“Our old man was a fur trapper. We took to raisin' beef when the beaver trade pinched out. We lived up Ute Draw with a dozen scrubs, barely scratched out a livin'. Wasn't good beef country, don't you know. Too easy to lose the critters in them cuts and draws, not to mention to painters, Basque sheepmen, and Utes. I lit out when I was fourteen, joined the cavalry.”
He eased the eye patch back and forth across his empty eye socket, scratching an itch. “Comanches done this to my face. That's why white folks call me Comanche John.” He jutted his lantern jaw and knobby chin toward Longarm. “You know what the Comanches call me?”
“What's that?”
“One-eyed Hell-spawn!” Comanche John threw his head back on his shoulders and howled. “That's what they started callin' me
after
I healed up and took my revenge!” He plucked a necklace out from under his shirtâa braided rawhide thong with five of what looked like large, dried plums strung through it. “And you know what these here are?”
“What're those, Comanche John?”
“The balls of them Comanches that made off with my eye and my ear!” He loosed another, louder howl, making Longarm's eardrums rattle and a nearby dog start barking. “Pretty fair trade, don't you think?”
“I'd say they got the short end of the stick,” Longarm said, as Greta came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in one hand, a glass of buttermilk in the other.
“Greta, I ever tell you that story?” Comanche John asked, swatting the woman's broad butt as she wheeled snootily, chin high, and headed back toward the kitchen.
Walking away, she turned her head to call behind her, “Only about feefteen time this year!”
Comanche John snorted. “Woman's crazy for me.”
“That's plain to see.” Longarm sipped the coffee, piping hot and tar-black, just like he liked it. “So tell me, Comanche John, have you had any run-ins with this Magnusson feller and his wolf women?”
Comanche John shook his head and slurped at his goat milk, licking the white liquid from his mustache. Setting the glass down, he said, “Ain't seen old Magnus in six, seven years. He always did keep to himselfâhim and his squaws. Heard he had a son once, too, but the boy took sick and died.
“Last time I seen Magnus, I was passin' through the home country on the way to Lulu City, helpin' out a bounty hunter I knew in the cavalry. We stopped for a beer at a little watering hole midway up canyon, and Magnus was there with his daughters, tradin' hides for sugar and flour.”
Comanche John snorted and took another sip of the thick milk, lapping again at his whiskers like an old dog. “Even then those two girls were cute as speckled pups. Long-legged, pretty-faced, with titties already pushin' at their buckskins. One red as a damn full-blood, the other so fuckin' blond you'd think she'd just jumped off a Norski whaler!
“You could tell they were both half-wild.” The grizzled mountain man leaned toward Longarm, widening his lake blue eye and making the eyeball dance as though electrified. “
Crazy looks in their eyes!
”
“Must be more than just crazy, since they're able to lure men in so they and their old man can kill 'em.”
“Oh, yeah, they're more than just crazy,” Comanche John hooted, watching Greta haul a large wooden tray out of the kitchen, steam wafting up from the four heaping plates. When she set the tray on the table, Comanche snaked his right hand under her left arm and squeezed her large left breast through her dress and apron. “They're both built like clipper ships!”
“Comanche
John
!” she exclaimed, wiggling away from him and raising her small, pudgy fist. “My beau vill feex you like thees!”
She shook her fist then removed two plates from the tray and set them gently before Longarm, her brown eyes meeting his with a soft, coquettish glow. One of the plates was entirely mounded with chopped potatoes fried with butter and sauerkraut, while the other bore four easy-over eggs and two eight-inch lengths of fat venison sausage fairly bursting its skin and reeking of black pepper.
As the mountain man chuckled at the girl's pluck, Greta set the other two plates before him, snorting and slamming them down huffily before sweeping a lock of stray hair from her cheek. “You very horny old dog!” she told John as she picked up her tray and set it on her shoulder. “I hope those crazy vimen in mountains pop you on head!”
Comanche John made smooching sounds and, picking up his silverware, winked at Longarm. As Greta disappeared back into the kitchen, John said, “The woman's crazy about me, mark me. Her beau knows it. Valentine Fettig. Big son of a bitch of an ugly Prussian muleskinner. I don't stay in town long when he's around. One of the few white bastards who can whip me in a fair fight.”
