“Apache,” he laconically observed, figuring nobody but a tenderfoot needed more explanation than that when Western Union shut down for repairs in Apacheria. Nobody had ever had to explain electricity to any hostiles. All they’d had to hear was that the blue sleeves got word somehow along those singing wires stretched from pole to lonely pole, far from the gaze of any cavalry patrol.
With the wires down in all directions, Longarm felt no pressing need to identify himself as he stocked up on some cheroots instead.
As he stepped out on the walk, pausing to light one of the cheroots, the man in black called Wesley Jones caught up with him. “Where have you been? They just told me you weren’t in your room and I’ve been looking high and low for you.”
Longarm finished lighting his cheroot and shook out the match before he said, “You found me here instead because I was running low on tobacco. What did you want with me, Wes?”
Jones said, “It’s Queen Kirby who’d like another word with you. I was asking where you might have been earlier this morning when she first sent me to fetch you.”
Longarm blew smoke in the rude questioner’s face and calmly told him, “Where I might or might not have been is my own beeswax. When did Miss Queen adopt me as her wayward child? I can’t come up with any other reason I’d have to report to her for roll call. Can you?”
Jones said, “I can. You can’t ride on to that job up Chama way with Apache on the warpath. Meanwhile she’s got as good if not a better job for a man who’s not afraid to use a gun on short notice.”
Longarm didn’t want to seem too anxious. On the other hand, he sure wanted to know why Queen Kirby was recruiting a private army of hired guns. So he shrugged and said, “I’ll hear her out. I ain’t saying I want to work for any woman, though.”
The man in black smiled thinly. “You’ll find Queen Kirby as tough as most he-bosses if you cross her. Now that it’s over, I can tell you just how close you came last night to finding out how tough she can get. How come you swapped two fine Arab ponies for bay scrubs up Loma Blanca way, Crawford?”
Longarm was glad he’d picked an alias easy to remember as he answered casually, “I left in a hurry. Would you want to be riding a cream and leading a palomino right after a serious gunfight, Wes?”
The man in black led the way along the walk as he chuckled and replied, “They say you changed your shirt from green satin to rosy cotton, too. I admire a man who thinks fast on his feet. It’s a good thing you never put on a pale blue shirt or swapped those pale ponies for a buckskin or a paint.”
Longarm knew exactly what he meant, but naturally pretended not to as they walked on past that saloon and around to the card house, where this morning better than a dozen ponies were tethered out front.
When they went inside, the gaming room was full of tobacco smoke and some hard-looking gents, armed to the teeth and not playing cards or shooting craps. When Longarm commented that it looked as if someone was fixing to go to war, Jones told him he was right.
They went into Queen Kirby’s office. A hatchet-faced individual with an old army shirt, shotgun chaps, and an English Enfield.476 six-shooter was leaning against a back wall, arms folded Indian-style. Queen Kirby asked, “You ever meet up with Poison Welles before, Henry?”
Longarm stared, neither friendly nor unfriendly, at what assumed to be the stranger instead of a desert water hole, and allowed he’d never had the pleasure.
Queen Kirby said, “Fortunately for us all, Poison here knows the famous Custis Long, or Longarm, on sight.”
Poison Welles nodded soberly and declared, “He ain’t half as tough as they say he is in the Rocky Mountain News. I backed him down in Durango, just about this time of year, around ‘76 or ‘77. Thought he could dance with my gal just because he was a famous lawman. But when I told him to fill his fist, he just grinned like a fool and said he’d only been funning.”
“I’m sorry I missed that,” said Longarm, trying not to sound too sarcastic. He wasn’t supposed to be as clever as Queen Kirby, and it was no skin off his nose if she didn’t know the town of Durango hadn’t been there in ‘76 or ‘77, since they’d built it on land the Ute had lost more recently, after that ill-advised Meeker Massacre closer to White River. He didn’t know why fabulists like Poison Welles made up such whoppers, but he was glad this one had when Queen Kirby said, “We’d already backtracked you enough to feel we were safe in calling you Henry, Henry. But having Poison here assure us you can’t be who you couldn’t be means I may as well lay some more cards on the table, face-up. I want you and your gun hand working for me, Henry. I’m paying a hundred a week and found, with a bonus for each and every time you really have to fire a gun. How do you like it so far?”
Longarm quietly asked, “Who might I be fixing to gun for you?”
She said, “Right now I’ve got Apache pestering me. I knew from the beginning that that stupidity with the Jicarilla was going to cause more Indian trouble. Those fools down in Santa Fe never thought ahead as they were pulling strings to move the Jicarilla. I told you what the wise-money boys told me about the Bureau of Land Management freezing all that Indian land, and now we’re stuck with upset Indians, at a time the army can’t spare us any help with them!”
Longarm cocked a brow and cautiously asked, “You’ve been recruiting gunhands to fight Indians, ma’am?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders and replied, “Somebody has to. I just told you the army seems too busy. General Sherman says he just can’t spare the troops to chase horse thieves when Victorio and his four hundred total savages are running wild down south.”
She took a drag on her cigar before adding primly, “I prefer to call you boys my’ Regulators,’ not my hired guns. I can assure you all it’s perfectly lawful, Henry. I’ve cleared it with both Santa Fe and our county sheriff up Ensenada way. So how’s about it?”
Longarm exchanged glances with Poison Welles, as if he thought the blowhard knew his ass from his elbow, then turned back to Queen Kirby to demand, “What’s the bounty per Apache head, ma’am?”
She met his gaze unflinchingly and said, “I knew you were my kind of gun, Henry. A hundred dollars on each dead buck and fifty for a squaw or kid. We don’t take prisoners. Any Apache who messes with me will learn I’m not a fool government you can fight with one day and tap for a handout the next.”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I follow your drift, ma’am. I’ve often wondered why Uncle Sam fights
