“You could hide out in my hotel room whilst I whipped over to the mesa and back.”
She slapped the back of his wrist. “Why Custis Long, whatever are you saying?”
He said, “Nothing all that indecent, ma’am. You’ll be even safer from my forward ways upstairs alone than here in this dining room holding hands with me. We’ll leave the lamp lit and you can read my Police Gazette and Scientific American whilst I’m out riding. That could even help explain where I spent the earlier parts of this evening, should anybody glance up at my shuttered windows. Might be a good idea if you were to move about and cast some shifty shadows from time to time.”
She didn’t answer. They sat there holding hands across the table a spell as Longarm gave her the time she needed to make up her mind. Then she did, and she was laughing like a kid starting out on Halloween with some laundry soap and rotten eggs as she said, “Let’s do it. It sounds like fun!”
It wasn’t the schoolmarm’s cordovan mare pony that gave Longarm a literal pain in the ass. It was the sidesaddle he’d found cinched to the otherwise satisfactory mount when Trisha brought it around to the back of the hotel. The stock saddle he’d borrowed off his male pals at the Diamond K was out of reach in the tack room of the boss lady’s livery, and what the hell, it wasn’t as if he was hoping to meet up with anyone in the dark. So he handed his room key to Trisha, told her to make sure the door was bolted after her as well, and got on the mare awkwardly with his Winchester across his unusually placed thighs.
Actually riding sidesaddle made it tougher for a man to buy all the snickering things other men said about gals who rode that odd way, with the left foot natural in the near stirrup and the other one dangling in midair with one’s right knee wrapped around a sort of leather banana sprouting from the forward swells. He doubted a gal could really gallop astride, seated backward with that big banana up inside her. For aside from being too big, the knee brace was set at better than forty-five degrees off center. Longarm found this one braced his right knee well enough for him to lope the mare once they were off to the northeast a ways.
He didn’t lope all the way to that mysterious mesa, of course. It was too far for one thing, and too mysterious for another. He reined to a walk when he spied the moonlit rimrocks looming about a mile and a half ahead. He was glad he had when he heard distant hoofbeats.
He hadn’t been followed from town. The riders, a plot of riders, were coming his way from the canyon- carved mesa—fast!
Longarm reined off the trail into high, but not high enough chaparral, cussing the old-timers who’d cut all the real firewood this close to town. When the pony balked at moving off farther, Longarm dismounted, Winchester in hand, to lead the balky brute deeper into whatever chaparral was left.
True chaparral, back in Old Spain, was scrub oak. The Mexican and Anglo vaqueros, or buckaroos, had decided any sticker-brush too tall to call weeds and too short to call woods was chaparral. The shit all around seemed mostly cat’s-claw and palo verde, neither offering cover worth mention in bright moonlight unless you’d got a heap of it between you and someone else!
Then he almost stepped off into space, and told the mare he was sorry for cussing it as a balker once he saw why the trail ran the way it did. The arroyo running alongside was so deep he couldn’t see bottom. He sighed, got between the pony and the trail, and snicked the hammer of his Winchester to full cock. He knew a man could flatten out in thin chaparral with an outside chance of not being seen. But there was no way to ask a live pony to flatten out like a bear rug, and as long as they were likely to see the damned mare in any case, a man could dodge lead better on his feet. There wasn’t a bit of solid cover between his exposed position and the trail.
He could only stand quietly in the moonlight, hoping to pass for a clump of overlooked firewood, as he listened to those riders riding ever closer. Then he could see them in the moonlight, and he cradled his Winchester to cover the pony’s nostrils with a palm and held his own breath as well, hoping against hope, even as he knew he had to be hoping in vain.
Then the baker’s dozen of bare-headed and cotton-shined riders had passed by, without a glance in his direction, as the moon shone brightly on white stripes across dark faces framed by long hair bound with rolled cloth. As they jingled off into the darkness he murmured, “Jesus H. Christ, those Quill Indians seem to be headed for town! So how do we get there ahead of ‘em to raise the alarm?”
The pony didn’t answer. Longarm wasn’t sure he could have either. Cutting cross-country by moonlight, over busted-up range he didn’t know, would be risky riding slow. Those painted Jicarilla had been following the trail at a lope. But hold on. Could no more than thirteen of anything hope to raid a whole town on the prod with all that Apache talk in the air?
He led the pony back to the trail afoot. “They have to be headed somewheres else. In a hurry, seeing they missed us standing there like moonlit graveyard statuary. They could circle the town and be across the river and back on their reserve before sunrise. So that makes more sense.”
Then he remounted awkwardly, and rode on up the trail to the northeast as he muttered, “Might be interesting to see where they just came from.”
He naturally knew better than to ride into a canyon entrance in Apacheria. That could be a fatal move in calmer country. So a quarter mile out, as the range began to rise at a steeper angle, Longarm led the pony off to the other side of the trail, tethered it to lower but lessferocious greasewood, and gave it a hatful of canteen water before he put the wet Stetson back on his head and started legging it the rest of the way, saddle gun at port arms.
A mesa was called a mesa because that was the Spanish word for a table and the early Spanish explorers had noticed how many flat-topped hills they seemed to have in these parts. Most mesas grew that way because millions of rainstorms had carved away land that hadn’t been covered by a lava flow, an ancient lake bottom dried to dense mudrock, or whatever, leaving land that had once lain lower perched higher in the sky. The moonlit caprock of La Mesa de los Viejos was far higher than Longarm had time to climb. So he worked about a third of the way up the gentler slopes below the jagged rim of the flat top, and proceeded to mountain-goat around bends that swung into the canyon that the trail entered down below.
He found he was near the upper limits of easy sidewinding when one of his boot heels dislodged a fist- sized chunk of scree that, fortunately, fetched up in a clump of yucca instead of rattle-clanking all the way down the slope. So he eased down to where the footing felt surer and learned great minds often ran in the same channels when he rounded a bend to spot movement ahead and freeze in place.
He sank slowly down to one knee as he tried to decide what he was looking at, near the very limits of eyestrain in the moonlight. Then one of them stood up to stretch near that big moonlit boulder, and Longarm proceeded to crawfish backward, slow as hell for a white eyes who’d just spotted painted Apache!
