Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister Page 14

  Longarm yelled, “Hang on! I got me some rope to throw!”

  El Moro gasped, “Have you been smoking funny cigarillos? They’ve spilled! There’s no stopping that much carne y hueso, once it gets to moving!”

  Longarm didn’t answer as he shook out a loop, smaller than he might have if he hadn’t been saddled with a backseat rider who kept telling him to get them both the hell out of there!

  Then he’d overtaken the mean brute that had gored El Morro’s roan and roped it by its right horn from its right side to inspire its whirling more to the right in a clockwise attempt to gore the wall-eyed paint, this time.

  But for all her bucking, the paint was still an old cowpony who’d been trained to keep the rope taught betwixt its saddlehorn and an object of any sort doing anything at the other end of said rope. So El Moro was screaming in sheer terror and Longarm was laughing like a loon as the two men rode one of the two beasts in a mad kerchief dance through mesquite and a whole lot of rising dust, as other beef circled in like soap bubbles swirling down the drain hole of a bath tub until, having no drain hole to swirl down, they just circled the central swirl in confusion.

  “We’re milling them!” EI Moro yelled in a happier tone as the big steer trying to gore the paint gave up to just hang there at the far end of the taut hemp, head down and tongue hanging way out as it pawed dust to prove it was still out to win, as soon as it figured this fool game out.

  Longarm had no call to explain to a cowboy how stampeding cows were inclined to stampede clockwise. Longarm didn’t know why most men were right handed, either. But he’d never seen cattle stampede the other way, counterclockwise, and once you had them milling in a circle, they were as good as standing in one place, save for all the weight they were out to lose on you as they panted and puffed with horns clashing.

  By this time other D Bar L riders had circled in on all sides to bunch the mill tighter, and as the herd steadied down to a milling walk Longarm saw there was no handy way to get that steer off the other end of his rope from the saddle. So he told the Mex behind him, “I paid good money for that rope and that steer can’t have it. Take these reins and scoot your crotch forward as I dismount, hear?”

  El Moro gasped, “You can’t be serious! Those brutes charge a man on foot on sight!”

  Longarm allowed he’d have to teach ’em better manners. He threw his right leg across the horn in front of them to sit sidesaddle just long enough to hand the reins to El Moro. Then he only had to draw his left boot from the stirrup to drop lightly to the dust and go hand-over-hand along the rope as the steer on the far end eyed him wildly, trying to solve a problem it had never been offered before.

  Then Longarm muttered, “Oh boy!” as he saw that tail going back up to arch just above its roots with the bushy end whipping back and forth like a cobra trying to line up on a swaying Hindu and his pesky flute. That long rack of horns went down. Longarm tried to decide which way he wanted to dodge as he remembered reading how no Spanish bullfighter would face this mongrel breed because you just never knew with a longhorn, bred for nothing better than stringy supper grub.

  Then another shot rang out and the crazed critter simply dropped as if it had already made it to the sledge-man at the San Antone slaughter house.

  Longarm glanced to his right to see Connie Deveruex demurely seated sidesaddle with a smoking Navy .36 in one dainty hand as she called out, “Get your rope and get back in your saddle, you silly! That brute cost me a good pony and Lord knows how much trail wastage. The one’s left ought to be easier to manage, now. What was that noise that set them off like that? It sounded like a rifle shot.”

  Longarm said, “It was, ma’am. Let me ride El Moro, here, back to his own saddle and I’ll see what we can find out.”

  He got his rope free and rode with the Mex to a roan pounded flat in a patch of trampled mesquite and cheat. He reined in and said, “Your saddle ain’t busted up too bad, and your saddlebags should have gotten your possibles through.”

  As the younger Tejano dropped off, he stared around to soberly declare, “Jesus, Maria y Jose! I think you just saved my life, gringo!” Longarm modestly replied, “I know I did. Don’t call me gringo if you don’t want me calling you greaser, El Moro.”

  The Tejano smiled up at him boyishly to reply, “Is a deal. Como se llama?”

  Longarm allowed Dunk would do well enough and left the dismounted Tejano by his battered horse and saddle for the remuda riders, bringing up the rear behind the chuck wagon, to cope with at their own pace.

