A Noose for the Desperado (15 page)

“We'll get there.”

“Look at this,” he said, holding his tally book in front of me.
“Twenty men is all we've got, and they're already beginning to lose
their guts for this thing. According to the scouts, the smugglers have
around thirty outriders, most of them Indians.”

I looked up and the sun was almost gone, and long, cool shadows were
reaching into the canyon, and pretty soon it would be dark. I said,
“Out of these twenty men of mine, is mere anybody we can trust if the
going gets tough?”

Bama thought about it. “There's maybe four or five that ought to
string along.”

“All right, this is what we'll do. When we ride out of here you'll
stay with Kreyler in the van of things, and you'd better keep a couple
of those men with you. Have the others somewhere in the middle of the
column when we hit the mountain trails, and tell them to report to me
it anybody starts acting up. I'll be back in the drag with the kid.”

We didn't move out until Bama went through the motions of contacting
the boys he thought-would stick; then finally he gave me the sign and
we began to round up our horses.

It was dark by the time we rode out of the canyon, traveling in a
column of twos and looking like the ragged, whipped-out remnants of
some defeated army. After a while a pale moon came out, looking aloof
and cold as only a mountain moon can look, and I began to feel the
uneasiness of the men.

Maybe an hour went by, and then we reached a wide place in the trail
where one of the men had dropped out to tighten his girth. “Cameron.”

I got a look at his face in the moonlight and recognized him as one
of the men that Bama had singled out to be trusted. I motioned to the
kid to pull up beside me and I said, “Yes?”

He looked all around as the column wound on down a rocky grade, and
he lowered his voice.

“In about an hour,” he said, “we're goin' to hit a flat stretch of
country at the bottom of this grade. There's talk up ahead, among the
men.”

“What kind of talk?”

“They're goin' to make a break for it. They haven't got the guts for
a raid like this, I guess. They plan to leave you sittin' high and
dry.”

For a minute I just sat there. “Who's behind this talk? Kreyler?”

“Kreyler's in no condition to do anything. It's all he can do to stay
on his horse.” He pondered for a minute. “Maybe he's behind it, at
that. I guess he is. But it's Bucky Fay that's doin' the talkin',
gettin' the men stirred-up.”

I guessed that Bucky Fay was one of the men I had inherited from
Basset, but I didn't know him. Not by name, anyway. I figured it was
about time we got acquainted.

I said, “I don't think they've got the guts to make a break for it,
but I'll ride up just to make sure. I'll see that you get taken care of
when we make the cut on the silver.”

He grinned. That's what he had been waiting for. He was about as
dependable as a cardboard dam in a flash flood. But maybe the silver
would hold him as long as I needed him.

I brushed my black horse with the rowels of my spurs and we spurted
toward the head of the column. We threaded in and out between riders
along the narrow trail, and it didn't take long to see that something
was going on. I rode up behind one man and heard him saying:

“By God, it's suicide. Nobody but a damn fool would try to attack
smugglers in Funnel Canyon. Personally, I never took myself to be that
kind of fool. How about the rest of you boys?”

By that time I was riding alongside him, and I said, “Are you Bucky
Fay?”

His voice shut off suddenly, like the squawk of a chicken on a
chopping block. I had seen him in the saloon and his face was familiar,
even if his name wasn't. He was one of Kreyler's buddies, all right,
just like I figured—one of those tight, nervous, flint-faced little
bastards that I never liked anyway, and that was going to make my job
that much easier.

We were on the moon side of the mountain and everything was light
enough to see what was going on. The column limped along like a dollar
watch with a busted spring, then suddenly it stopped. Everybody was
looking, and that was the way I wanted it.

“Bucky Fay?” I said again, and I found that it was getting harder to
keep my anger shoved down where it ought to be.

He got over his first shock of seeing me there beside him. He started
to sneer—it was just the beginning of a downward twitch around his
puckered little mouth, and I guess he thought he had me just where he
wanted me. His eyes shifted from one side to the other and he saw that
most of the men were on his side and that gave him the confidence he
needed.

