Longarm and the Undercover Mountie by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 16

Between Longarm’s cardsharpery and the handsome send-off from Last Chance Charlene they had more funds to flash than Dodge City pimps with the herds in town, and it was just as well. For the Peacock’s Nest, the one hotel in town, was as up-to-date as the Cheyenne Social Club, and it charged accordingly.

The reasoning was self-evident. Most everyone in the company town built and managed or franchised by the Peacock Mining Company dwelt in company housing and had no call to stay in any hotel. The only folk who needed a hotel were investors visitng at company expense or, as in the case of the two undercover lawmen, transients passing through.

In the case of visitors, the company wanted to impress them, and in the case of uninvited transients, saddle tramps were not welcome in the town of Peacock. So rooms started at a dollar a night, with indoor plumbing and newfangled electrical lights to go with bed linens changed every day whether you checked out or stayed over. There was nothing slow about the Peacock’s Nest, and it could have held its head up along Seventeenth Street down Denver way.

There was no town livery, but the hotel had its own stable out back, and they figured the matched bays they’d ridden so far would last them another etape after a full night’s rest, seeing they were in no hurry with nowhere in particular to go, now that Doc Tyler had turned out such a disappointment. For until they met up with a real guide, their best bet was to flash more cash than their rough-hewn appearances warranted and look sort of lost.

They each paid a dollar and a half in advance for rooms with baths. As they supped on Welsh rabbit in the hotel taproom under a moose head outfitted with Edison bulbs wired to the tines of its antlers, with their riding stock secure out back and their possibles upstairs under lock and key, Crown Sergeant Foster said, “This is pretty posh, but I’d feel safer if we were a few more miles from the scene of the crime.”

To which Longarm replied, “I’ve been studying on that. If Fong and his boys covered up after themselves worth shit, nobody ought to figure anything happened to Doc Tyler and his trash brothers. After that, seeing Doc wasn’t the real thing, the real thing can’t be stationed too far up the road to Natova or nobody would have ever found him, and we know some did.”

Foster nodded but asked, “Why should we expect to find anyone in particular here in this little company town? Wouldn’t it make more sense to set up an . . . outlaw travel agency somewhere more substantial, such as the river crossing at Fort Missoula?”

Longarm rinsed some melted cheese on toast down with lager before he said, “Told you I’ve been studying . . . Moe. A bottleneck such as this with one saloon, one whorehouse and this one hotel makes it easier to hail ships passing in the night.

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