Many a critter was stirring, judging by the faint sounds in all directions. But the lower moonlit expanse to the southwest stared back up at him as innocent as carpet in an empty drawing room. He couldn’t make out the better-known trail along the main drainage between the neighboring ranges. If those others had built a fire, they knew how to hide it in a deep wash after dark. He figured it was more likely they were on the move, wherever the hell they thought they were, right now.
He resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke, warning himself how the flare of a match could be spotted from three miles or more by a human eye adjusted to the night. He could only hope some greenhorn on the other side might not know this. There was just too much yonder out yonder for his own night vision to really draw a bead on anything that didn’t look like brush or cactus.
He sat down, bracing his elbows on his upraised knees with the Big Fifty across his lap, as he willed his impatient body to relax and settle down a spell. He knew that neither the sorrel nor that mule were half as anxious as he was to head anyone off at any fool pass. They needed some serious rest while that solid food sank in. Riding stock farted that way when it ate too much green clover too. Any cavalryman who’d ever ridden down an Indian on a grass-fed pony could tell you it took solid grain to sustain a mount beyond a few short hours in the field.
As he lowered his head to his crossed arms, Longarm warned himself not to let himself go all the way to sleep. Then he remembered other times like this and sighed, “Aw, shit, we’re only human.”
So the next thing he knew he was waking up from a dumb dream with a piss hard-on, shivering and goosefleshed under his hickory shirt, to see the moon had moved quite a ways from the last time he’d looked up at it.
He would have turned over and gone back to sleep if this had been his furnished digs in Denver. But it wasn’t, so Longarm groaned himself to his feet, pissed on a patch of bare caliche, and headed back down to the trail, where he found both his equine pals had been dozing and pissing themselves.
He loaded up and mounted the sorrel to take up the slow but steady chase, knowing it all depended on how disciplined or self-indulgent the outlaws had been.
He got a little trotting and a lot of walking out of the mismatched pair he’d selected from a choice of four. He gave them a trail break once every ninety minutes or so, and forced himself to take another catnap in the wee small hours, when the cold night air woke him even sooner. Then the clear sky was pearling pale in the east, and he could see farther across the wide-open spaces he seemed to ride alone. The slopes to his left were less steep. The distant hills of sunset were now much closer. The valley between was less flat as well as more narrow. He could see how they were funneling their way to that shallow pass he’d been told about.
He knew two could play at most any game. So he dropped down off the higher trail he’d been following all night to find that, sure enough, a wider trail did wind its way southeast through the thicker desert growth where rains soaked in deeper.
But Longarm wasn’t half as interested in the cactus and stickerbrush as he was in the all-too-clear hoofmarks in the rain-smoothed sand of the damned old trail. They’d already made it this far, six shod and two unshod head, adding up just right for it to be them and all wrong for him to follow.
He dismounted anyway and struck a match to make sure. The sons of bitches had a four-to-six-hour lead on him. There was no way he could catch up this side of the border, and he had direct orders to never darken the door of El Presidente Diaz again. So how was he ever going to obey directly conflicting orders from the Denver District Court in the person of Marshal Billy Vail?
He’d been told to go fetch Harmony Drake from that Yuma jail, and he’d been warned not to cause another international incident down Mexico way. That was what they called it when you had to shoot a Mexican rurale.
So the gambling boys would have assured Longarm that he’d done his best but lost the game, and that it was time to get up from the table and head back to report that his man had simply gotten away from him, along with his badge and gun. That way, at least nobody could accuse him of refusing to obey a direct order, right?
Longarm rose with a sigh, walked back to the mule he was riding now, while the pony carried the pack, and morosely informed them both, “I know the two of you are tired. I am too. We still have to push on. Those sons of bitches seem bound and determined to get this child into another damned war with Mexico. But I still aim to take Harmony Drake, dead or alive!”
Chapter 6
Mules and ponies were only human, but any number could play the ambush game. So Longarm kept their unavoidable trail breaks as short as possible, and punched through Organpipe Pass after moonset and just before dawn.
There was nobody trying to hold the pass, which was more of a notch in the higher tableland to the south than a gap between real ridges. There was nobody guarding the border, wherever it was, when Longarm must have crossed it before noon. For the fresh sign on the trail he was following with a grim smile and a Big Fifty wound through what was a natural hell to patrol—or a paradise for cactus, large and small.
Something about the soil or the way clouds swept across that higher patch of desert had resulted in a tangled mess of organpipe, lots of saguaro, and way too much cholla, with a peculiar Mexican relation of saguaro that grew prone across the ground, like a green spiny python, to tangle its upright cousins in thorny logjams. You had to pick your way carefully through such tedious desert patches. He could see the rascals he was trailing had. The occasional horse apple he spotted in the now-dry dust looked dusty and flyblown enough to give them a good twelve-hour lead on him, blast Rosalinda and his own weak nature.
He had to give in to the natural needs of his equine pals as the sun glared down on their weary hides from the dead center of that blue dome. There was no hint of breeze from either side of the cactus-lined trail, and the mule he was leading kept fighting the line like a fish that just didn’t want to be hauled any higher and drier.
Longarm reined in and dismounted, muttering, “When you’re right you’re right. It’s fixing to get way hotter before it cools a tad, and Drake’s gang have likely holed up for la siesta by now down the trail a piece.”
He led his nearly spent stock between two clumps of organpipe and over one of those reclining whatevers toward a grove of wicked cholla. The mule had likely stuck its muzzle on cholla before, and tried to tell this to Longarm.
The fortunately strong-wristed deputy jerked the line the other way and said, “I know what I’m doing, mule. I know cholla looks and acts like the Devil’s own crab-apple tree. But the really nasty thorns all sprout from the pads on the ends of those corky limbs, and the trunks holding all that mischief off the ground don’t have any thorns at all.”
Holding both leads in his left hand with the sling of the Big Fifty, Longarm proceeded to carefully but quickly lop away the hellish fuzzy cholla pads that needed plenty of sunlight to go with the tree-like roots of its cork-barked trunk. Once he’d cleared a less dangerous overhang, he led first the pony and then the mule through, holding their heads low to clear the vicious thorns of the archway.
Inside the ancient cholla grove, they found it a shady if low-ceilinged bower, with clean caliche between the trunks a yard or more apart. The dense shade of closely packed cactus pads had killed anything else that had ever sprouted there, and the thrifty desert critters had carried every dry scrap away as grub or bedding.
Longarm tethered both brutes with their heads low and put extra water in their nose bags, along with a double ration of cracked corn. He knew the parched grain would go on swelling after the stock had downed it. But you seldom bloated a critter if you let it have its fill of water before it ate and you didn’t let it eat too much.