Longarm quietly replied, “Hardly seems fair to say your stage was stopped by El Gato unless you saw him do it, Senorita.”
She said, “I just told you I was confused. The coach crew cursed when they drove in to find nobody here for to change their team for them. While they were arguing about what to do about that, I excused myself for to use the … letrina. When I returned, they had driven on without waiting for me. I think they must have been very frightened of something. From the way this place was deserted, with coals in the kitchen stove still glowing, something must have frightened everyone. I know that I am most frightened. I am called Consuela O’Hara y Mendez, and you are called … ?”
“My friends call me Custis, Custis Crawford,” Longarm lied, since most of the high-toned families down this way sided with Diaz to begin with, and since it was easy to recall how kissing-cousin Crawford Long had come up with ether anesthesia in time to save a heap of old boys a heap of pain at places such as Shiloh and Cold Harbor. Then Longarm told the lady peering out the window at him that he had to get on down the road.
She sobbed, “Espere! Do not leave me here alone in the desert!”
Longarm looked eastward at the first faint hint of dawn as he told her, “I wish you’d make up your mind, Miss Consuela. I have to find some safe shade for these mules and me before the sun comes up. For those unwinking stars up yonder ain’t forecasting a cold spell. I got a spare mule if you ain’t too fat, and while we’re at it, is there any spare water to be had in yonder?”
She eagerly told him about the well pumps behind the kitchen and empty stable out back. So he dismounted and led both mules in through the overhang of the fortress-like walls of the quarters and stable, to find the stranded senorita waiting for him in the courtyard.
He couldn’t say how pretty she might be in such faint moonlight, but he could see she was young and filled her cotton summer dress in a refined willowy way. He wasn’t surprised to see she didn’t really have a gun.
He ticked his hat brim to her. Then he led the mules to the watering trough by the stable entrance, pumped it half full, and let them both go at it.
He explained he’d been husbanding his trail water, and explained how she’d have to share one mule with topped-off water bags and ride bareback. She said she knew how to ride, but asked, “For why do wish for to push on with sunrise almost upon us? Do you know of a safer place, with more shade, than this fonda?”
To which he could only reply, “I sure do. There’s thirty or forty miles of open desert betwixt here and Puerto Penasco, with all sorts of shady stuff to be found along the way if you really look hard for it. I know this deserted fonda has shade, water, and walls as thick as the ones at the Alamo. I’ve heard it said that Travis and Bowie were still dumb to wait, since Santa Anna was sure to come looking for ‘em.”
The marooned Mexican gal said, “Los rurales are as likely to come along as those bandits, no?”
Longarm didn’t want to argue politics with a lady who seemed that enthusiastic about rurales. So he just shrugged and replied, “It’ll be way safer if it’s left for us to decide who we want to wave to along this mighty lonesome road, Miss Consuela. You can stay here if you’d rather. I can’t say for certain whether you’d be safer either way. I don’t know what scared a whole bunch of grown men to flee these thick walls, all this water, and like you said, a road out front patrolled now and again by rurales. I figure it must have been something sort of scary. I’d rather not wait here and see if it comes back.”
She allowed how, in that case, she’d just as soon tag along.
Leaving the mules to laze in the moonlit courtyard, Longarm and his new-found traveling companion went into the fonda to fetch her one carpetbag and see if the others had left anything useful behind in their sudden stampede for safer ground.
Longarm lit a wall sconce inside to shed some light on the subject. He was glad he had as soon as he saw what Consuela O’Hara y Mendez really looked like.
Aside from looking worried, the obviously Irish and Spanish gal of perhaps twenty-five had wavy auburn hair to go with her big blue eyes. But her skin, exposed from the breastbone up, was that odd soft shade of peach you almost never saw on anyone but certain gals from the olive-growing parts of Spain.
She’d left her baggage out front in the taproom. Longarm moved back to the kitchen with a view to grabbing at least a sack of cracked corn or frijoles for the mules. He lit a waterproof Mexican match made more like a small candle than a wooden stick, and found an oil lamp near the kitchen sink. He lit that too. Then he stared harder at the plastered ‘dobe above the sink and muttered, “Aw, shit.”
Someone had written “Yaqui!” with a finger dipped in chili sauce, or blood. That was all Longarm needed as he blew out the lamp and strode out to rejoin Consuela, saying, “Vammos. En seguida. I’ll explain along the way.”
He did. It was easy, as he got Consuela and their combined baggage, including eighty pounds of fresh water, loaded up. You didn’t have to explain as much about Yaqui to a gal who’d been raised on a ranch in these parts.
The Yaqui Indians of Northwest Mexico claimed to be left-over Aztecs who’d never surrendered to the Spanish, and acted as if they were out to take Mexico back in the name of Montezuma.
As advanced as Pueblo when it came to raising corn, beans, and kids in their canyon strongholds, the Yaqui were better than Apache when it came to raising hell. They’d have been as famous as Apache, Sioux, and such had they raised hell north of the border. But fortunately for most Anglo soldiers and settlers, the Yaqui raided close to home and the Mexican newspapers tended to play down all the embarrassment they caused Mexico’s official Indian policy.
Mexican governments, all the way back to those of Old Spain, held that the best way to get along with Indians was by fair but firm, if not exactly gentle, persuasion.
Instead of setting up a Bureau of Indian Affairs, old Cortez and the governors who’d come after him had simply ordered any Indians he hadn’t already killed to wipe off that fool paint, put on Christian pants, and show up for the early Mass at the nearest mission church.
The policy had worked as well as Uncle Sam’s, at less cost to both sides in the end, with most of Mexico’s native population. It was tougher to hold an Indian uprising when so many Indians had Spanish kith or kin, and vice versa. But not unlike some snooty white folks to the north, the Yaqui didn’t hold with marrying up or even shaking hands with anyone who didn’t speak their Nahuatlan version of Uto-Aztec and pray to the same bloody-minded elder gods of Old Mexico.
Having agreed they wanted nothing to do with any Yaqui, Longarm and the stranded Mexican gal lit out down
