Longarm and the Redhead's Ransom by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 12

By five that afternoon the wind had shifted, becoming warmer and drier from the southwest and blowing the rain up Texas way. So that felt swell. Then the sun came back out to turn their cactus patch into a steam bath that felt awful. So they put on their still-damp duds, saddled up, and rode on, with two bloodhounds less interested in rutting or chasing lizards as the afternoon on the trail wore on.

They’d topped their canteens during the summer storm, and only had a few more miles to go. But Longarm advised, and Perrita agreed, that they ought to husband their water and give what they could spare to their mounts during trail breaks. A human sitting down could have made it all the way from Ciudad Acuña to the Burros without a single drink of water, although they’d have wound up willing to sell their souls for a cold beer before they reached that posada. But horses and even mules just dropped dead, all of a sudden, when they got too dry. Not being able to talk and not feeling up to bucking when they were really feeling bad, they had no way to tell you they were dying until they just upped and died.

This had only happened to Longarm a few times. Such unpleasant surprises had taught him to look out for literally dumb animals. The two bloodhounds could look after themselves almost as well as cats, a dog being much smarter than any horse outside a sentimental novel such as Black Beauty.

Longarm and Perrita were wishing that the overcast sky would come back, even if it meant more rain, by the time they’d left the last pear flats behind, with the range all around commencing to roll like the groundswells of a chaparral-covered sea. The chaparral was getting higher too, as greasewood and sage gave way to catclaw, paloverde, and such, with all of it wet and the late sun in a cloudless sky beaming down on the soggy bare soil between. So the humid air felt hotter than it was, and you couln’t make out the mountains rising to the west, even though they had to be much nearer now.

It was in such misty light, with the rays slanting seriously from the the west, that the four buscaderos who’d given up on waiting at that posada topped a rise to find themselves staring at two other riders, a tall gringo and a petite peon, who’d reined in atop the next rise to the east.

From where Longarm and Perrita had been alerted by the bloodhounds that something awful lay out ahead, the four Mexicans were just black outlines wearing broad sombreros. But Longarm had thoughtfully drawn his Winchester from its saddle boot to rest across his thighs, with a round in the chamber.

The odds were still four to one, since Perrita wasn’t armed with anything but her barlow knife, and so one of the Mexicans declared to the others. Then he added, “Nice pinto, and I claim his boots because I saw them first.

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