A Noose for the Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  He blinked his eyes. He was used to getting more respect than that, especially from boys not out of their teens yet. “A tough punk,” he said flatly. “If there's anything I can't stand it's a tough punk.”

  The way he said it went all over me. It was like cursing a man, knowing that he was listening and not having enough respect for him to lower your voice. Before he knew what hit him I had the barrel of my pistol rammed in his belly almost up to the cylinder. “Goddamn you,” I said. “I don't know who you are, but if you use that word again I'll kill you. That's one thing in this world you can depend on.”

  I had knocked the wind out of him and he sagged against the hitching rack gasping. His flat eyes became startled eyes, then they became hate-filled eyes. I should have killed him right then and got it over with, because I knew that he would never quite get over it, being thrown down on by a kid, and someday he would try to even it up. Pappy Garret would have killed him without batting an eye, if he had been in my place. But like a damn fool, I didn't.

  “Jesus Christ!” he gulped. “Get that pistol out of my stomach. I didn't mean anything.”

  “Not until I find out why you were sucking around my horse. You were waiting for me to come out, weren't you? All right, why?”

  “Sure, sure, I was waitin' for you to come out,” he said. “Word got around that a stranger was in town, and we don't go much for strangers here in Ocotillo. Basset sent me down to have a look. He figured maybe you was a government marshal, or maybe one of them Cavalry intelligence men.”

  “What gave him a smart idea like that?”

  “That girl you was with. She come around a while ago and told Basset she was holdin' you at her house. It was her idea that you was a government marshal.”

  That was fine. While I had been taking a bath and thinking that she was quite a girl, she had been working up a scheme to get me killed. “Who is Basset?”

  “You haven't been in Arizona long if you don't know who Basset is. He about runs things in this part of the territory.”

  “What does the Cavalry do while Basset runs Arizona?”

  “Hell, the Cavalry's too busy with the Apaches to worry about us. Now will you take that pistol out of my stomach?”

  I pulled the pistol out enough to let him breathe. I hadn't bargained for anything like this. What looked to be just another little Mexican town was turning out to be a hole-up for the territory's badmen.

  “What do you think about me now?” I said, “Do you still think I'm a government man?”

  “Hell, no. I spotted that horse of yours right off. The last time I saw that animal was in Texas, about two years ago, and Pappy Garret was ridin' him. We heard Pappy was killed not long ago, but the”—he almost said “punk”—“the kid that was ridin' with him got away.”

  “Did the kid have a name?” I said.

  “Talbert Cameron, according to the 'Wanted' posters. Jesus, I never saw anybody pull a gun like that, unless maybe it was Pappy himself.”

  Well, that settled it. I couldn't outride my reputation, so I might as well try to live with it. At least until I thought of something better. I holstered my pistol because it looked like the fuss was over for the present. The big man pulled himself together and tried to pretend that everything was just fine. But no matter what he did, he couldn't hide the smoky hate in the back of his eyes.

  “Let's go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “I want to see the man that runs things around here, Basset.”

  He didn't put up any argument, as I expected. He merely shrugged. And I unhitched the black.

  The fiesta had left the streets and had gone into the native saloons, or maybe the church, wherever it was. The bonfire was dying down and the night was getting darker. The street was almost deserted as we went up to the far end, and the ragged Huachucas looked down on the desert and on the town, and I had a feeling that those high, sad mountains were a little disgusted with what they saw.

  After a minute I got to thinking about that girl, Marta. What was she up to, anyway? First she tells a gang of outlaws that I'm a government marshal, and then she tells me that there's somebody waiting to kill me.

  I said, “What about that Mexican girl back there, the one called Marta? What was her cut for going to Basset and telling him I was a government man?”

  The big man darted a glance at me and kept walking. “She's crazy,” he said. “Let her alone. If you want to get along in Ocotillo, let that girl alone.”

  He said it as if he meant it.

  At the end of the street there was a two-story frame building that was all out of place here in a village of squat adobe huts. From the sound of the place I could tell that it was a saloon of some kind—one with a pretty good business, if the noise was any indication. On the other side of the saloon there was a circle corral and another frame building that I took to be a livery barn.

  “My horse needs grain and a rubdown,” I said.

  My partner shouldered through the doors of the saloon and picked out a Mexican with a jerk of his head. “Take care of the horse outside,” he said. Then to me, “Wait here. I'll see if Basset wants to see you.”

  He marched down to the far end of the saloon, opened an unmarked door, and disappeared.

  It was quite a place, this saloon. There were big mirrors and glass chandeliers that must have come all the way around the Horn and then been freighted across the desert from San Francisco. Part of the place was done in fancy oak paneling and the rest of it finished out in rough planking, as if the owner had got disgusted after the first burst of enthusiasm and decided that it was a waste of money in Ocotillo. What surprised me was that anybody could have been so ambitious in the first place.

