“Mr. Logan and I are buying cattle hereabouts. I knew Miss Maggie from a few years ago. We stopped by. She gave us a glass of lemonade. Out on the porch.”
“You smoke cigars, Mr. Logan?”
Logan opened his coat, exposing an inside pocket with a silver case stuffed in it. He looked down at it as though he had never seen it. “Yes, I do. Would you like one?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You’re a lawman,” Longabaugh said.
“A Texas Ranger and a city marshal at various times. These days I’m neither.” Hackberry squeaked the cork out of the whiskey bottle and poured into their shot glasses. The smell of the whiskey rose into his face with the allure of a dangerous girlfriend’s embrace.
Longabaugh took a sip from his shot glass. “Maggie told you something about our previous relationship?”
“I was wondering how men treat women where you boys come from. You speak like you’re from up north, Mr. Longabaugh. Are women treated respectfully where you grew up?”
“I’m from Pennsylvania. It’s little different from Virginia. Does that answer your question?”
“How about you, Mr. Logan? People treat women fine where you come from?”
Logan cleaned his nails. “If you got a burr in your britches, you ought to take it somewhere else.”
“Me?” Hackberry said.
“I suspect it’s got to do with Maggie Bassett. I married a jenny-barner myself. The secret is to keep an empty space in your head about what they’ve touched, particularly with their mouths.”
“I’m not sure I heard you right. Married a what?”
“A jenny-barner. A whore. The challenge is to find one that don’t have clap or the rale. The homeliest ones are the best. They’re certainly the most grateful.”
“I never thought about it in those terms. Would you call my wife homely, Mr. Logan?”
“I wouldn’t call her anything. It was Sundance who wanted to visit your place,” Logan said. He lifted his empty beer mug to the bartender and held up two fingers.
“One for me, too,” Hackberry said, raising a finger. “Somebody burned my wife’s chest with a cigar.”
Longabaugh began stacking dominoes, steadying them with one finger when he thought they were about to fall. “Sometimes people who use opiates see unicorns eating the tulips in their gardens.”
“My wife is no longer a user of narcotics. But if she were, she wouldn’t know she had been burned with a cigar?”
“Maybe she has ringworm,” Longabaugh said.
Hackberry’s right hand rested under the table. “Maggie says you’re fast.”
“At what?”
“Putting pennies on a man’s eyes.”
Longabaugh knocked over a stack of dominoes. “I never shot anybody. Don’t plan to, either. Somebody has been selling you fairy tales.”
“Why did y’all hurt her?”
Longabaugh was hunched forward, his eyes unfocused, his coat pinched against his narrow shoulders. He wore an unbuttoned checkered vest under his coat, with a watch and fob and chain pinned to it. He rubbed one hand on top of the other, his calluses whispering across his knuckles. “Neither me or Harvey has ever hurt a woman. Don’t be saying we did.”
The bartender set down three mugs of beer on the felt and went away.
“Let’s stop this serious talk,” Longabaugh said, his eyes brightening. “It’s about as pleasant as a sermon in a church house that doesn’t have windows.”
He tipped the bottle to the rims of the three mugs. Hackberry’s gaze never left Longabaugh’s face. The whiskey bloomed in an amber cloud inside the beer and ran with the foam over the side of Hackberry’s mug, dripping onto his knuckles.