by Evans, Tabor
Nobody answered until he reined in close to the bearded one, who grudgingly said, “I’d be Hamp Morrison and you ain’t driving all them damned cows over the next rise behind us because we’re trying to grow some damned barley and we’ll not have it trampled!”
Longarm nodded pleasantly and said, “We’d heard the land office has opened up more government range to home-steading. Could you and me ride off a piece for a more private conversation, Mister Morrison?”
The appointed leader of the homesteaders demanded, “Why? Ain’t one thing we could say that I don’t want the whole world to hear.”
“I can see you ain’t never been married up.” Longarm smiled, adding with a meaningful glance, “There’s some things best said man-to-man that a lady’s ears might find offensive.”
It worked. As Connie stared thunderghasted, the burly Morrison gave in to his own curiosity and rode north with Longarm until the two of them were in sight but out of the hearing range of the tense confrontation on the cattle trail.
Longarm reined in first to say, “I just hate to talk about cow shit in front of ladies. Don’t you?”
Morrison swung his farm plug closer as he scowled and demanded, “You brought me over here to talk about cow shit?”
Longarm nodded and added, “Dry cow shit. Prairie peat. Texas coal. Burns slower than wood and I see you’ve already cleared a lot of the mesquite you found in these parts. You gents do have your new homesteads fenced, don’t you?”
Morrison said, “Not entirely. We chipped in for a drift fence along this infamous cattle trail. But the point is that cattle stray and our spring-planted barley has barely sprouted, temping as vanilla ice cream to your average cow!”
Longarm nodded sagely and said, “That’s the truth. You were smart to drill in barley. Too dry out this way for wheat or corn. You’ll want to raise some chicken and pigs as soon as you settle in some, too. Farming this far west of the Brazos without irrigation can be a bitch.”
Morrison looked more worried than angry now, as he sighed and said, “Tell me something I’d have never guessed. You see how it is. We just can’t have cattle crossing our hard-won crop lands!”
Longarm asked, “Ain’t there no open range left outside that drift fence you just mentioned?”
The farmer nodded but said, “There is. But it’s rough range indeed and you’d never get a goat to stay on it if there were barley sprouts in plain sight behind three strands of bob!”
Longarm nodded some more, but insisted, “We ain’t driving goats to San Antone. We’re herding cows with more riders than you really want to tangle with and, wait, don’t get your shit hot until I’ve finished, said riders can make better friends than enemies if you not only get out of their way but invite Miss Consuela Deveruex y Lopez over for coffee and cake whilst she beds her herd across the way for the night. Anyone can see it’ll soon be sundown and ...”
“You’re crazy,” Morrison cut in.
Longarm insisted, “I’d rather be called crazy than just plain stupid. You ain’t going to win if you try to bar a public right of way. I doubt like hell you could stop Miss Connie and the rest of us. But even if you could there’d be others, and vagueros don’t just bed cows down after dark. They’ve been known to burn unwelcome neighbors out.”
“Are you threatening us with night riding?” the burly homesteader demanded.
To which Longarm replied in a firm but friendly tone, “Don’t have to. Don’t want to. As a man with Miss Connie’s interests at heart I’d be first to advise her to just go around you unfriendly folk. It would mean an extra half day on the trail but likely less trouble with the rangers. The rangers can be such fusses about a little arson or gunplay. Other cattle outfits might or might not go around you. Whether they did or not, like I said, you’ve cut all the handy mesquite and you’ll be giving up a hell of a lot of free fuel! One herd bedded down overnight can leave wagon loads of cow chips, each about the size of a saucer and ready to burn like Irish peat, with less stink, once it dries out total under this Texas sun.”
It worked. As he’d hoped, the hard-scrabble homesteader had already cut and cured enough mesquite to grasp the advantages of an easier to to gather fuel. He cautiously asked, “You have enough riders to keep them north of the trail and nowhere else?”
Longarm smiled modestly and replied, “I’m paid to ride swing and not let ’em go anwhere without permission.”
So they rode back to their comrades-in-arms on the trail and the burly Morrison called out, “War’s over, boys! I’ll tell you about the deal as we ride home.”
