fall under him along the sandy trail, even as it got tougher to make out. He knew all riding stock saw better than he did in the dark. The one good thing to be said for your mount being dumber than another human, or even a dog, was that you could count on it to just stop when it couldn’t tell what was in front of it. You had to be smart enough to care what a master thought of you before you’d take really stupid chances.
As the sky kept clearing, the stars got awesomely bright against the blackness of what was again a dried-out desert sky. You never really got to lick your eyes across the Milky Way where there were any street lights at all. But those old-timers who’d made up all the names for the stars had been desert dwellers too. So riding under the same breed of night sky, you could see what they’d been jawing about in those old astrology books. That big old Dog Star, staring down from the August sky, really did look hot-tempered and glaring when you got to stare back at it. He’d heard those Moors who’d taught the Spanish so much about roping and riding had named one star up yonder “The Ghoul,” ghoul being a Moorish word, because of the way it got dim and bright, mysterious and sort of spooky, next to the other stars. He couldn’t make out any ghoulish stars, but that distinctly red one closer to the horizon had to be old Mars, which was said to be a world like this one, all covered with red deserts, like the Four Corners up the other side of the Gila. Nobody could say whether there might be any folks roaming the Martian deserts. Longarm waved a howdy in any case.
Then the moon came up, lemon yellow as it rose above the jet-black fangs of the jaggedy Growlers, to bathe everything for miles around in a ghostly glow that set coyotes to howling and things in the brush all about to skittering.
The pony had farted five times in as many recent minutes, so it seemed a good time to combine more than one concern. Longarm reined in, dismounted, and broke out the nose bags he’d packed for the two mules with occasions such as this one in mind. He put a generous but thoughtful amount of water and cracked corn in each bag, and put them on both brutes before he unsaddled them both to dry as they munched and lazed beside the trail.
Then he and the Big Fifty went up the slope a furlong to see what could be seen out yonder in the moonlight.
Many a critter was stirring, judging by the faint sounds in all directions. But the lower moonlit expanse to the southwest stared back up at him as innocent as carpet in an empty drawing room. He couldn’t make out the better-known trail along the main drainage between the neighboring ranges. If those others had built a fire, they knew how to hide it in a deep wash after dark. He figured it was more likely they were on the move, wherever the hell they thought they were, right now.
He resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke, warning himself how the flare of a match could be spotted from three miles or more by a human eye adjusted to the night. He could only hope some greenhorn on the other side might not know this. There was just too much yonder out yonder for his own night vision to really draw a bead on anything that didn’t look like brush or cactus.
He sat down, bracing his elbows on his upraised knees with the Big Fifty across his lap, as he willed his impatient body to relax and settle down a spell. He knew that neither the sorrel nor that mule were half as anxious as he was to head anyone off at any fool pass. They needed some serious rest while that solid food sank in. Riding stock farted that way when it ate too much green clover too. Any cavalryman who’d ever ridden down an Indian on a grass-fed pony could tell you it took solid grain to sustain a mount beyond a few short hours in the field.
As he lowered his head to his crossed arms, Longarm warned himself not to let himself go all the way to sleep. Then he remembered other times like this and sighed, “Aw, shit, we’re only human.”
So the next thing he knew he was waking up from a dumb dream with a piss hard-on, shivering and goosefleshed under his hickory shirt, to see the moon had moved quite a ways from the last time he’d looked up at it.
He would have turned over and gone back to sleep if this had been his furnished digs in Denver. But it wasn’t, so Longarm groaned himself to his feet, pissed on a patch of bare caliche, and headed back down to the trail, where he found both his equine pals had been dozing and pissing themselves.
He loaded up and mounted the sorrel to take up the slow but steady chase, knowing it all depended on how disciplined or self-indulgent the outlaws had been.
He got a little trotting and a lot of walking out of the mismatched pair he’d selected from a choice of four. He gave them a trail break once every ninety minutes or so, and forced himself to take another catnap in the wee small hours, when the cold night air woke him even sooner. Then the clear sky was pearling pale in the east, and he could see farther across the wide-open spaces he seemed to ride alone. The slopes to his left were less steep. The distant hills of sunset were now much closer. The valley between was less flat as well as more narrow. He could see how they were funneling their way to that shallow pass he’d been told about.
He knew two could play at most any game. So he dropped down off the higher trail he’d been following all night to find that, sure enough, a wider trail did wind its way southeast through the thicker desert growth where rains soaked in deeper.
But Longarm wasn’t half as interested in the cactus and stickerbrush as he was in the all-too-clear hoofmarks in the rain-smoothed sand of the damned old trail. They’d already made it this far, six shod and two unshod head, adding up just right for it to be them and all wrong for him to follow.
He dismounted anyway and struck a match to make sure. The sons of bitches had a four-to-six-hour lead on him. There was no way he could catch up this side of the border, and he had direct orders to never darken the door of El Presidente Diaz again. So how was he ever going to obey directly conflicting orders from the Denver District Court in the person of Marshal Billy Vail?
He’d been told to go fetch Harmony Drake from that Yuma jail, and he’d been warned not to cause another international incident down Mexico way. That was what they called it when you had to shoot a Mexican rurale.
So the gambling boys would have assured Longarm that he’d done his best but lost the game, and that it was time to get up from the table and head back to report that his man had simply gotten away from him, along with his badge and gun. That way, at least nobody could accuse him of refusing to obey a direct order, right?
Longarm rose with a sigh, walked back to the mule he was riding now, while the pony carried the pack, and morosely informed them both, “I know the two of you are tired. I am too. We still have to push on. Those sons of bitches seem bound and determined to get this child into another damned war with Mexico. But I still aim to take Harmony Drake, dead or alive!”
Chapter 6
Mules and ponies were only human, but any number could play the ambush game. So Longarm kept their unavoidable trail breaks as short as possible, and punched through Organpipe Pass after moonset and just before dawn.
There was nobody trying to hold the pass, which was more of a notch in the higher tableland to the south than
