She looked more amused than annoyed as she observed, "Oh, dear, and I was looking forward to the shrimp salad here. I take it you're some sort of physician, good sir?"
Longarm laughed easily. "Not hardly. I'm a federal deputy marshal. Name's Custis Long. So you go right ahead and order the iced shrimp if you've a mind to, and I'll tell 'em you died brave if you guessed wrong. The odds are better'n eight out of ten in your favor, ma'am. I just don't value the taste of shrimp cocktail that highly, having witnessed a few cases of food poisoning whilst passing through these parts in the past."
The willowy blonde made a wry face--it still remained fair to gaze upon--and decided, "Brrr, I don't think I like those odds myself. So what do you suggest, seeing you seem so familiar with the local cuisine?"
He replied without hesitation, "Anything Mex served hot, ma'am. I know hot tamales or chili con carne washed down with cold rum or hot coffee sounds dumb. But the Mex folk, who've lived down this way longer, hardly ever come down with food poisoning. Hot spicy grub must kill them bitty bugs that French chemist has been studying."
She studied the menu he'd handed her dubiously, telling him that she'd read about Louis Pasteur in a ladies' magazine devoted to female problems and getting the vote. Then she asked if he'd read anything about that other scientist blaming tropical fevers on the bites of bigger bugs, such as flies, ticks, and even mosquitoes.
He nodded. "Him too. You're talking about that Anglo-Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who keeps saying yellow jack and Texas fever might be spread by bug bites. I don't see why they can't both be right. Meanwhile, I see that waiter coming back. So do you trust me to order for the both of us, Miss ...?"
"Colbert, Lenore Colbert," she said with a bemused smile. "I suppose I'll have to trust you when it comes to hot tamales and so forth. I've never eaten any Mexican food no matter which of those scientists may be right. I don't see how they could both be right, though."
The waiter was there by this time. So Longarm allowed they'd both go for chili con carne, tamales, and chicken enchiladas, knowing most Anglo palates could manage such beginner's fare. To drink, he ordered black coffee laced with white rum. As the waiter left, Longarm explained, "I don't hold with one cause for all fevers. It only stands to reason that fevers as different as, say, scarlet, yellow, and the ague or chills-and-fever can't be caused by the same whatever. We know now that the milk fever that killed Abe Lincoln's mother was inspired by poisonous snake-roots their milk cow had been into. For some reason the poison passes through the cow harmlessly to kill human folks who drink her milk. But you don't have to drink milk to come down with yellow jack or even the Texas fever northern cows die from. So maybe both Pasture and Carlos Finlay could be on to the truth. Or half the truth leastways. I suspect there's way more to coming down sick than modern medicine has a handle on. I know my own job's more complicated than some figure. I've wound up mighty confounded by two separate crimes I was trying to solve as the work of one outlaw. So what if folks get sick for all sorts of different reasons whilst the docs seek some common cause?"
She was staring past him in a desperately casual manner as she replied, "That's their problem. Don't look now but there's another man boring holes in your back with his cold steel eyes. You are on some sort of mission for the government, right?"
Longarm resisted the impulse to turn his head as he smiled at her uncertainly and replied, "I am, but it ain't no secret mission, and it wouldn't do anyone a lick of good if they managed to stop me. My office sent me down this way to pick up an owlhoot rider by the name of Clay Baldwin. He's already been arrested and they've been holding him at Escondrijo for us. He'd still be locked up if someone bored real holes in my back and threw me over the side. My boss would likely send two or three deputies to fetch Baldwin as soon as things got that serious. Might you have a bitty mirror in that bag across your lap, Miss Lenore?"
She said she did and, to her credit, never asked why a grown man might want to borrow such a thing. Meanwhile, the waiter got back with their orders. So it was easy enough for her to slip Longarm the small square mirror amid all the confusion atop their table.
