Longarm - Longarm and the Apache Plunder Part 7

Longarm let go of the reins, seeing they weren't doing a thing to control either brute. As the two of them kicked at nothing much and writhed like wiggle worms caught by the sunrise on flagstones, Longarm found some horse puke, hunkered down, and got some on one finger to sniff at.

Horse puke, like cow puke, smelled oddly sweet to the human nose. There was something in the way grazing critters digested vegetables that made the stuff smell like malted grain. But when Longarm held a flickering wax match near the vomit he could make out yellow corn, gray shreds of oat, and what looked like fine red pepper.

"Rat poison!" he suddenly declared out loud. At the same time the buckskin, who'd showed the effects last, suddenly went limp and just lay there in the moonlight like a big tawny beanbag.

Longarm drew his six-gun as he strode over to the writhing paint, saying, "I can imagine how you must feel, you poor brute." He dropped to one knee, placed the muzzle of his .44-40 in the hollow above the paint's left eye, and pulled the trigger.

He made sure the buckskin was as dead before he went about recovering both bridles, the saddle, and his heavy but necessary trail supplies, muttering, "They must have fed you ponies red squill by the sugar scoop back yonder!" Red squill is a well used rat poison by folks with kids and pets to worry about because it only makes a kid, a cat, or a dog puke like h.e.l.l. Rodents, like ponies, can't throw up enough of the poison to save themselves. "I wonder which sneaky Mexican back yonder knew that much about ponies. There's no mystery as to who gave the order, or why!"

Tying the two bridles to the saddlehorn, Longarm hefted the heavy roper to one hip and morosely regarded the dead ponies by the light of a silver moon. They both lay too close to the public thoroughfare.

They'd spook h.e.l.l out of any team or mounted pony coming up or down the valley day or night. But he didn't see how he could move either far enough to matter with just his one human back.

He got out a cheroot and lit up one-handed as he pondered his next move.

He was a good way from that trail town, a sure place to hire or, if need be, buy more riding stock. Those Mexican riders he and Kinipai had seen stringing wire close to twenty-four hours back had surely been off some stock spread closer to that place where they'd crossed the river.

Longarm decided it was worth trying a mile to the south, and trudged that way, muttering, "Don Heman knew Ramon and at least two Apache gals might get steamed if he had his segundo drygulch an Anglo they were on good terms with. So thinking I was some hired gun out to join up with others, fixing to do Lord knows what down this same valley, he decided to just rat-poison my ponies and leave me afoot whilst they ... what?"

Stranding a rider along the trail and making him walk for many a mile was a sure way to make him mad as h.e.l.l, which was doubtless why the State of Colorado still hung horse thieves. It was run by old-timers who'd heard many a sad tale about long dusty strolls. But Don Heman would have surely known his dirty joke would leave Longarm alive.

He shifted the awkward load to his other hip as he clenched his cheroot between bared teeth and growled, "Try her this way. He didn't want to kill a gringo close to home, but wanted him slowed down to an almost stationary target for later!"

That had worked, ominously well. Had he stopped in Vado Seguro the way most riders might have, those two ponies would have appeared to have taken sick and died on him while he was with the other Anglo riders in the saloon.

"Hold on," he warned himself. "Why couldn't you have simply gotten other riding stock at the town livery? Come to study on it, that town livery could have had rat poison of its own to spare. And you never told them stable hands in Vado Seguro just how far you and La Senorita might be riding. So gunslicks of either the Mexican or Anglo persuasion, coming up from them canyons after being sent for, could be expecting to catch up with you and Kinipai any time now and a considerable distance north of Rancho Alvera!"

He warned himself he could be playing chess while the other side was simply playing mumblety-peg like mean little kids who couldn't even say what made them so mean. For like many an Anglo rider, or for that matter many a Mexican, he'd strode through many a set of swinging doors to find himself in a whole heap of trouble with a.s.sholes who were just mean by nature and inclined to view a stranger of a different breed as a personal insult just because he was still standing up.

Longarm decided to set his suspicions to the back of the stove until he met up with a horse doctor who could hazard a guess as to how long it took to rat-poison a pony. For he was d.a.m.ned if he knew.

His load wasn't getting any lighter as he trudged on down the dark lonesome road, with night critters scattering off to either side as he made no effort to move quietly along the wagon ruts. A sneaky walker could get in a whole lot of trouble at snake time, the first few hours after sundown.

He was even more worried about spooking beef stock. His boots offered some protection from snakebite, but the undiluted Spanish longhorn was inclined to regard any human on foot as a target of opportunity, and while the moon was shining bright, many a shadow in the middle distance could well be a cow making up its mind to come tear-a.s.sing his way without warning. it was the female of the species that was more likely to really kill you, since the bulls tended to charge straighter and with their heads lower.

