Longarm on the Fever Coast (10 page)

Waving the dripping muzzle of his six-gun at the two wet rats hunkered in windswept misery at the rear of the heavy wagon, he explained. "You're going to guide me through this stormy night to where I want to go, Juanito. I'll kill you at the first suspicion we ain't headed the right way, and Lord only knows what'll ever happen to these pals of yours. Must get hot and thirsty as hell around here when the sun comes back in the Texas sky after a storm."

Hunkered by the wheel, Lamas bitched, "You can't do that to fellow cristianos, senor! Nobody but a Comanche would kill anyone as slow as that!"

Longarm said, "I ain't finished. So all three of you listen tight. When and if Juanito gets me safe and sound to Escondrijo, I mean to turn him loose with the key to them cuffs. If he knows the way down to Escondrijo he ought to know the way back. You'll wind up with a free set of handcuffs instead of my shirt and rosy red rectum. So I'd best take your guns and pocket money in exchange."

They protested it wasn't fair to rob them at gunpoint the way they'd been planning to rob him. He just laughed. When young Juanito asked if he might have his own pony to ride both ways, Longarm thought that was sort of funny too. He said, "It ain't too far for you to make on foot in one day, if you really put your mind to it."

When Juanito insisted it would take him at least eighteen hours, Longarm just shrugged and said, "We'd best be on our way then. For I suspicion these pals of yours will be hot and thirsty as all get out by the time you hoof it all the way back with the key to them cuffs."

CHAPTER 7

The storm let up before sunrise. It still took longer to make it to Escondrijo by way of Juanito's longer route through higher range to the west. By then they'd spent enough time together, with nothing better to do than talk, for Longarm to have gotten a handle on what Juanito and the others had been doing out in all that rain.

They were gun runners, waiting for a load of British Enfield rifles they meant to smuggle across the border up above Laredo. Longarm had a notion he knew the unguarded stretch they'd had in mind. He knew a Mexican rebel depending on the federate troops he fought for ammunition favored the same brand of rifles most federales still used. Mexico had gotten a swell buy on Enfields, considering what they cost folks who meant to pay for them sooner or later. Old Sam Colt had known enough to demand cash on the barrel head for the horse pistols los rurales got to fire at pigs and chickens on their way through many a sullen village.

Finally Longarm spied church spires and chimney smoke against the sunrise to their east. He turned to Juanito and said, "That Scotch poet was right about the best-laid plans of mice and men, you mean little shit. I was fixing to wire the Rangers and have 'em waiting for you by the time you hiked all the way back."

"That is not the deal we made!" protested the unhappy youth.

But Longarm replied, "Yes, it was, as soon as you study the small print. I'm a lawman and the three of you confessed right out, albeit in Spanish, you were fixing to waylay me and worse. But I ain't finished. I may be a lawman, but I suffer from this rough sense of justice, and there ain't no justice down Mexico way with that piss-faced Porfirio Diaz calling his fool self El Presidente, as if he'd been elected, the lying son of a bitch."

Juanito turned on the seat they were sharing. "You know this much about my poor country and her poor people, senor?"

Longarm shrugged and replied, "Not as well as I might if I'd been born that unfortunate, I'll allow, but well enough to suspicion most any government you rebels could come up with would have to be some improvement. So getting back to the deal we made, I reckon I'm going to have to keep it the way you thought I meant it, with no small print. You can save yourself better than an hour afoot if you get off right here and get going whilst it's still cool. Grab one of them canteens in the back, and what the hell, you ought to be able to pack along a few tortillas. A lady I know rolled some in wax paper for me back in Corpus Christi. So here's the damn key, grab what you need and just git! What are you waiting for, a good-bye kiss?"

The kid rummaged in the wagon box for the water and trail grub as he murmured, "I do not understand you at all, senor. I mean, now that I recall our earlier conversation, I see what you mean by small print. Is true you only said you would turn me loose with this key. You never said you would not tell the Rangers we were ladrenes, or where we might be found. Pero what has changed your mind about us?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "I haven't changed my mind about you. I still think you're three mierditas who'd be a disgrace to your families if anyone could say who your fathers might have been. But you ain't the only Mex rebels I've ever met, and some of the ones I like better may need them rifles before El Presidente steps down of his own free will. So adios, shithead, and shoot a federale for me, if you have the balls."

