them alive!'
Devereaux repeated Longarm's command, since it sounded more official coming from him, and called out to the trapped smuggler to surrender in the name of the U.S. Revenue Service.
Doyle didn't answer. Then they all heard hoofbeats, and down the road came Lieutenant Flynn himself, waving his dress saber aboard a bay thoroughbred. As Devereaux warned him off by pumping his own rifle over his own head, the sandy-haired C.O. slid his handsome mount to a stop and dismounted gracefully, if somewhat dramatically, waving that nickel-plated blade like a seagoing version of J.E.B. Stuart, or George Armstrong Custer. You had to give even a pain in the ass credit for being a good rider.
Devereaux filled his C.O. in, out of easy earshot, on the north side of the trapped Doyle. Longarm knew what they'd been jawing about when Flynn called out, 'All right, Mister Doyle, you have ten seconds and counting to throw out your weapon and come out with your hands up! I now make it seven and still counting!'
Longarm bawled, 'Hold on! We got him boxed, Lieutenant!' Meanwhile, deeper in the gumbo-limbo, Doyle wailed something that sounded like, 'A mo abra! Fan ort! Is cruinti? mi!'
Then Flynn shouted, 'Volley, fire!' and nobody paid Longarm a lick of attention as he shouted himself hoarse above the rattle of rifle fire, with each infernal Spencer firing seven times before anyone had to stop!
In the ringing silence that followed, Longarm croaked, 'Asshole! How am I supposed to take 'em alive with help like that?'
Flynn said coldly, 'You heard me warn him. That sounded like some ancient Irish war cry he threw back at us. Does anyone here have the Gaelic?'
Longarm snorted in disgust and said, 'I wanted him to testify in English before a federal grand jury. I'm going in now. If any of you fill me full of lead, I'll never speak to you again!'
Devereaux warned, 'Be careful, we were firing blind!'
Longarm eased up to that wilted sea grape he'd piled across the very same gap the day before. Now he muttered, 'I noticed. There might be enough of him left to make a dying statement.'
But there wasn't. Longarm had only moved in about as far as where he'd backed Ruby's shay before he spotted Doyle, further back among the supple saplings than he'd have thought possible. But Doyle had been sort of wiry as well as desperate. So there he stood, still on his feet, staring blankly as the blood still oozed from a good two dozen gunshot wounds.
Longarm propped his Winchester against two closely grown trunks and reached into the tangle, with some effort, till he had a grip on one of the dead man's sleeves. It was still a chore to wriggle Doyle out, even dead as the snows of yesteryear and limp as an old man's dick after a whole night in a whorehouse.
Devereaux joined him in the sun-dappled grotto, holding Longarm's Stetson in his free hand as he said, 'One of my men just found your hat across the way. Is he dead?'
Longarm picked up his Winchester and took back his Stetson as he replied, 'Yep. Didn't get much out of him as he breathed his last in a mishmash of English and that odd lingo... Gaelic, you say?'
Devereaux said, 'Don't look at me. We were part of the Protestant gentry in the old country, to hear my grandmother go on. It could have been Gaelic. Or it could have been Greek, for all I know.'
Longarm said, 'I've known some Irish gals who burst into Gaelic when they were feeling sore at me, or vice versa. It may as well have been Greek to me, but I think Doyle's a Scotch or Irish name.'
Devereaux asked, 'What about Pryce, his late partner's handle?'
Longarm said, 'Welsh, I think. His other pals, Godwynn and Reynolds, sound like they had plain English names to me. In the meanwhile, we ain't going to get much more than bug-bit hanging about in this baby jungle!'
Devereaux agreed, and said he'd deal with the cadaver. So Longarm stepped back out in the sunlight, where Flynn asked much the same questions and got about the same answers. While everyone but the big cheese on the bay got to walk the short distance to the nearby Coast Guard station, Longarm asked how Deputy Gilbert and their prisoner, Baldwin, might be making out.
Flynn said, 'They both seem on the road to recovery. I'm not sure I see how the outlaw they sent you and Gilbert after might fit into this wild whatever that Pryce & Doyle were up to.'
Longarm said, 'Baldwin don't fit at all, Lieutenant. He was wanted on other charges entirely, and got his fool self arrested when he tried to sell stock he'd stolen close by to other crooks who'd picked this nice quiet stretch of coast to ship cold-storage meat from. Escondrijo's close enough to Old Mexico for a crooked outfit to pick up quarantined beef, at a considerable bargain, but far enough from the border to avoid suspicion as to where in this world they ever came by it.'
Devereaux, walking on the other side of Longarm, asked how they'd ever managed to move cold-storage beef by the ton across more than a hundred miles of Texas cattle country.
Longarm said, 'They couldn't have. So they never did. I figure they smuggled the forbidden Mex beef in from some Mex port such as Matamoros. No Mex officials would have call to worry about an outward-bound cargo and even if they did, you can buy most anyone working for El Presidente Diaz cheap.'
Devereaux frowned thoughtfully and said, 'That sounds needlessly complicated to me! Once a vessel put safely out from Matamoros with a load of refrigerated beef, what was there to prevent it from going on up to, say, Galveston or New Orleans to unload?'
Longarm said, 'You boys. The U.S. Coast Guard can't watch every tub leaving Old Mexico or even plying these coastal waters, as long as it acts natural. But how would you go about putting in to some major seaport with a valuable load and no proper bill of lading?'
From the far side, Lieutenant Flynn almost snapped, 'It's all so obvious now that the scheme's been exposed, Mister Devereaux. Pryce & Doyle simply acted as a way station for their seagoing confederates. Probably putting in from the open sea through Corpus Christo Pass in one of those innocent-looking fishing luggers we only occasionally check now and again. With their own more elaborate ice plant they could afford to amass a respectable cargo, which they'd then load aboard one of those coastal steamers that had already passed through U.S. Customs down by the mouth of the Rio Grande. Delivered with proper papers up the coast as Texas beef, nobody would have been the wiser had only they had the sense to leave Deputy Long here free to carry out his own less complicated mission. What was the name of that Mexican crone who's said to smuggle contraband in from the high seas, Mister Devereaux?'
