Longarm and the Big Fifty

**skip**LONGARM AND THE BIG FIFTY By Tabor Evans Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1996 by Jove Publications, Inc.

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ISBN: 0-515-11895-8

Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

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A Jove Book published by arrangement with the author Printing history Jove edition July 1996

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him … the Gunsmith.

LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.

SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

Chapter 1

The long, hot summer day had ended, and so Yuma was getting out of bed as Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long was finishing his supper in a stand-up cafetin across the plaza from the jailhouse. The fish pie was tempting, but he had chores to do and a train to catch. So Longarm, as he was better known to friend and foe alike, washed down the last of his hot tamales with tepid black coffee and settled up with the pretty Mexican counter gal, leaving her a dime tip to show he hadn’t ignored her batty eyelashes because he’d thought she was too fat. Then he paused by the newsstand out front to light a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and grimace down at the evening headlines.

As if folks along the lower Gila didn’t have enough to worry them, the fool Arizona Advocate was blaring, “APACHE OUT ON WARPATH!”

You couldn’t buy the Tombstone Epitaph around the central plaza. So there was no sweet voice of reason from old John Clum, the former BIA agent who’d given up educating Indians to publish his own newspaper for cowboys and such to read. The last edition of the Epitaph read by Longarm had explained how unlikely it would be for Victorio and his reservation-jumpers to raid west of, say, Apache Pass in high summer. It was scandalous to scare folks like that just to sell a few more copies of your otherwise dull newspaper.

President Hayes and his first lady, Miss Lemonade Lucy, had made it clear they expected all federal employees, including lawmen, to dress and behave like ribbon clerks or bank tellers. But since neither of them came out to Arizona Territory in August all that often, Longarm had packed his tweed frock coat and vest away with his infernal tie, and pinned his federal badge to the front of his hickory shirt lest anyone take him for a saddle tramp packing a .44-40 cross-draw.

It was still hotter than the hinges of Hell as he trudged across the dusty plaza. But somewhere in the night a guitar was commencing a lively hat dance and a young gal was standing on a trestle table to light a string of paper lanterns. Longarm didn’t ask or even wonder if they were fixing to have a fiesta or just a market night. Once the sun went down in Arizona, everyone felt overdue for some damned sort of a celebration.

Longarm had already done the paperwork at the jailhouse when he’d arrived that morning aboard the westbound Southern Pacific, so they had Harmony Drake out front and ready to go. Or out front in cuffs and leg irons, whether he wanted to go or not.

One of the Arizona lawmen who’d been holding the killer on a federal warrant for Longarm to pick up confided cheerfully that the prisoner seemed mighty sad for a sport who killed other folks with such a carefree attitude. “Old Harmony turned down both his dinner and a finer supper than he deserved,” the lawman said. “Says he’s feeling poorly. Reckon they told him how you crap your pants when they hang you and he’s hoping to hold down the stink.”

Longarm had never cottoned to gallows humor aimed at victims in no position to enjoy it. So he simply nodded at the seated prisoner, perhaps a tad younger and too over-dressed for the occasion, and said, “We’ll be leaving now, Mister Drake. I got us a coach seat aboard the night train to Deming. I’m sorry you have to wear those leg irons. But they’re what you get for escaping the last time anyone tried to transport you cross-country. We’ll be seated by a window and you may need that denim jacket as this desert air cools off after dark. But right now you’re sweating like a pig, and I reckon we’d best get you down to shirtsleeves before we leave.”

Earlier, Longarm had given the Arizona jailors the cuffs and leg irons the prisoner was wearing. So he fumbled the little key from the fob pocket of his tweed pants to unlock the cuffs as Harmony Drake’s rusty-sounding voice creaked, “I ain’t sweating because I feel hot. I feel like I’m coming down with something. Something serious as hell.”

Longarm helped the uncuffed prisoner out of his sweat-soaked though thin denim jacket as he calmly replied, “We have to lay over betwixt trains at Deming, just across the New Mexico line. If the cool night ride ain’t cheered you up, I’ll have a sawbones look you over before we head on up to Colorado.” Drake said he doubted he’d last that long. The local lawman who’d made rude remarks about his date with the hangman suggested he die on his way there and save everyone a heap of trouble.

Longarm snapped the cuffs back in place and draped the limp denim jacket over the shining steel links as he helped the condemned killer to stand up, quietly saying, “The train depot ain’t but a furlong or so to walk. Do you reckon you can make it without help?” Harmony Drake said, “Not hardly,” and sat back down, adding it felt as if someone had drained all the juice out of his legs and that he had a bellyache as well.

Another local jailer snorted, “He’s gold-bricking you, Longarm. He ain’t sick. He just don’t want you to carry him back to that Colorado court’s jurisdiction.”

The thought had already occurred to Longarm. But even a convicted killer had been known to take sick like other mortals. So he got out his pocket watch, cussed it, and decided, “I could use some help from you gents in bearing him from here to that railroad platform.”

He could see nobody seemed anxious to leap at such an opportunity. So he fished out some smokes to distribute as he quietly added, “If he dies aboard the train, it’ll be all my misfortune and none of your own.”

So after they’d all lit up, they improvised a litter to carry the moaning and groaning Harmony Drake down the way, and cheerfully helped Longarm get him aboard the 8:15 eastbound.

In the time they had left while the engine took on water for the first leg of its desert run, Longarm cuffed his prisoner’s right-hand wrist to the arm of his seat against the south-facing window and gave him a cheroot and some waterproof Mexican matches, murmuring, “I have to ask the conductor something. Don’t go ‘way, unless you want a bullet where it might smart, and I’ll be back directly.” Harmony Drake said he didn’t feel like smoking. He asked if Longarm would mind removing his leg irons seeing he was secured to the seat and it felt better when he held his right knee up as high as he could get it.

Longarm had hoped the rascal wouldn’t say anything like that. He muttered, “When I come back. I know what you’re trying to sell me. I ain’t sure I’m ready to buy it. But just sit tight and like the old hymn goes, farther along we’ll know more about it.”

Then he strode up the aisle and into the car beyond, where sure enough, he caught the grizzled conductor flirting with a gal young enough to be his granddaughter.

Ticking the brim of his Stetson to the gal, Longarm curtly cut in to ask the older man if they’d be stopping to jerk water at the Gila Bend Indian Agency.

The conductor nodded and said, “East-or westbound, we always jerk water at Gila Bend. Why do you ask, Deputy?”

Longarm explained, “I’m carrying a prisoner back to Colorado with a bellyache. Leastways, he says he’s got a bellyache, with a fever. I thought I’d like to have the sawbones at that Indian agency take a look and tell me I’m just acting like an old fuss.”

The gal chimed in to say with a smile that she was not connected in any way with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but that she worked as a nurse out of the Deming Dispensary if he was in the market for her modest medical opinions.

He declared he surely was. So all three of them went on back to find Harmony Drake writhing on the floor between the seats like a sick wolverine with one paw caught in a trap.

The gal, whose light hair and coloring went by the name of Sister Ilsa Anders, stamped a foot and told him to behave like a big brave boy if he expected her to give him a proper medical examination.

Harmony Drake stared goggle-eyed, laughed more like a silly kid than a big brave boy, and asked if she cared to give him an improper going-over.

Longarm told him to behave, and got him back up on the seat as the train was pulling out of the depot with a mournful tolling of its engine bell. When Ilsa asked him to free the prisoner’s ankles, Longarm did so, and sure enough, Drake hauled his right knee up to hug against his belly with his free arm, gasping, “Oh, Lord, that feels much better!”

The ash-blonde perched on her knees in the empty seat in front to reach over and feel Drake’s forehead with the back of her hand, sadly wishing aloud for the medical kit she hadn’t packed while going to visit her kin in Yuma.

She asked Drake whether he’d been having any chills as well as hot, sweaty spells. When he allowed he had, she made him stick out his tongue. Then she turned to tell Longarm, “It’s hard to be sure with not even a proper thermometer to work with. It could be nothing more than mesenteric adenitis, albeit he seems a tad old for such childish infections. It could be pyelonephritis of the right kidney, of course.”

Longarm stared morosely out at the window lights of the town they were rapidly leaving as he quietly asked, “Or couldn’t it be a mortified appendix, such as Brother Brigham Young just suffered up to Salt Lake City, ma’am?”

The conductor whistled, and allowed he could still stop the train if they wanted to get off.

Longarm was tempted. But then the gal who seemed to know more about such grim matters said, “There are a dozen less dangerous conditions that have the same symptoms, and he’ll do better, no matter what ails him, if you get him to a doctor at a higher and cooler altitude. The muggy heat down at this end of the valley is enough to make anyone with any condition break out in a sweat, and even if this is what I’m sure we all hope it isn’t, cooling that abdomen as much as possible is indicated.” The conductor said they had some ice up in the dining car.

Longarm asked him to go fetch some as he told his prisoner and the volunteer nurse, “We’ll put an ice pack aboard and see whether it’s better or worse by the time we reach Gila Bend. Unless it’s way better, we’d best get off there and stick you in that agency clinic, old son.”

Harmony Drake protested, “I don’t want to have that bellyache Brigham Young come down with and died, damn it! Can’t you cure me better than them Mormon medicos, ma’am?”

Sister Anders said soothingly, “It may not be anything half as serious as appendicitis, sir. Didn’t you just hear me saying there were a lot of other conditions with similar symptoms?”

Harmony Drake insisted, “My gut hurts like fire and you ain’t said you can make it better, pretty lady!”

The blonde regarded him with ill-concealed distaste as she told him he’d have more to worry about if the pain suddenly vanished for no apparent reason. The conductor came back with a colored dining car attendant who was packing some linen napkins and a bucket of crushed ice.

The conductor volunteered, “We have a vacant sleeping compartment up forward if you want to operate on him, Sister Anders.”

The young blonde sighed and replied, “If only I or anyone else had the skills, or the nerve. Surgeons have removed inflamed appendixes, in a hospital, under general anesthesia, and some few of their patients have survived. But the currently accepted procedure calls for bed rest with ice packs and quinine or other febrifuges that may get the patient’s temperature down before the inflamed appendix bursts!”

Harmony Drake sobbed that he didn’t want his damned appendix busting inside him. Longarm told him not to blubber up, and suggested they get to that compartment, strip him down, and ice his guts good.

The three grown men managed to move him forward three damned cars and change, with the gal fussing at them not to make any sudden moves, as other passengers gaped at them all along the way.

Then they had the condemned killer stretched out atop a bed quilt with his shirt open and his pants half down, despite his protestations that he didn’t know Sister Anders that well.

She told him to just hesh as she placed the ice pack in place. It was soggy as hell as the warm night air got right to work on that ice. But Harmony Drake blessed her as an angel of mercy who made Florence Nightingale look like a witch on a broom, and allowed that he was feeling a whole lot better already.

The blonde’s worried blue eyes met Longarm’s. She indicated by a slight motion of her head that there were some things it might not be wise to discuss in front of the children. Longarm had naturally cuffed one of his prisoner’s wrists to a handy brass rail of the bunk bed. So he simply nodded, and the two of them stepped out into the companionway for her to confide, “We should have gotten off back there when we had the chance. I know this line. There’s nobody that can help him at that Gila Bend agency if it’s his appendix. There’s nobody anywhere who’ll be able to save him if his appendix bursts before we get him to a real surgeon. What if we were to take him off at the next water stop and catch a westbound back to Yuma?”

To which Longarm could only reply with a sigh, “What westbound coming when, Miss Ilsa? They run passenger trains both ways at night across this desert in high summer. Next westbound for Yuma will just be leaving Deming with a good twelve-hour run ahead of her.”

She made a wry face and decided, “We’d be far better off holding out for Deming and hoping for the best then. They’d never be able to help him at the Gila Bend agency, and poor old Doctor Wolfram at Growler Wash just doesn’t have the sanitary facilities for any really serious operation.”

She turned to go back into the compartment. But Longarm reached out to stop her, saying, “Hold on, ma’am. You say there’s a surgeon at that flag stop way this side of Gila Bend?”

She nodded, but said, “Retired. Seventy years old and trying to grow olives, dates, or something on an experimental farm near that trading post and desert post office. We don’t want to get off there with poor Mister Drake and an inflamed appendix! They say Doctor Wolfram was a wonder at saving limbs when he was running that Union field hospital in his salad days. But even if he still has his old skills, the risky operation that may be called for is a whole new procedure and, as I just said, old Doctor Wolfram is running an experimental farm, not a modern hospital.”

Longarm slid the compartment door open to call in to the conductor, “Could you stop this train and let the three of us off at Growler Wash, pard?”

The conductor replied, “I command this fool train. I can stop it anywhere I’ve a mind to. But why would anyone want to get off at that cluster of ‘dobes around our railroad trestle in the middle of nowhere, after sundown, during an Apache scare?”

Longarm explained, “Sister Anders here knows a retired surgeon there.”

The prisoner melting ice on the bunk with his warm belly moaned, “I don’t want no retired sawbones touching my fair white body! I want to go to that hospital in Deming you were talking about before. Then I want another doctor to look at me before anyone cuts into me. For I have heard it said that opening up a man’s belly can be perilous as all get-out!”

Longarm didn’t answer. He read enough to know Drake was only repeating common medical opinion. Thanks to modern painless surgery, opening up the skull, chest, or abdominal cavity was now more possible. But it was improbable that the patient would recover from the almost sure-to-fester incisions and sutures. It would have been unkind to tell a convicted killer what the exact odds were. So he simply let the nurse assure Drake nobody was about to cut him open if there was any other way to keep his fool appendix from busting inside him like an overstuffed sausage. Longarm had read how some docs held it was best to open and clean out the ruptured guts as a last resort, while some few others were in favor of going in ahead of time, removing the swollen appendix in one piece before it burst, and hoping plenty of phenol and prayer as you backed out of the exposed innards would offer a better hope against infection.

Sister Ilsa allowed strong liquor wasn’t likely to put Drake in any more peril than he seemed to be in. So Longarm had that dining car attendant fetch them a bottle of Maryland Rye. The conductor only stayed for one swig before he had to move on with his ticket puncher, assuring them he’d let them off at Growler Wash unless they changed their minds. So Harmony Drake got to swallow most of the pint, with Longarm and the gal helping, as the train crawled on through a desert night with plenty of stars but no moon worth mentioning.

Longarm knew the flag stop the nurse had mentioned lay about half way between Yuma and Gila Bend. So he wasn’t surprised less than two hours later to feel the train was slowing down. He was on his own feet and had his prisoner dressed more modestly, uncuffed from the bunk bed, when the conductor came back to say they were fixing to stop and to ask about their baggage.

The gal said her one overnight bag had been checked through to Deming and that she figured she might as well pick it up from their depot once she got there.

Longarm said his prisoner had no baggage, and allowed he’d trust the same railroad with his own light baggage, seeing they’d all be going to the end of the line shortly if Doc Wolfram could do something for Harmony Drake’s indisposition. He felt no call to discuss funeral arrangements in front of any man before he was sure they’d be needed.

So with Drake allowing that he was starting to feel better, thanks to all that ice, or Maryland Rye, they got him out on the car platform by the time their train rattled across a trestle spanning a wide dry wash and hissed to a stop on the far side, with a handful of window lights watching them from the low starlit adobes of the desert hamlet.

Some dirtily lit figures commenced to drift toward them as Longarm and the gal helped the gimpy Harmony Drake down the steps to the trackside gravel. Sister Ilsa called out for help in getting a mighty sick man over to Doctor Wolfram’s place. After some buzzing back and forth, one of the hands allowed in a friendly tone that he knew who they were talking about. So it seemed as if they all wanted to help as the conductor up on the platform yanked his bell cord and the night train proceeded onward up the line.

Longarm asked which way they were trying to herd his sick prisoner, seeing they seemed to be milling nowhere in particular, even with the tracks cleared and nothing blocking progress in any fool direction.

Then somebody drove another night train right against the back of Longarm’s skull, and he just had time to gasp, “Gee, Doc, I thought she was a nice gal,” before this inkwell opened wide and swallowed him lock, stock, and barrel.

Chapter 2

After he’d been at it a spell, Longarm got to wondering why he was soaring through the night like an owl-bird with a headache, high above the stars. Then it came to him that he was looking up, not down, at the starry desert sky and that his only resemblance to any species of bird was that he seemed to be lying spread-eagle on his back as naked as a jay.

He naturally tried to do something about that, and decided to stop and think some more when somebody drove a red hot hat pin into his bare back. For the sons of bitches had staked him by his wrists and ankles aboard an ant pile, and this was no time to wake a million or more red harvesters from their evening repose!

The night air all around was goose-pimple cold by now. It wouldn’t warm enough to really stir the multitudes just under him before the sun rose a bit. But once you’sorted all those stars into constellations, they read that it was well past midnight. That meant he had four to six hours to bust loose, without busting more of the crust he lay upon. They’d left him a swell choice. He could relax and just wait to be eaten alive after sunrise, or invite thousands of tiny venomous jaws to enjoy him as a late-night snack by straining at his bonds!

As he lay there considering his grim options, he became aware of a dark figure standing over what would be the head of his grave if the bastards had had the common courtesy to just gun a man and bury him. After a spell, Longarm croaked, “Howdy, you son of a bitch. I hope you’ll forgive my not rising.”

There came no answer. Longarm called his mysterious tormentor a mighty silly son of a bitch, adding, “Shoot and be damned, you asshole. The show you’re waiting to see don’t start until well after sunrise, and I hope they bite you too!”

Then, as he gingerly craned his neck for a better look, he saw that the Milky Way sort of outlined one of the figure’s shoulders, if it had had a real shoulder. Then the pattern fell in place and Longarm marveled, “Now why would they have wanted to strip me bare-ass, then hang my duds on cross sticks like they were building a damned old scarecrow?”

His head still throbbed, but it was working better now, so before long he decided, “Right. It’s far more noticeable from a passing train. Billy Vail sent me all the way to Arizona to transport a paid assassin with an escape-artist rep. So Drake and his pals knew full well that as soon as I didn’t come back to Denver with him, Denver would come looking for me and him.”

His duds didn’t even flutter in the chill night air.

Longarm almost shrugged before he remembered all those tiny jaws under him. “They slickered me in a way that makes Samson in the Good Book look like a suspicious banker,” he continued out loud. “At least he got to lay Miss Delilah before she made a chump out of him. So they had to know I worked for a smarter lawman, and we all heard that conductor commenting on the three of us getting off here.”

An August meteor shot across the Milky Way on high. So Longarm made the only sensible wish a man in his position could think of, and added aloud, “The all-points Billy Vail sends out by wire will trace the three of us this far. That conductor warned us about Victorio’s band being off the reservation this summer. Victorio ain’t about to lead his bronco bunch west betwixt the Fourth Cav at Fort Apache and the Sixth Cav at Fort Huachuca, even in cooler weather. But how many white eyes know this, and what are they likely to say when they find yours truly eaten alive on an ant pile Apache style, with my prisoner and a pretty white gal missing? Would you want to trail bronco Apache across this desert in high summer when everyone but the army agrees it’s a proper chore for the damned old army?”

He reflected nobody who’d seen him getting off that train with what seemed a sick prisoner and a nursing sister would be in any position to describe anyone else. But that line of reasoning only worked if Drake’s pals had wiped out even the modest population of a small flag stop.

“I’m sorry, Victorio,” Longarm muttered aloud. “Some of my own kind can beat any Indian born at thinking mean, and you’re still likely to get blamed for another one of your famous massacres here.”

Then he heard a soft female voice call out, “Onde esta, El Brazo Largo?”

Since Brazo Largo meant Longarm in Border Spanish, the tied-down man so addressed was inspired to quietly call back, “Aqui. Quien es?”

Then a small dark angel of mercy who smelled just awful hunkered over him with the starlight gleaming on the keen blade of her barlow knife. When Longarm warned her about the ants, she said she knew. She’d heard those ladrones laughing about what they were planning to do to him long before they’d done it.

