Longarm and the Missing Husband (10 page)

By the time the sun came up, Longarm had the animals saddled and the packs in place on the spare mule. He shook Beth out of bed, suspecting she would have stayed there half the day if he had not, and fed her a quick breakfast of jerky and canned peaches.

“Are you ready?” he inquired when the peaches were gone. If he had been alone, he would have been a half hour up the trail by now.

“Why are you in such a rush?” she demanded. “You don't even know where we are going.”

“You're right. Where we're going, I never been there. But it will be easy enough t' figure out,” he said.

“How in the world are you going to do that?”

“Your husband was here t' survey for a railroad, wasn't he? Well, I don't know if you've noticed but those are mountains up ahead. Trains can't climb mountains. They have t' have easy grades. So from here, we just go where we think a railroad line might be possible. That's the direction he likely would've gone.”

“Oh.”

Little was stirring around the agency when Longarm led them out, riding his leggy mule and leading the other. Beth was mounted on the rather sluggish horse. Better, though, for the animal to be slow than to be so spirited that it could get away from her. Longarm figured he could handle pretty much any animal that he could strap a saddle on, but he was not so sure about Bethlehem.

They passed through the Indian encampment and moved north, Longarm leading the way and choosing the easiest grade but always seeking to move higher.

They nooned in a grove of cottonwoods above a thin trickle of snowmelt from far away and high above.

“This isn't lookin' very promising,” Longarm mentioned over a cup of coffee and a piece of stick bread.

“But Hank would have come this way?”

“Likely,” he said. “There's no way you an' me can know that for certain, but I'm trying t' pick the easiest rise. That's what he would've had t' do. He was thinking about rails and trains. He had t' find easy slopes or a railroad wouldn't be possible. Which, o' course, is exactly what the railroad company needed t' know.”

Beth stood and looked around here. “This is such empty country. Beautiful but empty. I hate to think of Hank being up here by himself with no one to turn to for help if something bad happened.”

Longarm was not thinking about Hank Bacon at that moment. He was, however, thinking about Bacon's wife. Or widow.

Beth was a lovely sight anyway, and when she turned like that, it pulled the cloth of her shirt tight against her tits, emphasizing them and the slenderness of her waist, the flare of her ass, and the length of her legs.

She had found another pair of men's trousers at the White River sutler's store and by now had completely abandoned dresses in favor of more practical clothing. A shirt and trousers did not make her look like a boy, though. She was all girl and damned pretty.

Longarm's dick agreed completely with that viewpoint. Hank Bacon was—or had been—one fortunate son of a bitch.

He finished his coffee and wiped out the cup, then settled back and lit a cheroot to smoke while Beth finished her lunch.

“Ready?” he said when she began packing their cups back into the pack where they were stored.

“Yes. Let's go.”

Four hours later Longarm drew rein and stopped on a sandy shelf just short of a thicket of chokecherry.

“Why are we stopping?” Beth asked.

“We'll camp here for the night,” Longarm told her.

“So early? We still have at least two hours of daylight left.”

Longarm dismounted and began to untie the packs on the mule he had been leading all day. “We want t' follow as close as possible the way your husband would've gone, right? Well, he would've been stopping every now an' then to take his survey measurements an' whatever the hell it is that surveyors do. I figure this would've been about as far as he could go that first day out from the agency. So we'll stop here, too.”

Beth gave him a questioning look. But she dismounted. Took a few uncertain steps and bent backward, both hands pressing in the small of her back.

“Tired?” Longarm asked.

“Yes, of course. I suppose you are right. We should stop now.”

“Why don't you set up camp? If you don't mind, I think I'm gonna take a little walk before we turn in for the night. Get my legs stretched after all day in the saddle.”

“All right, but would you build the fire first? While you are doing that, I can put a pot of coffee on to boil.”

He smiled. “Fine idea, thanks.”

Longarm gathered wood and dry brush enough for a good fire, shaved a little tinder, and put a match to it. “There y' go. Mind you don't let it go out,” he said.

“I know how to tend a fire.”

“Right. Well, I'm gonna take a stroll while you handle things here.”

He moved out from the camp a little distance and looked back to make sure Beth was occupying herself at the fire. Then he lengthened his stride and moved purposefully toward a patch of crackwillow a few hundred yards ahead.

The presence of magpies and buzzards ahead was the reason he had wanted Beth to stop where they did.

Something was dead up there, and Longarm wanted to see what it was before taking Bethlehem past it.