Longarm had thought that with the vast breakfast before them, Comanche John would hold his tongue for a bit and let Longarm eat in peace. It was, after all, still early.
But by the time they were scrubbing the last bit of yokes from their plates with chunks of venison sausage or potatoes, Longarm had a fair working knowledge of John's historyâof the prime Irish stock from which he had descended, his own Indian war record as well as that of his father who'd fought in the war of 1812, and even that of his grandfather, the indomitable John Henry Blassingame, owner of lands and slaves in early New England.
“Don't worry, John,” Longarm said, tossing down several coins then rising and plucking his half-smoked cigar from the table. “You got the job . . . if you'll do it for five dollars a day.”
Longarm flicked his cigar to life on his thumbail.
John clapped his hands loudly and laughed as he gained his feet. “I do tend to go on a bit. Five's right stingy for Uncle Sam, but I don't have nothin' else goin'. Say, you all outfitted, are ye?”
“I just have to pick up my horses at the Occidental. You?”
“I stabled mine with an old half-breed outta town aways. Why don't you go on ahead? I got a little business to tend here in town. I'll pick up my cayuses and meet you up trail in an hour or so.”
“Sounds right as rain to me, John,” Longarm said before turning and heading for the door, while puffing his cigar. He'd enjoy the hell out of that one quiet hour. It was bound to be a long trip up canyon with this blow-nasty uncle of Merle's. But if Comanche John knew the canyon as well as he claimed, he'd no doubt be worth a couple of sore eardrums.
“Uh . . . Longarm?”
The lawman turned with one hand on the doorknob. Comanche John stood on the other side of the table, adjusting his eye patch, his beard lifting with a buttery grin. “You reckon you could advance me . . . say . . . uh . . . one silver cartwheel? I got some notes comin' due.”
Longarm tucked the cigar in the far right corner of his mouth to cover a wince. He plucked a gold eagle from his denims pocket and flipped it to Comanche John, whose meaty right paw snapped it out of the air like the practiced beak of a mud hen snatching a junebug in mid-flight.
“
Gracias, amigo!
” intoned Comanche John.
Longarm made a mental note to add the eagle to his expense sheet, then turned, went out, and set his hat for the Occidental Livery and Feed Barn.
Maybe the son of a bitch would prove more annoying than handy after all. But once you've fucked the niece, you're pretty much stuck with the uncle.
Chapter 8
Longarm was rigged up and moseying out of town, the pack mule following on a long lead rope, by the time the huge, liquid red sun had risen like a giant fire balloon out of the sage-pocked eastern prairie.
He'd started out wearing his sheepskin vest, as the nights and mornings were brisk most of the year at this altitude. But by the time he'd swung both horses along the low, cottonwood-stippled southern bank of the Diamondback River, the sun was branding his back and neck.
He stopped to roll the vest into his soogan and rain slicker. When he'd let both mounts draw water from a rocky ford, from which they'd scared up a good hundred barking and quarreling Canada geese, he mounted up and booted the muscular sorrel toward the mouth of Diamondback Canyon, a wedge-shaped gap in the sandstone and granite scarps rising in the west, at the base of higher, purple green peaks shouldering back against the far horizon.
Longarm was well within those high, crenelated walls pushing shade a good ways into the narrow canyon and over the frothy, tea-colored river, before he caught a glimpse of a rider galloping behind himâa big man in buckskins on a tall dun and trailing a black pack mule. Longarm continued walking the sorrel along the rushing stream, following the deep-carved wagon trail through scattered aspens and cottonwoods, until the pounding of hooves rose above the river's rush.
He stopped the sorrel and looked behind.
Comanche John galloped toward him through the dappled shade of sprawling cottonwoods. He held his reins up high against his chest, the brim of his sombrero shading his face. The big man's buckskins were sweat-stained, and both his dun and the beefy mule were lathered and dusty.
“Hold up, John!” Longarm called, scowling. “No point in faggin' your animals. I'm not goin' anywhere.”
