Wes said, "Riders have been known to change horses, and those old bays could have been swapped for those better Indian ponies easy!"

Queen Kirby said, "That's why I sent Fats and Tiny up the river to Loma Blanca, Wes. We'll know soon enough whether anyone swapped those Indian ponies for livery nags. I told them to ask if anyone had been wearing a tamer shirt during that saloon fight, too. But I'm going to be mighty disappointed if our Henry really turns out to be Longarm. For they say he's called Longarm because they send him far, wide, and sudden, to be the long arm of federal law."

Wes didn't seem to follow her drift. So she stamped her foot, close to Longarm's ear, and said, "I'm talking about the time even a slowpoke would have taken to get here from the Dulce Agency, you dunce. If that was the real Longarm we just talked to, where has he been all this time?"

Wes said, "Somewheres, I reckon. We know he rid out of the Dulce Agency to poke his nose into our own business and-"

"No we don't," Queen Kirby said with a chuckle. "You just heard me tell him about those land-rushers way up the valley. So how you know the real Longarm isn't poking about up yonder, having heard some of them are hiring guns, and not having heard a thing about our bigger play down this way?"

Longarm grinned in the darkness right under her feet as he waited for what came next. But all that came next was a b.i.t.c.h from Wes about some stockman who couldn't seem to savvy he was supposed to pay off his gambling markers.

Queen Kirby told Wes not to worry about it, adding she'd own the deadbeat's land and cattle before long in any case. So Wes asked her about some other business dealings, and Longarm decided to quit while he was ahead.

He rolled out from under the card house and made his way out of there without being spotted in the tricky light of early evening. But even as he headed for the town livery he realized there was no way to take out even one of those bays without Queen Kirby learning he'd gone night-riding. So he headed back to his hotel on foot, his mind in a whirl as he considered whether to risk his a.s.s one way or another. For he had to ride over to that mesa sooner or later, and it sure seemed sooner was best.

His mind made up, he trudged on toward the lamp-lit side entrance, muttering, "Perfidy, thy name is woman, and you're likely to feel a fool when she tattles on you!"

Then he sighed and said, "Aw, s.h.i.t, stealing a horse would be taking an even bigger chance, and you know you have to get a d.a.m.ned horse off somebody!" He knew Queen Kirby owned neither his hotel nor that dining room.

The dining room was still open and that dishwater blonde seemed pleased to see Longarm. But she told him the kitchen had shut down for the night if he wanted anything more than cooling coffee or a slice of something colder. Seeing there was n.o.body else out front, he took a deep breath and asked if she thought she could keep some right important secrets that wouldn't mix her up in anything indecent.

She sat him down at a corner table and then sat down beside him, smiling a tad indecently as she confided, "My daddy was a Myers of clan Menzies, and I was raised on the tale of brave Jeannie MacLeod, who refused to say where Prince Charlie was hiding, no matter how the redcoats beat her and raped her!"

Longarm resisted the chance to allow the gal couldn't have enjoyed the beatings and got out his wallet instead as he said, "I need a horse as bad as that old cuss in Shakespeare's play, Miss Trisha. I got the two I rode in with over in Queen Kirby's own livery. Don't see how I'd get either out for some night-riding without them telling her."

The waitress stared thunderstruck at his federal badge and identification as she marveled, "You mean you ain't the Henry Crawford I've been ... getting to know all this time? Well, I never, and there's the mail coach coming through around midnight if you have to get out of town without anyone but me knowing about it, Henry. I mean, Custis."

He put a hand on her wrist as he put the wallet away, explaining, "Ain't ready to leave for good. Got to snoop around over by La Mesa de los Viejos, and it's too far to walk both ways before sunrise."

She gasped, "You don't want to go over there alone! They say there's spooks, crazy hermits, or just some sickness in the canyon soils. In any case, n.o.body lives over yonder or rides over yonder since the old-timey cliff dwellers all got sick and died a thousand years ago!"

He patted her wrist rea.s.suringly and said, "We heard different. Your government and mine wants me to see just what in blue thunder is really going on over yonder, and like I said, I need a mount to lope me over there and back before dawn. How are we doing so far?"

