A Noose for the Desperado (14 page)

By that time I was in the middle of things. I said, “Just stay where
you are, all of you.” One of the horses was nervous, snorting and
pawing the ground, the way animals will do at the smell of blood. He
started to rear up but I grabbed the reins and jerked him down good and
hard, and then I stroked his neck for a minute until he quieted down.
After all that I finally got around to inspecting the thing in the
saddle.

It had been a man once, but now it wasn't much of anything. He lay
belly down across the saddle, his feet and hands tied with a strip of
rawhide under the horse's belly to hold him in place.

“Somebody give me a knife.”

A knife appeared from somewhere and I cut the rawhide thongs. The
body slid out of the saddle and sprawled out in the dust at my feet. He
was one of my scouts, a little man with a mangy beard and a pair of
wide-open eyes that seemed to be staring about a thousand miles into
space. He had been shot all to pieces and there was no use feeling of
his pulse to see if he was dead.

I went around to the other horse where the second body was, and I cut
him down. This one had been my chief scout, the lanky, tobacco-chewing
man who had thrown his weight on my side the day I shot Basset. He was
bleeding from almost a dozen wounds, wounds that at first looked as if
he had been caught in the haphazard blast of a scatter gun. But then I
saw that there was nothing haphazard about it. He had been shot to
death scientifically, by an expert rifleman, with the bullets just
missing the really vital parts of his anatomy. It was the hard way to
die, the way he had died. It was the long way.

I don't know how long I stood there looking at him before I began
working up some kind of feeling about it. I had never known him very
well. He was just a man on the run, like the rest of us, and his name
was Malloy, and he was a pretty good scout who did his job without
asking too many questions. That was about as much as I knew about him.
But, seeing him sprawled out in the dust, I seemed to know him better
that I had ever known him before. And for a moment something like fear
struck in my guts, and I had the crazy idea that it was myself that I
was looking at. I could almost feel the pain that was still a silent
scream in the scout's eyes, I could almost feel the darkness closing
in....

Then Bama said hoarsely, “My God, he's still alive!”

I snapped out of it, and I looked into the scout's eyes, and I saw
that Bama was right.

“Get hold of him and take him into the saloon,” I said. “Take him
back to the office and put him on my bed. Bama, see if you can find
Marta. She's pretty good at this kind of thing.”

But I knew that neither Marta nor anybody else could help him now.

Four men picked him up as easily as they could and took him into my
room and put him on my bed. Somebody brought some water and rags.

“Whisky.”

Somebody brought the bottle, but I knew that the scout would never be
able to drink it. I soaked a rag and washed his face and that was about
all I could do for him. It occurred to me then that it had been meant
all along for him to live until he got back to Ocotillo. Such careful
shooting wouldn't have been necessary if they had meant only to kill
him.

“How do you feel, Malloy? Can you swallow some whisky?” They were
both stupid questions, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.
For a moment his eyes lost their glassiness, and he looked at me and at
the men crowding into the room.

“Who did it, Malloy, can you tell us that?”

It took a long time to get his mouth working, and when . finally did
get it working, no sound would come out. I put the wet cloth to his
face again and squeezed a little of the water between his lips. He
tried again, and this time I could make out the words “Smugglers...
Indians...” His mouth kept working, but those were the last words he
ever said.

I turned around and said, “Get out of here, all of you.” Then I saw
that Bama had come back with Marta and I motioned for Bama to come in.

The girl came in with him and I said, “Not you. He's already dead.”

She looked at me in that flat way of hers, and then she crossed
herself. “I say prayer.”

It looked like it was a little late to pray for Malloy, but what
difference did it make?

She knelt down by the bed where the dead man was and I turned to
Bama. “Smugglers. Indians. What the hell did he mean by that? Apaches
don't run in this part of the country.”

“Mexican Indians,” Bama said. “They're even more expert at torture
than Apaches.”

“Do these Indians run smuggler trains of their own?”

Bama shook his head. “The Mexicans hire them sometime, when they have
to, as guards, and that's what we've run into this time. The Mexicans
don't like them, but your men like them even less. They won't go up
against a smuggler train with an Indian guard, if they know about it.”

