Then I was riding for the trees. The remaining two men had had all they wanted and they was back a good ways. They tried a couple of shots at me, but they was too far to be effective and I raced into the little circle of rocks and jumped off my horse. My poor little mare was just about done in. She was sweated up and heaving bad. Before I ran for the rocks I loosed her cinch, which gave her some relief. Then I joined Les and Howland in laying down a fire on the remaining two men. They milled around a minute or two more, then turned and began riding for town. We knew what they were doing. They weren’t quitting. They were just going for help.
We slumped back. I let out a breath. Howland said: “Goddam!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, goddam!”
We were in a little kind of draw. The trees banked up to our back and on both sides and we had a scattering of rocks out in front of us. It wasn’t a bad place to fort up, but we wasn’t in no position to stand off anybody for very long even if we’d been in Fort Davis. We were laying up among the rocks with the horses standing around in the bottom of the draw, their heads hanging and their sides heaving. I saw where Les had laid Tod out in the shelter of a rock that had rolled down to the bottom. I could see his chest moving.
“How’s Tod?” I asked Les.
“I don’t know,” Les said. “I didn’t have a second to see.”
“I reckon not,” I said. We was all speaking in short sentences, being out of breath ourselves.
Les looked at me. “But, my God, Will, you’re shot to pieces yourself! You’ve got blood all over you!”
“Yeah!” I said and looked at my thigh. It suddenly began hurting.
“No, I mean your neck. You got blood all over it.”
“My neck?” Then I remembered the tug I’d felt while we were in the bank. I put my hand to my neck and found the wound. It was a groove along the left side that you could have hidden your finger in. It wasn’t serious, but it had sure bled a lot. I’d been lucky. An inch the other way and I’d have been keeping Chico company.
“It ain’t nothing,” I said. “But my thigh is hurting like hell.”
“I’ll see to Tod, then,” Les said. He got up and went over to his cousin. Howland was sitting, his revolver hanging loosely in his hand, staring at the ground and not saying anything. I got my pants down and seen I’d been lucky again. The bullet had gone in high on my leg, missing the bone and going all the way through. On the left side was a kind of pouched-in hole and, where the bullet had come out, the flesh was blown open and ragged around the edges. It wasn’t too bad, but it was hurting like hell. Then I suddenly thought about the bullet going all the way through.
I jumped up, struggling to pull on my pants. If the bullet had gone all the way through it might have hit my little mare. I took off for my horse in a kind of stumbling run. My leg was beginning to stiffen up already. “If that sonofabitch ...” I said aloud, but then remembered that I’d already killed him. I got to my little horse and looked at the saddle. A hole was in the outer leather and I lifted that and saw the bullet embedded in the saddle stock. “Goddam!” I said. I worked the cartridge head out. The lead was flattened and misshapen. It hadn’t touched my horse. My leg and the saddle leather had stopped it. I was gladder about that than anything that had happened the whole bad day.
I put the flattened bullet in my pocket and limped over to where Les was squatted down by Tod. The cousin was down on his back breathing in little short gasps. I could see with one eye he was bad off. Les had his shirt ripped apart in a couple of places.
“Bad,” I said.
“Damn bad,” Les said. “He’s caught one in the side here and one from the back.” He half turned the redhead on his side. “See there. I think it nicked his lungs.”
A bullet had entered from the back and had come out a little above the nipple on his right side. I figured Les was right about the lung because a little blood was coming out Tod’s nose and mouth. He had his eyes closed.
“Is he conscious?”
I squatted down beside them. Les was trying to plug up the holes with some pieces he’d torn off his own shirt. Both bullets had gone all the way through, so we didn’t have nothing to dig for. And we might could stop the blood from coming out, but there wasn’t a thing we could do about the bleeding that was going on inside Tod’s body.
“We’re in a bad way,” I said.
“You got that right.” It was Howland. He’d come up and was standing over us, the revolver still hanging loosely from his hand. He stood there, glaring down at us.
“They’ll be back,” Les said.
