Longarm 243: Longarm and the Debt of Honor by Tabor Evans

me, I appreciate it,” Longarm said. And indeed he did. He fingered his chin absently, as if only then discovering the beard stubble there, although he’d deliberately neglected to shave when he arose this morning. “One thing you gents could do for me,” he said.
    â€œName it,” a smith named Jones offered.
    â€œYou could point me to where I might find a shave and a trim.” His hair could have gone a week longer before it needed cutting, but what the hell.
    â€œThat’s an easy decision. Only one barber in town,” Jones said. “His name is Baldwin. Luke Baldwin. Nice fella too, you’ll like him.”
    Longarm nodded. He wasn’t convinced that he was going to like their Mr. Baldwin, but Longarm was certainly eager to make the gentleman’s acquaintance after what Eleanor Fitzpatrick had said last night.
    One of the other gents at the breakfast table gave Longarm directions to the barbershop. Longarm thanked them all again, and reclaimed his Stetson off the rack by the door on his way out into the bright morning sunshine.
    He felt pretty good, everything considered. Although, after the way he’d been worked up for a while there last night, it was a pure wonder he hadn’t soiled his drawers by squirting off in a wet dream. That Eleanor was a handful. And considerably more than a mouthful. And one of the things that made her so damned desirable was that she didn’t seem to have the least idea that she was so almighty sexy and desirable. That was a rare quality in a handsome woman. Most of them knew it and traded on it, although some were less obvious about it than others.
    Longarm just plain liked Eleanor Fitzpatrick’s style. He surely did. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment to light a cheroot and get his bearings, then headed down the street toward where they’d said he could find Luke Baldwin’s barbershop.
    There were several customers ahead of him, so Longarm deposited his hat on a rack, selected a recent copy of the Hirt County Courier from a pile of reading matter, and settled in to wait his turn in the chair. He was in no hurry at all, and in fact was pleased with an opportunity to bury his nose in the folds of the newspaper while he quite shamelessly eavesdropped on the chatter between the barber and the man he was shaving.
    The talk touched briefly on the subject of poor Dinky Dinklemann—neither Baldwin nor the customer could fathom that one—then turned onto subjects of greater importance. Like the amount of moisture in the fields after the recent hot spell and whether the corn crop would fill out this year. Longarm couldn’t claim to be much interested in that, so he returned his full attention to the newspaper.
    The Courier , it seemed, was published in Jasonville, the farm town that was soon to become county seat. Longarm gathered that either Crow’s Point had no newspaper of its own, or that the Courier used to be based in Crow’s Point, but had already moved along to the new county seat. It was a shame, a town declining like this one was, but that sort of thing happened all the time. And in the mining country, unlike out here on the plains, whole towns could up and disappear practically in the blink of an eye. Crow’s Point had made its run. It really didn’t have all that much to bitch about now.
    â€œYou’re next, mister.”
    Longarm looked up. The men who’d been ahead of him were all gone, and there were a couple of later arrivals waiting for Baldwin to finish with Longarm. Longarm had been wool-gathering for a bit there. About Eleanor Fitzpatrick, actually. He knew better than that. But he’d done it aplenty last night while he was trying to get to sleep and now found himself doing it again. Damned if he didn’t, kind of envy his old friend Norm. Except for that one small fact about Norm being locked up in the jail, of course. But as for his relationship with Eleanor, well, that