Longarm and the Big Fifty

Then fat raindrops landed all around to make cowpats of mud in the powdery dust. You didn’t get caliche in a lava field. The chemistry was different as time and occasional but patient rainwater broke basaltic lava down.

Consuela sobbed, “We’re going to get soaked! What will people say if I ride into town with my nipples showing through a thin wet dress?”

Longarm replied, “They’ll say you’ve got great nipples. But hold the thought and let’s swing closer to yonder wall of black rimrock. We may be able to find some shelter from the coming storm.”

In such tricky light, it wasn’t as easy as it sounded, but they did—by the time they’d gotten good and wet. The cave-like mouth of a lava tube, paved with a flat bottom of black sand, gave them more room than they and any number of scorpions and bats might ever ask for. Dismounting, they led the ponies in under the overhang. Longarm handed Consuela some of his wax matches to explore deeper as he broke out the best canvas tarp they had and stepped out into the rain with it to spread it flat in the downpour.

It poured down on him too. But he was already wet, so what the hell. He moved back inside to spy an orange glow, and following it around a bend in the glass-walled lava tube, found Consuela had built a small but cheerful fire, using windblown tinder and some dry sticks she’d found back there.

Longarm didn’t ask why she was kneeling stark naked on a damp cotton flannel blanket. He glanced up at the shiny black ceiling and decided they could risk that much smoke for now. He knew her small blaze would die down to smokeless coals by the time it got light enough outside to matter.

He nodded down at her and murmured, “Tiene razon, I’ll fetch the saddles and we can drape stuff over the trees to dry some whilst we wait out this storm. You sure have tedious wet spells in this desert, no offense.”

He leaned the Big Fifty against the black bumpy glass and moved to shift the damp saddles and such back to the small fire. Then he picked up their water bags and headed back to the mouth of the tube.

Once there, he placed his hat and the Schofield on a fallen black slab, sat down to haul off his boots, then stripped naked before he picked up the bags and stepped out into the deluge.

It felt swell.

The tempest from the muggy Sea of Cortez still held a hint of the tropical clime it had come from, and had he only had a bar of naphtha soap he’d have thought he was taking a shower after a long night in the saddle. But he didn’t. So he was shaking out the now-clean tarp when Consuela, who somehow looked more naked, joined him there in the wet warm dawn to ask what they were doing.

Longarm sighed and said, “I was fixing to refill our water bags with the real stuff. I figured I could drape this tarp on the rocks so’s to funnel rainwater into the bags. I mean to dump what the poor ponies have left of their cactus juice first and … Miss Consuela, would you mind going back inside with that teasing torso? I’m trying to get some work done here, and to tell the truth, I find naked ladies sort of distracting.”

She laughed wickedly, reached down to grasp his semierection, and chortled, “So I see! Who said I was teasing?”

Then, as he really rose to the occasion, she gulped and added, “Ay, que grande! There seems to be more to you than meets the eye, and perhaps we should reconsider!”

So Longarm tossed the wet tarp on the gritty black sand, took her chilled wet form in his arms, and proceeded to lower the two of them to the tarp as she gasped, “No, espar-te. Todavia es temprano, and I did not expect you to take me this seriously!”

Then Longarm had her spread-eagle on the tarp, and his old organ-grinder hardly needed guidance as it parted the wet hair between her rain-slicked thighs and suddenly thrust, cold and stiff, into soft warm tightness as she stiffened in protest, sobbed, and then thrust upward with her firm young pelvis, pleading, “Ay, estoy embrujada! I cannot believe I am taking such a big gringo’s pipi in my only-human crica and, oh, Custis! Chinge me! Chinge me mucho!”

So he did, and they both agreed it felt swell to let themselves go at it hammer and tongs in the warm summer rain like a pair of frogs mating in a lily pond, only better. He reminded her that frogs didn’t get to stick it in, and she agreed the poor slithering things had to be missing a lot for all their croaking and splashing.

They tried it dog style in the rain, and managed to come that way as well, but then Consuela said she was getting chilled from all that rain on her back and running down between them. So they went inside and dried off to do it another way on a blanket by the fire. They agreed it was like starting all over with somebody new, save for the sweet fact you didn’t have to mess around as much before you got started. She said she’d always found getting started sort of awkward, and he said he’d noticed. That made her laugh, accuse him of rape, and thank him for being so understanding by getting on top.

So, with one swell position and another, it was broad day outside by the time both the rain and their passions let up for the moment.

Not knowing what the sky had in store for the rest of the day, they got dressed, polished off the last of the beans and tomato preserves, and saddled up to ride on.

Patches of jagged-ass rock extended all the way down to the seacoast, Puerto Periasco meaning about the same as Rockport, but they rode through a mile or more of cactus-hedged milpas of beans and corn before they drifted into the outskirts of the seaport via a farm lane instead of that coach road.

So not too many local folks seemed to pay them much mind, and she seemed pleased as punch by that. She said she had business that could wait, her southbound steamer not being due for a few days, and asked if they could find some out-of-the-way posada where her sordid but enchanting affair might not attract as much attention.

That was what some gals who just wouldn’t leave a man alone called the inevitable results, a sordid but enchanting affair. She seemed to have herself convinced he’d seduced her with some Casanova spell. It allowed her to act wild as hell, though. So he had no call to argue.

He wasn’t sure how much a man with a Mexican bounty posted on him ought to tell a gal of the currently ruling class down Mexico way. So he never did. He just said he was going out to see about innocent chores after they’d stopped at a dinky little inn near the waterfront. She said she’d let him, as soon as they tested the bedsprings just once. So seeing that he’d never had her in a real bed with a couple of pillows under her slim hips, they were going at it hot and heavy on the top floor while a Puerto Periasco lawman had a cup of coffee and some conversation with the innkeeper down in the kitchen.

Having been paid in advance, the heavy-lidded innkeeper didn’t care one way or the other, and it showed, as he told the town law that the mysterious gringo who’d arrived that morning was still screwing the not-bad-looking but rather skinny blanca he’d arrived with.

The lawman sipped thoughtfully and murmured, “The one they wired us about was said to be traveling alone, with two mules he stole from afonda to the north.”

The innkeeper shrugged and said, “They arrived on horseback. The four ponies are out back in the corral if you wish for to examine them. I can show you their vaquero saddles, if you like.”

The portly lawman shook his head and said, “Our country is so far from God and so close to Los Estados Unidos. There are gringos all over the place, and the one I seek crossed the border alone with one mule and one sorrel mare. After he had worn them out he stole two fresh mules. Nobody has reported any missing ponies. The couple upstairs may be just what they seem, a chingado gringo and a puta with poor taste in lovers. I shall keep an eye on them. But I do not see how either could be the notorious El Brazo Largo.”

The innkeeper made the sign of the cross and gasped, “Dios mio! Is that who you thought I had upstairs, trying for to break my bedsprings with that bag of bones?”

The Mexican lawman sighed and replied, “If only that were so. Is a handsome reward being offered for the head of El Brazo Largo. Some business about him siding with rebels against our beloved El Presidente. But the malvado they seek could hardly be down this way for to just get laid. So as long as that is all the one upstairs seems interested in, I shall only, as I said, keep an eye on him.”

He finished his cup and left while, blissfully ignorant upstairs, Longarm was washing up at a corner stand, anxious to get going while the naked lady he’d just withdrawn from lay slugabed with her eyes closed, a dreamy smile on her lips as she spread her lean thighs wide to cool things off for a spell.

Slipping out of their room and down the back stairs, Longarm went first to the docks, asked directions, and found his way to the steamboat office.

He bought himself passage to Yuma, at the north end of their line. They told him the northbound would get in late that afternoon, be in port perhaps four hours, and shove off for the night run north around ten P.M. That gave him more than enough time to sell those four ponies, buy himself another double-action .44-40 with a decent gun rig, take Consuela to supper after another good screwing, explain how he just couldn’t stay, and still have time to slip aboard that coastal steamer before Harmony Drake and his own pals were likely to make a last-minute run for the gangplank!

The sale of the ponies went off without a hitch, at a handsome profit, as soon as one considered how much he’d paid for them. The innkeeper, who seemed sort of anxious about something, helped Longarm out by telling him who to see about the deal.

He didn’t have to herd four ponies anywhere. The Mexican horse trader came over late that morning to look the four brutes over, then dicker a bit before they shook on a price they both knew to be fair, and that was that. The innkeeper witnessed the sale, and the horse trader said he’d send his hired help over for the stock and the saddles after la siesta.

That just gave Longarm time to arm himself more sensibly, now that he was getting to be so rich off Mexican outlaws and Indians. So he asked directions and, packing the Big Fifty, with the Schofield tucked in his pants, headed for the gunsmith both the innkeeper and the honest horse trader recommended.

He was almost there, with the sun getting higher and hotter, when he spied a pair of ponies tethered in the shade of a cantina awning.

They were both saddled Anglo-style, which might not have meant as much if one hadn’t been favoring its near hind hoof, having missed a shoe for many a weary mile. Longarm shut one eye to let its pupil adjust to dimmer lighting as he crossed the calle to stride on into the cantina with an innocent expression.

There were only two obvious Anglo riders in the nearly deserted establishment. The older and shorter one sat in one corner behind a limed oak table with his back to the angled ‘dobe. The one at the bar, as if to order, was tall and lean, packing a mighty familiar .44-40 in a cross-draw rig Longarm recalled having bought and paid for.

The one in the corner was staring out from under his Texas hat in such a disinterested way he just had to be interested as Longarm bore down on the one at the bar. That one didn’t seem to notice Longarm approaching with the Schofield in his right fist and a cocked buffalo gun in the other. The mestizo barkeep cocked a brow and said something about opening another bottle as he headed on back to somewhere less tense.

The one packing Longarm’s side arm, and doubtless a lot of other of his belongings, swung to face the man he’d robbed as he sensed an ominous movement to his right.

There was no more delicate way to start. So Longarm strode closer to that one, a gun in either hand, and quietly said, “Howdy. Before you get your bowels in an uproar, I was only sent to bring in Harmony Drake. Would you rather fight another man’s fight or make a deal?”

The kid wearing Longarm’s gun blustered, “How would you like to try for a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, Longarm? You ain’t got any jurisdiction down this way and, come to study on it, I could give a little whistle and have you gunned down like a dog by them rurales.”

Longarm quietly raised the Schofield, murmuring, “Do us both a favor and leave them sweet lips unpuckered. I don’t think you follow my drift, old son. I’m offering you a break you never offered me the other night in Growler Wash. You’d be well advised to take it!”

The one in the far corner, who must have thought Longarm didn’t know they were together, suddenly tipped his thick oak table forward and dropped behind it to make mysterious movements of his own. Longarm doubted he was jerking off. So before the Anglo could get his own gun muzzle over the top edge of his improvised barricade, Longarm swung the muzzle of the Big Fifty up to fire a shot heard all across Puerto Periasco.

The cuss who’d made such an unwise decision squealed like a stuck hog for a short spell as he writhed in the corner on one side, with a belly full of oak slivers and distorted lead. As his agonized pissing and moaning subsided, Longarm quietly informed the other one, “I said I was willing to deal. I never said I was willing to put up with any more of this bullshit.”

The younger and taller outlaw had gone fish-belly White and one got the impression, from the way both his hands were trembling at shoulder height, he was beginning to review his options seriously.

Then a voice from the doorway was saying in passable English, “I am not pointing my own guns your way for to ask your opinions of them, caballeros. You will both stand most still while my deputies put your weapons and everything else on the bar for my inspection. I am called Inspector Gomez, by the way. The words are the same in Spanish as English.”

Longarm didn’t turn as another Mexican in a gray summer uniform moved in to take both guns while a third searched him and put all his pocket jingle and his steamline ticket beside them on the bar.

The gun waddie he’d been fixing to relieve of far more suddenly blurted out, “He just killed my pard! You’ll find the dead body over in yonder corner. He come in here, raving like a maniac, and just blew poor old Jake away.”

Inspector Gomez, a stocky Mexican of about forty, moved over to the corner, took one look, and softly said, “I thought that was a buffalo round I heard from over in the marketplace. Your innocent friend seems to have a Remington .45 on the bloody floor by his right hand, senor. Could I have some names now?”

The snot who’d just surrendered Longarm’s gun and such to the Mexican lawmen smiled at Longarm as he said, “I’d be Sam Ferris, as innocent a child as ever rode out of Texas. Me and my poor pal, Jake Larkin, come down here looking to buy some of your fine dally-ponies. This murderous bounty hunter who just kilt Jake must have taken us for somebody else. He’d be that famous Longarm I understand your boys have had their own troubles with!”

Gomez turned to Longarm with renewed interest. “You are El Brazo Largo?

For why were you registered at your posada as Senor Crawford?”

Longarm didn’t like to lie when he didn’t have to. So he simply smiled at Ferris and replied, “Ask him. I ain’t the one packing the cross-draw .44-40 everyone says El Brazo Largo shoots rurales with.”

Gomez swung about to stare thoughtfully at the gun rig his deputy had taken from Ferris to place atop the bar next to the Schofield .45 the real Longarm had been carrying. The burly Mexican lawman shoved Ferris back a pace to pick up the wallet they’d just taken from him. Ferris smiled weakly and said, “That ain’t mine. We took it from him, see?”

