The Desperado (5 page)

The gun looked deadly, but quietly so. I figured the man would be the
same. The gun didn't have an angry look or a belligerent look, but at
the same time you knew it wouldn't stand for any foolishness. I
wondered where the hell the owner had managed to get it, because I knew
he wasn't a soldier, even before I looked at him.

And I was right. He was a long, hungry-looking man with faded gray
eyes and a curious twist to his mouth that at first seemed like a
smile, but after a second look you knew it wasn't. He had a face as
long as a nightmare. His long, sharp nose drifted off to one side of
his face, and there was a scar across the bridge, and a dent that you
could lay the barrel of a .44 into. A week's growth of dirty gray beard
didn't help his appearance any.

For clothes, he wore a hickory shirt with two buttons missing, a
dirty bandanna around his scrawny neck, and a pair of serge pants slick
from saddle wear. His hat had been black once, a long time ago, but it
wasn't much of any color now.

I knew, before looking, that he would be wearing two side guns. I was
right again. Two Colt .44's, the regular “Army” percussion model, but
they had been altered to use metallic cartridges and looked like
different guns. The ramrods and lever were gone, and new blued ejectors
were molded to the sides of the barrels, and the new cylinders had
loading gates. They were clean and cold and deadly-looking, and the
gunsmith who had done the altering had been a man who loved his work.

I saw all this while maybe a tick of a second went by, while Red was
rearing up just a little because of the jerk I had given on the reins.
And by the time Red's forefeet hit the ground again I had the feeling
that the stranger and I were old friends—or rather, old acquaintances,
because he didn't look like the kind of man who would have many
friends. I didn't know what Ray Novak was thinking, but I noticed that
he didn't do anything foolish, like going for his own .44 or trying to
ride the man down. There was something about the stranger that told you
instinctively that a trick like that would only get you a sudden
burial.

It crossed my mind quickly that maybe the stranger was a bounty
hunter. The Yankees had plenty of such men working for them, free-lance
killers who hunted fugitives from carpetbag law at so much a head. But
I discarded that thought before it had time to form. This man wasn't
working for the carpetbag law, or any other kind of law, for that
matter. I don't know how I was so sure of that. He just wasn't the
type.

“Ain't it kind of early in the morning,” the man said softly, “to be
taking a ride?”

“Or late at night,” I said.

The stranger's mouth twitched slightly in what was almost a nervous
tic, and he made an almost silent grunting sound that came all the way
up from his belly. It was like no sound I had ever heard before, but I
was to find out later that it was laughter—or the closest thing to
laughter that he ever came to. He hadn't asked us to raise our hands or
drop our guns, so I figured that he didn't have anything against us in
particular, except for the fact that we were strangers riding at an
unusual hour.

I said, “We figured to make camp here on the bend, but I guess we can
move on to another spot....”

He made a negligent little motion with his shoulders. He had sized us
up quickly as men not too friendly with the law. Why else would we be
riding by night and sleeping by day? But he studied us for a while
longer with that gray gaze of his. He regarded Red appreciatively, and
the grub sack thoughtfully. I think it was the grub sack that made up
his mind.

“I don't mind a bit of company... once in a while.”

That, I knew, was all the invitation we were going to get. He lowered
his carbine, holding it in the crook of his arm, and I started to swing
down from the saddle.

Then Ray Novak spoke for the first time. “We'll just move on,” he
said. “I reckon there are other places.”

Ray hadn't taken to the stranger. Disapproval was stamped all over
his face as he sat slouched in his saddle, his forehead screwed up in
thought. Ray Novak had lived on law for so long that he recognized and
hated outlaws instinctively. He was a special breed of man. Breeding,
and blood lines, and training made his hackles rise at the sight of an
outlaw, just as naturally as a long-eared Kentucky hound gets his back
up at the sight of a badger. The fact that he was now an outlaw himself
had nothing to do with it. He was still the son of Martin Novak.

