He’d stocked up on more canned trail goods and tobacco earlier that day in Vado Seguro, so he had no call to ride back through the small trail town as he approached it some hours later by moonlight.
If there was one way for a stranger to be noticed in a small trail town, it would have to be riding in just as the card games and drinking had narrowed down to the regulars who’d known one another a spell. So Longarm circled the settlement through the hillside chaparral and rode on and then some, until he figured he was just south of where he and Kinipai had crossed the river much earlier.
He was already starting to feel wistful about the friendly little witch woman. But that wasn’t why he reined in a furlong on. The paint he was riding was acting mighty odd under him.
Horseflesh wasn’t made right for puking. A pony had to be sick as hell to even try to vomit, and when it tried, the little it could get up came out through its nostrils, which was dangerous as well as disgusting. Neither horses nor mules can breathe through their mouths. So what a man, a dog, or a cat would call a stuffed-up nose could be a fatal illness to a pony.
He reined off the riverside trail into stirrup-high rabbitbrush that for them horses to browse as he uncinched his borrowed stock saddle and put it aboard the buckskin, telling the paint he was sorry those Mexican kids back at Rancho Alvera had apparently allowed it to cool off too fast.
The paint just kept on retching, paying no attention to the brush that every critter that ate leaves seemed to admire. Then the buckskin lowered its head and started gagging too!
Longarm led them both back to the road afoot, intending to rest them both as the three of them strode along in the moonlight, with him mulling over all the plagues and dyspepsias horseflesh was heir to.
They had plagues, the same as hogs and humans, but it was as odd to see two ponies take sick at the same time, within minutes of one another, as it would be to see two kids come down with the whooping cough while you were reading them a bedtime story. None of the other riding stock he’d seen since getting off the train at the Dulce Agency had looked at all out of sorts. So what in thunder could have gotten into them?
The buckskin, the one he’d thought in better shape, suddenly snorted odd-smelling vomit out both nostrils, tried to breathe in some more, and failing that, went into convulsions at the other end of the reins Longarm was holding.
That added up to a whole lot of contorted horseflesh, bucking and kicking and flopping about on the trail like a big dusty trout he’d hauled out of the nearby Rio Chama. In the meantime the paint busted loose, and might have run off if it hadn’t been running in a series of circles until it ran head-on into a trailside oak and wound up flopping on its side like the poor buckskin.
Longarm let go of the reins, seeing they weren’t doing a thing to control either brute. As the two of them kicked at nothing much and writhed like wiggle worms caught by the sunrise on flagstones, Longarm found some horse puke, hunkered down, and got some on one finger to sniff at.
Horse puke, like cow puke, smelled oddly sweet to the human nose. There was something in the way grazing critters digested vegetables that made the stuff smell like malted grain. But when Longarm held a flickering wax match near the vomit he could make out yellow corn, gray shreds of oat, and what looked like fine red pepper.
“Rat poison!” he suddenly declared out loud. At the same time the buckskin, who’d showed the effects last, suddenly went limp and just lay there in the moonlight like a big tawny beanbag.
Longarm drew his six-gun as he strode over to the writhing paint, saying, “I can imagine how you must feel, you poor brute.” He dropped to one knee, placed the muzzle of his.44-40 in the hollow above the paint’s left eye, and pulled the trigger.
He made sure the buckskin was as dead before he went about recovering both bridles, the saddle, and his heavy but necessary trail supplies, muttering, “They must have fed you ponies red squill by the sugar scoop back yonder!” Red squill is a well used rat poison by folks with kids and pets to worry about because it only makes a kid, a cat, or a dog puke like hell. Rodents, like ponies, can’t throw up enough of the poison to save themselves. “I wonder which sneaky Mexican back yonder knew that much about ponies. There’s no mystery as to who gave the order, or why!”
Tying the two bridles to the saddlehorn, Longarm hefted the heavy roper to one hip and morosely regarded the dead ponies by the light of a silver moon. They both lay too close to the public thoroughfare. They’d spook hell out of any team or mounted pony coming up or down the valley day or night. But he didn’t see how he could move either far enough to matter with just his one human back.
He got out a cheroot and lit up one-handed as he pondered his next move. He was a good way from that trail town, a sure place to hire or, if need be, buy more riding stock. Those Mexican riders he and Kinipai had seen stringing wire close to twenty-four hours back had surely been off some stock spread closer to that place where they’d crossed the river. Longarm decided it was worth trying a mile to the south, and trudged that way, muttering, “Don Heman knew Ramon and at least two Apache gals might get steamed if he had his segundo drygulch an Anglo they were on good terms with. So thinking I was some hired gun out to join up with others, fixing to do Lord knows what down this same valley, he decided to just rat-poison my ponies and leave me afoot whilst they… what?”
Stranding a rider along the trail and making him walk for many a mile was a sure way to make him mad as hell, which was doubtless why the State of Colorado still hung horse thieves. It was run by old-timers who’d heard many a sad tale about long dusty strolls. But Don Heman would have surely known his dirty joke would leave Longarm alive.
He shifted the awkward load to his other hip as he clenched his cheroot between bared teeth and growled, “Try her this way. He didn’t want to kill a gringo close to home, but wanted him slowed down to an almost stationary target for later!”
That had worked, ominously well. Had he stopped in Vado Seguro the way most riders might have, those two ponies would have appeared to have taken sick and died on him while he was with the other Anglo riders in the saloon.
“Hold on,” he warned himself. “Why couldn’t you have simply gotten other riding stock at the town livery? Come to study on it, that town livery could have had rat poison of its own to spare. And you never told them stable hands in Vado Seguro just how far you and La Senorita might be riding. So gunslicks of either the Mexican or Anglo persuasion, coming up from them canyons after being sent for, could be expecting to catch up with you and Kinipai any time now and a considerable distance north of Rancho Alvera!”
He warned himself he could be playing chess while the other side was simply playing mumblety-peg like mean little kids who couldn’t even say what made them so mean. For like many an Anglo rider, or for that matter many a Mexican, he’d strode through many a set of swinging doors to find himself in a whole heap of trouble with assholes who were just mean by nature and inclined to view a stranger of a different breed as a personal insult just because he was still standing up.
Longarm decided to set his suspicions to the back of the stove until he met up with a horse doctor who could hazard a guess as to how long it took to rat-poison a pony. For he was damned if he knew.
His load wasn’t getting any lighter as he trudged on down the dark lonesome road, with night critters scattering off to either side as he made no effort to move quietly along the wagon ruts. A sneaky walker could get in a whole lot of trouble at snake time, the first few hours after sundown.
He was even more worried about spooking beef stock. His boots offered some protection from snakebite, but the undiluted Spanish longhorn was inclined to regard any human on foot as a target of opportunity, and while the moon was shining bright, many a shadow in the middle distance could well be a cow making up its mind to come tear-assing his way without warning. it was the female of the species that was more likely to really kill you, since the bulls tended to charge straighter and with their heads lower.