Gomez opened the wallet to stare down at Longarm’s federal badge and identification with a wolfish smile as he softly marveled, “You made Senor Crawford hand this over as he was covering you with a loaded revolver? I mean no disrespect, El Brazo Largo, but you seem to be trying to feed me a big bowl of mierditas! They say El Brazo Largo is a tall gringo who wears his .44-40 cross-draw. You are a tall gringo. You were wearing that .44-40 cross-draw, and you would seem to have had El Brazo Largo’s badge and identification in your pocket. Would you care to explain how this might indicate this other noisy gringo, and not yourself, could be El Brazo Largo?” Ferris nodded desperately and said, “Sure I can. I may as well confess me and poor old Jake were wanted over in San Antone, but not here in Mexico. We all know Longarm here is a lawman north of the border who’s the wanted outlaw down this way. He chased us all this way illegal because he’s after a pal of ours and-“

Gomez cut in. “You say you were wanted by the state of Texas and so a federal deputy marshal tracked you all this way for to kill your friend with these antique weapons? Is that for why he registered at a second-rate posada with a woman and took his time for to encounter you by chance in this cantina?”

Ferris insisted, “It’s true! He’s Longarm, or El Brazo Largo as you all call him! We got the jump on him the other night, up the other side of the border. I took his gun rig because I fancied it. I’ve been packing his badge and identification because I meant to turn it in for the reward as soon as someone else I know finished his business here in Puerto Periasco, see?”

Gomez turned back to the real Longarm, who shrugged and said, “Don’t ask me why they’d get the drop on a famous lawman and forget to kill him before they rode off with his badge and gun.”

Gomez softly said, “Guns. Plural. Did you not notice the derringer attached to that watch chain on the bar, Senor Crawford?” Longarm shrugged again and said, “I stand corrected. Why don’t we get him to tell us where this mysterious pal of his might be at the moment? Seems to me I’d want anyone who knew me to identify me if I was being confounded with somebody wanted by the local law. I’m pretty sure there’s a lady back at my posada who can tell you I answer to the name of Crawford.”

It didn’t work. The portly Inspector Gomez smiled thinly as he shook his head and then said, “I have a better idea. I think I shall run you both over to la crircel for to wait until we hear from higher authorities. We shall take photographs of the two of you and try for to make you comfortable in our most modern cells until it is decided who is to go free and who is to be shot, eh?”

Ferris protested he didn’t want his pals to leave town without him.

Longarm said, “For once I agree with this son of a bitch! I got me a steamboat to catch this evening!”

But Gomez just smiled and said, “I noticed the ticket. If you are really who you say you are, it will still be good for passage to Yuma when we let you go. If you are El Brazo Largo, you will not be going anywhere but up against the wall, comprende?”

Chapter 11

When Inspector Gomez had bragged about the local jail being so modern, he’d meant the original oaken doors of the stone-walled cells had been replaced by iron bars, painted blood red. Prisoners still got to sleep on a floor mat and relieve themselves in a honey bucket. Their captors had prudently placed Longarm and Sam Ferris side by side in adjoining cells, separated by a thick slab of basaltic masonry. From their side of the bars, neither could see the modern Bell Telephone speaker that dangled between cells at face level.

But Longarm knew that old bromide about walls having ears had been inspired by ploys of the Spanish Inquisition. So when Ferris moved to the front of his own cell and called to him as “Longarm,” the tall prisoner who’d given his name as Crawford repeated his alias as he ambled over, asking in a sincerely puzzled tone, “Who might you be performing for, old son? It’s siesta time and I doubt that guard with his head on the desk out front speaks English, whether he’s awake or not.”

The outlaw picked up with Longarm’s badge and gun insisted, “Come on, you know what I’m talking about, Longarm. They took both of our pictures in the office. It’ll only take a few days for the Mex mails to put that fat greaser straight, and then where will you be?”

“Likely free as a bird, Longarm,” the real Longarm declared with as happy-go-lucky a tone as he could muster. It would have been sort of dumb to say anything else, whether the walls were listening or not.

As if he could read minds, Ferris said, “All right. I don’t owe you any favors neither. But I’d like to get out of here long before those photographs convince everyone you’re a big fibber. So what if we let one hand wash the other? I might be able to get you out of here alive if you saw fit to spring me early.”

Choosing his words carefully, Longarm asked, “How do you figure I can get you out of here early, Longarm? You may not be able to tell from where you’re standing, but this cell door seems locked secure and I just can’t seem to reach that key ring on the desk out front without stretching considerably.” Ferris said, “You could confess to being who we both know you are. They ain’t going to let you go in any case. But if you told ‘em I was me instead of you, they’d turn me loose and then I could see if I could get you out on one of them writs of habitual corpses, see?”

Longarm laughed for real, and declared, “You’re all heart. First you accuse me of being a lawman who shot your pal, and now you want to bail me out? I heard about you during a similar stay in the Yuma jail, Longarm. They said you could lie like a rug and talk the horns off a billy goat. But I have to allow I expected you to be more good looking …”

Ferris swore and almost sobbed, “Lying to me ain’t going to help you, Longarm. Look at my offer another way. Even if you figure it’s a mighty slim chance, at least it’s a chance. The greasers ain’t fixing to offer you shit. You heard what that slob Gomez said about shoving the famous Longarm up against the nearest wall.”

The famous Longarm shrugged and replied, “I heard. I can see why you’re so anxious about getting out of here before they can pin you down for certain. Old Gomez could have acted meaner. He let us both hang on to our smokes and matches. He didn’t stick hot irons up your ass or mine. I thought that was pretty slick of him to have us both pose for our portraits instead. The trouble with beating answers out of prisoners is that they tell you what they think you want to hear instead of the truth. Is that why you keep trying to get out of this bind by accusing me of being you, Longarm? What if you were to own up to your own badge and identification so’s I could see about getting you out?”

Ferris snorted in disbelief, and told Longarm to try something that was not only a physical impossibility but mighty undignified.

Longarm persisted. “You were the one who mentioned contacting a local lawyer and all. If you have pals here in Puerto Periasco, I’d be proud to look them up for you.”

Ferris snorted,. “I’ll bet you would. I saw what you did to old Jake with that buffalo gun. So all in all, I’d as soon give any pal of mine the galloping clap than an introduction to you!”

One story above them, Inspector Gomez removed the Bell receiver from his ear and wiped his face with a kerchief as he sighed, “One of them would seem to be on to us. Is a waste of time in this heat for to listen in on such guarded fencing with words.”

He nodded at the worried-looking woman with auburn hair his men had brought from that posada. Consuela O’Hara y Mendez was guarding her own words as well. She had no idea what was going on, but as a woman of means on the run from a wayward husband, she sensed this was no time to confuse Inspector Gomez with her Father Confessor.

Gomez nodded to her pleasantly and said, “We are satisfied you are who you say you are, senora. Both your banker and the lawyer you named before as references have vouched for you and your family. I believe you when you say you and your, ah, associate down in the cell block met along the post road and arrived here after exciting but hardly unlawful adventures. I am sorry about the uncle you lost, killed by rebels against our beloved Presidente. But is it not possible this gringo you know as Crawford was lying to you?”

Consuela had no trouble sounding sincere as she replied in a poised tone, “For what reason? From the two photographs you just showed me, I can say the nicer-looking of the two men you hold identified himself to me as a Senor Crawford. And he got me out of the desert alive, after I had been abandoned to the mercy of heat, thirst, and Ya qui!”

“I said I believed all that,” Gomez told her. There was no way a man with a political appointment could ask a young woman of good family and sensitive political connections whether she’d been serviced in any other way by a handsome gringo. So Gomez quietly asked, “Did not your fellow adventurer give you any first name as the two of you rode all those miles together?”

Consuela naturally recalled Longarm’s slip. She had no way of knowing it had been a slip. But she’d learned in her short adventurous life that men with oily smiles were seldom out to do her any favors, and Custis had been a dear about letting her get on top when she’d found his weight a bit too much for her on firm soil. So she shrugged and replied, “I do believe he gave his full name when we first introduced ourselves. I’ve been trying to recall it. It may come to me later. I have never been able to tell Tom or Dick from Harry. All their names sound much the same to me.”

Gomez nodded gravely and said, “I shall have two of my officers escort you back to that posada, senora.”

But Consuela shook her head as she rose, saying, “I do not intend to go back there. As I told you before, we rode in off the desert too tired to seek more proper shelter for our animals and ourselves. Now that I have had time to bathe and dress more properly …”

“I understand,” Gomez said, adding, “In that case my officer shall escort you anywhere you wish for to go, senora.”

As the man led her out of the room, Gomez turned to an older associate to place a finger alongside his nose and confide, “He meant less to her than he might have thought. We know more about her than I was ready to admit just now. She used the big tough gringo for to help her get safely away from a worthless husband. Whether he did anything more for her is unimportant. Any man alone with such a dish would wish for to taste some of it. The question is not what the one who calls himself Crawford has done to a lovely woman. It is who he really might be!”

His aide opined, “I find it hard to believe a woman of good family would lie for a wanted man unless she was most fond of him, Inspector.”

Gomez nodded and replied, “I just said that. I told her we would let one of them go, as soon as we discovered which was El Brazo Largo. So why did she not ask when that might be if she had any intention of waiting for either?”

The aide agreed as, down on the calle, Consuela was getting into a carriage with two officers and a Mona Lisa smile. Was it possible she had actually made love, in the French manner, to a notorious as well as handsome wanted man?

Such an affair would be madness to carry on, of course, but her Custis had saved her life and been a great lay, and she could hardly wait to tell the other girls back home once she got her adventurous culo that far from Carlos and his own friends!

As Inspector Gomez stared wistfully after her from an upstairs window, his aide quietly called out, “They are talking again down below. Each is still insisting the other is El Brazo Largo.”

Gomez yawned and decided, “Why do things the tiresome way when there is the easy way? Is impossible to guess which of them is the real thing or a most determined liar. But we shall have the straight answer soon enough from rurale headquarters. I am already late for my siesta. I suggest you take your own.”

As the aide rose from the listening post, he asked if Gomez wanted anyone to listen in during the coming darkness, observing, “Late at night, when one cannot sleep, one may be inclined to babble, no?”

Gomez said, “No. they are not comrades in arms or even strangers picked up at the same time. They are sworn enemies we arrested as they were enjoying a personal war. But look upon the bright side. I doubt we have any possible fear of them trying to break out together, and should one try it on his own, the other would be likely to sound the alarm.” The aide said, “Nobody but El Brazo Largo for certain would have a serious motive for to take such a risk. The one who is truthful about being someone else already knows he is in no danger of being shot as a menace to Mexico!” Gomez smiled thinly and said, “Let us not get over-sentimental. All such gringo gunfighters are a menace to Mexico. But let us see which one deserves the firing squad with full ceremony and which can simply be disposed of with a bullet in the head before we concern ourselves with such details, eh?”

The aide agreed, and the two of them went home to their individual siestas.

The hot muggy afternoon crept by less enjoyably for Longarm and his fellow prisoner in the waterfront jail. Longarm was out of tobacco and hungry as a bitch wolf by the time they were served a sunset supper of tortillas and frijoles which, without salt or seasoning, could be said to taste like white blotting paper wrapped around red clay.

In the next cell over, Sam Ferris betrayed a certain lack of border lore by demanding, “Jesus H. Christ! Do they expect us to eat shit on unfried flapjacks?”

Longarm soothed, “Frijoles only look like shit. They’re mushed up beans and it’s them, not the tortillas, that get sort of fried in a pan. Are you trying to tell me El Brazo Largo’s never eaten any Mexican food before?”

Ferris almost sobbed, “Aw, cut that out, Longarm. You know we took the stuff they got in yonder desk away from you the other night. I can see what you’re trying to pull. But it ain’t gonna work.”

Longarm moved over to sit on his floor pallet with his back to the stone wall as he slowly ate his tasteless supper, savoring every bite to make it last as the sun went down outside to make his grim cell seem even spookier.

The only light after sunset came from a desk lamp a young kid had brought in and lit for their armed guard, a burly mestizo who’d brought some books to read and didn’t seem sleepy at all.

Longarm didn’t want to attract attention by pacing. He’d already been over every inch of his small simple cell with his thoughtful and experienced eyes. There seemed no way out, whether their night man watched like a hawk or wandered off somewhere to play with himself.

The walls were dense basalt set in cement mortar. The floors were solid concrete slabs. Both the wooden ceiling and tiny barred window were too high to get at with nothing to stand on, and even if there had been something to stand on, those ceiling beans and iron bars looked too solid to gnaw through with one’s teeth in any reasonable time.

Longarm finished the last of his lousy supper, decided against breaking the earthenware cup or saucer to use as a sharp edge for as long as it would take that guard to throw down on him through the front bars, and contented himself with simply sitting there to softly croon:

Away to war, across the water, For seven years of blood and slaughter. When I returned, Dunbarton’s daughter, Though pledged to me, was wed away!

From the next cell, Ferris yelled at him to shut up. So Longarm laughed and, having found something to amuse himself, switched to:

As I sat on Riley’s doorstep, Listening to the tales of slaughter, Came the thought into me mind, Why not shag the Riley’s daughter?

Ferris wailed, and the guard out front glanced up from the novel he was reading to grunt, “Ay, crillate la trompa.”

Longarm replied, “Ceme mierda,” then sang on about the delights of Riley’s daughter as raucously as possible on purpose.