I could see Ray thumbing back in his memory, going through all the
dodgers on outlaws that had come through his pa's office, trying, to
place the stranger. He hadn't placed him yet. But sooner or later that
plodding mind of his would come across the right dodger, and the right
photograph or drawing, and the stranger would be pegged.

In the meantime, I didn't give a damn. I'd rather bed down with an
outlaw than pull a stretch on the work gang. Anyway, I was tired of
riding, and I was tired of Ray Novak. I dropped down from the saddle.

“If you want to ride on,” I said, “you can ride. I'm stopping.”

He didn't like that much. But he thought it over for a minute and
didn't argue. Maybe he wanted to study the stranger some more. Or maybe
he figured that all this was his fault in the first place and that made
him bound to stay with me. I didn't know or care.

The stranger watched us carelessly as we unsaddled our horses and
staked them around the bend near his big black. When we came back, he
had a small fire going down near the water. He worked easily, almost
lazily, selecting just the right kind of dry twigs. It was an expert
fire, big enough to cook on, but practically no smoke came from it. He
looked up and smiled that half-smile of his as I got the skillet out of
the blanket roll and brought it and a bacon slab down to the fire. We
were all friends, it seemed. But I noticed that he never let himself be
maneuvered into a position that would show his back.

Before long, the sharp air of early morning was heavy with the rich
smell of frying bacon. We propped the skillet over the fire on two
rocks and once in a while I would turn the meaty slabs with a
pocketknife. There is nothing like the smell of bacon in the early
morning, but I was the only one that seemed to be interested. The
stranger, I knew, was half starved, but he regarded the food only
passively, hunkering down on his heels, with his back against the solid
trunk of a cottonwood. Ray Novak hadn't said anything since we had
unsaddled the horses, but I could see that he was still poking at the
back of his mind, trying to get the man placed. I think the stranger
saw it too. But he didn't seem to care.

We ate the bacon with Ma's cornbread, spearing the dripping slices
with our pocketknives, chewing and swallowing without a word. The
stranger helped himself only after Ray and I had what we wanted. After
we had finished, I went down to the creek and rinsed the skillet and
filled it with fresh water. When I got back, the two of them were still
sitting there on the ground, without saying a thing, staring
thoughtfully at each other.

We boiled coffee in the skillet and I found two tin cups that Ma had
packed in the blanket roll. I poured for Ray and myself, and still not
a sound from anybody. I began to wonder what Ray Novak would do after
he finally dug the stranger out of his memory. The stranger must have
been wondering the same thing. And I had a crazy kind of feeling that
the stranger was feeling sorry for Ray.

The coffee was black and strong and coated with a thin film of bacon
grease. Like the bacon, the stranger had his coffee after Ray and I had
finished. The silence was beginning to work on me. It magnified faraway
sounds and brought my nerves out on top of my skin and rubbed them raw.

At last the stranger got slowly to his feet. “I'm much obliged for
the grub,” he said. “I guess I'll stretch out for a while. It's been a
long night.”

I said, “Sure.” Ray Novak said nothing. The stranger walked up the
slope a way, still not showing us his back, and stretched out under a
rattling big cottonwood where his saddle was. He seemed to go to sleep,
but there was no way of being sure about that. He pulled his hat partly
over his face and lay down with his head on his saddle, but I had an
uneasy feeling that he was just waiting.

I rinsed out the skillet and cups and put them back in the blanket
roll. Ray had moved over to another cotton-wood, still studying the
stranger. Without looking at me, he said, “You'd better get some sleep,
Tall.”

“How about you?”

“I can stay awake for a while. I've got a feeling that one of us had
better keep his eyes open.”

The way he said it made me burn. It was in that offhand sort of
way—the way you'd tell a kid to go on to bed, you had important things
to do. Maybe he thought my eighteen years made me a kid. Maybe, I
thought, Ray Novak could go to hell.

But I didn't try to make anything of it. Beginning tonight, I didn't
intend to ride with him any more. I spread my saddle blanket and sat
leaning back against my saddle. I wasn't particularly sleepy, and,
anyway, I wanted to see what Ray would do when he finally figured out
who the stranger was.