As the waiter poured and laced their coffee and the gal across the way stared thunderstruck at the unfamiliar grub in front of her, Longarm found it easy enough to prop the mirror up against a saltshaker. Sure enough, an ugly galoot was staring mean as hell at him from another nearby table. The lean and hungry face failed to remind Longarm of anyone he was currently after. The stranger sat across from another cuss dressed for south Texas riding. But that didn't mean either had to be mixed up in beef or other produce. For it had been six or eight years since Longarm had been a serious cowhand, and wasn't he wearing shirt and jeans in this infernal climate?
The one staring mean at Longarm's back had his slate-gray Texas-creased hat on at the table. The one facing the other way had on a less dramatic Carlsbad with its crown crushed cavalry. Their matching white shirts, worn vestless, might have said they were a couple of Texas Rangers if Longarm had had recent trouble with the recently reorganized and often proddy Rangers. But he was on fair terms with the Ranger captain back in Brownsville, and didn't know if they even had a Ranger station up around Escondrijo. As in the case of federal deputies, the Texas Rangers worked out of widely spaced headquarters, mostly built near towns of some importance, and only chimed into local matters in other parts when a federal or state offense seemed too big for the local law to cope with. So Longarm doubted there'd be any cases the Rangers would be worried about this side of, say, Corpus Christi.
Escondrijo was on this side of Corpus Christi, and a day's ride away in a straight line from that more important stop. But moving along the Fever Coast by horse took longer, thanks to all the inlets and swamps there were to go around. By an ironic trick of geology, as the post office riders had known before coastal steamers got so common along the inland waterway, a rider could move much faster along the back dunes of Padre Island, an otherwise mighty lonely string bean of white sand and sea gull shit the winds and waves had piled a few miles out extending from Corpus Christi Pass all the way south to Matamoros in Old Mexico. They said it was healthier as well as a bit cooler out along the barrier sands. It was too bad nobody had yet come up with any way to make a living off no more than white sandy beaches and sunshine.
"What are these things that look like lengths of broomstick boiled in oil?" the blonde across the table was asking as Longarm tried in vain to make out what sort of hardware the sinister strangers had behind him. He adjusted the mirror as he assured her hot tamales were sort of big hollow noodles made of cornmeal and stuffed with spicy ground meat.
When she asked what kind of meat, he decided she'd feel better if he said it was likely beef. Beef was possible, and some folks felt odd about eating goats, cats, dogs, and such. The idea of all that red pepper in a hot tamale was to assure that the meat was safe to eat as well as impossible to identify by taste.
He knew he'd said the right thing when Lenore took an experimental taste, followed by a bigger bite and a sudden grab for her coffee to put out the fire, then a smaller but more relaxed nibble as she decided it was a tad spicy but good.
He dug into his own chili con carne to look busy, with his back to those jaspers in her mirror as he casually replied, "That's doubtless because we've a Texican chef on board, ma'am. Mex grub is peppered more along the border than anywhere north or south of it. I suspect Mexicans and Texicans are trying to prove something to one another. Left to themselves--say as far off as Durango, Mexico, or Durango, Colorado--cooks pepper just enough to make a dish sort of interesting. Further south in Old Mexico they cook lots of other ways, with bananas, rice, and such. I had a chicken basted with hot bitter-sweet chocolate down Mexico way one time. Reckon that's what they call an acquired taste and... I see that one in the lighter-gray Carlsbad is packing a two-gun buscadero rig, with the one gun I can make out from here a nickel-plated Schofield."
She said, "These beans are less spicy. What's a Schofield?"
He explained, "A revolver gun, ma'am. Mostly made by Smith & Wesson, but named after Brevet Colonel George Schofield of that Colored Tenth Cav. The colonel wasn't colored. He was the baby brother of General John M. Schofield, in charge of the U.S. Army Small Arms Board during the Grant Administration. Colonel George was stuck with a gross of Model 3 S&W horse pistols left over from an order for the Russian cavalry. It wouldn't be charitable at this late date to guess what the general got out of the deal. The younger Schofield, stuck with using the bargain six-guns in the field, made some improvements on the originals, rechambering 'em for army ammunition to begin with. So by the time they'd sold the first three thousand remodeled Russian cavalry guns to their own army, they were so delighted they renamed the gun the Schofield."
