Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister (6 page)

 

The scattered spurs of the Davis Mountains flattened out to turn into the Stockton Plateau. The lower Pecos Valley lay between that and the Edwards Plateau to the east, with the former Comanche home range on the Staked Plains more to the northeast. By this time, of course, not many Indians, quill or tame, haunted their former hunting grounds on marginal range, which was being rapidly covered with livestock and mesquite. The earlier buffalo herds had been hell on mesquite and other chaparral.

He got into another tense discussion over a friendly game of Five Card Stud and then he was down in the valley of the Pecos, somewhat north of that Deveruex-Lopez Grant, south of Sheffield-Crossing.

He timed his arrival in Sheffield-Crossing on a dusty cordovan gelding for just after noon, hoping the few dusty streets would be cleared for La Siesta, which was followed by sensible Anglos, as well as Mexicans in West Texas, for the same reasons of health.

Neither Mexicans nor Southerners who hid indoors from the worst heat of day—days could get seriously hot—were lazy, as some outsiders thought. But even in Ante Bellum Dixie, where the Planter Folk had led more sporting lives, they'd gotten in most of their social gatherings and fox hunting during the early morn or evening hours. All the flirty belles knocked off around noon to undress and doze fitfully upstairs during the hotter hours, only to come back down gussied up in their hoop skirts for dancing and fan-fluttering that could go on past midnight, when all industrious New Englanders were fast asleep.

Longarm thought he'd timed things right as he passed the first houses on the outskirts of town. There wasn't much stirring when he rode down the one main street toward the river and reined in out front of the one livery stable. He rustled up a dozed-off Caddo kid to care for his damned pony. As the Indian watered and fed the gelding in its hired stall (You never fed a pony before you watered it.), Longarm stored his roping saddle in their tack room, but hung on to his Winchester and draped the center strap of his two saddlebags over his left arm. Anyone desperate enough to steal his old bedroll was welcome to the summerweight flannel blankets, canvas tarp, or rolled-in slicker and chaps.

He tipped the young Caddo a dime extra and asked about any hotel or posada they might have in Sheffield-Crossing. The Indian kid said he just worked there at the livery. They didn't serve Indians anywheres else in town. Sheffield-Crossing was a cow town of recent vintage. So most everyone who had anything to say there was an unreconstructed reb.

Longarm stepped out into the now dazzling sunlight with his rifle cradled over his saddlebags, the grips of his sixgun peeking out from under them, with his gun hand free.

He was mildy surprised but felt no great concern when he saw a baker's dozen of dismounted riders lined up on the shady side of the street in front of an inviting-looking saloon.

That reminded Longarm he hadn't had anything stronger than homespread coffee all day. So he started across the wide, dusty street to do something about that. But one of the riders on the far side, in a pair of pony-hide chaps with a matching vest, bellowed out, “Stay put, you rude bastard! Show some respect for the damned dead!”

Longarm was fixing to stride on over and ask the cuss who's death he had in mind when he heard the drums of the dead march and glanced up the street to the west to see ... nothing at all.

But somebody had to be beating that mournsome drum. So Longarm stayed put and, sure enough, a raggedy uniformed band with just the one drummer drumming a snare covered with black muslin, came out of a side street to swing their way, followed shortly by a rubber-tired hearse drawn by a handsome black team with plumed harness. As it drew nearer you could see the silver-handled mahogany coffin through the plate glass sides of the hearse. Whoever they were fixing to plant had died rich, it was safe to assume. A full platoon of mourners were following afoot, with one Mex kid gussied up in a silver-trimmed black
charro
outfit, leading a freshly groomed palomino, saddled
vaquero
style with polished wood showing, where Anglo saddle trees were leather covered. The saddle was empty. Two tall, tooled
vaquero
boots rode backwards in the stirrups with their big spur rowels leading.

The mourners seemed a mixed bag of Anglo, Mex, and in-between, all wearing their Sunday best, which seemed to make folk look more like their ancestors than the everyday work duds worn by everybody did.