It was a dry camp. Very tidy and nicely put together by someone who was accustomed to being in the wilderness. A small pot rested on flat stones next to the ashes of a fire. A sleeping bag—not blankets but an actual bag, the material stuffed with something puffy, probably feathers—was laid out next to the fire. Panniers and a pack saddle were opposite the sleeping bag.

When Longarm approached, he disturbed a feeding buzzard. The bird lumbered awkwardly into the air, a string of something moist and red trailing from its wicked beak, the sunlight glinting blue-black on its feathers.

Lace-up boots and some articles of clothing gave indication of what this bird and many others before it had been feeding on. What remained no longer appeared to be human. A good many of the bones had been torn away and gnawed. Coyotes, Longarm supposed. A bear would simply have taken the entire carcass away.

The smell at this point was of rotting meat, long overripe.

The head was fifteen feet or so away. It showed a bullet hole low in the back. A few scraps of hair clung to the dark, bloody skull, but both eye sockets were empty. Those would have been pecked out by magpies.

The murder had been coldly deliberate, the shot having been delivered while the victim was either kneeling or standing quietly in front of the killer. Longarm guessed that Hank Bacon had not known he was the target of a murderer. Possibly the surveyor assumed he was being robbed. At this point only the killer could tell the full story of what happened here.

But Longarm could see enough.

What he sorely wanted to see, but could not, was the identity of the killer who'd murdered Bacon.

Longarm spread the sleeping bag over what remained of the decomposed and half-eaten dead man and weighed it down with some rocks, hoping to keep the magpies and other carrion eaters away.

A dozen yards from the camp he noticed an iron stake driven into the ground. Curious, he walked over to it. A generous length of rope was attached to the stake and a halter lay at the other end of the rope.

Bacon had had a pack animal and had taken care of it the evening—Longarm assumed it to have been evening right after the camp was set up—shortly before he was killed.

The killer, Longarm saw, had thought to free the animal, either to steal it or to allow it to run loose. No, not to steal it. He would have kept the halter on the animal if he'd been stealing it. So he turned it loose to keep it from suffering the pangs of starvation.

Thoughtful of the son of a bitch, he was sure.

And doubly interesting now that someone was also trying to kill Bethlehem Bacon. More likely trying to have her killed. If he had been trying to do the job himself, the attempts would have stopped back there in Rawlins.

Trying to cover the fact that Hank Bacon had been murdered? Perhaps, Longarm thought.

Beth was only causing problems, looking for her husband and bringing a Federal lawman along with her when she did it. That would be reason enough for a coldhearted killer.

But who? And why? A competing railroad? That was not impossible. Improbable, perhaps, but certainly not impossible.

Longarm had many questions and no answers. The one thing he knew for sure was that now he had to go back and tell Beth that her search was over.

It was not a duty he looked forward to performing.

“He didn't suffer,” Longarm said. It was what one nearly always told the grieving family members but in this case it was probably true. A bullet to the back of the head meant virtually instantaneous death.

Beth stiffened her back and raised her chin. She was the one doing the suffering and was trying not to show it. “I thought he was gone,” she said. “All along I thought he was gone or he would have come back to me. We were in love. He wouldn't have just disappeared.”

She walked out of the firelight on the far side of the camp. Longarm could dimly see her at the edge of the circle of light. She stood there for several minutes. Composing herself, he supposed. Willing herself to accept this tragedy without showing her pain. Then she turned and came back to the fire, where he had poured himself a cup of coffee to ward off the creeping chill of the night.

“I want to see him,” she said firmly.

“Not possible,” Longarm told her. “It's too dark now anyway.”

“In the morning then,” Beth said. “I want to see my husband's body. I want to know for myself that he is gone and how it happened.”

“I told you—”

“I want to see,” she declared. “If you won't go with me, I'll go by myself, but I intend to see.”

“Think it over tonight. See if you feel the same in the morning,” Longarm said.

Beth nodded. “Very well. You will go with me?”

“I will,” Longarm said.

They spoke little the rest of the evening. Beth seemed to be deep in her own thoughts, and he did not want to break in on whatever she was pondering.

He cooked their supper. Beth did not exhibit much of an appetite but she did eat a little. After supper they made an early night of it and retired to their bedrolls.

An hour or more later, judging by the swing of the stars overhead, Longarm was awakened by Bethlehem crawling into his bed.

He lay on his side and put an arm over her. She did not want sex. He understood that. What she wanted, what she needed, was simple human contact.

She lay pressed tightly against him. He could feel the heat of her tears and the trembling of her slender body as she cried.

Longarm could not help himself. He responded with a powerful hard-on. He knew good and well that Beth could feel his dick pressed against her belly. She was a married woman and would know what that was. And why. But she did not move away.

