Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Harking back to the heyday of stagecoach travel, this installation, where they'd not only paused to change teams, but had gotten off to enjoy a late supper and an early breakfast with a few hours' sleep between, was as much a wayside inn as a repair shop, smithy, and livery stable, with a stock farm out back. But Longarm was still pleasantly surprised, once he'd checked in and stowed his valuables upstairs. He found they ran their downstairs dining room more in the style of the Montana gold fields to the northeast than the Mormons all about might approve. The willowy ash-blonde who presided over the dining room in a chocolate-brown dress and fresh white apron told him

they served far more Montana mining men than Mormon farmers in there of an evening. He believed her when she not only said he could have all the black coffee he wanted with his sit-down supper, but asked if he liked his coffee laced with bourbon in the high-toned Irish manner.

He said he did. He didn't want her to think him a sissy, and in any case he'd be a bit too keyed up to go to bed alone after sipping black coffee with nothing in it to steady the nerves.

After they got that settled he ordered their special of mule-deer chops and a canned vegetable of his choice as long as it was green peas or wax beans. He told her to forget the rabbit fodder, and asked whether they got their fresher grub from the locals.

She said, "Local Indians. Boss has a deal with some of that old Pocatello's Snakes. You'd be surprised how many sides of venison those Indians will swap for just a keg of firewater."

Longarm almost said he wouldn't. But it was none of his beeswax unless and until the B.I.A. or Revenue Service said so.

He didn't ask what Shoshoni might be doing this far south of their official reservation either. She'd just now told him the Indians seemed to be trading. He waited until the sort of plain gal had come back with his supper before he asked about those other whites he'd hoped to catch up with here.

She wasn't all that plain when she smiled, sort of wistfully, and assured him she'd have remembered any party of six or eight Easterners, or even Westerners, passing through. One got the impression business had been slow at that Overland stop of late. He said they'd told him much the same at the desk out front, but that sometimes riders in a hurry just paused for a bite before riding on, without bedding down in town at all. She said lots of saddle tramps passing through did that a lot, and asked him who all his pals in such a hurry might be.

He washed down some mule deer with black coffee and explained they weren't exactly pals of his. He said, "I've never laid eyes on any of 'em, far as I know. If I ever do, we're all of us headed up to Fort Hall for some sort of powwow with the same old boys you get your groceries from."

For some reason that seemed to fluster her. She spent a long time in the kitchen just to fetch a man's serviceberry pie with mousetrap cheese.

But once she did get back, with a mighty generous helping of dessert, she was smiling fit to bust and admiring the blazes out of him with her big blue eyes while she asked, in a mighty worried tone, if he might be a lawman.

He chuckled fondly and replied, "I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long out of the Denver office, ma'am. I'm sorry I never said so sooner. But to answer what they really wanted you to ask me out in the kitchen, I don't worry all that much about a friendly trading off his agency, with or without the full a approval of his agent. Friendly or hostile are the words I'm interested in, on account I've tangled with hostile Shoshoni in my time and all in all I prefer the other kind."

She gulped and said she'd only spoken in jest about firewater. So he assured her he'd assumed as much, and insisted on her naming a price for all that swell grub no matter what her boss out in the kitchen said about feeling patriotic.

So they settled on seventy-five cents, tip included, and he went out front to sit on the steps a spell, wishing he could smoke and wondering where in thunder those others might be.

When a distant bell tolled ten times Longarm knew that whereever they were, they'd have dismounted for the night by this time. So he got back up, went back inside, and ambled back for more Irish coffee with a smoke, only to find the lamps all trimmed with the chairs stacked upside

down on all the tables. So he went on up to his hired room, early as it still might be.

The willowy ash-blonde from downstairs was waiting for him, already in bed with her long, lank hair unpinned and down around her bare shoulders. She hadn't worn that dining-room outfit or anything else to bed, as far as he could tell from his own side of the cotton sheet and maroon flannel blanket she was holding over her tits. She looked sort of coy as she demurely said, "Whatever kept you down there all this time? It feels as if I've been waiting up here for hours!"