His dusky rescuer worked gently and carefully on the rawhide the sons of bitches had bound him with. So he only got bitten on the bare ass one time as she helped him roll free of the sleepy but pissed-off ant pile. He grabbed his duds and got them well clear of the milling red ants. They’d stolen his six-gun, badge, and identification, along with his watch and derringer. But he was mildly surprised to discover they’d left him his Stetson and stovepipe army boots, as well his tweed pants, long underwear, and hickory shirt.

As he hunkered amid stickerbrush to cover his nakedness, he learned the gal answered to Rosalinda. She said she spoke more English than the pals of Harmony Drake had thought. So once she’d heard them discussing their plans for her, she’d hidden out a full day in the last place a stranger to such parts might think to look.

An August afternoon on the flat roof of a ‘dobe trading post, listening to them talking about you below, accounted for the poor little thing’s dire need of a bath. She and her sweated-up cotton shift now reeked with the combined odors of mesquite smoke,‘dobe dust, and armpit all over.

Once he was dressed, although flat broke and without a weapon to his name, Rosalinda led him toward the only lamplight left, explaining how los ladrones had lit candle stubs all about to make the deserted flag stop seem more lively. She said she’d put them out to prevent the place from going up in flames as she’d heard them intending.

As they got to the trading post door she’d left ajar, Longarm saw an arrow stuck in the jam. It might have struck him as more artistic if it hadn’t been one of those gussied-up toy arrows they made to sell tourists along the railroad lines.

He wrinkled his nose and said, “It’s nice to know they’re capable of some mistakes. That blonde they had laying for me on the night train from Yuma was too slick for this child by half! She forced a card on me, like a tinhorn dealing to a greenhorn! I was the one insisting on getting off here! They must have been laughing like hell as they rode off with my badge, my other stuff, and my prisoner!”

She said they surely had been as she led him inside, waving at the trade goods scattered carelessly and the candle stub set in a pile of tinder under a wall shelf as she explained, “As I told you, they did not know I spoke English, or that I was right above their heads as they were plotting. I knew who you were as soon as I heard one of them say they could sell your pistol and identification in Sonora to los rurales. Everyone this close to the border knows of the reward on the head of El Brazo Largo.”

He asked her to rein in and start at the beginning. So she did, and she was interesting to look at too as she told her sad, simple story.

Longarm figured her for a Mexican-Papago breed of nineteen at the most. For the slight waves in her dusty black hair spoke Spanish, and while her pretty little heart-shaped face spelled Papago, she still had her short but ample figure.

The desert-dwelling Papago nation offered living proof that old Professor Darwin might have been on to something with that notion of flora, fauna, and folks evolving to fit their ways of life. It was easy to see by their blossoms how the desert cactus plants had started out as some kin to the rosebush, forced to get by in country too dry for any regular rose. The Papago had likely begun as plain old Indians. But a heap of living where the living was hard on a jackrabbit had produced a breed of short, wiry folks who could thrive on next to nothing, or bloat up like a circus fat lady if they dared to eat half as much as anyone else—Anglo, Mex, or even Pueblo.

As if to prove Professor Darwin’s point, Rosalinda rummaged amid the spilled trade goods for something to eat as she told him how she and her two sisters, the daughters of a Butterfield wrangler and his Indian mujer, had all three married up with the Anglo trader here at Growler Wash, a nice old Mormon gent called Pop Wolfram.

Longarm forced himself not to cut in. It was obvious that that so-called nurse aboard the train had been making up her retired surgeon in this dying settlement. Rosalinda went on to explain how the real Wolfram had set up this trading post when the Butterfield coaches still had a relay stage there, where the east-west stage line crossed a north-south desert trail up Growler Wash from the Gila Flats to the north.

Traveling by coach across the southwest corner of Arizona Territory had never been a pleasure. So travelers and even the U.S. Mail had given it up entirely when the new rail line between Yuma and Deming had followed the same route across the burning wastes. To say business had been slow at an abandoned Butterfield relay station and occasional flag stop would be to imply you didn’t sell much soda pop in a graveyard.

One of Rosalinda’s sisters and co-wives had gone off to live back on the blanket with Indian kin. Rosalinda and a more optimistic older sister had hung on, hoping things would pick up. When they hadn’t, her husband and elder sister had left Rosalinda in charge and flagged a train to Yuma, in hopes of finding a buyer for all this unsold merchandise.

Rosalinda said she’d been waiting there alone for the better part of a week when four riders had come along the tracks one early morn, leading two more saddle mounts and four pack mules.

She said that when one of them addressed her in Spanish, she’d been smart enough to reply in the same, not letting on that she followed their drift as they said mean things about her tits in English.

As she and Longarm sipped pork and beans from the cans as if it was soup, cow-camp style, Rosalinda asked with a pouty face if he thought her chupas were too big for the rest of her. He assured her she had chupas muy linda, and asked her to go on.

She said the riders had begun by helping themselves to three mules’ worth of trail supplies, with the one speaking Spanish making up a big fib about paying up as they were leaving. She’d figured what the payoff was likely to be when one of them sniggered in English about her great little culo. So she’d drifted out back as if headed for the outhouse. Then she’d swiftly climbed a pole ladder to the flat roof and pulled it up after her. She started to explain how she and her sisters had often cooled off up yonder on straw matting after a long hot day. But Longarm bade her to stick to the mystery riders.

So she did, and it was soon less mysterious. They’d yelled back and forth when they’d searched in vain for her outside. And then she’d been listening at the stovepipe through the clay and matting roof as they’d whiled away a whole day waiting for Longarm, a pal called Harmony, and a slick-talking gal called Goldmine Gloria.

When she got that far, Longarm put down his empty can and groaned, “Oh, Lord, I’ll never live this down!”

“I’ve read the fliers out on a confidence gal called Goldmine Gloria Weaver, and I let her force cards on me anyway! You say your man and older sister caught the train to Yuma about a week ago, Miss Rosalinda?”

She nodded and sighed, “I fear they never meant for to come back. Papa always liked fat Maria best. She is willing for to do things my other sister and me find perverse. Is harder for even a Mormon to get by with more than one mujer in California, no?”

Longarm said soberly, “They might not have made it that far. A killer called Harmony Drake was arrested in Yuma just ten days ago. If pals who were still at large sent for Goldmine Gloria right after, she could have been on the night train from Deming when it stopped around dawn for your man and your sister. They call her Goldmine Gloria because she makes friends fast aboard trains, with a view to selling a gold mine, water rights, or whatever. It wouldn’t have taken such a slick talker long to sense the golden opportunity her newly made friends from Growler Wash were offering her on a silver platter.”

He shook his head wearily and added, “And I was the one who insisted we get off here, like that fly stepping into the parlor of that spider!”

There was a brass alarm clock ticking on a shelf near the emptied cash till. If it was halfway right, they had a little over two hours’ wait for that train down from Deming. Meanwhile the outlaws would be riding south along a goose-pimple-cool trail, and they’d likely make a few more miles before it warmed up enough to matter after sunrise.

He added the travel times in his head and groaned aloud. “I don’t see how I can make it come out right. Say we get in to Yuma early in the morning and I have no trouble rounding up a federal posse. Say the next train back leaves earlier than usual tomorrow evening, and we cut their trail in the dark with no trouble. The border lies, what, sixty-odd miles, or two nights of hard riding, from here?”

She nodded, cheerfully considering, and said you followed the flats west of the Growler Range as far as Organpipe Pass, then punched through a cactus jungle astride the unguarded border, and then it was almost all downhill to the Sea of Cortez and a steamboat out to most anywhere.

Longarm swore under his breath and decided, “Way too tight. I have orders not to cross the border anymore, and I’d play hell getting more fussy lawmen to ride into Sonora with me. Can you think of anywhere closer I could come by a pony or, better yet, a riding mule, ma’am?” She said her other sister had been able to walk home to her maternal kin holed up for the summer in a nearby canyon. She added that her uncle, as close to being a chief as the free and easy Papago would abide, kept a remuda of riding stock. Then she spoiled it all by pointing out how Longarm would be riding after those ladrones alone and unarmed.

He muttered, “When you’re right you’re right, ma’am. I don’t suppose you’d have anything like a shooting iron for sale around here.” She shook her dusty head and said those pals of Harmony Drake had even helped themselves to most of the ammunition they’d had in the store.

A less experienced questioner might have let that one word get past him. But Longarm brightened and asked, “You said most, Miss Rosalinda?”

She shrugged her tawny shoulders under her filthy thin shift and moved around the end of the counter to produce a couple of brick-sized cardboard boxes as she told him los ladrones had laughed to see them on sale.

Longarm smiled thinly and said he could see why they hadn’t bothered to steal the ammunition. He asked, “How come you stock buffalo rounds down here where the jackrabbit and Gila monster roams?” She said there were mule deer over in the Growlers, and then recalled one of those Butterfield hands across the way had kept an old single-shot hunting rifle.

Since she’d already told him about that outfit pulling up stakes and moving on, he came close to letting it go at that. But they paid Longarm to be nosy. So he was, and she recalled they’d been stuck with over a hundred rounds of .50-120-600 when the old-fashioned coot across the way had come down with the plague and died on the job.

Longarm bent to snatch that unlit candle stub from the floor as he asked if she could spare him some matches and show him around the abandoned stage stop.

She said she could, but being a woman, pestered him all the way across the dusty road about his eccentric taste in rifle-guns. She said, “Even if you find the pobreci to’s old gun, you do not wish for to go after five hombres and a dangerous mujer with a single-shot weapon, do you?”

To which he could only reply, “They don’t pay me to do what I want, and the only rifle chambered .50-120-600 is that Sharps ‘74 Big Fifty. I’ll allow it takes forever to load a Big Fifty next to, say, a Winchester or even a Spencer. But once she’s loaded, watch out!”

They found another dumb arrow stuck on the open door across the way. Rosalinda said she’d noticed the silly toy when she’d darted all over to snuff all those candles.

Longarm lit the candle he was packing just inside the door, and saw how the Butterfield outfit had left the heavy plank tables and benches in the dining room so those fake Indian raiders could tip them over.

The office next door was empty, save for old papers strewn across the dirt floor. Longarm nodded at the snuffed-out candle amid a pile of crumpled paper in one corner, and said, “That wouldn’t have done a whole lot, even if you hadn’t nipped it on the bud. These thick ‘dobe walls are sort of tough to set afire.”

Then he noticed something black and limp as the skin of a witch’s cat draped over a corner of the windowsill. When he picked it up he saw it was a gal’s fancy black lace chemise. He sniffed it and said, “Brand-new, never worn, and meant to be found. Reckon Goldmine Gloria wanted to be remembered as a gal who’d been wearing clean and classy unmentionables when those red devils dragged her fair white body off to a fate worse than death.”

Rosalinda gasped. “Ay, que lujoso! Is that real French encaje?”

Longarm handed the frilly underwear to her, saying, “Goldmine Gloria seems a real spender, considering how honestly she comes by her money.”

The little breed gal held the black lace as if she feared it was a fragile treasure as she gasped, “Is for me? I can have it? Muchas gracias, and I can not wait for to put it on. Pero first I ought to take a bath, no?”

He allowed that seemed a sensible notion, and moved on, shielding the flickering candle flame with his free hand as they explored the cluttered ‘dobe maze. He could sense the bitterness of the suddenly out-of-work coaching hands as they’d hurriedly packed to move on, traveling by the rails that were making long-distance coaching obsolete. Longarm considered himself as progressive as most, but you had to feel wistful for overnight old-timers in a rapidly changing West.

He murmured aloud, “Seems the old boys just got good at trapping beaver when it came time to hunt buffalo instead. Reckon the older hand who was working here when he died hunted buff before the Concord coach became the rage.”

She told him the old man had been sort of silly to hunt rabbit with his old buffalo gun. She said, “Is not much meat on el conejo for to begin with.”

Longarm grimaced at the mental picture, and agreed a Big Fifty was more gun than one needed to hunt skinny desert jacks.

But he was after bigger game. So he kept searching until he found it at last, wrapped in a dusty bedroll atop a wardrobe in one of the back bunk chambers.

He grinned wolfishly as he unwrapped the Sharps ‘74 .50-120-600, noting it had been cleaned and stored away with a thick coat of whale oil. The tooled steel of the sliding-block breech moved slick as silk, and the peep sights were set at five hundred yards, or close range for a Big Fifty. He turned to Rosalinda with a smile on his lips and death in his gun-muzzle gray eyes to ask her how far they had to walk to see her Papago kin about that riding stock.

She said, “No more than three hours, and will not be too hot for to walk before nine or ten in the morning. But those ladrones carry rifles too. Repeating rifles that go bang, bang, bang!”

Longarm patted the oiled steel of the Big Fifty and calmly informed her, “This artillery piece don’t bang. She throws way better than two times the weight of a Winchester, more than three times as far, with the punch to stop full-grown buffalo.”

Rosalinda shook her dusty head and pointed out, “One at a time. There are five of them. Six if you count that blond puta. What do you expect the others to do after you get off your single shot, hold their own fire as they patiently await their own turns for to die, optomisto mio?”

Chapter 3

The eastern sky was pearling pink behind the jagged black skyline of the Growler Range by the time Longarm had both Rosalinda and the Big Fifty atop the flat-roofed trading post with him.

She’d washed her tawny hide and wavy black hair with laundry soap and sprinkled herself with lilac water before slipping into that black lace chemise and nothing else. She seemed to feel well dressed for polite Papago society. Longarm had to allow she looked as fine as she smelled now.

While she’d been washing up, Longarm had busied himself choosing other stuff they’d need for desert travel. He’d left most of their supplies below, but hauled a canvas bandolier he’d loaded with Big Fifty cartridges topside, along with the gun they went with.

It had been some time since Longarm had handled an old buffalo gun. But there seemed to be no rush as, way off in the desert, the night train from Deming whistled something off the tracks.

He levered the sliding block down to expose the half-inch chamber. As he slid the monstrous brass cartridge in, Rosalinda was asking why they were waiting for the train up there. She explained, “When you wish for to stop a train at Growler Wash, you must stand by the tracks and wave something at it, comprende?”

Longarm levered the block back up to note with satisfaction how old Christian Sharps’s simple but clever action snapped tight as any banker might want his money vault. Earlier breech-loaders had tended to leak hot gasses in a marksman’s face. But the breech designed by old Christian sealed itself even tighter when pressure built up inside. That was why his guns could take ever grander loads of powder and ball, starting with the military round of seventy, then the original plains rifle round of ninety, and then on to this swamping 120 grains that lobbed a bullet farther than most men could aim, if the truth were to be told.

As he braced the loaded and locked rifle on the ‘dobe parapet he told Rosalinda, “Ain’t aiming to flag no train to Yuma. I want to see if anyone else crawls out of a hidey-hole to flag it down.” She asked, “Who could you be thinking of? I told you those ladrones were planning for to sell your badge and wallet south of the border, for the reward on El Brazo Largo!”

Longarm nodded grimly and replied, “Didn’t you tell me you were a Papago?

Ain’t you never heard of a rabbit doubling back on its tracks? We don’t have it in writing that all six of ‘em were planning on such a long dusty ride.”

Rosalinda pouted, “Had my mother wished for to raise us all on rabbit meat and cactus fruit, she would not have wed our Mexican papa. But I know how game doubles back for to fool the hunter. Pero for why have they not tried for to kill you some more if they did not ride off as we thought?” Longarm said, “Like you thought, you mean. I’d want that flashy Goldmine Gloria out of my hair before I commenced to cross over the border and moseyed my gringo way to a sleepy Mex seaport, no offense.”

She told him he was even smarter than they said he was along that same border. She asked if it was true El Brazo Largo had once wiped out a Mexican Army artillery column over in the Baja.

He modestly allowed he’d had help, and added, “I get along with a few of the more decent Mex lawmen. They ain’t all bad. Just the total pendejo running the country.”

She agreed El Presidente Diaz was sin faita un chingado zorillo, or a fucking skunk, and then they could see the smoke plume of the night train from Deming, puffing as if it really wanted to get to Yuma by sunrise.

Longarm full-cocked the Big Fifty and braced it across the ‘dobe parapet they were hunkered behind as the train came into full view, going lickety-split and never slowing down as it rumbled across the trestle spanning Growler Wash.

Longarm put the hammer back on half-cock and decided, “Reckon they figured Goldmine Gloria would stand out less in Mexico than along a railroad line she’s been known to frequent. You say your uncle’s camp is about a three-hour walk?” She said they had plenty of time for a hearty breakfast and some strong black coffee to get them off to a good start.

He started to argue. But she’d been letting him have a hell of a lot of stuff on easy credit, and he was counting on her goodwill to set him up with that Indian riding stock he couldn’t pay for either. So he allowed he’d scout to the south for sign while she warmed up some more canned goods. it was getting light enough to see colors now, so going down the ladder ahead of Rosalinda, lest she need some catching, was a tad tougher on his nerves than going up it had been. For that lace chemise covered her chunky brown thighs a third of the way down if you were standing beside her. But the view from below was more sassy, and it seemed to be true that Spanish ancestry made for more body hair than pure Indian.

But she was a married-up gal. Sort of. Longarm had long suspected Mormons and Indians got on better with one another than either could with Queen Victoria’s crowd because they weren’t as inclined to primp for their womenfolk.

It took a heap of flowers, books, and romantic twaddle to justify the warmer feelings a properly brought-up Eastern gal was expected to have for a weak-chinned banker’s son instead of, say, a poor but honest cowhand or, hell, a good-looking blacksmith who didn’t own his own business yet. Queens and such were expected to fall madly in love as diplomacy dictated, as if they were brood mares being paired with the proper stallion to drop foals with proper papers. So they had to get married in cathedrals with mile-long trains, organs blaring, bells ringing, and the multitude waving lest anybody wonder what in thunder the happy couple saw in one another.

Brother Brigham of the Latter-Day Saints had noticed while headed west that he had more women than men tagging along, and seeing that both the King James Good Book and that Book of Mormon encouraged folks to be fruitful and multiply, he’d revealed with little romantic blathering that it was all right for a man to marry up with all the wives who’d have him. The Indians wandering the western deserts had already come to much the same conclusion. But neither pragmatic bunch carried on as shockingly as some newspaper reporters alleged. Rape was almost unheard of among the Saints and their mostly Uto-Aztec-speaking neighbors, and while some parents were always inclined to marry off the daughter of the house to a rich old man, neither the Salt Lake Temple nor your average medicine man condoned the practice of making a maiden marry against her will, which was more than some royal families could say.

So it was safe to say Rosalinda and her sisters had married up with that missing Mormon trader fair and square, for practical reasons. It was easy to see little Rosalinda had a healthier appetite than your average handsome Papago was ever going to satisfy.

As she whipped up her second breakfast before sunrise, Longarm and the Big Fifty scouted out across the desert pavement to the south for sign. It was easy to find and easy to read as the first rays of sunrise caught everything at a low angle in golden and lavender tones. Desert pavement was what you got between the tall columns of cactus and low thorny scrub after the dry winds blew away all the finer dust and the mineral salts from deeper down were sucked to the surface by the rare rains to cement the fine pebbles and coarse sand together. Mexicans called it caliche. By any name it formed a brittle surface, thick as cardboard, that gave away the progress of any critter heavier than, say, a rat or lizard.

Exactly six steel-shod ponies and a couple of unshod and heavier-laden mules or smaller ponies had moved south the night before in a column of twos at a trot. Longarm made a mental note that for all her faults, the brassy Goldmine Gloria was a good rider. You ate more miles at a cool trot than at any other gait. But sissy riders of any gender found that the most uncomfortable way to ride. Experienced riders did too. But you called them experienced because they knew how to get the most mileage out of a horse. It helped some if you stood in the stirrups and only let the jiggedy-jogging saddle spank you now and again.

