“Fess up, Longarm,” John said. “What was she like?”
Longarm frowned over his cup rim. “What was who like?”
“What was
who
like?” John mocked. “Why, Merle, of course! Are you tellin' me you didn't share her mattress sack? Pshaw! A man big and handsome as you? Merle keeps her knees clamped so tight you couldn't pry 'em apart with a crowbar, but”âhe slitted his eyesâ“I suspicion she might've opened 'em fer you.”
Longarm plucked a cigar from his shirt pocket and bit off the end. “What a question for an uncle to ask of his niece.”
“Shit, you seen her. Even an uncle can tell she's built like a brick shithouse. And, hell, I heared her damn screams last night all the way over to Old Louis's whore-house on the bank of the Diamondback!” John slapped his thigh, thrust his chin at the stars, and guffawed.
As if to reply, coyotes yipped and yammered on a nearby ridge.
“John, a gentleman don't kiss and blabber . . . especially to the lady's uncle.”
Chagrined, John furrowed his brows at him over the leaping flames.
“Now you tell
me
somethin',” Longarm said, tossing his hat down beside him and running a brusque hand through his hair. “Who the hell's trailin' us?”
John looked stunned. “Huh?”
“I spied their dust trail a couple hours ago. Three, four riders. Just before the sun went down, I saw a sun flash off either a rifle barrel or a field glass lens.”
“Whiskey must be gettin' to you. Better lay off, Longarm.” John took a pull.
Longarm stared at him. “You don't know anything about 'em?”
John scowled into the fire. “Sometimes the railroad sends market hunters out thisaway when the game's done been shot off the plains. Hell, they could be prospectors. Been some good washings in this canyon of late . . . in spite of that kill-crazy trio workin' their evil deeds.”
“I reckon you're right. They could be prospectors. They could also be dissatisfied creditors who spied you spending that gold eagle I gave you on whiskey instead of puttin' it toward, say, maybe, a grocery bill or a gambling debt.”
Comanche John glared at him. “Longarm, you think I'm hock-high to a shithouse rat, don't ya?”
“Well, you did spend the gold eagle on hooch, and you are rather interested in your niece's bedroom habits . . .”
John corked his bottle and heaved himself to his feet, staggering a little and punching his open palm with the other fist. “Okay, goddamnit, Longarm. I just gotta know. I ain't gonna be satisfied till I'm clear on who's the tougher son of a bitchâyou or me!”
Longarm stared up at the man from beneath his cinnamon brows. “Huh?”
John motioned for him to stand. “Come on. Git up!”
Longarm continued staring at him. John seemed to get crazier by the hour. Had Merle been pulling a practical joke, recommending the loco mossy-horn for a mountain guide?
The big graybeard kicked his empty coffee cup from the fire ring. “Come on, damnit.” Wheeling, he began unbuttoning his right shirt cuff as he ambled over to a flat boulder on the far side of the bivouac, near where the horses and mules stood grazing idly at their hitch rope. Rolling the sleeve up his arm, he knelt on the far side of the rock and stared over the rock's flat, fissured surface at Longarm.
“Git up, now, damnit! Don't be yalla. I gotta know which one's tougherâyou or me.”
“Give the owls in your tree a rest, John,” Longarm snorted, remaining on his own rock and tipping his coffee cup to his lips. “They're right tuckered, and so am I.”
“Get over here, blast ya!” John was working on the other sleeve. “It's drivin' me crazy. I gotta know!”
Longarm looked over the fire at the crazy mountain man hunkered down on the far side of the boulder. John had both sleeves rolled up his long, pale, muscle-corded, knife-scarred arms, and he was carefully brushing sand and pine needles from atop the rock.
“You wanna arm wrestle,” Longarm said, elbows on his knees, one brow arched as he scrutinized his crazy partner.
John laughed without mirth and set his right elbow atop the rock, flexing his hand. “You're right quick for a federal badge-toter!”
Longarm sat there for a time, feeling ridiculous. He looked around, half-expecting to spot Merle, watching from afar and snickering her pretty head off.
