There were no streets that Longarm could see. The houses stood higgledy-piggledy, and sandy trails wound between them. A few people were moving in the town. Most of them seemed headed in the general direction of its center. All but a few were on foot, though the hats of three or four who rode burros or horses could be seen bobbing along at a higher level than the heads of the pedestrians.
Instead of crossing the draw at once, Longarm nudged the dapple with his heel and turned to move along the sandy margin. He wanted a look at the town from one end, and wanted as well to get an unobstructed view of the river channel that divided Mexico from Texas. At the end of the sandspit he reined in and looked back. Now he could see the place from another angle, and decided it was a bit bigger than he'd thought at first; there were houses on the sloping western side that had been invisible from his earlier broadside vantage point.
Sloping ground led to the river. A lone fisherman, his pole propped in a forked stick, sat at the shore's edge. In its channel the Rio Grande rolled smoothly, its water an opaque greenish brown. The surface, unbroken by ripples, told Longarm the water was both deep and swift. The bank on the Mexican side rose sheer from the water. The rough, stone-studded rise was crowned with a thick growth of chamizal, a mixture of scrub mesquite, catsclaw, and broad-leafed pear cactus. It looked tangled, impenetrable, and unfriendly, as scrubby and shabby as the town itself.
"Well, old son," Longarm muttered under his breath. "It sure as hell ain't much to look at, and I don't reckon it'll improve when I get closer."
He angled across the draw to the humped center of the sandspit and rode into Los Perros, moving in the general direction of the saloon. Before he reached the building's tall false front, Longarm entered an open space, not a formal square or plaza typical of so many Southwestern towns; this one had no well-defined perimeter. The buildings that marked its roughly circular area were set askew, at odd angles to one another, giving the enclosure a ragged, unplanned look. The saloon, across from the spot where Longarm sat on Tordo, seemed to be the area's chief focal point; the second was a well, located a bit off-center, and half a dozen yards from the well a single, man-high post a foot in diameter had been set in the hard earth. The plaza, if it could be called that, was obviously about to be the scene of some kind of public occurrence. People kept arriving to join the crowd already stirring within it.
Longarm was less interested in the buildings and other permanent features of the place than he was in the people standing and moving around. Most of them were men, though a handful of women clustered at one side, shrilling at children who darted like so many small, brown, active beetles between the legs of the men. It was not a prosperous-looking group. The men were generally dressed in the loose raw cotton blouses and trousers of borderland peons; their heads were covered with wide-brimmed straw sombreros, their feet stuck sockless into huaraches of braided leather. Black was the predominant color among the women: black dresses that swept the ground and black rebozos that covered the wearers' heads and shaded their faces so that Longarm couldn't tell which were young, which middle-aged, and which old and wrinkled.
Against clothing dominated by monotones, the few men wearing charro outfits stood out like peacocks in a flock of pigeons and crows. The charro suits glistened with gold or silver embroidery on waist-length, fawn-hued jackets and on towering felt sombreros, and along the seams of skintight pants that were tucked into tall, shining, high-heeled boots. Equally conspicuous were the men, fewer in number, who wore the regulation outfits of border ranch hands: tight Levi's faded from indigo to sky blue by repeated washing with lye soap, denim shirts of blue or gray or tan, stitch-traced high-heeled boots, and broad-brimmed Stetsons, creased Texas style, a single deep dent running up the front from brim to crown.
Longarm was suddenly very conscious of his Prince Albert coat and his cavalry-style, forward-tilted Stetson. He was also aware that the eyes of just about everybody in the plaza seemed to be watching him. He looked around for a hitching rail and saw only one, in front of the saloon, and guided Tordo at a slow walk around the edge of the plaza, twitching the reins when necessary to keep the dapple from breaking up a group of people.
He noticed now that here and there around the plaza's rim, tiny threads of smoke were beginning to rise from the improvised stoves of food vendors. Longarm recalled that any event in a settlement along the border drew food stalls to feed the crowds, as well as vendors carrying trays of sweets, buns, and candied cactus and sweet potatoes. It had been a long time since breakfast. Longarm watched for a tray bearer, spotted one, and reined up. For a nickel he got three puffed buns crusted with colored sugar on top, and munched them as a prelude to the lunch he'd look for later. He sat Tordo long enough to finish the last bun after he got to the hitching rail, then dismounted and looped the gray's reins around the crossbar.
He'd taken three or four steps away before he remembered the Winchester in his saddle scabbard. In almost any place except Los Perros, Longarm would have left the gun where it was. Nowhere in the West would a saddled horse or its gear be touched by anybody except its owner. Los Perros impressed Longarm as being a town where normal rules and customs were ignored. He went back, slipped the rifle from its scabbard, and tucked the butt into his armpit. Then he joined the crowd that by now had grown to sizable proportions. The center of interest seemed to be near the well. He dodged his way in that direction and stopped eight or ten paces from the well.
One of the men wearing the clothes that identified him as a ranch hand stood alone, a short distance from where Longarm stopped. The marshal stepped up to him and asked, "What's the fuss about?"
"Everybody's waiting for the whipping to commence."
"Whipping?"
"Sure. Sheriff Tucker's got the right idee. Instead of lockin' a lawbreaker in jail, havin' to feed him and keep him, the of sheriff sees he gits a good whipping, then he's turned loose."
"Who's getting whipped today?"
"Don't recall his name. Some saddle tramp that pulled a knife on one of the sheriff's deputies and cut him a little bit."
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought public whipping was outlawed in the United States," Longarm observed. "Seems to me that was done when the slaves got freed."
Turning, the stranger faced Longarm squarely. "Mister, here in Los Perros nobody gives a billy-be-damn for the U.S.A. If you're a Yankee bluenose, this ain't no place for you."
Longarm was more interested in getting information than he was in protesting an implied insult. He let the comment slide by and asked, "I suppose this drifter stood trial, didn't he? And the judge said he was guilty?"
"Sure. It was all handled legal and proper."
"Who was the judge that tried the case?"
"Hell, we ain't got but only one judge in Los Perros — Sheriff Tucker. If you wasn't a stranger here, you'd know that."
"Seeing I am a stranger who don't know beans about your town, maybe you can tell me how come a man can be sheriff and judge all at the same time."
"Maybe you better ask Sheriff Tucker about that. It's just the way things has always been here, I guess."
"I see."
Before Longarm could ask another question there was a stir in the crowd and a murmur of voices. Longarm and the stranger craned their necks to see what was happening. A knot of men was coming around the corner of the saloon building. Their leader was an imposing figure. He stood high and wide in fancy, heeled boots with colored stitching and wore a tall-crowned Stetson creased in a Dakota peak, but his width competed with his height and detracted from his overall appearance. His stomach hung over his trousers top and rolls of fat forced him to wear his gunbelt too low. Even then, the fat crowded the butt of the old-fashioned ivory-handled revolver that dangled in a tooled leather holster. A gold badge was on the big man's left shirt pocket.