One gal in particular caught Longarm's eye. She strode down the street as if she owned it, despite her respectful expression as she followed the dead man's mount. She was dressed for riding, herself, in a black Spanish habit and one of those flat-topped black hats with fly tassels dangling all around the edge of the broad brim. Her complexion was that odd orange shade you never saw on any man or any woman who didn't descend from whatever part of Old Spain such an unusual peachy hide called for. As she disdainfully glanced his way, he saw her big old eyes flash hazel. Her hair was swept up under a hat the color of old gold braid. She sure was something and he couldn't blame her for dismissing him as some saddle tramp. He'd been busting a gut trying to be taken for a saddle tramp.

As the hearse passed, most of the riders in front of the saloon on the far side made the sign of the cross. For all the mean things they said about Mexicans, or perhaps because of them, a heap of so-called Texas Anglos were Irish Catholics. Spain and then Mexico had encouraged swarms of such folk from the British Isles to settle their province of Texas in the vain hope they'd form an English-speaking Catholic buffer between Old Mexico and the alarming Yanqui Heretics.

Longarm had spent enough time around Papists on both sides of the border to know how it was done. But he had no call to lie about religion to a dead man he'd never met, so far as he knew, and simply removed his hat to show some respect as, just before the passing hearse blocked his view across the street, he spotted something that didn't seem quite right.

He wasn't sure what he'd seen. It was one of those odd shifts in the regular scenery of life that you sometimes catch out the corner of one eye. By the time the rear of the hearse passed on to expose them all again, they'd finished ... what had they been doing all at the same time?

They'd been making the sign of the cross. All the same way. Or had one of them done it backwards? As if he'd been faking it, without too much Catholic Sunday School under his belt.

By the time the whole procession had passed and Longarm saw they were heading toward the crossing the town was named for, as if they meant to bury the poor cuss on the far side, he'd decided it hardly mattered whether one of those cow hands had just tried to show the same respect as his real Papist pals or whether he'd been brought up in another faith that did things different. Nobody back home in West-By-God, Virginia, had crossed themselves any which way. But he'd heard or read there were furriners who called themselves Catholics but couldn't seem to agree what day Easter might fall on. Praying too much could get a body in as much trouble as never praying at all.

Longarm glanced heavenward and muttered, “I'm fixing to have a nice cool pitcher of suds now, Lord. Feel free to send me a sign if you don't want me to.”

He strode through the crowd out front to beat them all inside. He dropped his saddlebags and Winchester on a corner table and moved to the bar to pay for a pitcher of draft beer and two tumblers. Then he set up in that corner with his possibles on the floor and the rifle across his lap to see if anybody aimed to join him. For getting a town drunk talking in a small town was as easy a way to horn in as going to their barber when you didn't really need a haircut.

His eyes were just getting used to the dimmer light of the saloon when he spied someone drifting over, outlined by the sunlight through the swinging doors beyond.

Then an all too familiar figure sat down, wearing the circled five-pointed star of the Texas Rangers on his trail-dusted white shirt as he said, “Afternoon, Longarm. What brings you to Sheffield-Crossing, that bust-out up Denver way?”

Longarm rolled his eyes up at the pressed-tin ceiling as he sighed and muttered, “Oh, Lord, you might have sent me this sign before I paid for all this beer!”

Hoping against hope it wasn't too late, Longarm murmured, “The name is Crawford, Duncan Crawford, off the Diamond K in New Mexico Territory if you follow my meaning, Ranger Travis.”

The ranger replied no louder, “I follow your drift, even though I thought the Diamond K was in Colorado and that reporter for the Denver Post signed his newspaper stories Crawford. I remember them from when I was up that way to deliver a federal warrant. They were about this good old boy who took me over to that Parthenon Saloon. Speaking of which, is this my glass?”

Longarm poured the tumbler closest to the ranger as he tried as hard as he could not to look up and see if anyone else was close enough to worry about. Glancing around, like a kid fixing to shoplift a stick of candy, was a certain way to look worried.

But none of the booted feet he could take in without looking up seemed to be standing within easy earshot. So Longarm risked quietly observing, “I've heard there was another Diamond K outside of Denver. I doubt anybody in these parts would have much to say to that reporter or the lawman he writes all those tall stories about.”