  About half the customers were Mexicans, which was about right, since the Mexican border wasn't more than a day's ride to the south. There were four or five saloon girls sitting at tables in the back of the place, near the roulette wheels, chuck-a-luck, and card tables. There was even a pool table back there, and I hadn't seen one of them since Abilene.

  It was a crazy, gaudy kind of place to be stuck out here in the desert, off all beaten trails and a hundred miles away from anything like civilization. I went over to the bar and ordered beer. The Mexican bartender served it up in a big crock mug and I pushed my face into the foam.

  From the minute I walked into the place I became the main attraction, but I figured that wasn't unusual, considering what Basset's hired man had said about strangers. The customers all made a big to-do about carrying on with their talking and drinking as usual, but from the corners of their eyes they were cutting me up and down. They studied my two guns. They noticed that I used my left hand to drink, leaving my right one free. They didn't like me much, what they could see of me. They were thinking that I was damn young to tote so much iron.

  They were thinking that somebody ought to get up and slap hell out of me just to teach me not to show off—but nobody got up.

  I finished my beer and let the customers gawk until my friend with the dangerous eyes came back.

  “Basset says come on in,” he grunted, and he went on out the front door without waiting to see if I had anything to say about it.

  Chapter Two

  I DON'T KNOW WHAT kind of man I expected Basset to be but I never would have figured him as the man he really was. Basset, it turned out, was a greasy-looking man not much over five feet tall and weighing not much under three hundred pounds. He was sprawled out in a tilt-back chair, in front of a roll-top desk, as I came in. He peered at me with dark little eyes that were almost squeezed out between enormous rolls of fat.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said, panting as if he had just finished a long run.

  He was alone in the room. He looked completely harmless, but I shied away from him like a horse shying away from a snake.

  “My man Kreyler says you're the Cameron kid,” he wheezed. “Says you used to ride with Pappy Garret. Hell with guns.”

  “That's what your man Kreyler says,�
� I said.

  “What do you say?”

  I took a cane-bottom chair, the only other chair in the room. “Maybe.”

  Basset shifted abruptly and sprawled in the other direction. “What did you want to see me about?”

  I wasn't sure why I had wanted to see him. So I said, “I'm not sure. Maybe I just wanted to see what the boss of Arizona looks like.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said, panting. He just spoke the words, he wasn't laughing. “All right, out with it, do you want a job?”

  “That depends on what I have to do.”

  “Have you got any money?”

  “Twelve dollars,” I said. That was left from a job of trail driving I had done almost six months ago. I hadn't had a chance to spend it.

  “Ha-ha,” Basset said again. “Let me tell you something, Cameron. I knew Pappy Garret. If you can handle guns the way he could, I'll make a rich man out of you. A rich man.”

  “I don't hire my guns,” I said.

  I'd had about enough of Basset. Watching his enormous, shaking belly made my skin crawl. I made a move to get up, but he waved me down.

  “Just a minute,” he wheezed. “Let me tell you about our charming little village here, Ocotillo.” He settled back, smiling and breathing through his mouth. His lips were red and wet and raw-looking, like an incision in a piece of liver. “Ocotillo,” he said again. “It was just a little village of Mexican farmers, a few sheep herders, until a few years ago, when some sourdough thought he had discovered a vein of silver up in the foothills. Overnight, you might say, civilization came to Ocotillo. You wouldn't believe it, but two years ago this whole area was covered with tents and shacks and wagons, and fortune hunters crawled over the hills as thick as sand lice.”

  He chuckled for a minute, remembering.

  “Well, it turned out there wasn't any silver there after all, except some 'fool's silver,' traces of lead ore and zinc. Before you knew it Ocotillo was as empty as a frontier church. The fortune hunters all moved on, and for a while I'll admit I was worried. You saw the wood in my bar out there? Redwood from California. My wheels, pool table, gambling equipment, shipped clean from New York around the Horn and freighted across the desert. Cost thousands of dollars, this saloon, and for a while it looked like it wouldn't bring a penny.”

  I rolled a cigarette while he talked. As I held a match to the corn-shuck cylinder, Basset smiled and nodded.

  “I remember Pappy used to smoke his cigarettes Mexican style like that. Anyway, here I was with this saloon and nobody for customers except a few poor Mexicans. Then one day I got another customer.”

  He slouched back in the chair, smiling, waiting for me to ask the question. “And this customer was...” I said.

  “Black Joseph,” he said with satisfaction.

  I wasn't particularly surprised. I hadn't heard of the famous Indian gunman for a year or more, so I knew that if he wasn't making buzzard food of himself he had to be in New Mexico or Arizona. I had never seen him, but I knew him by reputation. The artists' drawings on “Wanted" posters always showed him as a hungry-eyed, hawk-nosed, Osage, with a battered flat-crowned hat pushed down over his black, braided hair. He had been a scout for the Union Army during the war, but it seemed that even the bloody battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga hadn't blunted his craving to kill. He was supposed to be fast with a gun. According to some men who ought to know he was the fastest. I didn't know about that, and I didn't care. Black Joseph didn't have anything against me, and I had nothing against him.