Finally, Longarm chuckled dryly. It was pretty plain the conversation about the men behind them was closed. He threw back the last of his coffee and whiskey and dropped the cup by the fire. He felt as though he'd slipped back about twenty-five years, and the playground bully was calling him out for the right to ask the freckle-faced girl to the barn dance.
“All right, John.”
He stood and swept his hair back from his forehead, and, strolling over to Comanche John eyeing him like a hungry bobcat, he unbuttoned his right leather shirt cuff and rolled the sleeve up above his elbow.
“We playin' for nickles, dimes, quarters . . . ?”
“Braggin' rights,” said the mountain man. “Come on. Git down here and put up your paw!”
Longarm pinched his trousers up his thighs and dropped to one knee. He planted his right elbow atop the rock, locking gazes with Comanche John, and moved his elbow around a little, getting comfortable.
Comanche John set his left hand up in front of his right elbow, palm open, as if to shake. Longarm did likewise, taking the old man's hand in his, feeling the dry, calloused fingers close around his own.
It was obvious right off the bat that John couldn't beat him. At least, not in his inebriated state. Longarm let their locked fists swing back and forth a few times, like the pendulum on a wound-down clock. After about a minute, however, he feigned exhaustion and let his arm go limp.
John slammed his knuckles into the boulder.
“Hawwwwwwwww! By jove, you slick little river rat, I won!”
There's your bragging rights, as if you needed them, Longarm thought.
“You're one tough son of a bitch, John.” Longarm gained his feet. “Now, you mind if I get some shut-eye?”
“Know what you done wrong?” John said, grinning across the rock. “You done used up too much strength at the beginnin', tryin' to whup me right off! I seen it many a time in the overconfident. Ha!”
Longarm shook his head and headed back to the fire. “I'm gonna have to remember that.”
John said behind him, “Another thing you might do, Longarmâif'n you wanna keep arm wrastlin', that isâis strengthen the muscles in your forearm. Guys like you, you're all shoulders. That's all right if you're just tossin' feed sacks to and fro, and if'n you're just out to bag pussy. But that ole forearm is important, too.”
John stood, brushed sand and pinecones from his knees, and swaggered over to the fire, chin lifted like the prow of a clipper ship cleaving a smooth sea, his gaze proud as that of a young panther bringing fresh kill back to the cave.
“Yes, sir, I might be on the lee side of sixty, but I can still whup you pups. Maybe not every time. I ain't sayin' that. Don't call
me
cocky. But every now and then I'll surprise ye!”
Longarm took a long pull from his bottle of Maryland rye. His nerves were shot. The only thing more exhausting than a hard trail was a braggart. He kicked off his boots. “I'm done wore out, John. I'm gonna call it a night. You mind keepin' the first watch?”
No doubt, the oldster's swollen head would keep him awake for a couple of hours anyway.
John laughed as Longarm crawled into his soogan and drew several blankets up to his chest.
“Ah, hell, I don't mind. You city boys need your sleep. I'll wake ye in a couple hours.” John prodded Longarm's right calf with the toe of his jackboot. “Say, Longarm?”
Longarm looked up at the graybeard towering over him.
“Just be glad we weren't fightin' with our bare-knuckled fists.” He winked, then picked up his old Spencer repeater and blustered off into the darkness.
Longarm lay his head on his saddle and tipped his hat brim low. “Mercy.”
Chapter 9
The Mexican said, “They are stopped on the trail, right side of the river. Comanche John is pointin' at something on the ground.”
“Maybe he finally found his marbles,” said Crazy Eddie Lancer, chuckling as he raised a whiskey bottle to his thin lips.
“Shut up and cork the bottle, Eduardo,” ordered Natcho as he continued staring through the spyglass.
It was mid-afternoon of the next day, and the man known only as Natcho swept a greasy tangle of black hair from his forehead as he snugged the spyglass to his right eye, scrutinizing the two menâComanche John and his unknown, dark-haired partnerâwhom Natcho and his two companions had been following for the past two days.
“What're they lookin' at, Natcho?” asked Wilbur Keats, sitting with Crazy Eddie in the rocks beneath Natcho.