  That mysterious rifle shot was the real question before the house.

  Rejoining Connie Deveruex near the dead steer, he spied Slim Gonzales and two other D Bar L hands escorting an Anglo in bib overalls and a straw hat, mounted on a mule, in from the North. Gonzales was holding a twenty-gauge shotgun high in his free hand as he rode within earshot to call, “This one claims he was hunting quail, Miss Connie. If you’d care for my opinion he was after a free side of beef!”

  The dusky blonde stared imperiously at the scared and neither too young nor too bright-looking Anglo as she declared, “Whatever you were hunting, you were hunting it on my land, Mister. Might you have the price of one good cow pony and one prime steer on you this morning?”

  The scared old coot whined, “I never shot no pony! I never shot no steer! I pegged one shot at an infernal quail and I missed! Nobody told me I was on private land, ma’am. I just rode south from my government claim to see if I could put us some game meat on the table, and I never seen no posted property signs!”

  Slim Gonzales said, “We’ve put ’em up plain every quarter mile and cleared a fence line we mean to string wire along one of these days. We know the damn yankee Federal Land Office has thrown open all that grazing land to you home-steading pests, north of the county line. Just like you were told, anything this side of it was the Deveruex-Lopez Land Grant.”

  He turned to his boss lady and asked, “What do you want us to do with him, Miss Connie?”

  She looked undecided and allowed she was open to suggestions. One of the Tejanos who’d rounded him up with Gonzales volunteered, “Why don’t you take his mule, scattergun, and boots in partial payment and let us escort him off your property, Miss Connie?”

  Another suggested, “Why escort him when we can rope and drag him? Being drug half that far would surely impress most nesters with the need to pay attention to property lines.”

  She turned to Longarm to ask, “What do you think, Dunk?”

  Longarm didn’t think he ought to say he felt sorry for the poor old greenhorn, who likely needed that one mule he owned in this world.

  So he said, “Only one way to deal with him, Miss Connie. Ain’t none of this mesquite tall enough for his toes to clear the ground. But we ain’t too far from them blackjack oaks to hang him right.”

  It worked. It was Slim Gonzales who objected that solution might cause more trouble than the dead stock was worth. It was the hand who wanted to drag a man miles through chaparral who said flat out that he wasn’t willing to take part in any murder.

  As there came an uneasy murmur of agreement, Connie said, “I can see how things got out of hand up Lincoln County way if your old boss dealt with trespassers so ... permanently!”

  Longarm shrugged and said, “You never heard me say I’d seen anybody hanging from a tree on Jingle Bob range, Miss Connie. I only answered your question as best I knew how. Nobody trespasses on the Jingle Bob. Some say that’s because Uncle John’s riders hang unwelcome riders from the nearest tree and others say such pests just vanish into thin air with their final fates unknown. I told you when you asked that I never killed a soul for anybody when I was drawing forty-and-found for working cows and working cows alone!”

  She insisted, “You just now offered to kill this poor nester for me, didn’t you?”

  Longarm just shrugged and asked, “If you don’t want us to hang him for you, what do you want us to do with him, Miss Connie?”

  He liked her bette
r when she snapped. “Oh, just get the pendejo out of my sight this time, and make certain he understands things won’t go as easily on him the next time!”

  Slim Gonzales told his two Mex followers, in Spanish, to escort the nester off the grant and just rough him up a little to make sure he understood exactly where the property lines might be.

  Longarm pretended not to understand. As a sworn peace officer he’d have been honor-bound to step in if they’d really meant to adminster cruel and unusual punishment without a fair trial. But, seeing the old greenhorn could use a little help with his own disregard of common law, Longarm was sure Billy Vail would go along with a split lip or a black eye.

  As the vaqueros led the trespasser north through the chaparral, the owner of the milled and bunched beef asked Longarm, “I suppose you think I’m a sissy?”

  Longarm grinned at her and replied, “Being sort of sissy ain’t no shame to a lady of quality, ma’am. What do you want us to do about your remaining cows?”

