by Lauran Paine
Warfield fished around for his tobacco sack, made a smoke, offered the makings to his companion, who also made a cigarette, then the pair of them lit up off the same match and stood in quiet silence, gazing at one another.
Finally Warfield nodded. “All right. But let me point something out to you. I’m already outlawed so it won’t hurt me. But you … and your friends … will probably be outlaws, too, when this is over. Do you know that?”
“It has been discussed, señor. We know.”
“And your friends are still willing?”
The Mexican nodded, saying quietly: “Being an outlaw with pride is better than being a dog without pride. They are willing.”
Warfield sucked back a deep inhalation and noisily let it back out. He cast a glance skyward. The midsummer evening was descending but it would be several hours yet before nightfall. The little homely sounds of a village putting aside another day were around in the hot late afternoon, even the pungent aromas of cooking were there.
“When?” he suddenly asked.
The Mexican said, with a little twinkle: “The minute I walk out of that little gate over there, take my hat off, and mop my forehead.” At Warfield’s quick, wide-eyed look, the Mexican’s twinkling black eyes glowed stronger. “I told you … we have been talking all day.”
“They’re out there right now?”
“All around, señor. Even the ones who work in Bricker’s saloon have their pistols beneath their shirts. They are scattered up through the town. Some are loafing by the saloon and some are at the livery barn. There are even three men atop the stage line office roof … with rifles and pistols.”
Warfield breathed softly: “I’ll be damned.”
The Mexican chuckled. “My wife wanted to come here earlier and prepare you. I thought it wiser for her not to. After all, we have a child.”
Warfield put a narrowed look upon the tall Mexican. “Your people sure overlooked something,” he said softly. “They’re looking up to the wrong man. You’re their leader, not I.”
The Mexican’s expression turned saturnine. “My people,” he said slowly, “are like conquered people everywhere, señor … they are blinded by the splendor of those who have vanquished them, and see among their own kind only others as miserable as they also are. So … they look up to a man like you, a gringo pistolero. For me, the slight is nothing. I want only to be able to walk upright like a man.”
Warfield smoked his cigarette down, dropped it, and ground it underfoot. He was still having trouble assimilating all this. He had seen civil disturbances in his lifetime; he had even seen pitched battles. But he had never been involved in anything quite like this at all. It had nothing to do with range rights, with the wars between sheepmen and cowmen. This was purely and simply a revolution—Mexican style—and extricating John Trent from Bricker’s murderous grip was going to be only a very small part of the whole thing.
He raised his head. The tall Mexican was steadily regarding him. Warfield wagged his head in a rueful manner and the Mexican smiled broadly at him. “You will do it,” he said through that broad smile. “Bueno. Let me walk out of here and give the signal. Then you also come out.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Warfield.
“A very simple one, amigo. You and I walk up the roadway to the front of Bricker’s saloon. We call on him to bring out your friend, and, of course, he won’t, so then we shoot him along with his killers, take back our town, and give you back the life of your friend.”
Warfield was astounded. “Pardner,” he said softly, “we wouldn’t be alive two minutes after we walked up there.”
The Mexican dropped his smoke and stepped on it. As he raised his head, he said, as though he’d anticipated Warfield’s reaction and was prepared for it: “All right, jefe … then you tell me.”
Warfield had been jockeyed into leadership of the Mexicans. He knew it the minute his companion had spoken, even without being called chief. “We’ll get under cover before we call on Bricker to turn Trent loose, and, after the shooting starts, we’ll concentrate only on Bricker and his gun hands. No plundering, no general massacre. Understood?”
“Understood,” said the Mexican, and offered Warfield his hand. As he shook, he said: “This Señor Trent … they are holding him in a back room at the saloon. There is always one guard with him. They mean to take him secretly out of town after dark, kill him, and bury him. I think we must attack soon now. No?”
Warfield tightly smiled. “Go give the signal,” he said. “Then wait outside for me to join you.”
Chapter Twelve
The greatest benefit to health is the degree with which a strong man can bounce back from punishment. But even this has its limitations, as with Trent’s swollen face. He had eaten twice since being brought to Fulton, had drunk sparingly, and was now, a day and a night after being brought in, as sound as ever physically. But his face still was badly blistered and puffy around the eyes.
Of course, Trent heightened this effect, too, with his cultivated deep squint, but, even without that, and although he felt fit again, he looked like a wreck. Once, one of the guards suggested that he shave and wash, but Trent declined, giving as his excuse that he couldn’t see to accomplish either. The guard didn’t really care, so nothing more was said about this.
Bricker came in after the last of his men had returned, reporting they could find no trace whatsoever of Warfield. Bricker was not pleased. He said with audible finality: “All right, lawman … we’ve played our little game and now it’s finished. If there’d been money on Warfield, either ridin’ with him or on his head, you just might’ve walked out of here all in one piece.”
“Naw,” contradicted Trent from his cot. “You never meant for it to end like that right from the start, Bricker. We both know that.”
Bricker said indifferently: “Have it your way, it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m curious,” said Trent. “What is it with you, Lem … what happened sometime back in your life to make you hate badges?”