Then he turned to Connie to tug at his hat brim and add, “My wife would doubtless be proud to coffee and cake you if you’d care to stop by this evening, Miss Deveruex. Our place is the first one over yonder rise, with the patent windmill and the scarecrow wearing a red shirt.”
Then he wheeled his old plug to ride after his younger pals as the dusky blonde stared in wonder after him.
Longarm said, “He invited your visit because there’s a handy cleared patch to bed the herd, across from his spread, with night coming on. But I reckon we could drive ’em a few miles further if you want, Miss Connie.”
She asked, “What did you say to him, just now? He didn’t seem the least scared of Slim, here.”
Slim muttered in Spanish, “I have no reputation as a murderer.”
Longarm pretended not to understand as he told Connie, “We just talked it over, ma’am. I’ve found you can talk your way out of lots of trouble if you choose your words with care.”
Slim Gonzales smiled thinly and said, “I used to know an hombre who could talk bankers out of money by choosing his words with care. He said, ‘Stick ’em up!’. The last I heard he was serving time in state prison.”
Longarm laughed lightly and replied, “Some of us have the gift whilst others don’t. It’s like shooting pool.”
Slim asked, “Did you offer to shoot him in a pool?”
Connie said they’d best move her herd on to that bedding ground. So Longarm loped back to the right swing position and they did as she asked. It took less than a full hour before they had her beef spread across the glorified weed-lot across the trail from the three strands of drift wire and the four quarter-section homesteads to the south. A little gal in bib overalls and pigtails came across to ask Connie to sup with her folks before the sun went down. Longarm hunkered with the other D Bar L riders around the chuck wagon crew’s coffee fire to sup on grits and gravy with chicken enchiladas. Tex-Mex cooking could get like that. He went easy on the coffee, not having drawn night duty and having ever more trouble falling asleep alone, as one lonesome night followed another out here amid all this nothing-much. But as he hunkered there watching the sunset, whilst cows lowed all around and somebody got to strumming a sad Mex tune on a distant guitar, Longarm was reminded of something he’d read about East India and the way they called the gloaming “The hour of cow dust,” which made them Hindu cowhands sound as poetic as your average Mex with a guitar.
Then it was deep purple with the stars winking on, and Longarm and his bedroll drifted upwind to a patch of love grass nothing had been grazing or shitting on. He was spreading his bedding on the vanilla-scented grass when Connie crossed the road from the Morrison spread, spied him there, and came over to declare, “When you scare men they do stay scared! I wasn’t able to get a thing out of Farmer Morrison just now. To hear him talk, you’d think the two of you had gone in business together!”
Longarm smiled up at her to say, “We have. Sort of. I convinced him it was better business to make friends with passing cow outfits than it was to pick fights with them.”
The dusky blonde stamped a boot heel and said, “Don’t be such a big fibber. You scared the liver and lights out of the whole bunch and why won’t you tell us what you said to make such a sea change in that big mean Anglo? Are you afraid we’d tell the law on you, Dunk?”
Longarm managed not to laugh. But it wasn’t easy as he soberly said, “Ask me no
questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Miss Connie. We all have our own little secrets and you don’t hear me asking you about anything you wouldn’t want the law to know about, do you?”
Chapter 19
Longarm had been riding six or eight years for the law. So he’d almost forgotten how much the daily grind of the cow hand reminded him of being in the army. They got you up early and let you off for the day late, when you didn’t draw night duty. The cow hand got more pay, but the army served somewhat better grub and issued you the duds and gear a cowboy had to buy out of his own pocket. After that, in both cases, you spent hours of boredom punctuated by mighty exciting moments and, the hell of it was, you didn’t want to let your guard down when nothing was happening because you never had much warning things were fixing to blow, and you didn’t want to be caught gathering moon beams when they did.
They were driving the herd across the Edwards Plateau, and “plateau” was French for a flat stretch, which the Edwards Plateau lived up to as tedious as it could manage. So day after day went much the same as they drifted the same damned herd through what seemed like the same damned miles and miles of little more than miles and miles.