Maybe fifteen minutes went by without either of us making a sound.
Then, suddenly, Ray Novak made a little grunting noise and started to
shove himself away from the cottonwood.

“All right,” I said.

“All right what?”

“Who is our gun-loving friend? You've been working on it ever since
he first stuck that carbine in our faces.”

That took the wind out of him. “How did you know that?”

I shrugged. What difference did it make?

“Well, you were right,” Ray said softly. “I should have figured it
out a long time ago, but the beard and broken nose were things the
government dodger on him didn't show. But I pegged him finally. He's
Garret. Pappy Garret.”

I didn't believe it at first. Pappy Garret was one of those men that
you hear about all your life, but never see. The stories they told
about him were almost as wild as the ones about Pecos Bill, or if you
live in the north country, Paul Bunyan. He was wanted by both North and
South during the war for leading plundering guerilla bands into the
Kansas Free State. There wasn't a state in the Southwest that hadn't
put a price on his head. Pappy Garret had the distinction of being
probably the only thing in the world that the North and South saw alike
on. They were out to get him.

Twenty notches was Pappy's record, as well as records of men like
that could be kept. Some put the number of men who had gone down under
Pappy's guns as high as thirty. But most claimed it was twenty, more or
less, with some few claiming that he was overrated as a bad man and had
never killed more than fifteen men in his life. No one, but Pappy
Garret, would know for sure about that. And maybe Pappy didn't even
know. The story was that he had a hideout up in the Indian Territory
where he lived like a king by robbing the westbound wagon trains. Some
people said that he lived with an Indian princess, the youngest
daughter of the head chief of the Cheyennes. Others had it that he had
been killed during the war fighting for the Confederacy—or the Union,
depending on who was telling the story—and the real killer was Pappy
Garret's son, a child of his by the Indian princess.

But most people didn't put much stock in that story. They figured
that such a child couldn't be more than five or six years old, and a
boy that age wasn't apt to be doing much killing. Not even a son of
Pappy Garret's.

Still others had it that Pappy had gone to South America shortly
after the war and was settled down there on a big plantation as
respectable as you please, and all the killings that were laid to him
were done by men who just happened to look a little like Pappy. Many
such stories sprang up from time to time. Nobody really believed them,
but it gave them something to talk about. The peace officers probably
had the best idea of what Pappy was really like. He had killed two
marshals on the Mexican border, and one up in the Panhandle country not
long before, when they tried to arrest him. They saw Pappy Garret as a
killer, without any fancy trimmings.

It was hard to believe that the lank, hungry-looking man not twenty
yards away could be Pappy Garret, but Ray Novak didn't make mistakes
about things like that. I knew one thing, however: Pappy hadn't been
living like a king up in the Indian Territory, or anywhere else. He
looked like he hadn't had a full belly since he was a child. Lying
there with his eyes closed, with his head on the saddle, he looked more
like a tired old man than a killer.

And maybe that was the reason I wasn't afraid of him. If I felt
anything at all for Pappy Garret, it was sympathy. I'd had one night of
running from the law, and that was plenty for me. I wondered how Pappy
must feel after running for four or five years.

In the back of my mind, I realized that ten thousand dollars in
bounty money was mine if I wanted it. All I had to do was dry my gun
and empty it into Pappy Garret's skinny body and it was mine. There
wouldn't even be any trouble when I rode back to John's City. The
carpetbag law would be so glad to see Pappy's lifeless body dangling
across that big black horse of his that they would forget the grudge
they had against me. I'd be a hero, and a rich one at that. With ten
thousand dollars, I could buy a piece of free range and have the
beginnings of a ranch of my own. I could even marry Laurin Bannerman,
which was what I wanted more than anything else.

But I didn't think I would be able to sleep at night without seeing
that ugly, tired face of Pappy's; so the thought of killing him never
really got to be an idea.

Ray Novak had ideas of his own. He stood up quietly, his hand
unconsciously going down to his hip and feeling of the butt of his gun.
I said, “Just what do you aim to do?”