could, knowing he’d at least kept his federal want from getting away. He had no doubt he could drop anyone he was aiming at with a peep-sighted Big Fifty. He was still working on how you got a second shot off in time.
It was getting on toward sundown when Longarm spied smoke rising up ahead and dismounted to lead his mules afoot as he regarded the odd development with the Big Fifty cradled handy.
It didn’t add up right. He’d been picturing Drake and his pals off to the right, somewhere out on those lower flats. Pogamogan had told him this hillside trail was a sort of Papago secret. It was possible strangers to these parts, tired of splashing through mud, might work their way to higher ground and stumble over a drier trail headed the same way they wanted to ride, but would outlaws on the run build such a smoky fire in broad day?
He murmured to the nearest mule, “That fancy gal they have tagging along has a way of getting menfolk to mind her and she may not be used to wet socks. Any fire you built with anything out here today would burn damp and smoky.”
They moved along until a stray eddy of air carried the smell of wood smoke and frijoles to him through the damp chaparral. It hardly seemed likely a bunch of Anglo outlaws would be having Mexican frijoles for supper. Lots of regular Americans liked chili con carne, hot tamales, and such, but frijoles were a sort of tasteless variety of mushy brown beans you had to be raised on, the way Scotchmen were fed oatmeal early on, before you’d ever bother to eat them on purpose.
Feeling a tad better, but still cautious about someone cooking a pot of Mexican beans in the middle of nowhere, Longarm tethered the two mules to some trailside whitebark and eased forward alone, allowing the muzzle of the Big Fifty to lead the way as the trail wound through the hillside scrub.
He was scouting fair enough, he thought, until some sneaky son of a bitch rose from a clump of pear he’d just passed to call out in a jovial tone, “Buentardes, gringo. A onde va ?”
Longarm managed a slow turn and a sheepish smile in spite of that first impulse to leap out of his own skin. The Spanish-speaking gent with a sawed-off ten-gauge casually trained in Longarm’s general direction was wearing the straw hat and white cotton outfit of a humble Mexican or gussied-up Yaqui. His dark moon face could be read either way.
It was an old trick, but tricks got old by working, so Longarm tried to sound sort of stupid as he called back, “Me no savvy Spanny-Hole, Seen Yore. Can’t you talk American, seeing we’re both north of the border?”
It worked. The shotgun-wielding stranger made a dreadful remark about Longarm’s mother in Spanish, but tried to sound as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth when he replied, “Of course I speak Anglo. I ride for El Rancho Rocking T to our north and we are out for to hunt strays, eh?”
As if to explain the big fibber’s use of the plural another voice called out at some distance, “Alo, Juan Pablo. Quien es?”
The one confronting Longarm called back in the same lingo, “Hemos uno pendejo con dos mulas. Comprende que queremos?”
When the other called back in a jolly way, “Claro, no se preocupe,” Longarm sensed he was in trouble. When the one facing him tried not to sound worried while he casually shouted, “Cuidado, el tiene un fusil,” Longarm knew for certain, and simply swung the muzzle of his Big Fifty up to blast the one he could see and crab to one side and flatten down in some creosote while the Mexican he’d shot tried to bring down the sun with a dead finger on the trigger of his scattergun.
It felt like a million years, and might have taken as long as five seconds, for Longarm to lever down the sliding block and jam another round in the smoking chamber of the Big Fifty as he lay on his side in what smelled like a crushed drugstore, expecting to see that other Mexican looming over him with a more lethal weapon.
Then he’d reloaded, and better yet, the sounds of crashing brush were headed away instead of toward him. So he rolled up on one knee as, sure enough, a Mexican dressed the same but wearing a six-gun instead of a shotgun was breaking cover aboard a palomino barb to ride down the slope at full gallop, as if he had better places to go.
He was already out of range, had Longarm been following him with the sights of his regular saddle gun. But when he let fly with that Big Fifty, the barb found itself running under an empty saddle. So it naturally stopped a furlong down and turned to gaze back up the slope in equine confusion.
First things coming first, Longarm reloaded as he moved up to the first one he’d downed, muttering, “When you say you re covering an asshole with a couple of mules, you’d best make sure he don’t savvy Spanish, speaking of pendejos, pendejo.”
The Mexican sprawled by the discharged ten-gauge was too dead to reply. The hole in his white shirtfront was only half an inch across. Most of that blood running down the slope from where he lay had to be oozing out the fist-sized exit wound.
The two of them had just proven how useful a sawed-off shotgun was in a fight at medium range in wide-open country. So Longarm saw no reason to bother with the dead man’s gun as he turned to see how the other one might be doing.
Longarm knew he’d dropped the spooked rider about a quarter mile down from the trail. He lay somewhere in the smoke-blue or olive tangle of waist-high scrub and scattered tree-cactus. That pony was already working its way back to the tethered riding stock along the trail, about as fast as a kid drifting in for supper after playing in the sandlot across the way.
As he followed the muzzle of his lethal but limited weapon on foot, Longarm muttered, as if his fallen foeman could hear him, “You don’t call out that you know just what to do as you’re creeping up behind a simple Americano, amigo mio. But in all fairness, it was your pal’s warning I was packing a gun that made your full intent unmistakable. So where did I hit you and where are you at?”
He hadn’t really expected anyone to answer. So it came as quite a surprise when a bare-headed man in a bloody cotton shirt suddenly rose waist-high in the chaparral, about fifty yards away, to brandish a thumb-buster Schofield .4328 and scream, “Te voy a mandar pa’l carajo!”
Longarm called back, “No hagas fregadas! I have the drop on you at this range!”
But the badly wounded and doubtless confounded Mexican fired a wild and hopeless pistol round in Longarm’s general direction, and since he had more rounds where that one had come from, Longarm nailed him dead center with a second buffalo round that picked him off his feet and tossed him out of sight in the shrubbery again.
Longarm still reloaded as he moved in. When you were packing a single-shot rifle, you didn’t assume a man who’d only been hit twice with buffalo-droppers was fixing to just lie there.
