He said, “Their brains don’t work like yours or mine. Get cracking with that gun, and don’t fire it unless your target is closer than you’d ever want a Yaqui to get!”
She sounded as if she might be crying as she moved off through the dappled shade. Longarm didn’t feel like crying, but he sure felt alone.
Then he sighed and said, “Well, you were warned polite that you weren’t welcome here.”
Knowing at least one was nearer, with farther to run, Longarm drew a bead on that cactus clump halfway to the road and fired.
He was reloading without looking out for results as the echoes of his first Big Fifty shot were still fading. He’d reloaded as that one who’d been creeping closer jumped to his feet, yelling like a she-wolf giving birth to busted glass, and ran towards the smoking buffalo gun instead of away.
Yaqui were like that.
“You poor brave kid!” Longarm sighed, just before he pulled the trigger to blow the charging Indian’s left lung and shoulder blade out his back with a bucket of blood. Then he was reloading, as fast as he was able, and he still barely made it as another, wearing only white pants and sombrero, rose from behind some brittlebush to take careful aim Longarm’s way with a muzzle-loader left over from the Mexican War.
Longarm fired first. So it was never established whether the Yaqui had known what he was up to or not. It was said a Yaqui was harder to stop with a bullet than most. But a slug meant to knock a bull buffalo down seemed to do the trick.
Then Consuela was screaming and blazing away with that Schofield. So Longarm was up and reloading on the run. He joined her on the far side of the grove as the mules brayed and shook the mesquite branches above them. The Yaqui tearing up the open slope with a wild grin and a waving machete, despite the blood running down his side, seemed even wilder until Longarm dropped him with a second, much bigger hunk of hot lead.
He reloaded and put a second round into the limp form to make sure. Then he handed Consuela some spare .45 Shorts and said, “Nice going. Reload and keep up the good work whilst I tidy up out front.”
He got back to the buffalo rounds still spread on the rocks just in time to see the fourth surviving Yaqui trotting reluctantly toward those distant ponies three furlongs or better than six hundred yards away. Hence out of rifle range, or so he must have thought.
So the Indian was turning his head to grin back as hot metal slammed into his ear to tear his face off and skim his straw sombrero off like a pie plate.
Longarm reloaded and got up to call Consuela in, saying, “I counted four coming in and we seem to have put four on the ground. Wait here and I’ll fetch those sun-baked ponies.”
He did. But it wasn’t that easy. For as he broke cover, the fatally shot first one rose to his knees in the blood- spattered cotton to draw a wavering bead on Longarm and take another buffalo round where it seemed best to shoot a Yaqui, smack between the eyes.
Over by the organpipe clump, Longarm found that one staring up at the cloudless sky with a sleepy smile, his white shirt spattered with red blood and green cactus pulp. There was nothing worth taking from the faceless horror closer to the road either.
The four ponies, brands and saddles indicating they had been taken from some unfortunate Mexicans, had to be led wide of all the fresh-spilled blood. But they greeted Consuela and the two mules as if they’d known them for many a year.
As Longarm watered the overheated ponies, he told Consuela there wasn’t enough for all of them in those five-gallon bags.
He said, “I can cut and pulp some cactus. Pear is all right and barrel is better for the stock. We’ll save the well water for the two of us. Come sundown, we’d better turn the mules loose on yonder road. They’re coach mules who know it well. They’ll make it to the nearest fonda that’s still pumping water. You and me ought to make it on out of this desert in one hard night’s ride, changing back and fourth with four mighty tough ponies.” She asked how he could tell how tough their brand-new mounts were.
He answered simply, “Yaqui were riding ‘em. Horse Indians sort of go along with Professor Darwin when it comes to choosing horseflesh. If a pony can take ‘em where they want to go, when they want to get there, they keep it as a mount. When it can’t, they eat it. We ain’t got time to talk about it. We have to get far from here fast. I’d best see now about that cactus water. I vote we leave here just after sundown, and this ain’t no parliamentary democracy. We’ best shun that road everyone knows about and beeline by moonlight across the caliche. We’ll be leaving a mighty easy trail to follow as we do so. But that won’t matter if we’ve made it out of this fool desert before it’s light enough for any other Yaqui or … bandits to follow.”
She didn’t argue. He broke out some more canned grub and opened it for her before he stepped back out in the blast-furnace glare with a gunnysack to gather some cactus pads.
They were in luck. He found more than one watermelon-sized barrel cactus along with some soapier-tasting pear.
He toted them all back to the shade, where Consuela watched with interest as he got all the well water into one rubberized bag before he began to refill the empty one with cactus juice.
As he did so, he explained. “Found what was left of a wagon party surrounded by this barrel cactus one time. It appeared they’d died of thirst, the poor greenhorns. None of ‘em could have known there was a few quarts of tolerable water in each and every one of these thorny things. Thanks to that recent rain, these are juicier than usual. So their pulp water’s almost pure.” She asked for a pear pad to cut up as salad greens for their pork and beans. He didn’t care. It was sort of a cross between lettuce and soap suds when you weren’t used to it. But being a Mexican, she was used to it. He allowed he’d have some too. For the more moisture you got in you the better, especially when you couldn’t tell how much you’d really sweated since your last good whistle-wetting.
It got hotter. Consuela said she couldn’t believe that was possible either, and she’d been living in Sonora a spell. She said that back in her thick-walled ranch house around this time of day, she’d been in the habit of stripping down totally to lie atop her bedding during the dry heat of la siesta.
He told her to go ahead, adding, “It’s too blamed hot for a member of the opposite gender to notice. Or leastwise, to do anything about anything he might notice.” She laughed roguishly and said she was tempted to just go ahead and test his self-control. She added it would certainly feel better, no matter what he thought about ladies cooling off as best they knew how.
