sunbeams bright enough to hurt one’s eyes and set other acres a-shimmer. The only bright spot, to Longarm’s way of thinking, was that while he couldn’t have made out a camel caravan for certain moving yonder in any damned direction, nobody on the other side was likely to notice two bitty dots creepy-crawling along the flanks of equally distant mountains.
He felt safe lighting a smoke before he heeled his mount on to the far-away goal of Organpipe Pass. He could already picture the swell ambush site that had to go with such a name.
Folks just passing through aboard a train tended to lump organpipe cactus with the similar-looking saguaro of the Sonora Desert. But the equally proportioned organpipe grew only half the height and thickness of the forty-to- sixty-foot saguaro, and never branched the way its way bigger cousin did. It was called organpipe because it tended to grow in clusters, like the pipes of some massive gray-green church organ. So you could hide behind organpipe which was tougher to manage behind the bigger but more lonesome trunks of saguaro.
“You got to get there before you hide ahind shit!” a small sardonic voice warned Longarm from the back of his skull.
Longarm had quit school early, to attend a war they were having, before he’d ever been taught any formal trigonometry. But anybody who’d ever led a distant duck with a shotgun muzzle, or learned to rope running calves from the back of a moving pony, had practiced it in his head, and the trigonometry functions he had to cope with were simple, damn each and every one of them.
Somewhere off to the southwest—he couldn’t distinguish the broad main wash or narrow pony trail from his own vantage point at such far range in such tricky light—the bunch he was after had a fifteen-to-thirty-mile lead on him. To head them off at Organpipe Pass, he’d have to cover about sixty miles in the time it would take them to go thirty or forty. Writers who wrote about Sioux warriors or Mongol hordes who could ride a hundred miles a day didn’t know much about riding. On a good day in cool weather a Pony Express rider would cover sixty miles in six hours, changing horses six times along the way. Riding slowed a lot when you asked the same four hooves to move that far in a full two days. The 3rd Cav still bragged about the time it had marched fifty-four miles and fought a four-hour battle within thirty-six hours during Crook’s Powder River Campaign back in ‘76. Critters just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, run much more than a mile before you had to let them walk a spell. They wouldn’t walk much more than an hour before you had to let them stop to rest. So unless they were some sort of wind-up toys, those incredible Mongol ponies would have to stay incredible.
Staring hard at the wide panorama to his southwest, Longarm was stuck for one corner of his big imaginary triangle. Thanks to this break in the usual August weather, nobody was kicking up a lick of trail dust whether they were moving along any damned trail or not. The cooled-off and cloudy afternoon that allowed him to ride by broad day after high noon offered them the same opportunity, although on riding stock that had already been pushed a fair ways.
Longarm tried to put himself under the Stetson of the other side’s trail boss. He knew they’d figured on nobody even trying to cut their trail this early, and by now they’d seen that any trail they’d been leaving had been wiped clean by that morning rain. Also, they had one woman for certain, and any number of greener riders, with them. There were more lazy bums and misfits than top hands riding the Owlhoot Trail. So they might be inclined to laze in the cool shade of some whitebark as they let their stock graze and rest, figuring on just drifting across the border under cover of the wee small hours any old time they got around to it.
Longarm spied a clump of prickle-pear ahead, and reined in as he got out a barlow knife from the trading post stock, muttering aloud, “On the other hand, if I was in charge of that bunch I might want to push on faster, taking advantage of this break in the heat. They must have someone guiding them who knows this desert, and if there’s one thing to know about this desert, it has to be that you don’t get many cool days down this way in August!”
He dismounted and tethered the two mules to some handy paloverde while he went to work on that thorny but vulnerable prickle-pear with his spanking-new blade. As he lopped off and peeled pad after pad to produce two piles of what looked and likely tasted like oval servings of watermelon rind, he told the nearest mule, “No sense passing up a free gallon or more of extra water. I know you brutes think I’m loco, packing eighty pounds of water along through all this rain. But the desert diggers who know them better say old Waigon giveth sky water and old Tanapah taketh away. That’s what they call the thunderbird and the desert sun spirit, Waigon and Tanapah. They’re scared shitless of both, with good reason.”
He moved both mules closer to let them take advantage of his pulpy green treat, knowing they’d get some nutrition as well as watery sap from it.
Then little wet tree toads seemed to be hopping around the brim of Longarm’s Stetson, and he looked up at the swirling clouds to declare, “Damn it, Waigon, you’ve rained all over us enough for one day!”
Then a thunderbolt sizzled down to turn a hundred-year-old saguaro into a steaming mist of pea-green soup, and as Longarm fought to hold the mules from bolting, he told them soothingly, “Look on the bright side. This afternoon storm might keep those others pinned down, and I don’t mind getting a tad wet if you stubborn mules don’t.”
Chapter 5
The cavalry hated to admit it, but while horses ran faster, men and mules could cover more ground in the long run. Both trotted at about the same speed as a horse, and legged-up infantry could walk a tad faster than any riding stock. The edge dragoons or cavalry held over infantry was that a trooper who didn’t have to tote his own load was in better shape to fight after he’d gotten there firstest with the mostest. That reserve burst of speed under a cavalryman’s ass could move him across a field of fire faster, and sometimes rattle enemy marksmen more, than a line of charging bayonets.
When it came to forced marches across rough ground, a determined man on foot could out-pace mounted rivals anywhere but dry country. The sheer weight of that vital water they were packing kept Longarm busy with the damned mules as they got ever harder to handle, hour after hour.
He walked them a lot, then rested, watered, and fed them more than he’d have ever indulged himself. He naturally changed mounts every mile or so, eighty pounds of water and thirty pounds of trail grub and such weighing less than himself and the Big Fifty. The water bags he’d filled in Pogamogan’s canyon got no lighter along the trail because it would have been dumb to tap either, with rainwater running in silvery trickles or muddy brooklets down the mountain slope and across the very trail they were following.
Short spells of rain were interspersed with longer intervals of afternoon sunlight that would have baked things hotter, once they’d dried some, if more shimmering veils of torrential rain hadn’t swept through every hour or less from the south. A man down to his last chips played the cards he held as best he could. So Longarm cussed and kicked the brutes along the trail as they tried to tell him they were too tired to set such a determined pace. For the wild card Longarm was playing, if he held it, was the likelihood that the others were waiting out this dying tropical storm as it bled itself to death so far from its tropical spawning grounds.
He didn’t have to beat them all the way to that distant pass. He only had to get ahead of them. He’d settle for a cactus-covered rise with a clear field of fire, drop Harmony Drake first, and play out the end-game as best he
