Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

He did. Zion was a small but thriving Mormon settlement a tad off the map of Utah Territory. Mormons were like that. They had this calling to make the desert blossom as the rose, and put whole towns in the last places any other white folks might pick. So he'd even met up with Mormons south of the border, raising a bodacious crop of kids and com in the Sonora Desert.

The ones around Zion seemed more interested in wheat, unless that was barley stubble in the harvested fields he saw all around as he rode in by moonrise. The country was too high for profitable com crops. Gentile homesteaders might have held it was too bumpy for any field crops at all. But coming from West-by-God-Virginia, Longarm knew a family could scratch a bushel here and another yonder, as long as they used hand tools instead of a plow where they had a time standing upright without hanging on to something.

Since coming West after the war, Longarm had decided it made a heap more sense grazing stock in country this high and dry. But of course the Latter-day Saints would recmit new converts from such outlandish parts as the British Isles, and most of their elders had started out as Eastern farm boys to begin with.

He saw some beef grazing closer to town as he rode toward the soft, shimmering lamplights ahead. The contented-looking beef were shorter of hom and whiter of face than one saw grazing out on open range in these parts.

But the stockmen around Zion seemed to raise beef on their own irrigated grass, inside bob-wire, so it was likely safe for a short-homed steer to gorge itself so fat if it wasn't likely to stand off any range wolves on its own.

There were still folks up and about as Longarm rode into what they were starting to call the seat of Zion County in the Territory of Idaho, a recent part of the once-enormous Oregon. Longarm knew better than to ask directions to the nearest saloon in a Mormon settlement. But when he asked a kid in bib overalls for directions to the best place to meet other strangers in town, the kid told him to try the stage stop, where they stayed open to all hours and even served coffee, as long as it was only to outsiders just passing through.

Longarm thanked the Mormon kid and rode on without wasting time on livery matters. He knew any place that catered to the stagecoach trade would surely be willing and able to water, fodder, and stall a couple of extra ponies.

He found his way by the lantern lights from the windows of the private homes all about. There wasn't much of a business district for the number of families that lived bee-swarmed together the way farm folks dwelt back in the old countries across the big water. It made a lot of sense in Indian country. White outlaws were even more likely to hit isolated spreads, now that the Indian wars had commenced to wind down. The Mormon folks behind those lamplit lace curtains all around were doubtless more secure and likely felt a lot less edgy late at night with the winds making funny noises in the hills all around.

Somewhere someone had baked an apple pie, and like many another traveling man, Longarm had always felt most wistful about his own lone riding when riding by a lamplit window just around bedtime while sort of wondering who might be going to bed with whom inside.

It didn't really help to tell himself he'd never be really happy settled down in Mormon long underwear with any gal who wore the same to bed and wouldn't even let him

smoke afterwards. It didn't help, if it was true or not, to consider that most gals willing to serve a man coffee and climb into bed with him bare-ass were sort of plain to begin with, and inclined to nag after the first few weeks no matter what they looked like. He was starting to feel homy again, and a stranger could get in trouble with the kith and kin of any small-town gal of any persuasion.

He cheered up a mite when he spied the more imposing sprawl of the layover stop Overland had built in such an out-of-the-way spot. The Overland Line had fallen on hard times since they'd had to compete with the Iron Horse. But in its day they'd had the only means to move mail, freight, or passengers between Salt Lake City and the Montana gold fields. So they'd been well able to build adequately, and since they still carried plenty of light freight and impatient mining men across what was still a shortcut, they made enough to maintain the layout there in Zion.

But Overland didn't do so much business these days that they'd be too proud to overnight a pair of strange ponies. After Longarm had negotiated that, he discovered they'd be willing to water, fodder, and overnight him at a modest price as well. A layover built when the Overland stages had run every day, both ways, was in no position to turn travelers away from its door now that the Concords only came through half empty no more than thrice a week.