Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister (19 page)

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.

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.”

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.”