He smiled wolfishly and told his mount, “The odds ain’t as bad as we feared. Los rurales are likely to shoot all of us for our boots except Goldmine Gloria. They won’t shoot her before they’ve all had their turn with her. I wonder why we’re riding east. I’d have thought it would be shorter to that seaport sixty miles or so away if we swung around Sonoyta to the west.”
Neither critter seemed to want to trot in either direction. So Longarm dismounted to lead on foot at a walk as he scouted for sign in the greened-up desert.
That philosopher who’d first remarked on what a difference a day could make had likely ridden the Sonora Desert in his time. Cactus flowered in the spring, dry or wet, as if remembering they’d once been rosier. But other stuff with no way to store as much water paid more attention to the weather than the calendar. So fairy dusters were already sprouting feathery little leaves, and the scattered clumps of paloverde, which was usually a sort of gigantic witch’s broom of bare green sticks, were starting to bud like pussy willow. Tomatillo and jobjola brush that had looked dead and dried out before that rain were suddenly green and perky as if they’d been growing in a park back East. Staring down at the crust of caliche for hoofprints, Longarm made out microscopic flowers he’d have otherwise missed. They were mostly yellow, but came in all colors, as if meant to go in some little gal’s doll house in a teeny-tiny vase.
The bunch he was trailing had spread some to ride through the paloverde and cactus clumps. So Longarm concentrated on just one set of prints, left by a pony who’d thrown its near rear shoe as its rider set as direct a course as possible almost due east.
An hour off the trail, Longarm had to lead around the flyblown remains of a roadrunner someone had blasted almost in two, likely with a pistol shot.
“Miserable bastards,” Longarm muttered as he skirted the column of flies above the pathetic ruins of a recently lively clown-bird. It wasn’t hard to kill roadrunners. They got their name from their habit of scampering along with desert travelers, likely to catch the sneakier critters flushed by hooves or wagon wheels. No Indian would dream of harming such a friendly critter with such tasteless stringy meat. Mexicans admired them because they cleared the roads of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and such. But there was a variety of Anglo asshole that simply couldn’t resist taking potshots at road signs, saguaros, songbirds, or anything else that wasn’t likely to shoot back.
“They passed this way by daylight,” Longarm assured the mule as they hurried on. He had no call to tell a Papago mule that roadrunners patrolled for snakes, lizards, and bugs early in the morning or late in the afternoon. The poor dead bird was too flyblown for death within the past few hours. It wouldn’t have come out of the shade to get shot by a prickhead it was only running with during the siesta hours just past. Longarm decided the outlaws were eight or ten hours ahead of him. Even less, if they’d holed up out ahead for their own siesta.
He knew he had that edge if anyone was lying in wait out ahead. He didn’t see why anyone would be, but they’d have the late sun in their eyes while he’d be aiming at a well-lit target. Old U.S. Grant had told his boys they’d have the sunrise at their backs as they advanced at Cold Harbor. Old U.S. Grant had gotten one hell of a heap of his boys killed at Cold Harbor, come to study on it. But it might have been worse had the sun been shining the other way.
He almost fell over the edge of the dry wash winding south to north through the cactus and stickerbush. You had to be right on top of it to know it was there. Once you did, the brushy bottom was so shaded that Miss Cleopatra could have been performing a snake dance in those inky shadows for all he could tell from up where he was.
It got much easier to see as soon as he and his riding stock had worked down a crumbling wall to the sandy bottom. Flood waters had scoured the center of the wash clean, save for the neatly defined hoofprints left by the bunch he’d been trailing. He wasn’t at all surprised to see they were all headed south, towards what had to be a nearby border now.
“Slick,” Longarm reluctantly grunted as he paused to change the Mexican saddle back to the sorrel mare for a spell. He watered both brutes again, forked himself into that hardwood saddle, and followed the spoor of the fugitives up the wash.
It was running north out of higher desert because the original peace treaty had set the border along the Gila River to the north. That had left things awkward for both countries before the Gadsden Purchase had drawn a new imaginary line, designed to leave the natural watershed of the east-west Gila to Uncle Sam and the Southern Pacific Railroad. But in point of fact, Mexico had wound up with the headwaters of many a desert stream running downhill to the north. It hadn’t been raining when they’d surveyed the Gadsden Purchase.
So this wandering wash he was following likely began as a dried-out mud puddle somewhere south of the border, but with any luck, it didn’t matter to Mexico anyway.
Longarm patted the sorrel’s neck and muttered, “Five will get you ten those banditos rode you and your palomino pal down this very wash the other way before we had all that rain.”
He glanced back to see their own hoofprints were adding a mighty clear picture to the ones they were following. Los rurales were no damned good, but they were skilled manhunters, and anyone could see a heap of likely prosperous Yanqui riders had come up this same fool wash without bothering anyone at the regular crossing.
He hummed a few bars of “Farther Along” as he rode on after the others, hoping their guide had some clear plan in mind.
It was almost as pleasant as a hot Denver day in July down here in the shadows cast by the high banks and thicker brush. No members of the cactus tribe could survive with their shallower roots spread in sand that got scoured about once a year, of course. But the water that lay deeper in the drying sand encouraged mesquite, ironwood, and hackberry, all of it greened out again as if it thought this was May, for Pete’s sake, and the critters that usually holed up in the summer daylight of the desert were acting frisky all about, which was sort of distracting, but meant nobody was sitting in ambush around the next bend, at least.
Cicadas buzzed, white-wings cooed, and woodpeckers hammered in the olive greenery to either side as big blue-gray dragonflies chased red-eyed cactus flies about like kids playing tag after school. Now and again a ground squirrel cussed him, and once he flushed a comical desert jackrabbit with impossible ears and a zigzag way of running that made Longarm suspect some of those buzzards high above. He knew one breed of desert hawk grew black feathers and held its wings out the same way as a harmless buzzard until it saw fresh meat on the move down below. This highly evolved desert held lots of such grim surprises for the unwary.
Longarm wasn’t all that surprised when they cut throughb some brush to see the sand ahead all trampled and strewn with dried scraps and the shit of man and beast. The remains of more than one cook-fire told Longarm this was where the border-patrolling rurales paused to brew some coffee out of sight of prying eyes. Los rurales were out to jump border raiders and truculent Indians, not vice versa.
You couldn’t make out any particular set of tracks across the abused stretch of wash. That meant a Mexican detachment, a big Mexican detachment, had been through here since the last rain. It was as likely a federale or army column as the usual rurale patrol. Longarm hurried on lest the usual evening patrol catch him admiring all the scattered sign down here.
He caught up with the sign of Harmony Drake’s bunch on the cleaner sand upstream. He followed it because he had to. But he still wondered what in blue blazes was supposed to prevent the next rurale patrol from Sonoyta from cutting and following such a blatant trail.