Juanito dropped off the far side with Longarm's generous issue of water and trail grub and the handcuff key in a pocket. Then he said, "I think I know who you must be now. My people speak of a muy gringo but simpatico Yanqui they call El Brazo Largo."

Longarm didn't answer. He just snapped the ribbons to drive on to town, leaving Juanito to stand there, making the sign of the cross as he marveled, "Jesus, Maria y Jose! I threatened to screw El Brazo Largo before I killed him and I am still alive! They are right about him. The man is a goddamn saint!"

Longarm didn't hear that, which was just as well. For he already felt sort of guilty about it being such a beautiful morning. All that wind from the sea had left the coastal plain smelling cool and clean as a whistle, with the salt grass dewy and lightly grazed this far out of town. He spied a few widely scattered sea lions, as longhorns grazing the swampy coast ranges were called by Texicans. Some of them stared back at him wall-eyed, but none of them shied off at the sight of a mule-drawn wagon. Longarm felt a moment of concern for the Mexican kid he'd just dropped off afoot this close to any kind of free-ranging beef critters. For your average longhorn was as likely to charge a man afoot as it was to flee anyone on a cow pony. But while a dude could get in a heap of trouble around cows, mounted as well as afoot, most Mexicans found dancing the fandango with beef on the run an interesting challenge. Most of them were good at it. It didn't take a college degree to tell when a beef critter was fixing to charge with murderous intent. They never really meant it unless their four hooves came together under their centers of balance as their tails went up and their heads went down so they could sort of fall towards YOU With Most of their weight before they commenced to play Express Train. So once you were sure they were coming at you, hell bent and head down, the idea was to get the hell off the tracks.

He spied more cows grazing on shorter salt grass as he rolled closer to the rooftops of the awakening town with the sun in his eyes. He knew that steamer he'd come north on had just picked up a load of freshly slaughtered beef in Escondrijo. So that was likely why they were spread so thin on heavily grazed range. The sea lions that had been spared looked a tad lean but healthy enough. So they'd likely been passed over for now to fatten up a mite before they wound up refrigerated.

"Enjoy life whilst you can, cows," he called out aloud, although not without any sympathy at all. It was hard not to feel just a tad sorry for any critter whose only purpose in life was to be slaughtered and butchered for human consumption. But as soon as you studied on it, you could see there'd have never been a tenth as many domestic brutes, from cows to chickens, if humankind had never learned how swell they tasted.

Some cows tasted more tender than Texas longhorns, although few other breeds enjoyed the taste of Texas grass. It took a tough cow to thrive on such tough range, although both the grass and beef grew just a tad more tender within the salty smell of the Texas shores. The long-horned sea lions all about might have had a better hold on the beef market if it hadn't been for the fevers that seemed to go with such green and muggy grazing.

The Fever Coast seemed to be the breeding grounds for more than one mean ague. One of the meanest was a spleen-rotting cow plague known as Spanish fever in Texas and Texas fever everywhere else.

Longhorns in general and the coastal sea lions in particular seemed immune to Texas fever, which made them about as welcome as a lit cigar in a hayloft in other parts, where folks were trying to raise shorthorn or dairy breeds that just curled up and died when they caught it.

Whether they cottoned to Kansas views on Texas fever or not, the ranchers raising Texas beef along this Fever Coast were maybe twice as firm about the hoof-and-mouth plague carried by healthy-looking cows out of Old Mexico. Nobody was sure about the causes of either. But as in the case of Texas fever, hoof-and-mouth seemed to hide out in immune stock between disastrous outbreaks that could slaughter whole herds and make them unfit to even skin for hides. Stock known to have either highly contagious disease had to be shot and buried deep. That was the law, state or federal. Nobody with a lick of sense wanted to risk the whole Western cattle industry with the price of beef rising ever higher back in the booming East.

