LONGARM AND THE APACHE PLUNDER
By Tabor Evans
Synopsis:
U.S. Deputy Marshall Custis Long is in the New Mexico Territory trying to stop a band of renegade Apache indians. But is it really indians who have been robbing, killing and generally causing trouble? 189th novel in the “Longarm” series, 1994.
CHAPTER 1
A man had to study on his drinking money when he didn’t have a job. But while the Parthenon Saloon, near the place he used to work, asked an extra nickel for a needled beer, it also offered the best free lunch in town. So the former Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long was down at that end of the bar, nursing a needled beer while eating pickled pigs’ feet and potato salad, when his recent boss, Marshal Billy Vail, caught up with him.
The older and shorter Vail bellied up to the bar, snapped a German-silver badge upon the polished mahogany between them, and demanded in an injured tone, “What in blue blazes did I do or say, old son?”
Longarm, as he was better known away from the federal building he’d just stormed out of, coldly replied, “At the risk of sounding like your fool echo, you told me you wanted me to sneak down the other side of the Colorado-New Mexico line and ride herd on a heap of storm clouds hoverin over La Mesa de los Viejos, which is ominously close to Jicarilla country.”
Billy Vail nodded his balding bullet head. “I thought I said something to that effect just before you threw your badge in my face and lit out like a schoolmarm seven unwashed sheepherders were out to screw.”
Longarm washed down some potato salad with a carefully measured swallow of expensive beer and replied, “The government signed with the Jicarilla in ink after making them move twice before, speaking of screwing.”
Vail seemed sincerely puzzled. “What in thunder do those Mountain Apache have to do with the chore I was assigning you when you went loco en la cabeza on me?”
Longarm sounded really disgusted as he replied. “The Jicarilla have kept the peace since ‘73. They have more in common with their Navaho cousins than they have with Victorio’s mixed band of bronco Mescalero and Chiricahua. Yet the Great White Father, in his infinite wisdom, wants me scouting the hornet’s nest he just heaved a rock through. I swear, the War Department must have dozens of congressmen’s kids who just made second lieutenant and want that pretty red-and-blue campaign ribbon, even though so many Quill Indians have sued for peace. I suppose you hadn’t read about the BIA fixing to move the Jicarilla down to Tularosa Canyon, eh?”
Vail shrugged. “Sure I read about it. I read everything. The powers that be feel the army will have a better handle on the really treacherous Mescalero Apache if they move ‘em over to study war no more with their Chiricahua allies at San Carlos, under tighter rein from Fort Apache just next door.”
When he saw he was getting no argument from Longarm about that, he continued with a bemused frown. “Moving the Mescalero out of Tularosa Canyon leaves an established BIA agency with nobody to agent for. So I reckon that’s why they’re fixing to move the far smaller Jicarilla nation south from that marginal mountain reserve and teach them real farming in-“
“Bullshit!” Longarm said, scowling like hell. “It’s a pure and simple land grab! The Jicarilla gave us a hell of a fight, surrendered under honorable terms, and were ceded barely more than a hundred square miles of mountain scenery nobody else had any use for at the time. But well-watered and half-timbered high country is still a far cry from the desert scrub the Mescalero keep running away from because there’s no way even Na-dene could get by on hunting and food-gathering alone. That’s what the folks we call Treacherous Apache call themselves, Na-dene.”
Vail snorted, “Don’t tell your granny how to suck eggs, or offer an ex-Texas Ranger lectures on Mister Lo, The Poor Indian. You won’t get no argument from this child if you want to pine the U.S. Army has enough on its plate with Victorio and his bunch this summer. But you’re wrong if you think I’d fib about Indians to any deputy who’s been riding for me six or eight years. I don’t know who told you the Mesa de los Viejos is within thirty miles of the Jicarilla agency at Dulce by crow, but-“
“Now who’s teaching whose granny to suck eggs?” Longarm said with a thin smile. “It ain’t as if New Mexico Territory is stuck to the back of the moon. How many times have we been asked to help the new territorial government clean up after the Santa Fe Ring left over from poor old Grant and his political bandits?”
Vail sighed. “‘Political bandit’ is a redundancy. I told you I read a heap. They call it a redundancy when you use two words to low-rate the same thing. Calling a politician a bandit is as needless as calling a woman of the town a whore, or an Apache an ornery Quill Indian. Man will cure the clap and fly to the moon before he ever gets the banditry out of politics. But speaking of bandits, I was trying to tell you about such shit down around La Mesa de los Viejos when you got all excited about your pet Apache.”
“La Mesa de los Viejos ain’t no thirty miles from that Jicarilla reserve!” Longarm stated. “I keep telling you I know that country. The hunting grounds those Indians signed for in good faith straddle the Continental Divide down yonder. So Stinking Lake, a whole lot closer than Dulce Springs, lies inside the reservation line just a lope west from where you keep saying you want me scouting somebody else.”
He bit a boiled egg in half, washed that part down, and insisted, “There ain’t nobody else but Indians, dead or alive, up the canyons of that big slab of bedrock. They call it La Mesa de los Viejos because Viejos means ‘Old Ones’ in Spanish and the early Mexican rancheros were the first to notice all the cliff dwellings full of old dead Indians. Then they backed off to let the Old Ones be. Mexicans ain’t as superstitious about dead bodies as Na-dene. Nobody could be. But anyone with a lick of sense could see they had no business settling canyonlands too mean for cliff-dwelling Indians to dwell in. Some Pueblo I know laugh at our professors who say the ancient cliff dwellers were from ancient Egypt or mayhaps Atlantis before they went extinct. The Zuni, Hopi, and such say their own ancestors started out in canyon strongholds before they just got numerous enough to move out on more sensible cornlands and hold bigger pueblos against all corners.”
Vail nodded down at the deputy’s badge that still lay on the bar between them. “I asked you not to lecture me about Mister Lo. If I gave a tinker’s dam about abandoned cliff dwellings, I still wouldn’t fathom how all this Indian bullshit has a thing to do with the situation Governor Wallace of New Mexico Territory asked us to look into for him. He asked for you by name, by the way. Seems you handed in the most impartial report on that Lincoln County war they were having a spell back.”
Longarm tried some more pickled pigs’ feet as old Ginger, the barmaid, shot them both a dirty look in passing. He told Vail, “You’d better order at least a schooner of draft, lest that sassy redhead reports us for taking unfair advantage of this free lunch.”
Vail growled, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and you’ve had your tantrum for the day, damn it. Those Mexicans you just mentioned have been growing their own corn and grazing stock along the Rio Chama, betwixt the Jicarilla you’re so worried about and that mesa New Mexico is even more worried about. The established settlers in those parts report heaps of sinister strangers camped up many an old dry canyon, loaded for bear and reluctant as hell to tell anyone what they’re doing there. Couple of locals have wound up drygulched, by a person or persons unknown. The closest thing they have to a full-time sheriff in such thinly populated country has declined the honor of riding anywhere near that mysterious mesa in search of answers. How do you like it so far? Like I said, they asked for you by name.”