The killing of Original Greaser Bob had surprised Longarm because Greaser Bob Landrum had been one of the few men who had consistently ridden with Jack Shaw. Longarm could only conclude that he had outlasted his usefulness. Or maybe Shaw had gotten tired of the silliness. Greaser Bob wasn’t called that because he was Mexican. At some point in the past he had gotten in the habit of staining his face and hands with walnut juice, made by boiling walnut shells in water, to make himself appear as a Mexican. But since he looked nothing like a Mexican, the skin coloring fooled no one. He’d picked up the name Original when others had tried the trick, hoping to have the authorities hunting for Mexican bandits while they washed off the stain and went on their way as gringos.
Halfway through the Santa Teresas he came upon a cold campfire with a dead man lying beside it. Longarm didn’t know the man, but he recognized the three bullet holes in the man’s chest. Beside him, on the ground, was a tin plate of beans. It didn’t appear he’d been given time to take a single bite. Longarm figured that Shaw had either picked a quarrel with the man, or had convinced the others that their accomplice was planning to steal the booty and make off with it some night when they were asleep.
Longarm finally followed the trail out of the Santa Teresas with the weakest of his three horses beginning to fade. That worried him. In the mountains there had been water and good grass and he’d paused long enough, knowing what was coming, to let the animals build up as much strength as they could.
Out of the mountain range Shaw had taken another straight southerly course. It was not bad traveling except for the heat. There was grass and an occasional water hole, and Longarm snatched what sleep he could and rested the horses when he could, but he could tell, from the age of the sign, that he wasn’t making up much ground. All the way, since he’d left the train, he’d been leaving his own sign for the Arizona Rangers. He’d broken limbs, and stacked rocks, and had even torn up a shirt and used strips of it to mark the way. But now, out on the flats of the high plateaus, all he could do was ride his horses in a circle every so often and hope the Rangers weren’t blind.
Then Shaw had abruptly cut west and entered the Galiuro range, which wasn’t so much mountains as a series of low mounds with deep gullies, sharp crags, and slash precipices. There was almost no growth through the badlands since most of the ground was rock. It was halfway through the rough country that his next horse came up lame. He turned the horse loose and set back in on the trail. At first, he’d been trading off riding the three strongest horses, using the fourth, the weakest, to carry the pack. Then he’d been down to two saddle mounts. Finally he was down to one. He’d been on the trail four days and four nights, and he didn’t know if he could catch Shaw before he made it to the border.
Once out on the flat land again, the going appeared to be fairly easy.
The trail, especially with the number of horses Shaw had, was relatively easy to follow. Leaving the Galiuro range, he had taken a southwesterly heading, just about what Longarm had expected he would do. Longarm was so confident of the trail that he made an early camp on the fifth night out, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep. Then, sometime during the late night, a hurricane-like wind blew up, not uncommon in that high desert country, and by the first light of dawn, Longarm could see that all traces of Shaw and his crowd had been blown away. All he could do was go ahead on the last known course, follow it, and hope.
About noon his hopes were rewarded. The country had been descending.
In a little grove of trees he found traces of a campfire, a lot of horse tracks, and the bodies of Shaw’s last two henchmen. Both of them had been shot in the back.
Unfortunately, the camp had been made right at a rock-rimmed canyon.
That Shaw had crossed it, Longarm had no doubt, but he could not find a single trace of sign or proof of Shaw’s passage. He pushed on in the southwesterly direction, calculating that Shaw would want to cross the border in a long, lonely stretch between Nogales and Douglas. But it was a lot of country to find one man in, especially a man who had five horses to ride to Longarm’s one.
He had no choice except to push his tired horses across the trackless waste, sharing with them what little water he had left in the big canteen, once he’d discovered the mishap that had befallen the big tin of water he’d been counting on. The corn helped some, but the horses were too thirsty to chew it good. Most of it fell out of their mouths.
Then, finally, he spotted the line shack and rode forward and into trouble. He’d found Jack Shaw, but Jack Shaw had found him in equal measure.
An hour had passed without conversation between them. Longarm had stayed alert, watching for any movement of the horses in the corral that would indicate Shaw was trying to slip out of the back and mount and ride south. Longarm didn’t really expect him to make such a dumb play, especially in the daytime. If he tried it, his move would come at night, probably very close to dawn, when the moon would have been down for at least an hour and the sun was yet to come. The old expression that it was darkest just before dawn was a true one and useful.
Shaw said, breaking the silence, “Custis, you never did tell me how you come to get on our track so quick. Or is that a government secret?”
“Not if you’ll tell me how you done in Hank Jelkco. He didn’t have a mark on him.”
“You found ol’ Hank? Hell, I went to considerable trouble to roll him down in the bottom of a gully. What was you doing down in there?”
“Trying to drive a dumb horse that was played out down to grass and water. Lo and behold, there was ol’ Hank, dead as a whore’s hopes. He’d fetched up against a little sapling. How did he come to depart this life?”
“Aw, I strangled the sonofabitch. It was the first night we really made a camp to rest up. I had the watch and when the others was asleep, I just cranked my hands around his neck and squeezed. He never even made a gurgle. Then I drug him over to that draw and rolled him off. Told the boys the next day that it appeared he’d taken a sack of money when my back was turned and lit out.”
“And they believed that?”
Shaw laughed. “Custis, ain’t you never noticed I don’t pick the boys that go to the head of the class to ride with me? All I want them there for is to give anybody with a gun a choice of who to shoot at. Cuts down the odds on me being the one selected. I was holding the loot and wasn’t a one of them knew how much we had, so they didn’t know if there was any missing or not. You got to remember, these boys are a mite on the selfish side. Hank was just one less to share with.”
“What about his horse?”
“I said it appeared he took off on foot, which was smart. Make him harder to trail. I said ol’ Hank could go for days on foot. They didn’t know one another, so they’d believe anything. Now how about you?”