But it didn’t work. The guard must have had orders, or a thick skin, since neither advising him to eat shit nor the very vulgar song in English seemed to inspire him to suit actions to his muttered threats. He only laughed when Longarm switched to Spanish lyrics, promising to piss on the guard’s father’s grave as soon as his old whore of a mother could figure out which of her many customers he might have been.

There was a lot to be said for cussing in Spanish. Since it had few words that were dirty all by themselves, the language called for more personal suggestions. For example, “son of a bitch” lost a lot of its bite when simply translated as “hijo de perra.” So “hijo de puta” or “son of a whore” came out about as nice along the border.

Most everyone you drank with was a cabrone. The secret of starting a fight down this way was to mention any woman of his family, however politely, that he’d never introduced you to.

Longarm considered asking their guard whether it was true his sister was so fond of her burro because its dong was so much bigger than his own. But he decided against it. The cuss looked too smart to open the cell door without orders, and too Mexican to stand still for many serious insults without at least shooting somebody in the knee.

Another million years went by as silence set in, save for the sound of a page turning now and again. A fair piece after sundown, Longarm glanced up from his study of the dusty concrete floor as he heard their guard curse.

It took a few moments for Longarm to follow the devoted reader’s drift. Then the lamp on the desk flickered again. Their guard put down his book and picked up the lamp to shake it. Once he’d determined there was plenty of oil left, he fiddled with the wick while the glass chimney blackened with sooty smoke until suddenly, the whole place was plunged into total darkness.

Almost total, at any rate. Longarm couldn’t see his hand before his face as somewhere somebody opened something, judging by the draft of air on Longarm’s hands as they gripped the bars of his cell.

Their guard must have felt it as well. He called out, “Que pasa?” and might have demanded, “Quien es?” had not further remarks from him been cut off in the dark by what sounded like someone slicing through a cabbage, followed by a large dull thud.

A familiar male voice called out, “El Brazo Largo?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Aqui. I thought that sounded like someone’s throat getting cut, El Gato. Get me out of here. I got a boat to catch!”

There came the jingle of a key ring, but no sound of approaching steps. They didn’t call the rather sinister young man a cat because he stomped about in the dark in his boots and spurs.

As his invisible rescuer smoothly slid the right key in the lock, Longarm didn’t ask how El Gato could see what he was doing. El Gato couldn’t understand why everyone else seemed to go blind after the sun went down. But he’d long since learned to take advantage of his freakish night vision.

As he unlocked Longarm’s cell, El Gato asked what their plans for Sam Ferris might be. The story of their cantina fight was all over town by this time.

Longarm stepped out, saying, “Let me get back my badge, my guns, and such whilst I ponder the prick’s fate.” El Gato said, “Mierda, is no time for to ponder anything. I have your gun belt here. Put it on as we leave the premises muy pronto! I can unlock this other cell or leave it the way it is. Which shall it be, El Brazo Largo?”

Longarm laughed and said, “They have him pegged as El Brazo Largo to begin with, and they ain’t going to give toad squat who he is when they find that guard with his throat slashed.”

Then he called in to Ferris, “Are you ready to aid and abet the U.S. Justice Department instead of Harmony Drake, El Brazo Largo?”

Ferris naturally answered, “You can’t leave me here with that dead greaser. I’ll be lucky if all they want to do is shoot me! But who’s this Harmony Drake you keep asking me about?”

Longarm told El Gato, “Vammos. I haven’t time for games. I told you I got a boat to catch and I know who’s likely to be aboard it!”

So they and some other unseen presences left by way of a side exit to move along a dark alley. There was just enough light from the overcast sky above them to make out moving shapes. The nearest one with the big sombrero had to be El Gato. The other four figures could have been male, female, or big black bears for all one could really tell. As they moved swiftly but silently through the maze of back alleyways, Longarm buckled on his familiar .44-40. Then El Gato handed him his wallet and badge, saying, “One of my own may find that Schofield better for to carry than a pepperbox. What of that monstrous buffalo rifle they took away from you? Can we have it?” Longarm said, “Not just yet. My Winchester’s all the way over in New Mexico Territory by this time, Lord willing and they ain’t lost all my baggage on me. I hope your muchachos hung on to that ammunition as well.”

El Gato sighed and replied, “Our disgusting government seems to buy only modern guns and ammunition. Hey, how did you like that trick with the guard’s night light, eh?”

Longarm chuckled fondly and said, “Couldn’t have done it better my ownself. That kid working around the jail was one of your own, right?” El Gato said, “Si, is easy to place your own people in positions a grand government cabrone would not even choose for a brother-in-law. You know what was in that lamp instead of whale oil?”

Longarm nodded and said, “Sure. Water, with just a film of lamp oil floating on top to feed the wick for the first few hours of the night.”

El Gato grumbled, “Cofio, you peeked.” Longarm said, “Never mind how you got me out. Let’s just say I owe you for that and show me the way to the docks. For I’m turned around total and I have to get aboard that northbound steamboat poco tiempo, lest it leave for Yuma without me!”

El Gato suddenly pulled Longarm through a doorway into a much more brightly lit corridor. Longarm could see all of them were dressed in black charro outfits now. One of them was wearing that bandolier and packing the Big Fifty.

El Gato himself was an almost girlishly good-looking gent who moved in a disturbingly slinky way. The scion of a pure Castilian clan he preferred not to name, the young rebel leader would have had no trouble passing as a dapper Anglo in a different outfit. But he preferred to dress like a vaquero in mourning, with his black wool and leather trimmed in shiny ebony and black lace. The friendly eyes he saw so well with in the dark could have been brown, dark blue, or even purple as they shifted constantly in the tricky hall light.

When Longarm repeated his urgent need to catch that boat, El Gato said, “Is too late. The night boat for Yuma left some time ago. Let us hope Inspector Gomez thinks you caught it. In either case they are certain for to turn this poor town upside down in search of you!” Longarm swore softly and asked where El Gato was taking him.

The rebel leader pointed at the stairway down at the far end as he explained. “Next door to the room in which our good Inspector Gomez is in the habit of taking his siestas with a woman of La Causa, is the last place Inspector Gomez would expect to find you, no?”

Longarm laughed incredulously and demanded, “Jesus H. Christ, you expect me to hide out in a whorehouse?”

El Gato shrugged and replied, “Were you planning for to hide behind a cactus? Is no better cover for two days’ ride in any direction!”

Chapter 12

They led the thoroughly battered Sam Ferris from his cell at dawn, then out of town a mile, where they made him dig his own grave by the side of the road. When Inspector Gomez finished his morning coffee, he rode out to join them.

Gomez smiled in a fatherly way and declared, “Everything you told our midnight shift would seem to hold together, gringo. Was three other men and one woman staying at that waterfront hotel you named. They left, as you said, on the night boat for Yuma. Perhaps they will get there. Perhaps not. I have wired los rurales at San Louis Rio Colorado, where their vessel must pass through customs before proceeding on up the delta into your own country. The descriptions you gave of your leader and two henchmen were not too helpful. But how many blondes pass through San Luis Rio Colorado in a given period, eh?”

Ferris failed to puff the lit cigarette a guard placed between his bruised lips. He pleaded, “I told you that was the real Longarm you had in the very next cell. So how come I’m standing here in this old hole?”

Gomez pleasantly replied, “Because you would stink terribly in this heat if we did not bury you. Tell me for why you and your band came all this way down from Arizona Territory if Arizona Territory was where you wished for to live.”

Ferris sobbed, “I’ve told you over and over! We were holed up fine near Yuma when old Harmony went into town and got picked up by the law. Harmony was wanted on federal charges. So when we heard they was sending Longarm to transport him back to Denver, we had time to set up a bluff. We knew Longarm was too good to die the way we left him. We wanted him to bust loose, flag down a train, and tell everyone we’d run off to Mexico, see?”

Gomez wrinkled his nose and asked, “You really ran for where you wished him for to say you were running?”

Then, before Ferris could answer, the wily manhunter nodded as if to himself and said, “That explains all those boat tickets. Your friends are doubling back to a hideout that would have been ideal if this Harmony Drake had only behaved himself. No Yanqui lawman knows of it to this day. Or should I say no Yanqui lawmen knew of it until he tracked you this far? El Brazo Largo had booked passage aboard that same night boat before he somehow slit the throat of the desk sergeant from an impossible distance.”

Ferris cried, “I told you some Mexicans came to bust him out. I can tell you where Harmony, Goldmine Gloria, and the boys are headed too!”

Gomez grimaced and coldly replied, “Is not important to me. I know it was El Gato or some of his people who helped a known friend escape. I have no jurisdiction in Arizona Territory. I intend to catch the one I am really after on my own side of the border. Whether your friends go to Yuma or to Hell is of no interest to me.”

As he started to turn away, Ferris pleaded, “What about me then? If you don’t give a shit about anyone but Longarm, what am I standing in this hole for?”

Gomez shrugged and quietly replied, “Is the best place for us to dispose of an unimportant stink. Is no reward posted for you on either side of the border, and you pests make so much noise at the Americano Consulate every time we bruise you just a little. So all in all, I feel this may be best for all concerned, eh?” Then he said “Ahora” in a conversational tone, and turned to leave as they shot Ferris to a bloody mess in the bottom of his shallow grave.

Once he got back to his headquarters, Gomez wired San Luis Rio Colorado for further news on that night boat, and ordered his men to keep the pressure on in the unseemly Parts of town, observing that low-lifes who were not being paid to hide wanted men were inclined to want them caught, if only so they could get back to their own shady business.

Then, after a tedious morning defending his country, the ponderous patriot enjoyed an early snack and waddled over to his favorite house of ill repute to enjoy a few hours of sensual siesta time.

As he was being serviced by a slender mestiza with hips that just kept moving and eyes that held no expression at all, the man he had his whole force searching for in other houses of ill repute was in the next room, pacing the floor and puffing furiously on the big claro cigar El Gato had brought him. The saturnine Mexican himself sat on the windowsill, idly staring down at the street through the slats of the blue pine shutters.

The walls of the solidly built chincheria were too thick for them to hear what Gomez was begging for next door. It was just as well for Gomez’s peace of mind that he couldn’t hear El Gato’s answer when Longarm asked why they were letting the fat lawman live.

El Gato said, “Is a matter of the devil we know against a new one who might be better. Gomez is good, but not as good as he thinks he is. Nobody could be. His weakness is that when the putas tell him how much everybody fears him, he believes them. But about that government payroll shipment my friends and me are here for. Do you wish for to be in on it or not? Your share would be better than ten percent, if you could spare a few extra days down this way.”

Longarm didn’t want anyone calling him a sissy. So he said he just loved to take part in payroll robberies as a rule, but had to get on down the road. When he asked again about any other boats headed north, El Gato said, “Patience, my idealistic youth. I told you there were boats and then there were boats. Would be suicide for anyone on our side to put out to sea before sundown. This tiresome government we’ve been suffering under has bought a fleet of steam cutters from that old cosita Queen Victoria for to guard our coasts against piracy. That is what El Presidente calls catching fish without paying him off, piracy.”

El Gato turned from the window, adding, “The streets below are now clear of friend and foe. Is too hot outside for anyone. After the woman of La Causa has learned more from our gallant Gomez, we shall perhaps be able to plan your mad dash up the coast with more certainty, eh?” Longarm smiled thinly and asked, “Does Gomez always blab all his plans to the ladies?”

El Gato nodded soberly and explained, “That is for why I asked them to give him a good price. When a man thinks he is getting it almost for nothing, he is inclined to think she must like him. Married men in the habit of patronizing putas are seldom simply oversexed. Women who make a business of pleasing men are inclined to let men talk, no matter how boring they may seem at home. I understand our gallant Gomez is saddled with a delicate faded rose who does not like for to hear about clever questioning or ingenious disposals, eh?” Longarm said he followed El Gato’s drift, then added, “No matter where he thinks I ran to, I have to get going if I mean to catch up with Harmony Drake and his pals. If I wait until dark, they’ll have put in at Yuma long before I can hope to get there!”

El Gato shrugged and suggested, “Forget about them and help us steal money instead. Is no way you could overtake that night boat before it puts in at Yuma. Not if you left this very minute. I told you the only vessels our side controls are fishing boats or, all right, smugglers, powered by sails in the fickle winds of this stagnant Sea of Cortez. Your prisoner and his blond puta will be back on shore, free for to run in any direction, long before we could hope to land you in Yuma. To begin with, is a guarded border crossing you would never get through if you followed the main channel of the Rio Colorado. The broad swampy delta provides many better, or at least less famous channels. But progress through that windless sea of tule reeds can be slow.”

“I don’t aim to catch ‘em aboard that infernal steamboat,” Longarm declared, snorting smoke out both nostrils as he explained. “The best I can hope for in Yuma is somebody who saw which way they were headed. Such witnesses get tougher to come by as time winds on. They know this. They figure they led me on a long ride around Robin Hood’s Barn, and I’m figuring they heard I’d been arrested before they ever boarded that side-wheeler. Even if they take some pains, it’s tough to cover your tracks when you get off a steamboat with a good-looking blonde. I only need someone who can say for certain they caught a train either way. I’m betting they never planned to.”

El Gato cocked a thoughtful eyebrow. “Par que? For why would anyone stay close to Yuma when he knew that was where the law expected them to hide out?”