Nor did she invite anything further. She wanted to be held, wanted to be comforted, nothing more.

Once, just to be sure, he put his hand on her breast, but Beth pushed it away and stayed where she was.

Longarm held her close and let her cry it out. His erection did not go down, but he did not do anything about it.

After a while he drifted off to sleep. When he woke later to put some wood onto the fire, Beth was gone, back in her own bedroll.

“You said you would go with me,” Beth said, her tone one of accusation. “Instead you are squatting there cooking something. If you intend to go back on your word . . .”

“I ain't going back on nothing,” Longarm told her, looking up from the skillet, where he was stirring some fried potatoes in bacon grease. “But we got things we got t' do. Including having something t' eat and packing our gear ready t' head back south when you're done over there. So don't be in a hurry. Everything over there will still be there after we've had somethin' to eat.”

He dumped the potatoes onto two enamelware plates and handed one to Beth. “Here. There's salt in the bag and forks are over there.”

Longarm took his own advice and moved away from the fire a little before settling down to breakfast.

When they were done eating, Longarm did the cleaning up and started packing, ready to head back.

“Aren't you ready yet?” Beth snapped, obviously irritated that he was taking so much time to pack.

“Almost done.” Finally he said, “All right. Let's go.”

Longarm led the way on foot to the site of Hank Bacon's last camp.

The first thing Beth did was strip the sleeping bag back so she could look at her husband's remains. She sat beside the body in silence for several minutes. When she looked up again, she said, “I don't want him buried here. I don't want him buried anywhere in this horrid country. I want to take him home with me so he can lie in the family plot.”

“All right,” Longarm said, “but everything considered, it's gonna take a wagon t' get him back somewhere half civilized. We can't pack the body, not in the condition it's in.”

“What can we do?” she asked.

“We'll go back to the Shoshone reservation an' get someone t' come out here with a wagon an' collect the, uh, the remains. They can build a coffin that you can ship on the train east. I don't know that the stage could take such an outfit. You might have t' hire the wagon to take him all the way down to Rock Springs. D'you have money left over?”

“Enough, I think. Whatever it costs, though, I want to take him home where he belongs.”

“Fair enough. We'll do what we can,” Longarm assured her.

“What about his things?” Beth asked.

“There isn't all that much. Certainly nothing I think you'd want t' keep. There wasn't nothing important in his pockets. I checked them yesterday. Whoever killed him cleaned out any money he had on him.”

“It was a robbery then?”

Longarm shrugged. He was not so sure that it had been, mostly because of the attempts that had been made to keep Beth from coming here.

She spent a few minutes looking around the camp. Finally she turned to Longarm and said, “What about his ledger? I see his transit is in the pack there, but what about his compass and his ledger?”

“I didn't see either o' them,” Longarm said.

“Hank kept a ledger. He always did. When he was done working, after he ate he would sit and make notes and write down any readings he had taken that day. He always did that without fail. So where is his ledger now?”

“I didn't look through the packs. Could be in there,” Longarm said.

“It isn't. I already looked there,” Beth said.

“I can't think of a reason why a thief would think a plain ledger was important,” Longarm said. “What did it look like?”

“Cloth bound in heavy canvas,” she said, “much like public records books in clerks' offices but smaller, about eight by ten inches. Hank always wrote down his sightings. He made drawings and elevations and such. He never would have been without it.”

“You'd think it was somewhere here then. Would a wild animal have dragged it off?”

“You tell me,” Beth said. “Why would a wild creature want it?”

“Why would a two-legged creature be interested?” Longarm countered.

“Someone murdered Hank for more than the money in his pockets,” Beth said.

“They did take that. Seems they took the ledger, too. Unless . . .”

Longarm stood and went over to the crude fire pit where Hank Bacon cooked his last meal. “Found it,” Longarm said. “Or what's left of it.”

He used a stick to stir the ashes of that last fire and dislodged several charred pieces of thick pasteboard covered on both sides by heavy gray canvas. A few partially burned pieces of bound paper remained. Someone had tried to get rid of the ledger and almost succeeded.

“Is this it?”

Beth came to him. She knelt down and picked the ledger pieces out of the ashes. “Yes. This was the ledger. I can even”—her voice choked and it took her a moment to compose herself so she could go on—“I can even see some of Hank's handwriting close to the edges here.”

She collected all the pieces she could find and kept them. Longarm guessed they were her last link to her dead husband, and she intended to hang on to them.

He waited several minutes then said, “We'd best be getting on if we intend t' get back to the agency before dark.”

“All right.” Beth stood. But she continued to hold the pieces of Bacon's ledger. “Let's go.”