Desert of the Damned (2 page)

He spoke to the girl. “I reckon you’ve come a long ways, ma’am, and are probably a heap anxious to get where you’re going. But, touchin’ on that brooch again, it sure has got me fightin’ my hat to figure what you been using to get there. Even if your stage fare was paid in advance, you’ve been having to eat and — ”

The drummer said with contempt for his ignorance, “She could write her name on butcher paper and get enough cash to buy half this country!”

“Well now that’s fine,” Reifel drawled. “You got any paper with you?”

The salesman’s perspiring cheeks became mottled. It was plain he could have bitten his tongue out. He started to pretend he didn’t have any but a second harried look at the eyes above that blue bandanna convinced him he had better find some. He got the order book out of his left coat pocket, tore a sheet from the top and bitterly passed it over.

“You reckon she can write with her finger?” asked Reifel. “Give her the book. And a pencil to work with.”

The girl looked at him shyly. “What is it that you’d like to have me do?”

“Write your name. On the back of that paper.”

He could see she didn’t like it.

Her chin came up. “And supposing I refuse?”

“We ain’t here to play parlor games, Miss. I reckon you’ll do pretty much what I tell you.”

Her eyes locked with his. There was plenty of pluck in them. But the situation did not favor any robust rebellion and in the end she dropped her glance and took the dude’s book and pencil.

He watched her put aside her parasol, a vision of feminine pulchritude which brought home to him as few other things could have an awareness of facts which he had previously ignored. The girl had spirit. She had a pride and self-possession that was truly remarkable in one so patently unacquainted with violence. She was like no woman he had ever known and a hungry yearning commenced to build in him, a fierce desire to know a better way of life.

His lot in these past few years had been a rough one but he’d had sufficient learning to recognize the signposts. Evil companions had not led him astray. He’d been brought up right by honest God-fearing people and had “gone to the dogs” by deliberate intention as the shortest cut available to a man who had no backing. He had ridden the owlhoot with both eyes open, knowing well the risks and penalties. Actually he’d given these considerable attention augmented by a deal of research into the lives of notorious transgressors. It wasn’t the banks the James boys had robbed, the trains stopped by Ketchum or the safes blown by the Daltons which had brought those outlaws to their final accounting — it was the dead men strewn through their dust that had got them.

There were no grinning dead men on Ben Reifel’s backtrail. And there weren’t going to be. He had crowded his luck as far as he dared and now, with a stake, he meant to hunt smoother pastures. Leave the chaparral to the fools who belonged there. Burt Alvord had got clear. And there was no damned reason why Ben Reifel shouldn’t also.

He watched the girl carefully, treasuring each gesture, each fleeting shade of expression. She’d take a lot of living up to but, by grab, he could cut it.

His eyes narrowed cunningly.

“Better take them gloves off. I wouldn’t want there to be any doubt who wrote this.”

She considered him a moment as though half-minded to defy him.

Some new thought came and with a kind of shrug she shed them. Her left hand was bare; he felt inordinately pleased. Having finally found the woman he wanted it hadn’t seemed likely she could still be unmarried.

He guessed all the men where she had hailed from must be blind. All the right curves in just the right places. Black hair, white teeth and lips red as berries. Young, too, and healthy. Be able to raise a family.

And she had more class than a basket of chips.

He had done a heap of thinking about the kind of woman he would want to latch onto when he pitched in his hand to take a whack at legitimate business. He had used to think he might like a blond or maybe a shapely redhead, but he’d had sufficient of both by now to put no dependence in them. What a man really needed when he settled down was someone who could help him. Some jill who knew her way around and could hobnob with the moguls. What Reifel had been wanting was a twenty-four karat lady — and here, by God, was the very spit and image.

He felt like pinching himself but he didn’t.

He had been so engrossed with finding out if she were married he had given no attention to her other hand at all. Passing through a shaft of sunlight it suddenly snared his notice. There was a sapphire on her slim third finger that looked damn near big enough to choke a cow.

Reifel’s eyes turned a shade more thoughtful.

The girl, glancing up, caught an edge of his scowl.

Red lips gave him a nervous smile. “How much did you — ”

“Just write your name,” he said. “I’ll fill in the rest of it later.”

As a matter of fact all he’d wanted was her name, just a handle by which he might find some means to trace her. And that was still all he wanted. But after the way she’d sought to gull him he thought it might be good if she were to do a mite of worrying.

It looked like she was worrying plenty. She chewed at her lip. Her glance jumped around. But it always came back to those chilled-steel eyes so steadily rummaging her face. She wrote her name with a sigh and held out the paper.

