Part 7 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+ning 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?”