Consuela moved to join him as he calmly took a half-dozen long .50-120-600 rounds from their belt loops and lined them neatly in front of him on the black rock of the low natural barricade. He braced the Big Fifty to one side and laid the Schofield .45 Short by the cartridges on the rock as he said, “Maybe they’re only bandits, or even better, just making for that coach road betwixt us and them. They won’t spot any sign we left as long as they don’t cross the road to make for this shade.” She asked what the odds of them doing that might be.
He sighed and said, “It’s pushing noon and they’d be fixing to hole up for la siesta if they were back wherever they’ve come from. I’m fixing to fire my first round wide, as a warning. Anyone at all familiar with the rules of the Owlhoot Trail ought to follow my drift. If they’re innocent travelers, they’ll ride on and look for their own damned shade. If they don’t, we’ll know it’s open season on such rude gents.” She said she knew how to handle a pistol. To which he could only reply, “That would be swell if you had one. We’re going to have to cover both sides of this teeny mesquite grove if my first ruse don’t work. But right now I need both these guns, great and small.”
Before he had to explain further, the sun had risen another notch in the cloudless cobalt sky and what had seemed a vast shimmering sea just wasn’t there anymore.
The four widely spaced riders hadn’t vanished, though. At this still-wavering distance it was impossible to say whether they were Mexicans of the ruder sort or Indians who’d taken those advances they’d found useful while rejecting sissy notions such as property rights or the right of any stranger to go on breathing.
Longarm waited until the four of them got to the road and bunched closer around the one pointing directly at him and Consuela—or at least at the shade they were sweating in. Then Longarm sighed and picked up the pistol, saying, “I fear we’re about to have company. If they’re Indians they’ll read two mules heading out this way. Let ‘em get halfway along the ridge and then call out to ‘em to ask them nicely to go away.”
She asked, “Will that not alert them to the fact that one of us is a woman?”
He nodded grimly and explained. “When you’re down to your last chips you play the cards you hold. Tempting as the thought of your used and abused body might be to anyone who’s yet to lay eyes on the same, I don’t want ‘em thinking one gun is alone out here with a pack mule. You yell. Then I’ll yell at you to shut up. That ought to make them study on bothering to circle us in this heat, seeing two or more of us could be watching both ways with any number of guns, see?”
She didn’t seem to. He didn’t have time to elaborate. The four mystery riders had tethered a roan, a buckskin, and two paints near the road to ease along the low ridge afoot through the knee-high brittlebush. There was a clump of taller organpipe a furlong or a little over two town blocks off. Longarm told Consuela to challenge them just as they drew abreast of the cactus screen.
She did, calling out, “Veiyesen! No mejodas, cabrones!”
Longarm had to laugh as the four of them took cover. For such a high-toned little gal, Consuela had quite a mouth on her. Having no improvements to add, he called out in English, “Don’t fuck with me either, you dumb jerk-offs!”
He was answered only by dead silence. He picked up the Schofield and pegged a shot low toward that clump of organpipe.
Consuela saw the puff of dust, and sadly observed the underpowered pistol didn’t have that much range.
He grinned wolfishly and replied, “As a matter of fact, I could lob some slow-moving .45 Short slugs that far, if distance was all I was aiming for. I ain’t out to hit anybody with this six-gun. I only want them to know we have it, and that we were serious about wanting them to ride on and leave us alone.”
A blur of dusty white showed itself for an instant between some low stickerbush closer than those organpipes. She gasped, and Longarm said, “I see him. Two are hunkered behind that screen of cactus. The other two are trying to side-wind closer. They figure they’re still well out of range.”
Then he emptied the wheel of the Schofield their way to give them pause, and reloaded it as he soberly explained, “They are, if this was all we had at our disposal. I want you to move over to the far side of the mules with this and cover our rear. I don’t think they’re out to circle us just yet. I think they’re planning on waiting, just outside of range, until dark. But you never know what Yaqui might be up to. They like to surprise you.”
She took the Schofield gingerly, but asked if the Indians weren’t likely to fry their brains out under the hot son of an entire afternoon in August.
He said, “Their brains don’t work like yours or mine. Get cracking with that gun, and don’t fire it unless your target is closer than you’d ever want a Yaqui to get!”
She sounded as if she might be crying as she moved off through the dappled shade. Longarm didn’t feel like crying, but he sure felt alone.
Then he sighed and said, “Well, you were warned polite that you weren’t welcome here.”
Knowing at least one was nearer, with farther to run, Longarm drew a bead on that cactus clump halfway to the road and fired.
He was reloading without looking out for results as the echoes of his first Big Fifty shot were still fading. He’d reloaded as that one who’d been creeping closer jumped to his feet, yelling like a she-wolf giving birth to busted glass, and ran towards the smoking buffalo gun instead of away.
Yaqui were like that.
“You poor brave kid!” Longarm sighed, just before he pulled the trigger to blow the charging Indian’s left lung and shoulder blade out his back with a bucket of blood. Then he was reloading, as fast as he was able, and he still barely made it as another, wearing only white pants and sombrero, rose from behind some brittlebush to take careful aim Longarm’s way with a muzzle-loader left over from the Mexican War.
Longarm fired first. So it was never established whether the Yaqui had known what he was up to or not. It was said a Yaqui was harder to stop with a bullet than most. But a slug meant to knock a bull buffalo down seemed to do the trick.
Then Consuela was screaming and blazing away with that Schofield. So Longarm was up and reloading on the run. He joined her on the far side of the grove as the mules brayed and shook the mesquite branches above them. The Yaqui tearing up the open slope with a wild grin and a waving machete, despite the blood running down his side, seemed even wilder until Longarm dropped him with a second, much bigger hunk of hot lead.
He reloaded and put a second round into the limp form to make sure. Then he handed Consuela some spare .45 Shorts and said, “Nice going. Reload and keep up the good work whilst I tidy up out front.”
He got back to the buffalo rounds still spread on the rocks just in time to see the fourth surviving Yaqui trotting reluctantly toward those distant ponies three furlongs or better than six hundred yards away. Hence out of rifle range, or so he must have thought.
So the Indian was turning his head to grin back as hot metal slammed into his ear to tear his face off and skim his straw sombrero off like a pie plate.
Longarm reloaded and got up to call Consuela in, saying, “I counted four coming in and we seem to have put four on the ground. Wait here and I’ll fetch those sun-baked ponies.”
He did. But it wasn’t that easy. For as he broke cover, the fatally shot first one rose to his knees in the blood-spattered cotton to draw a wavering bead on Longarm and take another buffalo round where it seemed best to shoot a Yaqui, smack between the eyes.
Over by the organpipe clump, Longarm found that one staring up at the cloudless sky with a sleepy smile, his white shirt spattered with red blood and green cactus pulp. There was nothing worth taking from the faceless horror closer to the road either.