“I’m sorry, Victorio,” Longarm muttered aloud. “Some of my own kind can beat any Indian born at thinking mean, and you’re still likely to get blamed for another one of your famous massacres here.”
Then he heard a soft female voice call out, “Onde esta, El Brazo Largo?”
Since Brazo Largo meant Longarm in Border Spanish, the tied-down man so addressed was inspired to quietly call back, “Aqui. Quien es?”
Then a small dark angel of mercy who smelled just awful hunkered over him with the starlight gleaming on the keen blade of her barlow knife. When Longarm warned her about the ants, she said she knew. She’d heard those ladrones laughing about what they were planning to do to him long before they’d done it.
His dusky rescuer worked gently and carefully on the rawhide the sons of bitches had bound him with. So he only got bitten on the bare ass one time as she helped him roll free of the sleepy but pissed-off ant pile. He grabbed his duds and got them well clear of the milling red ants. They’d stolen his six-gun, badge, and identification, along with his watch and derringer. But he was mildly surprised to discover they’d left him his Stetson and stovepipe army boots, as well his tweed pants, long underwear, and hickory shirt.
As he hunkered amid stickerbrush to cover his nakedness, he learned the gal answered to Rosalinda. She said she spoke more English than the pals of Harmony Drake had thought. So once she’d heard them discussing their plans for her, she’d hidden out a full day in the last place a stranger to such parts might think to look.
An August afternoon on the flat roof of a ‘dobe trading post, listening to them talking about you below, accounted for the poor little thing’s dire need of a bath. She and her sweated-up cotton shift now reeked with the combined odors of mesquite smoke,‘dobe dust, and armpit all over.
Once he was dressed, although flat broke and without a weapon to his name, Rosalinda led him toward the only lamplight left, explaining how los ladrones had lit candle stubs all about to make the deserted flag stop seem more lively. She said she’d put them out to prevent the place from going up in flames as she’d heard them intending.
As they got to the trading post door she’d left ajar, Longarm saw an arrow stuck in the jam. It might have struck him as more artistic if it hadn’t been one of those gussied-up toy arrows they made to sell tourists along the railroad lines.
He wrinkled his nose and said, “It’s nice to know they’re capable of some mistakes. That blonde they had laying for me on the night train from Yuma was too slick for this child by half! She forced a card on me, like a tinhorn dealing to a greenhorn! I was the one insisting on getting off here! They must have been laughing like hell as they rode off with my badge, my other stuff, and my prisoner!”
She said they surely had been as she led him inside, waving at the trade goods scattered carelessly and the candle stub set in a pile of tinder under a wall shelf as she explained, “As I told you, they did not know I spoke English, or that I was right above their heads as they were plotting. I knew who you were as soon as I heard one of them say they could sell your pistol and identification in Sonora to los rurales. Everyone this close to the border knows of the reward on the head of El Brazo Largo.”
He asked her to rein in and start at the beginning. So she did, and she was interesting to look at too as she told her sad, simple story.
Longarm figured her for a Mexican-Papago breed of nineteen at the most. For the slight waves in her dusty black hair spoke Spanish, and while her pretty little heart-shaped face spelled Papago, she still had her short but ample figure.
The desert-dwelling Papago nation offered living proof that old Professor Darwin might have been on to something with that notion of flora, fauna, and folks evolving to fit their ways of life. It was easy to see by their blossoms how the desert cactus plants had started out as some kin to the rosebush, forced to get by in country too dry for any regular rose. The Papago had likely begun as plain old Indians. But a heap of living where the living was hard on a jackrabbit had produced a breed of short, wiry folks who could thrive on next to nothing, or bloat up like a circus fat lady if they dared to eat half as much as anyone else—Anglo, Mex, or even Pueblo.
As if to prove Professor Darwin’s point, Rosalinda rummaged amid the spilled trade goods for something to eat as she told him how she and her two sisters, the daughters of a Butterfield wrangler and his Indian mujer, had all three married up with the Anglo trader here at Growler Wash, a nice old Mormon gent called Pop Wolfram.
Longarm forced himself not to cut in. It was obvious that that so-called nurse aboard the train had been making up her retired surgeon in this dying settlement. Rosalinda went on to explain how the real Wolfram had set up this trading post when the Butterfield coaches still had a relay stage there, where the east-west stage line crossed a north-south desert trail up Growler Wash from the Gila Flats to the north.
Traveling by coach across the southwest corner of Arizona Territory had never been a pleasure. So travelers and even the U.S. Mail had given it up entirely when the new rail line between Yuma and Deming had followed the same route across the burning wastes. To say business had been slow at an abandoned Butterfield relay station and occasional flag stop would be to imply you didn’t sell much soda pop in a graveyard.
One of Rosalinda’s sisters and co-wives had gone off to live back on the blanket with Indian kin. Rosalinda and a more optimistic older sister had hung on, hoping things would pick up. When they hadn’t, her husband and elder sister had left Rosalinda in charge and flagged a train to Yuma, in hopes of finding a buyer for all this unsold merchandise.
Rosalinda said she’d been waiting there alone for the better part of a week when four riders had come along the tracks one early morn, leading two more saddle mounts and four pack mules.
She said that when one of them addressed her in Spanish, she’d been smart enough to reply in the same, not letting on that she followed their drift as they said mean things about her tits in English.
As she and Longarm sipped pork and beans from the cans as if it was soup, cow-camp style, Rosalinda asked with a pouty face if he thought her chupas were too big for the rest of her. He assured her she had chupas muy linda, and asked her to go on.
She said the riders had begun by helping themselves to three mules’ worth of trail supplies, with the one speaking Spanish making up a big fib about paying up as they were leaving. She’d figured what the payoff was likely to be when one of them sniggered in English about her great little culo. So she’d drifted out back as if headed for the outhouse. Then she’d swiftly climbed a pole ladder to the flat roof and pulled it up after her. She started to explain how she and her sisters had often cooled off up yonder on straw matting after a long hot day. But Longarm bade her to stick to the mystery riders.
So she did, and it was soon less mysterious. They’d yelled back and forth when they’d searched in vain for her outside. And then she’d been listening at the stovepipe through the clay and matting roof as they’d whiled away a whole day waiting for Longarm, a pal called Harmony, and a slick-talking gal called Goldmine Gloria.
When she got that far, Longarm put down his empty can and groaned, “Oh, Lord, I’ll never live this down!”
“I’ve read the fliers out on a confidence gal called Goldmine Gloria Weaver, and I let her force cards on me anyway! You say your man and older sister caught the train to Yuma about a week ago, Miss Rosalinda?”
She nodded and sighed, “I fear they never meant for to come back. Papa always liked fat Maria best. She is willing for to do things my other sister and me find perverse. Is harder for even a Mormon to get by with more than one mujer in California, no?”