“To hide out, of course,” said Longarm, taking pity on his pal’s bewildered smile. “Harmony Drake was the only member of the bunch anyone ever spotted in Yuma. Or should we say, the downtown parts of Yuma. I’m saying they must have been holed up somewhere good. Somewhere they felt safer than anywhere here in Mexico where nobody in possession of a U.S. federal warrant had just cause to look for them.”

El Gato nodded soberly and said, “Is agreed those two you tangled with in that cantina should not have been out drinking when they had reason for to be expecting someone like you to come along. But should the gang leave that boat for to go straight to some Yuma hideout, do you have any idea where such a secret lair might be?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Upstairs or down, close to the center or way out on the outskirts of town. A hideout is by definition somewhere nobody else knows about. With any luck, I’ll be able to trace them as far as the depot, and we can wire an all-points on the sneaky sons of bitches. But with my luck, they’ll go to ground somewhere close to Yuma, where Billy Vail sent me to get old Harmony in the first damned place. How long does it take a sailboat to carry a lawman that far, old son?” El Gato said, “Twenty-four hours with a following wind. It gets to be more of a problem when the winds are calm or contrary. I think you have more fun helping us rob El Presidente Diaz. They gonna kill you if they catch you anyway. So you may as well have the game as long as you have the name, no?”

Longarm grimaced and said, “It sure beats all how they ban books suggesting it feels good to get laid, whilst you’ll find a copy of Robin Hood in most every school library. That one book has got more folks killed than all the French postcards ever printed. It ain’t wise to tell little kids it’s all right to commit highway robbery if you don’t like the sheriff.”

El Gato shrugged and said, “I spit in the milk of your Robin Hood’s mother. I fight for Mexico in the tradition of El Cid, the grandfather of all Spanish-speaking rebels. When his king shit on him, El Cid went loco and killed people until they apologized sincerely. But be off to Yuma in search of the goose if you must. I shall send word to our most sneaky smuggler, Dandolo. Nobody knows this rocky coast and the swampy Colorado Delta more better than Dandolo, But if she agrees for to take you up to Yuma, you must let her do it her own way and set her own pace, comprende?”

Longarm stopped pacing and frowned. “She? This Dandolo is a gal?”

El Gato nodded. “Did I not just say she was sneaky? I understand she is not even a true Mexicana. Her family came here from Venice years ago as coastal traders. Perhaps that is for why Dandolo speaks so many languages. Her crew more than makes up for any lack of brawn Dandolo has for to go with her brains. Her vessel, a Yanqui schooner she inherited from her father, is fast and, even better, shallow-draft. The delta of the Rio Colorado has always been tricky for to navigate, and they tell me that lately, since your Anglo settlers have been drawing irrigation water from its tributaries, it has gotten worse.”

Before Longarm had to say he was sorry about that, there came a soft tapping on the bolted oaken door. El Gato opened it to admit a pleasingly plump puta in a loosely fastened robe.

As El Gato closed and barred the door behind her, the gal told them, “The pig is asleep, filled with wine, empty of desire, and most pleased with himself. Telegrafo messages move faster than the winds. So Gomez knows a, how you say, squall line is moving up the coast. He says we are to get hit with much wind, rain, thunder, and lightning just after the sun goes down.”

Longarm cocked a brow. “You say this pleases Gomez?”

The whore who’d doubtless also pleased the inspector nodded and explained. “He says that if you were not aboard that night boat bound for Yuma, you must be hiding here in Puerto Periasco and must be most anxious for to leave before they can turn over the wet rock you must be hiding under. I mean no disrespect, El Brazo Largo. Was him who said this, not me.”

Longarm nodded and told her to go on. So she continued. “Gomez expects you to make a break for it by sea during the coming storm. He has ordered the crew of that steam cutter at the far end of the embarcadero to stoke their boilers no later than three this afternoon, so they will have the full head of steam before sundown. When I yawned in his face and played with his pipi, he naturally thought I did not find his plans so interesting. So he naturally insisted on telling me how that cutter would find itself out on a calm sea in the moonlight if it cast off in the teeth of that squall as it swept north.”

Longarm and El Gato exchanged thoughtful glances. El Gato sighed and said, “I must learn not to underestimate the sly fregado. They have a Gatling gun mounted on that cutter, and is no way Dandolo can outdistance it by sail alone under a full moon!”

Longarm said, “I know. Is it right to picture this government cutter something like a big single-masted sloop, rigged fore and aft, with the mainsail set back a tad to make room for a steam funnel and that deck gun?”

El Gato nodded soberly. “Under sail or steam she is muy pronto. Is no paddle wheels. She has a modern screw propeller and one of those keels you can haul up for to tear across shallow water. They must have heard how certain people avoid the official entry port at San Luis Rio Colorado. In any event, is no way for you to leave by sea for at least a few nights.”

Longarm took a thoughtful drag on the claro before he asked,“What if I left earlier? I told you I was in a hurry to get it on up to Yuma whilst the trail of those outlaws is still warm. And seeing they mean to get up a full head of steam before that gale hits at sundown, I have no call to let it go to waste, do I?”

The whore had no idea what he was talking about. El Gato laughed like a mean little kid, and told her she’d best get back to her fat customer.

As the rebel leader locked the door after her, he told Longarm, “Dandolo may be willing. She is almost as loco en la cabeza as yourself. I have yet to grasp why it should be so that people who are not true Mexicanos seem to enjoy our revolutions more than we do!”

Irena Dandolo soon arrived with some of her piratical-looking “fishermen.” She looked like a pirate too.

The sun-and wind-tanned woman of perhaps thirty or so, give or take a rough life on the bounding main, Was tall and wiry for a female but not bad looking, once you got used to the scar on her forehead and her short-cropped dark-brown hair. She was dressed in rope-soled zapatas, white bell-bottoms, and a striped Basque shirt that didn’t really appear as manly as she might have wished. She had quite a pair of chupas for such a lean athletic figure.

She shook hands with a firm grip, and her palm felt as if she knew her ropes. Longarm admired the way she grinned when he told her his plan. He still felt obliged to say, “It’s not really your fight and the odds favor the other side, Miss Irena.”

The female skipper looked hurt and demanded, “Do you take me for a mere woman just because I am a woman? Listen, Yanqui, I am a direct descendant of Enrico Dandolo of Venice! You have heard of him, no?”

Longarm smiled sheepishly and asked, “Should I have?”

She snapped, “Of course. You English-speakers make so much of that boy-buggering mariposa Richard of England when it was the men and the ships of Venice who made all those crusades possible. My ancestor, Enrico Dandolo, led the ladder assault over the walls of Constantinople in 1204. This would not have been so remarkable in itself. He was from Venice, after all. But at the time he was in his nineties, and blind! You think it would have slowed him down if he had been born with a slit between his legs?”

Longarm gulped and declared, “Not enough to matter, ma’am. But how come this blind old hero was attacking Constantinople during one of those crusades. Wasn’t that a Christian town at the time?”

The ferocious old man’s proud descendant sweetly explained that her ancestor had been blinded in a much earlier war with the Greeks of Constantinople, and added, “There were always Moors for to kill. When he saw the chance to kill some old enemies, it was too good for to pass up. He died just a year after he led the assault over the walls of Constantinople. He must have died content, after a life well spent. I would die with a smile upon my lips tonight if I knew I had done something to annoy a most annoying government!”

So later that afternoon, as the streets came back to life after la siesta, under an oddly greenish sky with the taste of brass in the muggy air, the engineer in the hold of El Tiberon Blanco valved a little pressure off as he eyed the gauges of their small but very up-to-date Scottish auxiliary plant. The iron-framed and teak-sheathed cutter was built for short, furious bursts of speed, while intended to cruise under sail as often as possible. She burned oil instead of coal, to keep her light and fast. But oil cost money and it was not to be wasted.

Up in the cockpit, aft the mainmast, under furled sails, the skipper and deck crew were keeping an eye on that discolored sky. It was intolerably hot and damp in port that afternoon, and they were all anxious to put out to sea, where the motion of their vessel alone might offer some cooling breeze. But orders were orders and they had to wait until that storm hit, or until they spied another vessel of any kind putting out to sea ahead of it.

For who but ladrones up to no good would be shoving off this late in the day with storm warnings flying above the harbor master’s watchtower?

Up forward, under the meager shade of the furled jib, the three-man crew of the swivel-mounted Gatling gun were swapping dirty stories as they casually eyed the crowd along the quay.

Nobody drifting in and out of the waterfront shops or simply staring at the boats looked sinister. But when one manned a Gatling for as popular a tyrant as Porfirio Diaz, one kept one eye on the taxpaying public at all times.

Hence it would have been tough to just swagger across the fifty feet of cobblestones from the nearest cover to come aboard the cutter via the one gangplank near the stern.

So just as the sun was setting, where the brassy-smelling sky met a bruised-looking sea of smooth but ominously large swells, considering the total lack of any breeze, Longarm nudged Irena Dandolo, who in turn gave the signal on her bosun’s whistle.

That naturally alerted the government men aboard the cutter, just as Longarm had hoped. So the quay began to clear as if by magic when the deck crew swung the multiple muzzle of that Gatling shoreward, like a deadly pepper shaker sniffing for someone to pepper.

Longarm knew they couldn’t see him as he raised the muzzle of the Big Fifty in the narrow slit between a ship’s chandler and a sidewalk cantina. He drew a careful bead on the one aiming the Gatling and blew him over the low starboard rail with a well-aimed buffalo round.

That inspired two of his shipmates to dive over the far side as the others took cover below decks.

That had been the plan. Yelling like a band of Yaqui with toothaches, the eight men and one woman of the Dandolo crew charged across the open field of fire with Longarm, blazing away with carbines or six-guns as instructed, until they were all aboard with only one of their own lightly wounded, mopping up with guns and machetes at close quarters.

The wounded survivors of the other side were allowed to live, as long as they knew how to swim, while El Tiberon Blanco cast off and steamed across the bar into the sunset, people shouting curses and encouragement from the bewildered shore.

The cutter was a distant dot against the sunset by the time a most chagrined Inspector Gomez climbed up into the harbor master’s watchtower to make certain his second in command had not been drinking.

For quite some time Gomez could only rant and rave. Then he heaved a great sigh and decided, “We must wire San Luis Rio Grande and confess they shoved it up my ass while I was bending over. Is more important for to stop that double-thumbed son of a two-headed witch than it is for me to simply go on sounding smart. People such as El Brazo Largo are most expensive for to share this earth with. First he wipes out that artillery column in the Baja, and now he has stolen a brand-new steam cutter from us!”

Chapter 13

The groundswells rolling ahead of the oncoming storm had the stolen cutter bucking pretty good as Irena Dandolo took the helm, set a course with the brass binnacle ahead of the wheel, and called for her crew to set the jib and mainsails.

Longarm, clinging to a steel cable stay as he stood beside her in the cockpit, stared thoughtfully aft, where the twilight sky was swirling mighty strangely, and quietly observed, “That squall line we’ve been promised seems to be coming up the trail behind us, Miss Irena. I know I ain’t no sailor. But is this really the time to be setting all those sails?”

The seawoman laughed girlishly and replied, “I wish for to give us a head start on any marina federate boats following us. I know more about sails than engines. Nobody in my crew knows much more. Is possible the machinery below will stall, or run out of fuel, before we make it to the reed beds of the Colorado Delta. Is better to be far from Puerto Periasco than near it when that happens, eh?” Longarm said he hoped she knew what she was doing. Then he went below via the hatch and ladder ahead of the cockpit to see if her crew could use someone who could at least read.

They could. In the dinky engine room just aft of the mainmast, he caught up with a Mexican and a Sandwich Islander, coping as best they could, by feeble lamplight, as the duckboards under them rocked like a corkscrew. The brass telegraph, in this case a signal device worked by push-rods rather than electricity, was set at full ahead, and the Islander, a big Kanaka who answered to Monakai, had that part figured out. He knew enough about steam engines to have the throttle valve wide open. When asked, neither allowed that the half-dozen dials set at eye level between the upright boiler and compact opposing cylinder engine meant anything to them.

Longarm left things the way they were for the time being as he studied the setup and tried to recall such steam lore as he knew. The vessel was bucking to one side now, and the screw made the hull hammer as if a Navaho way-chanter was beating it for a cure whenever the spinning blades broke the surface near the rudder. So Longarm got a grip on a grab-iron with one hand, and used the other to ease back on the throttle to cruising speed, which might have been six knots in a calmer sea with the screw in the water all the time.

The Mexican, called Bajo, or Shorty, despite his formidable size, quietly observed that Dandolo had signaled full speed ahead.

Longarm nodded agreeably and replied, “She just told me she was afraid we’d run out of fuel oil. You can hear for yourself how that screw’s just churning through air half the time. May as well be using less steam up as we ride out this blow. Let’s see if I can make any sense out of those dials now.”

As he moved along the line of pipes and fittings, Bajo put a big greasy paw on his dirty shirtsleeve and growled, “Hey, gringo, I am in charge here.”

Then Longarm twisted free to face them both, narrow-eyed but still smiling as he quietly said, “No me jades. I mean that. There are times to fuck around and there are times the situation is just too serious for kid games.”

Bajo took a swing at him.

Longarm had figured he might. So his left forearm came up to block the roundhouse blow as his right hand whipped his .44-40 from its cross-draw rig. So Bajo was throwing a left hook as Longarm stepped inside the radius of his swing and cracked him across the mouth with the steel barrel.