That was why Mexican matadors only fought bulls, and flat out refused to consider fighting even a bull of any Anglo dairy breed. They knew the graceful fawn-colored Jersey milker, both male and female, had killed more men, women, and children than all the other breeds combined.

He was glad most Mexicans drank goats' milk, and preferred not to think of the hogs they had ranging free for acorns, mesquite pods, and such.

Hogs could be dangerous as well.

But when the strumming of a far-off guitar drew his eye to some pinpoints of lamplight way off to his left, he resisted the hankering to cut catty-corner through the waist-high mustard you always seemed to see around Spanish longhorns. The critters that admired the herb they'd crossed the main ocean with tended to lie down in it at night, and they could get up suddenly, with horns spanning seven feet from tip to tip, or nine feet if you measured around the curves.

He trudged on until, sure enough, he found a side lane heading to that isolated rancho. There was neither a fence nor cattle guard in evidence. So those hands stringing wire had been more worried about stock straying across the reservation line than goring poor wayfaring strangers on a public right-of-way.

Sneaking up on folks after dark could be as dangerous as the spooking of other critters. So, not wanting to waste ammunition, Longarm decided he'd best sing, out of tune, with that distant Mexican guitar.

It seemed to be trying for "La Paloma." So Longarm let fly with an old Irish ballad they'd based that trail song on. Instead of "Streets of Laredo," although to the same tune, he sang:

"Sure, pity the plight of a wayfaring stranger, With night coming on, and a long way from home."

It worked. He'd barely finished the first verse when that guitar ceased strumming and the lights ahead commenced to wink out. But the moonlit wagon ruts led him on through the darkness, as he switched to a more cheerful song about the Chisholm Trail, until a furlong or so on he heard a rifle c.o.c.k and somebody called out, "Quien es?"

Longarm replied in Spanish, giving his true name but not his true occupation as he explained how two ponies had died along the coach road under him.

There was a low, urgent consultation. Then a feminine voice called out in pa.s.sable English, "Might El Senor by any chance be the Custis Long some of my people call El Brazo Largo?"

Longarm, as that translated from the Spanish, sighed sheepishly and allowed he hadn't known he was that famous this far north of the border.

The woman called back more cheerfully, "Bienvenido, El Brazo Largo. You say you have need of caballos?"

Longarm said, "I'd be proud to pay for the hire of at least two, ma'am, and I sure wish someone might see fit to get the two I had off the road about a mile and a half north. I suspect they both ate rat poison, and in any case they're sure going to wind up somewhat disgusting."

He heard what seemed like a boss lady order someone else to gather a work detail for some hide salvage and an easier disposal than burial.

Mex folks were as bad as his own when it came to letting folks downstream worry about their s.h.i.t and garbage.

He didn't say anything. El Rio Chama ran fairly clear this far up, but it would carry the dead ponies into the far bigger Rio Grande, which ran as muddy and stinky as the Missouri by the time it got halfway to El Paso.

They'd made him welcome, so he moved forward, derringer palmed in his free hand, to be greeted like a long-lost rich uncle and, of course, relieved of his load as the gal took his left elbow to tell him she was honored and that her casa was his casa for as long as he cared to own it.

He knew she was only being polite. Both her English and Spanish were spoken the way landholders who've never had to ask for a job were inclined to speak. He made out her retainers, doubtless armed, as eight to a dozen. Some of them had already scampered ahead, he felt sure, when he saw lamps being lit and heard more music up the road a piece.

By the time they got to the hollow square of 'dobe walls with red-tiled roofing, they'd established she was called Consuela Rosalinda Llamas y Valdez. He was sort of surprised, when she led him into her well-lit Spanish Baroque front parlor, to see that she was a Junoesque gal old enough to have a streak of silver in her black braided hair, and that she looked more Indian than full-blooded Kinipai had.

As she told him his saddle and possibles would be taken to his room, and sat him on a leather sofa near the glowing coals of her baronial fireplace, he recalled what that anthropology gal who'd kissed so nice had said about skulls. She'd said all babies had the same cute little bones behind their face meat, and that the kids of the different races slowly got more different as they grew up, with the outstanding differences waiting till they got older to stand out. He'd read about that sad case of the pretty quadroon pa.s.sing herself off as pure white and marrying up with a proud and proddy planter, who'd shot her and then his own fool self when he just couldn't ignore the fact that his wife kept getting more colored-looking as they both got older.

