Tabor Evans - Longarm on the Border

"It's supposed to be about where the Pecos River goes into the Rio Grande."

"Rough country, in that part," Longarm said thoughtfully. "If it's there, though, I reckon I can find it. Only, I aim to take the long way gettin' there. I better circle around New Mexico instead of going the straightest way. I show my face in old Senator Abeyeta's country before the old man wears his mad off, I'd have to fight my way from Santa Fe clear to El Paso."

"You steer clear of New Mexico Territory, and that's an order, " Vail agreed. "You've stirred up trouble enough there to last awhile."

"Now, don't get your bowels riled up, Chief. I'll figure me out a route. Just let me think a minute." He leaned back in the red morocco leather chair, the most comfortable piece of furniture in the marshal's office, and began thinking aloud. "Let's see, now. I take the Kansas Pacific outa here tonight and switch to the Missouri Pacific at Pueblo. That gets me to Wichita, and I make a connection there with the Indiana-Great Northern or the Southern Pacific to San Antonio. Pick me up a horse and some army field rations at the quartermaster depot there, ride to Fort Stockton, or whichever other fort's nearer to Los Perros. That'll beat jarring my ass on the Butterfield stage, and it'll get me to spittin' distance of the border a lot faster."

"Tell my clerk," Vail said impatiently. "He'll write your travel vouchers and requisition your expense money. Here. Take these letters and read 'em on the train. They'll give you the whole story as good as I can. Now get the hell outa this office before I get a wire from the attorney general or the president telling me to suspend you or fire you outright."

"Which you can't do, if I ain't here," Longarm grinned. "All right, Chief. By the time I close this case and get back, things ought've cooled down enough to get me off the political shit list."

* * *

During the three train changes and four days and nights it took Longarm to reach his jumping-off place deep in Texas, he spent his time catching up on lost sleep and studying the letters Marshal Vail had gotten from the Texas Rangers captain and those sent to Ranger headquarters by the post adjutant at Fort Stockton. He was looking for some sort of connection that might tie the four disappearances together, but there didn't seem to be any.

Ranger Nate Webster had been working on a fresh outbreak of wholesale rustling involving what had come to be called the "Laredo Loop" along the Texas border. Cattle stolen from central Texas ranches were hustled across the Rio Grande's northern stretches, their brands altered, and bills of sale forged to show that the steers had been Mexican-bred and bought from legitimate ranchers in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Cohuila, or Nuevo Leon. Then, driven south through Mexico, the rustled herds were brought back across the river at Laredo and sold there to buyers. As Laredo was the only point on the border except El Paso, nearly a thousand miles north, where a railroad crossed the Rio Grande, it had long been a center for livestock sales. Even with Mexican cattle selling well below the market price for Texas beef, the profits were huge. Nate Webster's investigation had led him to Los Perros. He'd been heading there when he'd last reported to ranger headquarters in Austin. That had been early in July, and he hadn't been heard from since.

Soon after the Ranger made his last report, the two troopers from the all-black 10th Cavalry, the "buffalo soldiers," as they'd been named by the Indians, who saw in the blacks' hair a resemblance to buffalo manes, had deserted from Fort Lancaster. This small outpost was one of a string of almost a dozen forts, a day's ride apart, that had been built paralleling the Rio Grande to forestall the threat of invasion during the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846. The two men had left a frail that the Cimarron scout summoned from Fort Stockton had had no trouble following. He'd followed it to Los Perros. Captain John Hill, the Charley Troop commander, had gone with the scout. Hill had sent the Cimarron back to report and had himself followed the deserters' frail across the Rio Grande. Like Webster, like the deserting troopers, Hill had vanished on the Mexican side of the river after leaving Los Perros.

"Dogtown," Longarm muttered to himself, drawing on four-year-old memories of the last case that had taken him to Texas. "Los Perros. Mouth of the Pecos. Wild country. Big enough and rough enough to swallow up four hundred men, let alone just four, without a trace being left. I better start trying to remember what little bit of the local lingo I learned."

Then, because it was his philosophy that a man couldn't cross rivers before he tested them to see how deep and cold they ran, Longarm ratcheted back the rubbed plush daycoach seat, leaned back and went to sleep again, the smell of old and acrid coal dust in his nostrils. A little stored up shut-eye might come in handy when he hit the long frail on horseback from San Antonio to the Rio Grande.

At the I-GN depot in San Antonio, Longarm swung off the daycoach and walked up to the baggage car to claim his gear. He'd left everything except his rifle to the baggage handlers; it would have been tempting fate to leave a finely tuned Winchester .44-40 unwatched in a baggage car or on a depot platform between trains. The rifle had ridden beside him all the way from Denver, leaning between the coach seat and the wall.

As always, he was traveling light. He swung the bedroll that contained spare clothing as well as a blanket and groundcloth over one shoulder, draped his saddlebags over the other, and picked up his well-worn McClellan saddle in his left hand to balance the rifle in his right. Then he set out to find a hack to carry him from the depot to the quartermaster station.

"All the way to the quartermaster depot?" the hackman echoed when Longarm asked how much the fare would be. "That's a long ride, mister. Cost you fifteen cents to go way out there. It's plumb on the other side of town and out in the country."

"We got to go by Market Plaza to get there, don't we?" Longarm asked. When the hackman nodded, he went on, "I'll pay the fare, even if it does seem a mite high, provided you'll stop there long enough for me to eat a bowl of chili. I got to get rid of the taste of them stale butcher-boy sandwiches I been eating the last few days."

"Hop in," the hackman said. "It's my dinnertime, too. Won't charge you nothing extra for the stop."

Counting time taken for eating, the ride down Commerce Street and then north on Broadway to the army installation took just over an hour. The place was buzzing with activity. After more than five years of debating, the high brass in Washington had finally decided to turn the quartermaster depot into a large permanent cantonment, and everywhere Longarm looked there were men at work. Masons were erecting thick walls of quarry stone to serve as offices; others were busy with red bricks, putting up quarters for the officers. A few carpenters were building barracks for the enlisted men on a flat area beyond the stables, where the hackman had pulled up at Longarm's instructions.

Not until he'd been watching the scene for several minutes did Longarm realize what had struck him as odd. There was only a handful of soldiers working around the quadrangle the buildings would enclose when all of them were completed. The hackie lifted Longarm's saddle and saddlebags out of the front of the carriage; Longarm got out and paid the man. He stood with his gear on the ground around his feet until the hack drove off. Then he slung his saddlebags and bedroll over his shoulders, picked up the saddle, and started for the nearest uniforms he could see, a clump of soldiers gathered around a smithy's forge a few yards from the stable buildings.

Longarm singled out the highest-ranking of the group, a tall lantern-jawed sergeant. "I'm looking for the remount duty noncom, " he told the man.