That busted the bully’s face up a lot, although Longarm had been careful not to break off any teeth this far out to sea. His aim was to set an example, not to saddle Irena Dandolo with a cripple in dire need of a dentist.

As Bajo cowered back against the engine room ladder, holding a hand to his shattered, bloody lips, Longarm mildly asked the somewhat taller Monakai whether he had any comment.

The big Kanaka shook his head and replied, “It’s not my fight. I know better than to take a punch with a fist at a man who’s wearing a gun!”

Bajo nodded and sobbed, “Was not fair for to use a gun on me when I only wished for to punch you a little!” Longarm said, “I didn’t use this gun on you, pendejo. I mean to the next time you start up with me. I told you not to fuck with me. That was one strike. You fucked with me and I busted your lip. That was two strikes. You fuck with me again and I’ll strike you out for good!”

Then he put his gun back in its holster, adding, “Bueno. As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted, we’d best see if we can nurse at least a hundred and fifty nautical miles out of this Scotch hardware.”

The water level in the boiler seemed high enough. Longarm took a pencil stub from his shirt pocket, wet the lead with his tongue, and marked the glass before he called the more sensible Kanaka over.

When Monakai proved willing to listen, Longarm pointed to the mark and a valve just above it, saying, “We want water in this tube below that pencil mark and steam above it. I know it’s moving up and down a mite. The rocking of the hull is sloshing the water in the boiler. The idea is not to flood the boiler until there’s no room for the steam, but also not to let her boil so dry we could have us an explosion. The way you get a steam boiler to explode is to let it get so hot and dry a sudden surge of water against hot steel produces more steam, all at once, than the boiler plates or safety valve can cope with. So this tube and injection valve ought to be kept in mind.” The Kanaka said he followed Longarm’s drift. Bajo moved away up the ladder, pissing and moaning about his fool face, as Longarm showed Monakai the reserve water gauge and explained how you had to inject cool fresh water, pumped by steam pressure, into the seawater-cooled condenser from time to time. For while in theory the steam went from the cylinders to the condenser to turn back into boiler water over and over, in practice you always lost some steam forever.

The Kanaka said Longarm was sure smart.

To which Longarm could only reply, “Not hardly. This fuel gauge is the snake in the grass I can only guess at. I have it on authority of the Union Pacific that you burn around five pounds of coal an hour for each and every horsepower of your steam engine. This here’s a forty-horsepower engine. But it’s burning oil, which weighs a quarter as much as coal for the same amount of heat. so let’s see, a pint is a pound the world around, so a gallon of oil ought to give off the heat of sixty-four pounds of coal and … Kee-rist!”

The big Sandwich Islander swore as loud in his own odd lingo as gallons of seawater poured down the ladder to slosh ankle-deep or deeper across the duckboards. The dimly lit chamber filled with brine-scented mist as some seawater sloshed against the hot metal of the firebox, and Monakai sobbed, “Tangaroa and Tiki Jesus, we are sinking!”

Longarm told him not to blubber up about it, and added, “We’d best go topside just in case you’re right. I told that gal she was setting full sail at a mighty awkward time!”

Monakai wasn’t listening. He was already halfway up the ladder.

Then all the water sloshed into one corner and stayed there as the hull stayed on her starboard side at an ominous angle. So Longarm set the throttle at dead slow and went topside after the big Kanaka.

He wasn’t certain he should have, as his face got lashed and his duds got soaked through by horizontal wind and rain. He groped his way aft through the howling darkness to find Irena Dandolo singing, or screaming, at the wheel as she steered them over rolling ranges of foaming brine with one rail under. Longarm had to almost shove his nose up her ear for her to hear him as he shouted, “You’re fixing to capsize us! You can’t leave all your canvas up in a full gale!”

She cackled like a pretty witch jerking off with her broom and insisted, “Of course I can. You call this a gale? Wait until you ride out a hurricane with us! Foul weather is the friend of pirates and smugglers. We must be making eighteen knots in this squall, but alas, it is already letting up!”

Longarm shouted, “You call this a letup?” as green water came over the taffrail to soak them both to the thighs. But he had to allow they weren’t heeled over quite as far now, and the wind had died from actually painful to just frightening.

Irena asked him why he’d throttled back the engine. He made note of the fact that she knew what she was doing after all, and told her, “We were wasting fuel stirring foam with the screw out of the water that often. I left her turning over fast enough to keep from dragging against the sails, and it’s best to be using some steam with fire under the boiler than it is to let it just build up with nobody manning the relief valve.”

She swung the wheel to catch more wind as they crested a sea. Then she said, “Maybe I should sign you on as my engineer. For why did you break Bajo’s face like so? Were you jealous? Listen, is not true I have been sleeping with Bajo. He just likes to talk. I never sleep with anyone who works for me. Is very bad for business for to do that. How do you fire a lazy worker after you have let him pick your flowers, eh?”

Longarm nodded gravely and allowed he followed her drift as she steered a course a New England skipper might have found too rich for his blood.

Longarm told her he’d pistol-whipped Bajo for getting in the way while he was trying to make sure they weren’t fixing to blow up. He added, “It ain’t that I’m an infernal steam engineer, Miss Irena. But I’ve seen a steam boiler blow a time or more and it ain’t a pretty sight.” She asked if he had any idea how much steam they could count on between where they were and the Colorado Delta.

He answered truthfully, “I can’t say. If we can coax eight or ten miles an hour out of this tub, we ought to have enough. If we can’t, we don’t. Where were you figuring on refilling your fuel tanks, up Arizona way?”

She laughed and asked what made him think the storm-lashed cutter would be coming back from Arizona. Then they crested a whopper of a wave and the wind-filled sails laid El Tiberon Blanco on her beam ends.

Longarm was sure they were fixing to turn turtle. Someone else was too. For the vessel began to slowly right herself as the wild gal at the wheel shouted, “Condenado! Who reefed the mainsail without my permiso?”

Longarm could just make out the bare mast whipping back and forth against the rain-lashed overcast as the big Sandwich Islander, Monakai, joined them in the half flooded cockpit to shout, above the gale-force wind, “You were driving her under! The hero Maui with all his mana could not ride out a blow like this with two hulls if he had those damned sails set!”

Irena yelled, “Eso es una mierda! I know what I am doing, and I ought to send you back to your cannibal island for to be sucking on your mother’s chupa like the big baby you are!”

Before the impassive Kanaka could answer, the wind died as if some monstrous door had slammed shut in the sky behind them, and while the waves rolled on as high, the surface was now smooth and black as India ink.

Then the full moon was smiling down on them through the thinning cloud cover, and Irena laughed and said, “Our Inspector Gomez knew what he was talking about. If we had survived that squall line in our smaller schooner, this bigger tub and its Gatling would be leaving port at this moment for to hunt us down as we sat becalmed with no engine! Take the helm, Monakai. El Brazo Largo and I must go below and see how far we can push this hull with no help from the wind!”

She didn’t have to tell Longarm to follow her. He wanted to know as much as she did. Down in the engine room the water they’d taken through the hatch had drained away into the bilge, but the lamp had gone out and the only light came from the blue flames of the firebox under the boiler. It worked something like a glorified oil stove. An inventor back East had patented an air-blower to fan such flames far hotter. But the notion hadn’t caught on as yet. Modern machinery was complicated enough without having to gussy it up with fancier gingerbread.

As Longarm relit the lamp, he asked what she’d meant about having no serious plans about a return trip. He asked if she and her crew planned on settling down north of the border.

She shook her curly head and replied, “Someday, after we rid poor Mexico of that Chingado Diaz, I may be the first woman admiral of the marina federate. El Gato told me you were most serious about the laws of your own country and that I should not let you catch me breaking any Yanqui laws before I got you locura de amor. I fear I do not see why this should be so. To betray a lover for La Causa is considered muy romantics where I come from.”

Longarm laughed as he got out his notebook and pencil stub to calculate their fuel reserves, observing, “It’s my own fault I told El Gato that much about our courts of law as we were killing a long night around a campfire. That boy sure has a wicked sense of humor. He thought it was mighty funny that I wasn’t supposed to mess with a female suspect, lest her lawyer use that against us at her trial.”

He jotted down some dial figures, calculated roughly, and assured her there was no way in hell they were ever going to steam all that way north to Yuma. Then he said, “I figure you got enough oil to carry us a tad over a hundred miles, depending on how you nurse your steam. So that leaves us forty to sixty miles short of the mouth of the Colorado, and Gomez will have wired San Luis Rio Colorado that we’re on our way.”

Irena shoved the throttle to full speed ahead and said, “We shall put some distance between ourselves and anybody a puerco called Gomez may send after us. By morning there will be a fair sea breeze as the inland desert heats up for to suck. We shall sail the sixty miles our fuel tanks lack. That should leave us the reserves we need for to play tag among the tules of the delta with anyone trying for to cut us off. How does an American go about getting out of your prisons by saying somebody screwed her with a badge, eh?”

Longarm put his notebook away with a weary smile, saying, “I never treat friend or foe that way with my badge, Miss Irena. Even if I did, it wouldn’t get anybody out of prison. It would only make it a mite tougher for me to put ‘em there. Judges and juries frown upon the arresting officers taking advantage of prisoner gals, or using what they say in bed as evidence.” She said she wasn’t sure what he meant. So he told her to just not tell him about anything crooked she was planning for north of the border.

She sighed, reached up to trim the lamp, and as the engine room was plunged into a romantic darkness, save for the faint blue glow from under the boiler, leaned against Longarm with her arms around his damp shirt and husked, “Bese me con ferocidad and do not ask about any other sins I may have in mind then!”

Longarm kissed her. It seemed only polite. Then it felt swell. But he had to question her common sense, if not her motives, when she reached down between them to unbutton his fly and reach inside his pants for what was only acting natural.

As her rope-calloused hand grasped his turgid organ-grinder, he removed his lips from hers long enough to quietly ask if she’d lost track of where they were at the moment.

She squeezed harder and softly replied, “I bolted the door after us as we came down the ladder. Would make my crew feel left out if I took you to the cabin I have claimed from los federales. Better we rage together down here, no?”

Longarm winced and pleaded, “Not so hard. My poor old ring-dang-doo is only flesh and bone right now. I follow your drift about your cabin, but that floor underfoot is not only wet but duckboarded. I wouldn’t want your own fair flesh bruised with stripes, like I’d had you up against a picket fence!”

She let go of his erection to unbutton her bell-bottoms as she demurely replied, “Is good thing I got long legs and we have a ladder for to hang on to. For why are you not taking off your gun belt and pants at least?”

As if to answer for him, the hatchway at the top of the ladder was rattled by someone trying to open it as a voice that sounded like old Bajo called, “Are you down there, Dandolo? Monakai wishes for to know if you know we are steaming at full speed across a calm sea!”

The gal who was obviously used to being in charge dropped her bell-bottoms all the way and stepped out of them in her zapatas while she called back in a voice of authority, “I would not have shoved this throttle to full speed if I wished for to be becalmed with the marina federale searching for us under steam! Tell Monakai to steer north-northwest for that delta until I have further instructions for him. At the moment we are adjusting the machinery. Is very delicate work and we do not wish for to be disturbed!”

She laughed softly as her crew member went away. Longarm had to chuckle. But he warned her, “That old boy is sure to gossip about all this adjusting behind a bolted hatchway in the dark.”

He could just make out her stark-naked form, edged in blue light, as she moved over to lean her back against the ladder and calmly ask him, “Como cofio lo quires?”

So, seeing he’d been not only invited but urged to take her any way he wanted, Longarm just stepped up to her in his wet duds and gun rig to take her chilled firm flesh in his arms some more.

She started to protest the wet cloth and chilly belt buckle against her bare breasts and belly. Then she hugged him closer with an amused remark about novelty, and hooked one of her naked thighs over the grips of his six-gun as she pleaded, “No me friegues!”

So, seeing she seemed to feel he was fooling around too long, he guided the raging tip between her twitching love-lips and thrust up into the warmest place in the engine room, next to the engine.

“Dios mio! Is too big!” she gasped, even as she lifted the other thigh to make room for all he could offer. It worked better once he’d grabbed hold of the ladder with one of her knees hooked over either elbow. She hung on to a step above their heads for leverage as she moved her hips in unconscious time with the hissing and sucking sounds of the nearby steam engine. Then they came together fast.

Longarm had been braced all the while for another knock on the door right above them. But as nobody came but them, he figured it was just possible he wasn’t the first passenger Irena might have adjusted her machinery with. So he was game when she suggested they do it a tad friendlier. He hung his hat and gun on handy valve handles, and draped his wet duds over the boiler as they tried it on the duckboards with her on top. He said he didn’t care if he wound up with a purple stripe or so up his back, and there was a lot to be said for letting a gal who’d been climbing the rigging since childhood squat over your partly satisfied privates to bring them back to full attention with a friendly game of stoop tag.

In the end they wound up dog style with the blue burner light on her firm young nalgas reminding Longarm of another gal he’d had this way by moonlight. It sure beat all how gals who got more exercise aboard most anything that bucked wound up with the same shapely behinds, be they blond or brunette. As he thrust in and out of Irena, he wondered idly who was doing this to the young Widow Stover this same moonlit night. For somebody had to be, damn his liver and lights. Old Kim had been a lot like this pretty little crook when it came to country customs, and damn it, the best ones always seemed to be the ones a man just had no business messing with.

