said, “Rocket here can carry a man your size to glory. She stands sixteen hands and if you see a fence in your way, she’ll jump it for you.”
“Irish bloodlines,” Trooper O’Donnel chimed in with just a hint of smugness.
Longarm just got cracking to get his saddle and bridle aboard the big roan mare. As they helped him, the two Lazy B riders who’d been such a help in that saloon offered to ride along with him if he wanted to wait up just a few minutes.
He said he doubted there’d be shooting if he got there soon enough. Then he forked himself aboard the bigger pony and lit out to get there soon enough.
They’d been right about the roan’s strength and speed. She’d have been a pleasure to ride nowhere in particular. She tore on across a rolling sea of moonlit grass with her hooves pounding steady on sod rendered just right for pounding by that passing summer storm. Cows and night critters scattered as they tore through the night, but the ride was so steady Longarm was able to think as clearly as if he’d been seated in a rocking chair, mulling over all those odd goings-on. The only trouble was, mull as he might, he couldn’t figure out what in blue blazes could be going on!
Chapter 14
You didn’t have to be Mexican to engage in Mexican standoffs. An even number of prudently hot-tempered men from Sappa Crossing and Cedar Bend had lined up along a prairie rise just south of Cedar Bend to shake fists and brandish weapons. The mostly native-born barley or corn growers who needed rain stood their ground, on foot, in a sort of infantry skirmish line. The mostly Germanic wheat growers had reined in short of the bonfires along the rise to sit their nervous mounts nervously as, out in the middle, a dismounted clump of leaders, whether elected or self-appointed, seemed to be arguing about who the Good Lord and the Thunder Bird should love the most.
As Longarm rode in with his badge pinned on his denim jacket, he called out, “I wish you gents would quit looking daggers and glance up at the starry sky above us! That line squall was a natural fluke that anyone but an Eastern greenhorn or a stubborn Dutchman would expect more than once a summer!”
A Cedar Bend man Longarm recognized as one of old Dad Jergens’s deputies bawled, “Try to tell that to these fool furriners! Such rain as we got with that hail was barely enough to lay the durned dust, and the hail played bob with our poor parched cornstalks!”
Kurt Morgenstern, the usually more friendly smith from Sappa Crossing, growled loudly, “Our quarrel is not with you Yankee homesteaders. If you want to plow at the wrong time for this climate, we agree it’s a free country. But it’s not supposed to rain at this time of the year, and we don’t want it to rain at this time of the year. So we paid those Ruggles sisters to stop trying to make it rain, and it rained, and we want our money back!”
An older Cedar Bend man yelled, “That ain’t the way we heard it! All we got was a mess of busted down corn stalks. So we ain’t paying them that rain bounty the bank was holding in escrow, and neither one of ‘em is down in the valley behind us!
The Cedar Bend deputy declared, “They left earlier this evening, before that hailstorm. For they’d run out of dynamite and none of us would extend ‘em any more credit!”
Morgenstern demanded, “Why won’t you let us pass then?”
Longarm announced, “Same reason you boys from Sappa Crossing would guard your wheat fields from night riders, Kurt! As a paid-up lawman I’d be honor bound to side with anyone being unlawfully and unfairly trespassed until such time as his federal homestead has been proven and deeded fee simple! But the man just told you those rainmaking gals ain’t hiding in any of their corn fields, and I for one believe him. I never would have asked them to scare my stock with dynamite to begin with, and no offense, you’ve all been acting mighty unscientific.”
Morgenstern demanded, “How can you say that? One of my customers showed us the newspaper article saying they had a government patent for their rainmaking balloon!”
Longarm shook his head wearily and explained. “You mean you saw how a bearded wonder who calls himself a scientist patented a method of setting off dynamite under a balloon without losing the balloon. The U.S. Patent Office demands a working model if you’re trying to patent a perpetual-motion machine. But most of the time they’ll issue you a patent on most anything that just might work, whether anyone would ever want one or not.”
He saw he had their attention. So he got out a cheroot and lit it to give them more time to think before he continued. “The drugstores are filled with patent medicines because, next to mixing up a medicine that cures something, nothing beats a patent number on the label as a reason to buy. It’s the mixture in the bottle that you get the patent on. The contents don’t have to do anything. I hope, by now you’ve all seen how much rain you get using Dan’l Ruggles’s patented sky bombs. Whether those two gals were bombing the sky with either his permit or knowledge is moot. Like I told the older one earlier, it ain’t a federal offense to practice quack science.”
“What about Hexerie?” asked an old country wheat grower as if he meant it.
Longarm replied, “If you’re talking about witchcraft, that’s even more impossible. I’ve never understood why grown men and women can’t show the common sense of Miss Esmeralda, that Gypsy gal in the yarn by Mon-Sewer Victor Hugo.”
That made some of them laugh uncertainly, and nobody seemed to follow his drift. So Longarm explained. “They brung this Miss Esmeralda before the king to fess up to being a witch, seeing everybody knew Gypsies had such secret powers.”
Some of the men in the crowd allowed they’d heard as much.
Longarm blew smoke out both nostrils and said, “Miss Esmeralda had more sense. She asked the king, if he had secret powers, if he’d prefer to wander the world homeless and ragged-ass, having poached hedgehogs for supper and swiping apples for dessert. The king didn’t have to study long to follow her drift. He was a smart old bird, for a king. But then this witch hunter who’d been turned down by Miss Esmeralda thought up some more charges. Witch hunters can always come up with more charges, since proving you ain’t a witch is tougher than proving you ain’t never coveted thy neighbor’s ox or ass. But had Miss Esmeralda pled innocent in my court, I reckon I’d have had to agree with her simple defense.”
He heard men on both sides muttering that his words made sense, to the extent they had anything to do with that damned hailstorm.
Then old Wemer Sattler finally caught up with Longarm, not saying where on earth he’d been, as he called out, “You had no right to call a posse together without asking me, Kurt. What are you trying to do, a range war start? Das gefallt mt’r nicht, Dummkoff!”
Longarm saw Martin Link and Trooper O’Donnel along with the six or eight Sappa Crossing riders with Sattler.
