A Noose for the Desperado (17 page)

And then it wasn't quiet any longer because they were coming after
us.

Bama just sat there looking at them. They split the afternoon wide
open with their yelling and shooting—six of them, and I remember
thinking that it might as well be six hundred.

They came at us from three sides and it seemed to take them a year to
reach us. I had the impulse to shoot as fast as I could at anything
that moved, but I choked it down and took my time. I made the one
cartridge in Bama's rifle good, but it didn't even slow them down. Bama
seemed to have completely disconnected himself from the whole business.
He sat there smiling that half-smile of his, as if a hole had suddenly
opened up for him and he could look right through that impenetrable
barrier that separates the living from the dead. I don't know what he
saw there on the other side, but whatever it was, he had reconciled
himself to it, and he was waiting for it with no bitterness and no
regret.

But not me. I hadn't gone to all this trouble only to be cut down by
a few savages. All I had to do was hold onto my guts. I raised my
pistol and waited until it seemed that I had the muzzle in an Indian's
mouth. Then I pulled the trigger. He was the fast one of the bunch. He
was the eager one with a whetted taste for blood, and I could almost
smell his rancid breath in my face as the pistol jerked in my hand.

I could count him out. He was traveling the road to hell on a fast
horse, and now I could turn my attention on the others and try to
figure out a way to make two bullets do the job of one. That was what I
was thinking, and the next thing I knew he was hacking at my skull with
a hand ax.

I don't know how he did it. I'd never seen a man take a .44 bullet in
the face before, and keep coming after you, still determined to kill
you. We went down in a bloody tangle of arms and legs and my pistol
went flying out of my hand. Something hit the side of my head then. It
felt like a mountain falling on me, but I guess it was just a glancing
blow from the Indian's hatchet. A smothering black fog rolled in. It
was a cool, comfortable fog where there was no noise and no pain, and
the most pleasant thing in the world would be just to lie down and let
it wash over me.

But I kept fighting. Reflex, I guess, took over where the brain left
off, and I grabbed hold of an arm and held on until the fog drifted off
somewhere. We seemed to wrestle for a week, kicking, biting, scratching
there on the rocky ground. He was gouging at my eyes and giving me the
knee every chance he got, but I still held onto that arm. I seemed to
be covered with blood and I couldn't tell if it was coming from me or
him, or maybe both of us. I held onto that arm.

When it was over it was over all of a sudden. He went limp and the
hatchet dropped out of his hand and that's all there was to it. I
shoved him away. I knelt on my hands and knees and tried to gulp all
the air in Arizona into my lungs. “Well,” I heard somebody say, “the
sonofabitch finally decided to die.” It didn't sound like my voice, but
it was, I guess. And then—finally—I remembered the other Indians.

I couldn't move. I squatted there like a poled steer and wondered why
I wasn't dead. What had happened to the other Indians that had been in
on the charge? It worried me, but I didn't have the strength to do
anything about it.

I gulped some more air into my lungs. My stomach was sick and
fluttery and the muscles in my legs were as weak as buttermilk. Maybe a
minute went by while I got a hold on myself. I was pretty sure that
those Indians hadn't decided to knock off work and go home just when
they had us where they wanted us. Maybe it was one of those miracles
that you hear about but almost never see. Like Daniel and the lions.
But I didn't put much stock in it. I hadn't led the right kind of life
for that sort of thing.

I had a few more theories, but I discarded them. It was time to take
a look.

The first thing I saw was Bama. He was still sitting there behind the
mule, holding onto the bandage around his leg. He looked as if he knew
the answer, but he wasn't saying anything unless I asked him, and I was
still too addled to think up words to put into questions. I stood up,
finally, and saw that the Indians had been taken care of. They were
scattered around carelessly like dirty laundry in a bunkhouse, and just
as lifeless. One of them had reached our mule fortress and had died
with a knife in his hand just as he was about to go over the top. His
trouble had been two rifle bullets in the chest, spaced almost a foot
apart. Not very good shooting. But good enough. By that time I had the
answer. Johnny Rayburn was walking across the flat with a rifle cradled
in the crook of his arm.