Longarm turned and headed back to the trading post, adding in his head. He knew experienced riders would still be moving at this hour, trotting two furlongs, walking one, trail-breaking for, say, ten minutes out of every ninety, then slowing down to fifteen-or twenty-minute rests for each hour in the saddle as their confidence grew and their mounts got wearier. He knew an old-time Pony Express rider could have made it to the border by this time. But those hell-for-leather kids had gotten to change ponies every ten miles or so. Harmony Drake’s bunch had to get sixty or more before they’d be out of his jurisdiction.

He nodded to himself and decided, “They’ll play it cavalry style. They’ll call thirty miles a fair ride and hole up for the day no more than halfway to the border. So if I head after them after sun down, the way I’m supposed to, they’ll be crossing into Sonora about the time I find their damned midway camp at dawn!”

He stomped inside to find Rosalinda, naked as a jay, setting a plank kitchen table with their heroic breakfast.

She’d been enough to give a man pause in that black lace chemise. It hadn’t half shown how flawless her smooth tawny charms really were. A lot of gals that were still worth screwing had protruding or otherwise odd belly buttons, mismatched nipples, and so on. But Rosalinda’s casually displayed body was just plain perfection.

He tried not to comment as he sat down to inhale bully beef and tomato preserves with Arbuckle Brand coffee. But as she sat demurely bare-ass across from him, she felt obliged to tell him she’d stripped to keep from spattering her swell new dress.

Longarm laughed despite himself and said, “That black lace left behind as a red herring is meant to be worn as a combinacion, not a vestido for street wear, Miss Rosalinda.” She nodded and said, “You told me. Pero I do not intend for to wear it on the streets of Yuma. I intend to wear it for Papago friends and relations to admire. Do you really think my chupas are too big? I see you avoid them with your eyes and I am not used to this. Even my poor old husband liked for to look at the three of us as we served him his morning coffee in bed.” Longarm sighed and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with your tits, Miss Rosalinda. It’s just that you’re a married-up lady and … Hold on, did you say you and your sisters served a Mormon coffee in bed, all three of you stark naked?”

She pouted. “Si. Then he asked us for to put on a naughty show for him. He was generous and kind, pero as I said, old. So perhaps he had trouble with his manhood and needed more inspiracien than most. As I told you, Fat Maria was willing. Pero Felicidad and me felt it would be bad medicine, as well as a mortal sin, if two blood relatives did such things to one another while he and a third mujer went reverso.”

Longarm cut in with a laugh. “Never mind the lip-smacking details. A dirty old man pretending to be a Mormon should have known how most Indians would rather indulge in cannibalism than incest in any way, shape, or form. He had to be pretending to be a Mormon because, whilst a real Latter-Day Saint might or might not make Indian wives wear that special Mormon underwear, he’d never let them serve him coffee, tea, or tobacco, in bed or anywhere else. How did he go about convincing the three of you he was marrying up with you according to the Book of Mormon?”

She looked blank, and then recalled the old trader had said something about writing their names in the flyleaf of his Good Book to make it all lawful and binding. Then she asked what was so funny.

He said, “You ain’t married up to nobody, Miss Rosalinda. If it’s any comfort to you, Goldmine Gloria doubtless pulled the wool over his eyes as well on the way in to Yuma. I’ll try to find out what happened to him and your elder sister when I catch up with the sass. So what say we quit messing around and get cracking!” She said that sounded like a grand suggestion, and swept the tin cup and plates from the table to climb up on top of it and spread herself in wide welcome by the dawn’s early light.

Longarm rose thoughtfully to his feet, unbuttoning his shirt, as he murmured, “Well, as long as it’s all in the line of duty …”

But he enjoyed it too, once he was pronging her hard and deep with his feet on the dirt floor, a palm braced atop the table to either side of her wriggling hips, and with her bare ankles over both his naked shoulders. For she was almost too tight for him, and he believed her when she bragged that she’d never had that much manhood inside her, or any man at all for some time. He told her she was built just right for him as well. So they naturally wound up back in her bedroom, and a good time was had by all as Rosalinda showed him what that imaginative old trader had wanted her to do with her sister. He had to allow it didn’t seem as sinful, seeing she’d just had a bath and they weren’t even distant cousins.

So between one swell position and another, it was broad daylight outside before they headed out, half satisfied and heavily laden, as the morning sun made short work of the cooling effects of that hot shower they’d enjoyed under cold water out back.

Longarm had suggested Rosalinda load up on gifts for her Papago kinfolk, seeing she’d be staying with them till it was safe for her and her one surviving sister at the trading post they likely now owned.

Aside from that Big Fifty and its bulky ammunition, Longarm knew how much more important water could be than other trail supplies in the country out ahead. So he helped himself to a couple of five-gallon water bags, but left them empty for now, with water weighing eight pounds a gallon and Rosalinda sure they could make her uncle’s summer camp on a couple of canteens. Longarm slung the Big Fifty and bandolier of buffalo rounds across his chest, and shoved all the trail grub he had room for in the two gunnysacks he’d packed with water bags, flannel blankets, canvas tarps, and so on. Then he tied the ends of the two sacks together and slung the knot over his left shoulder to take the lead Indian style. Indian men didn’t walk ahead of womankind to be rude. They considered it cowardly to let women and children stomp on the horse apples and rattlesnakes ahead of them. They walked with no load but their weapons so they could spot trouble faster than a gal trudging head-down with all their baggage. But there was no way a gal as small as Rosalinda could have packed both their loads on a level walk, even on a cooler morning.

Longarm figured it was now somewhere in the eighties, and he knew it would soon be a whole lot hotter. But with any luck they’d be able to make it by noon. Folks of any race along the border knocked off for la siesta by noon if they had a lick of sense and any reason to go on living. Folks from other parts were inclined to consider la siesta a lazy Latin habit. They were used to dividing their days up into hours set aside for working, resting, eating, sleeping, and so on. Both the Spanish-speaking folks and the desert dwellers knew better. Whether Moorish or American Indian, they divided their days up into times of being too hot or cool enough to move. This inspired them to keep hours others found odd. The same lazy-looking Mexican you’d find knocking off for the afternoon was likely to be open for business at midnight, or having a party at three in the morning. The hands of a man-made clock had less say than the rays of that ferocious sun up yonder in this part of the world.

But this early in the day, the southwest corner of Arizona Territory could get almost pretty in its own exotic way. Whether you called it the Yuma Desert or the northern reaches of the Sonora Desert, it was all trying to make up its mind whether it could best be described as lusher than usual desert or drier than usual chaparral. The flora and fauna of such long-established dry country had had time to adapt to it more ways than you saw in younger deserts. Cactus grew in all sizes and shapes, from bitty pincushions to the tall skinny organpipes and far more impressive saguaro, looming all about like holdup victims in green Robin Hood outfits.

Vicious jumping cholla tried to look like a cross between a cactus and a crab-apple tree, as if tempting the unwary traveler to get too close. There was lots of prickle-pear, and the knee-high barrel cactus that could save your life if you ran out of water and didn’t mind drinking what looked like warm spit and tasted like soapy dishwater. Wherever the cactus roots or flash-flood washes left room, you saw thin chaparral, or stickerbush, from creosote and catclaw to eight-or ten-foot whitebark and paloverde.

It was just as well the egg-shell-white trail they were following got plenty of dappled shade as they trudged ever upwards to the jagged teeth of the Growler Range to the east. It was already warm enough for the snakes and lizards to have quit for the day. Here and there something rustled amid the stickerbrush as they passed. But the only critters to be seen were buzzards and white-trimmed chocolate-dipped birds about the size and flocking habits of common crows. Rosalinda called them halcones. He had no call to argue with her, seeing she hailed from the same country as the big brown birds. But they didn’t look like hawks to a West-by-God-Virginia boy.

He figured they’d walked about six country miles when they came to a dip, shaded by whitebark and carpeted with creeping thyme. Rosalinda dropped her own load and threw herself full length on the soft sweet-scented herbage, declaring she needed a rest but wouldn’t be too averse to some gentle screwing in such a romantics setting.

Longarm was leg-sore enough to put down his load and prop the Big Fifty in a fork of whitebark. But even as he flopped down beside her, he said, “It’s fixing to get hotter before it gets any cooler, querida. It ain’t that I don’t admire the way you’re smiling up at me from under the hem of that scandalous lace chemise, but we just don’t have the time!”

She rolled over on her hands and knees with the lacy hem all the way up around her waist as she pouted, “Just one chingita before we get to my uncle’s band, por favor. Is impossible to do in daylight without making the children laugh and point the fingers.”

Longarm was sorely tempted. Most men would have been. But it was going on 9:30 or later, and they had a ways to go before that August sun rose high enough to bake their brains inside their skulls on the open trail. He said so, as Rosalinda wiggled her bare brown behind and moaned over her shoulder, like an alley cat in heat, that she’d settle for two fingers if he was feeling too flojo to do it right.

He laughed despite himself and said, “It’s tempting enough just looking at it, as well you know. But sin faita, mi corazen, the two of us are fixing to wind up with heat stroke if we don’t make it to that canyon!”

She shook her head, tossing her unbound brunette waves as she insisted, “Pero no. Is going for to rain this afternoon. Clouds will shade the trail ahead for us by the time you satisfy me. Metetelo al funciete and satisfy me if you are in so much of a hurry!”

Longarm tried to ignore the pressure inside his pants as he gaped up at the clear blue desert sky and demanded, “How did you come up with that grand notion, querida? I’ve heard tell of wishful thinking, and it ain’t that I don’t wish we had the time, but …”

“Ay, gringo mio,” she cut in. “Did nobody ever tell you for to watch the birds along the trail?”

Longarm swept the clear sky with his keen eyes as he mused, half to himself, “I don’t see any birds up yonder at the moment.”

Then the penny clinked inside the player piano, and as the old song began to tinkle, he nodded at the only bird in sight, a distant buzzard perched atop a tall green saguaro, and decided, “Right. Birds don’t fly as much when they sense a sudden change in the weather. You get your summer rains from the southwest in these parts, right?”

She moaned, “Es verdad. Take off your clothes. Put them away if you wish for to wear them dry this evening. Then put it in me and make us both sweat a lot, so we can really enjoy the cold shower we are in for whether we are entwined in el rapto supremo or not!”

Chapter 4

The Sonora Desert was unusually hot and dry because it was usually cut off from the Pacific westerlies by the coast ranges on the far side of the Colorado-Gila Delta. It was unusually green for a desert because from time to time it paid host to wet contrary winds from the Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California to the southwest. When it did this it got a lot of tropical rain all at once, along with downright dangerous thunder and lightning. So Longarm and Rosalinda were fairly sated by the time the desert downpour ended. For the reverends who advised horny young gents to take cold showers for their hard-ons had never showered with as horny a pal as Rosalinda, and every time the lightning had flashed it had inspired her already tight charms to clamp down like a hot, slick hangman’s noose while they both wallowed in slippery mud and warm pounding rain.

The sun came back out to dry their hides and freshly laundered duds as they strolled on, naked as Adam and Eve before the Fall, had Adam been packing a Big Fifty along with his burlap sacks and such.

Where desert pavement lay flat, the rainwater was already getting blotted up by a root jungle that would have made Professor Darwin hug himself with glee. Stickerbush and cactus could grow closer to each other than either could abide neighbors of its own breed. The cactus roots spread far and wide but shallow, while the creosote and mesquite reached way down deep for water the cactus had failed to sop up near the surface.

Cactus got by between rains by storing water aboveground in its green pulp. In a wet year, such as this one, cactus could overindulge. It was usually too much water that ended the otherwise long and uneventful life of a tall saguaro. As Longarm and Rosalinda passed close by a couple, they could see the pleated thorny trunks were already commencing to bloat like the arms and legs of untended battlefield casualties, and by the day’s end Longarm knew more than one ancient saguaro would have split its thorny green hide, like a kid grown too big for his britches, to expose its vulnerable juicy pulp to all the thirsty critters, large and small, who lay in wait all around for such rare treats.

Somewhere in the hazy blue-green distance they heard a long groan and the muffled crash of something big and soft smashing brittle dry branches. Rosalinda said, “Hohokam. They do that sometimes when it has been raining.”

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, “We’d best stop here and put our duds back on. I thought that was a water-logged saguaro just now. Ain’t Hohokam what your Papago kinfolk call the old time pueblo farmers who dug all those canals across a desert that must have been a tad less sand in their day?”

Rosalinda paused to take her black lace chemise from one of her own sacks as she explained. “Hohokam is difficult for to explain in Spanish or English. My mother’s people do not always think a word as you Saltu, Anglo or Mexican, say it. Is bad medicine for to say muerto or dead in the tongue you call Papago. Hohokam may be thought as ‘all used up’ or ‘those who have gone before us,’ comprende?”

Longarm hunkered to remove his boots and put on his underwear as he replied with a dubious frown, “I ain’t sure I do. I know the folks we think of as Apache or Navajo call the old-timers who left ruins up in their neck of the woods Anasazi. They seem unclear if they mean Ancient Enemies or just Old Timers when they call ‘em Anasazi. I can’t say I ever heard a Navajo call a dying cactus an Anasazi, though.”

As he pulled his boots back on over his long underwear and pants, the part-Indian gal half-concealed her tawny charms in black lace as she explained, “Saguaros used to be people and still have spirits, don’t they?

You Saltu sometimes use the manlike saguaro for target practice, or even rope one and pull it over, for no reason. But Papago respect and honor them because they live longer than most grandmothers and give sweet red fruit for to eat or make wine, if you ask them politely.”

Longarm buttoned his shirt and nodded, saying, “I follow your drift. Sort of. What say we push on to see if your alive and kicking kin can fix this child up with some riding stock.”

They could, once you got them calmed down.

The almost childishly friendly Papago greeted Longarm as well as Rosalinda like long-lost kissing cousins they’d never expected to see alive again. They both were relieved of their bundles and escorted up a brush-choked canyon an outsider might have ridden past without even smelling a fair-sized but scattered encampment. The Papago were shy, as well as near-naked drifters.

Like their more settled Pima cousins, the Ho-or Uto-Aztec-speaking Papago might have been more famous and rated more chapters in the history books if they hadn’t been such neighborly sorts. For they had to be sharp to get by in such grim country, and nobody who’d ever made the mistake of messing with them ever called them cowards.

The Pima and Papago bands of the Sonora Desert were the only nations both the Na-dene, or Apache, and ferocious Yaqui, or Unreconstructed Aztec, had long since learned to leave the hell alone. For grim tales were still told of the time Chiricahua raiders from the far-away White Mountains had hit the shyly smiling Papago for fun and ponies.

The Papago had followed the Apache raiders all the way home, like shadows, to pick them off one by one along the trail and then go on terrorizing them and their families, on their home ground, by cutting throats in bed and stabbing the backs of those on the way to take a pee. Their upset Enemies, for that was what “Apache” meant in Ho, tried to make peace by howling into the darkness and leaving presents for the shadowy Papago lurking all about like slick old timber wolves. But the Papago just went on patiently killing the Apache raiders, then their women, their children, and their dogs, until nothing was left of them. Then all the Papago had gone home to do a little farming and a lot of hunting and gathering in their own stark country, where the Apache never bothered them again. Those few Mexicans or Anglos who knew anything at all about the secretive desert dwellers left them alone for much the same reason. There was no great profit in raiding such humble folk to start with, and once you did raid them, they’d follow you all the way home to Mexico or, hell, Chicago or Saint Lou, according to some old-timers who’d bothered to break bread with the little rascals.

Longarm had broken bread with them in the past, and in that odd way illiterate cultures had of spreading the word, he was known far and wide among various Ho-speaking nations as Saltu ka Saltu, or “the stranger who is no stranger.”

So Rosalinda’s maternal uncle and traditional guardian knew who Longarm was as soon as his sister’s child, and hence a woman of the same ancestry, introduced them in his smoky brush wickiup. It was just as well the older man, called Pogamogan, spoke fair Spanish. For Longarm knew they were being offered something to eat when the old Papago said something about duka, and everyone knew you said si for yes and ka for no. But after that the lingo got awesomely tough to follow.

It started to rain some more as Longarm told Pogamogan and some of the other elders his sad story, seated cross-legged with a gourd bowl of blue-corn, nopal, and chili mush in his lap. Being a woman, even if she was blood kin, Rosalinda and her older sister had naturally been sent off to eat and gossip somewhere else. Papago respected womankind, and never hit kids just for acting like kids. But they held it was as tough for men to talk around womankind as it was under a tree full of jaybirds.

When Longarm got to the part about being willing to sign a government IOU for the riding stock he needed to carry himself and the old Big Fifty after his prisoner and those other outlaws, Pogamogan’s basalt eyes filled with tears and he sobbed in Spanish, “You enter my camp with a kinswoman you have rescued from bandits, you accept food and shelter from me, and then you imply I am a poor shit who must be paid for mere mules?”

Longarm soberly replied, “I was wrong and I know it. But it is the custom of my own chief that I take nothing without offering to pay for it.”

Pogamogan snapped, “We are not agency people. We have never lived on your Great Father’s blanket and we do not beg for salt and matches as children beg for … how do you say penal in Saltu?”

Longarm thought and decided miel, the Spanish for honey, was what they were groping for.

The graying Papago shrugged his leathery shoulders and declared, “We agree on what is in my heart. I will give you all the ponies or mules you think you need. But how do you expect to catch up with all those bad Saltu on this side of the border? They have had all of this time to get away from you!”

Longarm swallowed a polite bite of mush, shook his head, and told Pogamogan, “I doubt they have more than a twelve-hour lead. Stubborn or desperate human beings can push themselves harder than anyone can get a pony or even a mule to move. They rode out of Growler Wash well after dark. Say they pushed on into the morning, and even allow they were smart as your niece about the weather. They’d have still had to hole up somewhere to let their riding stock recover. So even as we’re talking about ‘em, they’re bedded down in some cactus flat or chaparral patch as their ponies browse and laze, no?”

The man who knew this country better consulted with his fellow elders in their chanting way before he turned back to Longarm to say, “You may be right. They may be holed up halfway to the border. This heavy rain will have smoothed over their sign. Even if you cut their trail, they will be moving on by sundown. If they ride no faster than your blue sleeves on patrol, they will be south of the unguarded border before you could catch up with them.”

He glanced at the bandolier of cartridges across Longarm’s shirtfront and added with a sigh, “Perhaps this is just as well. By your own account, they overpowered you when you were wearing a six-shooter and carrying a double derringer. I think you would do well to leave them to the unsettled conditions in the even more dangerous desert to the south. We are desert dwellers and we would not go south of Organpipe Pass this summer. That Apache, raiding further east, has the Mexican federales out in force. So naturally the Yaqui are out on the warpath. Los federales simply can not ride past a pig, a chicken, or a pretty girl without molesting them.”

Longarm shrugged and replied, “I’ll cross that border when I come to it. Right now I’m planning on beelining along the foothills with a couple of good riding mules in hopes of heading those outlaws off at Organpipe Pass. You’re right about it being a waste of time if I scouted for sign after all this rain. I figure it’s going to rain some more before sundown. They have a woman as well as more delicate mounts under the canvas I’m hoping they’ve spread across some handy branches. I’m hoping they’re feeling as sure as you gents that they’ve gotten away clean, with more worries ahead than behind them.”

He got to work on his mush, knowing he was expected to clean the bowl if he knew what was good for him. Pogamogan chanted with others for a spell, then turned back to Longarm to say, “We have decided you really are a saltu ka saltu. You might beat them to the border, and it is true you are carrying a medicine gun. You may kill two or more of them before the others circle in and finish you off with repeating rifles. Organpipe Pass is not the narrow defile you may be picturing. It is no more than an easier route winding through rolling hills that are overgrown with organpipe, a lot of organpipe. So there is plenty of cover for men on foot with repeating rifles, coming at you from as many directions as there may be enemies determined for to kill you!”

