Chapter 12
This time Longarm rode back to the reservation along the railroad tracks instead of taking the wagon trace from town. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but he’d never ridden the entire stretch and it was possible that his survey map was missing a few details.
As he topped the rise, west of town, and started across the higher prairie rolling toward the distant foothills, a calico steer with a broken left horn stared wild-eyed at him for a moment and lit out, running. Longarm saw its badly worn hide and figured it for a queer. Sometimes something funny happened to a castrated calf and it grew up thinking it was a heifer. The range bulls thought so, too, and the poor spooked animal was all worn out from trying to get screwed. Some pissed-off bull had whupped it good for fooling him, most likely, and now it was ranging alone, too scared to let anything near it.
The range between Switchback and the reservation line was badly misused in this stretch, too. The native grasses had been overgrazed and the brush was getting out of hand along the railroad right-of-way. Prickly tumbleweed, both blowing and growing, formed dense windrows between higher clumps of sage and grease wood that had followed the tracks east out of the Great Basin beyond the mountains. Some of the brush was waist-high to a man on foot and getting too woody for even an antelope to browse. It was a hell of a way to treat a country, Longarm thought, but told himself not to worry about it. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help wondering where it would all lead to. He was all for progress; the Iron Horse had opened up a continent to Europe’s hungry hordes in his own lifetime, but couldn’t people see there was a limit to what the land could take? The high plains had been grazed for thousands of years without being damaged by its indigenous wildlife. The longhorn probably didn’t hurt the buffalo grass any more than the buffalo had, head for head. But the buffalo had kept moving, giving the grass time to grow back. The Indian had been willing to live the same way, drifting across the sea of grass from place to place. The white man’s notion of staying put with his cows and crops didn’t give the range time to recover. The ten inches of rain each season and the short green-up of the native short-grasses called for at least two years of fallow for every one grazed. At the rate they were overstocking, the cattle raisers would be raising more dust than cows in a few more years.
He kept an eye on the queer. It had stopped, and was staring at him from behind a clump of greasewood, now. The critter was mixed up enough between the horns to do almost anything, he knew. Cows grazing with others were usually neighborly enough, but loners, away from the herd, tended to get odd notions. When that messed-up calico didn’t think he was a gal, he just might decide he was a Spanish fighting bull. That busted horn might make a nasty hole in his chestnut’s hide, too.
Longarm rode on, pretending not to notice, the way one rides past a barking farmyard dog. Then, as he and the chestnut came abreast of the queer, it lowered its banged-up head, snorted, and charged. “Son of a bitch,” muttered Longarm, swinging his mount in a tight circle to spoil the rogue’s aim. Something ticked the brim of his hat as, behind him, a gunshot swore at him, too!
As the steer thundered by on one side, Longarm was rolling out of the saddle on the other, dragging his Winchester from its boot as he threw himself at the dirt. He landed on his side and rolled behind a waist-high clump of sage in a cloud of mustard-colored dust, ignoring the horse running one way and the steer the other. He rolled over again and rose on his elbows with the rifle trained back the way he’d come. The second shot tore through the sage where he’d landed, and spotting the gunsmoke wafting from some greasewood near the tracks, Longarm fired back, dropped lower and snaked at an angle toward it, cradling his rifle in his arms as he walked his elbows through the dust.
Longarm heard the pounding of hooves and turned his head to see the calico queer headed his way, its good horn down and plowing through the brush as it came!
He fired a shot into the dust ahead of the charging queer to turn it. The critter didn’t even swerve, but Longarm’s unseen attacker parted his rising gunsmoke with a bullet. The lawman pulled his knees up, dug his heels into the dust, and kicked himself sideways as the calico charged blindly through the space he’d just occupied, snorting like a runaway locomotive. Longarm landed on the back of his neck, somersaulted backwards, and came up pumping lead in the general direction of the greasewood clump the shots seemed to be coming from. Then he dropped and rolled out of sight without waiting to see how good the other’s aim might be. There were no answering shots. If he hadn’t hit the son of a bitch, then his enemy was lying doggo, or had lost interest and was crawling himself, now.
There seemed to be no way to find out which, without catching a rifle ball in the head or attracting the attention of the crazy calico. So Longarm stayed prone in a clump of tumbleweed, propped on one elbow, as he took a fistful of loose cartridges from his coat pocket and thumbed them into the rifle’s magazine. He risked a look to the west and saw that his chestnut had stopped a quarter-mile away and had begun to graze as if nothing had happened. Longarm peered through a gap in the brush and observed that the one-horned calico was broadside to him, now. The lunatic longhorn had its tail up and its head down, pawing the dirt with one hoof as it regarded something hidden to Longarm’s left, closer to the railroad tracks. Longarm didn’t think the calico had spotted anyone for sure, since it wasn’t spooked or charging, but the calico had seen something, so Longarm started crabbing toward the tracks, keeping his head and ass down, moving as fast as he could. Before he reached the tracks, a double-header freight came over the rise between him and town, with both engines puffing, fore and aft. The one-horned queer lit out for Texas, bawling in fright. Longarm heaved a sigh of relief and kept crawling toward the tracks as the ground vibrated under him in time to the pounding drivers of the double-header. He saw a brakeman staring down at him, slack-jawed, from the top of a car. Then the train was past and he was kneeling behind some tall, dried sunflower stalks with a reloaded rifle in his hands and not much notion where to point it.
He worked his way east along the railroad bank for four or five minutes until he reached a wooden culvert that ran under the tracks through the embankment. He saw where human knees had carried someone under to the far side and, swearing, threw caution to the winds and ran up and over. He dropped to one knee on the north side of the tracks, and swept the horizon with his eyes. Then he ran toward the edge of the drop-off, rifle ready. He surmised the bushwhacker had crawled through the culvert after that last exchange, jumped up as the train covered his movements, and lit out.
At the edge, he looked down the slope toward the outskirts of Switchback. There was nobody on the gently inclined, bare, eroded slope to the first fence line. The bastard who’d shot at him had made it to the cover of those railroad sheds and the shanties past them. Longarm considered strolling on down to ask anyone he met what they might have seen, but it seemed a waste of time. If anyone had anything to say, Sheriff Murphy would hear about it, sooner or later.
The deputy recrossed the tracks, and after some coaxing and cussing, got back aboard the chestnut. He rode on his way again without further incident, chewing an unlit cheroot as he dusted himself off and tried to puzzle out what had happened. If whoever’d shot at him was the same one playing Wendigo, Wendigo’s methods weren’t subtle. Could those others simply have been shot?
That might explain why the Wendigo took the heads. If he was trying to spook the Blackfoot with spirit killings, he wouldn’t want corpses left about with bullets in their skulls. On the other hand, the sound of a gunshot carried for some distance, and nobody’d heard any.
Who was that fellow back East who said he’d patented some newfangled gadget that could silence the muzzle
