A Noose for the Desperado (12 page)

I started to ask him what they were saying about me, but I changed my
mind and said, “That's right. Now, who are you, besides just somebody
by the name of John Rayburn?”

“Well, gosh,” he said, “I'm not anybody much. My pa owns a little
brush-poppin' outfit down on the Nueces, like I said, and I was born
there and lived there all my life—until the last month or so.” He
hesitated until he became convinced that it was all right to talk.
“Well, hell,” he said, “I guess I got into some trouble. There was a
dance in Lost Creek—that's a town by our place—and I guess some of
the boys kind of got liquored up and there was a fight. The first thing
you know there's a deputy sheriff dead on the floor, and then the first
thing I know they're claimin' I was one of the boys that done it.”

He looked at us to see what we thought about it. “I didn't have
anything to do with it,” he said, “but they locked me up anyway, along
with the others. And when they have the trial the jury says
manslaughter and sentences all of us to three years on the work gang.”
He grinned uncertainly. “But the jail they was holdin' us in wasn't
much, so I lit out of there as fast as I could. God knows how I wound
up in Arizona.”

For a minute there was silence and I sat there thinking about myself,
a kid who had started running just about the same way, and was still
running. Then, for no reason I could think of, I began to get mad, and
I wanted to get up and shake that kid until his teeth rattled and knock
some sense into his head. I wanted to tell him that there were worse
things than the work gang. I wanted to tell him how it was when you ran
and ran until you couldn't run any more, but you knew that if you
stopped it would be all over. There were a lot of things I could tell
him— things I wished somebody had told me.

I think Bama's mind was working about the same way mine was, but he
just sat there waiting for me to do something. But all I did was to sit
back in the chair and say, “Do you want a job?”

“With you, Mr. Cameron? Gosh, yes!”

I looked at him and then looked away. He was building me up in his
mind as a big hero, but I didn't feel like a hero right then.

I said, “Bama, give him the ledger and tell him what to do,” and I
threw out the sack of Basset's with the five hundred adobe dollars in
it. “This ought to be enough to take care of the lawyer.”

Bama took the money and waited a minute for me to look at him. But I
didn't look at him.

That night after the saloon had emptied and things had quieted down.
I went back to my new quarters behind the office and tried to get
things straightened out. The room was a plain affair with the usual bed
and chair and washstand. On one wall there was a big framed picture
that showed a bunch of battered, dejected, half-frozen soldiers
marching through the snow. They had rags tied around their heads and
rags on their feet, and they looked as if they had about a bellyful of
war. But off to one side there was a cocky little man sitting on a big
white horse, and just by looking at him you knew that he was the boss
and the war wasn't going to be over until he said so. Down at the
bottom of the picture there was some small print that said, “Napoleon
in Russia.”

There was a bookshelf beside the bed, and a coal-oil lamp. I picked
up one of the books, and it was
The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare.
There was also a limp-backed Bible there, and I tried
to imagine Basset reading a few chapters of Luke or John before going
to bed every night, but the picture wouldn't work out. There were also
two big volumes of Dante's
Divine Comedy
and pictures of devils
and angels and a lot of people suffering in one kind of hell or
another. Well, I thought, Basset ought to be right there among them
about now.

There were a lot of other books there, but I didn't look at them. I
began to count the money that the saloon had taken in for the night,
and it was a little over two hundred dollars. I was just beginning to
appreciate what a good thing I'd come into. I made a mental note to ask
somebody where Basset had got his whisky supply for the saloon, but I
figured it would probably be Mexico. Then I started figuring how money
would be coming in every month from the saloon and the smuggler trains,
and the amount it came to was staggering.

I paced up and down the room with figures running through my mind,
and every once in a while I would stop and look at that picture of
Napoleon and I knew just how he felt. There was only one way to
look—straight ahead.

That was before I found out what happened to Napoleon in Russia.