She was too polite to indicate she was sorry she'd asked. But he knew women would rather talk about clothes and such. Hence he added, more tersely, "Let's just say the Texas Rangers are issued the Colt.45 Peacemaker one at a time. A man packing two Schofields in tie-down holsters is showing off or expecting some serious fighting. Either way, I doubt they could be Rangers, and I'd be likely to recognize any well-known outlaws in these parts."
She suggested, "Maybe the one glaring at you just arrived from other parts. He certainly seems to recognize you!"
He volunteered to just get up and see what the cuss was so sore about if such rude staring was getting on the lady's nerves. But she pleaded, "Please don't! I can't stand public scenes, and it's not as if he's done or said anything wrong to either of us!"
So Longarm just went on eating, and a few minutes later, having started earlier, the two mysterious strangers finished, got up, and sauntered out of sight. But not before Longarm had made certain they were both loaded for bear. Neither looked dumb enough to carry six in the wheel on either hip. But assuming they, like him, preferred the hammer of a six-gun riding on one empty chamber, that still tallied out to twenty rounds for them and five for him in the first exchange. He'd left the derringer he usually carried in a vest pocket with his other possibles back in his stateroom. So maybe it was just as well he hadn't yelled at them over their dessert.
By the time he and the willowy blonde were having their own, a raisin pie fresh from the oven, the sun was setting in full glory and he'd learned she was a Boston gal headed home after attending the reading of a distant relative's will back in Brownsville. She said she meant to get off their coastal steamer and catch herself a train at Houston once they got there.
He didn't feel up to going into the details of moving between the offshore stop at Galveston and the inland rail yards of Houston. He tried not to sound wistful as he said, "I'll only be spending the one night ahead aboard this slow but steady tub if I'm lucky. Might get in in the wee small hours if the skipper keeps his word about putting on some speed."
She sipped the last of her coffee, her hair glowing as pretty as old gold in the fading light from her left as she replied she was sure they'd have been moving faster by this time had the skipper really cared about getting anywhere in a hurry. She added, "At least I booked a stateroom on the seaward side this time. I almost steamed myself to clam chowder coming down this coast a week ago."
He didn't say anything. But it was a good thing he wasn't playing poker with such a keen-eyed gal. For she demanded, "What did I say wrong, ah, Custis? Don't you think I should have booked myself a stateroom on the cooler side?"
To which he could only reply, since she'd asked, "If seaward was the cooler side, Miss Lenore. Winds blow from where it's cooler to where it's warmer. Come daybreak the sun-baked plains to our west will send hot air rising to suck in cooler air off the gulf to our east. But the gulf ain't all that cool as seawater goes. So once the plains cool off a tad under starlight, the warmer waters of the gulf ought to suck land breezes out to sea through such portholes as might be open on the landward side."
The Eastern gal stared across at him like a blue-eyed owl as she insisted, "But I was on that side, coming down the coast just a week ago, and as I said, I got steamed like a clam baked in seaweed!"
He chuckled at the memory of some clams he'd had that way the time he'd spent back East on Long Island with another blonde. He said, "I never told you the landward staterooms would be cool. I only meant they wouldn't be as hot and stuffy as the ones catching no breezes at all. You don't have to answer if you find this too indelicate, ma'am. But may I take it you were trying to sleep in a steamer stateroom this far south, at this time of the year, in, ah, modest attire?"
She blinked and said, "Well, of course I had my nightdress on, if that's what you mean! Would you have a lady retire under her sheets as bare as some sort of tropical savage?"
He managed not to grin too knowingly as he quietly replied, "I ain't sure how savage the old-time Coahuiltic were when they still owned this part of Texas, ma'am. But their Mex descendants don't retire under a sheet or anything else when it gets this hot. Seeing I'll be getting off come morning, I'd be proud to let you sleep in my stateroom instead."
He could tell, even by such poor light, how hard she blushed as she gasped, "You really are in a hurry, aren't you!"