“Hold on,” he warned himself. “Why couldn’t you have simply gotten other riding stock at the town livery? Come to study on it, that town livery could have had rat poison of its own to spare. And you never told them stable hands in Vado Seguro just how far you and La Senorita might be riding. So gunslicks of either the Mexican or Anglo persuasion, coming up from them canyons after being sent for, could be expecting to catch up with you and Kinipai any time now and a considerable distance north of Rancho Alvera!”
He warned himself he could be playing chess while the other side was simply playing mumblety-peg like mean little kids who couldn’t even say what made them so mean. For like many an Anglo rider, or for that matter many a Mexican, he’d strode through many a set of swinging doors to find himself in a whole heap of trouble with assholes who were just mean by nature and inclined to view a stranger of a different breed as a personal insult just because he was still standing up.
Longarm decided to set his suspicions to the back of the stove until he met up with a horse doctor who could hazard a guess as to how long it took to rat-poison a pony. For he was damned if he knew.
His load wasn’t getting any lighter as he trudged on down the dark lonesome road, with night critters scattering off to either side as he made no effort to move quietly along the wagon ruts. A sneaky walker could get in a whole lot of trouble at snake time, the first few hours after sundown.
He was even more worried about spooking beef stock. His boots offered some protection from snakebite, but the undiluted Spanish longhorn was inclined to regard any human on foot as a target of opportunity, and while the moon was shining bright, many a shadow in the middle distance could well be a cow making up its mind to come tear-assing his way without warning. it was the female of the species that was more likely to really kill you, since the bulls tended to charge straighter and with their heads lower.
That was why Mexican matadors only fought bulls, and flat out refused to consider fighting even a bull of any Anglo dairy breed. They knew the graceful fawn-colored Jersey milker, both male and female, had killed more men, women, and children than all the other breeds combined.
He was glad most Mexicans drank goats’ milk, and preferred not to think of the hogs they had ranging free for acorns, mesquite pods, and such. Hogs could be dangerous as well.
But when the strumming of a far-off guitar drew his eye to some pinpoints of lamplight way off to his left, he resisted the hankering to cut cattycorner through the waist-high mustard you always seemed to see around Spanish longhorns. The critters that admired the herb they’d crossed the main ocean with tended to lie down in it at night, and they could get up suddenly, with horns spanning seven feet from tip to tip, or nine feet if you measured around the curves.
He trudged on until, sure enough, he found a side lane heading to that isolated rancho. There was neither a fence nor cattle guard in evidence. So those hands stringing wire had been more worried about stock straying across the reservation line than goring poor wayfaring strangers on a public right-of-way.
Sneaking up on folks after dark could be as dangerous as the spooking of other critters. So, not wanting to waste ammunition, Longarm decided he’d best sing, out of tune, with that distant Mexican guitar.
It seemed to be trying for “La Paloma.” So Longarm let fly with an old Irish ballad they’d based that trail song on. Instead of “Streets of Laredo,” although to the same tune, he sang:
“Sure, pity the plight of a wayfaring stranger, With night coming on, and a long way from home.”
It worked. He’d barely finished the first verse when that guitar ceased strumming and the lights ahead commenced to wink out. But the moonlit wagon ruts led him on through the darkness, as he switched to a more cheerful song about the Chisholm Trail, until a furlong or so on he heard a rifle cock and somebody called out, “Quien es?”
Longarm replied in Spanish, giving his true name but not his true occupation as he explained how two ponies had died along the coach road under him.
There was a low, urgent consultation. Then a feminine voice called out in passable English, “Might El Senor by any chance be the Custis Long some of my people call El Brazo Largo?”
Longarm, as that translated from the Spanish, sighed sheepishly and allowed he hadn’t known he was that famous this far north of the border.
The woman called back more cheerfully, “Bienvenido, El Brazo Largo. You say you have need of caballos?”
Longarm said, “I’d be proud to pay for the hire of at least two, ma’am, and I sure wish someone might see fit to get the two I had off the road about a mile and a half north. I suspect they both ate rat poison, and in any case they’re sure going to wind up somewhat disgusting.”
He heard what seemed like a boss lady order someone else to gather a work detail for some hide salvage and an easier disposal than burial. Mex folks were as bad as his own when it came to letting folks downstream worry about their shit and garbage.
He didn’t say anything. El Rio Chama ran fairly clear this far up, but it would carry the dead ponies into the far bigger Rio Grande, which ran as muddy and stinky as the Missouri by the time it got halfway to El Paso.
They’d made him welcome, so he moved forward, derringer palmed in his free hand, to be greeted like a long-lost rich uncle and, of course, relieved of his load as the gal took his left elbow to tell him she was honored and that her casa was his casa for as long as he cared to own it.
He knew she was only being polite. Both her English and Spanish were spoken the way landholders who’ve never had to ask for a job were inclined to speak. He made out her retainers, doubtless armed, as eight to a dozen. Some of them had already scampered ahead, he felt sure, when he saw lamps being lit and heard more music up the road a piece.
By the time they got to the hollow square of ‘dobe walls with red-tiled roofing, they’d established she was called Consuela Rosalinda Llamas y Valdez. He was sort of surprised, when she led him into her well-lit Spanish Baroque front parlor, to see that she was a Junoesque gal old enough to have a streak of silver in her black braided hair, and that she looked more Indian than fullblooded Kinipai had.
As she told him his saddle and possibles would be taken to his room, and sat him on a leather sofa near the glowing coals of her baronial fireplace, he recalled what that anthropology gal who’d kissed so nice had said about skulls. She’d said all babies had the same cute little bones behind their face meat, and that the kids of the different races slowly got more different as they grew up, with the outstanding differences waiting till they got older to stand out. He’d read about that sad case of the pretty quadroon passing herself off as pure white and marrying up with a proud and proddy planter, who’d shot her and then his own fool self when he just couldn’t ignore the fact
