His riding stock made short work of their first helping. He poured more for them, saying, “Take it easy and don’t drown yourselves on your feet. I saw a greenhorn do that to an army mule one time. He filled the nose bag higher than the poor brute’s nostrils, and took all that kicking and snorting for high spirits.”
Receiving no answer, Longarm went back to his bedding and hauled on his duds and boots, with some reluctance. It had felt hot enough naked in the shade.
He ate a can of pork and beans from the trading post and rinsed it down with tomato preserves. Then he lit a smoke and watched three zebra-tail lizards play tag around a nearby cholla trunk. It was ten times hotter than it should have been, but at least twenty degrees cooler than it had been around high noon. Lizards and other cold- blooded desert critters got in most of their fun in the few hours between too hot and too cold in these parts.
He hated to even think about it, but since he didn’t know whether those other border jumpers planned an early or late crossing, he had to go with as early a crossing as practical.
That meant soon, damn it. Los rurales would just be breaking their own siestas about now. They’d tank up on coffee and saddle up for an evening patrol as the shadows lengthened. Anyone slipping across the line about now would likely make it without meeting up with los rurales. Anyone waiting for the cool shade of evening and the cloak of darkness would be risking a moonlit tryst with old desert hands who knew how to sit a pony silent and listen to the night noises all about.
Longarm sighed, gripped the cheroot between bared teeth, and rolled up the bedding. The mule and pony bared their teeth a bit too as they grasped his full intent to load them back up and lead them back out into that glaring sunlight.
He did it anyway, and all three had been right about it feeling as if they’d stepped through an oven door. The sun was far lower in the west, but it felt as if you were breathing alkali dust through cobwebs.
Longarm led the way afoot as far as the trail. Then, seeing those same hoofprints that had preceded him south at some damned time in the past, he mounted the mule to lead the sorrel mare and their depleted water supply at a trot.
He had at least one member of the gang pictured as an hombre who knew these parts. Longarm didn’t need a map to tell him this trail had to lead to the village of Sonoyta. Trails generally led somewhere, and Sonoyta was the only border town for miles to the east or west.
The question was why he or the outlaws he was trailing would want to go there. Strangers riding into small desert towns always drew a good deal of attention. Anglo riders in a Mexican border town were apt to draw more than their fair share from the local rurales.
There was the unpleasant possibility that an owlhoot rider in the habit of crossing the border in these parts might have come to some sort of understanding with the local rurale captain. A lot of Longarm’s own problems with Mexico’s answer to the Texas Rangers sprang from their almost cheerful demands for bribes, whether you’d done anything or not.
Then, just as he was starting to really worry about some son of a bitch with his badge and gun and a rurale company as well, Longarm saw the hoofprints he’d been following veer off to the east through a patch of stirrup- deep creosote.
He smiled wolfishly and told his mount, “The odds ain’t as bad as we feared. Los rurales are likely to shoot all of us for our boots except Goldmine Gloria. They won’t shoot her before they’ve all had their turn with her. I wonder why we’re riding east. I’d have thought it would be shorter to that seaport sixty miles or so away if we swung around Sonoyta to the west.”
Neither critter seemed to want to trot in either direction. So Longarm dismounted to lead on foot at a walk as he scouted for sign in the greened-up desert.
That philosopher who’d first remarked on what a difference a day could make had likely ridden the Sonora Desert in his time. Cactus flowered in the spring, dry or wet, as if remembering they’d once been rosier. But other stuff with no way to store as much water paid more attention to the weather than the calendar. So fairy dusters were already sprouting feathery little leaves, and the scattered clumps of paloverde, which was usually a sort of gigantic witch’s broom of bare green sticks, were starting to bud like pussy willow. Tomatillo and jobjola brush that had looked dead and dried out before that rain were suddenly green and perky as if they’d been growing in a park back East. Staring down at the crust of caliche for hoofprints, Longarm made out microscopic flowers he’d have otherwise missed. They were mostly yellow, but came in all colors, as if meant to go in some little gal’s doll house in a teeny-tiny vase.
The bunch he was trailing had spread some to ride through the paloverde and cactus clumps. So Longarm concentrated on just one set of prints, left by a pony who’d thrown its near rear shoe as its rider set as direct a course as possible almost due east.
An hour off the trail, Longarm had to lead around the flyblown remains of a roadrunner someone had blasted almost in two, likely with a pistol shot.
“Miserable bastards,” Longarm muttered as he skirted the column of flies above the pathetic ruins of a recently lively clown-bird. It wasn’t hard to kill roadrunners. They got their name from their habit of scampering along with desert travelers, likely to catch the sneakier critters flushed by hooves or wagon wheels. No Indian would dream of harming such a friendly critter with such tasteless stringy meat. Mexicans admired them because they cleared the roads of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and such. But there was a variety of Anglo asshole that simply couldn’t resist taking potshots at road signs, saguaros, songbirds, or anything else that wasn’t likely to shoot back.
“They passed this way by daylight,” Longarm assured the mule as they hurried on. He had no call to tell a Papago mule that roadrunners patrolled for snakes, lizards, and bugs early in the morning or late in the afternoon. The poor dead bird was too flyblown for death within the past few hours. It wouldn’t have come out of the shade to get shot by a prickhead it was only running with during the siesta hours just past. Longarm decided the outlaws were eight or ten hours ahead of him. Even less, if they’d holed up out ahead for their own siesta.
He knew he had that edge if anyone was lying in wait out ahead. He didn’t see why anyone would be, but they’d have the late sun in their eyes while he’d be aiming at a well-lit target. Old U.S. Grant had told his boys they’d have the sunrise at their backs as they advanced at Cold Harbor. Old U.S. Grant had gotten one hell of a heap of his boys killed at Cold Harbor, come to study on it. But it might have been worse had the sun been shining the other way.
He almost fell over the edge of the dry wash winding south to north through the cactus and stickerbush. You had to be right on top of it to know it was there. Once you did, the brushy bottom was so shaded that Miss Cleopatra could have been performing a snake dance in those inky shadows for all he could tell from up where he was.