“Bring it here,” Reifel said, “and fetch along that wallet. Feel around in them shoes now and see what you can hit.”

With nose wrinkling daintily she reluctantly did so. But the shoes were empty and Reifel, staring hard at the dude, said: “Get them sox off, mister.”

Here of late a lot of travelers had got onto that dodge and Reifel knew the dude had as soon as he said it. The fellow unfurled his teeth like he was minded to argue but he just didn’t have enough guts to get the job done. He pulled off the sox.

“Wad ’em up and pitch ’em over.”

Looking mad enough to grind all the caps off his molars the drummer did so.

“Now, ma’am,” Reifel said, “if you will hand them up to me — ”

The rest was lost in the crash of a six-shooter. The drummer’s eyes looked like they would roll off his cheekbones.

Reifel whirled with a curse. With a riveted stare he watched the limp body drop between the two wheelers.

It was that new man the Company had hired to “ride shotgun.” He might never wake this side of hell but he’d sure got done with snoring.

R
EIFEL
needed no tea leaves to make out what had happened. Like Black Jack Ketchum he’d played one hand too many and his tenuous thread of luck had snapped. That new guy with the driver hadn’t had enough savvy to realize he was covered and, with Reifel’s attention turned away, had gone and grabbed for his Greener.

A red fog of anger surged over Ben Reifel. Just because that crazy fool had seized a chance to play at hero was no reason to go ahead and
make
him one!

Fury made the veins stand out like ropes on Reifel’s forehead. All the care, the slick maneuvering of months was thrown away now, sold down the river by a single flash of powder, jettisoned like so much slop because one stinking saddle tramp had let off his gun without thinking.

It was ever the way with their goddam kind! Where the Lord had intended a brain to grow the most of these bastards packed nothing but bone. You could tell them a thing ten thousand times over but you would get just as far shouting into your hat. A gun, with their kind, was the answer to everything.

Sweat cracked through the pores of his skin.

A wicked impulse leaped through him to search out that slug slammer and send him on in roped fast to the dead man.

But that wouldn’t help them. The damned blood was spilled now. The law wouldn’t quit with the actual killer. It would camp on their tracks till hell wouldn’t have them.

Reifel cursed the thought away from him and yelled to old Perkins to hang onto his horses. His bitter eyes snapped around to the girl. “You can hand me them things now.”

She flung him a frightened white-faced stare and moved like something activated by strings while the drummer, behind her, started heaving his lunch up.

Reifel hated the look of the girl’s frozen face as she came to his stirrup and gave the socks to him. Stuffing them into the pocket with the wallet he said: “Get aboard that stage and be quick about it — both of you!”

The drummer wiped off his mouth on the back of a shirtsleeve and stumbled across to the coach’s open door. He hauled himself in with cheeks gray and sagging, leaving the girl to fend for herself.

She appeared quite able. Retrieving her parasol, she gathered her skirts up and climbed in beside him, staring stonily ahead of her as Reifel shut the door.

Reifel nodded to the driver. “Get goin',” he said grimly.

• • •

Even after the stage rattled out of sight he sat humped on his horse like he was going to take root there, eyes unseeingly fixed on that unmoving shape, the hard core of his mind pawing over this sequence without uncovering any vestige of comfort. The fellow was dead, killed in a stick-up engineered by Ben Reifel and no amount of slick talk could erase that fact.

He let out a gusty breath and scowled bitterly. What was done was done and there was no going back of it. A man had been killed and they were stuck with it now.

He loosened his wipe and got out of the saddle, ramming the Winchester back in its scabbard. Leaving the buckskin on grounded reins he tramped over to the misguided fool who’d played hero and, squatting down beside him, started going through his pockets.

All he got from the first was a handful of change. But the right hip pocket held a bulky wallet and when he flipped this open Reifel knew the worst.

Cold loneliness closed over him. The sound of his men working toward him through the brush was like the rattle of earth against the lid of a coffin.

He sighed once again and stood tiredly upright. His eyes met Bo Breen’s and he tossed him the wallet.

“What’s the matter,” Breen growled, “have we been took with that box?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t opened it.”

“Shoot the lock off it, Snake,” Breen told one of the others, “an’ let’s see what we’ve drawed to.” He walked up to Reifel. “I know what’s eatin’ you — you’re sore about that goddam stiff.” Impatience moved across his gaunt cheeks and he spat in the dust and rubbed a hand on his pants-leg. “If you want my opinion you’re in the wrong line of business.”

