The waitress stared thunderstruck at his federal badge and identification as she marveled, “You mean you ain’t the Henry Crawford I’ve been… getting to know all this time? Well, I never, and there’s the mail coach coming through around midnight if you have to get out of town without anyone but me knowing about it, Henry. I mean, Custis.”
He put a hand on her wrist as he put the wallet away, explaining, “Ain’t ready to leave for good. Got to snoop around over by La Mesa de los Viejos, and it’s too far to walk both ways before sunrise.”
She gasped, “You don’t want to go over there alone! They say there’s spooks, crazy hermits, or just some sickness in the canyon soils. In any case, nobody lives over yonder or rides over yonder since the old-timey cliff dwellers all got sick and died a thousand years ago!”
He patted her wrist reassuringly and said, “We heard different. Your government and mine wants me to see just what in blue thunder is really going on over yonder, and like I said, I need a mount to lope me over there and back before dawn. How are we doing so far?”
Trisha said, “Heavens, I don’t keep a horse of my own. I’ve no occasion to go that far from this place I work or my hired cottage down by the river.”
She placed her other palm on the back of his already friendly hand. “I’d be afraid to ride out into the open range around town. It was Apache country until mighty recent, and some say Apache riders have been seen out there since!”
Longarm said, “If they were visible to the casual eye I doubt they could have been Jicarilla, Miss Trisha. You don’t know anyone you could borrow a mount from, saying you were brave enough to ride off somewhere you just had to get to tonight?”
She started to say no. Then she brightened and said, “Meg Campbell! Over by the schoolhouse! She does ride her own pony and, seeing she’s from a Highland family as well, we ought to be able to confide in her, Custis!”
Longarm said, “I’d rather we didn’t. Two can keep a secret if one of them be dead. A secret shared by three ain’t much of a secret to begin with. Couldn’t you just tell her some white lie, borrow her pony on the sly, and lend it to me eight or ten hours, Miss Trisha?”
The waitress thought, sighed, and said, “Lord, I don’t know what excuse I’d give for borrowing her pony over night. She knows I don’t have a sweetheart, and she’s homely enough to snoop if I told her I’d met somebody since the last time we talked.”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I wasn’t going to ask you to risk your good name. But since you just came up with such a swell excuse, couldn’t you say you had to ride out to a big spender’s cow spread to admire his stamp collection or whatever? I don’t see how your schoolmarm chum could hope to follow you once you borrowed her only mount.”
Trisha said, “She wouldn’t be able to snoop around any rancho I just made up. But she knows where my cottage is and it’s only a short walk from her own!”
He shrugged and said, “Nobody would expect to find their pony by any cottage in town if they’d lent it out for a midnight tryst somewheres else, would they?”
Trisha explained, “Meg Campbell’s nice, but she’s inclined to be nosy. What if she knocked, knowing it wouldn’t matter if nobody was there, but meaning to ask me where her pony was if anyone came to the door?”
Longarm started to say she couldn’t simply pretend to be out. Then he had a better notion and suggested, “You could hide out in my hotel room whilst I whipped over to the mesa and back.”
She slapped the back of his wrist. “Why Custis Long, whatever are you saying?”
He said, “Nothing all that indecent, ma’am. You’ll be even safer from my forward ways upstairs alone than here in this dining room holding hands with me. We’ll leave the lamp lit and you can read my Police Gazette and Scientific American whilst I’m out riding. That could even help explain where I spent the earlier parts of this evening, should anybody glance up at my shuttered windows. Might be a good idea if you were to move about and cast some shifty shadows from time to time.”
She didn’t answer. They sat there holding hands across the table a spell as Longarm gave her the time she needed to make up her mind. Then she did, and she was laughing like a kid starting out on Halloween with some laundry soap and rotten eggs as she said, “Let’s do it. It sounds like fun!”
CHAPTER 12
It wasn’t the schoolmarm’s cordovan mare pony that gave Longarm a literal pain in the ass. It was the sidesaddle he’d found cinched to the otherwise satisfactory mount when Trisha brought it around to the back of the hotel. The stock saddle he’d borrowed off his male pals at the Diamond K was out of reach in the tack room of the boss lady’s livery, and what the hell, it wasn’t as if he was hoping to meet up with anyone in the dark. So he handed his room key to Trisha, told her to make sure the door was bolted after her as well, and got on the mare awkwardly with his Winchester across his unusually placed thighs.
Actually riding sidesaddle made it tougher for a man to buy all the snickering things other men said about gals who rode that odd way, with the left foot natural in the near stirrup and the other one dangling in midair with one’s right knee wrapped around a sort of leather banana sprouting from the forward swells. He doubted a gal could really gallop astride, seated backward with that big banana up inside her. For aside from being too big, the knee brace was set at better than forty-five degrees off center. Longarm found this one braced his right knee well enough for him to lope the mare once they were off to the northeast a ways.
He didn’t lope all the way to that mysterious mesa, of course. It was too far for one thing, and too mysterious for another. He reined to a walk when he spied the moonlit rimrocks looming about a mile and a half ahead. He was glad he had when he heard distant hoofbeats.
He hadn’t been followed from town. The riders, a plot of riders, were coming his way from the canyon-carved mesa—fast!
Longarm reined off the trail into high, but not high enough chaparral, cussing the old-timers who’d cut all the real firewood this close to town. When the pony balked at moving off farther, Longarm dismounted, Winchester in hand, to lead the balky brute deeper into whatever chaparral was left.
True chaparral, back in Old Spain, was scrub oak. The Mexican and Anglo vaqueros, or buckaroos, had decided any sticker-brush too tall to call weeds and too short to call woods was chaparral. The shit all around seemed mostly cat’s-claw and palo verde, neither offering cover worth mention in bright moonlight unless you’d got a heap of it between you and someone else!
Then he almost stepped off into space, and told the mare he was sorry for cussing it as a balker once he saw why the trail ran the way it did. The arroyo running alongside was so deep he couldn’t see bottom. He sighed, got between the pony and the trail, and snicked the hammer of his Winchester to full cock. He knew a man could flatten out in thin chaparral with an outside chance of not being seen. But there was no way to ask a live pony to flatten out like a bear rug, and as long as they were likely to see the damned mare in any case, a man could dodge lead better on his feet. There wasn’t a bit of solid cover between his exposed position and the trail.
He could only stand quietly in the moonlight, hoping to pass for a clump of overlooked firewood, as he listened to those riders riding ever closer. Then he could see them in the moonlight, and he cradled his Winchester to cover the pony’s nostrils with a palm and held his own breath as well, hoping against hope, even as he knew he had to be hoping in vain.