But I was feeling pretty good about it then, and the feeling hung on
as long as I kept thinking of money and had that picture to look at. It
was only after I had undressed and blown out the lamp that something
different began to happen.

There in the darkness things began to look different. I began to
think about the day and the things that had happened and I couldn't
believe it. Here I was in Basset's room, in Basset's bed, and the fat
man was dead and buried—but none of it seemed real.

Maybe, I began to think, it was because I didn't want it to be real.
I lay there for a long time and I could hear Bama saying, “What has
happened to you?” And that was what bothered me. I didn't know. Things
had happened too fast to know much of anything. It was like having a
comet by the tail and not being able to let go.

Abruptly, I got out of bed, fumbled for matches, and lit the lamp. I
looked at the picture again, but that didn't help. The cocky little man
on the white horse didn't seem so cocky now, and I doubted that he was
as sure of himself as he tried to make people believe.

I went into the office and fumbled around in the dark until I found
the whisky that Bama had left. I poured and downed it. I poured again
and downed that. I began to feel better.

I took the bottle and glass back into the room and sat on the bed and
had another one. I was beginning to feel fine. Another drink or two and
I would be ready to kick Napoleon off that white horse and climb on
myself.

I don't know how long I sat there, with my mind going up in dizzy
spirals, skipping from one place to another like a desert whirlwind.
But after a while it hit me and I realized what I was doing. Nothing
ever hit me any harder.

Suddenly I could understand Bama, because I was on the road to
becoming just like him. Miles Stanford Bon-ridge, gentleman and son of
a gentleman. Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself
that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.

But not for me. I hammered the cork into the bottle and took it back
into the office and there it would stay.

Not for me. But the effort left me weak as I went back and sat on the
bed and tried to piece together a lot of loose ends that didn't seem to
fit anywhere.

But they did fit when you worked at it long enough. And the first
loose end was that smuggler raid. Killing was one thing, but killing
like that was something else and would never really be a part of me. I
should have known that when I went back to my room and messed up the
floor, and maybe I had known, in the back of my mind.

I sat there for a long time, getting a good look at myself and it
wasn't very pretty. It was like that first day that I rode into
Ocotillo and Marta had taken me to her house and fixed me up with the
stuff to shave and take a bath with. I remembered the shock I'd got
when I looked into that mirror. The face I'd seen was a stranger's
face, and I guess I was experiencing the same thing all over again.

Except that I was looking deeper. Maybe I had a hold of that dark,
illusive thing that they call a soul. But I turned loose of it in a
hurry, just as I had looked away from the mirror.

IT'S FUNNY HOW everything seems different in the light of day. Most
of your doubts and fears go with the darkness, and after a while you
forget about them completely.

The kid, Johnny Rayburn, got back to Ocotillo late the next day. I
came out of the office and there he was standing at the bar, gagging on
a shot of tequila.

I said, “You made a quick ride. Did things work out all right in
Tucson?”

“Sure, Mr. Cameron.”

Then Kreyler came into the saloon and I said, “Wait a minute. All
this is for the Marshal's benefit, so he might as well hear about it.”

The three of us went back to the office, and I could feel Kreyler's
eyes on my back, looking for a soft spot to sink a knife in. But he
didn't bother me now. I had him where I wanted him and he knew it. Or
he would know it pretty soon.

I said, “All right, kid, let's have it. Tell Mr. Kreyler just exactly
what you've been doing for the past day and night.”

The Marshal gave the kid a quick look. Then he sat in a chair and
waited, and he might as well have been wearing a mask, for all the
expression you could read on his face.

“Well,” the kid said, “I rode into Tucson, like you said, and I gave
the ledger to—to the man Bama told me about. I gave him five hundred
dollars and asked him if he would hold onto the book as long as I kept
coming back every month to give him another hundred, and he said sure,
he'd be glad to. Then I came back to Ocotillo.”