Longarm gulped down a heroic mouthful of mush and swallowed a time or two before he calmly replied, “I’ve played tag in a cactus patch before. I could tell you a tale about evading Yaqui in a pear flat a spell back, but I don’t like to brag. I don’t suppose that any of you might have an old Spencer rifle or a Walker Colt you could spare me, though?”

Pogamogan morosely replied, “I was asking that just now. We prefer to hunt with bows and arrows we can make ourselves. We hunt no game a well-placed arrow will not bring down, and once the Saltu traders have you dependent on them for matches, salt, and gunpowder, you may as well put on a dog collar and hand them your leash.”

Longarm swallowed some more, nodded gravely, and soberly said he’d heard tell of those prospectors who’d trifled with a Papago maiden up along the Gila, only to wind up looking a lot like pincushions.

He added, “I’ve often wished I was as good with a bow and arrow as a rifle. Your point about rolling your own ammunition is well taken. But I’ve never had time for serious violin lessons either. So I’ll have to do what I have to do with this old buffalo rifle.”

He licked the last green scrap of nopal off his fingers to display refined desert manners, and added, “My Papago uncle has filled my belly to the bursting point. Would he and his brothers be offended if I only had cheroot-tobacco to offer?”

Pogamogan showed he was a genuine gentleman by shaking his head with a thin smile and replying, “The offer is enough when a serious man with a good heart has said more than once that he is in a hurry. Come with me and choose the mules you wish for to ride on with. You won’t ever head those enemies off at Organpipe Pass unless you leave right now, by a foothill trail we can show you, chanting for rain, a lot of rain.”

Longarm rose to follow the older man outside, with an anxious glance at the sky. It was starting to look pretty, damn its cauliflower-head clouds swirled around in a cobalt-blue bowl by stirring-rods of sunbeam.

As he legged it up the brushy canyon after Pogamogan, rifle slung and packing his heavy burlap sacks, he heard a distant mutter of mountain thunder and grinned. He could almost hear the conversation in that far-off outlaw camp. Some would be for pushing on with the afternoon just right for riding. But older and wiser trail hands would be pointing out that the storm front was far from blown over and you could never rest a mount too much for a serious uphill dash for Sonora, another twenty or more miles ahead.

Like the Papago encampment itself, their remuda of over a hundred head had been hidden up a side canyon, watered by a recently dammed pool, with plenty of thorny but tasty mesquite for the ponies, mules, and burros to browse as a couple of Indian kids kept watch at the mouth of the natural stock pen.

Longarm told the older man he’d trust him to choose the mules. So it only took a few minutes before they were loading a matched pair of Spanish cordovans to move out.

Asking Papago for regular saddles would have made as much sense as asking them to supply him with a Gatling gun. Some horse nations made or stole fair saddles and bridles. Papago were still in the earlier stages of what was still a white man’s notion, for all the bullshit about natural red horsemanship. So while the Indians helped Longarm fill his heavy water bags and lash them aboard one mule with thongs of braided horsehair, along with his other trail supplies, he knew he was expected to ride the other one bareback and to hell with the seat of his pants.

Both mules were outfitted with jaguima or hackamore halters, made of heavier braided rawhide, with a thick bozal or nose-pincher instead of a bit. Papago fought dragoon style, riding only to the scene of battle, then dismounting to fight on foot. So such simple rigs were all they bothered with, and what the hell, neither mule had ever had a steel bit between its teeth, and this would hardly be the time to retrain either.

So he accepted the long lead line with a nod of thanks, and forked himself and the Big Fifty aboard the other mule. He’d been braced for Pogamogan to ask him if he wanted to say adios to Rosalinda. Mexicans would have considered him a shit to just ride off on a gal like that. But with any luck Rosalinda was thinking more Indian now that she’d spent some time with her mother’s kinfolk. Longarm tended to agree with most Indians that long tearful good-byes were a pain in the ass.

So once he was mounted up, all Longarm did was ask about that foothill trail they’d mentioned earlier. Pogamogan snapped something at one of the naked boys on duty there. The kid nodded, caught Longarm’s eye, and lit out running.

Longarm followed without looking back at Pogamogan and the others. The kid set a hell of a pace, and Longarm was glad he was riding after him aboard a mule. He sensed the kid was showing off a bit. A lot of desert nations initiated their young men by making them run a marathon in the heat of day, holding a mouthful of water without being allowed to swallow it as they panted through their noses. The gals were there to admire, or jeer, as the long-distance runner crossed the finish line to spit out all that water, or fail to, depending on how sincere he was about growing up to be a man of his nation.

Riding bareback at a trot was a literal ball-buster. Longarm suspected the running Indian knew that. But real men didn’t get to complain of such minor discomforts unless they wanted others laughing at them. Cowboys and Indians shared some views on good clean fun.

After a while they’d made it out of that brushy canyon to a narrow trail winding southeast along a contour line of the Growler Range’s cactus-covered apron. The Papago kid scampered ahead for a few furlongs, and then suddenly vanished sideways into a thick clump of jumping cholia that common sense said no naked human hide had any business in. The dramatic exit saved Longarm the trouble of trying to pronounce skookumchuck out loud. In any case he wasn’t sure whether that meant thank you or all is well. But he said it anyway as he heeled his mule into an impolitely faster and far more comfortable lope both to warm both critters up and to make up some lost time.

You loped a mount no more than a third as much as you walked it—if you wanted it still moving under you at all by the end of your day on the trail. So Longarm reined to a walk again as the trail wound out a ways from the general slope to afford him a good hard look at the view to his southwest.

He knew the bunch he was after was somewhere down yonder on the flatter expanse between the Growlers and a sister range, looming about twenty miles away. The cactus-and chaparral-peppered flats between were covered by a spiderweb of dusty trails and dry washes, with the view complicated by the unusual weather they were having.

Drifting clouds cast almost ink-black acres of shadow across the already specked desert. They were stirred by sunbeams bright enough to hurt one’s eyes and set other acres a-shimmer. The only bright spot, to Longarm’s way of thinking, was that while he couldn’t have made out a camel caravan for certain moving yonder in any damned direction, nobody on the other side was likely to notice two bitty dots creepy-crawling along the flanks of equally distant mountains.

He felt safe lighting a smoke before he heeled his mount on to the far-away goal of Organpipe Pass. He could already picture the swell ambush site that had to go with such a name.

Folks just passing through aboard a train tended to lump organpipe cactus with the similar-looking saguaro of the Sonora Desert. But the equally proportioned organpipe grew only half the height and thickness of the forty-to-sixty-foot saguaro, and never branched the way its way bigger cousin did. It was called organpipe because it tended to grow in clusters, like the pipes of some massive gray-green church organ. So you could hide behind organpipe which was tougher to manage behind the bigger but more lonesome trunks of saguaro.

“You got to get there before you hide ahind shit!” a small sardonic voice warned Longarm from the back of his skull.

Longarm had quit school early, to attend a war they were having, before he’d ever been taught any formal trigonometry. But anybody who’d ever led a distant duck with a shotgun muzzle, or learned to rope running calves from the back of a moving pony, had practiced it in his head, and the trigonometry functions he had to cope with were simple, damn each and every one of them.

Somewhere off to the southwest—he couldn’t distinguish the broad main wash or narrow pony trail from his own vantage point at such far range in such tricky light—the bunch he was after had a fifteen-to-thirty-mile lead on him. To head them off at Organpipe Pass, he’d have to cover about sixty miles in the time it would take them to go thirty or forty. Writers who wrote about Sioux warriors or Mongol hordes who could ride a hundred miles a day didn’t know much about riding. On a good day in cool weather a Pony Express rider would cover sixty miles in six hours, changing horses six times along the way. Riding slowed a lot when you asked the same four hooves to move that far in a full two days. The 3rd Cav still bragged about the time it had marched fifty-four miles and fought a four-hour battle within thirty-six hours during Crook’s Powder River Campaign back in ‘76. Critters just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, run much more than a mile before you had to let them walk a spell. They wouldn’t walk much more than an hour before you had to let them stop to rest. So unless they were some sort of wind-up toys, those incredible Mongol ponies would have to stay incredible.

Staring hard at the wide panorama to his southwest, Longarm was stuck for one corner of his big imaginary triangle. Thanks to this break in the usual August weather, nobody was kicking up a lick of trail dust whether they were moving along any damned trail or not. The cooled-off and cloudy afternoon that allowed him to ride by broad day after high noon offered them the same opportunity, although on riding stock that had already been pushed a fair ways.

Longarm tried to put himself under the Stetson of the other side’s trail boss. He knew they’d figured on nobody even trying to cut their trail this early, and by now they’d seen that any trail they’d been leaving had been wiped clean by that morning rain. Also, they had one woman for certain, and any number of greener riders, with them. There were more lazy bums and misfits than top hands riding the Owlhoot Trail. So they might be inclined to laze in the cool shade of some whitebark as they let their stock graze and rest, figuring on just drifting across the border under cover of the wee small hours any old time they got around to it.

Longarm spied a clump of prickle-pear ahead, and reined in as he got out a barlow knife from the trading post stock, muttering aloud, “On the other hand, if I was in charge of that bunch I might want to push on faster, taking advantage of this break in the heat. They must have someone guiding them who knows this desert, and if there’s one thing to know about this desert, it has to be that you don’t get many cool days down this way in August!”

He dismounted and tethered the two mules to some handy paloverde while he went to work on that thorny but vulnerable prickle-pear with his spanking-new blade. As he lopped off and peeled pad after pad to produce two piles of what looked and likely tasted like oval servings of watermelon rind, he told the nearest mule, “No sense passing up a free gallon or more of extra water. I know you brutes think I’m loco, packing eighty pounds of water along through all this rain. But the desert diggers who know them better say old Waigon giveth sky water and old Tanapah taketh away. That’s what they call the thunderbird and the desert sun spirit, Waigon and Tanapah. They’re scared shitless of both, with good reason.”

He moved both mules closer to let them take advantage of his pulpy green treat, knowing they’d get some nutrition as well as watery sap from it.

Then little wet tree toads seemed to be hopping around the brim of Longarm’s Stetson, and he looked up at the swirling clouds to declare, “Damn it, Waigon, you’ve rained all over us enough for one day!”

Then a thunderbolt sizzled down to turn a hundred-year-old saguaro into a steaming mist of pea-green soup, and as Longarm fought to hold the mules from bolting, he told them soothingly, “Look on the bright side. This afternoon storm might keep those others pinned down, and I don’t mind getting a tad wet if you stubborn mules don’t.”

Chapter 5

The cavalry hated to admit it, but while horses ran faster, men and mules could cover more ground in the long run. Both trotted at about the same speed as a horse, and legged-up infantry could walk a tad faster than any riding stock. The edge dragoons or cavalry held over infantry was that a trooper who didn’t have to tote his own load was in better shape to fight after he’d gotten there firstest with the mostest. That reserve burst of speed under a cavalryman’s ass could move him across a field of fire faster, and sometimes rattle enemy marksmen more, than a line of charging bayonets.

When it came to forced marches across rough ground, a determined man on foot could out-pace mounted rivals anywhere but dry country. The sheer weight of that vital water they were packing kept Longarm busy with the damned mules as they got ever harder to handle, hour after hour.

He walked them a lot, then rested, watered, and fed them more than he’d have ever indulged himself. He naturally changed mounts every mile or so, eighty pounds of water and thirty pounds of trail grub and such weighing less than himself and the Big Fifty. The water bags he’d filled in Pogamogan’s canyon got no lighter along the trail because it would have been dumb to tap either, with rainwater running in silvery trickles or muddy brooklets down the mountain slope and across the very trail they were following.

Short spells of rain were interspersed with longer intervals of afternoon sunlight that would have baked things hotter, once they’d dried some, if more shimmering veils of torrential rain hadn’t swept through every hour or less from the south. A man down to his last chips played the cards he held as best he could. So Longarm cussed and kicked the brutes along the trail as they tried to tell him they were too tired to set such a determined pace. For the wild card Longarm was playing, if he held it, was the likelihood that the others were waiting out this dying tropical storm as it bled itself to death so far from its tropical spawning grounds.

He didn’t have to beat them all the way to that distant pass. He only had to get ahead of them. He’d settle for a cactus-covered rise with a clear field of fire, drop Harmony Drake first, and play out the end-game as best he could, knowing he’d at least kept his federal want from getting away. He had no doubt he could drop anyone he was aiming at with a peep-sighted Big Fifty. He was still working on how you got a second shot off in time.

It was getting on toward sundown when Longarm spied smoke rising up ahead and dismounted to lead his mules afoot as he regarded the odd development with the Big Fifty cradled handy.

It didn’t add up right. He’d been picturing Drake and his pals off to the right, somewhere out on those lower flats. Pogamogan had told him this hillside trail was a sort of Papago secret. It was possible strangers to these parts, tired of splashing through mud, might work their way to higher ground and stumble over a drier trail headed the same way they wanted to ride, but would outlaws on the run build such a smoky fire in broad day?

He murmured to the nearest mule, “That fancy gal they have tagging along has a way of getting menfolk to mind her and she may not be used to wet socks. Any fire you built with anything out here today would burn damp and smoky.”

They moved along until a stray eddy of air carried the smell of wood smoke and frijoles to him through the damp chaparral. It hardly seemed likely a bunch of Anglo outlaws would be having Mexican frijoles for supper. Lots of regular Americans liked chili con carne, hot tamales, and such, but frijoles were a sort of tasteless variety of mushy brown beans you had to be raised on, the way Scotchmen were fed oatmeal early on, before you’d ever bother to eat them on purpose.

Feeling a tad better, but still cautious about someone cooking a pot of Mexican beans in the middle of nowhere, Longarm tethered the two mules to some trailside whitebark and eased forward alone, allowing the muzzle of the Big Fifty to lead the way as the trail wound through the hillside scrub.

He was scouting fair enough, he thought, until some sneaky son of a bitch rose from a clump of pear he’d just passed to call out in a jovial tone, “Buentardes, gringo. A onde va ?”

Longarm managed a slow turn and a sheepish smile in spite of that first impulse to leap out of his own skin. The Spanish-speaking gent with a sawed-off ten-gauge casually trained in Longarm’s general direction was wearing the straw hat and white cotton outfit of a humble Mexican or gussied-up Yaqui. His dark moon face could be read either way.

It was an old trick, but tricks got old by working, so Longarm tried to sound sort of stupid as he called back, “Me no savvy Spanny-Hole, Seen Yore. Can’t you talk American, seeing we’re both north of the border?”

It worked. The shotgun-wielding stranger made a dreadful remark about Longarm’s mother in Spanish, but tried to sound as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth when he replied, “Of course I speak Anglo. I ride for El Rancho Rocking T to our north and we are out for to hunt strays, eh?”

As if to explain the big fibber’s use of the plural another voice called out at some distance, “Alo, Juan Pablo. Quien es?”

The one confronting Longarm called back in the same lingo, “Hemos uno pendejo con dos mulas. Comprende que queremos?”

When the other called back in a jolly way, “Claro, no se preocupe,” Longarm sensed he was in trouble. When the one facing him tried not to sound worried while he casually shouted, “Cuidado, el tiene un fusil,” Longarm knew for certain, and simply swung the muzzle of his Big Fifty up to blast the one he could see and crab to one side and flatten down in some creosote while the Mexican he’d shot tried to bring down the sun with a dead finger on the trigger of his scattergun.

It felt like a million years, and might have taken as long as five seconds, for Longarm to lever down the sliding block and jam another round in the smoking chamber of the Big Fifty as he lay on his side in what smelled like a crushed drugstore, expecting to see that other Mexican looming over him with a more lethal weapon.

Then he’d reloaded, and better yet, the sounds of crashing brush were headed away instead of toward him. So he rolled up on one knee as, sure enough, a Mexican dressed the same but wearing a six-gun instead of a shotgun was breaking cover aboard a palomino barb to ride down the slope at full gallop, as if he had better places to go.

He was already out of range, had Longarm been following him with the sights of his regular saddle gun. But when he let fly with that Big Fifty, the barb found itself running under an empty saddle. So it naturally stopped a furlong down and turned to gaze back up the slope in equine confusion.

First things coming first, Longarm reloaded as he moved up to the first one he’d downed, muttering, “When you say you re covering an asshole with a couple of mules, you’d best make sure he don’t savvy Spanish, speaking of pendejos, pendejo.”

The Mexican sprawled by the discharged ten-gauge was too dead to reply. The hole in his white shirtfront was only half an inch across. Most of that blood running down the slope from where he lay had to be oozing out the fist-sized exit wound.

The two of them had just proven how useful a sawed-off shotgun was in a fight at medium range in wide-open country. So Longarm saw no reason to bother with the dead man’s gun as he turned to see how the other one might be doing.

Longarm knew he’d dropped the spooked rider about a quarter mile down from the trail. He lay somewhere in the smoke-blue or olive tangle of waist-high scrub and scattered tree-cactus. That pony was already working its way back to the tethered riding stock along the trail, about as fast as a kid drifting in for supper after playing in the sandlot across the way.

As he followed the muzzle of his lethal but limited weapon on foot, Longarm muttered, as if his fallen foeman could hear him, “You don’t call out that you know just what to do as you’re creeping up behind a simple Americano, amigo mio. But in all fairness, it was your pal’s warning I was packing a gun that made your full intent unmistakable. So where did I hit you and where are you at?”

He hadn’t really expected anyone to answer. So it came as quite a surprise when a bare-headed man in a bloody cotton shirt suddenly rose waist-high in the chaparral, about fifty yards away, to brandish a thumb-buster Schofield .4328 and scream, “Te voy a mandar pa’l carajo!”

Longarm called back, “No hagas fregadas! I have the drop on you at this range!”

But the badly wounded and doubtless confounded Mexican fired a wild and hopeless pistol round in Longarm’s general direction, and since he had more rounds where that one had come from, Longarm nailed him dead center with a second buffalo round that picked him off his feet and tossed him out of sight in the shrubbery again.

Longarm still reloaded as he moved in. When you were packing a single-shot rifle, you didn’t assume a man who’d only been hit twice with buffalo-droppers was fixing to just lie there.

But when Longarm found his victim, sprawled across another ant pile and already covered with the bitty red devils, he could only say in a not unkind voice, “At least I had the courtesy to kill you first. I was about to say I’d like to go through your pockets. But seeing you ain’t got any pockets in those glorified pajamas, I’d best settle for that rusty six-gun over yonder. I hope you have extra ammo in your saddlebags.”

He turned to retrace his steps, picking up the Schofield along the way. A bit of added motion joined his own long shadow as it proceeded him. So he glanced over his left shoulder to see that, sure enough, a flock of those brown hawks and at least two buzzards were taking an interest in the proceedings from where they circled on a rising column of afternoon warming. He knew it was the tethered stock and his own moving form that kept them pinned to the sky. He grimaced, told them to just hold the thought a spell, and trudged on up to the earlier scene of carnage.

The first Mexican he’d gunned had pockets in his more substantial white pants. But the fistful of gold and silver coins didn’t say a thing that could have been used against the dead cuss in court. Everybody knew an honest vaquero riding for some ranch in the middle of nowhere got paid off in U.S. silver dollars and Mexican double eagles worth about twenty of the same.

Longarm put the sixty-odd dollars worth of specie in his own pants pocket, feeling better about the money he’d lost in Growler Wash the other night.

There were four rounds left in the wheel of the single-action army pistol, cheaper than the already cheap but more popular Colt ‘73 Improved Model, or Peacemaker. The dead Mexican had been packing it cheap in his waistband. Longarm had no choice but to stick it in his own the same way. He was glad it was single-action as he felt its steel barrel chill his gut. Dreadful accidents had resulted from hasty grabs at a double-action six-gun stuffed down the front of a man’s pants. A fast draw was out of the question, of course, but at least he’d be set for taking on more than one enemy at a time, and he figured he had at least five men and a mighty mean woman to deal with before he could say for certain who’d won.