“What happened, Trent? Well, it’s not any one thing. It’s a whole lot of things. Every time I got started at something, the law loused me up. When I was a kid first startin’ out down in Texas, there was always a badge to interfere. You know what that does to an ambitious man after a while?”
“Yeah, Bricker, I know. But didn’t it ever occur to you that it was you, not the law … didn’t it ever cross your mind, friend, that every time you stepped outside the law to make your living, it was you who was wrong?”
“Wrong, Trent? What’s wrong? Wrong is what folks say a man is, when he’s tryin’ to claw his way up the same way they did … when he gets caught at something they got away with. That’s what wrong is. And you … and all the badge-heavy devils like you … what gives you such a high and mighty outlook? A lousy tin badge? Naw, Trent, with men like you it’s the wish to look down on others. It’s the desire to think you’re better’n anyone else … to have a badge and a gun to back that up with.”
Trent lay there listening to that wire-tight voice getting more rabid and savage, and he thought back to hearing this kind of unstable reasoning from other outlaws and killers. Trent had a theory: when a man passed thirty he was forever molded, and, if he was a killer, he went on killing until he was himself killed. If he was a thief, he went on stealing until society took away his freedom. If he was a mad dog, as Lem Bricker clearly was, he ground down other people until, one day, they got enough and ground him down. It was John Trent’s own private version of the law of retribution—with variations.
He said: “Lem, I’ve never known it to fail … a man reaches a height in his career, and his judgment is put on trial. He can turn right or he can turn left, but whichever way he turns, forever after, forges his remaining life.”
“Quite a sermon,” said Bricker dryly from beside the cot. “You missed your callin’, Marshal. You should’ve been a Bible banger.”
Trent ignored this. “You’re at the place right now, friend.
You can probably kill me … at least according to the numbers and the guns you can likely come a lot closer to doing it than I can come to preventing it.”
“That’s good reasonin’,” said Bricker dryly.
“But, Lem, that’s when you’ll have permitted your warped reasoning to turn you to the left, because, after I’m dead, you’ll have made your choice, and you’ll never get another full night’s rest.”
“Trent, you’re talkin’ like a fool. Who’s goin’ to find your grave? This is one hell of a big desert.”
“I told you once, Bricker … federal officers make it a personal issue when one of their own is killed.”
“Who’ll even know you were killed? You’re just goin’ to disappear.”
Trent shook his head. “I was last seen in Daggett. Constable Chalmers up there knew what I was doing and where I was going next. South of here on, across the desert, is a place called Hayfork. I’ll never arrive there. Lem, where does that put me? Right here in Fulton!”
But Bricker wasn’t disturbed. Few men in his situation were disturbed when unbalanced judgment swayed them. “Let ’em come and let ’em look,” he said. “No one here’s goin’ to tell ’em a damned thing. And you sure won’t be doin’ any talkin’, Marshal.” Then Lem Bricker did one of the odd little things that both good men and bad men do with no really valid reason. He said: “We won’t meet again until nightfall, Trent, so I’ll send you in a drink … a double shot of rye whiskey. Even a lousy lawman deserves that before he takes off.”
Then Bricker turned on his heel and walked out of the room. He paused to give a brief order to the guard at the door and afterward passed from sight.
For a little while the guard sat there, looking at Trent, his expression as indifferent as hard men have to be, then he said in a droll way: “Marshal, I got to hand it to you.” He didn’t enlarge upon this, he simply got up, shook his head, and walked on out of the room.
Trent opened his eyes, watched the doorway until he heard his guard and other men speaking back and forth out in the barroom, then he swung his legs over the cot’s edge, stood up, and rolled his shoulders, punched at the hot, thin air with both fists, stepped right, stepped left, sat back down, and breathed deeply.
Through the grimy rear window of this room Trent could make out a dilapidated horse shed and a back alley where daylight struck bitterly against broken glass. This, he told himself, would be his way out, and if there was a horse in that shed, so much the better. If not …. Trent shrugged.
A noisy newcomer stamped into the yonder barroom while from the roadway came the angry cursing of someone upset by something his horse had done. A dog barked south of town and somewhere east of the main roadway a church bell pealed. This made Trent’s thoughts turn ironic: A church bell ringing in Lem Bricker’s town is as incongruous as a coffin at a wedding.
The guard returned, sauntered on in, kicked the door closed, and said: “Here’s your likker, Marshal. Make it last.” The man chuckled. “If you make it last long enough, it might be like a reprieve … no one shoots fellers while they’re drinkin’.”
This unfunny remark of his tickled the guard and he laughed louder as he walked ahead.
Trent had both feet planted squarely under him where he sat. He neither spoke nor raised his head, but he put out a groping hand. The gunman halted, bent slightly from the waist, and put a glass into Trent’s fingers. In a blur of movement this same whiskey splashed into the man’s eyes and he emitted a sharp little astonished squawk.
