Longarm gulped down a heroic mouthful of mush and swallowed a time or two before he calmly replied, “I’ve played tag in a cactus patch before. I could tell you a tale about evading Yaqui in a pear flat a spell back, but I don’t like to brag. I don’t suppose that any of you might have an old Spencer rifle or a Walker Colt you could spare me, though?”
Pogamogan morosely replied, “I was asking that just now. We prefer to hunt with bows and arrows we can make ourselves. We hunt no game a well-placed arrow will not bring down, and once the Saltu traders have you dependent on them for matches, salt, and gunpowder, you may as well put on a dog collar and hand them your leash.”
Longarm swallowed some more, nodded gravely, and soberly said he’d heard tell of those prospectors who’d trifled with a Papago maiden up along the Gila, only to wind up looking a lot like pincushions.
He added, “I’ve often wished I was as good with a bow and arrow as a rifle. Your point about rolling your own ammunition is well taken. But I’ve never had time for serious violin lessons either. So I’ll have to do what I have to do with this old buffalo rifle.”
He licked the last green scrap of nopal off his fingers to display refined desert manners, and added, “My Papago uncle has filled my belly to the bursting point. Would he and his brothers be offended if I only had cheroot-tobacco to offer?”
Pogamogan showed he was a genuine gentleman by shaking his head with a thin smile and replying, “The offer is enough when a serious man with a good heart has said more than once that he is in a hurry. Come with me and choose the mules you wish for to ride on with. You won’t ever head those enemies off at Organpipe Pass unless you leave right now, by a foothill trail we can show you, chanting for rain, a lot of rain.”
Longarm rose to follow the older man outside, with an anxious glance at the sky. It was starting to look pretty, damn its cauliflower-head clouds swirled around in a cobalt-blue bowl by stirring-rods of sunbeam.
As he legged it up the brushy canyon after Pogamogan, rifle slung and packing his heavy burlap sacks, he heard a distant mutter of mountain thunder and grinned. He could almost hear the conversation in that far-off outlaw camp. Some would be for pushing on with the afternoon just right for riding. But older and wiser trail hands would be pointing out that the storm front was far from blown over and you could never rest a mount too much for a serious uphill dash for Sonora, another twenty or more miles ahead.
Like the Papago encampment itself, their remuda of over a hundred head had been hidden up a side canyon, watered by a recently dammed pool, with plenty of thorny but tasty mesquite for the ponies, mules, and burros to browse as a couple of Indian kids kept watch at the mouth of the natural stock pen.
Longarm told the older man he’d trust him to choose the mules. So it only took a few minutes before they were loading a matched pair of Spanish cordovans to move out.
Asking Papago for regular saddles would have made as much sense as asking them to supply him with a Gatling gun. Some horse nations made or stole fair saddles and bridles. Papago were still in the earlier stages of what was still a white man’s notion, for all the bullshit about natural red horsemanship. So while the Indians helped Longarm fill his heavy water bags and lash them aboard one mule with thongs of braided horsehair, along with his other trail supplies, he knew he was expected to ride the other one bareback and to hell with the seat of his pants.
Both mules were outfitted with jaguima or hackamore halters, made of heavier braided rawhide, with a thick bozal or nose-pincher instead of a bit. Papago fought dragoon style, riding only to the scene of battle, then dismounting to fight on foot. So such simple rigs were all they bothered with, and what the hell, neither mule had ever had a steel bit between its teeth, and this would hardly be the time to retrain either.
So he accepted the long lead line with a nod of thanks, and forked himself and the Big Fifty aboard the other mule. He’d been braced for Pogamogan to ask him if he wanted to say adios to Rosalinda. Mexicans would have considered him a shit to just ride off on a gal like that. But with any luck Rosalinda was thinking more Indian now that she’d spent some time with her mother’s kinfolk. Longarm tended to agree with most Indians that long tearful good-byes were a pain in the ass.
So once he was mounted up, all Longarm did was ask about that foothill trail they’d mentioned earlier. Pogamogan snapped something at one of the naked boys on duty there. The kid nodded, caught Longarm’s eye, and lit out running.
Longarm followed without looking back at Pogamogan and the others. The kid set a hell of a pace, and Longarm was glad he was riding after him aboard a mule. He sensed the kid was showing off a bit. A lot of desert nations initiated their young men by making them run a marathon in the heat of day, holding a mouthful of water without being allowed to swallow it as they panted through their noses. The gals were there to admire, or jeer, as the long-distance runner crossed the finish line to spit out all that water, or fail to, depending on how sincere he was about growing up to be a man of his nation.
Riding bareback at a trot was a literal ball-buster. Longarm suspected the running Indian knew that. But real men didn’t get to complain of such minor discomforts unless they wanted others laughing at them. Cowboys and Indians shared some views on good clean fun.
After a while they’d made it out of that brushy canyon to a narrow trail winding southeast along a contour line of the Growler Range’s cactus-covered apron. The Papago kid scampered ahead for a few furlongs, and then suddenly vanished sideways into a thick clump of jumping cholia that common sense said no naked human hide had any business in. The dramatic exit saved Longarm the trouble of trying to pronounce skookumchuck out loud. In any case he wasn’t sure whether that meant thank you or all is well. But he said it anyway as he heeled his mule into an impolitely faster and far more comfortable lope both to warm both critters up and to make up some lost time.
You loped a mount no more than a third as much as you walked it—if you wanted it still moving under you at all by the end of your day on the trail. So Longarm reined to a walk again as the trail wound out a ways from the general slope to afford him a good hard look at the view to his southwest.
He knew the bunch he was after was somewhere down yonder on the flatter expanse between the Growlers and a sister range, looming about twenty miles away. The cactus-and chaparral-peppered flats between were covered by a spiderweb of dusty trails and dry washes, with the view complicated by the unusual weather they were having.
Drifting clouds cast almost ink-black acres of shadow across the already specked desert. They were stirred by sunbeams bright enough to hurt one’s eyes and set other acres a-shimmer. The only bright spot, to Longarm’s way of thinking, was that while he couldn’t have made out a camel caravan for certain moving yonder in any damned direction, nobody on the other side was likely to notice two bitty dots creepy-crawling along the flanks of equally distant mountains.
He felt safe lighting a smoke before he heeled his mount on to the far-away goal of Organpipe Pass. He could already picture the swell ambush site that had to go with such a name.
Folks just passing through aboard a train tended to lump organpipe cactus with the similar-looking saguaro of the Sonora Desert. But the equally proportioned organpipe grew only half the height and thickness of the forty-to-sixty-foot saguaro, and never branched the way its way bigger cousin did. It was called organpipe because it tended to grow in clusters, like the pipes of some massive gray-green church organ. So you could hide behind organpipe which was tougher to manage behind the bigger but more lonesome trunks of saguaro.