“Damn right they’ll be back,” I said. “And pretty quick. Them was either rangers or Association men. None of your townspeople. They’ll be back.” I knew damn good and well they were professional gunmen. I was thinking about the man with the broken leg still trying to shoot me when he could have laid low and hid in the brush. A storekeeper might have hid, but not a gunman.
“They know we’ve got a wounded man and are short a horse,” I added. “They figure they got us.”
“Ain’t they?” Howland asked.
I looked up at him. “Maybe they got you, but they ain’t got me.” Blood and dust was caked all over his face. “You got any of that rum left?”
“Sure,” he said, biting off his words. “In my saddlebags.” He jerked his head. “Out yonder.”
“Well, how about getting it?” I said.
He sat down. “You get it.”
I looked at him for a second, then heaved myself up. “All right,” I said. “Can I take your horse, Les? He’s had more rest. I’ll just walk him.”
“Sure,” Les said, but he looked over at Howland. “You ought to go, Thomas. Will is hit. We got to get something into these wounds to keep off gangrene.”
“Let him go,” Howland said. He sat down. “I ain’t.”
Les stared at him. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that if Will hadn’t cut over to cover you that you’d be laying out there shot to pieces. They’d have rode you down like a dog.”
Howland didn’t say anything for a minute. Finally he got up. “All right,” he said. “But it was Wilson Young that—”
I cut him off. “What? What’s that you’re saying?”
“Nothing!” He jerked on by me and went and mounted up and rode slowly out of the little draw.
Les was sitting on the other side of Tod, slumped, his chin on his chest. Things had come to a hell of a mess. If nobody was hurt and we had horses enough we could have been making tracks and been clear of the country before a posse could come. I could imagine them back in town rallying up support, telling everybody that it was duck-shooting time. They’d be saying they had them some outlaws pinned up and they couldn’t move, that half of them was hurt and they were short horses. Oh, they’d get together quite a blood-thirsty bunch. Most men are willing to go in for a little killing if it’s easy enough. What most men don’t like is when they’s a chance they’ll get hurt themselves. Well, some of them might get surprised.
I looked over at Les. “That old Rio Grande’s a long way off.”
He nodded slowly. “I know it.”
“Reckon old Tod can make it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, then looked up at me. “But I ain’t leaving him.”
I laughed as best I could. My thigh was hurting like hell. “I know it,” I said. “And I ain’t neither. You know me.”
He ducked his head and kind of half smiled. “Yeah, I know you, Will. I ain’t worried about you.”
We sat there, quiet, in a kind of half stupor. The day was very hot but now and then a stray breeze would kick up little swirls of dust in the ravine floor. A few flies were buzzing around the blood caked up on Tod’s shirt and Les flicked at them tiredly. I looked up at the sun and was surprised to see it nowhere near noon. It was still early even though it seemed like a whole week had passed since we’d rode into the bank that morning.
I don’t know. Things had gotten so bad that I just didn’t know wha
t to think. I wondered, sitting there in the sun and dust, what the girl Linda was doing at that moment. Probably she was sitting in an upstairs room of that cool hacienda writing poetry or something. She’d be smelling of lilac water and clean and pure and not thinking anything at all about a wounded, bloody, dusty cowboy sitting in a draw just outside Uvalde, Texas, maybe fixing to get killed in the next little while.
And I wondered to myself if I hadn’t got myself in this fix on account of her. I wondered if my decision to quit hadn’t been on account of her. Or better, if my decision to quit with a little something in my poke hadn’t been on account of her. I could have quit, sure, and gone north and went to punching cattle or something without the worry of having money enough to set up.
But would I? Hell, I didn’t know.
But the girl was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and anything I’d done in her name hadn’t been her fault. It had been my own doing.
Well, they’d been waiting for us and I didn’t know who to blame. It could have been Tod’s doing or Howland’s talk or both of them. But in the end it was my own doing. I was the one said we’re going in. It had been my mistake.
