But when Longarm found his victim, sprawled across another ant pile and already covered with the bitty red devils, he could only say in a not unkind voice, “At least I had the courtesy to kill you first. I was about to say I’d like to go through your pockets. But seeing you ain’t got any pockets in those glorified pajamas, I’d best settle for that rusty six-gun over yonder. I hope you have extra ammo in your saddlebags.”
He turned to retrace his steps, picking up the Schofield along the way. A bit of added motion joined his own long shadow as it proceeded him. So he glanced over his left shoulder to see that, sure enough, a flock of those brown hawks and at least two buzzards were taking an interest in the proceedings from where they circled on a rising column of afternoon warming. He knew it was the tethered stock and his own moving form that kept them pinned to the sky. He grimaced, told them to just hold the thought a spell, and trudged on up to the earlier scene of carnage.
The first Mexican he’d gunned had pockets in his more substantial white pants. But the fistful of gold and silver coins didn’t say a thing that could have been used against the dead cuss in court. Everybody knew an honest vaquero riding for some ranch in the middle of nowhere got paid off in U.S. silver dollars and Mexican double eagles worth about twenty of the same.
Longarm put the sixty-odd dollars worth of specie in his own pants pocket, feeling better about the money he’d lost in Growler Wash the other night.
There were four rounds left in the wheel of the single-action army pistol, cheaper than the already cheap but more popular Colt ‘73 Improved Model, or Peacemaker. The dead Mexican had been packing it cheap in his waistband. Longarm had no choice but to stick it in his own the same way. He was glad it was single-action as he felt its steel barrel chill his gut. Dreadful accidents had resulted from hasty grabs at a double-action six-gun stuffed down the front of a man’s pants. A fast draw was out of the question, of course, but at least he’d be set for taking on more than one enemy at a time, and he figured he had at least five men and a mighty mean woman to deal with before he could say for certain who’d won.
He found that palomino barb nuzzled up with a sorrel mare, tied to some more paloverde near that hasty campfire they’d baited him with when they’d spotted him first in the distance. The fire had gone out under the tin can of water and frijoles. He’d already noted frijoles were an acquired taste, and he knew those birds up yonder were more hungry right now. So he gathered the two ponies and his mules in one bunch and led them on foot a decorous distance away, muttering, “Those obvious outlaws would have left this child for the buzzards, and we’re pressed for time in any case. So why don’t I peel you all some pear and go through some saddlebags as we all get to know one another a tad better?”
The riding stock didn’t argue. The two Mexican ponies were as used to the taste of skinned-out cactus as the Papago mules. The only clue to anyone’s identity was a crumpled reward poster, in Spanish, saying that the governor of Sonora would pay a thousand pesos for the head of one Juan Pablo Ebanista, wanted for everything including poor church attendance. There was nothing on the other wayward youth.
Longarm discarded the dirty spare duds, filthy bedrolls, and dried grub the two of them had been packing. The same wet spell that had cleaned both exposed tree-dally saddles had spoiled their jerked beef, cornmeal, and beans.
He had no use for their canteens at the moment, but left them in place just in case, once he’d rinsed them out and refilled the four of them from a sandy puddle of standing rainwater by the trail. For the late afternoon sky was rapidly clearing, with the low western sun outlining the remaining clouds in bright gold, and they’d never named these parts a desert because it rained with any regularity.
Longarm found and treasured half a box of .45-28 Army Shorts for the poorly kept Schofield tucked in his pants. The army issued, and lost, a lot of underpowered but heavy slugs with the same reasoning it issued easy-to- maintain but slow-firing small arms. Recruiting many an immigrant greenhorn into its low-paid ranks, the army didn’t want any kid who’d never handled a gun before blazing away all his ammunition at once, or flinching from recoil too much to aim the one shot at a time they wanted from him. So they’d turned down the original 40-grain charges offered by more than one bemused gunmaker in favor of the shorter and more gently kicking army rounds.
The ubiquitous Schofield was an army ordinance design rather than a brand. Although Smith & Wesson made the most of the break-front notions of Major George—not General John—Schofield. Meant to be packed as only a backup to a trooper’s rifle or carbine, the rugged but far from ideal six-gun might hit an aimed-at target fifty yards away. But the small kick sacrificed any killing power the Schofield had past, say, a hundred yards.
All five of those outlaws he was trailing, and likely that mean gal, packed .45 or .44-40 side arms that could kill, with any luck, from five times as far away. The only edge Longarm had was the Big Fifty, if they weren’t expecting him to aim anything that awesome their way. Gunfighters expecting regular gunfighting might expose themselves at what they considered the safe distance of five hundred yards, a dead-easy bull’s-eye with a Big Fifty.
But like the old gospel song said, they’d know more about that farther along. So once he had his superabundance of riding stock watered and fed on cactus pulp, and seeing he knew the mules far better, Longarm shifted his water bags but no trail supplies to the mule he’d been riding, tethered the four of them along one of the Mexican’s rawhide riatas, and mounted that palomino barb to get acquainted as he got them all on up the trail.
By sundown he’d ridden all four brutes, and knew the sorrel mare and the taller of the two mules were less trouble. The smaller mule had been fighting the lead for some time. The palomino barb seemed to feel much the same way as its previous owner about riders who spoke to it in English. Longarm could have managed any two of the four if he’d had to. But he didn’t have to, and the constant argument was slowing them all a bit. So when he stopped for another trail break while the sun set glorious in a fluffy bed of red and gold, Longarm put the most comfortable of the two Mexican saddles on the more willing mule, tossed the other in a circle of greasewood down the slope, and cut a length of riata to loosely tether the stubborn mule and surly palomino together as he gently explained to the pony, “I don’t like you either. But it would be cruel to leave you to find your own way out here, with the air already commencing to smell dry again. So stick with this mule and you’ll both wind up back in that Papago camp, where you’d better learn to control your damned temper, hear?”
The pony lashed out with a hind hoof as Longarm hit the mule it was with across the rump. Then they were both escaping from him down the trail with snorts of equine mischief. Longarm had to laugh too. Then he mounted the more reasonable mule, gently jerked the lead he’d tied to the sorrel’s bridle, and led off to the southeast at a ball-busting but mile-eating trot.
Getting to stand in the tapped stirrups of that easy-riding Mexican saddle seemed a treat at any pace after all that bareback riding. The saddle had been invented with that in mind. The Mexican-made Moorish ancestor of the American stock saddle, despite its cantle and swells of exposed cottonwood, was, if anything, more chair-like. For while Anglo cowhands preferred to fall clear of a cart-wheeling pony when things went wrong, the Mexican vaquero was inclined to be more fatalistic about the possible future, and preferred his ass comfortable in the here and now. So the saddle Longarm had salvaged for his trotting mule cradled the bigger frame of an Anglo rider as if the bare wood had been molded to his thighs and pelvis like clay. He’d already made a mental note not to risk a downhill lope in the dark aboard such a dangerously comfortable saddle. It hardly seemed likely either mount was likely to
