The riders he’d spotted the night before had been camped among some barely noticeable ruins. The “Old Ones” of La Mesa de los Viejos had either dwelt there mighty far back, or built their cliff dwellings and canyon-bottom pueblos mighty carelessly.
They’d all dismounted to scout for sign amid the squares or circles of freestone. So Longarm was counting flies on some horse apples by what might have been a kiva, filled in and almost totally erased by the rare floodwaters of many a year, when the famous badman Poison Welles came over to join him, holding a fresh but empty tin can.
Poison said, as if he knew, “Canned salmon. No Apache ever brung this from his agency. Reservation trading posts don’t stock any sort of canned fish for Apache.”
Longarm took the can and sniffed it, saying, “Been open and empty a spell. Might have been whites up this way ahead of ‘em. I heard in town that some kid had seen a mess of white strangers over by this mesa a spell back. You hear anything about that, Poison?”
Welles shrugged and replied, “No white boys up this way right now. No Indians neither. But wouldn’t you say them turds at our feet were dropped by a white man’s horse?”
Longarm nodded and said, “I was just admiring the oat husks. The flies say the pony was here about two days back. The Pueblos never named them Apache because they steal from one another.”
Poison Welles said, “I follow your drift, but they raided that white outfit last night, not two days ago.”
Longarm made a mental note to be careful with Poison Welles in spite of that bad first impression. The West was full of pests who seemed half bullshit and half real. Old Bill Cody had started to grow his hair shoulder-length and wear fringed white buckskins like some of those sissy boys who stayed in camp with the women. But it was still a fact that he had shot all those buffalo, and had fought it out blade-to-blade with Yellow Hand of the Cheyenne Nation.
Wesley Jones, another bullshit artist, came over to ask what was going on. Longarm said, “Mixed signals. Red or white campers this far up the canyon. I’d go with white if I didn’t have good reason to, ah… suspect a good-sized war party rode out of this very canyon just last night.”
Jones said, “Damned gravel makes it hard to track any breed at all, not to say which way or when, Hank. What inspired you to say Apache in particular were up this way last night?”
Longarm reminded himself that Cockeyed Jack McCall had been taken for a harmless blowhard till he’d really gone and gunned Wild Bill in the Number Ten Saloon. Then he chose his words carefully and told them both, “I can’t say I saw them with my own two eyes. But don’t it stand to reason? Why would any white boys with a lick of sense be way out here in this dry canyon during an Apache scare when they could be safely drinking rotgut or, hell, sipping cider over by the river in Camino Viejo?”
Poison Welles stared around at the canyon walls as he objected. “I can’t see Indians camping even dumber, Hank. This is about the last stretch of canyon I’d expect to find an Apache camp.”
Jones scuffed at the outline of an old stone wall with his boot and said, “Oh, I dunno. You can see some Indians must have favored this spot in olden times.”
Poison Welles shook his head, wigwagging his comical tan Texas hat, and insisted, “Anasazi lived up these canyons on sites and for reasons no modern mind can fathom. But Apache are worse than schoolboys about graveyards and haunted houses, which these old ruins sort of combine. Could you see kids scared of ghosts camping out in a graveyard when there was plenty of sites just as good further up or down?”
Longarm managed not to ask how a man who knew that much about Indians could fail to know the town of Durango had mushroomed on a recent hunting ground. He said instead, “We know what’s down this canyon we just came up. Let’s go on up it some more and have a look-see.”
As they strode back to the others and their ponies, the hard-to-figure Poison Welles called ahead, “We’re moving on. But don’t nobody mount up. It’s safer to walk your horse around a canyon bend in Indian country.”
A prouder man might have reminded Welles that Queen Kirby had told himself to lead the patrol. But Longarm let it go, letting Poison have as much rope as he wanted.
The canyon boxed a furlong farther on. That explained the ancient ruins at ground level. Noah’s forty days and forty nights would have had a tough time flooding the canyon floor this close to its upper end. The box was paved with gravel, too, along with scattered horse turds. This time it was Jones, despite his soft hands and carnival grifter’s manners, who declared, “They must have kept their Indian ponies up here in this natural corral.”
Longarm said, “Somebody’s ponies at any rate. But they ain’t here now, and there must be more canyons than this one cut into the mesa.”
There were. It took the better part of the day, with some volunteers scaling the rocks to scout around with a buzzard’s-eye view, before Longarm and all his so-called Regulators decided there weren’t any fool Indians to be found around La Mesa de los Viejos now.
They reported back, hot and dusty, only to be told another spread had been raided, this time down the river to the south, with the wire still down and nobody moving along the coach road.
When Longarm said you traveled through Apacheria by night but hunted Apache by day, because that was the best time to find them holding still, Queen Kirby told them all to get a good night’s rest and go get the savage rascals at sunrise before they hurt somebody.
Longarm enjoyed a good meal, a hot bath, and even got some rest before Trisha got off work and rejoined him in his hotel room.
After he’d shown her how much he’d been missing her too, she asked how long he’d be staying there in Camino Viejo.
He finished lighting their cheroot, patted her bare shoulder, and truthfully replied, “Can’t say. If those mysterious white strangers were ever holed up around that mesa, they ain’t there now. I might have gone riding with some of them today. Queen Kirby seems to have all the gunslicks in these parts on her payroll. I’m still trying to figure out why.”
She took a drag, handed the smoke back and said, “I was working in Santa Fe when they hired all those Regulators down in Lincoln County. But we sure heard about all the feuding and fussing. You don’t suppose Queen Kirby is out to murder the county sheriff and just take over like a real queen, do you?”
Longarm said, “The lady don’t seem that stupid. The Lincoln County War was mutual stupidity, no matter what you read in the papers about it. The Murphy-Dolan faction thought they owned a whole county because Major Murphy said so three times, like that queen Miss Alice met up with in Wonderland. The Tunstall-McSween side said they owned Lincoln County because Truth, Justice, and Billy the Kid was on their side.”
He took a drag on the cheroot and said, “It was a bareknuckles fight betwixt stubborn cusses who, all huddled together, might have added up to one mature adult. Old John Chisum sided with Tunstall and McSween at first. But being a grown-up, he backed out in time and wound up way better off when… Hmm, I wonder if Queen Kirby noticed that.”
Trisha began to fondle him fondly as she repressed a yawn and asked, “Was that the Chisum they sing about in that trail song, hon?”
He said, “Nope. Jesse Chisholm blazed that cattle trail north from Texas. John Chisum is the biggest cattle king in New Mexico Territory now. Because he had the brains to pull in his horns and sit it out as the Gingham Dog and Calico Cat ate each other up. You can’t just shoot folks, rob them of their land and property, and sit there like a fool dog with a bone, no matter how wild Ned Buntline writes about these parts. The Murphy-Dolan boys gunned Tunstall and McSween in turn, only to have their tame Sheriff Brady back-shot and have martial law declared by the new governor appointed by President Hayes. Jimmy Dolan ran off, along with most everyone else who meant to go on living outside of jail, or simply go on living. Old Murphy died broke, his business ruined by the war and his health ruined by all the nerve tonic he’d been taking in increasing doses. Some say The Kid is washing dishes down at Shakespeare, near the border. I don’t know where he might be right now and don’t much care. He’s only wanted local for gunning Sheriff Brady. My point is that everyone got ruined but Uncle John Chisum. When it was all over he was in position to buy up all that property mortgaged or abandoned by the fools who’d ground one another down to nothing, see?”