Keats and Crazy Eddie Lancer were sitting with their backs to the black-granite scarp, passing a whiskey bottle and smoking hastily rolled quirleys. The cigarette smoke wafted up to Natcho, as did the pungent odor of the cheap strychnine whiskey the men had bought at a roadhouse outside Casper two days ago.
In the spyglass's sphere of magnification, Comanche John rose up from his haunches and waved an arm around, indicating directions. Comanche John's partner booted the sorrel straight up trail. Comanche John heaved himself into his own saddle, then reined his dun down the riverbank. He rode through a row of aspens, across the small rocks lining the shore, and into the water.
The hooves of the horse and the mule sent up a fine, white spray sparkling in the sunlight.
“What's goin' on?” asked Wilbur Keats.
Natcho slid the spyglass back right. Comanche John's partner was trotting his sorrel and pack horse up a low rise, the handles of the picks and shovels tucked into the panniers nodding with the pack horse's movements.
When the man had disappeared down the other side of the rise, Natcho slid the spyglass left again. Comanche John had mounted the river's opposite bank. He appeared to be heading for the mouth of an off-shooting ravine.
Natcho lowered the spyglass, reduced it, and stuck it into the fringed sheath hanging around his neck. “They split up,” he said as he leaped off the scarp, landing on the lower ledge between Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats. He continued on down the shelf toward their horses tethered in the ravine.
“Split up?” said Keats, the biggest of the three, breathing hard as he followed Natcho and Crazy Eddie.
“John is headin' into a ravine, south side of the river. Nearest I can figure, they are looking for a claim.” Natcho leaped the slope's last few feet and landed flat-footed in a patch of bromegrass. To his left, the three horses tied to spindly cedar shrubs eyed the men expectantly, the high-altitude sun dancing on Natcho's silver-mounted black saddle and bridle chains.
“What if he don't have the money on him?” Keats asked as Natcho turned his left stirrup out, then swung into the leather.
Natcho put his black-and-white pinto toward the canyon, whipping the horse's left hip with his rein ends and digging his spurs into the mount's flanks. “We take it out of his hide.”
He was halfway across the river when the other two caught up to him, one on either side, shod hooves ringing off the half-submerged rocks. As they gained the river's low, southern bank, Natcho shucked his brass-breeched Henry repeater from its scabbard, cocked it one-handed, and turned the pinto toward the ravine mouth, glancing down to see John's tracks gouged in the sparse weeds and river sand.
Pressing a finger to his mustachioed lips for quiet, and grinning evily, he turned to the others, who fell in behind him, walking their horses single-file as they cleaved the ravine's mouth.
Being mere drifters and occasional drovers, Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats deferred to Natcho, who'd been a Texas shootist and border bandit before running north from Mexican bounty hunters.
The three followed a narrow trail along a seep, into the ravine's soft purple shadows. About fifty yards in, the ravine's rocky, brush-tufted walls fell back, and woods opened on the left and across the seep on the right.
Bird and squirrels chittered. Springs murmured up from mossy stones.
They'd passed several dry sluice traps and the remains of an old mining shack, when Natcho drew rein and raised his rifle for the others to follow suit. About forty yards ahead, where the trail began a slow swing toward the right along an aspen copse, a black mule's ass protruded from the woods, tail swishing lazily. Natcho could make out part of a dirty canvas pack saddle.
He waved to Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats, then reined his horse hard left, and in seconds they were dismounting behind a low knoll among cedars and buffalo grass. No one said a word as they tied their mounts to the spindly shrubs. Then, Keats and Crazy Eddie following Natcho while holding their old-model repeaters up high across their chests, they crept toward the half-concealed pack mule.
Natcho stopped and turned to the others. He kept his voice low. “I will circle around. Keep going and, for the love of Mary, don't make any noise!”
Wilbur Keats wrinkled his nose indignantly as Natcho slipped into the trees on the right side of the trail, moving soundlessly on his low-heeled, black boots.
“Fuckin' bean-eater thinks we're a coupla moon-calves,” he groused and continued tramping up trail, Crazy Eddie on his left.
“I'd have back-shot him a long time ago if he wasn't so good at gettin' us women,” Crazy Eddie whispered.
“Shhh,” Keats said as they approached a broad birch, moving up to within twenty yards of the black pack mule beyond the tree.