I don't know how he did it, but he must have slipped down from the
high ground some way and then crawled for about a quarter of a mile on
his belly across the flats. The important thing was that he had done
it. While all the others had been running, he had been figuring out a
way to save my hide.

I guess I hadn't realized before just how close I had been to dying.
The thought of it put a watery feeling in my guts.

“He's going to be a big help to you, isn't he, Tall Cameron?” Bama
said dryly.

The words jarred me, because that was exactly what I was thinking as
the kid came toward us. With some training, with some of the greenness
rubbed off and some experience rubbed in, he would be a big help. He
would be somebody I could trust; that was the important thing.

That was when I started changing my plans, putting the kid into them,
taking Bama out of them. Bama couldn't help me. Not with that leg. But
the kid... That was something else again.

Johnny Rayburn grinned nervously as he came up to where we were. He
looked awed by the thing he had just done.

“I thought I told you to stay with the horses,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I figured the horses could take care of themselves.
Anyway, I wasn't crazy about staying up there on the bluff with
Kreyler's men.” He shifted hands with his rifle. “I didn't do wrong,
did I?”

I laughed, not because anything funny had happened, but just because
it felt good to have a kid like that on my side. I said, “No, you
didn't do anything wrong.”

“I told you once I was a pretty good shot.”

“Not too damn good,” and I nodded at the dead Indian, “when you space
them a foot apart.” I knew that Bama was listening. And I didn't give a
damn. I said, “But there's nothing wrong with your shooting that can't
be fixed. And I'll fix it.”

He couldn't have been more pleased if I had just handed him Texas
with a fence around it.

From that moment, I guess, it was just me and Johnny Rayburn against
the world. Or rather me and Johnny Rayburn, and a fortune in silver.
That reminded me— we had to do something about the silver.

We didn't have any horses, and we sure couldn't carry the stuff on
our backs. I looked up at the high ground and saw that Kreyler and some
of his boys were still up there. I guess they had time to get their
guts in shape, and probably they had just been waiting for me and the
Indians to finish each other off so they could come back down and take
the silver for themselves. But I had something else planned for them.

I stepped out in the open and cupped my hands around my mouth and
yelled for them to come on down. I hadn't forgotten the way they had
run out on us, but I could take care of that when the time came. This
wasn't the time.

They must have been pretty disappointed to see me come out of it
alive, and they must have had a pretty good idea that it wasn't purely
an act of brotherly love that prompted me to call them back into the
fold. I could see them talking it over. There was some arguing, I
guess, but in the end they came down, as I knew they would. The silver
was still down there and they couldn't resist the temptation of that
easy money.

As they started down the slope, I went over our battlefield and found
my rifle and salvaged some .44 cartridges for my pistols. I was ready
for them by the time they rode up, and there wasn't much doubt as to
who was still boss.

Kreyler looked like a man who had been outvoted. Silver wasn't as
important to him as it was to some of the others, but he couldn't very
well tell them to go to hell, because he still had ideas of running the
business himself someday.

I said, “Well, men, we did it. All we've got to do now is get this
silver back to Ocotillo and split it up. Let's get at it.”

That jarred them a little. They had expected a good cussing at the
very least, and here I was practically patting them on their backs. But
they got over their shock. A yell went up and they went scurrying over
the battlefield, cutting open the silver-filled aparejos and stuffing
the adobe dollars into saddle pouches and war bags. But Kreyler wasn't
fooled. He knew that I had to have them, if I wanted to get that money
back to Ocotillo.

But there was nothing much he could do about it. Anyway, all that
silver was putting a hungry look in his eyes, and the first thing I
knew, he was as busy as any of us. Bama sat quietly through all of it,
his face getting whiter and whiter. After a while I had the kid bring
the horses down, and I found Bama's bottle and gave it to him.

“Here,” I said, “you'd better have a drink of this.”