By the time he was within three miles, or an easy hour's walk on foot, of those rooftops along the lagoon, he saw more corn, beans, and peppers growing all around than cows. Most such milpas or small truck fields in these parts were tilled by Mexican hoe farmers. That seemed the way most Mexican folks liked to farm, living in close-knit villages or their own barios of larger towns so they could walk out to their scattered milpas. He wasn't sure whether Mexicans stuck to such habits because they were backward or because it made a certain sort of sense. The Anglo Homestead Act had never been tried in Old Mexico, and a Mexican played hell trying to file a homestead claim with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management unless he brushed up on his English or, failing that, convinced some land office clerk he was a dumb Dutchman or Swede. So that was a likely reason you seldom saw isolated Mexican farmhouses off on some lonely quarter section. And there was something to be said for having one's cash crops scattered among, say, half a dozen smaller holdings. For even as he passed some corn milpas flattened by the recent storm, he spied others where, from some natural whim, the green young cornstalks still stood proud in the morning sun. Mexican hoe farmers were independent thinkers when it came to what they had growing in a particular plot too. So unlike many a homesteader with all his seed money tied up in one cash crop, his more casual Mexican competitor, growing all sorts of stuff in modest amounts, could neither make a killing on a rising market in, say, popcorn or get wiped out in, say, a corn-borer plague.

He passed a cactus-fenced field where a small ragged-ass kid was overseeing a half-dozen young hogs, likely from the same litter, as they rooted in a wind-flattened and rain-flooded bean field for such value as that storm had left. A few fence lines along he saw some goats, tethered on long lines, already starting to tidy up a ruined corn milpa by consuming the still-green stalks so they could wind up as goat cheese or gamy meat. Mexicans liked both more than your average Anglo did, but nobody could eat smashed and sun-dried cornstalks unless he or she was a goat.

Longarm didn't see any serious stock, Or serious stockmen, on the modest Mexican milpas this close to Escondrijo. But he didn't find that odd. You had to get out of Denver a ways, maybe a half a day by produce wagon, before you came to more spread-out cattle spreads.

He didn't know whether such outfits in these parts would turn out to be Mexican or not. He knew anyone owning a big enough beef operation to matter would have to be Anglo-Texican, for the same reasons it was risky to one's health to spread out across much range in Old Mexico unless one was an Old Mexican. But while one seldom saw Anglo buckaroos riding for Mexican outfits to the south, a lot of big Texas outfits hired Mexican vaqueros, who worked cheaper as well as better than many an Anglo top hand.

Thinking about that led Longarm into thinking about various Texas cow towns of a surly nature on your average Saturday night. But Billy Vail hadn't sent him all this way to see how the local Mexican and Anglo cowhands got along. He just had to see whether Deputy Gilbert and their prisoner, wanted in Colorado, were fit to get on back there.

He'd have to track down old Norma Richards and give her this old Saratoga, of course, and maybe by now the Rangers had some notion as to why some asshole up in Corpus Christi had such a hard-on for an out-of-state lawman only trying to do his job.

He hoped they had. He was cursed with a curious nature, and he knew Billy Vail would never abide him wasting enough time to matter if Rod Gilbert and Clay Baldwin were fit to travel.

The wagon trace rumbled him onto a simple plank bridge across a tidal creek half choked with tall spartina reeds. He could see some windows under the rooftops ahead now. He'd have doubtless felt a bit closer to town if it hadn't been for a swamping cactus hedge on the far side of the creek. Then a skinny young gal of the Mexican persuasion ran out onto the wagon trace, long black hair unkempt, white cotton frills aflutter, and bare feet really moving, until she spied Longarm and reversed direction toward him coming with that wagon an screaming for help, a lot of help, in a hurry.

Longarm let the mules haul him on to meet her as he called out to her, "Que pasa? En que puedo servirle, senorita?"

To which she replied in English no worse than his Spanish, "Is my father. He has been bitten by a beast and we cannot stop the bleeding!"