It was a brisk, sunny morning with the grass still greening up in the rolling Flint Hills range. No flint showed above ground, of course, and the chalk it was imbedded in was rounded smooth as a big old gal’s tits and ass as it was weathered or hoof-stomped. Buffalo, pronghorn, and even prairie elk had grazed the Flint Hills for thousands of years before the first cows, of course. They hadn’t ridden far before Longarm saw the longhorns and black Cherokee stock that had replaced the buffalo and Kansa Nation.
But while the Flint Hills range was stocked more heavily than the short-grass High Plains to the west, they didn’t seem to be harming the big blue stem and switchgrass all around, with wheat grass and side-oat grama growing shorter on the taller wind-swept rises, for grass grew best where wildfire or grazing brutes passed over it fairly regularly. Where you rode across a draw or slope too steep to favor livestock, you saw more woodland growth, from ground cherry and prairie rose up through sumac and dogwood to fair-sized hackberry and blackjack oak, with the giant weed-like cottonwood ever ready to claim an overgrown gully for its shady own. They got enough rain for woodlands this far east, and the woodlands and prairies were at constant war, with mankind and his livestock tipping the scales either way without knowing it. So that was how come you had parks and street trees in the older prairie towns, and saw weeds and brush in vacant city lots instead of the grass that needed regular burning or grazing to thrive.
Grass grew from its roots, like human hair, while the forbs and woody growths that competed with it grew at their tips, and tended to give up once a prairie fire or herd of cows had passed over them a time or more.
He and Waco rested and grazed their mounts now and then, watering them as well at the few running creeks they crossed. But they didn’t cross many, even that early in the year, because the chalky bedrock below the springy sod sucked rainwater up, down, and sideways, the way chalk always tended to. Waco had heard tell of the Nesbits and a few others who’d tried to homestead in the Flint Hills. He said he was glad they’d gone broke before they could prove their claims. Next to damn Yankees, there was nothing Waco hated worse than homesteaders.
Reporters and dime-magazine writers back East were already making much of what they imagined as an age-old grudge between the cattle man, the sheep man, and the farming man. What they tended to miss, being city boys, was that everyone raised country dabbled at most every country way there was to make a living. Like many of his fellow High Plains riders, Longarm had been raised further east on a hardscrabble farm in the hills of West-by-God-Virginia. So he knew a cornfield made the most sense in one place, a herd of sheep in another, and a herd of cows on range such as this. It wasn’t as if cows, sheep, or crops were religious experiences. It just pissed an established outfit off considerably to have an already complicated life upset by strangers barging in with damn-fool notions to shove you out of the way. Farmers rightly got sore as hell when they saw beef cattle out in the middle of their barley crop, and cattle men could get surly when a homesteader tied up a quarter section of range, and Lord only knows how much water needed in a thirsty land, long enough to fail and maybe take some cow outfit with him.
The peculiarly pure American feud between sheep and cattle outfits made no sense to riders from, say, Australia or even Mexico, where sheep, goats, and cows grazed side by side. But that worked best when the same outfit owned all the stock involved. There were some few American outfits who ran mixed herds. But as in the case of the farms that didn’t grow anything but wheat, cotton, tobacco, or whatever, the American stock producer felt more comfortable growing a single cash crop, be it cows, sheep, hogs, or hell, poultry. So he hired like-minded hands who’d share his distaste for anything grazing where his own swell stock had been grazing first.
So as he and Waco rode along, Longarm was just as glad to see the Flint Hills offered few temptations to anything but cows, although back in the Shining Times of the Kansa he suspected the pronghorn and other browsers had kept down the encroaching brush a bit better.
He never said that, when and if he ever had his own cattle spread, he’d run a few goats or even sheep along with his cows to tidy things up in the draws. Waco had barely gotten over his north range Stetson.
A hard morning’s ride got longer when you started out so late in the morning. So it was more like three in the afternoon when, having eaten some canned beans and tomato preserves while their ponies grazed bareback in a watered draw halfway between the two towns, the now-friendlier former foes rode into the crossroads settlement of Minnipeta Junction thirsty as hell.
To his own credit, Waco didn’t have to be reminded that his pony’s needs came first. They left the two jaded mounts at the livery near the one bank, and crossed over to the nearest saloon to wash the trail dust off their teeth with some lager draft. Waco insisted the drinks were on him, if Longarm would lend him a little pocket jingle until the end of the month.
Longarm raised a brow, but did so with a game smile. As their eyes adjusted to the sudden shade, Longarm noticed a furtive figure slip past them, trying too hard not to notice them for Longarm to believe they hadn’t been noticed. So he quietly moved himself and Waco further down the bar, getting his back to a rear wall so he could keep an easy eye on the bat-wing doors.
But the next one who came in from the glare outside was his old cell mate Silent Knight, who came over with a grin to exclaim, “We thought that was you two ducking in here just now. Old Lash is in the barbershop across the way. He’ll be joining us directly, if only to find out why you two lovebirds just rid in together. Did I get your story turned the wrong way in my head last night, Buck?”
Longarm chuckled and replied, “We’ve decided not to fight no more. It’s too expensive. Did you just see a slithery young cuss, dressed cow, sidewind out of those same swinging doors a few minutes before you came through ‘em the other way, Silent?”
Silent Knight turned to stare pensively toward the street as he said, “Might have seen somebody leaving as I was crossing over. I never paid him no mind, albeit now that you mention it, he was sort of slithery. I just thought he was walking that way because he’d started drinking too early in the day. Is he somebody we ought to worry about, Buck?”
Longarm shrugged and said it seemed unlikely. He was wrong, though.
For up near the bank the one who’d slithered out of the saloon was talking to another shifty-eyed innocent who’d slithered out of the barbershop. Both had watched Longarm and Waco ride in and put their ponies away in the nearby livery. For they’d been chosen as lookouts with just such events in mind.
The one who’d been in the saloon and seen Longarm at closer range said, “It could be that long drink of water that we were posted here to watch out for. He didn’t look as if he just got out of no hospital. But the height, the build, mustache, Colorado hat, and .44-40 in that cross-draw rig add up to what could be the one and original Longarm!”
But the one from the barbershop said, “There’s heaps of tall tanned men with similar habits. Meanwhile, even if he wasn’t still in that hospital, he’d hardly ride into town with a local badman. I just heard some other riders from these parts identify them as good old boys they knew from sharing a jail cell with. Does that sound like a deputy U.S. marshal? The one getting his hair cut couldn’t see him as well. The one who just tore across to join him says his name’s Buck Crawford, and they both agrees he enjoys saloon brawls.”
The one who’d just left Longarm in another saloon decided, “Reckon it’s just some cuss who sort of fits the same description. I still say we ought to tell the boss lady, though.”
Chapter 7