Get to the point. I’ve got work waiting for me.”

  “No need to get a chip on your shoulder, Mr. Hawkins,” Longarm said mildly. “I’ve got a reason for what I’m asking.”

  “Tell me what it is, then.”

  “Sure. The Justice Department back in Washington doesn’t want to see any funny business going on when election day rolls around. I guess you know what I mean. Stuffed ballot boxes, repeaters, toughs keeping legitimate voters away from the polls.”

  “Things like that only happen in big cities, Long. Places where there’re a lot of votes, where the rings control thousands of voters. You don’t expect me to believe that the people in Washington are worried about a little place like this corner of Kansas.”

  “Just happens they are, though,” the tall deputy said.

  “Why, in God’s name? There’s not a thousand votes between Wichita and Fort Dodge. Besides, it’s the state’s job to look after the polls on election day.”

  “You’re right all down the line, Mr. Hawkins—up to a point.”

  “Where’s the point, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “Might say there’s two points. First off, this is a federal election year, a big one. President, senators, congressmen. And I’m told it’ll be close. Even a thousand votes could make a difference in the way the state electors vote on who’s going to be president.”

  Hawkins rubbed his chin thoughtfully. After a moment he said, “Damned if I thought this little place could be all that important. I’m still not convinced it is, Long. Why’d you get sent here? Seems to me you’d do more good in the big cities, Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita, where the votes run up into the thousands.”