Howland came riding back through the rocks. He came slowly, his head down like he was thinking. He was carrying a bottle of rum in one hand and his carbine that he’d rescued out of his boot in the other. He came on and pulled up a few feet from me and Tod.
“Here,” he said. He pitched the bottle of rum down to me. I caught it and passed it to Les. He took the cloth plugs out of Tod’s wounds and then poured in the rum. The redhead stirred and jerked as the hot liquor burned into him, but he didn’t open his eyes. Howland watched him, still sitting atop Les’s horse with his rifle propped across the saddle.
Les finished with the wounds, doused the plugs with rum and replaced them and then passed the bottle across to me. I first slapped a handful against my neck, the burning almost raising me up, and then pulled down my breeches and went to work lacing my thigh wound. I had to turn sideways to pour it into the opening.
“Goddam,” I swore.
Les grinned. “Hurts, don’t it?”
“Like the hinges of hell!”
“He ain’t gonna make it.” This came from Howland. I looked up at him. He was gesturing down toward Tod. “Look at him. He ain’t gonna pull through.”
“He might,” I said. “If we can get him to a doctor.”
“How?” Howland said, sarcasm heavy in his voice. “Catch the train? Hell, Wilson, we’re short a horse! We’re in a tight! We ain’t gonna make it if we don’t leave Tod!”
“We ain’t leaving nobody,” I said evenly.
“But look here, man! We’ve got time to get a good start before anybody gets back. Hell, we could make ten miles and then let them try and track us!”
“No!” I said.
He stared back at me, the rifle still across the pommel of his saddle. “He’s the one,” he said, “got us in this mess. If it hadn’t been for him we’d be riding out of here now with a sack full of gold. He caused it by going into town.”
Beside me, Les said: “No need for that kind of talk, Howland.”
“Anyway,” I put in, “you might have done a little causing yourself. You and your big mouth.”
He looked back at me, his face flushing and his neck swelling. I was conscious of the way he was holding the rifle. “I done told you that man lied.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Listen,” Les said, “this won’t get it, this kind of talk. We got ourselves into this, now we just got to get ourselves out.”
Howland pointed at Tod with the rifle. “There’s the way,” he said. “Without Tod to hold us back we could be clean out of the country by the time they get a posse together.”
“We ain’t leaving Tod!” Les said, a little thread of anger in his voice.
“Les,” Howland said, “I wouldn’t have said it if he had a chance, but look at him. Man, he’s hardly breathing now. Why, just loading him on a horse would bring his end. Look here,” he added, making his voice friendly and reasonable, “is it right he should get us all done in when he hasn’t got a chance? Now is it? If it was me laying there I’d say, ‘Fine boys, take the horses and ride out. I ain’t got a chance anyway.’ That’s what I’d say if it was me.”
Me and Les just stared at him.
He looked back, waiting for us to give him some kind of answer. Between Les and I, Tod stirred a little. I looked over at him and thought for a second he was going to open his eyes. But his lids just kind of fluttered and then relaxed. I didn’t know how he’d made it as far as he had. His shirt was just all over soaked with blood. I figured he must have lost a gallon. But he was a tough boy. Who could say whether he’d pull through or not?
“Les,” Howland said again, “look at it this way. If we try to drag that boy cross-country he just ain’t gonna make it. You know it and so does Wilson. If you leave him here that posse’ll find him and get him into a doctor. That way we’ll all make it.”
Les didn’t say anything. I looked up at Howland. “Listen, Howland,” I said easily, “whyn’t you give that horse a rest and find a rock to sit on?”
He acted like he didn’t even hear me, just went on looking at Les, waiting for him to say something. Les was busy with Tod.
“What do you say, Les? Time’s running out. I’m for the boy, you know that. But this is his best chance.”
I was starting to get a little angry. I didn’t like the way Howland was staying on that horse with that rifle just kind of casually pointing toward us. “Say, Howland!” I said loudly. “How about getting off that horse!”
He finally looked over at me. “What’s your rush?”