Reifel’s high flat body settled into its tracks and all the frustrated anger of his reckless nature fused into a hard, prolonged attention. The sun, fire red, dropped below the ridge and its furnace glow, deployed above the crest, spilled ruddy light across Reifel’s cheekbones, starkly gilding the Roman curve of his nose. It flashed from the concha underneath Breen’s chin and struck up a glinting along the brass rims of cartridges looped to his belts.

A wind prowled the brush, plucking sound from small branches. It fluttered the ends of the scarf at Breen’s throat.

He was a cat-footed man with a gun at each hip, very adroit at promoting his own narrow interests. The hair that stuck out below the roll of his hatbrim was prematurely white and gave a false paternalism to features otherwise distinguished almost wholly by guile.

The moments stretched out while the others stood waiting for Reifel’s answer, their inscrutability at last revealing signs of impatience and Breen’s bright glance, licking round that intent circle, showed an increased edge of confidence, a heightened boldness, that fully confirmed all the things Ben had suspected.

A smile touched the corners of his lips remotely. “That makes two of us that think so. Maybe it’s your notion I should let you run this outfit?”

“I’ll say this,” Breen sneered — “I could do as good as you have.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

Breen’s mouth wrenched open with the shock of surprise. Tensed to claw for leather, Reifel’s tame surrender swung the man off balance. Cheeks flushed with an angry confusion he was unable to comprehend that any man could step down calmly and with such equanimity see the reins of his authority pass into another’s hands. He simply could not believe it. “You mean — ”

“The outfit’s yours. You’ve been wantin’ it, haven’t you? Then go ahead and run it.”

Breen scowled suspiciously. “What’s the big idea?”

“The job’s just got too big for me is all.”

Breen didn’t believe that but Reifel shrugged indifferently. “Soon as this stuff’s been figured, I’m ridin' — ”

“Just a minute,” Breen growled, not at all sure he liked this. “You’ll leave when and if we say you can — savvy?”

Ben had lived with these men for a lot more months than he cared to look back on yet he found no regret in their silent regard. He moved his shoulders again and saw the strain let go of their postures. Snake Frenston went over and placed the muzzle of his gun against the iron padlock securing the express box. The shot made quite a racket. Frenston threw back the lid and they could all see the stacks of wrapped coins and greenbacks.

Breen didn’t bother to look. Belligerent, dissatisfied, his cat’s yellow eyes kept digging at Reifel. Ben’s easy acceptance of their suddenly swapped status took much of the pleasure away from Breen’s coup.

He said, tough and wary: “Throw them socks in the kitty.”

Reifel considered him another long moment before he got them from his pocket and tossed them to Frenston.

“Make the count,” Breen said, and chucked him Schmole’s wallet.

Reifel tossed him the dude’s. He knew a small triumph when Breen’s eyes flared and narrowed.

Breen took a step toward him. “Where the hell’d you get that?”

“Drummer.” Reifel smiled. “I took that other one off the express guard.”

Frenston, crouched above the box, suddenly dropped Schmole’s wallet as though recoiling from a rattler. He lurched to his feet with blanching cheeks and Bo Breen, twisting his head about, cried with an exasperated fury:
“Now
what?”

Frenston licked at his lips. “That goddam guard was a
deputy marshal!”

• • •

Reifel watched that knowledge scald its way through startled faces. These were all hard men, a tough minded lot long inured to violence and the anarchistic concept that whatever they wanted they could damned well take. He had always known they were not his kind but had carelessly accepted them as diamonds in the rough, free thinkers, rebel spirits of too adventurous a turn to unprotestingly accept the stultifying laws and prescribed standards of conduct contrived by barons intent on keeping lesser men tied firmly in their places. Wolves of the chaparral he had humorously dubbed them but now, stripped of pretense, he recognized too late that these were nothing but jackals — two-legged coyotes tricked out in wolves’ clothing.

Disgusted, he turned away from them, reaching for the reins of his ground-hitched horse.

Breen’s voice plowed after him. “Come back here, damn you! You got us into this and — ”

Reifel spun wickedly. His body sloped from the waist and he stood that way, watching, right hand spread and ready. Crowdy, peering over Breen’s shoulder, wildly jumped to one side, flinging himself away from Breen with a contagion of fright starkly mirrored in other faces.

“Go on,” Reifel said. “Let your dogs see the rabbit.”

Breen appeared locked in some kind of paralysis. Reifel’s sudden aggression had thrown him into confusion. Abandoning guile he slammed both hands at his pistols but they froze inches short of the bonehandled grips. The full tide of Breen’s rage could not drive them nearer and he stood, visibly trembling, like a hamstrung bronc.

