the road until it was getting light enough to see colors.
Then Longarm led them off along a gentle ridge, pointing to a distant clump of mesquite as he called back, “Those mesquite seem to be sprouting from black basalt rock. Might be an old volcanic plug. Even if it ain’t, mesquite offers more shade than anything else out this way and the mules can browse it, if they’re careful about the thorns.”
She allowed there was plenty of mesquite on her husband’s ranch. That was the first Longarm had heard of any damned old husband. He hadn’t noticed her wearing any damned old ring, and that was the second thing a man looked for, once he’d admired a gal’s form and face.
It was hardly the time to ask where her mysterious husband might be. So he just led on to get them all under the low canopy of feathery mesquite leaves, greened up by that recent rain, and discover that, as he’d hoped, the center of the grove was a dirt-filled hollow surrounded by a two-or three-foot natural fortress of rounded basalt boulders.
He helped her down and began to unload the mules he’d tethered on long leads to separate mesquite trunks, explaining as he did so, “I read how they get formations like this in the dry country of South Africa too. Only you don’t find diamonds out our way. Columns of lava cool, shrink, and crack underground. Ground water rots out the centers a tad faster, the way a big old tree stump might rot, as the winds and rains peel away the original grade to … Well, you were looking for a safer place to spend the day, not a geology lecture. So suffice it to say we’ve found shade, a wide-open field of fire all around, and a swell place to fire from.”
She stared about nervously in the tricky light of a harsh desert sunrise as she asked who might be creeping up on them out there in the middle of nowhere.
He answered, “Likely nobody, Miss Consuela. I left that coach road on what was almost a sudden impulse when I noticed it was passing through a ridge with lots of slickrock and little deep caliche. We had to leave sign hither and yon along those three furlongs of ridge we just now negotiated. But like you say, it looks like the middle of nowhere and nobody has any call to expect us over here in this common-looking clump of mesquite. So what say I unroll some bedding and let you recline with some tomato preserves for a lie-down breakfast?”
She looked sort of shocked, but managed a polite smile as she told him it was not that she didn’t feel grateful to him for having rescued her from that frightening situation, but that he had to give her time to think.
She said, “Is true I have left Carlos forever, having caught him doing vile things with a mere servant. Maybe I did say I would do the same vile things with the first handsome man I met back in Ciudad Mejico, for I was most hurt as well as angry. But I was not expecting a handsome gringo, and I feel suddenly awkward about going to bed with you.”
Longarm smiled thinly and demanded, “Who said anything about me going to bed with anybody? Don’t I have anything to say about it? Is that all you women ever think about?”
She blinked owlishly up at him, suddenly laughed like hell, and said she’d always heard that worked the other way around.
To which Longarm could only reply, “Maybe it does, other times and places. Right now I figure we’re a day’s ride from help in any direction, with the Yaqui on the rise a heap closer. So if it’s all the same with you, Miss Consuela, I mean to keep this Big Fifty in my arms instead of you or even Miss Ellen Terry. For, no offense, neither of you gals, pretty as I find you both, can spit six hundred grains of lead half as far!”
Chapter 9
Longarm had read those unwinking desert stars all too right. It was pushing a hundred in the shade before noon, and the sun-lashed desert all around was shimmering as if behind a rain-washed window pane, while a shimmering silvery sea, or a mighty realistic mirage, now covered the coach road and the dry land beyond as far as some nameless ridge of shattered bedrock.
He’d gotten Consuela to stretch out atop a flannel blanket in her thin silk dress. She’d even dozed off more than once for a hot and sweaty catnap. But then she’d wake up to drone some more about her awful love life.
Longarm had long since noticed that when it came to screwing, men couldn’t think of much else they’d rather do, and women couldn’t think of much else they’d rather talk about—especially when it just wasn’t practical to really do it. So Longarm was commencing to feel left out as she went on and on about all those other men who’d used and abused her during an adult life that hardly seemed long enough.
To hear Consuela tell it, she’d been sent off to a convent school after her momma caught a wicked but hardly cruel stepfather feeling for pubic hair where none had sprouted as yet.
She’d felt for it herself a lot, and run off with a handsome groundskeeper at the precocious age of thirteen. So the same stepdad who’d fooled with her earlier had had the peon love of her life shot for trespassing. Then, since her momma found her awkward to have around the house, they’d married her off young to a rich as well as dirty old man. She’d found some of his advanced notions about the ways of a man with a maid delightfully exciting. He’d found her such a delight in bed that he’d died there, leaving her a rich young widow.
She said, “I never should have married Carlos a year later. He was only after my money and not, alas, my body. He said La Santa Fe forbade all but one position, and so I steeled myself to accept my lackluster lot. But then I caught him in the position of sixty-nine on the floor tiles, with a cleaning woman of mixed blood!” Longarm suppressed a yawn and said, “Some men seem to like a bowl of chili after they’ve been dining on steak for a spell. I hope you had the sense to get your money out of there before you lit out in person aboard that night coach.”
She sighed and replied, “I wired my bank for to transfer my account to Puerto Periasco two days before I left, while Carlos was away on business, or with some puta, the beast.”
Longarm stared thoughtfully at some seagulls floating on the sea over yonder as he cocked a brow and asked, “You can wire south to the capital and across to the Sea of Cortez from that dinky border town? No offense, but I ain’t seen many telegraph poles along that coach road to the east. None sticking out of all that mirage either.”
She explained how the telegraph line ran a more direct course to Mexico City and from there to the west coast. She didn’t have to tell him why the nationalized telegraph network had to avoid some parts of a north infested with unreconstructed Indians and bitterly poor mixed bloods. But she told him anyway.
He found it felt better to chew on a mesquite stem than a smoke when it got this hot and dry. So he was doing so as he sighed and observed, half to himself, “Los rurales in Sonoyta will have wired ahead to Puerto Periasco by now then. They wear those big gray felt sombreros as a rule, right?”
She nodded. “Es verdad, but for why would los rurales take any interest in my leaving Carlos?”
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “You’re right. I’m likely just worrying over nothing. Them four white