Ranger Travis sipped some suds and allowed he knew the feeling as Longarm filled his own tumbler. As Longarm drank, the ranger quietly told him, “I was just fixing to pack it in after riding high, low, and sideways in these parts after an escaped federal prisoner. For some reason nobody he grew up with remembers him at all. He ain't down the valley at his home spread on the Deveruex-Lopez Grant. He ain't at any of many a line shack they have spread out across all that property, and he ain't at the townhouse the Widow Deveruex has here in Sheffield-Crossing. Ain't that a bitch?”

Longarm cautiously replied, “I'd be sort of suprised to find a known killer at his officious home address when the law came calling. As for his local kith and kin, nobody ever gets along with everybody in his family, and they don't call him Devil Dave because he's unusually easy to get along with. You mark my words and see if somebody they trust won't betray Frank and Jesse, now that there's bounty money posted on 'em.”

Ranger Travis asked, “Why are we talking about the James Boys? I thought we were after Devil Dave Deveruex, ah, Mr. Crawford.”

Longarm explained, “Same deal. A wayward youth with more bullets than brains hiding out betwixt temper tantrums in a fair-sized neck of the chaparral, inhabited by a whole heap of locals the law can neither arrest nor get the right time of day from. You don't have to be a college professor to hold up a bank and run home to Momma. I know Devil Dave's old and ailing Mex mother spends most of her time in town these days. Tell me what you can about the daughter of the house who's said to be managing the family grant and business matters these days.”

Ranger Travis sipped more suds and topped his tumbler by pouring without asking as he murmured, “You just saw her outside if that was you I was staring at from out front. I thought at first you were a lawman I knew from up Colorado way. Reckon it must have been that pork-pie hat.”

Longarm said, “Nevermind my hat. The wind blows serious where I first learned the ropes of the beef industry. From what we had on file I was given to understand the Deveruex-Lopez herd tallies over a thousand head and you say I just saw this shemale wonder?”

The ranger nodded to say, “Miss Connie Deveruex. She leaves off the maternal Lopez and hates it when the greasers call her Doña Consuela. But she shares the proud Spanish notion that as soon as you can count your cows you own too few of 'em. She was walking behind that hearse just now. She sets a pony even prouder, sidesaddle.”

“Are we talking about a dusky blonde gal in black who stares at a man as if he was a bug on a pin?” asked Longarm hopefully.

The ranger sighed and said, “I wish she'd stared through me half that friendly when I called on her to ask about her baby brother. She invited me to supper and offered to put me up for the night. But that was only because she was Landed Irish on her daddy's side and Hidalgo Class on her momma's. Her eyes get innocent but her smile drips venom when you mention her kid brother. She swears she hasn't seen hide nor hair of him since he stopped the Butterfield Stage a good three years ago. She's lying, of course. Every time any of us cut the bastard's trail it leads us towards this valley before we lose it in the quicksands of ‘
_¿
Quien Sabe?'
That's what greasers say when they're too polite to tell you to go to hell. It means, Who Knows?”

Longarm muttered, “I've noticed. I can manage a lick of Border Mex if I put my mind to it. I'd hesitate to tell any lawman where a kinsman or neighbor might be if I was still a farm boy back in West-By-God, Virginia. Such conversations can get you burned out if it don't get you or any of your kin murdered total. So there ain't no mystery about his kith and kin covering up for Devil Dave. What I don't understand entire is why they have to.”

He fished for a cheroot to nurse along with his beer as he went on. “Most outright outlaws are in it because they really need the money. Clay Allison was a crazy-mean killer. King Fisher has to be touched in the head to run around in tiger-hide chaps picking fights, and Ben Thompson has killed men with guns, knives, or anything handy since he and his mean kid brother, Tom, arrived from Old England. But none of them mad dogs have ever robbed a bank because they simply had no call to!”

The ranger nodded and showboated a tad by observing, “I follow your drift. The late Clay Allison supported his bad habits well enough with a spread and herd smaller than Connie Deveruex manages. King Fisher prefers ranching to robbing as a source of income, and, despite their disgusting ways, the Thompson brothers have usually gotten by as trail bosses or hired guns. What if Miss Connie just wouldn't give her kid brother an allowance? Many a minister's son has gone bad because his old man was tightwad, you know.”