"Get your hands up! First one that touches his gun's a dead man!" Longarm shouted. He was still hidden by the boulder behind which he'd crouched to survey the camp.
His call stopped the rustlers' hands in midair. Slowly their arms went up, and they turned carefully to face the direction from which the command had come. Longarm wasn't too greatly surprised to see that one of the pair was Lefty. He'd been very sure, after Lita's revelation of the night, that Sheriff Tucker was involved in the rustling ring, and Tucker had sent Lefty off with a reminder of a job that waited for him.
When he was sure that both men were frozen into position, Longarm stood up and stepped from behind the boulder. Keeping the men covered by his Winchester, he began to pick his way across the bare, rock-strewn ground down the sloping canyon sides.
Lefty's companion said something to the deputy when Longarm had closed half the distance between them, but Longarm was too far away to hear the remark or Lefty's answer. He called, "Keep your mouths shut! If I get the idea you're framing to jump me when I get close, my trigger finger might get sorta nervous!"
There was no more conversation between the two. Longarm was within thirty yards of them when the steer locoed. He hadn't noticed the animal in particular; all along the creek there were cattle running and snorting, disturbed by his shot. The one that panicked hadn't done anything to attract attention; it just reacted in the way half-wild range cattle do at the sight of a moving man on foot. The steer pawed the ground, bellowed, and charged Longarm from a distance of less than fifty feet.
Longarm swiveled and dropped the animal with a single quick shot, but the diversion gave the unknown rustier the chance for which he must've been watching. The instant Longarm swung his rifle to shoot the locoed steer, the rustier dropped his arms and drew.
Longarm caught the move in the corner of his eye and dove for the dirt. He rolled twice before snapshooting. The rustier's slug kicked up dust where Longarm had recently been, but the man dropped before he could get off a second shot. Longarm lay still, his rifle ready. The downed outlaw didn't move. Neither did Lefty. He'd seen Longarm shoot before, and kept his hands safely in the air.
Keeping the deputy covered, Longarm rose to his feet. He walked slowly toward the men, his eyes darting from one to the other. Ten feet from the campfire, he stopped.
"All right, Lefty. Seems like I sorta got in the habit of taking your gun away from you. Lift it out easy, and toss it over here."
Lefty obeyed. When the pistol lay on the ground at Longarm's feet, he said, "I told that damn fool not to try it. He got itchy, soon as he saw you was by yourself. Wanted both of us to throw down on you, but I told him I wanted to live awhile longer."
Longarm nodded. "You was smart, for a change. Who's your friend?"
"Name's Sanchez, and that's all I know. Never heard anybody call him anything else."
"Is he dead?"
Sanchez answered the question with an involuntary twitching. Longarm took two quick steps and kicked the fallen rustier's pistol out of reach. He took his eyes off Lefty long enough to glance at the downed outlaw. Blood was seeping through Sanchez's shirt. The rifle slug had taken him in the side, between his belt and bottom rib. Sanchez was beginning to groan.
"You better see what you can do to help him, Lefty," Longarm ordered. "Probably he ain't worth saving, but maybe he'll live long enough to hang."
Lefty bent over Sanchez, loosened the man's belt, and pulled his clothing aside to uncover the wound. "He's lucky," Lefty said, then added, somewhat doubtfully, "I guess."
Longarm's bullet had plowed through the flesh just above Sanchez's hipbone. It was too shallow to have hit a vital spot. The wound would hurt and perhaps disable the man for a while, but it was a long way from being fatal.
"Put some kind of bandage on him," Longarm told Lefty. "He'll live long enough to tell me a few things I'm curious to know.' "
While Lefty worked over the wounded man, Longarm collected the rifles and pistols belonging to the pair and carried them far enough from the fire so they'd be out of diving distance. There was a coffeepot propped on a stone behind the boulder off which he'd shot the frying pan. He set the pot on the dying fire and rinsed out one of the tin cups that lay by it while he waited for the coffee to heat.
Lefty stood up. "I guess I got him stopped bleeding. He's gonna be sore as hell for a while, though."
"It's his own fault," Longarm said unemotionally. "Only a damn fool tries to draw on a man who's got him covered with a rifle."
"You are wrong, gringo.'' Sanchez's voice was weak, but his tone was positive. "Is better a bullet under the sky with my hands free than a rope in a jailyard."
"Can't say I'd argue that," Longarm replied. "Except that a man's better off not setting hisself up for a rope to start with."
"Look here, Custis," Lefty broke in, "just who in hell are you? You damn sure ain't some drifter that just happened to wind up in Los Perros accidental-like. I'm guessing you're either an enforcer from the cattleman's association, or a lawman of some kind."
Longarm had decided the time had come to begin working on his primary assignment. To get Lefty started talking, he'd have to tell him who he was, and that revelation couldn't be delayed much longer. If he had to keep the word from being passed to Tucker, he'd hustle the deputy past Los Perros on the Mexican side of the river and put him in Roy Bean's jail up to the north, or even haul him to Fort Lancaster.
"That's a good guess," he told Lefty. "You just know the first part of my name, for openers. Custis Long is the full handle, and I'm a deputy U.S. marshal working out of Denver." He took out his wallet and showed his badge.
"You're a hell of a ways from home base."
"Not so's you'd notice, or that it'd make much of a nevermind. Los Perros is like a lot of places, it ain't organized by the state, so that leaves it under federal jurisdiction."
"You checking out the rustling? Or hot on Ed's trail?"
"What I'm really here for is to run down a cavalry captain named Hill, who took off from Fort Lancaster after a couple of his troopers who deserted. And there's a Texas Ranger missing, too, name's Nate Webster. That's what got me interested in your rustling ring; Webster was checking to see if the Laredo Loop was working again when he dropped outa sight."
"Jesus! Ed thought him and his partners over here in Mexico was too smart for anybody to catch up with so quick. They figured they'd be able to go five or six years before the law come noseying around, and here it ain't been quite two years."
"Tucker didn't fool anybody. I had him figured for one of the kingpins in the rustling after I'd talked to him for ten minutes."
Lefty sighed. "Yeah. Ed's got sorta careless of late. He ain't the man he was, six, eight years ago."
"That's why you and Spud began scheming to push him out, I'd imagine," Longarm said.
"It was mostly Spud's idea."
Longarm remembered Lefty's efforts to shift the blame for the attempted attack by Luis onto Spud. He recognized Lefty's value as the weak link in Tucker's outfit and pressed on. "This is as good a time as any for you to tell me about the whole setup," he told the deputy. "And I mean all of it, including the Mexican side."
"Sanchez can tell you more about that than I can. He knows it better."
"How about it?" Longarm asked the wounded Mexican. "You ready to talk?"
"Chinga su madre, federalista! You don' get nothin' out of me!" Sanchez spat.
Longarm tried reason. "I'll find out soon enough without you helping me, Sanchez. But if you talk, it might save you from hanging."
"No soy graznido, hombre! No dice nada, nada, nada!"
"You might as well spill what you know," Lefty advised Sanchez. "I seen this fellow work. He'll find out what he wants, one way or the other."