Comanche John drew up abreast of Longarm, laughing. “I was afraid you might get lost.” He snapped a quick look over his left shoulder. “Besides, old Roberta and Matthew been stabled too much of late, and need to get the juices flowin'.” Again, he peered over his left shoulder to look behind with a cautious air, then turned back to Longarm. “We best get movin'. It's a good fifty miles to the pass.”
He booted the dun mare forward, jerking the black mule along behind.
Longarm stared after the graybeard for a time, frowning, then hipped around in his saddle to peer back over the wagon trail cleaving the sun-splashed cottonwood copse. Spying only John's sifting dust and mountain jays and woodpeckers among the trees, he spurred the sorrel forward and caught up to John as the big man traced a long bend in the rocky-banked river.
“So tell me, Longarm,” John said. “Are we huntin' ole Magnusson and those fiendish women of his, or are we hopin' they'll hunt us?”
“Both.” Longarm poked his hat brim up to peer along the granite walls rising on both sides of the river. “You know where he'd hole up as well as anyone, don't you, John?”
“I know the canyon better'n most. And I know where his cabins were as of three, four years ago. Since he went ape-crazy with killin', he might have abandoned those shacks and found him another. Hell, he could even be holed up in a cave. There's plenty up along the pass and around the base of Ute Peak.”
Longarm winced as he peered around. You never fully realized the depth of a country until you rode into itâand this was a deep one, indeed.
“Maybe they'll come lookin' for us first, and save us the time and trouble of lookin' too long for
them.
”
“Want I should pull my pecker out, Longarm?” Comanche John quipped, showing his entire set of ivory white teeth. “That'd git them girls down here right quick!”
John howled, scaring finches from a rocky, pine-stippled slope.
“Not just yet, John,” Longarm said. “I'll tell you when.”
Â
They camped that night about fifteen miles up canyon, beyond the Diamondback Narrows, a gorge pinched down to only a few yards across, where the water spewed through the boulders and granite slabs like a geyser.
The night came early, the sun sinking down behind the unseen Skull Pass at the canyon's far end. Wolves howled. The stars were like crystals. There was so little breeze that Longarm, sitting on a low scarp near their bivouac, puffing his cheroot and sipping coffee, his Winchester across his knees, could hear the slightest scrape of two branches, the faint rustling of burrowing creatures, and the flaps of an owl sweeping invisibly over the canyon.
The river was a constant, distant murmur over nearby shallows.
When he returned to the bivouac, Comanche John sat on a log by the fire, reaching into a burlap bag sitting at his jackbooted feet. He pulled out a bottle wrapped in deerskin and knotted twine. His eyes were glassy as he ran a thick, knobby hand down the bottle before holding it out to the fire, staring at the deep amber glow within.
“I reckon I see where that gold piece went,” Longarm said, walking over and prodding the sack with his boot toe. Another bottle rolled out of the bag's mouth, wrapped in deerskin.
“Now, see here, Deputy,” Comanche John said, carefully shoving the bottle back into the sack. “You think I'm low enough to shake you down for ten dollars, then go off and spend it on
hooch
?” He gazed up at Longarm from beneath his shaggy, gray brows. “The uncle of Diamondback's noble
marshal
?”
“That's what I'm thinkin'.”
John stared up at him, brows beetled, face flushing angrily, firelight dancing in his eyes. Finally, a sheepish grin broke over his weathered, bearded features. He popped the cork from the bottle in his hands. “Pshaw! I reckon you already spied the brand on this old reprobate!” He held the bottle up. “Drink?”
Longarm extended his cup. Comanche John splashed some whiskey into Longarm's coffee, then slid down off the log to rest his back against it, extending his buckskin-clad legs straight out toward the fire and crossing his jackboots at the ankles.
Longarm sat on a rock to John's left. He rested his elbows on his knees and stared into the fire, sipped the whiskey-laced coffee. It wasn't Maryland rye, but it wasn't bad.
After a few pensive minutes staring into the burning coals, wondering how many days it would take to run old Magnusson down, then remembering he'd forgotten to cable a report to Billy before leaving Diamondback, he turned to see John regarding him like the cat who ate the canary, his teeth as well as his eyes glistening like brands in the firelight.