But all those miles and miles provided more than enough space for an occasional something else. They had to ford what seemed the same chocolate-colored stream once or twice a day, and every other day or so they’d find themselves within sight of what seemed the same lights of the same trail town, with little more than a few shop signs and new faces to tell them they hadn’t ridden in a big circle.
Cows didn’t take kindly to surprises. So you let the sunrise wake them natural and gave them some time to water and graze, if there was anything wetter than dew nearby. Then you took your sweet time drifting them into line and moving them out some more.
When you came to water you let them scatter some and drink their fill because, like other grazing critters, they could store a bodacious heap of water in their guts or draw on body fat betwixt drinks, which sold by the pound at the end of the trail.
Moving at the pace of a courting couple most of the time, you let them break trail and graze a spell every three miles or when you came upon good grass. There wasn’t too much of that along a cattle trail by this late in the green-up, and a lot more mesquite and pear had crowded in where the buffalo had once kept the lawn mowed more neatly.
You wanted to move them well off the trail and bed them in a rounder bunch before sundown got the snakes and skittersome critters of Rattlesnake Time broke cover as the shadows lengthened. You never left a trail herd untended off its home range. But Slim Gonzales saw no reason to have more than one rider at a time slowly circle them after dark to assure them there were no wolves about and to give the alarm if there were. So, save for the two nights when it was cloudy in the East and threatening thunder, most of the small outfit got to ride into any town within reach after a day in the saddle.
An occupational disease you never read about in Ned Buntline’s Wild West magazines plagued the cowboy, or cowgal riding for hours astride a warm smooth saddle. Victorian folk who had to ride a lot, east or west, well knew of which they spoke when they allowed no proper young lady ought to ride astride, with her maidenly crotch open to the warm and constant caress of a saddle in motion under her until who knew what temptations might be popping into her innocent young head?
Cavalrymen and cowboys, having no choice but to ride astride as they rode more serious, just had to put up with the mild but constant crotch massage until they could dismount someplace where the local gals understood the natural natures of men on horseback.
Fathers, brothers, and swains of some such gals knew exactly what a stranger riding in after sundown was after before he settled down for some serious drinking and card playing. So, riding with a smaller than usual outfit, Longarm, Slim, Chongo, Cooky, and some of the other grown men of the D Bar L had to step in fast to nip trail-town brawls in the bud by hauling a younger rider away from some scandalized town-twist or buying her big brother a drink.
The older and wiser men of such towns, in turn, were as anxious to head off trouble and keep things friendly. For most every merchant and saloon keeper in the West had heard the sad tale of Abilene, the one in Kansas, where Marshal Tom Smith from the New York City Police had made a name for himself as a town tamer and brought financial ruin to the town.
In 1868 seventy thousand head of cattle had been shipped East from Abilene. Smith had been appointed marshal in ‘70, and in ’71 not a cow or Texas cowboy bothered anyone in Abilene worth mention. The welcome signs and newspaper ads in Texas papers that followed were just wasted money. The wide-open town of Newton was served by the Santa Fe and a tad closer to Texas when you studied on it. So it was now considered dumb to make cow outfits study on whether to ride in or ride around, and this tended to keep things under control.
Longarm was able to calm a couple of tense situations that Slim had to admit he’d needed help with. Most of the dozen-odd Tejano riders in the outfit were good old boys, Anglo or Mex, who only wanted to let off a little steam when the got near expensive whiskey and cheap women. But El Moro and his two more constant sidekicks, Pablo and Latigo, could get tense indeed with anybody. Longarm had been given an early taste of El Moro’s annoying swagger, and seen how the kid played to the audience he led around to watch him do his stuff. But, having saved El Moro’s hide that time, Longarm had an edge even Slim didn’t have, once the natural bully was strutting his stuff.
El Moro seemed to like him. It was simple as that. The three of them combined couldn’t have mustered the common sense of an average prize fighter, seeing they picked fights for no prize at all, but the spite-filled El Moro seemed driven by the simple fact that nobody had ever been nice to such a dedicated pain in the ass. So he’d been overwhelmed by Longarm’s common decency and seemed to think Longarm loved him, albeit in a manly way.