It wouldn't have been polite to ask a lady with such a long Mexican name what Indian nation she might have hailed from way back when. That sweet-kissing expert on the subject had told him Na-dene were not as closely related to Comanche, Kiowa, and such as the Pueblos, who came in more than one breed. But although he'd noticed some Indians were taller, shorter, prettier, or uglier than others, he'd learned not to make snap judgments. Indians tended to intermarry more than white breeds, being less inclined to brag about family trees. Some Mexican had obviously found Miss Consuela pretty enough to marry up with, wherever she'd come from. She was still a handsome old gal, and she hadn't learned such proud ways overnight. He decided she could have been a mission child. Before they'd been run off by the Mexican government, the Franciscan missionaries had done a tolerable job of turning Indian converts into fair imitations of regular Mexican farmers and artisans, which was why the Mexican government had put its foot down before Mexican politics could get even more complicated.

The lady of the house on a well-run Mexican rancho seldom had to give orders. Her willing workers had the mythical faithful darkies of the Dixie that never was beat by a furlong at antic.i.p.ating wishes. So a pretty little thing with more white blood than his hostess had a big tray of tapas in front of Longarm in no time, with his choice of coffee or Madeira.

He allowed he'd go with the coffee, being too tired already for much wine. As she poured and served him, Consuela told him that, as he'd sort of suspected, she was the widow of an older grandee whose family had held this grant, close to twenty square sections, since way before that treaty of 1848. He didn't care. But as he was working on a tapa filled with mushrooms he sure hoped were safe, she brought up the constant bickering about land grants in more recent years.

Since she'd asked, he explained. "It's a matter of scale, ma'am. You know how much range it takes to raise stock in a land of a tad less rain, and I know from my own cow-herding days that you rancheros could use more because you raise stock Spanish-style. But the Homestead Act of '62 only allows an Anglo to claim a quarter section of land. That's twice the size of many a prosperous Pennsylvania Dutchman's farm, but a pitiful joke in cattle country."

She protested that was hardly the fault of her and her local neighbors.

As he discovered a nicer tapa made with cheese, he washed it down with coffee, nodded, and said, "n.o.body said it was, ma'am. The way Anglo cattlemen get around the restrictions of the Homestead Act is by claiming a prime spot for a home spread and grazing the unclaimed open range all around."

She shrugged and asked who was stopping them from raising their own beef any way they wanted. Longarm replied, "You land-grant rancheros, ma'am, along with the Indian reserves, I mean. New Mexico and Arizona territories, save for the state of Nevada, have way more land tied up privately or as reserved federal land than most anywhere else. The price of beef has gone up back East, as I hope you've discovered to your own pleasure. But even as cattle barons like old John Chisum are trying to expand, they run into Indian reservations bigger than some Eastern states, or privately owned land grants big enough to be counties at least. Your modest holdings wouldn't quite hold Manhattan Island, albeit Denver could fit in easy enough. But I can see how some new neighbor cut off from the river road by that much private property could feel vexed about the earlier administration's generosity. The Homestead Act came way after that Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, you know."

She looked so worried he quickly added, "The real pressure in Santa Fe is for taking back all that land we gave to the Indians, now that we've found some use for it. I just came down from Dulce, and n.o.body I met was wearing war paint. So it seems more likely the government shifting all those Jicarilla will free up a mess of open range any time now."

She stared into the glowing embers of her fireplace, her own sloe eyes glowing back, as she murmured, "I know how most of your kind feel about the rights of Indians. I have, as you suggested, a new neighbor who would like to graze all the way to the river. He has taken me to court twice since my Carlos died a little over a year and a half ago. He and his Anglo lawyers keep trying to prove I am an Indian, rather than a Mexican protected by that treaty, and hence, that I have no rights to this land now!"

Longarm grimaced and said, "I'm certain he'd just love to take it off your hands, ma'am. But you were married lawfully to the holder of a land grant recognized by Guadalupe Hidalgo, right?"

She said, "Si, but alas, I was unable to give Carlos any children, and they say it was he, a blanco of pure Spanish blood, who held his family's grant from the old Spanish Crown."

Longarm polished off a pork-stuffed tapa and said, "I'm sure the court dismissed his plea because of the usual precedent's, ma'am. You call a ruling based on what earlier courts have found a precedent. That was decided years ago, out California way, when some earlier California Spanish raised the question in reverse. Seems this Scotch sea captain married a land-grant heiress who up and died, leaving a Spanish land grant to a pure gringo."

He sipped some coffee and added, "It was a federal court that held that inherited property was inherited property. They weren't about to hand over all that land to distant Mexican relations. You have been fighting off this rascal in a federal court, right?"