in that fool jail!”
“No, you don’t. They would have buried you by now. By the way, you made a deal with that midget to save yourself from a necktie party. You mind telling me what it was?”
“I told you. He said he’d get me out if I’d tell him where Jesse James was hiding.”
“I remember. Whereabouts did you say that was?”
“Hell, I don’t know! I’d’a said most anything to get my ass out of there!”
“Well, your ass is out. What did you aim to tell Cedric?”
“I told you. He said he’d get me out if I’d tell him some yarn.”
“Spin her my way, then. I listen as good as anyone.”
“Oh, hell, I dunno. I’d’a likely told him the stuff as is going around the bar rooms. You ask any two men where the James boys went after that big shootout in Minnesota and you get three answers.”
“Which one do you reckon makes most sense?”
“You heard about them lighting out to Mexico?”
“Sure, and I don’t like it much. The James boys has gotten by all these years by hiding out amid friends and kinfolks they grew up with. They have to be somewhere in or damn near Missouri. Surprise me if they was even far from Kansas City. Clay County’s been pretty well searched over, but they’ll be somewhere in the Missouri River drainage when we catch up with ‘em. That fool raid they made up into Minnesota likely taught ‘em the value of hiding out with folks they can trust to keep a secret.”
“I did hear one story about Saint Joe. Where is that from Kansas City?”
“Up the river a few hours by steamboat. I heard it, too. Sheriff of Buchanan County wires that nobody’s held up anybody in or about Saint Joe.”
“Well, I hear tell Jesse and Frank is trying to go straight. You see, Cole Younger was the real brains behind the gang, and with him in prison…”
“You just lost me, boy. Why do you fellers always spin that same old yarn about being led astray by wicked companions? Goddamn James boys has been robbing and gunning folks before they knew why boys and gals were different. If you’d told that midget that Jesse James is reformed after fifteen years of shooting at everybody but his mother, he’d have laughed before he killed you. though, come to think of it, the Hankses were figuring to kill you anyway.”
The light began to fade again as they rode down into the clouds beyond the pass. The top of the storm was only cold and damp, but they were back in rain before they rode under man-sized timber again. The prisoner asked, “When are we going to make camp?” and Longarm shot back, “We made it, over on the other side.”
“You aim to just keep riding, into the night as she falls?”
“Nope. We’ll rest the critters, along about midnight. If it’s still raining, we’ll build a fire. If it ain’t, we won’t.”
“Gawd, you’re going to kill me and the horses the way you’re pushing us!”
“Ain’t worried about you. The critters and me know how hard we can push.”
“Listen, you said by now we don’t have more’n a third or so of the bunch from Crooked Lance trailing us.”
“Maybe less. Day or so on a cold, wet trail can take the first flush off the enthusiasm. More’n one will have given up by now, I suspicion.”
“We’ve passed a dozen good places to make a stand. I mean, that Winchester of yours might discourage anybody.”
“You want me to bushwhack fellow peace officers?”
“Why not? They’re out to kill us, ain’t they?”
“That’s their worry. It wouldn’t be neighborly of me to blow holes in anybody wearing a badge. And I don’t want to hurt any of them fool cowhands either, if it can be helped.”
“Longarm, these fool horses ain’t about to carry us no four hundred miles in country like this!”
“I know. It gets even rougher where we’re headed.”
The Green River is born from countless streams in the Uinta Range, a cross-grained spur of the Rockies, rubbing its spine against the sky near where Wyoming, Utah and Colorado come together on the map. As Longarm had thought before, those lines were put there on the map by government men who’d never seen the country and wouldn’t have liked it much if they had.
The Green makes a big bend into Colorado in its upper reaches, then turns toward the junction with the brawling Colorado River near the southern border of Utah. To get there, the Green runs through canyonlands unfit for most Indians to consider as a home. The Denver & Rio Grande’s western division crossed the Green halfway to Arizona’s Navajo lands at a small settlement called, naturally, Green River. The lack of imagination implied by the name was the simple result of not having to name any other towns to the north or south in Longarm’s day.
They didn’t follow the river when they reached it. For one thing, the cliffs came right down to the boiling rapids along many a stretch. For another, Longarm knew the men trailing him might expect him to try this. So he led his prisoner the shorter way, across the big bend. The shorter way was not any easier; the route took them through a maze of canyons where the floors were choked with brush and the steep, ugly slopes of eroded shale smelled like hot road tar where the sun beat down on it. They’d been riding for three full days by now and Longarm figured they were nearly a hundred miles from Crooked Lance. Anyone who was still trailing them wanted pretty badly to have