He found that palomino barb nuzzled up with a sorrel mare, tied to some more paloverde near that hasty campfire they’d baited him with when they’d spotted him first in the distance. The fire had gone out under the tin can of water and frijoles. He’d already noted frijoles were an acquired taste, and he knew those birds up yonder were more hungry right now. So he gathered the two ponies and his mules in one bunch and led them on foot a decorous distance away, muttering, “Those obvious outlaws would have left this child for the buzzards, and we’re pressed for time in any case. So why don’t I peel you all some pear and go through some saddlebags as we all get to know one another a tad better?”

The riding stock didn’t argue. The two Mexican ponies were as used to the taste of skinned-out cactus as the Papago mules. The only clue to anyone’s identity was a crumpled reward poster, in Spanish, saying that the governor of Sonora would pay a thousand pesos for the head of one Juan Pablo Ebanista, wanted for everything including poor church attendance. There was nothing on the other wayward youth.

Longarm discarded the dirty spare duds, filthy bedrolls, and dried grub the two of them had been packing. The same wet spell that had cleaned both exposed tree-dally saddles had spoiled their jerked beef, cornmeal, and beans.

He had no use for their canteens at the moment, but left them in place just in case, once he’d rinsed them out and refilled the four of them from a sandy puddle of standing rainwater by the trail. For the late afternoon sky was rapidly clearing, with the low western sun outlining the remaining clouds in bright gold, and they’d never named these parts a desert because it rained with any regularity.

Longarm found and treasured half a box of .45-28 Army Shorts for the poorly kept Schofield tucked in his pants. The army issued, and lost, a lot of underpowered but heavy slugs with the same reasoning it issued easy-to-maintain but slow-firing small arms. Recruiting many an immigrant greenhorn into its low-paid ranks, the army didn’t want any kid who’d never handled a gun before blazing away all his ammunition at once, or flinching from recoil too much to aim the one shot at a time they wanted from him. So they’d turned down the original 40-grain charges offered by more than one bemused gunmaker in favor of the shorter and more gently kicking army rounds.

The ubiquitous Schofield was an army ordinance design rather than a brand. Although Smith & Wesson made the most of the break-front notions of Major George—not General John—Schofield. Meant to be packed as only a backup to a trooper’s rifle or carbine, the rugged but far from ideal six-gun might hit an aimed-at target fifty yards away. But the small kick sacrificed any killing power the Schofield had past, say, a hundred yards.

All five of those outlaws he was trailing, and likely that mean gal, packed .45 or .44-40 side arms that could kill, with any luck, from five times as far away. The only edge Longarm had was the Big Fifty, if they weren’t expecting him to aim anything that awesome their way. Gunfighters expecting regular gunfighting might expose themselves at what they considered the safe distance of five hundred yards, a dead-easy bull’s-eye with a Big Fifty.

But like the old gospel song said, they’d know more about that farther along. So once he had his superabundance of riding stock watered and fed on cactus pulp, and seeing he knew the mules far better, Longarm shifted his water bags but no trail supplies to the mule he’d been riding, tethered the four of them along one of the Mexican’s rawhide riatas, and mounted that palomino barb to get acquainted as he got them all on up the trail.

By sundown he’d ridden all four brutes, and knew the sorrel mare and the taller of the two mules were less trouble. The smaller mule had been fighting the lead for some time. The palomino barb seemed to feel much the same way as its previous owner about riders who spoke to it in English. Longarm could have managed any two of the four if he’d had to. But he didn’t have to, and the constant argument was slowing them all a bit. So when he stopped for another trail break while the sun set glorious in a fluffy bed of red and gold, Longarm put the most comfortable of the two Mexican saddles on the more willing mule, tossed the other in a circle of greasewood down the slope, and cut a length of riata to loosely tether the stubborn mule and surly palomino together as he gently explained to the pony, “I don’t like you either. But it would be cruel to leave you to find your own way out here, with the air already commencing to smell dry again. So stick with this mule and you’ll both wind up back in that Papago camp, where you’d better learn to control your damned temper, hear?”

The pony lashed out with a hind hoof as Longarm hit the mule it was with across the rump. Then they were both escaping from him down the trail with snorts of equine mischief. Longarm had to laugh too. Then he mounted the more reasonable mule, gently jerked the lead he’d tied to the sorrel’s bridle, and led off to the southeast at a ball-busting but mile-eating trot.

Getting to stand in the tapped stirrups of that easy-riding Mexican saddle seemed a treat at any pace after all that bareback riding. The saddle had been invented with that in mind. The Mexican-made Moorish ancestor of the American stock saddle, despite its cantle and swells of exposed cottonwood, was, if anything, more chair-like. For while Anglo cowhands preferred to fall clear of a cart-wheeling pony when things went wrong, the Mexican vaquero was inclined to be more fatalistic about the possible future, and preferred his ass comfortable in the here and now. So the saddle Longarm had salvaged for his trotting mule cradled the bigger frame of an Anglo rider as if the bare wood had been molded to his thighs and pelvis like clay. He’d already made a mental note not to risk a downhill lope in the dark aboard such a dangerously comfortable saddle. It hardly seemed likely either mount was likely to fall under him along the sandy trail, even as it got tougher to make out. He knew all riding stock saw better than he did in the dark. The one good thing to be said for your mount being dumber than another human, or even a dog, was that you could count on it to just stop when it couldn’t tell what was in front of it. You had to be smart enough to care what a master thought of you before you’d take really stupid chances.

As the sky kept clearing, the stars got awesomely bright against the blackness of what was again a dried-out desert sky. You never really got to lick your eyes across the Milky Way where there were any street lights at all. But those old-timers who’d made up all the names for the stars had been desert dwellers too. So riding under the same breed of night sky, you could see what they’d been jawing about in those old astrology books. That big old Dog Star, staring down from the August sky, really did look hot-tempered and glaring when you got to stare back at it. He’d heard those Moors who’d taught the Spanish so much about roping and riding had named one star up yonder “The Ghoul,” ghoul being a Moorish word, because of the way it got dim and bright, mysterious and sort of spooky, next to the other stars. He couldn’t make out any ghoulish stars, but that distinctly red one closer to the horizon had to be old Mars, which was said to be a world like this one, all covered with red deserts, like the Four Corners up the other side of the Gila. Nobody could say whether there might be any folks roaming the Martian deserts. Longarm waved a howdy in any case.

Then the moon came up, lemon yellow as it rose above the jet-black fangs of the jaggedy Growlers, to bathe everything for miles around in a ghostly glow that set coyotes to howling and things in the brush all about to skittering.

The pony had farted five times in as many recent minutes, so it seemed a good time to combine more than one concern. Longarm reined in, dismounted, and broke out the nose bags he’d packed for the two mules with occasions such as this one in mind. He put a generous but thoughtful amount of water and cracked corn in each bag, and put them on both brutes before he unsaddled them both to dry as they munched and lazed beside the trail.

Then he and the Big Fifty went up the slope a furlong to see what could be seen out yonder in the moonlight.

Many a critter was stirring, judging by the faint sounds in all directions. But the lower moonlit expanse to the southwest stared back up at him as innocent as carpet in an empty drawing room. He couldn’t make out the better-known trail along the main drainage between the neighboring ranges. If those others had built a fire, they knew how to hide it in a deep wash after dark. He figured it was more likely they were on the move, wherever the hell they thought they were, right now.

He resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke, warning himself how the flare of a match could be spotted from three miles or more by a human eye adjusted to the night. He could only hope some greenhorn on the other side might not know this. There was just too much yonder out yonder for his own night vision to really draw a bead on anything that didn’t look like brush or cactus.

He sat down, bracing his elbows on his upraised knees with the Big Fifty across his lap, as he willed his impatient body to relax and settle down a spell. He knew that neither the sorrel nor that mule were half as anxious as he was to head anyone off at any fool pass. They needed some serious rest while that solid food sank in. Riding stock farted that way when it ate too much green clover too. Any cavalryman who’d ever ridden down an Indian on a grass-fed pony could tell you it took solid grain to sustain a mount beyond a few short hours in the field.

As he lowered his head to his crossed arms, Longarm warned himself not to let himself go all the way to sleep. Then he remembered other times like this and sighed, “Aw, shit, we’re only human.”

So the next thing he knew he was waking up from a dumb dream with a piss hard-on, shivering and goosefleshed under his hickory shirt, to see the moon had moved quite a ways from the last time he’d looked up at it.

He would have turned over and gone back to sleep if this had been his furnished digs in Denver. But it wasn’t, so Longarm groaned himself to his feet, pissed on a patch of bare caliche, and headed back down to the trail, where he found both his equine pals had been dozing and pissing themselves.

He loaded up and mounted the sorrel to take up the slow but steady chase, knowing it all depended on how disciplined or self-indulgent the outlaws had been.

He got a little trotting and a lot of walking out of the mismatched pair he’d selected from a choice of four. He gave them a trail break once every ninety minutes or so, and forced himself to take another catnap in the wee small hours, when the cold night air woke him even sooner. Then the clear sky was pearling pale in the east, and he could see farther across the wide-open spaces he seemed to ride alone. The slopes to his left were less steep. The distant hills of sunset were now much closer. The valley between was less flat as well as more narrow. He could see how they were funneling their way to that shallow pass he’d been told about.

He knew two could play at most any game. So he dropped down off the higher trail he’d been following all night to find that, sure enough, a wider trail did wind its way southeast through the thicker desert growth where rains soaked in deeper.

But Longarm wasn’t half as interested in the cactus and stickerbrush as he was in the all-too-clear hoofmarks in the rain-smoothed sand of the damned old trail. They’d already made it this far, six shod and two unshod head, adding up just right for it to be them and all wrong for him to follow.

He dismounted anyway and struck a match to make sure. The sons of bitches had a four-to-six-hour lead on him. There was no way he could catch up this side of the border, and he had direct orders to never darken the door of El Presidente Diaz again. So how was he ever going to obey directly conflicting orders from the Denver District Court in the person of Marshal Billy Vail?

He’d been told to go fetch Harmony Drake from that Yuma jail, and he’d been warned not to cause another international incident down Mexico way. That was what they called it when you had to shoot a Mexican rurale.

So the gambling boys would have assured Longarm that he’d done his best but lost the game, and that it was time to get up from the table and head back to report that his man had simply gotten away from him, along with his badge and gun. That way, at least nobody could accuse him of refusing to obey a direct order, right?

Longarm rose with a sigh, walked back to the mule he was riding now, while the pony carried the pack, and morosely informed them both, “I know the two of you are tired. I am too. We still have to push on. Those sons of bitches seem bound and determined to get this child into another damned war with Mexico. But I still aim to take Harmony Drake, dead or alive!”

Chapter 6

Mules and ponies were only human, but any number could play the ambush game. So Longarm kept their unavoidable trail breaks as short as possible, and punched through Organpipe Pass after moonset and just before dawn.

There was nobody trying to hold the pass, which was more of a notch in the higher tableland to the south than a gap between real ridges. There was nobody guarding the border, wherever it was, when Longarm must have crossed it before noon. For the fresh sign on the trail he was following with a grim smile and a Big Fifty wound through what was a natural hell to patrol—or a paradise for cactus, large and small.

Something about the soil or the way clouds swept across that higher patch of desert had resulted in a tangled mess of organpipe, lots of saguaro, and way too much cholla, with a peculiar Mexican relation of saguaro that grew prone across the ground, like a green spiny python, to tangle its upright cousins in thorny logjams. You had to pick your way carefully through such tedious desert patches. He could see the rascals he was trailing had. The occasional horse apple he spotted in the now-dry dust looked dusty and flyblown enough to give them a good twelve-hour lead on him, blast Rosalinda and his own weak nature.

He had to give in to the natural needs of his equine pals as the sun glared down on their weary hides from the dead center of that blue dome. There was no hint of breeze from either side of the cactus-lined trail, and the mule he was leading kept fighting the line like a fish that just didn’t want to be hauled any higher and drier.

Longarm reined in and dismounted, muttering, “When you’re right you’re right. It’s fixing to get way hotter before it cools a tad, and Drake’s gang have likely holed up for la siesta by now down the trail a piece.”

He led his nearly spent stock between two clumps of organpipe and over one of those reclining whatevers toward a grove of wicked cholla. The mule had likely stuck its muzzle on cholla before, and tried to tell this to Longarm.

The fortunately strong-wristed deputy jerked the line the other way and said, “I know what I’m doing, mule. I know cholla looks and acts like the Devil’s own crab-apple tree. But the really nasty thorns all sprout from the pads on the ends of those corky limbs, and the trunks holding all that mischief off the ground don’t have any thorns at all.”

Holding both leads in his left hand with the sling of the Big Fifty, Longarm proceeded to carefully but quickly lop away the hellish fuzzy cholla pads that needed plenty of sunlight to go with the tree-like roots of its cork-barked trunk. Once he’d cleared a less dangerous overhang, he led first the pony and then the mule through, holding their heads low to clear the vicious thorns of the archway.

Inside the ancient cholla grove, they found it a shady if low-ceilinged bower, with clean caliche between the trunks a yard or more apart. The dense shade of closely packed cactus pads had killed anything else that had ever sprouted there, and the thrifty desert critters had carried every dry scrap away as grub or bedding.

Longarm tethered both brutes with their heads low and put extra water in their nose bags, along with a double ration of cracked corn. He knew the parched grain would go on swelling after the stock had downed it. But you seldom bloated a critter if you let it have its fill of water before it ate and you didn’t let it eat too much.

He unloaded them and set packs and saddle well clear, with the Mexican saddle upside down and its blanket shaken out flat on the dry caliche. Then he inspected all eight hooves for splits or pebbles, unpacked his tarp and one thin flannel blanket, stripped to the buff, wiped himself head to toe with a damp rag, and treated himself to all the flat, warm, rubber-scented water he felt like drinking before he positioned the Big Fifty and Schofield on his spread-to-dry duds and flopped flat atop the flannel, the shade cool on his naked hide, as he numbly wondered how he’d managed to get so sleepy-headed all of a sudden.

Then he was in the Denver Public Library, looking for an Atlas so he could look up Puerto Periasco and see how far those rascals had to ride for that blamed steamboat to Far Cathay, only he’d just noticed he was naked as a jay.

Nobody else seemed to notice as he sat down at a reading table to hide his uncalled-for erection. But then the librarian came over to tell him he wasn’t allowed to smoke. So he snubbed out a cheroot he hadn’t noticed he was smoking and explained, “I figure they have at least one experienced border-jumper with them, ma’am. So they’ll want to avoid that border town of Sonoyta and the rurales stationed there. I’m still trying to decide whether they’d be better off making their crossing after dark, when los rurales can’t see as far but expect folks to cross, or-“

“Never mind all that Deputy Long,” the librarian said. “How do you like the way my husband and I have been doing so far, and are you out to avoid another international incident for us or not?”

Longarm hadn’t noticed till then that he was talking to Miss Lemonade Lucy Hayes, the President’s handsome but sort of stuffy wife. She’d had her clothes on the time she’d served him orange punch instead of her notorious lemonade at the White House in Washington Town. Now he tried not to notice her middle-aged but not unattractive naked torso as he soberly replied, “Your man and me have about cleaned up the Indian Ring left over from the Grant Administration, and I’ve always been in favor of sound money and the end of Reconstruction, ma’am. I ain’t working on that lost, strayed, or stolen gift from Queen Victoria right now. I’m chasing plain old outlaws across the Mexican border. I know they don’t want me to do that any more. But I had orders to deliver the rascal to the Denver District Court too, so …”

“Why don’t we go back amongst the stacks and make mad Gypsy love?” the First Lady suggested, coyly adding, “I don’t hold with drinking hard liquor, but I’ve always liked other things hard.”

Longarm gulped and politely replied, “I ain’t sure we ought to, uh, ma’am. If screwing the President’s wife ain’t high treason, it has to qualify as disrespect to a superior.”

“Who says so? Who? Who? Who?” demanded Lemonade Lucy in a desperate tone. Then Longarm opened his sleep-gummed eyes and, still hearing the same repeated question, propped himself up on one elbow to see that a flock of gnat-catchers were mobbing an elf owl, perched on a nearby cholla branch. He didn’t see why. Owls holed up during the hours the fluttery gnat-catchers were using the sky. But he thanked them all in any case, saying, “I might have had a mighty disrespectful wet dream, or worse yet, overslept.”

The elf owl flew away with its smaller tormentors tagging after it all atwitter. It was odd how the human voice could spook some critters more than a thrown boot. He’d noticed in the past you could get pack rats to quit stirring about at night by just asking them, in a polite tone, to quit.

One of those bastards riding with Harmony Drake had Longarm’s watch. But the way the sunbeams slanted through the cholla pads above him said it was after three in the afternoon by now.

Longarm dragged his naked form erect in the decidedly warm shade, and moved over to the tethered riding stock, muttering, “Howdy. Are you two as thirsty as I am right now?”

They were, he saw, when he removed their empty nose bags to see they’d been licking at the bare bottoms of the bucket-like canvas containers. He filled them partway with tepid water from the handy rubberized bags, and put them back in place before he helped himself to some of the mighty uninteresting liquid.

The canyon springwater had tasted tangy when he’d filled the bags back at Pogamogan’s camp. This afternoon it tasted as if it had been boiled in an old rubber boot, which it had in a way. But looking on the bright side, it was easier to husband the water your body just had to replace in this dry heat. It would have been a total bitch to pack all the cold beer a man would be tempted to put away on days like this.

His riding stock made short work of their first helping. He poured more for them, saying, “Take it easy and don’t drown yourselves on your feet. I saw a greenhorn do that to an army mule one time. He filled the nose bag higher than the poor brute’s nostrils, and took all that kicking and snorting for high spirits.”

Receiving no answer, Longarm went back to his bedding and hauled on his duds and boots, with some reluctance. It had felt hot enough naked in the shade.

He ate a can of pork and beans from the trading post and rinsed it down with tomato preserves. Then he lit a smoke and watched three zebra-tail lizards play tag around a nearby cholla trunk. It was ten times hotter than it should have been, but at least twenty degrees cooler than it had been around high noon. Lizards and other cold-blooded desert critters got in most of their fun in the few hours between too hot and too cold in these parts.

He hated to even think about it, but since he didn’t know whether those other border jumpers planned an early or late crossing, he had to go with as early a crossing as practical.

That meant soon, damn it. Los rurales would just be breaking their own siestas about now. They’d tank up on coffee and saddle up for an evening patrol as the shadows lengthened. Anyone slipping across the line about now would likely make it without meeting up with los rurales. Anyone waiting for the cool shade of evening and the cloak of darkness would be risking a moonlit tryst with old desert hands who knew how to sit a pony silent and listen to the night noises all about.

Longarm sighed, gripped the cheroot between bared teeth, and rolled up the bedding. The mule and pony bared their teeth a bit too as they grasped his full intent to load them back up and lead them back out into that glaring sunlight.

He did it anyway, and all three had been right about it feeling as if they’d stepped through an oven door. The sun was far lower in the west, but it felt as if you were breathing alkali dust through cobwebs.

Longarm led the way afoot as far as the trail. Then, seeing those same hoofprints that had preceded him south at some damned time in the past, he mounted the mule to lead the sorrel mare and their depleted water supply at a trot.

He had at least one member of the gang pictured as an hombre who knew these parts. Longarm didn’t need a map to tell him this trail had to lead to the village of Sonoyta. Trails generally led somewhere, and Sonoyta was the only border town for miles to the east or west.

The question was why he or the outlaws he was trailing would want to go there. Strangers riding into small desert towns always drew a good deal of attention. Anglo riders in a Mexican border town were apt to draw more than their fair share from the local rurales.