Trisha said, "Heavens, I don't keep a horse of my own. I've no occasion to go that far from this place I work or my hired cottage down by the river."

She placed her other palm on the back of his already friendly hand.

"I'd be afraid to ride out into the open range around town. It was Apache country until mighty recent, and some say Apache riders have been seen out there since!"

Longarm said, "If they were visible to the casual eye I doubt they could have been Jicarilla, Miss Trisha. You don't know anyone you could borrow a mount from, saying you were brave enough to ride off somewhere you just had to get to tonight?"

She started to say no. Then she brightened and said, "Meg Campbell!

Over by the schoolhouse! She does ride her own pony and, seeing she's from a Highland family as well, we ought to be able to confide in her, Custis!"

Longarm said, "I'd rather we didn't. Two can keep a secret if one of them be dead. A secret shared by three ain't much of a secret to begin with. Couldn't you just tell her some white lie, borrow her pony on the sly, and lend it to me eight or ten hours, Miss Trisha?"

The waitress thought, sighed, and said, "Lord, I don't know what excuse I'd give for borrowing her pony over night. She knows I don't have a sweetheart, and she's homely enough to snoop if I told her I'd met somebody since the last time we talked."

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I wasn't going to ask you to risk your good name. But since you just came up with such a swell excuse, couldn't you say you had to ride out to a big spender's cow spread to admire his stamp collection or whatever? I don't see how your schoolmarm chum could hope to follow you once you borrowed her only mount."

Trisha said, "She wouldn't be able to snoop around any rancho I just made up. But she knows where my cottage is and it's only a short walk from her own!"

He shrugged and said, "n.o.body would expect to find their pony by any cottage in town if they'd lent it out for a midnight tryst somewheres else, would they?"

Trisha explained, "Meg Campbell's nice, but she's inclined to be nosy.

What if she knocked, knowing it wouldn't matter if n.o.body was there, but meaning to ask me where her pony was if anyone came to the door?"

Longarm started to say she couldn't simply pretend to be out. Then he had a better notion and suggested, "You could hide out in my hotel room whilst I whipped over to the mesa and back."

She slapped the back of his wrist. "Why Custis Long, whatever are you saying?"

He said, "Nothing all that indecent, ma'am. You'll be even safer from my forward ways upstairs alone than here in this dining room holding hands with me. We'll leave the lamp lit and you can read my Police Gazette and Scientific American whilst I'm out riding. That could even help explain where I spent the earlier parts of this evening, should anybody glance up at my shuttered windows. Might be a good idea if you were to move about and cast some shifty shadows from time to time."

She didn't answer. They sat there holding hands across the table a spell as Longarm gave her the time she needed to make up her mind. Then she did, and she was laughing like a kid starting out on Halloween with some laundry soap and rotten eggs as she said, "Let's do it. It sounds like fun!"

Chapter 12.

It wasn't the schoolmarm's cordovan mare pony that gave Longarm a literal pain in the a.s.s. It was the sidesaddle he'd found cinched to the otherwise satisfactory mount when Trisha brought it around to the back of the hotel. The stock saddle he'd borrowed off his male pals at the Diamond K was out of reach in the tack room of the boss lady's livery, and what the h.e.l.l, it wasn't as if he was hoping to meet up with anyone in the dark. So he handed his room key to Trisha, told her to make sure the door was bolted after her as well, and got on the mare awkwardly with his Winchester across his unusually placed thighs.

Actually riding sidesaddle made it tougher for a man to buy all the snickering things other men said about gals who rode that odd way, with the left foot natural in the near stirrup and the other one dangling in midair with one's right knee wrapped around a sort of leather banana sprouting from the forward swells. He doubted a gal could really gallop astride, seated backward with that big banana up inside her. For aside from being too big, the knee brace was set at better than forty-five degrees off center. Longarm found this one braced his right knee well enough for him to lope the mare once they were off to the northeast a ways.