Kim had been a rich widow out to marry up with him and settle him down, while this one seemed anxious to lead him and his badge down the primrose path to perdition. And so, in that friendly conversational tone that dog style seemed to inspire, he warned her, “I’m fixing to come in you again. But please don’t tell me what you were planning to do with this boat, or that Gatling gun, north of the border!”

She arched her spine to take it deeper as she sobbed a promise not to let him in on any crimes she had planned for the near future. So a fine time was had by all, and less than an hour later they got dressed and went back on deck, where Irena ordered yet another crew member to go below and keep an eye on the dials Longarm had marked with his pencil. Longarm assumed she was unaware or didn’t care that the smell of sweaty screwing hung in the air in an unventilated room for a spell.

Seeing she was yelling other orders, as if to make up for lost time, Longarm moved up in the bows to get out of the way and enjoy a smoke without being rude. He only had a few of those cigars El Gato had given him, and he didn’t want to have to offer.

The full moon was shining over his left shoulder, painting his shadow across the deck as he lit up facing north. So even though he was lighting a claro, he still spotted the other shadow of some sneak moving up behind him.

Longarm shook out the match and exhaled a cloud of unsuspicious smoke as the other one made his move. His aim, it seemed, had been to shove Longarm overboard. But things turned out the other way when the intended victim grabbed a stay to crab sideways, trip the murderous son of a bitch, and rabbit-punch him as he lunged with outstretched arms through the space where Longarm had been standing.

As his moonlight attacker dove headfirst over the rail with a yell, cut off by a splash nobody else seemed to notice, Longarm took another drag on the claro and murmured dryly, “That was strike three, Bajo.”

Chapter 14

Longarm found a cubbyhole with a door he could bolt, and caught a few safe hours of sleep before a change in the motion of the vessel and bright sunlight through the one porthole woke him up. He went out on deck to see they were heeled over at full sail in such breeze as a desert shore next to a stagnant inland sea had to offer. The sky above was that shade of blue Mexicans liked to paint tables and window frames. They were coasting close inshore to take full advantage of the onshore airs. The ominous black cliffs over yonder were likely lava, cooled and sharpened by seawater.

He went aft to the cockpit to find Irena talking to the helmsman she had at the wheel that morning. That didn’t surprise Longarm. What did surprise Longarm was that Bajo seemed alive and well behind the wheel.

Irena smiled up at Longarm and said, “Come below with me and I’ll have my galley crew serve you some breakfast. Have you seen Monakai anywhere this morning? Nobody seems to know where he’s been sleeping, and he is supposed to be standing watch!”

Longarm was too thunderstruck to mutter more than, “Well, we sure do live and learn!”

He hadn’t expected that to mean anything to her. As he followed her through the hatchway forward of the cockpit, she confided in a softer tone, “I am afraid for the Islander’s safety. Is not true he was allowed to treat me as you did last night, toro mio. But some of my muchachos may have thought I favored him a little. He learned for to sail aboard a Yanqui whaling ship, and perhaps some confused the way I relied on his sailing skills with a desire for his big brown pipi. Not that I have ever seen it, of course. Is difficult for to keep such secrets aboard ship, eh?” He said he wasn’t interested in Monakai’s big tool, but suggested, “You could be right about somebody on board having had a jealous hard-on last night. We’d best behave ourselves until we can sneak off to a more private love nest in Yuma. How soon were you figuring on getting us to Yuma, by the way?”

She sat them both down in the small main salon, and called forward for some coffee for the both of them and a plate of Moors and Christians or beans with rice for Longarm’s breakfast.

As they waited, she explained they’d be moving up through the swampy and uncharted Colorado Delta before sundown if these breezes held. She said, “Is better to approach the delta under full steam with the sails furled for not to attract attention, eh?” He asked if it might not be even slicker to sneak in the last few miles by moonlight, adding, “The seaward reaches of that whole delta are south of the border, ain’t they?”

Irena nodded and said, “With a marina federate base guarding the main channel. We must have some daylight for to navigate the channels we must choose instead. This big cutter draws more water than my own little schooner, and even she has trouble finding her way through the tule flats when the muddy waters of the Gila and Colorado meet the sea in ever-changing patterns.”

He said he followed her drift, and then a Mexican kid brought a tray back to them. The coffee was strong, and the government-issue rice was a nice change from most working-class Mexican cooking. Spanish-speaking folks liked rice almost as much as Chinese did. But it didn’t grow in most of Mexico. So only El Presidente and his own got to eat any rice worth mentioning, and Longarm’s pirate pals were out to consume all the government grub on board. Longarm didn’t ask Irena what she and her crew planned to do with this cutter farther along. He was afraid she’d tell him, and he’d already exceeded his instructions just a bit.

Irena left before he’d finished. Once he had, he took the empty cups and his plate forward to the galley. They didn’t seem to have any chores for him, so he went on deck and seemed to mostly get in the way, until he found a place on the foredeck to display some landlubber skills.

That Gatling gun had ridden out the storm under a tarp, but it was still overdue for some stripping and cleaning. Made like the first Winchesters from both steel and brass, the multibarreled death-grinder tended to corrode fast wherever sweat or salt water could set up odd little electrical currents where the two metals met.

Longarm carefully cleaned and oiled the Gatling, rubbed flecks of green corrosion off the top layer of its .45-55 brass, and as long as he was at it, cleaned and oiled his Big Fifty too. He did as careful a job as he knew how. It was still way the hell short of noon when he’d finished. So he smoked and stared off across the sunlit waves until Irena Dandolo joined him with more coffee and grub to allow they were making good time and ask him to tell her more about that private session he had planned for Yuma.

So they sat cross-legged to dine on sea rations by the Gatling, and he explained he figured on some paper-chasing once she got them all to Yuma. He said, “I have to paw through a whole mess of local files for homestead claims, property deeds, transfers of property, and so forth. It’s high summer, and I fear the government offices in Yuma will have picked up bad habits from you Mexican folks, no offense. I ain’t saying it’s bad to shut down for la siesta when it’s a hundred and change in the shade. I’m saying it’s a pain in the neck when an office shuts from noon to three and then don’t stay open after the usual six o’clock quitting time.” She asked what that had to do with el rapto supreme. So he fought back the temptation to feel her up on deck in broad daylight as he explained, “I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to find what I got to look through all those files for. I do know it’s likely to be a few hours on and a heap of hours off. So there’s this little hotel near the plaza, with cross ventilation north and east if you pick a top-story room with any common sense. Don’t tell me what you and your pals are planning to do around Yuma. Just tell me if you’d like me to include you in my siesta plans.” She laughed and said they’d talk about it once they got there. He didn’t argue. He’d read somewhere about shipboard romances being the bee’s knees until it came time to get off and you both remembered where you were headed and who you were. But it was sure a swell way to pass away the hours of an otherwise tedious journey, which likely accounted for the way spinster schoolmarms and married-up whiskey drummers wound up swearing eternal love on ships and trains so often.

But it wouldn’t have been prudent to while away the afternoon in a bunk with Irena, and it was too damned hot to lock himself in below in any case. So at least a million years went by as he lazed on deck in the shade of the mainsail. Then he felt the throbbing of the engine under his rump, and some son of a bitch slapped him across the face with the late afternoon sun when they suddenly lowered all sails.

Longarm rose and ambled aft just as Irena yelled from the cockpit, and he had to grab a stay as the vessel heeled into a turn at full speed.

Back by the wheel he saw Irena staring hard to the east through a long brass spyglass. Following her gaze, he spied a smoke plume on the horizon. Irena lowered her telescope and ordered a youth in floppy white cotton to go aloft. As he pulled himself hand over hand up the ratlines, Irena nodded to Longarm and sighed, “Monakai was the best lookout we had. I told you he had learned the ropes aboard a whaling ship. But I fear he must have fallen over the side last night.”

Longarm didn’t want to talk about that, so he asked what else was new.

Irena pointed at the distant smoke plume and replied, “Is burning oil and not coal in a careless fashion. That is for why is so black. When we turn, they turn. It has to be a federate gunboat out of San Luis Rio Colorado. Faster than us under steam. That is for why that smoke plume keeps getting closer! Do you think we could move that Gatling gun aft, for to give them a running gunfight if they catch us out here on open water?”

Longarm glanced the way they were headed to see that the north horizon, maybe three miles off, lay string-straight and oddly greener than the ripples all around.

Figuring they had at least half an hour to go, he asked her if she knew what sort of guns she had in mind for her running gunfight. When she told him the Mexican gunboats on the lower Colorado were mostly armed with Hotchkiss one-pounders outfitted with boiler-plate shields, he had to shake his head wearily and explain how her notion added up to a total waste of hope.

He said, “That Gatling fires cheap .45-55 rifle rounds. A good marksman can barely hope to stay on the target paper with his Springfield .45-70 at four hundred yards. Let’s say the Gatling can sprinkle out to thrice that range, with rapid fire and pure luck taking the place of aiming. A Hotckiss lobbing 37-millimeter shells back at you from behind an iron shield don’t add up to a gunfight. It’d be as one-sided as those Spanish bullfights you folks admire, no offense.”

She insisted, “Sometimes the bull wins, and have you forgotten that longer-ranging buffalo gun you brought aboard when we took this cutter?” Longarm sighed and said, “The Big Fifty can shoot straight about as far as their infernal deck gun, albeit way slower. Did you have an iron gun turret in mind for me to shoot from? That antique just ain’t a true field gun, Miss Irena. Did I bounce even seven hundred grains of solid lead off their iron shield, they’d just laugh and pay me back with a pound of exploding steel.”

He craned his neck for a better view forward as he added, “You did say you know your way through that big swamp we seem to be headed for, didn’t you?”

Before she could answer, the lookout shouted, “I can see her down to the waterline now! Is an armored gunboat and—Dios mio! Esos cabrones seem to be firing on us!”

The helmsman threw them hard left rudder without waiting for orders as the shell from the distant gunboat proved the lookout had guessed right about that big white puff of smoke he’d spotted. They heard the dull crump of the deck gun, followed by the whistle and far louder splash-bang when the shell went off under their wake to spout muddy water skyward.

Irena yelled up for their lookout to watch for shoal water as well, just as he let fly with another warning and they turned sharply the other way. When the second shell landed awfully close to where they’d just been, the war veteran among them grabbed the spyglass from Irena, snapping, “They ain’t ranging that tight by guesswork!”

Peering through the telescope at deck level, Longarm could only make out the smoke plume and top third of their mast. But that was enough for him to say, “They don’t have anyone in their crow’s nest! They’re aiming at our mast! It’s the only thing they can see at this range from their point of view!”

Irena proved herself the quick-thinking descendant of long-gone sea rovers by snapping out orders about fire axes. Longarm gazed in wonder as what looked like someone’s south forty of oats or barley moved across his vista at better than six knots. Then they were surrounded by more rule reeds than open water, and Irena was shouting a warning about falling timber.

The mast they’d chopped through crashed over the side with a mighty splash of muddy foam, and swung them broadside as its far end dug into the shallow bottom. But then swift machete strokes had severed every stay and, with Longarm’s help, the butt end was heaved overboard and they were on their way up a broad but twisting channel.

Hence, it took a spell to figure out what the other side was up to when another one-pound shell blasted a gout of mud and chopped-up tule from the bottom just to starboard.

Their own lookout had naturally come down before they’d chopped the mast through at deck level. Longarm took the spyglass from Irena again and aimed it at the far-off smudge of dirty oil smoke. He could see how they’d done it now. He told Irena, “they’ve sent their own lookout up. He can doubtless see all of us, even though we can only make out their infernal mast.”

Irena swore in Italian as well as Spanish before she pleaded, “Can you not reach them with your long-range buffalo rifle?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “No. They’re close to three miles away and the Big Fifty has its limits, even with full elevation!”

Then another one-pounder blasted a column of muddy water over the foredeck, and he added with a sigh, “Like Miss Mouse said to Froggie when he came a-courting, “This may not work but we can try,’ for they sure as shooting have our range!”

Irena tagged along as he strode forward to where he’d left the Big Fifty by that Gatling gun. The canvas tarp over the Gatling was leopard-spotted with fresh liquid mud. Longarm tore it off the .45-55-405 deck gun and spread it on the spattered planking as he got out that trading-post pocket knife and showed Irena how to cut oiled canvas patches the size of silver dollars before he went to work on both .50 and .45 ammunition on a far corner of the tarp.

Irena cut canvas with the skill of a born sail-patching gal, but she naturally asked him what in blue blazes they were doing.

Longarm explained, “My pistol balls ain’t heavy enough. But like Miss Goldilocks remarked on porridge, these 405-grain Gatling slugs might be just right. Heavier than this old .44-40 throws, but almost two hundred grains lighter than this Big Fifty, see?”

Irena replied, “No. I can see you can fit a smaller .45 bullet in the chamber meant for .50-caliber. Pero for how far can you hope to shoot with the gas escaping all around the most loose fit?”

Longarm used his teeth to pry a 600-grain Big Fifty slug from its brass cartridge before he explained, being careful not to let any black powder escape. “That’s how you figure to help me, with all those pretty patches. Hand me one and I’ll show you.”

She did. He centered the canvas over the open end of the Big Fifty shell and picked up a smaller Gatling round. He bit its head off, being careful not to dent the lead too deeply with teeth that were harder by far, and seated the 405-grain slug where six hundred grains had been.