There was the unpleasant possibility that an owlhoot rider in the habit of crossing the border in these parts might have come to some sort of understanding with the local rurale captain. A lot of Longarm’s own problems with Mexico’s answer to the Texas Rangers sprang from their almost cheerful demands for bribes, whether you’d done anything or not.

Then, just as he was starting to really worry about some son of a bitch with his badge and gun and a rurale company as well, Longarm saw the hoofprints he’d been following veer off to the east through a patch of stirrup-deep creosote.

He smiled wolfishly and told his mount, “The odds ain’t as bad as we feared. Los rurales are likely to shoot all of us for our boots except Goldmine Gloria. They won’t shoot her before they’ve all had their turn with her. I wonder why we’re riding east. I’d have thought it would be shorter to that seaport sixty miles or so away if we swung around Sonoyta to the west.”

Neither critter seemed to want to trot in either direction. So Longarm dismounted to lead on foot at a walk as he scouted for sign in the greened-up desert.

That philosopher who’d first remarked on what a difference a day could make had likely ridden the Sonora Desert in his time. Cactus flowered in the spring, dry or wet, as if remembering they’d once been rosier. But other stuff with no way to store as much water paid more attention to the weather than the calendar. So fairy dusters were already sprouting feathery little leaves, and the scattered clumps of paloverde, which was usually a sort of gigantic witch’s broom of bare green sticks, were starting to bud like pussy willow. Tomatillo and jobjola brush that had looked dead and dried out before that rain were suddenly green and perky as if they’d been growing in a park back East. Staring down at the crust of caliche for hoofprints, Longarm made out microscopic flowers he’d have otherwise missed. They were mostly yellow, but came in all colors, as if meant to go in some little gal’s doll house in a teeny-tiny vase.

The bunch he was trailing had spread some to ride through the paloverde and cactus clumps. So Longarm concentrated on just one set of prints, left by a pony who’d thrown its near rear shoe as its rider set as direct a course as possible almost due east.

An hour off the trail, Longarm had to lead around the flyblown remains of a roadrunner someone had blasted almost in two, likely with a pistol shot.

“Miserable bastards,” Longarm muttered as he skirted the column of flies above the pathetic ruins of a recently lively clown-bird. It wasn’t hard to kill roadrunners. They got their name from their habit of scampering along with desert travelers, likely to catch the sneakier critters flushed by hooves or wagon wheels. No Indian would dream of harming such a friendly critter with such tasteless stringy meat. Mexicans admired them because they cleared the roads of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and such. But there was a variety of Anglo asshole that simply couldn’t resist taking potshots at road signs, saguaros, songbirds, or anything else that wasn’t likely to shoot back.

“They passed this way by daylight,” Longarm assured the mule as they hurried on. He had no call to tell a Papago mule that roadrunners patrolled for snakes, lizards, and bugs early in the morning or late in the afternoon. The poor dead bird was too flyblown for death within the past few hours. It wouldn’t have come out of the shade to get shot by a prickhead it was only running with during the siesta hours just past. Longarm decided the outlaws were eight or ten hours ahead of him. Even less, if they’d holed up out ahead for their own siesta.

He knew he had that edge if anyone was lying in wait out ahead. He didn’t see why anyone would be, but they’d have the late sun in their eyes while he’d be aiming at a well-lit target. Old U.S. Grant had told his boys they’d have the sunrise at their backs as they advanced at Cold Harbor. Old U.S. Grant had gotten one hell of a heap of his boys killed at Cold Harbor, come to study on it. But it might have been worse had the sun been shining the other way.

He almost fell over the edge of the dry wash winding south to north through the cactus and stickerbush. You had to be right on top of it to know it was there. Once you did, the brushy bottom was so shaded that Miss Cleopatra could have been performing a snake dance in those inky shadows for all he could tell from up where he was.

It got much easier to see as soon as he and his riding stock had worked down a crumbling wall to the sandy bottom. Flood waters had scoured the center of the wash clean, save for the neatly defined hoofprints left by the bunch he’d been trailing. He wasn’t at all surprised to see they were all headed south, towards what had to be a nearby border now.

“Slick,” Longarm reluctantly grunted as he paused to change the Mexican saddle back to the sorrel mare for a spell. He watered both brutes again, forked himself into that hardwood saddle, and followed the spoor of the fugitives up the wash.

It was running north out of higher desert because the original peace treaty had set the border along the Gila River to the north. That had left things awkward for both countries before the Gadsden Purchase had drawn a new imaginary line, designed to leave the natural watershed of the east-west Gila to Uncle Sam and the Southern Pacific Railroad. But in point of fact, Mexico had wound up with the headwaters of many a desert stream running downhill to the north. It hadn’t been raining when they’d surveyed the Gadsden Purchase.

So this wandering wash he was following likely began as a dried-out mud puddle somewhere south of the border, but with any luck, it didn’t matter to Mexico anyway.

Longarm patted the sorrel’s neck and muttered, “Five will get you ten those banditos rode you and your palomino pal down this very wash the other way before we had all that rain.”

He glanced back to see their own hoofprints were adding a mighty clear picture to the ones they were following. Los rurales were no damned good, but they were skilled manhunters, and anyone could see a heap of likely prosperous Yanqui riders had come up this same fool wash without bothering anyone at the regular crossing.

He hummed a few bars of “Farther Along” as he rode on after the others, hoping their guide had some clear plan in mind.

It was almost as pleasant as a hot Denver day in July down here in the shadows cast by the high banks and thicker brush. No members of the cactus tribe could survive with their shallower roots spread in sand that got scoured about once a year, of course. But the water that lay deeper in the drying sand encouraged mesquite, ironwood, and hackberry, all of it greened out again as if it thought this was May, for Pete’s sake, and the critters that usually holed up in the summer daylight of the desert were acting frisky all about, which was sort of distracting, but meant nobody was sitting in ambush around the next bend, at least.

Cicadas buzzed, white-wings cooed, and woodpeckers hammered in the olive greenery to either side as big blue-gray dragonflies chased red-eyed cactus flies about like kids playing tag after school. Now and again a ground squirrel cussed him, and once he flushed a comical desert jackrabbit with impossible ears and a zigzag way of running that made Longarm suspect some of those buzzards high above. He knew one breed of desert hawk grew black feathers and held its wings out the same way as a harmless buzzard until it saw fresh meat on the move down below. This highly evolved desert held lots of such grim surprises for the unwary.

Longarm wasn’t all that surprised when they cut throughb some brush to see the sand ahead all trampled and strewn with dried scraps and the shit of man and beast. The remains of more than one cook-fire told Longarm this was where the border-patrolling rurales paused to brew some coffee out of sight of prying eyes. Los rurales were out to jump border raiders and truculent Indians, not vice versa.

You couldn’t make out any particular set of tracks across the abused stretch of wash. That meant a Mexican detachment, a big Mexican detachment, had been through here since the last rain. It was as likely a federale or army column as the usual rurale patrol. Longarm hurried on lest the usual evening patrol catch him admiring all the scattered sign down here.

He caught up with the sign of Harmony Drake’s bunch on the cleaner sand upstream. He followed it because he had to. But he still wondered what in blue blazes was supposed to prevent the next rurale patrol from Sonoyta from cutting and following such a blatant trail.

Then, less than an hour on, he saw how the hoofprints he’d been following led up the now-much-lower western wall of the wash. So he reined in, swapped saddles and packs again, and rode the mule up into the blazing rays of the setting sun.

It felt as if he was riding into an open fireplace, as late in the day as it was. He had to stare down to one side to make out the hoofprints the others had left in the caliche, etched almost black against salmon pink by the low sun.

They led him, just around sundown, back to that same desert trail, or one just like it, leading south from Sonoyta instead of towards such a nosy border town. Better yet, there were lots of other hoofprints headed both ways. It figured to be the main post road from the border town to the coast town of Puerto Periasco.

Longarm muttered, “Mighty slick!” as he reined south to follow, not the sign he could no longer read, but the road that had to lead much the same way. It was not only possible but likely the fugitives would part company with this well-beaten track before it led them past curious eyes on the main streets of Puerto Periasco. But there was no better place to catch a steamboat bound for the far horizon than the only seaport for many a dreary mile. The desert came right down to the sea, from the Colorado-Gila delta to the Rio Sonora to the distant south, and they were as good as caught if they tarried all that long in any part of Mexico. For los rurales could read, and there was a lot of bounty money posted for Harmony Drake.

As he rode at a trot in the gathering dusk, Longarm tried not to think about the Mexican reward posters offering handsome bounties on El Brazo Largo, muerto o vivo.

Which translated fairly tightly as “Longarm, dead or alive.”

Chapter 7

A couple of dark hours down the road, Longarm topped a rise to see lamplight ahead. A lot of lamplight ahead. Someone had lit up the front of a wayside ‘dobe structure as if they’d been expecting company.

Longarm wasn’t sure of his own reception. So he rode the sorrel and led the mule off to one side through the cactus and brush until he figured he’d be out of range of all that lamplight as he circled in for a look-see.

It only took a few minutes. Longarm tethered his stock and moved in afoot with the Big Fifty at port. Standing close to a far taller clump of organpipe, he could make out an anxious-looking older Mexican in the open doorway across the road. Sun-faded blue lettering across the buff adobe above the door and windows proclaimed the place to be afonda por coches or stagecoach stop. Longarm hadn’t known there was a coach line from Sonyata down to that steamboat line on the Sea of Cortez, but it made sense.

He decided it made more than sense as he slipped back to where he’d tethered his now sincerely jaded riding stock. The fondero in that doorway was obviously expecting a night coach to Puerto Periasco. His relay fonds was about ten or twelve miles south of the border. A stagecoach was called a stagecoach because it changed team in stages, every hour or so, which was about as far as one could drive a team at a steady trot. So even though it seemed to be running late, the Mexican stage from Sonoyta was likely to overtake anyone just riding along on one weary mount, or hell, beat the fugitives into Sonoyta with time to spare and pocket jingle to buy some serious side arms and get set to greet their arrival from a chosen vantage point!

Longarm knew the fleeing felons hadn’t jumped the border near a rurale post to buy passage south aboard a faster stagecoach. He had no desire to alarm the already worried Mexican more than he had to either. So he worked his way back to the road and rode in at a walk, singing “La Paloma” off key to let everyone know he wasn’t sneaking up on them.

The older Mexican in white cotton, but with boots befitting his social station, stepped out into the road as Longarm approached. As Longarm rode into the lamplight, the fondero indicated he’d noticed Longarm’s accent by calling out, “Buenoches, Senor. Have you see anything of the mail coach from Sonoyta? Was supposed to be here by this time, and is not good for to leave the relay team harnessed so long before they have a load for to pull, eh?”

Longarm reined in as he replied, “I haven’t seen anyone on this road south of the border but myself.” Which was the simple truth, as soon as you studied on it.

Getting no argument about that, he continued. “I was hoping I might still be able to board that night coach. I can’t understand it, but this stock I’ve only ridden a short way seems about to founder under me and I have a steamboat to meet in Puerto Periasco!” The fondero said, “We can board your stock and give you a faster ride, if that fregado coach ever gets here. Come inside for to drink with me in a more civilized position. I will have my muchachos take care of your jaded riding stock and we shall see what we shall see.”

Longarm allowed that was the best offer he’d had since sundown, and the two of them were soon seated at one of the blue wooden tables inside, being served pulque in earthenware mugs by a pleasantly plump cantina gal who liked to feel cool above the nipples, judging from the way she wore her pleated cotton blouse.

Pulque tasted better when a man was really dry, which might have been why the slightly slimy home brew was more popular south of the border. Longarm was thirsty enough to have enjoyed his own spit if he’d had more to spare. So he meant it when he told them both it was really swell pulque.

The older fondero rattled off some orders in rapid-fire Spanish to the gal, who dimpled at Longarm and headed back to see that the other help carried them out. Longarm kept his face blank, lest they savvy how well he savvied their lingo. So far, nobody seemed to be plotting against him or his four-footed traveling companions.

The older man opined there might not be any coach at all coming down the road that night. He explained how Los Yanquis Negros had brushed with Victorio at a place called Los Manantiales de Culebra de Cascabel and chased him across the border into Chihuahua.

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and mused half to himself, “If Black Yankees signifies the 10th Cav down from Fort Sill, which it ought to, and if they just chased four hundred Bronco Apache across the Tex-Mex border into Chihuahua from a part of the states we’re more likely to call Rattlesnake Springs, I’m stuck. How would Indian fighting so far to the east have any bearing on whether you’d be expecting a night coach to Pueto Periasco or not?”

The fondero explained, “Our own army garrison here in Sonora is on the way to join other federales in Chihuahua. You were so right when you said that diablo grosero has many riders following him!”

Longarm finished his pulque and, not wanting more, got out two cheroots as he quietly repeated his observation that any number of Apache on the far side of the Sierra Madres were hardly likely to stop any stagecoaches over this way.

The fondero again explained. “Apache are not the problem. Banditos are the problem. Since all this trouble to the east has drawn so many of our soldiers and mounted police away, the segunderos de la calle who seldom show their dirty faces have grown bolder. There has been much stealing of cows, and even horses, this summer. They say that the big gang led by El Gato Notorio has been seen on our side of the Sierra Madre!”

Longarm lit the older man’s smoke for him as he said without too much thought that he’d heard El Gato was more a rebel than a bandit.

He regretted saying it when the older man rose to his feet with a remark about late coaches and stomped out the back way to see how his boys were doing with the stock. It was easy to forget how divided opinion could be about El Presidente Porfirio Diaz down this way. The smooth-talking but murderous mestizo had stolen the liberation movement of Juarez according to some, while others opined that the one-time top general of the late Benito Juarez had now given Mexico the law, order, and stable government it needed.

That was what they called a government that treated most of its citizens like riding stock: a stable government. Taxes got collected, the mail got delivered, and you could usually count on making rail and steamboat connections, wherever that fool stagecoach was this evening. El Presidente and his Wall Street pals liked to say Mexico was now a smoothly running land of contented citizens. Los rurales shot citizens who wouldn’t say they were contented. They’d have hardly hired a sworn enemy of the state for this mail coach line either.

But the fat was in the fire. So when that plump serving wench came in through another door to ask if he’d like something to eat, he pasted a smile across his face and replied, “I’m not sure I’ll have the time, Senorita. I have to beat that steamboat to Puerto Periasco whether the coach is running or not tonight.”

She insisted, “I shall serve you some huevos fritos con jamon in no time at all. You will be able to meet that barco costanero with the time to spare if you have for to walk. Is only one a week either way. Your Yanqui friends from Yuma will not reach Puerto Periasco for at least four days, comprende?”

He digested that and asked, “How soon might the next northbound arrive with, say, my Mexican friends?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders and replied, “The day after manana, I think. Is the same slow but steady vapor, puffing north and south, south and north, in a most tedious manner on a calm but sultry sea. You say you have friends in the south of my country, Senor?” He said he’d sure like those ham and eggs now. So she went out back to fry them, or get somebody else to do so. The place seemed to be crawling with unseen kids, or maybe brownies, judging from the muffled elfin giggles.

The old fondero came back in, still smoking what was left of that cheroot. He said he’d put away the sorrel and mule. He also said he’d left Longarm’s saddle and baggage in the tack room next to the stable. Then he said he’d told his help to put the coach team they’d harnessed back in their damned stalls as well, seeing that coach was so late now, it would have to finish its run by broad day—in August, Jesus, Maria y Jose!

Longarm said he was waiting for a late snack, and asked about a coach ticket to go with it.

The grumpy old cuss said to settle with the cochero about his passage and the accommodations that went with it, when and if the triple-thumbed pendejo ever showed up with that chingado coach.

Longarm followed his drift. Out-of-the-way layouts such as this one were less attractive to road agents if they let the coach crew deal with most of the cash on hand.

The older man accepted another cheroot. But when the cantina gal returned with Longarm’s ham and eggs, the fondero allowed it was past his own bedtime and rose to leave.

Longarm said, “Hold on. If I can’t catch a coach out of here, how do you feel about swapping me two fresh mules for the mule and swell pony I rode in on?”

The fondero shook his head and replied, “is not for me to decide such matters for la compafiia, as fine as the sorrel seems. I mean no disrespect, but did you not say they began to give out on you no more than four leguas from Sonoyta?”

Longarm didn’t point out just how much the older man had given away about his authority over the remote station. It was his own fault for not fibbing more carefully earlier.

The gal brought Longarm more pulque, and sat across from him with a mug of her own as he polished off the ham and eggs, surprised at how hungry he seemed to be after all.

He didn’t have to pay all that much attention to the plump and lonesome mestiza to sense she was what her own kind defined as nada nids sube el culo. But he wasn’t in the market for an easy lay. He had to get to Puerto Periasco, better than fifty miles away, before those crooks he couldn’t identify on sight put Harmony Drake and that bitch Goldmine Gloria aboard that coastal steamer bound for Yuma.

He knew they were backtracking to Yuma now. Aside from the steamboat connection they seemed to be aiming for, the whole bunch would be able to fade into the woodwork faster north of the border. That was doubtless why they’d gone to so much trouble to convince everyone they were bound for the paradise of El Presidente Diaz, with its gringo-baiting, brutal, itchy-trigger-fingered lawmen. The plump and discontented gal drinking pulque with him broke into his thoughts by asking if he meant to hire a room out back for the night, or whether he might be interested in an arrangement that would cost him no more than a few gestures of kindness to a poor mujer who’d been driven almost to mandjarad.

Longarm had to laugh as he considered the time he’d gotten himself into an even sillier conversation in Laredo by confusing the verb manejar, meaning to manage or drive, with mandjar, meaning to jack off.

The gal took his lighthearted expression more romantically than intended. But it would have been needlessly cruel to a gal who seemed to mean well had he flatly refused when she suggested he finish his snack and let her show him around out back.

Longarm knew Marshal Billy Vail had never sent him all this way to fool around with Mexican gals, or even Mexico, so he explained he had to get on down the road because moonlight made for cooler riding than sunlight in a Sonora August.

She favored him with a Mona Lisa smile and demurely asked if he really thought he could last the night with a woman of passion who’d been feeling neglected since she’d broken up with a certain blacksmith. Longarm laughed again despite himself, and she quickly added that they had to wait for Tio Hector, her boss, to settle down for the night in any case.

She said, “is still early. If you wait until after ten you can go with God, my eternal gratitude, and those fresh mounts you asked him for in vain, eh?”

Longarm raised an eyebrow and quietly asked, “You could get away with that … ah … ?”

“My friends call me Ampollita,” she confided, rising from their table to reach for his hand as she added, “We shall have to, how you say, take care of the establero in charge of the remuda, since he and he alone keeps exact figures on the mules that come and go. You see, we exchange one team of six spent mules for a team of fresh ones every time a coach arrives from either direction. Then there are the extra ones we must keep on hand for to be sure, in case we get a lamed one for to water, feed, and rest. So …”

“I know how you run a stage line,” Longarm told her. “How much will I have to slip your head wrangler for those fresh mules?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders and demurely replied, “Quien sabe? He may feel that sorrel can be disposed of in town for enough to repay the favor. Let me argue the point with him later. He speaks no English.”

Longarm allowed he could manage enough Spanish for some horse trading. But Ampollita pulled him to his feet, with a surprising strength, and told him, “A third party can always strike the better bargain for you. Is easier for to lie when nobody can ask trick questions, such as where did one buy such a mount in the first place.”

That cinched it. The jolly little thing seemed to know more than she was letting on, and Billy Vail would want him to question her in more depth, as long as he wasn’t exactly torturing her.

He repeated what he’d said about not having all night, and she again assured him nobody was expecting that much out of him. Then she asked him to shut up as she led him out an archway and along a dark corridor lined with mysterious doorways.