He didn't lope all the way to that mysterious mesa, of course. It was too far for one thing, and too mysterious for another. He reined to a walk when he spied the moonlit rimrocks looming about a mile and a half ahead. He was glad he had when he heard distant hoofbeats.

He hadn't been followed from town. The riders, a plot of riders, were coming his way from the canyon-carved mesa--fast!

Longarm reined off the trail into high, but not high enough chaparral, cussing the old-timers who'd cut all the real firewood this close to town. When the pony balked at moving off farther, Longarm dismounted, Winchester in hand, to lead the balky brute deeper into whatever chaparral was left.

True chaparral, back in Old Spain, was scrub oak. The Mexican and Anglo vaqueros, or buckaroos, had decided any sticker-brush too tall to call weeds and too short to call woods was chaparral. The s.h.i.t all around seemed mostly cat's-claw and palo verde, neither offering cover worth mention in bright moonlight unless you'd got a heap of it between you and someone else!

Then he almost stepped off into s.p.a.ce, and told the mare he was sorry for cussing it as a balker once he saw why the trail ran the way it did.

The arroyo running alongside was so deep he couldn't see bottom. He sighed, got between the pony and the trail, and snicked the hammer of his Winchester to full c.o.c.k. He knew a man could flatten out in thin chaparral with an outside chance of not being seen. But there was no way to ask a live pony to flatten out like a bear rug, and as long as they were likely to see the d.a.m.ned mare in any case, a man could dodge lead better on his feet. There wasn't a bit of solid cover between his exposed position and the trail.

He could only stand quietly in the moonlight, hoping to pa.s.s for a clump of overlooked firewood, as he listened to those riders riding ever closer. Then he could see them in the moonlight, and he cradled his Winchester to cover the pony's nostrils with a palm and held his own breath as well, hoping against hope, even as he knew he had to be hoping in vain.

Then the baker's dozen of bare-headed and cotton-shined riders had pa.s.sed by, without a glance in his direction, as the moon shone brightly on white stripes across dark faces framed by long hair bound with rolled cloth. As they jingled off into the darkness he murmured, "Jesus H.

Christ, those Quill Indians seem to be headed for town! So how do we get there ahead of 'em to raise the alarm?"

The pony didn't answer. Longarm wasn't sure he could have either.

Cutting cross-country by moonlight, over busted-up range he didn't know, would be risky riding slow. Those painted Jicarilla had been following the trail at a lope. But hold on. Could no more than thirteen of anything hope to raid a whole town on the prod with all that Apache talk in the air?

He led the pony back to the trail afoot. "They have to be headed somewheres else. In a hurry, seeing they missed us standing there like moonlit graveyard statuary. They could circle the town and be across the river and back on their reserve before sunrise. So that makes more sense."

Then he remounted awkwardly, and rode on up the trail to the northeast as he muttered, "Might be interesting to see where they just came from."

He naturally knew better than to ride into a canyon entrance in Apacheria. That could be a fatal move in calmer country. So a quarter mile out, as the range began to rise at a steeper angle, Longarm led the pony off to the other side of the trail, tethered it to lower but lessferocious greasewood, and gave it a hatful of canteen water before he put the wet Stetson back on his head and started legging it the rest of the way, saddle gun at port arms.

A mesa was called a mesa because that was the Spanish word for a table and the early Spanish explorers had noticed how many flat-topped hills they seemed to have in these parts. Most mesas grew that way because millions of rainstorms had carved away land that hadn't been covered by a lava flow, an ancient lake bottom dried to dense mudrock, or whatever, leaving land that had once lain lower perched higher in the sky. The moonlit caprock of La Mesa de los Viejos was far higher than Longarm had time to climb. So he worked about a third of the way up the gentler slopes below the jagged rim of the flat top, and proceeded to mountain-goat around bends that swung into the canyon that the trail entered down below.

He found he was near the upper limits of easy sidewinding when one of his boot heels dislodged a fist-sized chunk of scree that, fortunately, fetched up in a clump of yucca instead of rattle-clanking all the way down the slope. So he eased down to where the footing felt surer and learned great minds often ran in the same channels when he rounded a bend to spot movement ahead and freeze in place.