Craig Johnson - A Serpent's Tooth - A Walt Longmire Mystery

“I get like that sometimes.”

I laughed.

She ignored me. “Cord, there are people out there who are good at believing things and following orders, and then there’s the rest of us, the ones who have urges and get mad about shit; the ones who ask questions. I’m one of those people, and I think I turned out all right.” She pointed a loaded finger at me. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“. . . Anyway.” Her eyes softened as she studied him. “Just so you know; there’s room for all of us.”

I wanted to kiss her but just kept driving as the afternoon sun cast rays across the rolling hills in that horizontal light like clean windows.

• • •

Cord was leaning forward when we got to Short Drop, his eyes staying on the cottonwood from which the noose twisted in the breeze. “Did they hang somebody here?”

“A long time ago, or at least they think they did.”

“They’re not sure?”

I pulled the truck down the embankment and into the town proper. “Back in the day, saying you’d hung somebody was almost as good a reputation as actually having done it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is cow country, and back in the late nineteenth century there was a lot of rustling, so if a town had a reputation of being hard on criminal activity, fewer operators were likely to go freelance and rustle cattle.”

His eyes were still on the noose as we drove by. “So they didn’t really hang anybody.”

I parked the truck in front of the Short Drop Mercantile. “I didn’t say that.”

Eleanor was standing on the boardwalk as we climbed out of my truck, and as tough as she was, I saw her sway just a tiny bit and then rest a hand on one of the support beams of the porch when she saw the boy.

I let Dog out, and he baptized a tumbleweed that had lodged itself against the steps. “Hey.”

Vic brought Cord around the side of the truck with a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and I watched as the breath caught in Eleanor Tisdale’s throat. “Um . . . Howdy.”

Cord glanced at me and then returned his eyes to her for only a second before dropping them to the gravel at his feet. “Hello, ma’am.”

Gathering herself, she pushed off the post and stepped toward the edge of the porch. “How would you folks like to come up and have a soda to wash the dust out of your mouths?” She started in but then added, “You can bring that grizzly bear, if you want.”

The beast and I followed Vic and Cord as they mounted the steps, and we followed the little troupe into the Merc, where, strangely enough, stacks of books stood all over the wide-planked oak floor in piles about three feet high. Eleanor tracked her way through the maze and stood amid the piles like some acolyte of literature. “I have a problem.”

I nodded as I reached down and plucked a particularly vintage tome from the nearest stack. “I know—it’s hard to borrow shelves.”

“I go to these auctions and estate sales and the one thing I cannot resist is the books, so I’m thinning the herd and taking the excess over to the library.”

I opened the volume to the title page and read: “ The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXV, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming 1890. ” I gently closed the heavy, leather-bound hardback and rested it against my chest. “Is this book for sale?”

She smiled at me with all the warmth of a Moroccan rug salesman. “Do you know what it’s worth?”

“I do.”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

I studied the marbled edges of the pages. “That’s not what it’s worth.”

“I wasn’t negotiating a price; I was simply trying to see if you knew the value.” She sighed deeply and picked up another from one of the towers near her. “I’m past the point of caring what things cost; I just want to know that beautiful and important objects are in the hands of people who will appreciate them.” She thumbed open the book in her hands. “ Tensleep and No Rest , Jack R. Gage, first printing and it’s signed; do you know he was the governor of Wyoming for two years?”

“I do.”

She thumbed the binding. “I guess he wasn’t much of a governor, but he was a hell of a writer.” She tossed the book to me, and I caught it. “Twelve dollars.”

I stood there holding the two books and looking at the piles around us—they were like literary land mines just waiting to explode minds. “Um, is there any way I could get you to lock the front door and not sell any more books until I’ve had a chance to go through all of them?”

“I’m going to have the books out of here by Sunday afternoon. I’m closing the place and selling the merchandise—other than what goes to the library, of course.” She glanced at Cord, who stood holding his own selection. “Did you find something of interest there, young man?”

His eyes came up slowly from the open pages. “There’s a book?”

The proprietor’s eyes shone. “Well, I’m not sure which book it is you’re talking about.”

He tipped the cover up so that we could see the familiar green hills, a boy, and a horse.

“Oh, My Friend Flicka . Is that a book you’d be interested in?”

He looked embarrassed. “I, um . . . I don’t read that well.”

Vic took the book from him and flipped a few pages back. “First edition, first printing, signed and dated.”

The owner/operator turned back to look at me. “My mother was a friend of Mrs. O’Hara down in Laramie.”

I looked around the stacks on the floor, estimating that there must’ve been close to two thousand volumes. “I repeat my request.”

She spread her hands. “All gone come this weekend.” She turned and walked toward the heavy door leading to the bar. “C’mon, the refreshments are this way.”

We followed her into The Noose, and Eleanor scooped a few pops from the cooler at the bar-back and placed them on the counter.

“Mrs. Tisdale, we were thinking of making the run out toward the East Spring Ranch and taking a look around, and I was wondering if it would be possible for us to leave Cord and Dog here with you?”

She studied the young man now seated on the end barstool, his nose buried in the book, his finger tracing the lines as he read very slowly with his lips moving. “Hey, youngster.”

His head swiveled, and he looked at her, smiling.

“You think you can tote books?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, ma’am.”

I gestured to Vic, and we started toward the front door of the bar, but only after I paused at Eleanor Tisdale’s side. “You do know what that book is worth, right?”

She smiled as she watched her grandson, his lips moving in time to the words. “I know what it’s worth to him.”

• • •

“You told her about My Friend Flicka ?”

I drove south and east of the little hamlet, the road undulating with the rolling breaks of the Powder River country. “It might’ve come up.”

She studied the stack that reposed on the seat between us, then picked up the heavier of the books and began studying the Bancroft. “It’s like a history of the state?”

“ The history of the state.”

She leafed through the pages, marveling at the imprinted words on them, her fingers touching them like braille. “‘Even the serpent, emblem at once of eternal life and voluntary evil, was not absent, taking up his residence in the underground inhabitation of the prairie dog, to escape the blistering heat of the sands, where he sometimes met that strange inmate, the owl, also hiding from the intense sunshine of the plains. So did this region abound with life in ages when the white man, to the knowledge of the red man, was not.’”