Longarm and the Colorado gundown

_{“No! Oh, please don’t think that, darling, please don’t. It’s me who’s being so awful, not you. But it’s true, dear. I would follow you anywhere, do anything for you. Give you money, be your slave, go back to selling my ass to keep you in the chips, anything you like. It’s true. And I don’t know a thing about you. Not really.”}

_{The crazy damn woman was carrying this kind of far in Longarm’s opinion. After all, a night of bounce and tickle was one thing. But no matter how damned good it was— and in Leah’s case it damn sure had been plenty good—a night of belly-bumping was all it’d been. And all he wanted it to be.}

_{Better, he decided, if he could get his business in Snowshoe wrapped up quick so he could be gone again before Leah got around to joining him there.}

_{“We’ll talk ’bout all that in Snowshoe,” he told her.}

_{“Promise?”}

_{“Absolutely,” he lied. He kissed her on the forehead, then left the bed and began dragging his clothes back on.}

_{By the time he was back in his own room he had all but forgotten Leah.}

_{Chapter 11}

_{“I’m real sorry, mister, but you can’t hardly get to that place from here,” the railroad clerk said apologetically.}

_{Longarm tipped his Stetson back and frowned. “But I’m sure the man in Silver Creek told me I could reach Snowshoe by way of Glory.”}

_{“What he maybe didn’t tell you, mister, is that our rail line and theirs are on completely different levels. Run close together part of the way, but they’re real different. We’ve been building down low along the bottoms. They’re bridging and boring and building high. The two lines never do come together. Don’t now and never will.”}

_{“He told me that,” Longarm persisted, “but he also said from Glory I should be able to get transportation up to the, oh, whatever the hell the name of that other railroad is, get up there to it anyway and take a train the rest of the way in to Snowshoe.”}

_{“The Bitterroot and Brightwater is the name of their line,” the clerk helpfully supplied.}

_{“Right, that was it.”}

_{“But you can’t get there from here,” the man insisted. “We don’t have any connection with them and we don’t plan one. Honestly.”}

_{“You’re talking about a rail connection,” Longarm said. The clerk gave him a blank look. “Certainly.”}

_{“But I could walk up and make a connection, couldn’t I?” “Walk? Climb would be more like it.” The man sniffed. Loudly. Walking? Climbing? On one’s own feet? In the}

_{mountains? Surely a man would have to be daft to even think of such a notion. He sniffed again.}