I said, “Tell us what's going to happen if we miss giving him the
hundred dollars every month.”

“He'll turn the book over to the U.S. marshal's office,” the kid
said.

I expected Kreyler to do something then, but he didn't. He just sat
there with that slab face not telling me a thing.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like you're working for me, Kreyler,
whether you like it or not.”

“It would seem that way,” he said flatly.

“It doesn't seem any way. You're working for me and you'll keep on
working for me until I get tired of having you around.”

“All right, I'm working for you.”

I didn't like the way things were going. I had expected a hell of a
racket about that ledger, but there he was sitting there as if he
didn't care about it one way or the other. There was something going on
behind those eyes of his, and I thought I knew what it was.

He kept looking at the kid, and then I realized that just three of us
knew where that ledger was, me, Bama, and Johnny Rayburn, and if
Kreyler wanted to find out where it was he would have to get it out of
one of us. I didn't have to do much figuring to guess which one he
would work on.

I jerked my head at the kid and said, “Go somewhere and get some
sleep.” Then it hit me that just “somewhere” wouldn't be good enough.
He had to be someplace where Kreyler wouldn't have a chance to work on
him. So I said, “Get your stuff and bring it down here. We'll put up a
cot or something and you can bunk with me until we figure out something
better.”

“Well, gosh,” the kid said. “Sure, if you want me to, Mr. Cameron.”
As he went out of the place he seemed to be walking about a foot off
the floor, and he had suddenly developed a curious kind of toe-heel way
of walking that reminded me of a cat with sore feet. It wasn't until
later that I realized that I walked the same way, because I had learned
that it was the quietest way to walk. And with a gunman, the quietest
way of doing a thing is the safest way.

It began to dawn on me that Johnny Rayburn was imitating me. A thing
like that had never happened before. I had never thought of myself as
much of a hero, and it had never occurred to me that anybody would want
to pattern his life after mine. But there it was, and there was
something about it that pleased me—the same way, I guess, that a man
is pleased to have some bawling, yelling brat named after him. It was
something like being assured that a part of me would go on living, no
matter what happened to Talbert Cameron.

I thought about that, and then I became aware of Kreyler sitting
across the desk from me, watching me, reading the thoughts going around
in my mind.

“There's something we'd better get straight right now,” I said. “If
anything happens to that kid, I'll kill you. All the cavalry and United
States marshals in Arizona won't be able to save you.”

He sat there for a while, half smiling. Then he got up and walked
out.

It took Bama and the two scouts eight days to make the kind of map I
wanted, but when they finally got back and put the finished product on
my desk I saw that they had done a good job. The chart was drawn in six
different sections, but Bama had the pieces lettered and numbered and
the whole thing made sense when he put it together. There were almost a
dozen natural traps that Bama had already marked, and there wasn't much
for me to do except to post scouts along the various canyons and wait
until a smuggler train was spotted.

“And what do we do,” Bama asked, “if the Mexicans decide not to use
one of these particular canyons?”

“We'll wait. They'll take one of them sooner or later, and when they
do, they won't have a chance.”

“No,” he said wearily, “I guess not. Do you want a drink?”

“No.”

“Well, I do.” And he went to the bar and came back with a bottle and
glass. “Did the kid take care of the ledger all right?”

“Sure, he did fine.”

Very deliberately, Bama poured the tumbler brimful and then sat there
looking at it. “I saw him out in the saloon,” he said, “when I came in.
I thought he was you at first. He walks like you, talks like you, even
dresses like you.”

I knew that it didn't mean a thing, but still I couldn't help being
pleased that somebody else had noticed. “He picked the new rig out in
Tucson,” I said, “with his own money. It's funny that he'd get just the
kind of things I wear.”

“Funny?” Then Bama picked up the glass and drained it without taking
a breath. He was tired and dirty and his eyes were red-rimmed from long
hours of riding in the sun. He said, “I guess I don't see anything very
funny about it.”