He started to say something—maybe it was to answer my question, or
maybe it was just to hold my attention while somebody else tried to put
a bullet in me. It doesn't make any difference now, because he never
got it said.

There's only one way to handle things like that. I would have shot
him, maybe, if it had been another time, another place, but now I
didn't want to rouse half of Arizona by burning a cartridge uselessly.
I had him on my near side and my pistol was in my lap for a saddle
draw. I leaned over slightly, my pistol jumped in my hand, and I
slammed the heavy barrel across his head.

It made a sound like dropping an overripe pumpkin on a flat rock, and
his eyes popped out as if they had been punched from behind with a pool
cue. I didn't know if I had killed him and I didn't particularly care.
I just knew that when he fell out of the saddle he was going to lie
there for a long time and he wasn't going to bother me or anybody else.

It all happened pretty fast, without the bickering back and forth
that usually goes before a fight. I raised up in the saddle so that I
could see every startled, gutless face in the column, and I knew the
less said about it, the better. Let them think about it. By the time
they got through thinking about it the raid would be over.

I noticed Kreyler up near the front and he looked pretty sick about
the whole thing. I couldn't tell what hurt him the most, his sore groin
or seeing his plans blow up in his face. I motioned down the line for
Bama to get things started again.

“Forward ho-o-o!” Bama called, as if he were still Lieutenant Miles
Stanford Bonridge of the Army of Tennessee.

There wasn't any trouble when we hit the flats at the bottom of the
grade. We crawled on up into the mountains and around daybreak the
column halted again and Bama lifted his arm.

“All right, kid,” I said, “let's have a look.”

“This is it,” Bama said when we reached the point, and he made a
vague gesture toward the rocky lowlands below us. At first I didn't
believe him, because there was no canyon there at all; it was just a
rocky tableland between two small mountain ranges a mile or so apart.
Bama must have seen the dismay on my face, and he didn't look very
happy about it himself.

I said, “By God, this is a hell of a place to try to ambush
somebody.”

He grinned, but it looked a little sickly to me. “That's what the men
have been thinking all along. Do you want to go through with it?”

“We've got to go through with it.”

But I didn't like it. We'd have to go right down and meet the
smugglers on their own battleground, and I didn't like to think what
the odds would be on getting out alive.

“Isn't there a better place than this?” I asked. “That map of yours
showed a neck on this canyon.”

Bama wiped his face. “What looks to be a neck on paper can cover a
lot of land on actual ground.” He was on the verge of telling me, “I
told you so,” but he didn't. He just sat there and let me sweat.

“Well, we can't sit here and let the men lose what few guts they've
got left.” I motioned for the column to start moving and we began
slipping and sliding down the side of the mountain.

When we hit bottom it didn't look much better, but at least there
were a few rocks and bushes that the men could hide behind.

“Maybe you ought to wait and hit them tonight,” Johnny Rayburn said,
and it seemed to me that it was the first time he had opened his mouth
in an hour or more.

“By night they'll be out of the mountains and into the desert,” Bama
said. “We couldn't get within a mile of them.”

I rode out a hundred yards or so to get the lay of the land, and
after I had done that I decided that the situation wasn't hopeless. I
motioned for the men to come after me and we rode right out to the
middle of the rugged mountain valley.

“It stands to reason,” I said as Bama pulled up alongside. “That
they'll come right down the middle of this draw, fanning their
outriders a hundred yards or so on both sides. Anyway, we've got to
count on that and make our lines.” I motioned for Kreyler to come up,
and his face was gray with sickness and hate, and maybe fear.

“Here's where we make our stand,” I said. “When the smugglers come
down the middle we'll hit them from both sides from behind rocks and
bushes or whatever you can find to get behind. We'll have to depend on
surprise. Come to think of it, maybe this isn't as bad as it looks,
because they're not going to be expecting an attack in a place like
this. Anyway, Kreyler, you take half the men and I'll take the others,
and we'll leave about four hundred yards of open space between our
lines. When you began to lose your guts, just think of that silver.”