I thought a minute. “They will this time, because we can't wait for
another one.”

Bama didn't believe me. He thought that I had run up against
something that I couldn't knock over.

I said, “You'd better be getting your horse ready.”

He just stood there. “They won't follow you. They won't go up against
those Indians. They're scared to death of them.”

“They'll be scared of something else if they don't.”

I walked into the saloon and Bama came after me, more out of
curiosity than anything else. The men were ganged up at the bar pouring
whisky down their gullets to settle their guts. I saw Johnny Rayburn
and motioned him out of the way, and then I heard Kreyler saying:

“Mexicans are one thing but Indians are something else. If you men
want to follow Cameron and wind up like those two scouts, that's fine,
but not me.”

I was behind him before he knew it. Instinct told me that arguing
with him would only be a waste of time, so I stepped in and hit him as
hard as I could behind the ear.

It stunned him. It stunned all of them. From the corner of my eye I
saw that Bama and Johnny had their hands on their guns, in case it came
to that.

But it didn't. I jerked Kreyler around before his head cleared and
hit him in the face. I slammed the heel of my hand on his chin and
snapped his head back, then I hit the corner of his square jaw. It was
a fool thing to do, maybe, using my hands when I had guns, but I was
still remembering that he was a United States marshal. And I didn't
want to kill a United States marshal, no matter who he was.

The way it turned out, I didn't need the guns. It hurts to get hit
like that, behind the jaw when you're not expecting it. It hurt
Kreyler. I could see pain flare up in those dull eyes as his head
snapped back. He began to go down, gasping for breath and grabbing for
something to hold to. But there wasn't anything there, and he fell to
his knees, and then he went over on his side.

I stood back for a minute, panting, and looking at the men.

“Has anybody else got any ideas about not going on this raid?”

Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Bama yelled:

“Look out!”

But I had already seen Kreyler making a grab for his gun. I could
have shot him, or I could have kicked the gun out of his hand, but I
didn't do either one of those things. I stepped in and slammed the toe
of my boot in his gut.

His mouth flew open and his face went from a dead white to an ashy
gray. He folded up like a jackknife and began to gag. The Marshal would
never be any sicker than he was at that minute, not if he lived to be a
hundred. All the fight had gone out of him. The fight seemed to have
gone out of everybody.

I said, “Bama, have you got a list of the men who are to make this
raid?”

“I've got it,” he said.

Then I looked at the men, still standing at the bar with their mouths
hanging open stupidly. “We'll check the list at the meeting place,” I
said. “Any man who's not there by sundown, I'll find him. I'll find him
if it's the last thing I do.”

They began to get the idea that this raid was coming off, no matter
what Kreyler or anybody else thought about it. They stood there for a
minute, shuffling uneasily. Then one of them hitched his belt and
started for the door, and the rest of them followed, one and two at a
time.

“Well,” Bama said, “I guess that takes care of that. You always get
what you want, don't you?”

“If I want it bad enough.”

Kreyler was still doubled up on the floor, too hurt and sick to move.
I said, “What I told the other goes for you too. You'll meet with the
rest of us, before sundown.” Then the three of us, me and Bama and
Johnny Ray-burn, walked out of the place. Bama stopped at the bar just
long enough to take a bottle out of the bartender's numb hands.

WE DIDN'T SAY much as we rode out of Ocotillo and into those barren,
angry-looking foothills of the Huachucas. Bama was nursing the bottle
again, and the kid wasn't doing much of anything, except that once in a
while he would look wide-eyed all around him as though he couldn't
understand how he had ever got here. I tried to do some thinking and
planning, but my mind kept shooting off on sharp tangents and winding
up in strange, long-forgotten places.

I guess we were all thinking pretty much the same thing—the wild
Nueces River brush country, the wide green lands of the Texas
Panhandle, and Miles Stanford Bonridge's state of Alabama. Home, for
all of us, was a long way off. Farther than the poles, farther than
those foreign lands on the other side of the ocean, because the
distance that separated us from home was more than miles. It couldn't
be measured and it couldn't be crossed.