  She laughed and said, “Let them graze and settle down some more before we drift them back into line on the trail and move them out again.”

  She turned to her segundo to ask, “Isn’t that the way you see it, Slim?”

  Gonzales nodded, agreed in English, but added softly in Spanish, “These cattle are not the only wild animals we may have to deal with between here and San Antonio. I warned you this one could be a paid assassin!”

  She told Slim to let her worry about that and turned back to Longarm to tell him, in English, “We won’t be here long enough to brew a round of coffee. But I think we could all use something stronger after all that excitement. Ride back to the chuck wagon with me and I’ll stand you to a shot of tequila.”

  Longarm didn’t argue, but as the two of them walked their ponies to the west he noticed Slim wasn’t tagging along. It wasn’t for him to ask how come. But she said she’d told Slim to drift their madrasta, or bellwether, back to the trail and see how many others naturally took to grazing nearby. He hadn’t expected her to tell him Slim had called him a paid assassin.

  Passing the place where El Moro’s roan had gone down, its owner pointed with her riding crop to say, “I saw what you did for El Moro over there. I doubt the hide of that poor roan would be worth salvaging, but we’re still close enough to my home spread to send word about that dead steer.”

  Longarm saw El Moro out ahead, trudging alongside the trail with his saddle braced on one hip. You trudge beside a recently traveled cattle trail unless you admired cowshit on your boots.

  Gazing about at her grazing cattle he refrained from commenting on all that mesquite, accusing her of overgrazing, but casually asked just how far east her family grant extended.

  She said, “We’ll be camping on D Bar L range tonight and the night after. But in God’s truth our grant is not as large as some think. All such ranchos near all-year water were laid out as cintas with their narrow dimensions facing the rivers so that all might have plenty of water as well as plenty of land. I don’t know why New Mexico let John Chisum claim so much range north and south along the upper Pecos. It makes his Jingle Bob look so big, next to the really bigger Spanish grant of Lucien Maxwell.”

  He figured she was testing him some more. So he kept his voice as casual when he replied, “Begging your pardon, ma’am. Old Lucien died five summers back and it’s his son, Pedro, grazing them close to two million acres these days. We call him Pete Maxwell, and he’s a good old boy. But, for the record, the Maxwell Grant ain’t Spanish. Old Lucien bought out the heirs of Don Guadalupe Miranda and a French-Canadian mountain man called Beaubien or Pretty Good, and they’d been granted the land in Apache Country by Old Mexico, not the earlier kings of Spain. I reckon I’d best give yon vaquero a hand with his saddle.”

  She didn’t object as he called ahead to EI Moro, who swung around with a weary smile to wait up for them. Longarm had learned how to get suspects to talk since he’d been riding with old Billy Vail. It seemed natural to clam up when somebody asked you right out what you had on your mind. It got tougher to keep a secret when nobody seemed to think you had one, and they had many a mile to go before they were even off her land. So he felt no call to ask her right out why she seemed to be in the market for a hired killer.

  Chapter 18

  The drive took the better part of two weeks and they all had a heap more time than Longarm or Billy Vail had planned on to get to know one another. Albeit nobody in the outfit seemed to know Connie Deveruex in the Biblical sense, and Longarm doubted he was the only rider waking up alone in a bedroll with a hard-on by the second or third morning on the trail.

  They’d driven the herd a hard seventy-five miles in the first three days to trail-break them. Then Slim set the pace closer to fifteen miles a day, lest they wind up with a lot less beef on the hoof by the time they got to the buyers in San Antone.

  But even knowing beef sold by the pound, Longarm was a heap more anxious than their owner to see the last of their dusty hides in San Antone. Her crazy-mean kid brother hadn’t joined them along this trail as hoped. He might or might not be waiting on the sale of all this beef to grubstake a serious trip to distant climes. Longarm knew Devil Dave’s big sister could have sold the beef for way more up North in Nebraska, where the rails fed the crowded industrial East. But he couldn’t risk asking her why she was willing to settle for less money faster. It was possible the numbers added up much the same, once you tallied the costs of a longer drive and rail freight charges in with a quicker sale in San Antone.