Reifel laughed harshly. He went over to his horse. But with a hand on the horn he looked back at Breen dismally. “When a marshal gets killed, Bo, the law don’t forget it. You better bust this bunch up and start scatterin’ pronto.”

He watched the flush crawl up Breen’s unwashed neck, smiled at him grimly and climbed into the saddle. He put the flats of his hands firmly down on the pommel and looked at Breen dourly, remembering again the supple shape of the girl. He saw the shine of sweat on Breen’s frozen face and Frenston’s elaborate appearance of boredom and, behind them, the stiffly schooled cheeks of the others.

“They’re all yours, Breen,” he said — “I wish you joy of them.”

Crowdy, shuffling his feet, lifted eyes that were bright with a nervous cupidity. “Feelin’ like you do … I mean — ” he swallowed, “what about your cut? You still figgerin' — ?”

Reifel writhed to think he could ever have been part of this confederacy of scoundrels. “You better give it to the killer. He’s like to have need of it.”

He refocused his attention on Breen who, recovered, stood sullenly watchful, the sneer on his lips not quite hiding his malevolence.

“I’m riding out of here,” he told them. “I ain’t aiming to come back and I’m not hankerin’ to be followed. What the rest of you do is your own damn business but if our trails ever cross again you’d better not know me. Is that clear?” he said sharply.

One or two of them grunted. Frenston dropped to a squat and got to work on the division. Crowdy edged in closer, lips silently moving as he peered across Frenston’s shoulder, suspiciously checking the count for himself.

There was something abysmal in the look of Breen’s stare. The man’s discomfited pride, smarting under the loss in prestige occasioned by that uncompleted grab for his pistols, might yet bring on gunplay. There wasn’t much doubt whose side the rest would take. Too long this bunch had chafed on the leash to have any love left over for Reifel.

He eased the buckskin backward toward the fringe of blue cedar.

Breen’s sneer grew more marked. There was something atavistic in the cant of his posture, something in his eyes which left Ben Reifel uneasy.

• • •

Seventy minutes of hard riding brought Reifel into the high-growing timber of the mountains’ northern flanks. It would soon be full dark. Where his way led steeply upward between the boles of ponderosa the gloom perceptibly thickened and not even the cry of a disturbed owl relieved the impenetrable stillness. A deep carpet of fallen needles cushioned the buckskin’s travel and the smell of the forest was a pungent aroma laced with cold air rolling down from the peaks.

He was probably a fool to be returning to the Cherrycows when all the dictates of caution urged flight. But he was damned if he would leave for Bo Breen’s enjoyment what share he still had in the undivided loot put away for times of trouble. The great bulk of his share in former hauls was safely banked under aliases at Douglas and Deming; but close to ninety-eight hundred in currency was cached beneath the feedroom of Cy Turner’s livery at Paradise, and it may have been remembrance of this which had put that smugness in Breen’s parting stare.

Three thousand dollars would come in mighty handy in turning over that new leaf. Nor was Riefel forgetting it was himself alone who had stopped that westbound stage this evening. Pop Perkins had been held up before by Ben Reifel and would carefully have catalogued the appearance of this buckskin. At Turner’s Ben could swap him for some less conspicuous animal … perhaps even for that blaze-faced roan Cy was fond of.

That blue roan was of the type dubbed locally a
gambler’s
horse, a strong-legged hustler that for three-eighths of a mile could give three lengths to chain lightning and beat it. Which was just what Ben needed, being minded to be out of here long before dawn. And that roan was an easy keeper of a strain highly regarded for endurance. There were a lot of tough miles wrapped up in that hide and if he could get him, Ben thought, he might yet pull clear of this goddam killing.

He was in no doubt as to the hell that would be raised once the star-packing brethren got wind of Schmole’s rub-out. Every tinbadge in these counties would go on the prod, for if one lawman’s death were allowed to go unpunished the whole tribe would stand in danger of extinction. They
had
to get this bastard.

Reifel understood that.

Perkins knew well enough Ben hadn’t killed the messenger, but that was no matter. They couldn’t chase phantoms. They’d be after the man on the buckskin horse. He was the one who had stuck up the stage. He was the one they would count most important. And if his name was Ben Reifel what the hell would they care! They
knew
about him. They had some clue to his identity.

He slammed another look behind him, knowing how futile it was even as he did so. There’d be nothing to fear along his backtrail yet. He had gone to some trouble to confuse pursuit, riding when he could across bare ledges; and the first town Perkins could start an alarm from was a good forty miles from the scene of the hold-up. Be another hour anyway before Perkins got there and at least three more before the law found their tracks. If the boys had followed their usual procedure, each one departing in a different direction….