Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

So Longarm left without wasting more time in useless excuses, and stopped at the first general store he came upon to stock up on trail supplies at outrageous cost, lest anyone get more outraged at him. Then he swapped pack and riding saddles and lit out for Fort Hall the rougher but shorter way he recalled of old. So that was how come yet another dry-gulcher, lying in wait for him atop an outcrop overlooking the stage route out of Ogden with a scope-sighted Big Fifty buffalo rifle, got to wait, and wait, and then wait some more. Meanwhile, Longarm rode up the far side of the Bear River, through willows and worse, in a serious effort

to overtake the government party some-damned-where this side of total disaster.

He wasn't expecting any Indian trouble this side of Fort Hall. He knew it would be a total disaster for him if they got as far as Fort Hall without him, and Billy Vail ever found out they had.

Chapter 5

The only stretch of the Bear River Longarm cared about at the moment ran north to south into the Great Salt Lake. He'd forded to the less-settled west side of the Bear before heading upstream, though the stage and freight route north ran east of the river. For the stage and freight route snaked and stopped at countless crossings as it served the northern end of the aptly named Mormon Delta.

The Mormon Delta was more a long green ribbon running north and south along the aprons of the mountains to the east than a D-shaped patch of irrigated crop and pasture land. Starting a day or so after they'd found their Utopia in the sagebrush wasteland between the Rockies and the distant Sierra Nevadas, the Mormons had commenced to dam and ditch like gophers full of locoweed, until one day there wasn't a wasteland anymore between the foothills and a western border formed by the Bear, the Great Salt Lake, and the drier Sevier, Beaver, and such to the south. Hundred of irrigation ditches, wide and narrow, cut the Mormon Delta into a patchwork of firm to soggy fields it wasn't considered neighborly to cut across. But since a rider found few if any such obstacles on the open sage flats west of the river, Longarm could beeline, making far better time, hitting a bend of the Bear no more often than his ponies needed a water break—and that wasn't all that

often, given stock with cayuse blood in sunny but not too sunny riding weather.

He rode all day, swapping mounts every eight or ten miles, and felt tempted to cut back across the Bear by sundown, figuring he should have overtaken the others, despite their lead, by this time. But then he considered they wouldn't have any confounded lead if he hadn't been overconfident up until then. So he forged on through the gathering dusk, through stirrup-deep sage, till his ponies needed a rest whether he did or not.

He made a cold camp in the middle of a sage flat because of the infernal cheat grass.

The ponies didn't care, once he'd watered them from carefully hoarded water bags and filled their nose bags with the real oats he'd bought them back in Ogden. He tethered them to deep-rooted sage clumps and spread his bedding atop cheat, upwind to the east. The night was crisp but not really bitter, and canned beans washed down with tomato preserves didn't require a fire either. He didn't need black coffee to put himself to sleep, and it wasn't a good idea to smoke in these parts either. It wasn't just that the Book of Mormon frowned on smoking and drinking anything stronger than, say, buttermilk. The former theocracy of Deseret, now Utah Territory, had been turned into a tinderbox by the unwelcome advance of an Old World annual after it had found its true vocation as another pernicious weed of the American West.

It was called chess—or cheat grass, because that was what it did. It hogged such scarce rain as the Great Basin got, to explode from the ash-gray soil as lush and green as Kentucky blue after a nice wet spring. But there was more thin sap than substance to cheat, even when it was green, and in no time at all it set too few seeds to matter and died back to tasteless straw that was mostly air and caught on fire every chance it got.

It wouldn't even stay springy under the bones of a weary traveler. So Longarm woke up stiff as well as early. After

that he watered the ponies again, broke camp, and rode on, sucking his own breakfast from the cans, atop the roan.

He was tempted to swing over into the delta and see if anyone else had made it this far north out of Ogden yet. But for all he knew the Easterners were cavalry vets on Tennessee walkers. So Longarm forged on, and on, all day, until he felt sure he'd crossed the Idaho line, and swung east around sundown to chase his own and other purple shadows across the swift but shallow Bear in hopes of beating those other birds into Zion.