sombreros out yonder wouldn’t be los rurales or even honest vaqueros at this hour of the morning on such a dazzling day.”
Consuela sat up to peer off to the east the same way, sounding a bit like a little kid as she marveled, “Ooh, el mirave! But I see no sombreros of any color out there. Do we seem to be underwater to them as well?”
Longarm morosely replied, “They must see something over this way. That’s likely why they’re heading so directly at us. Watch what seems to be bitty white dots near that three-branched saguaro. All those bitty dots are shimmering in the rising heat waves, but only the four white ones are moving closer.”
She gasped, “Ay, Dios mio! I see what you mean! I hope they are not those savage Yaqui!” Longarm sighed and said, “So do I. It ain’t my fight, and some of the Yaqui I’ve convinced of that treated me tolerable enough. It’s the ones I can’t seem to convince that I try to avoid. As friend or foe, your average Yaqui seems more emotional than your average gent of any other breed.”
He smiled wistfully at the memory of a lean brown Yaqui gal it wouldn’t have been decent to brag about, and continued. “I savvy just a few words of the more northern dialects of their overall lingo. A Papago can understand a Hopi or Shoshoni about as well as a Spaniard could follow the drift of a Portuguese or Italian. But every time I’ve tried that on Yaqui, they answer in Spanish and tell me not to mock ‘em. I reckon it’s something like the way you folks feel about high-toned Castilian and Border Mex.”
She told him in a worried tone not to worry about that, and asked if he knew how to tell Yaqui in Spanish that some of her best friends were Indians.
He chuckled dryly and replied, “If they’re willing to talk first. I’ve found it best to just dodge ‘em when they’re on the war path. We ain’t close enough to their home range in the Sierra Madre for them to be picking flowers.”
She looked wildly about, her unbound hair whipping like burnished telegraph wire, as she asked which way they could ride to dodge those ominous white dots.
He wearily replied, “I just said that.” Then he rose to his feet to take up a new position a few feet closer to the line of the higher ground they’d followed to this rare patch of shade.
Consuela moved to join him as he calmly took a half-dozen long .50-120-600 rounds from their belt loops and lined them neatly in front of him on the black rock of the low natural barricade. He braced the Big Fifty to one side and laid the Schofield .45 Short by the cartridges on the rock as he said, “Maybe they’re only bandits, or even better, just making for that coach road betwixt us and them. They won’t spot any sign we left as long as they don’t cross the road to make for this shade.” She asked what the odds of them doing that might be.
He sighed and said, “It’s pushing noon and they’d be fixing to hole up for la siesta if they were back wherever they’ve come from. I’m fixing to fire my first round wide, as a warning. Anyone at all familiar with the rules of the Owlhoot Trail ought to follow my drift. If they’re innocent travelers, they’ll ride on and look for their own damned shade. If they don’t, we’ll know it’s open season on such rude gents.” She said she knew how to handle a pistol. To which he could only reply, “That would be swell if you had one. We’re going to have to cover both sides of this teeny mesquite grove if my first ruse don’t work. But right now I need both these guns, great and small.”
Before he had to explain further, the sun had risen another notch in the cloudless cobalt sky and what had seemed a vast shimmering sea just wasn’t there anymore.
The four widely spaced riders hadn’t vanished, though. At this still-wavering distance it was impossible to say whether they were Mexicans of the ruder sort or Indians who’d taken those advances they’d found useful while rejecting sissy notions such as property rights or the right of any stranger to go on breathing.
Longarm waited until the four of them got to the road and bunched closer around the one pointing directly at him and Consuela—or at least at the shade they were sweating in. Then Longarm sighed and picked up the pistol, saying, “I fear we’re about to have company. If they’re Indians they’ll read two mules heading out this way. Let ‘em get halfway along the ridge and then call out to ‘em to ask them nicely to go away.”
She asked, “Will that not alert them to the fact that one of us is a woman?”
He nodded grimly and explained. “When you’re down to your last chips you play the cards you hold. Tempting as the thought of your used and abused body might be to anyone who’s yet to lay eyes on the same, I don’t want ‘em thinking one gun is alone out here with a pack mule. You yell. Then I’ll yell at you to shut up. That ought to make them study on bothering to circle us in this heat, seeing two or more of us could be watching both ways with any number of guns, see?”
She didn’t seem to. He didn’t have time to elaborate. The four mystery riders had tethered a roan, a buckskin, and two paints near the road to ease along the low ridge afoot through the knee-high brittlebush. There was a clump of taller organpipe a furlong or a little over two town blocks off. Longarm told Consuela to challenge them just as they drew abreast of the cactus screen.
She did, calling out, “Veiyesen! No mejodas, cabrones!”
Longarm had to laugh as the four of them took cover. For such a high-toned little gal, Consuela had quite a mouth on her. Having no improvements to add, he called out in English, “Don’t fuck with me either, you dumb jerk- offs!”
He was answered only by dead silence. He picked up the Schofield and pegged a shot low toward that clump of organpipe.
Consuela saw the puff of dust, and sadly observed the underpowered pistol didn’t have that much range.
He grinned wolfishly and replied, “As a matter of fact, I could lob some slow-moving .45 Short slugs that far, if distance was all I was aiming for. I ain’t out to hit anybody with this six-gun. I only want them to know we have it, and that we were serious about wanting them to ride on and leave us alone.”
A blur of dusty white showed itself for an instant between some low stickerbush closer than those organpipes. She gasped, and Longarm said, “I see him. Two are hunkered behind that screen of cactus. The other two are trying to side-wind closer. They figure they’re still well out of range.”
Then he emptied the wheel of the Schofield their way to give them pause, and reloaded it as he soberly explained, “They are, if this was all we had at our disposal. I want you to move over to the far side of the mules with this and cover our rear. I don’t think they’re out to circle us just yet. I think they’re planning on waiting, just outside of range, until dark. But you never know what Yaqui might be up to. They like to surprise you.”
She took the Schofield gingerly, but asked if the Indians weren’t likely to fry their brains out under the hot son of an entire afternoon in August.