It wasn’t easy. The oiled canvas didn’t want to let him. He had to really push, saying, “This stout patch puckered all around this lighter bullet ought to give us results something like you got with an old-time Kentucky rifle. They used to ram a .31-caliber ball down a .36-caliber bore with a cloth or deerskin patch. It was the patch, not the ball, as sealed the gasses and gripped the spiral lands as it tore on out the muzzle. Patch and ball part company within yards of the same, of course. But by that time the spinning lead is on its way to the target. So what the hell.”

Rising to his feet, Longarm loaded the Big Fifty with his ragged-looking improvisation, moved over to the rail, and elevated by guess and by God to let fly an experimental shot.

They couldn’t say whether anyone aboard that distant gunboat had noticed. So they picked up the mess hey’d just made and moved aft to the cockpit, and Irena’s spyglass, as he reloaded the smoking Big Fifty. Another one-pounder came down to spatter muddy water over the taffrail as they spread the tarp, patches, and cartridges in different stages of disrepair on the duckboards of the cockpit.

Bajo, cowering forward near the stub of the mast, wailed some stupid suggestion about surrender. But nobody bothered to answer. For even the galley boy knew he’d go up against the wall if the other side got hold of his skinny young ass.

Irena, peering through her spyglass, said that chingado federate lookout seemed alive and well as ever.

Longarm growled, “Ain’t out to kill him. I only need to rattle him enough to chase him down from his crow’s nest.”

He fired again.

She said, “I don’t know where you’re putting those bullets. But I can tell you they are not landing close enough to that cabrone for to notice!”

He fired again, and proceeded to jam another Gatling slug into the space meant for a bigger one as he decided, “I must have the elevation wrong then. Figuring the direction is no big deal. So I’m going over or under.”

He braced the Big Fifty on his thigh and decided to try just a tad less than a full forty-five-degree elevation, since there was nothing in this world he could do if he was already dropping them short.

He pulled the trigger, going through motions he felt to be futile as he tried to come up with something better. He had no way, from a good three miles away, to even guess where his small desperate shots might be hitting. But aboard the gunboat the lookout and conning crew on the bridge could see an occasional splash or even hear a metallic clang as a born marksman’s Kentucky windage paid off.

Not knowing this, Longarm suggested Irena’s crew set some flaming oil-soaked rags adrift in a pot from the galley, explaining, “Whether they think they hit us somewhere else or not, the smoke drifting amid all the reed islands we’re passing might make us tougher to aim at.”

So they got cracking as he kept loading and shooting off almost a round a minute. Nobody could have planned it, but just as somebody has to win every lottery, a lucky shot glanced off the steel mast to pink the lookout and whine eerily on to smack their funnel with a mighty bang of flattened lead on steel. So it took a spell for the lookout to gingerly peer over the rim of his crow’s nest, blood running down one cheek, to see a low pall of oily smoke drifting across the not-at-all-certain channel the outlaws had headed into.

He called down, “I think we’ve hit them. Fire at the same azimuth and elevation!”

The gun crew obliged as the lookout searched the bottom of his cockpit in vain for the binoculars he’d dropped somewhere. So their one-pounders landed wide, with change, as El Tiberon Blanco moved deeper into the tule reeds, her centerboard up, but still stirring up thick gobs of bottom silt from time to time.

The skipper of the gunboat didn’t care to risk a grounding as he stood out to sea and kept lobbing shells into that big black cloud of smoke. By the time it had cleared, a deckhand had brought the lookout his dropped binoculars. One lens still worked well enough for him to shout down with some confidence, “We’ve sunk her! Is nothing where she was but chopped up tule and an oil slick!”

So they told him to come down and get his scalp patched up as they turned to head back to San Luis Rio Colorado and the telegraph there. El Presidente was going to be so pleased with them for sinking El Brazo Largo and a whole pirate crew, even if it had been a government cutter and they’d had orders to watch out for that schooner Dandolo was said to be planning another smuggling run aboard.

So the sun had gone down by the time El Tiberon’blanco limped back to the main channel, north of the border, to make for the winking lights of Yuma on the last of its fuel oil.

Smoking the last of El Gato’s cigars on the foredeck, Longarm was more surprised than alarmed when the bows swung sharply for the higher left bank of the river. As Irena ran them aground in the soft mud of the shallows, Longarm grunted, “Right. No sense or profit in explaining a Mexican cutter to the Arizona authorities when you don’t have to.”

He moved forward to regard the jump to the muddy bank without a whole lot of anticipation. He didn’t think he could make it, and he jumped farther than most. Irena had long legs for a gal, but not that long. So what if he took off his boots and carried her?

Then Irena had joined him in the grounded bows just as someone on shore softly called out, “Conozco una guapa que es no puta,” which was sort of inane. Then, having been told the cuss on the dark bank knew a fine-looking gal who wasn’t a whore, Irena assured the cuss her parrot was sick, which had to be code.

Longarm knew he’d guessed right when the jolly rogues on shore got a long plank out to them in no time. It was mighty springy, and Longarm was glad Irena had gone first when she helped him and the Big Fifty ashore by taking the rifle from him as he was commencing to lose his balance in the tricky light.

Once she had all her crew ashore, Irena ran back aboard as if she’d forgotten something. When Longarm started to follow, she told him not to. So he never did.

A few minutes later, as she rejoined him and the others massed on the bank, he followed her drift. El Tiberon Blanco backed off the mud flats with the last of its steam turning its screw in reverse. She didn’t have to tell him the sluggish current would carry the abandoned vessel downstream to most anywhere. It was obvious she and her crew only cared to hide exactly where they might have gotten off.

He saw why a few minutes later as he followed Irena and her mixed bag of about two dozen crew members along the bank to where another vessel was tied up in a willowy bend. It was tough to make out in the dark, as they’d doubtless figured when they’d put in there, but he could see she was far smaller than the cutter they’d stolen, and he could make out her two masts against the night sky above Yuma.

He chuckled fondly and told Irena, “Don’t ever invite a United States lawman aboard or offer to show him your bill of lading after you pull a stunt like this, you sneaky little thing.”

She answered in an innocent schoolmarm voice, “Why Custis, what are you accusing me and mine of being up to?”

He laughed and said, “Like the love that dare not speak its name, there are business transactions along this border it’s best to say no more about. I’m going on to that place in town we were talking about. You go on about your unstated business, if you’ve a mind to. I don’t want to know a thing about it. It hurts just as much to lie to my boss as it does to peach on my pals, so …”

“I’m going with you,” she said, turning to a follower or kinsman Longarm hadn’t met before to rattle off some orders in North Italian. Then she scampered after Longarm to grab his one free elbow and demurely ask if he thought they’d let her in the hotel with him if the two of them were wearing pants.

He laughed and said they’d let him in with a sheep, as long as he was willing to pay for a double. So they ambled on along the bank until they were out of earshot of her crew and she could tell him how dirty she meant to treat him the moment she had him in bed behind another locked door.

He said he wasn’t scared, and added they’d have all night before he had to mosey over to the Yuma hall of records and grope through all those musty papers.

Irena sighed and said, “I wish your business here was simple as my own. We only have to unload a modest cargo for some Yanqui fruit growers.”

He warned, “Don’t tell me about your infernal smuggling, querida! I already know you combined business with pleasure by luring that gunboat away from the main channel so’s your own schooner could sneak on by. I’d just have to turn you in if I knew for certain what you just smuggled into these United States!” She asked, “For why? Was Mexico’s unjust export duties we avoided, while we did a favor for El Gato. Is no Yanqui duties on semillas, is there?”

To which he could only reply, “I don’t know. What sort of seeds are we talking about?”

She shrugged and said, “For to grow avocodos, dates, olives, and a dry-climate orange tree. Some Yanqui settlers are most interested in new crops for these irrigated bottomlands. So they pay well for new crops to experiment with, if only El Presidente would let us keep most of the money and … For why are you hugging me, Custis? Can’t you wait?” He said, “I can and I will and I mean to screw you silly, because I suspect you just saved me a whole heap of paperwork, you sweet-smuggling little thing!”

Chapter 15

It took two days, and Irena said she was glad. Longarm never did find anything out about Trader Wolfram and Rosalinda’s other sister. But once he’d settled on the desert claim of a late Doctor Dundee, he got out there just as the hot dry siesta time was commencing, lest he miss one member of the gang he’d run to ground at last.

So Harmony Drake, Centerfire Max, and Goldmine Gloria were enjoying a noonday repast served by Spud Travis, the junior member of the bunch, as Longarm let fly with the Big Fifty outside.

The thunderous report gained the undivided attention of all four crooks, an hour’s ride up the Gila Trail from Yuma, just as Longarm had intended.

He had his peep-sight trained on a gun loop cut through the thick ‘dobe wall beside the stout oaken door of the low-slung ranch house as he heard someone shouting, “Who fired that cannon and where are you at?”

Longarm knew that to those in the house he could be most anywhere along a ragged cactus hedge between their dusty dooryard and the dead and dried-out citrus grove behind him. He let them guess just where as he called back not unkindly, “Who’ve you been expecting, your fairy godmother? I’d be the same U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long you left for dead on that ant pile over by Growler Wash. So now you are all under arrest, and I don’t really care whether you want to come quietly or not. You’ve surely neglected the trees and shrubbery around your late husband’s homestead, Miss Gloria. Didn’t anyone ever tell you irrigation ditches don’t work unless you pump water into ‘em now and again?”

Inside the house a sweaty-faced Harmony Drake shot a thunderstruck look at his doxie and snarled, “You dumb cunt! I might have known you had to brag!

You were only supposed to be buttering him up aboard that train!”

Goldmine Gloria, sweating in her own right, brushed a strand of limp blond hair from her flushed forehead as she protested, “I never did! Nobody in town could have told him either. Are we going to fuss about how he found us or are we going to do something about it?”

Drake turned to the outlaw peering through the gun slit to ask, “Can you make any of ‘em out, Centerfire?”

Centerfire Max, so called for the single-cinched Mexican saddle he’d once ridden up Montana way rather than for the serious rifle rounds in his Winchester Yellowboy, eased the barrel of the weapon further out the gun slot as he tersely replied, “Sun’s in my damned eyes. He likely knew it would be when he chose this hour to come calling, the tricky son of a bitch!”

Across the way, Longarm shouted, “The warrant I have on you says dead or alive, and you’ve never done nothing to endear yourself to me, Harmony. If you ain’t coming out, I reckon we’ll have to come in. For it’s really starting to get hot out here.”

He waited a polite count of a hundred times Mississippi while, in the house, Harmony snarled, “Don’t nobody fall for that. He never up and said any of you others ain’t as wanted as this child. He’s trying that divide-and-conquer shit!”

From over near the fireplace, where he’d hunkered to douse the cooking coals, the kid called Spud looked up to ask just what Harmony meant. So Goldmine Gloria said, “Nothing. Stuff a sock in it, Harmony. He’s doing all right without your help.”

At the slot, Centerfire groused, “I told you all the other night we should have killed the big bastard! It ain’t as if he didn’t have a rep for tracking! But no, we had to slicker the best tracker they got by playing Here We Go ‘round the Mulberry Bush across the damned old desert with him.”

Then Longarm had finished counting and let fly with the Big Fifty. Guessing which opening they might be staring out from, and knowing a right-handed gunslick would be peeking out with his right eye, from the lower corner to Longarm’s right, he aimed at the angle formed by sill and jam, to send a fistful of splinters, a bowlful of blood and bone, and all of Centerfire Max flying back from the gun loop as his dead trigger finger fired an even more frightening shot inside the confines of the little ‘dobe!

“Oh, Jesus!” wailed Spud Travis as, spattered with gobs of blood and brain matter, he leaped to his feet and tore out the back way as fast as he could run.

He got halfway to the corral before he noticed someone had been at those ponies that should have been under the shady toldo above the watering trough. Then he made an even worse mistake and lit out afoot across the flat, moving pretty good despite the heat and his high heels and spurs. Longarm didn’t spot him before he’d made it almost two full furlongs from one corner of the house. Then Longarm called out to him, saw that only seemed to speed the kid up, and fired.

He’d already ducked and rolled by the time his heavy buffalo round cart-wheeled the running Spud Travis into a clump of pear, from which he would never rise under his own power. So when Harmony Drake blazed away at the Big Fifty’s smoke through another window, glass and all, Longarm was grinning through another gap in the hedge entirely. He knew nobody with a lick of sense would still be standing behind all that gunsmoke drifting through the shattered window. So he held his own fire for now.

Inside the house, Goldmine Gloria was saying, “He’s as crazy as I heard!

He’s got no other lawmen with him! He aims to take you in alone! Whatever makes the man act so contrary?”

Harmony almost snarled, “What makes womankind ask such totally stupid questions? Can’t you see he wants to take me alone because he refused help the other night and bragged he could handle me without any? Centerfire was right. We should have killed him when we had the chance. I was a fool to let you talk us into doubling back on our own trail like we done. When a body gets away from a lawman like Longarm, he’s got no business playing kid games!”

The brassy blond widow woman who owned the dusted-out farm said, “We’d have never been found out if you hadn’t had to go into Yuma and get caught that time. I told you everyone had me down as the rightful owner of this property, under my married name, not as the Goldmine Gloria of dubious fame along the Owlhoot Trail. I told you boys to let me run grub and snake-medicine out here whilst the law lost interest in us all, but-“

“You’re fixing to make a deal with him, ain’t you,” her paramour and partner in crime demanded.