The sun was about two hours high when we finally reached the big rock
ledge, and there were six or eight horses already grazing down the
canyon while the riders hunkered together under the shelf, waiting. We
unsaddled and unbitted and put our horses out to graze, and then Bama
went up to the head of the canyon to check off the names as the men
rode in.

Johnny Rayburn said, “Is there anything I ought to do, Mr. Cameron?”

He still had that lost look and I began to wish that I had left him
back somewhere.

I said, “There's nothing to do now but wait.”

I went up for a while to see how Bama was doing. The men were coming
in slowly, grim-faced, reluctant.

Bama checked off a name and said, “Twelve. They're coming, but they
don't like it worth a damn.”

I said, “They're getting paid for it. They don't have to like it.”

“Just the same, I've got a feeling that all our trouble won't come
from the smugglers. This isn't exactly the smartest play in the world,
and the men know it. They're beginning to say that they should have put
Kreyler in as boss.”

“The more they talk, the less they'll do.” But I wasn't so sure.

“It's the Indians they don't like,” Bama was saying. “It would be
better if you called this raid off and waited for another train to come
up.”

“And give Kreyler a chance to work on the kid in the meantime?”

Talking about the kid reminded me that Kreyler's men could be working
on him right now, for all I knew. I turned and half ran down the
canyon. But nothing had happened. He was squatting with his back
against the rocky wall. There was a ragged tally book on his knee, and
he was writing painfully in it with the nub end of a pencil. He didn't
see me until I was right in front of him, and when he looked up his
face got red, as if he had just been caught stealing pennies from a
poor box.

“I—well, I guess I was kind of writing my girl a letter,” he said.
“I know there's no place to mail a letter around here, but when I get
back to Tucson I can do it.”

I don't know why he thought it was necessary to tell me about it, but
he kept stumbling on, telling me about his girl. I guess he didn't
notice the look on my face—or maybe I had learned to hide the things I
felt.

“You think a lot of this girl, don't you?” I put in. “Why, sure.
Well, we've even got it planned to get married—sometime.” Sometime....

I should have done something right then. I should have put him on a
horse and sent him back to Texas. And I caught myself thinking, That's
exactly what I'll do— sometime.

It wasn't Johnny Rayburn that I was interested in, it wasn't even the
money—because if this was to be the last raid it didn't make any
difference what happened to the ledger. I was afraid—I admitted that.
But the queer thing about it was that it wasn't the prospect of getting
killed that scared me, it was the business of living and being alone.

It was crazy, and I guess there's no good way to explain it, but I
didn't have the feeling when the kid was around.

I guess he was what they call a symbol. A symbol of other times.
Better times.

The kid was still talking, rambling on. Now that he had got started,
he didn't seem to know how to stop.

“I wouldn't expect anybody else to knew how I feel about that girl of
mine,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn't think she was so much to look at,
but she's prettier than a new colt to me. Yes, sir, I'm going to go
back there someday. We're going to stake out a little place down on the
Rio Grande that I know about and raise some beef cattle and some
grain.” He laughed. “And some kids too, I guess.”

“What you do is your own goddamned business,” I said, “except just
keep it to yourself. I don't want to hear about it.”

The bitterness in my voice surprised me almost as much as it did the
kid. I didn't know why I had said it and I didn't know how to explain
it. I just knew that I didn't want to hear about his girl, or his
plans, or anything else.

I left him sitting there with a startled, bewildered look in his
eyes. As I turned I almost ran into Bama, who was standing behind me.

“Well, what do you want?”

Bama ran a hand over that bearded, weak-looking chin of his. “It
looks like the last of your men are in,” he said. “Kreyler came in just
a while ago. The scouts just got in, too.” He rummaged in his shirt
pocket and took out a section of the map that he had drawn. He put his
pencil on the throat of a funnel-shaped canyon. “Here is where the
train ought to be around noon tomorrow, according to the scouts. It'll
be an all-night ride, and then some, if we get there in time.”