She allowed it was safe to talk again once they’d entered a ‘dobe cell at the far end and she’d bolted the heavy oaken door behind them.

He said, “Nice place you got here,” as he stared around at the four walls crowding the only furnishings, a pine washstand and a fair-sized bedstead for these parts. A row of carved wooden Santos stared severely down at them from a plank shelf facing the foot of the bed.

She saw what he was staring at and giggled, saying, “It is about time they answered my prayers, no?”

Then she hauled the blouse off over her black curls, and dropped her ample skirts around her ankles to simply step out of them, as well as her braided leather sandalias, and stand there, hands on hips in the candlelight, asking how he liked it so far.

He gulped and allowed she’d make a fortune posing for an art class in Paris, France, provided she’d learn to hold still a bit. But she was bumping and grinding with a wicked smile on her pretty but sort of coarse face by the time Longarm had propped the Big Fifty in one corner and gotten himself undressed.

So he was showing it hard as he stepped out of his pants and moved to join her. He’d figured on lowering her to the bedding, but she said she liked it better standing up, and swung her bare back and ample behind to face the smooth oaken door as Longarm just followed the head of his turgid organ-grinder where they both wanted it to go.

He had to spread his own legs wider to lower his center of gravity as Ampollita gasped, “Ay, Dios mio, que grande! Chinge me! Chinge me mucho, El Brazo Largo!”

He did. Most men would have. But it almost went soft on him when that shit about him being El Brazo Largo sank in. He reached down to hook an elbow under either of her plump bare knees and slide her up the oak paneling to pound her big soft rump against the door with his own legs straight. She found it more comfortable too, judging by the feline sounds coming out of her as she clung tightly to him, inside and out, while he shot his wad inside her.

She sighed, “I felt that and I am so happy, El Brazo Largo!”

He left it in her, but stopped moving as he quietly replied, “So am I. But could we keep it down to a roar, and how did you ever get the notion I was this Largo gent, mi corazen?” She said she was still too excited for talk, and suggested they do something less tiring aboard her bedstead. He figured that would be a better place to talk. So a good time was had by all as he enjoyed her again with one of the pillows under her gyrating hips while she boxed his ears with her bare feet every time he slowed down. It was easier to see, in this position, how she had been getting more satisfaction in the kitchen than in bed. From the way she was sweating and gasping as she did at least two thirds of the work, he felt certain he’d just helped her shed a few pounds. He knew he was getting hungry again. It seemed a swell way to stay in shape, if only it didn’t make you come so soon whenever it got this good!

He finally had her calmed down enough to answer questions as he lit a cheroot to share with her on top of the rumpled sheets. She said it was well known that El Brazo Largo rode with the rebel leader, El Gato, and that everyone knew El Gato’s band was somewhere in Sonora at the moment because so many rurales and federales were concentrated over to the east right now.

He let her have a drag on their cheroot as he soberly observed she sure seemed to make up her pretty head at short notice. He said, “I’ve heard a tall gringo with a mustache has been seen in the company of El Gato on occasion. Since you called El Gato a rebel instead of a bandit, I’d hazard a guess you don’t share your Tio Hector’s political opinions. But a heap of us old West-by-God-Virginia boys grew up long and lean to grow some hair on our fool faces.”

Ampollita snuggled closer and put the cheroot to Longarm’s lips as she confided, “Everyone here, save for the old fool in charge, prays for the fall of Diaz and La Causa de Libertad. I guessed at who you had to be because you rode in on that sorrel, with those four notches carved on the handle of that six-shooter, eh?”

Longarm snorted, “Mierda, I never cut those fool notches on that old army thumb-buster. It came my way like so.” She said, “I know. The two riders you must have met before you got here stopped by a day or so ago. The one who was carrying the same six-shooter was riding a palomino. After they had eaten, and left us unharmed, Tio Hector sent a rider for to tell los rurales anyway. He said they were bonds he had read about in the newspapers. Later on, los rurales told us not to worry, because they knew the two of them were headed for El Norte for to rob a gringo trading post and blame it on Los Indios.”

“Great minds run in the same channels,” Longarm sighed as the coy cantina gal toyed with his damp pubic hairs. He chanced saying, “Esta bien, I did meet up with those two ambitious bonds, and it would be false modesty to say they won. But why does that have to make me this wild and woolly gringo who rides with Mexican rebels?”

She answered simply, “Because you won. They were not a pair of schoolchildren out for to have some fun. They were well-known killers. Both of them. When we saw one man alone had helped himself to one of their mounts and pistols, we knew he had to be better. So what do you get when you add up a deadly tall Anglo with a mustache and admiration for El Gato, when you know El Gato is riding nearby, and-“

“You said we,” Longarm cut in, demanding, “Who’s we, Ampollita?” She shrugged and said, “La raza, here at this fonda. Tio Hector told one of the muchachos for to ride into Sonoyta and tell los rurales you were surrounded here with jaded mounts.”

Longarm gasped, “Kee-rist, it’s about time you told me! Were you telling the truth about being able to fix me up with fresh mounts?” She sighed and said, “No se p reocupe, querido. I told the muchacho for to ride slow. Nobody but Tio Hector would wish for to make El Gato cross with them. I shall have you on your way in no time. But first do it to me one more time for to steady my nerves when los rurales arrive.”

Chapter 8

So Ampollita’s nerves were likely steadier than Longarm’s as he rode by moonlight with fresh mules carrying the same loads at a brisker pace.

He was tempted to push them faster to make up the time he’d lost—it had hardly been wasted—at the roadside fonda. He forced himself to take it slow but steady, knowing there was just no way he was going to make it in to Puerto Periasco before daybreak or, hell, in one jump. The fugitives would have to hole up in such shade as they could manage for most of the coming day and push on to the Sea of cortez the following night. If Ampollita had been right about that Yuma-bound coastal steamer, things might work out even better if he got in just before the fugitives boarded it.

He thought he’d heard something in the distance, and reined in for a tighter listen. The night sky wasn’t as easy to keep time by as his missing pocket watch, but he figured they were better than two hours south of that fonda now. So what sure sounded like hoofbeats, a lot of hoofbeats, was coming from somewhere closer.

“Those rurales made good time from Sonoyta, didn’t they?” he asked his mules in a disgusted tone as he dismounted to lead the two of them off the road towards the moon so everything would be outlined in the same shade of blackness. He led on foot to choose his path with care. A furlong out, he tethered both mules behind the same clump of organpipe and told them he’d be right back.

As he and the Big Fifty moved toward the road again, he looked back the way he’d just come, and saw nothing much but organpipes, separated just enough to peer between, rising higher than either mule.

On the way back to the moonlit road Longarm got out that knife from the trading post and cut a willowy branch of paloverde. When he met up with the sign he and the mules had left in the pale crust as they’d left the trail, he cradled the Big Fifty in one arm and got busy with his improvised broom. He swept sign to where hardly anyone but a desert Indian, scouting hard in the moonlight on foot, was likely to notice a slightly darker and rougher patch of caliche. He kept at it as he crawfished back between some cardon and prickle-pear. He’d chosen that gap through the cactus with exactly this move in mind.

Once he’d crawfished that far, he figured they’d either spot sign and rein in or they wouldn’t. So he moved on back to the mules and stood between them with the rifle braced in the organpipe clump that made a better screen than a fort. As those other critters got nearer, at a brisk trot, Longarm put a palm over either mule’s velvety muzzle, but didn’t pinch any nostrils just yet. Mounts could be divided into those who nickered at strangers and those who didn’t. A nose bag or gentle palm seemed to have a calming effect. If gentle methods failed, neither a horse nor mule could breathe through its mouth, and like anyone else, they had to take a deep breath before they let out a serious yell.

A low, calm voice had a quieting effect as well. So Longarm softly told them, “Sounds like six or eight riders, stirrup to stirrup and serious as hell about getting there. The next stage stop to the south figures to offer them remounts, whether they want to or not, if those are rurales out for blood!”

But it wasn’t. Longarm had to laugh at his own sense of drama as he saw the bulky dark mass of a stagecoach swaying southward, with no running lights lit, behind its six-mule team.

He watched with a wistful smile as it rattled and rumbled past at a pace he could only envy. He told his own mules, “They’ll have made it to the next fonda and a change of teams before midnight, with time out for everyone to coffee and shit whilst the three of us plod on at a trail pace. They’ll likely make it all the way in to Puerto Periasco by the time we’re scouting for some shade a night’s ride short!”

He began to swap loads as he heard the coach rattle and rumble out of earshot. He muttered, “Just as well I never waited for that late-running coach, Lord knows why it’s running so late, and I’d already been spotted as a wanted man by others working for the same outfit.”

He untethered, mounted up, and led off at an angle through the moonlight, drifting back towards the road, as he assured himself he knew what he was doing.

He lit a smoke, cupping the match flame in his Palm. Then he held the lit cheroot in a cupped hand, army Style, instead of between his teeth. Smoking at times and in places you weren’t supposed to didn’t really make Your forbidden treat taste better. But it gave you something to do and kept you wide awake.

Back on the road again, where he’d be harder to trail, Longarm mentally paced off the ride ahead, and saw that while there was no hope of making it in what was left of this night, he’d be riding in before midnight tomorrow night. That would still be early for a Mexican seaport.

He told his mule, “I’ll find a good home for you kids. Then I’ll use the ill-gotten gains of those bandits to buy me most everything I lost, save for my badge.”

He snorted angry smoke out both nostrils and grumbled, “I’ll get my badge and the bunch of them! They won’t want to board that boat to Yuma until it’s fixing to shove off. So if I get aboard it earlier I can … Great day in the morning, I don’t have to do shit! Not if all of us are aboard, but they don’t know it, before we steam through the delta and U.S. Customs comes aboard at Yuma!”

He laughed mockingly and nodded in passing to a solemn old saguaro. “Howdy, U.S. Customs. I’d be U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long of the Denver District Court, and I’d surely be obliged if you all would help me make some federal arrests aboard this vessel!”

The saguaro didn’t laugh. Longarm warned himself to stop jawing out loud like a prisoner jerking off in a solitary cell. The night noises all about sounded louder, and spookier, once he had.

He’d read somewhere that mankind, having eyes that worked better by daylight, had invented bad dreams and ghost stories to keep everyone huddled safer after dark instead of wandering about, half blind, to step off a cliff or into something bigger, hungrier, and with better night vision. It still beat all how uneasy an elf owl could make one feel, even when one knew that was only a bitty owl-bird calling from a woodpecker’s hollow in a saguaro.

The crickets chirping all about could spook a night rider worse. Desert crickets didn’t chirp any spookier than the ones you might hear by the hearth of some old run-down house. They spooked you by suddenly stopping for long pregnant pauses, every time someone or something else as big as a fool kit fox, or something meaner, passed within yards of the bugs. You seldom heard real rattlesnakes late at night in the desert. But there were all sorts of other critters who seemed to delight in buzzing like an eight-foot diamondback to scare you shitless and spook your mount. One breed of grasshopper had that sudden sinister buzz down pat. It could spook your mount just as much.

But the mules Ampollita had sent him on his way aboard were used to this very road at night, and happy to be driven down it at a far more gentle pace than they were used to. He’d find out how they felt about taking him more than ten or twelve miles without getting the rest of the night off when they got to the next fonda down the road. He didn’t aim to stop there, or even let the folks inside get a good look at him. For sooner or later that message from the first fonda’s boss had to reach los rurales, and it was always best to let such a swell bunch just guess which way you’d gone for certain.

He’d trot them a furlong, walk them two, and rein in for a breather now and again, changing mounts when he stopped for a real trail break every ninety minutes or so. Hence he figured he was setting a pace of at least a third of the cross-country speed of that night coach, and so it didn’t seem astounding when he suddenly realized the next stage stop was just down the road a piece,‘dobe walls and high mirador or lookout tower barely visible in the moonlight, and nary a speck of candle glow to greet them.

“Must be after four in the morning, so they’re all asleep,” he told his mules as he reined to a walk, considering the sounds of all eight hooves in the moonlit dust.

No dogs were barking. No window shutters were being thrown open, and sneaking through cactus and stickerbrush, far enough out to matter, seemed the slower way to Puerto Periasco. So he decided to just ease on by.

He almost managed. Then, just as he drew abreast of a roadside window, a female voice on the edge of total hysteria called out in high-toned Spanish, “Quien es? Que desea? No tengo dinero, pero tengofusiles.”

Longarm reined in again to calmly assure the frightened lady he was only a poor wayfaring stranger, he didn’t want anything, and he had his own money and guns if it was all the same with her.

She must have noticed his accent. She called out, “Es usted Americano?

Oh, that is true. They told me one of El Gato’s followers is a gringo! There is nothing left here for to steal, and I warn you I will shoot if you come any closer!”

Longarm calmly replied, “In that case I’d best be on my way then, seeing I make you feel so tense. But just to satisfy my own curious nature, Senorita, are you saying you all have been pestered by El Gato and some other gringo? I’m missing something here. I thought El Gato led a rebel band, and hadn’t heard he’d been recruiting all that many of my kind. I hate to have to admit it, but not many gringo riders of the Owlhoot Trail share El Gato’s idealistic notions. Neither Frank nor Jesse act as much like old Robin Hood as they would have us all believe.”

The unseen woman, who might or might not have had a gun trained on Longarm, said uncertainly, “I do not understand the point you seem to make. I do not know much more about what has been going on at this fonda. I came in aboard the mail coach to Puerto Periasco a few hours ago. We were running late because there was talk of El Gato’s band out our way and everybody knows he likes to strike in the dark, like the mouser he is named for.”

Longarm quietly replied, “Hardly seems fair to say your stage was stopped by El Gato unless you saw him do it, Senorita.”

She said, “I just told you I was confused. The coach crew cursed when they drove in to find nobody here for to change their team for them. While they were arguing about what to do about that, I excused myself for to use the … letrina. When I returned, they had driven on without waiting for me. I think they must have been very frightened of something. From the way this place was deserted, with coals in the kitchen stove still glowing, something must have frightened everyone. I know that I am most frightened. I am called Consuela O’Hara y Mendez, and you are called … ?”

“My friends call me Custis, Custis Crawford,” Longarm lied, since most of the high-toned families down this way sided with Diaz to begin with, and since it was easy to recall how kissing-cousin Crawford Long had come up with ether anesthesia in time to save a heap of old boys a heap of pain at places such as Shiloh and Cold Harbor. Then Longarm told the lady peering out the window at him that he had to get on down the road.

She sobbed, “Espere! Do not leave me here alone in the desert!”

Longarm looked eastward at the first faint hint of dawn as he told her, “I wish you’d make up your mind, Miss Consuela. I have to find some safe shade for these mules and me before the sun comes up. For those unwinking stars up yonder ain’t forecasting a cold spell. I got a spare mule if you ain’t too fat, and while we’re at it, is there any spare water to be had in yonder?”

She eagerly told him about the well pumps behind the kitchen and empty stable out back. So he dismounted and led both mules in through the overhang of the fortress-like walls of the quarters and stable, to find the stranded senorita waiting for him in the courtyard.

He couldn’t say how pretty she might be in such faint moonlight, but he could see she was young and filled her cotton summer dress in a refined willowy way. He wasn’t surprised to see she didn’t really have a gun.

He ticked his hat brim to her. Then he led the mules to the watering trough by the stable entrance, pumped it half full, and let them both go at it.

He explained he’d been husbanding his trail water, and explained how she’d have to share one mule with topped-off water bags and ride bareback. She said she knew how to ride, but asked, “For why do wish for to push on with sunrise almost upon us? Do you know of a safer place, with more shade, than this fonda?”

To which he could only reply, “I sure do. There’s thirty or forty miles of open desert betwixt here and Puerto Penasco, with all sorts of shady stuff to be found along the way if you really look hard for it. I know this deserted fonda has shade, water, and walls as thick as the ones at the Alamo. I’ve heard it said that Travis and Bowie were still dumb to wait, since Santa Anna was sure to come looking for ‘em.”

The marooned Mexican gal said, “Los rurales are as likely to come along as those bandits, no?”

Longarm didn’t want to argue politics with a lady who seemed that enthusiastic about rurales. So he just shrugged and replied, “It’ll be way safer if it’s left for us to decide who we want to wave to along this mighty lonesome road, Miss Consuela. You can stay here if you’d rather. I can’t say for certain whether you’d be safer either way. I don’t know what scared a whole bunch of grown men to flee these thick walls, all this water, and like you said, a road out front patrolled now and again by rurales. I figure it must have been something sort of scary. I’d rather not wait here and see if it comes back.”

She allowed how, in that case, she’d just as soon tag along.

Leaving the mules to laze in the moonlit courtyard, Longarm and his new-found traveling companion went into the fonda to fetch her one carpetbag and see if the others had left anything useful behind in their sudden stampede for safer ground.

Longarm lit a wall sconce inside to shed some light on the subject. He was glad he had as soon as he saw what Consuela O’Hara y Mendez really looked like.

Aside from looking worried, the obviously Irish and Spanish gal of perhaps twenty-five had wavy auburn hair to go with her big blue eyes. But her skin, exposed from the breastbone up, was that odd soft shade of peach you almost never saw on anyone but certain gals from the olive-growing parts of Spain.

She’d left her baggage out front in the taproom. Longarm moved back to the kitchen with a view to grabbing at least a sack of cracked corn or frijoles for the mules. He lit a waterproof Mexican match made more like a small candle than a wooden stick, and found an oil lamp near the kitchen sink. He lit that too. Then he stared harder at the plastered ‘dobe above the sink and muttered, “Aw, shit.”

Someone had written “Yaqui!” with a finger dipped in chili sauce, or blood. That was all Longarm needed as he blew out the lamp and strode out to rejoin Consuela, saying, “Vammos. En seguida. I’ll explain along the way.”

He did. It was easy, as he got Consuela and their combined baggage, including eighty pounds of fresh water, loaded up. You didn’t have to explain as much about Yaqui to a gal who’d been raised on a ranch in these parts.

The Yaqui Indians of Northwest Mexico claimed to be left-over Aztecs who’d never surrendered to the Spanish, and acted as if they were out to take Mexico back in the name of Montezuma.

As advanced as Pueblo when it came to raising corn, beans, and kids in their canyon strongholds, the Yaqui were better than Apache when it came to raising hell. They’d have been as famous as Apache, Sioux, and such had they raised hell north of the border. But fortunately for most Anglo soldiers and settlers, the Yaqui raided close to home and the Mexican newspapers tended to play down all the embarrassment they caused Mexico’s official Indian policy.

Mexican governments, all the way back to those of Old Spain, held that the best way to get along with Indians was by fair but firm, if not exactly gentle, persuasion.

Instead of setting up a Bureau of Indian Affairs, old Cortez and the governors who’d come after him had simply ordered any Indians he hadn’t already killed to wipe off that fool paint, put on Christian pants, and show up for the early Mass at the nearest mission church.

The policy had worked as well as Uncle Sam’s, at less cost to both sides in the end, with most of Mexico’s native population. It was tougher to hold an Indian uprising when so many Indians had Spanish kith or kin, and vice versa. But not unlike some snooty white folks to the north, the Yaqui didn’t hold with marrying up or even shaking hands with anyone who didn’t speak their Nahuatlan version of Uto-Aztec and pray to the same bloody-minded elder gods of Old Mexico.

Having agreed they wanted nothing to do with any Yaqui, Longarm and the stranded Mexican gal lit out down the road until it was getting light enough to see colors.

Then Longarm led them off along a gentle ridge, pointing to a distant clump of mesquite as he called back, “Those mesquite seem to be sprouting from black basalt rock. Might be an old volcanic plug. Even if it ain’t, mesquite offers more shade than anything else out this way and the mules can browse it, if they’re careful about the thorns.”

She allowed there was plenty of mesquite on her husband’s ranch. That was the first Longarm had heard of any damned old husband. He hadn’t noticed her wearing any damned old ring, and that was the second thing a man looked for, once he’d admired a gal’s form and face.

