Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Longarm was content to leave his recent purchases lashed to his packsaddle in their tack room. All his really expensive possibles were stored with his McClellan saddle under lock and key up in his hired room. His badge, identification, six-gun, money, and smokes he carried with him as usual, where it wouldn't matter whether anyone else had a passkey or not. But old Angus seemed certain there was a Mormon plot to steal every packet of salt and all the waterproof matches Longarm had advised his boss lady to buy. So he had those stable hands hopping as Longarm, already finished and getting tired of watching, got his McClellan and Winchester down from his own room and saddled the paint to do some scouting.

As he was leading it around to the front, afoot, that pesky Shoshoni Sam was standing there, smoking a two-bit claro. Longarm said, "Nice stock you got in there, if that was your matched bays and dapple gray I just admired a couple of stalls down from this scrub paint."

The showy showman cocked a bushy white brow at Longarm's mount to reply, "Oh, I wouldn't call the poor brute a scrub. I'd say it was more a barb and Irish hunter cross with at least one cayuse grandsire. Princess Tupombi would be a better judge of such stock. You can hardly beat a Comanche when it comes to judging horseflesh, you know."

Longarm dryly answered, 'They do say that's the nation as first stole Spanish horseflesh way back when. Your tame Comanche looks a tad Irish too, come to study on it."

He forked himself aboard the paint before he added, "Now that we seem to have that settled, I got to get on down the road to see if I'll be wanting the hire of a room upstairs after the three o'clock check-out time they've posted on the inside of my door."

Shoshoni Sam said he didn't follow his drift. So Longarm hung around just long enough to say, "Back down the road a few hours' ride each way, while there's time. If I don't see any sign of the slowpokes I've been waiting on by noon or a tad later, I'll assume I'll still need that room tonight. Because even if they show up later this afternoon, at the rate they've been creeping, they'll surely want to bed down here for the night. This is about the last chance any of us will have for table meals and a lie-down under a real roof this side of Fort Hall."

Shoshoni Sam asked what sort of accommodations they might expect once they all got up to Fort Hall. Longarm said, "Not as fancy," and rode out. It would have taken too long to relate the history of Fort Hall to a buckskin-clad greenhorn, and in any case they'd all find out for themselves farther along.

So Longarm was inspired to chuckle and began to throw back his head and sing, at an easy trot..,

Farther along, we'll know more about it.

Farther along, we'll understand why.

Cheer up, my brother.

Walk in the sunshine.

We'll understand it all, by and by.

Two young Mormon gals, hanging up washing in their railed-in yard, giggled and joined him in the next chorus without looking his way as he rode by. He knew they likely figured he was a Saint as well. There were times, over here in the delta, he almost wished he was. Both of them were pretty as pictures, and while they'd just started frowning on it at the Salt Lake Temple, a Saint could marry up with

as many pretty gals as he felt up to supporting out in the Mormon countryside, where spoilsports weren't as likely to ruin the chances of Utah Territory becoming a full state of the Union.

He soon found himself singing alone again in the open country south of the modest settlement. For the first three miles, or about as far from his own doorstep as your average farmer wanted even his barley, the dirt road ran sunbaked between open fields and winding irrigation ditches. Irrigation had to accommodate to the lay of the land this close to the Wasatch Range to the east. But the stock pastures and open range further south offered more cover to anyone lurking within rifle range of the road. So Longarm heeled his mount to a thoughtful lope that might make him a tougher target even as it got him by each rocky outcrop or thick clump of new-growth timber sooner.

That was one of the worries left over from the first flush of pioneering. Once the country around a settlement had been scalped for timber and firewood, lots of second-growth weed trees tended to reclaim the parts nobody was using at the moment with thickets of stickerbrush and trashwood better for hiding in than anything else.

Second growth was good for birds, rabbits, and even deer, which inspired country folks who still hunted for the pot to cut back less of the barely useful shit. They'd left lots of aspen, he saw, with a few round autumn leaves still fluttering like gold coins in the least breeze, as if to keep anyone passing from spotting more sinister movement amid their closely packed trunks of greenish gray.