a gap between real ridges. There was nobody guarding the border, wherever it was, when Longarm must have crossed it before noon. For the fresh sign on the trail he was following with a grim smile and a Big Fifty wound through what was a natural hell to patrol—or a paradise for cactus, large and small.
Something about the soil or the way clouds swept across that higher patch of desert had resulted in a tangled mess of organpipe, lots of saguaro, and way too much cholla, with a peculiar Mexican relation of saguaro that grew prone across the ground, like a green spiny python, to tangle its upright cousins in thorny logjams. You had to pick your way carefully through such tedious desert patches. He could see the rascals he was trailing had. The occasional horse apple he spotted in the now-dry dust looked dusty and flyblown enough to give them a good twelve-hour lead on him, blast Rosalinda and his own weak nature.
He had to give in to the natural needs of his equine pals as the sun glared down on their weary hides from the dead center of that blue dome. There was no hint of breeze from either side of the cactus-lined trail, and the mule he was leading kept fighting the line like a fish that just didn’t want to be hauled any higher and drier.
Longarm reined in and dismounted, muttering, “When you’re right you’re right. It’s fixing to get way hotter before it cools a tad, and Drake’s gang have likely holed up for la siesta by now down the trail a piece.”
He led his nearly spent stock between two clumps of organpipe and over one of those reclining whatevers toward a grove of wicked cholla. The mule had likely stuck its muzzle on cholla before, and tried to tell this to Longarm.
The fortunately strong-wristed deputy jerked the line the other way and said, “I know what I’m doing, mule. I know cholla looks and acts like the Devil’s own crab-apple tree. But the really nasty thorns all sprout from the pads on the ends of those corky limbs, and the trunks holding all that mischief off the ground don’t have any thorns at all.”
Holding both leads in his left hand with the sling of the Big Fifty, Longarm proceeded to carefully but quickly lop away the hellish fuzzy cholla pads that needed plenty of sunlight to go with the tree-like roots of its cork-barked trunk. Once he’d cleared a less dangerous overhang, he led first the pony and then the mule through, holding their heads low to clear the vicious thorns of the archway.
Inside the ancient cholla grove, they found it a shady if low-ceilinged bower, with clean caliche between the trunks a yard or more apart. The dense shade of closely packed cactus pads had killed anything else that had ever sprouted there, and the thrifty desert critters had carried every dry scrap away as grub or bedding.
Longarm tethered both brutes with their heads low and put extra water in their nose bags, along with a double ration of cracked corn. He knew the parched grain would go on swelling after the stock had downed it. But you seldom bloated a critter if you let it have its fill of water before it ate and you didn’t let it eat too much.
He unloaded them and set packs and saddle well clear, with the Mexican saddle upside down and its blanket shaken out flat on the dry caliche. Then he inspected all eight hooves for splits or pebbles, unpacked his tarp and one thin flannel blanket, stripped to the buff, wiped himself head to toe with a damp rag, and treated himself to all the flat, warm, rubber-scented water he felt like drinking before he positioned the Big Fifty and Schofield on his spread-to-dry duds and flopped flat atop the flannel, the shade cool on his naked hide, as he numbly wondered how he’d managed to get so sleepy-headed all of a sudden.
Then he was in the Denver Public Library, looking for an Atlas so he could look up Puerto Periasco and see how far those rascals had to ride for that blamed steamboat to Far Cathay, only he’d just noticed he was naked as a jay.
Nobody else seemed to notice as he sat down at a reading table to hide his uncalled-for erection. But then the librarian came over to tell him he wasn’t allowed to smoke. So he snubbed out a cheroot he hadn’t noticed he was smoking and explained, “I figure they have at least one experienced border-jumper with them, ma’am. So they’ll want to avoid that border town of Sonoyta and the rurales stationed there. I’m still trying to decide whether they’d be better off making their crossing after dark, when los rurales can’t see as far but expect folks to cross, or-“
“Never mind all that Deputy Long,” the librarian said. “How do you like the way my husband and I have been doing so far, and are you out to avoid another international incident for us or not?”
Longarm hadn’t noticed till then that he was talking to Miss Lemonade Lucy Hayes, the President’s handsome but sort of stuffy wife. She’d had her clothes on the time she’d served him orange punch instead of her notorious lemonade at the White House in Washington Town. Now he tried not to notice her middle-aged but not unattractive naked torso as he soberly replied, “Your man and me have about cleaned up the Indian Ring left over from the Grant Administration, and I’ve always been in favor of sound money and the end of Reconstruction, ma’am. I ain’t working on that lost, strayed, or stolen gift from Queen Victoria right now. I’m chasing plain old outlaws across the Mexican border. I know they don’t want me to do that any more. But I had orders to deliver the rascal to the Denver District Court too, so …”
“Why don’t we go back amongst the stacks and make mad Gypsy love?” the First Lady suggested, coyly adding, “I don’t hold with drinking hard liquor, but I’ve always liked other things hard.”
Longarm gulped and politely replied, “I ain’t sure we ought to, uh, ma’am. If screwing the President’s wife ain’t high treason, it has to qualify as disrespect to a superior.”
“Who says so? Who? Who? Who?” demanded Lemonade Lucy in a desperate tone. Then Longarm opened his sleep-gummed eyes and, still hearing the same repeated question, propped himself up on one elbow to see that a flock of gnat-catchers were mobbing an elf owl, perched on a nearby cholla branch. He didn’t see why. Owls holed up during the hours the fluttery gnat-catchers were using the sky. But he thanked them all in any case, saying, “I might have had a mighty disrespectful wet dream, or worse yet, overslept.”
The elf owl flew away with its smaller tormentors tagging after it all atwitter. It was odd how the human voice could spook some critters more than a thrown boot. He’d noticed in the past you could get pack rats to quit stirring about at night by just asking them, in a polite tone, to quit.
One of those bastards riding with Harmony Drake had Longarm’s watch. But the way the sunbeams slanted through the cholla pads above him said it was after three in the afternoon by now.
Longarm dragged his naked form erect in the decidedly warm shade, and moved over to the tethered riding stock, muttering, “Howdy. Are you two as thirsty as I am right now?”
They were, he saw, when he removed their empty nose bags to see they’d been licking at the bare bottoms of the bucket-like canvas containers. He filled them partway with tepid water from the handy rubberized bags, and put them back in place before he helped himself to some of the mighty uninteresting liquid.
The canyon springwater had tasted tangy when he’d filled the bags back at Pogamogan’s camp. This afternoon it tasted as if it had been boiled in an old rubber boot, which it had in a way. But looking on the bright side, it was easier to husband the water your body just had to replace in this dry heat. It would have been a total bitch to pack all the cold beer a man would be tempted to put away on days like this.
