He asked her to rein in and start at the beginning. So she did, and she was interesting to look at too as she told her sad, simple story.
Longarm figured her for a Mexican-Papago breed of nineteen at the most. For the slight waves in her dusty black hair spoke Spanish, and while her pretty little heart-shaped face spelled Papago, she still had her short but ample figure.
The desert-dwelling Papago nation offered living proof that old Professor Darwin might have been on to something with that notion of flora, fauna, and folks evolving to fit their ways of life. It was easy to see by their blossoms how the desert cactus plants had started out as some kin to the rosebush, forced to get by in country too dry for any regular rose. The Papago had likely begun as plain old Indians. But a heap of living where the living was hard on a jackrabbit had produced a breed of short, wiry folks who could thrive on next to nothing, or bloat up like a circus fat lady if they dared to eat half as much as anyone else—Anglo, Mex, or even Pueblo.
As if to prove Professor Darwin’s point, Rosalinda rummaged amid the spilled trade goods for something to eat as she told him how she and her two sisters, the daughters of a Butterfield wrangler and his Indian mujer, had all three married up with the Anglo trader here at Growler Wash, a nice old Mormon gent called Pop Wolfram.
Longarm forced himself not to cut in. It was obvious that that so-called nurse aboard the train had been making up her retired surgeon in this dying settlement. Rosalinda went on to explain how the real Wolfram had set up this trading post when the Butterfield coaches still had a relay stage there, where the east-west stage line crossed a north-south desert trail up Growler Wash from the Gila Flats to the north.
Traveling by coach across the southwest corner of Arizona Territory had never been a pleasure. So travelers and even the U.S. Mail had given it up entirely when the new rail line between Yuma and Deming had followed the same route across the burning wastes. To say business had been slow at an abandoned Butterfield relay station and occasional flag stop would be to imply you didn’t sell much soda pop in a graveyard.
One of Rosalinda’s sisters and co-wives had gone off to live back on the blanket with Indian kin. Rosalinda and a more optimistic older sister had hung on, hoping things would pick up. When they hadn’t, her husband and elder sister had left Rosalinda in charge and flagged a train to Yuma, in hopes of finding a buyer for all this unsold merchandise.
Rosalinda said she’d been waiting there alone for the better part of a week when four riders had come along the tracks one early morn, leading two more saddle mounts and four pack mules.
She said that when one of them addressed her in Spanish, she’d been smart enough to reply in the same, not letting on that she followed their drift as they said mean things about her tits in English.
As she and Longarm sipped pork and beans from the cans as if it was soup, cow-camp style, Rosalinda asked with a pouty face if he thought her chupas were too big for the rest of her. He assured her she had chupas muy linda, and asked her to go on.
She said the riders had begun by helping themselves to three mules’ worth of trail supplies, with the one speaking Spanish making up a big fib about paying up as they were leaving. She’d figured what the payoff was likely to be when one of them sniggered in English about her great little culo. So she’d drifted out back as if headed for the outhouse. Then she’d swiftly climbed a pole ladder to the flat roof and pulled it up after her. She started to explain how she and her sisters had often cooled off up yonder on straw matting after a long hot day. But Longarm bade her to stick to the mystery riders.
So she did, and it was soon less mysterious. They’d yelled back and forth when they’d searched in vain for her outside. And then she’d been listening at the stovepipe through the clay and matting roof as they’d whiled away a whole day waiting for Longarm, a pal called Harmony, and a slick-talking gal called Goldmine Gloria.
When she got that far, Longarm put down his empty can and groaned, “Oh, Lord, I’ll never live this down!”
“I’ve read the fliers out on a confidence gal called Goldmine Gloria Weaver, and I let her force cards on me anyway! You say your man and older sister caught the train to Yuma about a week ago, Miss Rosalinda?”
She nodded and sighed, “I fear they never meant for to come back. Papa always liked fat Maria best. She is willing for to do things my other sister and me find perverse. Is harder for even a Mormon to get by with more than one mujer in California, no?”
Longarm said soberly, “They might not have made it that far. A killer called Harmony Drake was arrested in Yuma just ten days ago. If pals who were still at large sent for Goldmine Gloria right after, she could have been on the night train from Deming when it stopped around dawn for your man and your sister. They call her Goldmine Gloria because she makes friends fast aboard trains, with a view to selling a gold mine, water rights, or whatever. It wouldn’t have taken such a slick talker long to sense the golden opportunity her newly made friends from Growler Wash were offering her on a silver platter.”
He shook his head wearily and added, “And I was the one who insisted we get off here, like that fly stepping into the parlor of that spider!”
There was a brass alarm clock ticking on a shelf near the emptied cash till. If it was halfway right, they had a little over two hours’ wait for that train down from Deming. Meanwhile the outlaws would be riding south along a goose-pimple-cool trail, and they’d likely make a few more miles before it warmed up enough to matter after sunrise.
He added the travel times in his head and groaned aloud. “I don’t see how I can make it come out right. Say we get in to Yuma early in the morning and I have no trouble rounding up a federal posse. Say the next train back leaves earlier than usual tomorrow evening, and we cut their trail in the dark with no trouble. The border lies, what, sixty-odd miles, or two nights of hard riding, from here?”
She nodded, cheerfully considering, and said you followed the flats west of the Growler Range as far as Organpipe Pass, then punched through a cactus jungle astride the unguarded border, and then it was almost all downhill to the Sea of Cortez and a steamboat out to most anywhere.
Longarm swore under his breath and decided, “Way too tight. I have orders not to cross the border anymore, and I’d play hell getting more fussy lawmen to ride into Sonora with me. Can you think of anywhere closer I could come by a pony or, better yet, a riding mule, ma’am?” She said her other sister had been able to walk home to her maternal kin holed up for the summer in a nearby canyon. She added that her uncle, as close to being a chief as the free and easy Papago would abide, kept a remuda of riding stock. Then she spoiled it all by pointing out how Longarm would be riding after those ladrones alone and unarmed.
He muttered, “When you’re right you’re right, ma’am. I don’t suppose you’d have anything like a shooting iron for sale around here.” She shook her dusty head and said those pals of Harmony Drake had even helped themselves to most of the ammunition they’d had in the store.