  He’d have asked a lady her real age before he’d ask the price she’d be asking or how much beef she still had grazing off to the west. He’d been raised too polite and he knew no Tejano counted stars or cows. Or so they said.

  Earlier in that same century this would have been true. English-speaking folk were beef eaters. Spanish speakers ate pigs or chickens when they could afford to and considered beef a second-rate by-product of the leather, soap, and bull-fight traders.

  Up until the Mexican War, the Hispano-Moorish longhorn cattle of the Southwest had roamed half wild on the range they could get by on, whilst their owners worried more about such profitable stock as horses, mules, poultry, and swine because they all needed more attention.

  Brush-popping cows, living more like deer out on marginal range, had been rounded up from time to time and butchered for their hides and tallow. Cowhide tanned cheap, to superior leather, whilst cow tallow made so-so candles and the fine Spanish soap sold as “Castile,” but even the first Anglo-Texicans had left most of the meat to rot because there just hadn’t been any way to get more than a little jerked beef to the eastern market before the post-war railroad boom.

  Things were way different with business back East driving the price of beef ever higher, and even the Potato Famine Irish were able to afford corned beef and cabbage more than once a month. So the despised free-ranging cow now stood supreme as the livestock of the West, and it was the poor Mex or Anglo homesteader you saw raising pigs and chickens for market these days. For even Tejanos, trying to display as much high tone as their Anglo rivals, had taken to serving steak and potatoes in the bigger towns such as El Paso or San Antone.

  Longarm, having proven his worth in that first stampede, rode mostly right swing and prevented a stampede or more by keeping a sharp eye on the natural troublemakers in the lead and moving in fast to herd them back in place and pace with the morse sensible cows. The knack was in knowing when to wave and cuss and when to join a jailbreak as it was starting and see if you could get them to follow you in a circle-dance whilst the left swing rider yelled and fired off his sixgun to the outside of your circle. Any cow hand who yelled whoopy-skippy at a herd that was behaving would have been fired and encouraged to take up life upon the wicked stage in one of those Wild West shows.

  So Longarm was just walking his pony of the day at a steady two-miles-an-hour stroll a sparking couple could have managed along any garden path when he noticed Connie and Slim up ahead, reined in to
talk to a cluster of strange riders sitting their own mounts in a line across the trail. They were all dressed more Anglo than Mex, albeit the styles of the vaquero and the buckaroo, pronounced much the same, tended to blend into one another by degrees, and you had to watch who you called a greaser in West Texas.

  Longarm waved the flank rider behind him forward and told the kid to hold the milled and grazing lead cows where they were as he rode ahead in time to hear one of the Texicans calling Slim Gonzales a greaser. So he drew his Winchester ’73 from its saddleboot and put it across his thighs as he walked his pony to join the party with an inquiring smile.

  None of the ragged-ass riders smiled back as they regarded him with as much curiosity. He read their outfits as trash white with delusions of grandeur. Real cow hands seldom wore baggy pants or suspenders, and none of them had throw-ropes on their saddle swells.

  Falling in to Connie’s right, since Slim had reined in to her left as a segundo was supposed to, Longarm kept his eyes on the full-bearded obvious leader of the half dozen strangers as he calmly declared, “The boys asked me to find out why we’ve stopped here, ma’am.”

  Connie’s voice wasn’t half so calm as she replied, “That’s the topic under discussion at the moment, Dunk. These gentlemen seem to feel we don’t have the right-of-way across open range. These gentlemen must be weary of life.”

  Longarm went on smiling as he stared at the bearded one to observe, “Aw, it ain’t that hot this afternoon. I’m sure these gents have some reason for being so confused. Do I have your permit to talk to them?”

  Slim spoke out from her far side, “We’ve gotten past talking, Dunk. I just told them, polite, we had the guns and the grit to keep going whether they liked it or not and they called me a durned greaser and dared us to try!”

  Longarm repeated, “Ma’am?” and she nodded, so Longarm walked his pony forward, calling out, “Howdy, I’d be Dunk Crawford from Lincoln County and you’ll find me as easy to get along with as you’ll let me.”