The brassy blonde sighed wearily and moaned, “Oh, Lord, hang some crepe on your nose. Your brain just died. I’d have turned you in for the bounty weeks ago if that had been my plan when I took you under my wing. How many times do I have to tell you the big job I have planned for up Tombstone way will Pay more than I could get for you, Frank, Jesse, and the Kid? I don’t need any damned bounty money, honey. I need some tough hairpins to back my play when I clean out that bullion shipment next month!”

Harmony moved to another window, six-gun in hand, as he grumbled a lot about recent developments. She said soothingly, “I know we seem to have been too tricky with Longarm for our own good, honey. I’m sorry I got all the boys killed. But we had to keep this homespread to work out of. We still need a place to hole up with that freight wagon of bullion we’ve been planning on. There’s just no way you could freight tons of silver out before they cooled off, and once we get rid of that one pest outside, and recruit a few more gunslicks-“

Then she screamed as Longarm, having caught a glimpse of her nervous pacing when she passed a wall mirror, let fly a buffalo round that shattered both another window pane and the wall mirror, to inspire a dive for the floor and considerable wetness between her already sweat-soaked thighs.

Harmony blazed back at the smoke curling up from the cactus across the way, then ducked and rolled for the other shattered window before Longarm could return his fire.

Crouched below the level of the other sill, reloading, Harmony muttered, “He’s still using that slow but sure buffalo rifle. He must have picked up another six-gun by now. He must be out to rattle us by busting things up with them big slugs.”

Goldmine Gloria moved toward the slot by the door with the Yellow Boy that Centerfire wasn’t using any more as she licked her lips and said, “It seems to be working. He’s got me scared skinny and you seem to be the one he’s after!”

Harmony Drake’s voice chilled ten degrees as he quietly asked her just how he was supposed to take that last remark.

Goldmine Gloria probably saved her blond head as she turned from the slot instead of shoving the gun muzzle out of it. She saw the sweaty but pale-faced Harmony was staring at her, rather than out the window, and she smiled wanly and said, “Honey, you’re letting him get to you! Our only chance calls for our sticking together! Be a good boy and shoot the bad man for Mommy and Mommy will give you a nice blow job. He’s whittled us down to where it’s only two to one. But that’s still two to one, if we don’t lose our heads.”

It wasn’t going to work. Goldmine Gloria was good at her chosen criminal career because she could almost read the mind of a mark from his or her words and expressions. Like all good confidence artists or poker players, Goldmine Gloria knew it was when words and expressions didn’t quite match up that things were about to go to hell in a hack. So as her partner in bed and crime smiled boyishly and softly allowed he’d yet to see her lose her own head, Goldmine Gloria fired from the hip and spun Harmony away from the other window with a round of .44-40 lead in his chest.

She watched numbly as her fellow plotter and paramour twitched his last on the dusty floor amid shards of busted glass and some spatters from the more thoroughly shot Centerfire. Then she rose to move over to that wall mirror while, outside, Longarm called out, “It’s commencing to get awfully hot out here.”

The sole survivor didn’t answer. She knew how much time she had. She knew Longarm was alone out there and had no way of seeing in. So that gave her time to strip off her sweated-up and pissed-in shift, rub a damp rag over her flushed skin, and run a comb through her limp hair before she moved over to the front door, opened it a crack, and tossed the Yellow Boy out before calling, “It’s over. You won. Come on in and have some sangria I just made.”

Longarm called back, “I have a better notion, Miss Gloria. I want you to step out on the veranda with your hands polite. Then I want the others to follow suit before we talk about any cooling drinks this here sunny afternoon.”

Goldmine Gloria stepped outside, in nothing but her high-button shoes. Longarm knew they were miles from the nearest neighbor, but it still surprised him some to see a stark naked gal with a figure like that by broad day.

Staying put in the ruined orchard behind its cactus hedge, Longarm ordered her to move clear of the gaping doorway behind her. Goldmine Gloria moved mighty interestingly as she sauntered to one side, calling across to him, “You got all three of them, Custis. There’s nobody left but little old me, and I hope you understand they made me do it that night aboard the train.”

Longarm sighed and shouted, “I saw how they had you covered. I have you covered better. So what say you come on across to me and all our ponies now.”

She demurred girlishly. “Without any clothes on, Custis?”

He thought, then decided, “Go back inside. Put on some duds. Then I want you to do me a little favor before you come back out.”

She asked what that might be.

When he told her, she said he was a big meany. But just the same, she piled all the furniture together and poured lamp oil over it before she struck a match, tossed it on the pile, and came out once more, just ahead of a whole lot of smoke.

As she joined Longarm in the meager shade of the dried-out trees behind the hedge, Goldmine Gloria archly asked if he was satisfied at last, smoothing her thin gingham shift in a manner to suggest she stood ready and able to satisfy most any other commands he meant to issue.

He stared soberly across the way at the ‘dobe. The smoke now issuing from all doors and windows would have been tough as all get-out to breathe, had anyone been trying. Then he nodded and said, “You must have been telling the truth. It happens, I’ve been told. We’ll let the smoke clear. Then I’ll see about loading the three of them aboard the ponies I led over this way earlier and getting all four of you to town.” Goldmine Gloria shyly said, “I have a teeny-weeny question to ask. You promise you won’t fuss at me?”

He smiled thinly and replied, “I ain’t mad. You shooting the last of them makes for a neater report on my part. My boss can be such an old fuss when he sends me after a want and I wind up having to kill the cuss. If you’re asking whether you’ll be entitled to the bounty money on old Harmony, you’ll have to take that up with the powers that be. I’m a lawman, not a lawyer, and it beats me whether a gang member is entitled to claim the reward on another or not. Worth a try, I reckon. Lord knows you may need the money for your golden years by the time you get out.”

Goldmine Gloria blanched and gasped, “Surely you jest! I did it for us, not the reward money! He was about to crack up and kill both of us, honey.”

Longarm nodded at the half-dozen ponies tethered back from the hedge in the meager shade of the dried-out orchard, and took one of her arms to steer her that way as he said, “Don’t be so formal. Call me Deputy Long. I ain’t taking you in on any federal charge. I have better things to do, and it ain’t as if you met up with me the other night as pure as the driven snow. What makes you so mean, Goldmine Gloria?”

She tried in vain to pull free as she protested, “You can’t turn me over to the Pinkertons. They’ve made up all sorts of awful lies about a poor orphan girl who was only trying to get by. I’d do anything, anything you could possibly desire of a woman, if only you’d try to see things my way!”

Longarm chuckled softly and replied, “I know you would. But I ain’t sure I could think the way you do. Thanks to you, most of my regular stuff went on to Deming without me. So I had to borrow this pony and such from the Yuma law.”

She gasped again in horror as he calmly produced a set of handcuffs and had her fastened to a small dead tree before she knew it.

He said, “Wait here whilst I gather up your playmates and get us all set to ride back to town. What sort of fruit did your late husband have in mind before you let this spread go back to pure desert?”

She sobbed, “How should I know? He said it would take seven long years before they’d bear fruit, and time’s cruel teeth give a woman so few years to spare! I wanted to enjoy my youth and beauty while I had them. I still want those few short years, Custis! You know I’ve never been really wicked. Let me help you catch crooks! I know a lot of crooks I’ll bet you’re looking for and we’d make a great team. I can help you track crooks by day and make your nights sheer paradise because I’ve read this Hindu love book and memorized every page!”

Longarm began to untether three of the ponies as he wistfully remarked, “This pretty widow lady I know up Denver way has a copy of that Kama Sutra some mighty imaginative Hindu wrote. Some of the positions are uncomfortable, and we found more than one just plain impossible. I’ll be back directly and we can see to your comfort in the Yuma jail.”

As he started to turn away, the brassy blonde demanded in a colder tone, “Wait. Won’t you at least tell me how you found out I owned this remote homestead in the middle of nowhere?”

Longarm smiled thinly and shook his head, saying, “Not hardly. I paid for my education and you’re already too smart by half. But I can give you a hint. A smart-ass little birdy told me.”

She nodded wearily and said, “We were afraid you might have gotten something out of Sam Ferris when the two of you were locked up together down in Puerto Periasco.”

Then Longarm spoiled it for her by soberly shaking his head. “If it’s any comfort to you, I tried in vain to get old Sam to talk. He seemed to be sore at me for some reason. He wasn’t the one who as much as told me all about this spread outside of Yuma.”

She frowned and decided, “You’re conning me. You never got a chance to question any of the others. I was the only one you ever had more than a few words with, and I know I never told you anything!”

He leaned the empty Big Fifty against another tree and gathered up the reins as he told her, “Look on the bright side. It’ll give you a puzzle to ponder late at night as you while away your jail time.”

So he never told her, no matter how she cussed and pleaded all the way back to Yuma, where they parted unfriendly.

But once he got back to his home office and filed his report, his immediate superior, the crusty U.S. Marshal William Vail of the Denver District Court, seemed less than satisfied as to some details.

Thus it came to pass that on a payday afternoon, as Longarm was anxious to go calling with a bunch of violets and a copy of the Kama Sutra in a plain brown wrapper, he found himself literally on the carpet in Billy Vail’s oak-paneled and smoke-filled back office.

A million years went by as Longarm sat smoking milder tobacco in the leather chair across a cluttered desk from the older, shorter, and far beefier Billy Vail, who seemed to enjoy reading reports over and over as the banjo clock on the wall ticked away whole minutes of fun a man could be having most anywhere else.

At last the older lawman lowered the typed-up first copy with a puzzled sigh and declared, “All right. You did well enough, I reckon. I sent you to bring back Harmony Drake and you at least produced that sepia-toned photograph they took before they nailed the coffin lid in Yuma. You paid for that out of your own pocket, of course?”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I owned up to his death in that report. I confess off the record I got a deal on the burials. Knowing how you feel about us putting in for bounty money, I suggested a pal on the Yuma force might as well, provided he’d care to take those dead boys off my hands, along with Goldmine Gloria.”

Vail nodded his bullet head curtly and said, “I ain’t puzzled about the way Harmony Drake and so many of his pals wound up dead, and you did good by turning that confidence gal over to the Pinks and saving the taxpayers the needless expenses of a federal trial.”

He chewed thoughtfully on his evil-smelling but expensive cigar and decided, “I’m taking your word you were in hot pursuit and never noticed you were in Mexico until you had that little misunderstanding with the greaser law, albeit sometimes these reports of yours push reasonable to highly unlikely. What I’m still trying to fathom is who put you on to that half-abandoned desert homestead owned by Goldmine Gloria Weaver under the name of the Widow Dundee.”

He brandished Longarm’s typed-up report like a sword as he added, “Sure, it all works after the fact. You say that once you got back to Yuma, figuring the gang had needed a good reason to double back there after such a wide circle through Old Mexico, you spent a few hours at the Yuma hall of records, narrowed it down to half-a-dozen possibles, and just rode about on a borrowed horse and saddle until you came to the right one.”

Longarm nodded. “It was all those dead fruit trees that gave the show away, Boss. Over an acre of expensive citrus saplings boxed in by a carefully transplanted cactus hedge. I saw right off how someone had put a heap of thought and hope into what had once been a tidy little experimental farm. That’s what you call it when you try to grow irrigated stuff that’s never growed on a desert before: an experimental farm.”

Vail growled, “You said it was an experimental farm homesteaded by a retired doctor and his somewhat younger wife in this report. I asked how come you knew where to look, damn it!”

Longarm nodded and said, “I reckon I got ahead of my story. It all begins on a train, where a confidence woman who’s really out to free a lover from a poor innocent lawman conned him good by pretending to be a trained nursing sister.” Vail nodded and said, “I heard about you and that nursing sister on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I can see how she’d have to put on a better than average act with a cuss so interested in medical matters.”

Longarm smiled sheepishly and confessed, “Goldmine Gloria sold me with some technical jargon you’d seldom read in the Police Gazette. So once I figured she’d only been conning me, I still knew she had to know more about medicine than your average outlaw’s doxie.”

Vail nodded grudgingly and said, “I follow your drift. But ain’t it a long reach from a gal who might have read some medical books to the widow of a doc who’d left her a homestead out in the desert?” Longarm shook his head and said, “Not hardly. She lured me off the train in another part of that desert with a lie about the trader there being a retired doc growing oranges and such under irrigation. A half truth makes a mighty good lie, and I’ve noticed a heap of crooks use the same when pressed for convincing bullshit. But it only came to me when a Mex pal told me how lots of Anglo settlers had been experimenting in the desert around Yuma with exotic crops that the lying gal might have fed me a half truth about another retired doc entirely. Once that came to me, it was easy enough to scout through the local files and cut their trail. How many doctors marry young wives and file homestead claims in a given neighborhood, for Pete’s sake? I never meant to hold out on you when I wrote that report up on the train, still feeling sort of coy. I reckon I was still enjoying my little joke on her. I hope she loses heaps of sleep in the years to come trying to figure out how any gal as smart as her slipped up with somebody dumb as me. Can I go now? I promised a lady supper at Romero’s come payday night.”

Vail laughed despite himself and said, “Go on. But just one thing more, Custis. This report says you wound up in Yuma last Thursday. So how do you account for not leaving town for another three days?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Goldmine Gloria reminded me of a book that Mex pal I told you about had never read. So I bought a copy. And then, of course, I had to translate it some.”