He didn't say a word, but he cut me wide open with a look that was
barbed with hate.

“All right,” I said, “get your men and move out.”

There was one thing I almost forgot—the horses. I called to Johnny
Rayburn and my dependable man, whose name was Lawson, and got them to
round up the horses and take them up to the high ground until the
fracas was over. Anyway, that would keep the kid out of the line of
fire and away from Kreyler.

It took about a half hour to get everything set, scattering the men
out in a wavery line and piling brush in front of them and on top of
them to make them as inconspicuous as possible. On the other side of
the flat I saw that Kreyler was doing the same thing, and finally
everything was set. All we needed now was the smugglers.

By the time the sun was well on its way to looking like a blast
furnace, and Bama was lying belly down behind a rock, mopping his face
nervously with his neckerchief.

“Pull your guts together,” I said, and dropped, down beside him.
“Hell, we should have picked places like this all along. These narrow
canyons practically advertise an ambush, but they sure won't expect
anything in a place like this.”

But Bama wasn't happy. His lips were dry and cracked and his eyes had
a desperate look to them. “I wish you'd told me you were going to drive
the horses off,” he said.

“If it's the bottle you're worried about, you can get it when this
business is over.”

He licked his lips. “I'm not sure that it will do me any good then.”

Up until now I had been too busy keeping the men under control to
find time to be scared. But now there wasn't anything to do but wait
and think about it, and I began to get some of that uneasiness that I
had felt on all sides of me.

“Was that smart,” Bama said, “giving Kreyler half the men? Do you
think they'll fight?”

“They'll fight,” I said. “They'd better.”

Bama sighed and I knew he was still wishing for his bottle. I jacked
a cartridge into the chamber of my rifle and said, “I don't like this
any more than you do, but we've got to have that silver.”

“Sure,” Bama said.

“What's the matter with you? Don't you want to get away from this?
Don't you want the safety and security that silver can buy?”

“The things I want can't be bought,” he said.

I lay there for a long while looking over my rifle, across the field
of fire. He was right, of course. Bama was almost always right, and
that's what made me so mad at times.

Bama looked up at the sun and said, “It won't be long now.”

As if that had been a signal, we began to hear the metallic sounds of
cartridges being jacked into rifles. They would fight, I thought
grimly. Maybe they wouldn't like it, and maybe their guts were crawling
like a bagful of snakes, but goddamn them, they would fight because
they were more afraid of me than they were of the smugglers.

I looked up and Bama was staring at me in that disconcerting way of
his, as if he had been reading my thoughts. But he didn't say anything.
He lay down again, motionless, looking over his rifle, and after a
moment he began singing softly:

“The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the grass again...”

It was an old war song, sugary and sentimental as most of those songs
were. I had heard the long, awkward boys of Texas singing it as they
marched the dusty roads with Hood to fight in strange and foreign lands
for the Confederacy. I had heard it again as they came straggling back
after Appomattox, what was left of them.

“We loved each other then, Lorena,

More than we ever dared to tell;

And what we might have been, Lorena,

Had but our lovings prospered well....”

I don't know, maybe it was the song that started me thinking about
Texas again. “And what we might have been, Lorena.” It was so goddamned
cloying and sickeningly sentimental that it was almost enough to make a
man throw up—and still, that just about summed it up....

Sometimes, after I had finished with my ranchwork, I used to ride
over to Laurin's place, which was only about two miles from our own
Panhandle ranch house. And more than likely I would use the excuse of
looking for strays, because her brother thought I was wild, as he
called it, and never liked for me to be hanging around. But he couldn't
keep me from seeing her. We were both pretty young then and we didn't
do much except talk a little, but we understood from the first the way
it was. I remember on my seventeenth birthday Pa had given me four head
of beef cattle and I couldn't wait to tell her about it. “This is just
the start,” I said. “Those four cows will grow into one of the biggest
ranches in Texas. It'll be our ranch.”