  Basset seemed to think that the Indian's name should have done something to me. Maybe I should have started sweating, or loosened my guns, or something. When I didn't, the fat man seemed slightly annoyed.

  “You've heard of Black Joseph, haven't you?” he panted.

  “I've heard of him,” I said.

  That seemed to make him feel a little better. “Well,” he said, “I began to get an idea the minute that Indian murderer rode into Ocotillo—not that I've got anything against him,” he added quickly. “It's just that he doesn't bother to think before he shoots. Anyway, I figured maybe there were a lot of boys like him, things getting too hot for them back in Texas.”

  He smiled that damp smile, as if to say, “You ought to know, Cameron.”

  I said, “Has all this got anything to do with me?”

  “That depends on you,” Basset said carelessly. “Now, you look like a man on the run. Would you like to have a place to settle down for a while and give the United States marshals a chance to forget about you? Would you like to be sure that you won't run into my cavalrymen? Would you like to have some insurance like that?”

  “You can't get insurance from a United States marshal,” I said, “or the Cavalry, either.”

  Basset lurched forward in his chair, got a cigar from a box on his desk, and rolled it between his wet lips. “You just don't know the right man, son,” he said, breathing heavily. “The Cavalry—no. But, then, the Cavalry is busy up north with the Apache uprising. There's no call for them to come down here unless somebody like a federal marshal put them up to it.”

  And what makes you think that some deputy marshal won't do just that?”

  He went on smiling, holding a match to his cigar, puffing until it was burning to suit him. Then he threw the match on the floor and shouted, “Kreyler!”

  The door opened and the big, slab-faced man came in. The last time I saw him he had been headed out of the saloon—but when Basset called, he was there.

  “Yeah?”

  “Show this boy who you are, Kreyler,” Basset said.

  Kreyler frowned. He didn't like me, and whatever it was that Basset had on his mind, he didn't like that either. But he didn't have the guts to look at the fat man and tell him so. Reluctantly he went into his pocket and came out with a badge—a deputy United States marshal's badge.

  “That will be your insurance,” Basset said, as Kreyler went out, “if you choose to stay with us here in Ocotillo.”

  The whole thing had kind of taken my breath away. I had only known one United States marshal before. He lived, breathed, and thought nothing but the law. I hadn't known that a man like Kreyler could worm his way into an office like that.

  Suddenly I began to appreciate the kind of setup Basset had here. In Ocotillo a man could live in safety, protected from the law, his identity hidden from the outside world. I thought of the long days and nights of running, afraid to sleep, afraid to rest, forever looking over my shoulder and expecting to see the man who would finally kill me. Here in Ocotillo I could forget all that—if I wanted to pay the fat man's price.

  Basset smiled, puffing lazily on his cigar.

  I said finally, “Insurance like that must come pretty high.”

  “Not for the right men, like yourself.” He bent forward, his jowls shaking. “Have you ever heard of the Mexican smuggling trains?”

  I shook my head.

  “There are dozens of them,” he said. “They come across the international line, taking one of the remote canyons of the Huachucas. Thousands of dollars in gold or silver some of these trains carry. They trade in Tucson for merchandise that they smuggle back across the border, without paying the heavy duty, and sell at fat profits. In a way,” Basset smiled, “you might say that Kreyler is upholding his oath to the United States, for he is a great help to us in stopping this unlawful smuggling of the Mexicans.”

  I was beginning to get it now, but I wasn't sure that I liked it.

  “Take your time,” the fat man said. “Make up your mind and let me know. Say tomorrow?”

  “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  I was glad to get out of the office. The bath that I'd had not long ago had been wasted. I felt dirtier than I had when I first rode into the place.

  I stopped at the bar on my way out and had a shot of the white poison that the Mexicans were drinking. Business had picked up while I was in the office. Most of the fancy girls had found laps to sit on, and their brassy, high-pitched giggles pun
ched holes in the general uproar like bullets going through a tub of lard. I studied the men in the place with a new interest, now that I knew who they were and what they were doing here. I didn't see anybody that I knew, yet I had a feeling that I knew all of them. Their eyes were all alike, restless, darting from one place to the other. They laughed hard with their mouths, but none of the laughter ever reached their eyes. I didn't see anybody drunk enough to be careless about the way his gun hand hung. And I knew I wouldn't. My friend Kreyler, the deputy United States marshal, wasn't around. Probably he was in some corner, waiting for Basset to yell for him.

  I stood alone at the end of the bar, wondering where I was going to sleep that night and listening to three Mexicans sing a sirupy love song in Spanish, when she said:

  “Hello, gringo!”