The riding stock didn’t argue. The two Mexican ponies were as used to the taste of skinned-out cactus as the Papago mules. The only clue to anyone’s identity was a crumpled reward poster, in Spanish, saying that the governor of Sonora would pay a thousand pesos for the head of one Juan Pablo Ebanista, wanted for everything including poor church attendance. There was nothing on the other wayward youth.
Longarm discarded the dirty spare duds, filthy bedrolls, and dried grub the two of them had been packing. The same wet spell that had cleaned both exposed tree-dally saddles had spoiled their jerked beef, cornmeal, and beans.
He had no use for their canteens at the moment, but left them in place just in case, once he’d rinsed them out and refilled the four of them from a sandy puddle of standing rainwater by the trail. For the late afternoon sky was rapidly clearing, with the low western sun outlining the remaining clouds in bright gold, and they’d never named these parts a desert because it rained with any regularity.
Longarm found and treasured half a box of .45-28 Army Shorts for the poorly kept Schofield tucked in his pants. The army issued, and lost, a lot of underpowered but heavy slugs with the same reasoning it issued easy-to-maintain but slow-firing small arms. Recruiting many an immigrant greenhorn into its low-paid ranks, the army didn’t want any kid who’d never handled a gun before blazing away all his ammunition at once, or flinching from recoil too much to aim the one shot at a time they wanted from him. So they’d turned down the original 40-grain charges offered by more than one bemused gunmaker in favor of the shorter and more gently kicking army rounds.
The ubiquitous Schofield was an army ordinance design rather than a brand. Although Smith & Wesson made the most of the break-front notions of Major George—not General John—Schofield. Meant to be packed as only a backup to a trooper’s rifle or carbine, the rugged but far from ideal six-gun might hit an aimed-at target fifty yards away. But the small kick sacrificed any killing power the Schofield had past, say, a hundred yards.
All five of those outlaws he was trailing, and likely that mean gal, packed .45 or .44-40 side arms that could kill, with any luck, from five times as far away. The only edge Longarm had was the Big Fifty, if they weren’t expecting him to aim anything that awesome their way. Gunfighters expecting regular gunfighting might expose themselves at what they considered the safe distance of five hundred yards, a dead-easy bull’s-eye with a Big Fifty.
But like the old gospel song said, they’d know more about that farther along. So once he had his superabundance of riding stock watered and fed on cactus pulp, and seeing he knew the mules far better, Longarm shifted his water bags but no trail supplies to the mule he’d been riding, tethered the four of them along one of the Mexican’s rawhide riatas, and mounted that palomino barb to get acquainted as he got them all on up the trail.
By sundown he’d ridden all four brutes, and knew the sorrel mare and the taller of the two mules were less trouble. The smaller mule had been fighting the lead for some time. The palomino barb seemed to feel much the same way as its previous owner about riders who spoke to it in English. Longarm could have managed any two of the four if he’d had to. But he didn’t have to, and the constant argument was slowing them all a bit. So when he stopped for another trail break while the sun set glorious in a fluffy bed of red and gold, Longarm put the most comfortable of the two Mexican saddles on the more willing mule, tossed the other in a circle of greasewood down the slope, and cut a length of riata to loosely tether the stubborn mule and surly palomino together as he gently explained to the pony, “I don’t like you either. But it would be cruel to leave you to find your own way out here, with the air already commencing to smell dry again. So stick with this mule and you’ll both wind up back in that Papago camp, where you’d better learn to control your damned temper, hear?”
The pony lashed out with a hind hoof as Longarm hit the mule it was with across the rump. Then they were both escaping from him down the trail with snorts of equine mischief. Longarm had to laugh too. Then he mounted the more reasonable mule, gently jerked the lead he’d tied to the sorrel’s bridle, and led off to the southeast at a ball-busting but mile-eating trot.
Getting to stand in the tapped stirrups of that easy-riding Mexican saddle seemed a treat at any pace after all that bareback riding. The saddle had been invented with that in mind. The Mexican-made Moorish ancestor of the American stock saddle, despite its cantle and swells of exposed cottonwood, was, if anything, more chair-like. For while Anglo cowhands preferred to fall clear of a cart-wheeling pony when things went wrong, the Mexican vaquero was inclined to be more fatalistic about the possible future, and preferred his ass comfortable in the here and now. So the saddle Longarm had salvaged for his trotting mule cradled the bigger frame of an Anglo rider as if the bare wood had been molded to his thighs and pelvis like clay. He’d already made a mental note not to risk a downhill lope in the dark aboard such a dangerously comfortable saddle. It hardly seemed likely either mount was likely to fall under him along the sandy trail, even as it got tougher to make out. He knew all riding stock saw better than he did in the dark. The one good thing to be said for your mount being dumber than another human, or even a dog, was that you could count on it to just stop when it couldn’t tell what was in front of it. You had to be smart enough to care what a master thought of you before you’d take really stupid chances.
As the sky kept clearing, the stars got awesomely bright against the blackness of what was again a dried-out desert sky. You never really got to lick your eyes across the Milky Way where there were any street lights at all. But those old-timers who’d made up all the names for the stars had been desert dwellers too. So riding under the same breed of night sky, you could see what they’d been jawing about in those old astrology books. That big old Dog Star, staring down from the August sky, really did look hot-tempered and glaring when you got to stare back at it. He’d heard those Moors who’d taught the Spanish so much about roping and riding had named one star up yonder “The Ghoul,” ghoul being a Moorish word, because of the way it got dim and bright, mysterious and sort of spooky, next to the other stars. He couldn’t make out any ghoulish stars, but that distinctly red one closer to the horizon had to be old Mars, which was said to be a world like this one, all covered with red deserts, like the Four Corners up the other side of the Gila. Nobody could say whether there might be any folks roaming the Martian deserts. Longarm waved a howdy in any case.
Then the moon came up, lemon yellow as it rose above the jet-black fangs of the jaggedy Growlers, to bathe everything for miles around in a ghostly glow that set coyotes to howling and things in the brush all about to skittering.
The pony had farted five times in as many recent minutes, so it seemed a good time to combine more than one concern. Longarm reined in, dismounted, and broke out the nose bags he’d packed for the two mules with occasions such as this one in mind. He put a generous but thoughtful amount of water and cracked corn in each bag, and put them on both brutes before he unsaddled them both to dry as they munched and lazed beside the trail.
Then he and the Big Fifty went up the slope a furlong to see what could be seen out yonder in the moonlight.