‘em in the summer and feeds ‘em through the winter, myself. But ain’t we likely to get in trouble with said government, slaughtering wards of said government without a hunting license?”
Queen Kirby shrugged and said, “Hell, I’m only asking you to shoot the red devils for me. Nobody’s asking you to sleep with them or buy them any drinks.”
Poison Welles chimed in. “White folks got the same right as anyone else to defend themselves, and it’s the Apache, not us, as started it!”
Longarm didn’t feel like debating that point. He’d warned Indians more than once not to give his own kind the excuse to fight them if they weren’t ready to start their own industrial revolution.
He said, “Well, like Wes here says, I’d never get up to Chama to see about that other job alone at a time like this. So I reckon you just hired another gun, Miss Queen.”
She said, “Good. Go home and get your Winchester. Then saddle up any mount in my livery and be ready to ride. I’ve heard those Apache are holed up around La Mesa de los Viejos and I want you to lead the patrol, Henry. For I know you’re a killer and I want those damned Apache killed, right down to the last papoose!”
Longarm didn’t intend to kill anyone he didn’t have to. But a reservation-jumping Jicarilla could offer mighty persuasive arguments for killing him wherever you might meet him off his reservation. So Longarm was not too upset to find that one canyon deserted once he’d led, or at least rode out ahead of, Queen Kirby’s score and a half of “Regulators.”
The riders he’d spotted the night before had been camped among some barely noticeable ruins. The “Old Ones” of La Mesa de los Viejos had either dwelt there mighty far back, or built their cliff dwellings and canyon- bottom pueblos mighty carelessly.
They’d all dismounted to scout for sign amid the squares or circles of freestone. So Longarm was counting flies on some horse apples by what might have been a kiva, filled in and almost totally erased by the rare floodwaters of many a year, when the famous badman Poison Welles came over to join him, holding a fresh but empty tin can.
Poison said, as if he knew, “Canned salmon. No Apache ever brung this from his agency. Reservation trading posts don’t stock any sort of canned fish for Apache.”
Longarm took the can and sniffed it, saying, “Been open and empty a spell. Might have been whites up this way ahead of ‘em. I heard in town that some kid had seen a mess of white strangers over by this mesa a spell back. You hear anything about that, Poison?”
Welles shrugged and replied, “No white boys up this way right now. No Indians neither. But wouldn’t you say them turds at our feet were dropped by a white man’s horse?”
Longarm nodded and said, “I was just admiring the oat husks. The flies say the pony was here about two days back. The Pueblos never named them Apache because they steal from one another.”
Poison Welles said, “I follow your drift, but they raided that white outfit last night, not two days ago.”
Longarm made a mental note to be careful with Poison Welles in spite of that bad first impression. The West was full of pests who seemed half bullshit and half real. Old Bill Cody had started to grow his hair shoulder- length and wear fringed white buckskins like some of those sissy boys who stayed in camp with the women. But it was still a fact that he had shot all those buffalo, and had fought it out blade-to-blade with Yellow Hand of the Cheyenne Nation.
Wesley Jones, another bullshit artist, came over to ask what was going on. Longarm said, “Mixed signals. Red or white campers this far up the canyon. I’d go with white if I didn’t have good reason to, ah… suspect a good-sized war party rode out of this very canyon just last night.”
Jones said, “Damned gravel makes it hard to track any breed at all, not to say which way or when, Hank. What inspired you to say Apache in particular were up this way last night?”
Longarm reminded himself that Cockeyed Jack McCall had been taken for a harmless blowhard till he’d really gone and gunned Wild Bill in the Number Ten Saloon. Then he chose his words carefully and told them both, “I can’t say I saw them with my own two eyes. But don’t it stand to reason? Why would any white boys with a lick of sense be way out here in this dry canyon during an Apache scare when they could be safely drinking rotgut or, hell, sipping cider over by the river in Camino Viejo?”
Poison Welles stared around at the canyon walls as he objected. “I can’t see Indians camping even dumber, Hank. This is about the last stretch of canyon I’d expect to find an Apache camp.”
Jones scuffed at the outline of an old stone wall with his boot and said, “Oh, I dunno. You can see some Indians must have favored this spot in olden times.”
Poison Welles shook his head, wigwagging his comical tan Texas hat, and insisted, “Anasazi lived up these canyons on sites and for reasons no modern mind can fathom. But Apache are worse than schoolboys about graveyards and haunted houses, which these old ruins sort of combine. Could you see kids scared of ghosts camping out in a graveyard when there was plenty of sites just as good further up or down?”
Longarm managed not to ask how a man who knew that much about Indians could fail to know the town of Durango had mushroomed on a recent hunting ground. He said instead, “We know what’s down this canyon we just came up. Let’s go on up it some more and have a look-see.”
As they strode back to the others and their ponies, the hard-to-figure Poison Welles called ahead, “We’re moving on. But don’t nobody mount up. It’s safer to walk your horse around a canyon bend in Indian country.”
A prouder man might have reminded Welles that Queen Kirby had told himself to lead the patrol. But Longarm let it go, letting Poison have as much rope as he wanted.
The canyon boxed a furlong farther on. That explained the ancient ruins at ground level. Noah’s forty days and forty nights would have had a tough time flooding the canyon floor this close to its upper end. The box was paved with gravel, too, along with scattered horse turds. This time it was Jones, despite his soft hands and carnival grifter’s manners, who declared, “They must have kept their Indian ponies up here in this natural corral.”
Longarm said, “Somebody’s ponies at any rate. But they ain’t here now, and there must be more canyons
