“Greenhorns,” he repeated, reining in to light a morning smoke as he considered other quacks he’d met up with in his travels. Even Hopi rain chanters knew enough to wait until rain seemed possible before they offered to try. West of longitude 100’ you got enough overcast days, or even weeks, with nothing falling from those damned stubborn clouds. But at least rain was possible when you saw some sky water up yonder. There was nothing you could do in or about a clear, dry sunny sky but wait for some damned clouds. He wondered idly if those self-styled pluviculturists really believed in their patented method of making noise.
There was no telegraph office in either Cedar Bend or Sappa Crossing. He’d asked. The Grange had been drumming for a rail spur or at least more modern communications north of the Smokey Hill River without much luck so far. But wait, if Horst Heger had sent that wire from the county seat twenty miles east of Sappa Crossing …
“Forget it!” Longarm warned himself aloud. Nobody’d asked him to investigate buxom rainmakers who might or might not be kin to the real Dan’l Ruggles and might or might not believe in what they were up to with all that noise in a cloudless sky. He’d meant it when he’d told that one sister he didn’t have jurisdiction over pesky threats to the local economy. It was a good thing too. For how would it look if a federal deputy showed up every time a Gypsy dealt out tarot cards or Miss Margaret Fox held another spirit-trapping seance by cracking a double-jointed toe under the table? Folk were supposed to know better than to pay good money for harmless pranks. Lawmen had enough to keep them busy chasing the dangerous crooks.
Somewhere out ahead hid a really dangerous furriner, trained to kill by one of the best military machines in the business of killing folks. It didn’t matter whether Ritter still had that monstrous LeMat or not. The rascal’s bloodstained records allowed he could kill with any sort of gun, a cavalry saber, a bowie knife, or in a pinch, his bare hands.
So Longarm rode on, and when those loco sisters set off yet another sky bomb less than an hour later, he didn’t even glance behind him. Old Dad Jergens had said they’d likely hear those blasts clean across the prairie in Sappa Crossing. It was their misfortune and none of his own, as long as nobody got in his damned way.
Chapter 8
The ride would have been no more than a dozen miles on a crow But following a wagon trace across constantly rolling prarie made for a longer row to hoe. So when they topped a rise and Longarm spotted a new-looking windmill, spinning merrily off to the west with blades winking back at the morning sun, he knew somebody had a cattle spread or homestead up here on the higher range. When he spotted a black Cherokee cow with a calf to match, he had a better grasp on that distant pumping machine. Cherokee beef was bred from Texas longhorn and chunky black beef cows from back East, adding up to a critter that could manage to survive on marginal range without butchering out so dry and stringy. The original longhorn the Western beef industry was based on had never been bred for meat on the table. The North African Moors who’d introduced the hardy breed to Spain ate lamb or mutton when they could get any, while everyone knew Spaniards and Mexicans cottoned to pigs and chickens or even goats for eating. So the longhorns down Mexico way had been intended for hides and tallow. Spanish-speaking folks used leather a lot more than most, while their night-owl habits in a sunny climate called for a whole lot of tallow candles.
As he spied more bred-up beef in the draw beyond, Longarm knew why their owner was going to that much trouble. During the long depression of the early ‘70s the folks back East had been as glad to eat any sort of beef as the poor folks of Spain who got the leavings of the bullring. But now that things had picked up under President Hayes and good old Lemonade Lucy, housewives who’d been lucky to serve corned beef and cabbage once a week were demanding filet mignon, or marbled steaks leastways, and turning up their noses at range beef.
He came upon more black longhorns wallowing hock-deep in what a greenhorn might take for wild rye. But Longarm had seen Mex stockmen play that same slick trick. They’d learned it from some of those old-time Moors before they’d chased them back to North Africa.
He’d read somewhere that the desert goatherds of that big Sahara still sowed quick-sprouting seed in those draws they called something like waddies in their own lingo. Most of the time nothing happened, or at best the birds got a free meal out of you. But every now and then your underfilled and labor-free seed set root, and the next time you came by with your stock it was their turn to feast. Longarm was still working on why anyone ought to cast bread on water. But risking a sack of oats or rye you could sow without getting down from your saddle made good sense. He made it close to two dozen critters out there in all that rye getting fatter by the minute.
A distant sky rumble seemed to give the grazing cows pause. More than one gazed his way as if he’d done it. He chuckled and quietly said, “Don’t look at me, ladies. I think it’s silly too.”
He topped another rise to gaze at a bigger and neater version of the trail town and surrounding farms he’d just left. Fields of wind-shimmered golden grain stretched clean to the skyline behind the bigger whitewashed structures of what had to be the Mennonite community of Sappa Crossing. But the way ahead seemed to be a matter of some dispute.
The critter had to be a Cherokee steer. No stockman kept more than one or two bulls if he wanted his cows to get any peace and quiet to fatten on. But sometimes the cutting went a mite awry as the spring roundup crew was turning bull calves to steers, and they called such results queer-steers. Impotent geldings, with enough meat left in their loins to behave like horny bulls who couldn’t get it up.
Longarm could sympathize with such a critter, even when he hadn’t just been used and abused by a horny Osage widow. But he didn’t think much of the way the queer-steer was pawing up dust as it held its horns low and its tail high. So he calmly hauled his Winchester from its saddle boot and levered a round in the chamber as he softly suggested, “Don’t you do it, Cherokee. I’d play tag with you if I had only one mount to worry about. No way I’m fixing to fool around with two to manage as you charge. So don’t charge.”
He’d naturally reined in to show he wasn’t disputing the right of way just yet. But the queer-steer had its tail up stiff as a poker now, and as it gathered all four hooves together, cocked its head to aim, and lowered it again to get going, Longarm muttered, “Aw, shit,” and fired. It was much easier to stop half a ton of madness on the hoof before it could really get moving.
He knew he’d done right when the critter exploded into an all-out rip-snorting charge despite two hundred grains of .44-40 aimed where all the other members of its species were supposed to have their hearts.
As his pony spooked under him, Longarm fired again and gasped, “I reckon you’re right, paint. Anywhere you say!”
So he let go of the lead line, and the two hired ponies took full advantage of his invitation to get the hell off the beaten path as that shot-up queer-steer charged down it like a railroad locomotive on hooves!
It collapsed a furlong on in a cloud of dust, of course. By the time Longarm had chased down the bay and retrieved the lead line, the critter who’d been out to gore the three of them had snorted its last and just lay there, not quite useless yet, damn its valuable hide.
He read the dead critter’s brand as he cussed it, and saw it went with those friendlier black Cherokee they’d