He took the bottle and looked at it blankly. He turned it up and
drank as if it were the last whisky he would ever see. Then he sloshed
a little of it on his wound. But not much.

He sat back and closed his eyes for a minute until the pain let up.
“You're not fooling Kreyler,” he said.

“I'm not fooling anybody.”

“You're not going to split that silver, are you, when you get back to
Ocotillo?”

I just grinned.

“That's what I thought. I guess there's no use telling you that the
men won't stand for it. But they won't. You've pushed them around about
as long as they'll take it.”

“Why don't you let me worry about that?”

He hit the bottle again. Loss of blood and shock and whisky were
beginning to hit him. His eyes were bleary. His mouth didn't seem big
enough to hold his tongue. He took another long drink and let the empty
bottle slip out of his hand. “You and the kid,” he said thickly, “ought
to make quite a team.”

“We might, at that.”

He looked at me for a while. Then he slid over on his elbow. He must
have passed out then, because his arm gave way and he fell on his face.

The tourniquet on his leg came loose and blood began spurting again.
I grabbed it and tightened it, and stretched him out as well as I
could. I looked up and the kid was standing there beside me.

“Get the horses,” I said, “and bring them over here. Then find one of
those Indian hatchets and cut a pair of blackjack poles long enough to
make a travois.”

He didn't ask a lot of fool questions. In a few minutes he was back
with the horses and poles. The poles weren't nearly long enough, but it
was the best he could do in this kind of country. We lashed them to
Bama's saddle and laced them with a reata that one of the men had. Then
we tied Bama on it.

By the time all that was done, the men were ready to go. The silver
had all been gathered up and they were anxious to get home and make the
split.

So we rode out of the valley and into the high Huachucas, the thud of
hoofs mingled with the heavy jouncing of silver. I didn't look back
this time. The death and stink of battle seemed a long way off, and I
wanted to keep it that way if I could. The kid rode beside me, his eyes
thoughtful, and I could see the question coming long before he got up
nerve enough to ask it.

“I was just wondering about something,” he said finally. “Did you
really mean it, what you said back there? When you said you'd fix up my
shooting?”

We rode on for quite a while before I answered. And in my mind there
was the memory of empty days and long nights. Tight-wound days and
tighter nerves, when the sound of a snapping twig or the rustle of
brush was always a cavalryman, or a marshal, or maybe just a
reputation-hunting punk anxious to get a notch in his gun butt. Sounds
were always sharper when you were on the run, and alone.

But who could you trust when you had a price on your head?

Well, I guessed I had found somebody at last. So I said, “Don't worry
about it, kid. I meant it, all right.”

IT WAS DARK again when we got to Ocotillo, and the town seemed nice
and peaceful and sleepy-looking there at the bottom of the foothills.
It seemed a shame to ride in there and get everything all stirred up
again. But it had to be done. A few Mexicans came out and watched as we
rode into town, and I imagined that their faces had a dull, angry look.

It was a funny thing, but I had never thought of the Mexicans'
resenting us and hating us. Well, I thought, they wouldn't be bothered
long with me and the kid, and if they got tired of Kreyler and his
bunch they could rise up and knock them down. I wondered why they
hadn't done it before now.

As we pulled up in front of the livery barn, beside the saloon, the
Mexicans sort of melted away in the darkness and I forgot about them. I
watched the men while they unsaddled and lugged their saddlebags and
war bags back to the rear of the saloon and into the office. After they
were all finished we had silver scattered all over the middle of the
room and it looked like a hell of a lot of money stacked up there in
one big pile. The men were all ganging up in the room to watch the
split. Something had to be done about that.

So I said, “It looks like a pretty good haul, doesn't it?” And
everybody agreed. I laughed and kicked the saloon door open and yelled
for the bartender to set them up.

That broke it up. They all flocked out and ganged up around the
bar—all but Kreyler, that is. He stayed in the office with me and the
kid, and I had an uneasy feeling that he had picked my brain and knew
as much about my plans as I did.