“No rush,” I said. “Just do it.”
“Well,” he said, drawling a little. “After that mess you made of things this morning I wouldn’t have reckoned you’d had the gall to still be giving orders. Mister Wilson Young.”
I felt a little chill hit me in the pit of the stomach. Now I seen what he had in mind, had had from the very moment he’d rode back. I was surprised he hadn’t just kept going and not bothered to bring us the rum. But running out on your partners is pretty serious business and I reckoned he hadn’t had his mind fully made up. Or maybe he’d really thought he could talk us into leaving Tod. What he thought, however, didn’t make any difference, for there he sat, the rifle balanced across the pommel and just kind of pointing in our direction.
“Get off the horse,” I said steadily.
He looked right back at me. “No,” he said.
Well, that was the way the dice were cast. I still hoped he’d come to his senses. “Howland, we got to have that horse. Get off him.”
“No,” he said.
“Well, then what are you planning on doing?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not planning on doing, Mister Wilson Young, and that’s staying here and catching a bullet for a job you and that redheaded fool messed up.”
“You figure to ride out then?”
“That’s right. I’m riding out.”
“I wouldn’t try it,” I said. It had got very quiet in the little draw. Our voices seemed to just boom and echo. Looking past him, I could see little heat waves shimmering off the hard rock. “I sure wouldn’t try nothing like that. I’d have to stop you.”
He sneered at me. “Yeah? And how you figure to do that, you with your breeches down around your ankles. Hell, you couldn’t even stand up without tripping.”
He raised the rifle just a little and I saw his finger go inside the trigger guard. “I don’t reckon you’ll do anything.”
From my left, Les suddenly said: “What about me, Howland?”
Howland cut his eyes sideways to take in Les and it was all I needed. My gun belt was laying on the ground beside me and I jerked my revolver clear and fanned off three shots. They went boom, boom, boom, in the little draw. Howland went flipping backward off the gelding and hit the ground hard. The noise had spooked the bl
ack and he ran off to stand with the others. I got up, pulled my breeches up, and walked over and looked at Howland. I’d hit him in the chest, the neck and the forehead. That’s the way of it when you fan a gun. If you’re not careful it will gradually bring your sights up. Fortunately I’d started low.
Howland lay on his back, his legs drawn up. Then he relaxed and his legs straightened.
“He’s dead,” Les said at my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. I walked back over and sat down. “Well, now we ain’t a horse short.”
CHAPTER 11
Heading South for Mexico
Once Howland lay dead we got busy breaking camp. We caught the horses and loaded Tod on Les’s black gelding. He was the strongest and the most rested and it was proper for the black to carry Tod.
Just as we got ready to go I rode up to the top of the little draw and looked back toward the town. I figured it had been about fifteen minutes since we’d run the posse off and they would just about be making it back to town. As to how long it would take them to round up fresh men I didn’t have no idea. Getting up a posse is a hard thing to figure. Most townspeople don’t want any part of going after desperados. They figure they’ve got this to do and that and, anyway, it ain’t their job. Still, a town can get aroused and a catch party can be put together in the wink-of-an-eye. Of course there were the professional lawmen to consider, but we’d cut them up pretty bad that morning in the gunfight. They’d want to fill their ranks out a little because they wouldn’t know we were down to just two. And they might not know how bad Tod was hurt. They might figure to be chasing four armed men and they’d be a little careful how they went about that.
I stared at the horizon, but couldn’t see a thing. Finally I turned my horse and rode back to where Les was waiting. He was mounted on Chico’s pony and had a lead rein on his black. We’d tied the redhead astraddle the gelding with his legs roped in position. He was slumped over the pommel and we’d passed a rope around the horse’s belly and over his back to keep him straight. I didn’t myself know how long he could make it. He’d probably die on the trip, but that was a hell of a lot better than being taken in and dying in some cell. We hoped we might find a doctor, but I doubted it. It had just been Tod’s bad luck to catch a bullet at the wrong time.
The Bank Robber Page 13