A less experienced questioner might have let that one word get past him. But Longarm brightened and asked, “You said most, Miss Rosalinda?”
She shrugged her tawny shoulders under her filthy thin shift and moved around the end of the counter to produce a couple of brick-sized cardboard boxes as she told him los ladrones had laughed to see them on sale.
Longarm smiled thinly and said he could see why they hadn’t bothered to steal the ammunition. He asked, “How come you stock buffalo rounds down here where the jackrabbit and Gila monster roams?” She said there were mule deer over in the Growlers, and then recalled one of those Butterfield hands across the way had kept an old single-shot hunting rifle.
Since she’d already told him about that outfit pulling up stakes and moving on, he came close to letting it go at that. But they paid Longarm to be nosy. So he was, and she recalled they’d been stuck with over a hundred rounds of .50-120-600 when the old-fashioned coot across the way had come down with the plague and died on the job.
Longarm bent to snatch that unlit candle stub from the floor as he asked if she could spare him some matches and show him around the abandoned stage stop.
She said she could, but being a woman, pestered him all the way across the dusty road about his eccentric taste in rifle-guns. She said, “Even if you find the pobreci to’s old gun, you do not wish for to go after five hombres and a dangerous mujer with a single-shot weapon, do you?”
To which he could only reply, “They don’t pay me to do what I want, and the only rifle chambered .50-120-600 is that Sharps ‘74 Big Fifty. I’ll allow it takes forever to load a Big Fifty next to, say, a Winchester or even a Spencer. But once she’s loaded, watch out!”
They found another dumb arrow stuck on the open door across the way. Rosalinda said she’d noticed the silly toy when she’d darted all over to snuff all those candles.
Longarm lit the candle he was packing just inside the door, and saw how the Butterfield outfit had left the heavy plank tables and benches in the dining room so those fake Indian raiders could tip them over.
The office next door was empty, save for old papers strewn across the dirt floor. Longarm nodded at the snuffed-out candle amid a pile of crumpled paper in one corner, and said, “That wouldn’t have done a whole lot, even if you hadn’t nipped it on the bud. These thick ‘dobe walls are sort of tough to set afire.”
Then he noticed something black and limp as the skin of a witch’s cat draped over a corner of the windowsill. When he picked it up he saw it was a gal’s fancy black lace chemise. He sniffed it and said, “Brand-new, never worn, and meant to be found. Reckon Goldmine Gloria wanted to be remembered as a gal who’d been wearing clean and classy unmentionables when those red devils dragged her fair white body off to a fate worse than death.”
Rosalinda gasped. “Ay, que lujoso! Is that real French encaje?”
Longarm handed the frilly underwear to her, saying, “Goldmine Gloria seems a real spender, considering how honestly she comes by her money.”
The little breed gal held the black lace as if she feared it was a fragile treasure as she gasped, “Is for me? I can have it? Muchas gracias, and I can not wait for to put it on. Pero first I ought to take a bath, no?”
He allowed that seemed a sensible notion, and moved on, shielding the flickering candle flame with his free hand as they explored the cluttered ‘dobe maze. He could sense the bitterness of the suddenly out-of-work coaching hands as they’d hurriedly packed to move on, traveling by the rails that were making long-distance coaching obsolete. Longarm considered himself as progressive as most, but you had to feel wistful for overnight old-timers in a rapidly changing West.
He murmured aloud, “Seems the old boys just got good at trapping beaver when it came time to hunt buffalo instead. Reckon the older hand who was working here when he died hunted buff before the Concord coach became the rage.”
She told him the old man had been sort of silly to hunt rabbit with his old buffalo gun. She said, “Is not much meat on el conejo for to begin with.”
Longarm grimaced at the mental picture, and agreed a Big Fifty was more gun than one needed to hunt skinny desert jacks.
But he was after bigger game. So he kept searching until he found it at last, wrapped in a dusty bedroll atop a wardrobe in one of the back bunk chambers.
He grinned wolfishly as he unwrapped the Sharps ‘74 .50-120-600, noting it had been cleaned and stored away with a thick coat of whale oil. The tooled steel of the sliding-block breech moved slick as silk, and the peep sights were set at five hundred yards, or close range for a Big Fifty. He turned to Rosalinda with a smile on his lips and death in his gun-muzzle gray eyes to ask her how far they had to walk to see her Papago kin about that riding stock.
She said, “No more than three hours, and will not be too hot for to walk before nine or ten in the morning. But those ladrones carry rifles too. Repeating rifles that go bang, bang, bang!”
Longarm patted the oiled steel of the Big Fifty and calmly informed her, “This artillery piece don’t bang. She throws way better than two times the weight of a Winchester, more than three times as far, with the punch to stop full-grown buffalo.”
Rosalinda shook her dusty head and pointed out, “One at a time. There are five of them. Six if you count that blond puta. What do you expect the others to do after you get off your single shot, hold their own fire as they patiently await their own turns for to die, optomisto mio?”
Chapter 3
The eastern sky was pearling pink behind the jagged black skyline of the Growler Range by the time Longarm had both Rosalinda and the Big Fifty atop the flat-roofed trading post with him.
She’d washed her tawny hide and wavy black hair with laundry soap and sprinkled herself with lilac water before slipping into that black lace chemise and nothing else. She seemed to feel well dressed for polite Papago society. Longarm had to allow she looked as fine as she smelled now.
While she’d been washing up, Longarm had busied himself choosing other stuff they’d need for desert travel. He’d left most of their supplies below, but hauled a canvas bandolier he’d loaded with Big Fifty cartridges topside, along with the gun they went with.