This caused Longarm no concern at first. He had way more important things to worry about, he thought, than whether he was popular with Miss Connie’s hired help. The two of them had gotten to talk a heap after more than a week on the trail, and Longarm was almost sure she was sending smoke signals with those big old hazel eyes, unless he was simply too hard-up to lock eyes with a gal and not think about her more private parts.
In either case, he hadn’t been able to get a thing about her kid brother out of her and that seemed only fair, since he hadn’t told her who he was really riding for, either.
Choosing not to buddy up with any other D Bar L rider in particular, Longarm was free to duck into a trail town Western Union now and again to get off a one-way wire to Marshal Billy Vail by way of his typist in the unlikely event Connie Deveruex still had Chongo watching him. The boss wrangler appeared to have lost interest in him, once he’d shown he could ride and Miss Connie had allowed he could ride along.
He asked his boss to wire him in care of the main Western Union office in San Antone if they’d found out anything about anybody back in Denver, or just wanted him to pack it in.
It went that way sometimes. There was never a pony that couldn’t be rode, never a rider that couldn’t be throwed, and nobody won every time. The rangers hadn’t been able to cut Devil Dave’s trail. He hadn’t been able to cut Devil Dave’s trail, and how could they be sure there was any trail to cut?
He could see that no kid brother, with or without that mysterious Hogan, could ride with his big sister and this modest outfit. Nobody had been able to find him holed up in Sheffield-Crossing or out on his home spread. It was just as likely he’d never come home, this time, or come by long enough to beg, borrow, or steal enough to move on, perhaps on down the Pecos where it met the Rio Grande on the Mexican border. It would serve the mean little shit right if he met up with Victorio and, come to study on it, those two sidekicks accounted for had been Apache, or Mission Apache, least ways. Knowing how to speak the complicated lingo of the NaDéné nations could make all the difference when you met up with the ones called Apache, or “Enemies” in the Uto
-Aztec dialects of most other Southwest nations. The folk who called themselves NaDérié, or natural folk, had drifted down from the far North, speaking a lingo unrelated to any other, and hard as hell to learn. So they were used to robbing, raping, and killing others, red or white, with little or no conversation and thus, when they did meet up with anybody who could howdy them, it confused the shit out of them and they had to study on what happened next.
Old Captain Tom Jeffords, a steamboat skipper hired to supervise the Overland mail through Apacheria back about the time Marshal Smith was taming Abilene, had taken the time and trouble to learn some baby talk NaDéné so’s he could hire an Apache friendly to take him into see Cochise and ask him what all the fuss was about. The notion that a white eyes was willing and able to talk to him astonished Cochise to where they decided to call Jeffords Taglito because he had a red beard, and leave his mail riders alone because he asked them to.
But the notion of Devil Dave and some Mission Apache breed joining forces with Victorio hardly promised better mail delivery!
Such grim notions tended to strengthen Longarm’s doubts about Devil Dave being anywhere closer. Then, one evening as they were camped on a lonely expanse with nothing to ride into after work but pear flats, Connie Deveruex got Longarm and his supper off to one side to say they had to talk.
Longarm allowed he was willing as they sat on the rim of a wash with their boots dangling and their mess kits in their laps, canteen cups of coffee on the stubble between them, as if to keep him from rubbing his hip against her own.
A man got mighty aware of shemale hips after all those days in the saddle if he was too fastidious for the modest offerings of trail town whorehouses.
Connie said, “Somebody told me you knew Irene Pantages, back there in Sheffield-Crossing.”
Longarm knew how complicated a web you could weave when you lied more than you really had to. So he just nodded and said, “I do. She’s a dressmaker. She told me she runs sheep over to the west and she asked me if I knew where her cousin by marriage, Greek Steve, might be. I told her true as I’m telling you, I have no idea where Greek Steve went or why he felt so inclined. I didn’t know him. I didn’t ask him where he was going. So he never told me.”