It was hardly the time to ask where her mysterious husband might be. So he just led on to get them all under the low canopy of feathery mesquite leaves, greened up by that recent rain, and discover that, as he’d hoped, the center of the grove was a dirt-filled hollow surrounded by a two-or three-foot natural fortress of rounded basalt boulders.

He helped her down and began to unload the mules he’d tethered on long leads to separate mesquite trunks, explaining as he did so, “I read how they get formations like this in the dry country of South Africa too. Only you don’t find diamonds out our way. Columns of lava cool, shrink, and crack underground. Ground water rots out the centers a tad faster, the way a big old tree stump might rot, as the winds and rains peel away the original grade to … Well, you were looking for a safer place to spend the day, not a geology lecture. So suffice it to say we’ve found shade, a wide-open field of fire all around, and a swell place to fire from.”

She stared about nervously in the tricky light of a harsh desert sunrise as she asked who might be creeping up on them out there in the middle of nowhere.

He answered, “Likely nobody, Miss Consuela. I left that coach road on what was almost a sudden impulse when I noticed it was passing through a ridge with lots of slickrock and little deep caliche. We had to leave sign hither and yon along those three furlongs of ridge we just now negotiated. But like you say, it looks like the middle of nowhere and nobody has any call to expect us over here in this common-looking clump of mesquite. So what say I unroll some bedding and let you recline with some tomato preserves for a lie-down breakfast?”

She looked sort of shocked, but managed a polite smile as she told him it was not that she didn’t feel grateful to him for having rescued her from that frightening situation, but that he had to give her time to think.

She said, “Is true I have left Carlos forever, having caught him doing vile things with a mere servant. Maybe I did say I would do the same vile things with the first handsome man I met back in Ciudad Mejico, for I was most hurt as well as angry. But I was not expecting a handsome gringo, and I feel suddenly awkward about going to bed with you.”

Longarm smiled thinly and demanded, “Who said anything about me going to bed with anybody? Don’t I have anything to say about it? Is that all you women ever think about?”

She blinked owlishly up at him, suddenly laughed like hell, and said she’d always heard that worked the other way around.

To which Longarm could only reply, “Maybe it does, other times and places. Right now I figure we’re a day’s ride from help in any direction, with the Yaqui on the rise a heap closer. So if it’s all the same with you, Miss Consuela, I mean to keep this Big Fifty in my arms instead of you or even Miss Ellen Terry. For, no offense, neither of you gals, pretty as I find you both, can spit six hundred grains of lead half as far!”

Chapter 9

Longarm had read those unwinking desert stars all too right. It was pushing a hundred in the shade before noon, and the sun-lashed desert all around was shimmering as if behind a rain-washed window pane, while a shimmering silvery sea, or a mighty realistic mirage, now covered the coach road and the dry land beyond as far as some nameless ridge of shattered bedrock.

He’d gotten Consuela to stretch out atop a flannel blanket in her thin silk dress. She’d even dozed off more than once for a hot and sweaty catnap. But then she’d wake up to drone some more about her awful love life.

Longarm had long since noticed that when it came to screwing, men couldn’t think of much else they’d rather do, and women couldn’t think of much else they’d rather talk about—especially when it just wasn’t practical to really do it. So Longarm was commencing to feel left out as she went on and on about all those other men who’d used and abused her during an adult life that hardly seemed long enough.

To hear Consuela tell it, she’d been sent off to a convent school after her momma caught a wicked but hardly cruel stepfather feeling for pubic hair where none had sprouted as yet.

She’d felt for it herself a lot, and run off with a handsome groundskeeper at the precocious age of thirteen. So the same stepdad who’d fooled with her earlier had had the peon love of her life shot for trespassing. Then, since her momma found her awkward to have around the house, they’d married her off young to a rich as well as dirty old man. She’d found some of his advanced notions about the ways of a man with a maid delightfully exciting. He’d found her such a delight in bed that he’d died there, leaving her a rich young widow.

She said, “I never should have married Carlos a year later. He was only after my money and not, alas, my body. He said La Santa Fe forbade all but one position, and so I steeled myself to accept my lackluster lot. But then I caught him in the position of sixty-nine on the floor tiles, with a cleaning woman of mixed blood!” Longarm suppressed a yawn and said, “Some men seem to like a bowl of chili after they’ve been dining on steak for a spell. I hope you had the sense to get your money out of there before you lit out in person aboard that night coach.”

She sighed and replied, “I wired my bank for to transfer my account to Puerto Periasco two days before I left, while Carlos was away on business, or with some puta, the beast.”

Longarm stared thoughtfully at some seagulls floating on the sea over yonder as he cocked a brow and asked, “You can wire south to the capital and across to the Sea of Cortez from that dinky border town? No offense, but I ain’t seen many telegraph poles along that coach road to the east. None sticking out of all that mirage either.”

She explained how the telegraph line ran a more direct course to Mexico City and from there to the west coast. She didn’t have to tell him why the nationalized telegraph network had to avoid some parts of a north infested with unreconstructed Indians and bitterly poor mixed bloods. But she told him anyway.

He found it felt better to chew on a mesquite stem than a smoke when it got this hot and dry. So he was doing so as he sighed and observed, half to himself, “Los rurales in Sonoyta will have wired ahead to Puerto Periasco by now then. They wear those big gray felt sombreros as a rule, right?”

She nodded. “Es verdad, but for why would los rurales take any interest in my leaving Carlos?”

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “You’re right. I’m likely just worrying over nothing. Them four white sombreros out yonder wouldn’t be los rurales or even honest vaqueros at this hour of the morning on such a dazzling day.”

Consuela sat up to peer off to the east the same way, sounding a bit like a little kid as she marveled, “Ooh, el mirave! But I see no sombreros of any color out there. Do we seem to be underwater to them as well?”

Longarm morosely replied, “They must see something over this way. That’s likely why they’re heading so directly at us. Watch what seems to be bitty white dots near that three-branched saguaro. All those bitty dots are shimmering in the rising heat waves, but only the four white ones are moving closer.”

She gasped, “Ay, Dios mio! I see what you mean! I hope they are not those savage Yaqui!” Longarm sighed and said, “So do I. It ain’t my fight, and some of the Yaqui I’ve convinced of that treated me tolerable enough. It’s the ones I can’t seem to convince that I try to avoid. As friend or foe, your average Yaqui seems more emotional than your average gent of any other breed.”

He smiled wistfully at the memory of a lean brown Yaqui gal it wouldn’t have been decent to brag about, and continued. “I savvy just a few words of the more northern dialects of their overall lingo. A Papago can understand a Hopi or Shoshoni about as well as a Spaniard could follow the drift of a Portuguese or Italian. But every time I’ve tried that on Yaqui, they answer in Spanish and tell me not to mock ‘em. I reckon it’s something like the way you folks feel about high-toned Castilian and Border Mex.”

She told him in a worried tone not to worry about that, and asked if he knew how to tell Yaqui in Spanish that some of her best friends were Indians.

He chuckled dryly and replied, “If they’re willing to talk first. I’ve found it best to just dodge ‘em when they’re on the war path. We ain’t close enough to their home range in the Sierra Madre for them to be picking flowers.”

She looked wildly about, her unbound hair whipping like burnished telegraph wire, as she asked which way they could ride to dodge those ominous white dots.

He wearily replied, “I just said that.” Then he rose to his feet to take up a new position a few feet closer to the line of the higher ground they’d followed to this rare patch of shade.

Consuela moved to join him as he calmly took a half-dozen long .50-120-600 rounds from their belt loops and lined them neatly in front of him on the black rock of the low natural barricade. He braced the Big Fifty to one side and laid the Schofield .45 Short by the cartridges on the rock as he said, “Maybe they’re only bandits, or even better, just making for that coach road betwixt us and them. They won’t spot any sign we left as long as they don’t cross the road to make for this shade.” She asked what the odds of them doing that might be.

He sighed and said, “It’s pushing noon and they’d be fixing to hole up for la siesta if they were back wherever they’ve come from. I’m fixing to fire my first round wide, as a warning. Anyone at all familiar with the rules of the Owlhoot Trail ought to follow my drift. If they’re innocent travelers, they’ll ride on and look for their own damned shade. If they don’t, we’ll know it’s open season on such rude gents.” She said she knew how to handle a pistol. To which he could only reply, “That would be swell if you had one. We’re going to have to cover both sides of this teeny mesquite grove if my first ruse don’t work. But right now I need both these guns, great and small.”

Before he had to explain further, the sun had risen another notch in the cloudless cobalt sky and what had seemed a vast shimmering sea just wasn’t there anymore.

The four widely spaced riders hadn’t vanished, though. At this still-wavering distance it was impossible to say whether they were Mexicans of the ruder sort or Indians who’d taken those advances they’d found useful while rejecting sissy notions such as property rights or the right of any stranger to go on breathing.

Longarm waited until the four of them got to the road and bunched closer around the one pointing directly at him and Consuela—or at least at the shade they were sweating in. Then Longarm sighed and picked up the pistol, saying, “I fear we’re about to have company. If they’re Indians they’ll read two mules heading out this way. Let ‘em get halfway along the ridge and then call out to ‘em to ask them nicely to go away.”

She asked, “Will that not alert them to the fact that one of us is a woman?”

He nodded grimly and explained. “When you’re down to your last chips you play the cards you hold. Tempting as the thought of your used and abused body might be to anyone who’s yet to lay eyes on the same, I don’t want ‘em thinking one gun is alone out here with a pack mule. You yell. Then I’ll yell at you to shut up. That ought to make them study on bothering to circle us in this heat, seeing two or more of us could be watching both ways with any number of guns, see?”

She didn’t seem to. He didn’t have time to elaborate. The four mystery riders had tethered a roan, a buckskin, and two paints near the road to ease along the low ridge afoot through the knee-high brittlebush. There was a clump of taller organpipe a furlong or a little over two town blocks off. Longarm told Consuela to challenge them just as they drew abreast of the cactus screen.

She did, calling out, “Veiyesen! No mejodas, cabrones!”

Longarm had to laugh as the four of them took cover. For such a high-toned little gal, Consuela had quite a mouth on her. Having no improvements to add, he called out in English, “Don’t fuck with me either, you dumb jerk-offs!”

He was answered only by dead silence. He picked up the Schofield and pegged a shot low toward that clump of organpipe.

Consuela saw the puff of dust, and sadly observed the underpowered pistol didn’t have that much range.

He grinned wolfishly and replied, “As a matter of fact, I could lob some slow-moving .45 Short slugs that far, if distance was all I was aiming for. I ain’t out to hit anybody with this six-gun. I only want them to know we have it, and that we were serious about wanting them to ride on and leave us alone.”

A blur of dusty white showed itself for an instant between some low stickerbush closer than those organpipes. She gasped, and Longarm said, “I see him. Two are hunkered behind that screen of cactus. The other two are trying to side-wind closer. They figure they’re still well out of range.”

Then he emptied the wheel of the Schofield their way to give them pause, and reloaded it as he soberly explained, “They are, if this was all we had at our disposal. I want you to move over to the far side of the mules with this and cover our rear. I don’t think they’re out to circle us just yet. I think they’re planning on waiting, just outside of range, until dark. But you never know what Yaqui might be up to. They like to surprise you.”

She took the Schofield gingerly, but asked if the Indians weren’t likely to fry their brains out under the hot son of an entire afternoon in August.

He said, “Their brains don’t work like yours or mine. Get cracking with that gun, and don’t fire it unless your target is closer than you’d ever want a Yaqui to get!”

She sounded as if she might be crying as she moved off through the dappled shade. Longarm didn’t feel like crying, but he sure felt alone.

Then he sighed and said, “Well, you were warned polite that you weren’t welcome here.”

Knowing at least one was nearer, with farther to run, Longarm drew a bead on that cactus clump halfway to the road and fired.

He was reloading without looking out for results as the echoes of his first Big Fifty shot were still fading. He’d reloaded as that one who’d been creeping closer jumped to his feet, yelling like a she-wolf giving birth to busted glass, and ran towards the smoking buffalo gun instead of away.

Yaqui were like that.

“You poor brave kid!” Longarm sighed, just before he pulled the trigger to blow the charging Indian’s left lung and shoulder blade out his back with a bucket of blood. Then he was reloading, as fast as he was able, and he still barely made it as another, wearing only white pants and sombrero, rose from behind some brittlebush to take careful aim Longarm’s way with a muzzle-loader left over from the Mexican War.

Longarm fired first. So it was never established whether the Yaqui had known what he was up to or not. It was said a Yaqui was harder to stop with a bullet than most. But a slug meant to knock a bull buffalo down seemed to do the trick.

Then Consuela was screaming and blazing away with that Schofield. So Longarm was up and reloading on the run. He joined her on the far side of the grove as the mules brayed and shook the mesquite branches above them. The Yaqui tearing up the open slope with a wild grin and a waving machete, despite the blood running down his side, seemed even wilder until Longarm dropped him with a second, much bigger hunk of hot lead.

He reloaded and put a second round into the limp form to make sure. Then he handed Consuela some spare .45 Shorts and said, “Nice going. Reload and keep up the good work whilst I tidy up out front.”

He got back to the buffalo rounds still spread on the rocks just in time to see the fourth surviving Yaqui trotting reluctantly toward those distant ponies three furlongs or better than six hundred yards away. Hence out of rifle range, or so he must have thought.

So the Indian was turning his head to grin back as hot metal slammed into his ear to tear his face off and skim his straw sombrero off like a pie plate.

Longarm reloaded and got up to call Consuela in, saying, “I counted four coming in and we seem to have put four on the ground. Wait here and I’ll fetch those sun-baked ponies.”

He did. But it wasn’t that easy. For as he broke cover, the fatally shot first one rose to his knees in the blood-spattered cotton to draw a wavering bead on Longarm and take another buffalo round where it seemed best to shoot a Yaqui, smack between the eyes.

Over by the organpipe clump, Longarm found that one staring up at the cloudless sky with a sleepy smile, his white shirt spattered with red blood and green cactus pulp. There was nothing worth taking from the faceless horror closer to the road either.

The four ponies, brands and saddles indicating they had been taken from some unfortunate Mexicans, had to be led wide of all the fresh-spilled blood. But they greeted Consuela and the two mules as if they’d known them for many a year.

As Longarm watered the overheated ponies, he told Consuela there wasn’t enough for all of them in those five-gallon bags.

He said, “I can cut and pulp some cactus. Pear is all right and barrel is better for the stock. We’ll save the well water for the two of us. Come sundown, we’d better turn the mules loose on yonder road. They’re coach mules who know it well. They’ll make it to the nearest fonda that’s still pumping water. You and me ought to make it on out of this desert in one hard night’s ride, changing back and fourth with four mighty tough ponies.” She asked how he could tell how tough their brand-new mounts were.

He answered simply, “Yaqui were riding ‘em. Horse Indians sort of go along with Professor Darwin when it comes to choosing horseflesh. If a pony can take ‘em where they want to go, when they want to get there, they keep it as a mount. When it can’t, they eat it. We ain’t got time to talk about it. We have to get far from here fast. I’d best see now about that cactus water. I vote we leave here just after sundown, and this ain’t no parliamentary democracy. We’ best shun that road everyone knows about and beeline by moonlight across the caliche. We’ll be leaving a mighty easy trail to follow as we do so. But that won’t matter if we’ve made it out of this fool desert before it’s light enough for any other Yaqui or … bandits to follow.”

She didn’t argue. He broke out some more canned grub and opened it for her before he stepped back out in the blast-furnace glare with a gunnysack to gather some cactus pads.

They were in luck. He found more than one watermelon-sized barrel cactus along with some soapier-tasting pear.

He toted them all back to the shade, where Consuela watched with interest as he got all the well water into one rubberized bag before he began to refill the empty one with cactus juice.

As he did so, he explained. “Found what was left of a wagon party surrounded by this barrel cactus one time. It appeared they’d died of thirst, the poor greenhorns. None of ‘em could have known there was a few quarts of tolerable water in each and every one of these thorny things. Thanks to that recent rain, these are juicier than usual. So their pulp water’s almost pure.” She asked for a pear pad to cut up as salad greens for their pork and beans. He didn’t care. It was sort of a cross between lettuce and soap suds when you weren’t used to it. But being a Mexican, she was used to it. He allowed he’d have some too. For the more moisture you got in you the better, especially when you couldn’t tell how much you’d really sweated since your last good whistle-wetting.

It got hotter. Consuela said she couldn’t believe that was possible either, and she’d been living in Sonora a spell. She said that back in her thick-walled ranch house around this time of day, she’d been in the habit of stripping down totally to lie atop her bedding during the dry heat of la siesta.

He told her to go ahead, adding, “It’s too blamed hot for a member of the opposite gender to notice. Or leastwise, to do anything about anything he might notice.” She laughed roguishly and said she was tempted to just go ahead and test his self-control. She added it would certainly feel better, no matter what he thought about ladies cooling off as best they knew how.

He went on eating beans and cactus cross-legged as he told her to try and get some damned sleep, in any state of dress, while he stood guard. “I’ll wake you up in time for you to spell me on guard for an hour or so. Then we’ll be pushing those ponies, and ourselves, as if our lives depended on reaching the coast by morning, because they likely will.” She repressed a shudder, asked if he was trying to cool her off by chilling her blood, and then calmly slipped her thin white dress off over her auburn head and lay back on the cotton flannel to close her big blue eyes with an innocent Mona Lisa smile. He couldn’t help but notice she had auburn hair all over.

Her nipples were pink, and standing at attention on her small but nicely molded breasts. Her pale skin and slender build were surely new wonders to admire after his recent adventures with Rosalinda and Ampollita. But he looked away, lit a cheroot, and got up to stand guard on the far side of the tethered stock.

Of course, a man had to move about his post to cover all sides as he guarded it. So he naturally just had to catch a glimpse of her pale nude form from time to time, and then time again.

He had to laugh at himself for peeking. He muttered, “She knew you were close enough to just spread her thighs and enjoy as close a look as you wanted, if it hadn’t been so hot and in such a dumb time and place. Haven’t you figured her yet as what her own kind calls one of them chirladas? She wouldn’t go on and on about it if she really wanted it. Did Rosalinda? Did Ampollita? Did any gal back home who wasn’t a total prick-teaser? How many times have you told a pal not to waste his time and tips on a barmaid that swaps dirty talk with the boys bellied up to her bar?”

He took another drag on his cheroot and snorted, “Shit, even if it wasn’t true, trying to lay anything that nice in this heat would kill you dead as those four Yaqui!”

Chapter 10

As anyone who studies deserts knows, the hottest days are usually followed by the coldest nights, since air baked dry can’t hold much heat after sundown. Yet the night stayed balmy as the two of them rode the four ponies across trackless caliche at a pace that would have done the U.S. Cav proud. So Longarm wasn’t surprised to glimpse distant flashes along the southern horizon, or wonder why the desert breezes from that same direction were commencing to taste more like seaweed than greasewood. When Consuela allowed they seemed to be in for another gully-washer, Longarm said, “I sure hope so. A good rain ought to erase our trail. But just in case it don’t, let’s ride.”

They did, risking their mounts and their own necks on the thin edge of desperate. Mounted astride like a man with her feet braced in stirrups and her skirts hoisted scandalously, Consuela was a good rider. He knew she’d had more than livery stable experience when she didn’t question his frequent trail breaks and changes of mounts. Longarm kept the four-mile-an-hour average of a good infantry column in mind as he rested the ponies more often and trotted them a mite faster.

So by first light, a tad after five in the morning because of an overcast, they were winding their way downgrade through an ancient and wildly eroded lava field when suddenly, off to the southwest, they could see a real silvery sea and Longarm said, “We made it. Can’t be more than a dozen miles from the coastline and it’s downhill all the way.”