Waco sheepishly confessed, “I ain’t got enough on me to grub my gut and get my pony out of the municipal corral. I figured I’d wait till I got back to the Rocking W and have the Chink rustle me up some eggs and onions.”
Longarm insisted, “Come on. I hate to eat alone and I have questions to ask about all the brands in these parts. Might your Rocking W be anywheres near Minnipeta Junction, Waco?”
As they strode side by side in the bright morning sunlight, Waco said, “Just the other side. I come into Florence for serious hell-raising when my Injun blood is up because they told me they’d run me off forever if I ever lost my temper close to the spread again.”
As Longarm pointed out the Chinese place near his hotel, Waco explained there were more north range riders than Texicans around Minnipeta Junction, and they’d established the night before how he usually got on with them.
But as Longarm ordered fried rice and chow nicin for the both of them, Waco cautiously declared, “I reckon I’ll forgive you the way you pancake your fool hat. You’re too open-handed to be a damn Yankee.”
Longarm didn’t rise to the bait. He’d questioned many a suspect in his own time, and he knew how tough it was to keep a false identity consistent when you took to offering any information you didn’t have to about your new self.
Once they were served and Waco dug in, he marveled that the Chinese cook out at the Rocking W never rustled up anything as good. Longarm explained that the many Chinese cooks hired out across the West tended to play it safe. He said, “This Chinese pal I was jawing with told me they don’t even eat chop suey and such back in his old country. When you cook for round-eyed devils who riot against your kind every now and again, you serve ‘em what you hope might soothe their savage breasts. A cook who doled out shark fin soup and black pickled eggs to hungry cowhands could find himself explaining why he’d set out to murder them all. I reckon it’s just as easy for a Son of Han to rustle up biscuits and bacon as it is to serve chop suey, chow mein, and all them other odd dishes he never saw before coming to the Golden Mountain. That’s what they call these United States, the Golden Mountain.”
Then he silently cursed himself when Waco said, “You sure have been all over and seen all the sights for a saddle tramp, Buck, no offense.”
Longarm assured him there was none taken, and felt a tad better about it when Waco slyly added, “I won’t ask which side you rid for or where you served hard time for what no more. It occurred to me as I was sobering up last night with an aching jaw that I had tangled with a serious student of the ferocious arts. I had my eye on your gun hand and that six-gun on your left hip when you threw that left hook my way instead. I was asshole drunk and another asshole might have shot me instead. So … Ah, shit, you know what I mean.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Assholes lead with their right fists too. I’d have never gotten off with a ten-dollar fine in magistrate’s court if I’d shot anybody last night in a strange town, pard.”
Waco said, “Mebbe not, but I still owe you for not using the excuse to build your rep that way. Folks ain’t as impressed with you for just beating the shit out of somebody, and I’ve often thought it would be keen to kill somebody mean as, say, Lash Flanders instead of just sort of staring him down.”
Longarm didn’t feel it would be wise to say he’d already stared down that other local bully. Another reason Longarm had for feeling disgusted with the breed was the constant childish testing that had to lead, in time, to real trouble when the bully of some dinky town tried his tedious games with some stranger as serious as, say, Clay Allison, John Wesley Hardin, or even the Kid. The graveyards out this way might not be half as crowded if only there hadn’t been as many overgrown bullies.
Longarm let Waco fill in the details of the mythical Buck Crawford to suit his fool self as he changed the subject to Minnipeta Junction and how he was fixing to get there. He explained, “I brung my saddle and possibles from Colorado without no pony. I figured I’d buy me as cheap a trail mount as I could find here in Florence.”
Waco said he was likely to get skinned unless someone they were afraid of went with him. Longarm had been figuring on that and another small but vital detail since he’d been inspired to pay Waco’s fine.
With the help of the local bully and another fifteen dollars, Longarm bought a twelve-year-old paint mare. Waco said it wasn’t far enough to worry about packing trail supplies. By the time Longarm and the livery man had the bill of sale worked out, Waco had fetched his own saddled gelding, a roan, from the nearby municipal corral. So the two of them rode out together before nine.
It was a brisk, sunny morning with the grass still greening up in the rolling Flint Hills range. No flint showed above ground, of course, and the chalk it was imbedded in was rounded smooth as a big old gal’s tits and ass as it was weathered or hoof-stomped. Buffalo, pronghorn, and even prairie elk had grazed the Flint Hills for thousands of years before the first cows, of course. They hadn’t ridden far before Longarm saw the longhorns and black Cherokee stock that had replaced the buffalo and Kansa Nation.
But while the Flint Hills range was stocked more heavily than the short-grass High Plains to the west, they didn’t seem to be harming the big blue stem and switchgrass all around, with wheat grass and side-oat grama growing shorter on the taller wind-swept rises, for grass grew best where wildfire or grazing brutes passed over it fairly regularly. Where you rode across a draw or slope too steep to favor livestock, you saw more woodland growth, from ground cherry and prairie rose up through sumac and dogwood to fair-sized hackberry and blackjack oak, with the giant weed-like cottonwood ever ready to claim an overgrown gully for its shady own. They got enough rain for woodlands this far east, and the woodlands and prairies were at constant war, with mankind and his livestock tipping the scales either way without knowing it. So that was how come you had parks and street trees in the older prairie towns, and saw weeds and brush in vacant city lots instead of the grass that needed regular burning or grazing to thrive.
Grass grew from its roots, like human hair, while the forbs and woody growths that competed with it grew at their tips, and tended to give up once a prairie fire or herd of cows had passed over them a time or more.
He and Waco rested and grazed their mounts now and then, watering them as well at the few running creeks they crossed. But they didn’t cross many, even that early in the year, because the chalky bedrock below the springy sod sucked rainwater up, down, and sideways, the way chalk always tended to. Waco had heard tell of the Nesbits and a few others who’d tried to homestead in the Flint Hills. He said he was glad they’d gone broke before they could prove their claims. Next to damn Yankees, there was nothing Waco hated worse than homesteaders.
Reporters and dime-magazine writers back East were already making much of what they imagined as an age- old grudge between the cattle man, the sheep man, and the farming man. What they tended to miss, being city boys, was that everyone raised country dabbled at most every country way there was to make a living. Like many of his fellow High Plains riders, Longarm had been raised further east on a hardscrabble farm in the hills of West-by- God-Virginia. So he knew a cornfield made the most sense in one place, a herd of sheep in another, and a herd of cows on range such as this. It wasn’t as if cows, sheep, or crops were religious experiences. It just pissed an established outfit off considerably to have an already complicated life upset by strangers barging in with damn-fool