Trent was on his feet with both arms lashing out. The guard dropped the second shot glass and instinctively sucked back to save his middle, but Trent was after him. He caught the gunman a solid strike over the heart, struck him again in the same place, dropped lower, and sank a fist to the wrist in the gunman’s soft parts. The man’s breath broke past his twisted lips in a loud burst of sound, but he was tough. He would not go down. He staggered back and kept trying to get away. Neither he nor Trent was making a sound. Except for the quick, abrasive slide of their booted feet over the rough flooring, there was no noise to this battle.
Once, the gunman threw a wild right. It grazed upward alongside Trent’s cheek bone and lost its force in the hair above Trent’s temple. The guard then gathered himself to spring clear, and caught a short, savage blow across his left shoulder that half spun him, half threw him off balance. He didn’t try to square around, he instead tried to get away, but Trent was after him with the desperation of a man who knew his own limitations. He hit the gunman again, high up alongside the jaw under the ear. He hit him again as the gunman was falling, full across the mouth. Claret spewed, the falling man’s head twisted violently. He hit the floor and lay soddenly without moving.
Trent got the man’s six-gun, dropped it into his own holster, stepped away, staggered, flung out an arm to steady himself, and stood there with that hand upon the wall, his head hanging, and the gasping raw sound of his own breathing loud in the stillness.
At any moment someone could walk in. Men came and went as curiosity brought them. It had been like that all through Trent’s captivity and it could happen any time now—or he might be left alone for an hour. But of one thing he was quite certain, the closer it got to nighttime, the nearer drew Lem Bricker’s deadline for him.
After a while he stood without support, wiped gingerly at his sweaty, raw, and swollen face, moved closer to the door, and listened. There was the usual monotone of masculine voices out in the saloon. It was getting along toward evening. Bricker’s men as well as others were drifting in for relief from the desert heat. Sometimes he heard rough laughter, sometimes the call of one man to another. It all sounded casual and easy as he’d hoped it might. He looked around. His guard was lying in a little pool of red, from a broken mouth, unevenly breathing. The man would be out for some time. Trent looked back, lifted the latch carefully, and opened the door a crack.
He couldn’t see into the barroom because of a partitioning wall that interfered, but on his right he could see a short run of dingy hallway. There appeared to be other doorways like his own along that corridor, all closed now, and there also seemed to be a strong silence down in that direction as though no one was about.
He opened the door wider, still couldn’t see into the barroom, waited out a relishing guffaw from some bull-bass voice, then stepped through. He was now beyond any hope of consideration if he were found. By staying in the room, he wouldn’t have had even this slim chance.
He looked hard down that hallway but there was nothing there, no movement and no sound, so he glided on through it, vaguely thinking there should be a rear door leading out of the building.
The corridor wasn’t more than twenty-five feet long, then it abruptly swung away northward, on Trent’s left. He scarcely breathed when he heard someone in a far room where the door was open. But opposite that open door was what he’d prayed he might find—a window beside another door, and the fading red light of dying day shown through that window. That second door, then, opened out into the alleyway he’d been able to see from his cot. He knew that rickety old horse shed was out there, too, which gave his spirit a surge of fresh hope.
He moved without a sound as far as that left-hand door where someone was moving, flattened there along the wall, and waited. From the sounds, that unseen man was making it seemed to Trent that this room was a kitchen, that the man in there was preparing food. He heard him rattle pans and glasses.
But the second he cast a long shadow across this kitchen opening it was sure to attract that cook’s attention as Trent reached the alleyway door. He loosened the .45 in its holster, took in a big breath, and stepped boldly forward into the kitchen doorway.
Instantly, with his meager light blocked out, the cook turned his head. He had been working at a chopping block and had a large cleaver in one hand. He was a Mexican with the blackest eyes Trent had ever seen. He stood like a statue, his face showing mild surprise but no fear or panic. In fact, Trent thought, as he leveled the .45 at th
is man, the Mexican’s expression showed something close to annoyance.
“Put the cleaver down,” Trent said.
The Mexican obeyed. He faintly scowled over at Trent. He was obviously troubled by something besides Trent’s leveled pistol. Then, with his face altering to quick decisiveness, the Mexican said: “Quick, señor, in here. Quickly!” The Mexican whipped his head around and back again. He pointed toward a floor-to-ceiling ventilated food cooler. “Get in there.”
Trent understood the Mexican’s urgings all right, but he did not understand the man’s sudden willingness to help him. This Mexican had not, to Trent’s knowledge, ever seen him before. Certainly the man owed him no allegiance.
“¡Pronto!” the Mexican hissed, and dashed toward the food cooler. “¡Señor!” He flung back the doorway and frantically raised the screened shelves inside, making a place. “¡Pronto!”
Trent looked over his shoulder at that doorway leading outside. He didn’t know this Mexican and he didn’t trust him. Many a dead lawman had put his faith out of desperation into a fast-thinking person who had afterward sold him out.
The Mexican’s face was twisted with anxiety. His black eyes were frantically beseeching. He made a furious beckoning movement with his left hand while holding the cooler’s door open with his right hand. “Señor Trent, there is no other way for you. The others are not ready yet. Within moments now these men will discover that you are gone. You can’t possibly get out of this town. There is not a chance at all for that. Now get in here!”