There was one pretty thing about this business of Basset's. Robbing Mexican smuggling trains wasn't like robbing an express coach or a bank or anything else that the local law had an interest in. The law didn't give a damn if a smuggling train was robbed. They probably took it as a favor.
But it's funny the way a man's mind works on things like that. I had never had anything to do with robbing people. Killing—that was different. A man had to kill sometimes in this wild country. In the bitter, hate-sick Texas that had been my home, it had been the accepted way of settling arguments between men. Life was cheap. The lank, quiet boys of Texas had learned that when they rode off to fight for the Cause and the Confederacy, when most of them didn't even know what Confederacy meant, or care. Killing had become a part of living. But robbing people—that was something new that I had to get used to.
There were only the bartender and one other man in the saloon when I got down there. The bartender was kicking the wreckages to one side and making a few passes with a broom, the other man was eating eggs and side meat at the bar. The place was dark and sick with the stale, sour smell of whisky and smoke and unwashed bodies. The man looked at me quietly as I came in and stood at the end of the bar. The bartender glanced at me and said:
“Eggs?”
“Fried on both sides, and some of that side meat.”
The man smiled wearily and pushed his own plate away half finished and stood up. “Eggs and side meat,” he said. “Side meat and eggs. It wouldn't surprise me if I didn't start cacklin' like a chicken before long, or maybe gruntin' like a hog. Sometimes I think I'll get myself a Mexican woman, like some of the other boys, and let her cook for me. But I can't stand that greaser grub, either.” He smiled a thin, pale smile. “Lordy, what I'd give for a mess of greens and a pan of honest-to-God corn bread!”
“Eggs sound good to me,” I said, “after living out of my saddlebag, on jerky, for a spell.”
He smiled again, that sad, faraway smile. “Wait till you've choked 'em down as long as I have.”
The bartender went back to the rear somewhere and I began to smell grease burning. The man who didn't like side meat and eggs glanced lazily at my scratched face and bandaged wrist, but his pale eyes made no comment.
He was about thirty, I guess, but no more than that. His voice was as thick and sirupy as molasses—a rich black drawl of the deep South. Everything he did, every move he made, was with great deliberation, without the waste of an ounce of energy. Lazily he shoved a filthy, battered Confederate cavalryman's hat back on his head and a lock of dry, sand-colored hair fell on his forehead.
He smiled slowly. “Welcome to Ocotillo,” he said as if he were reading leisurely from a book, “the Garden Spot of Hell, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be bad-men; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” His voice trailed off. “Welcome to Ocotillo, Tall Cameron.” He waved a languid hand toward a table. “Shall we sit down? I take it you're one of us now. Perhaps you'd like to hear about this charming little city of ours while you eat your side meat and eggs.”
I shrugged. He was a queer galoot, there was no doubt about that, but there was something about him I liked.
We sat down and the bartender brought me three eggs and three limp slabs of side meat and some cold Mexican tortillas. I dug in, and while I chewed I said, “How did you know my name?”
He looked quietly surprised. “Why, you're a famous man, didn't you know that? The protege of Pappy Garret, the wizard of gunplay, our country's foremost exponent of the gentle art of bloodletting. May I speak for our quiet little community and say that we are greatly honored to have you among us?”
I looked quickly into those pale eyes to see if he were laughing at me. He wasn't laughing. The thoughts behind his eyes were sad and far away.
“Let me introduce myself,” he drawled. “Miles Stanford Bonridge, one-time cotton grower, one-time captain of the Confederate Cavalry—Jeb Stuart's Cavalry, suh— one-time gentleman and son of a gentleman. I hail from the great state of Alabama, suh, where, at one time, the name of Miles Stanford Bonridge commanded more than small respect. The boys here in Ocotillo call me Bama.”
I said, “Glad to make your acquaintance, Bama.”
He nodded quietly and smiled. He made a vague motion with his hand and the bartender came over and put a bottle of the raw, white whisky on the table. “One thing about working for Basset,” Miles Stanford Bonridge said, pouring some into a glass, “is that he pays his men enough to stay drunk from one job to the other. Not that he can't well afford it—he profits by thousands of dollars from our smuggler raids.” He downed the whisky and shuddered. “Have you ever been on a smuggler raid, Tall Cameron?”
“I didn't know there was such a thing until Basset mentioned it.”
He poured again, held the glass up, and studied the clear liquid. “You were too young, I suppose, to have fought in the war,” he said finally. “And there is no parallel to these raids of ours, except possibly some of the bloodier battles of Lee's eastern campaign. For days after one of our raids the sky above the battleground is heavy with swarms of vultures; the air is sick with the sweet, rotting stink of death; the very ground festers and crawls with unseen things wallowing in the filth and blood.... Please stop me,” he said pleasantly, “if I am ruining your appetite.”
“You're not.”
He nodded again, and smiled, and drank his whisky in a gulp.
I had already decided that he was crazy—probably from too much whisky, and a sick conscience, and maybe the war. What it was about him that I liked I couldn't be sure. His manner of speaking, his slow, inoffensive drawl, his faraway, bewildered eyes—or maybe it was because I just needed somebody to talk to.
“Would you mind,” he asked abruptly, “if I inquired your age, Tall Cameron?”
If it had been anybody else I would have told him to go to hell. But after a moment I said, “Twenty. Almost.”
He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and seemed to think. “The day I became twenty years old,” he said, “I was a second lieutenant in the Army of Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg commanding. Holloway's Company, Alabama Cavalry.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe you remember September nineteenth, 1863. There we were on the banks of the Chickamauga, which was to become the bloodiest river in the South, and old Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland was on the other side, so close that we could see the pickets throwing up their breastworks.” He broke off suddenly. “No,” he said, “you wouldn't remember that.”
“I remember hearing about the battle of Chickamauga,” I said, “but I don't remember who was there—or exactly where it was, as far as that goes.”
Miles Stanford Bonridge shook his head. “It doesn't make any difference now.”
I couldn't help wondering how a man like Bama could wind up in this God-forgotten country of southern Arizona. He wasn't a gunman—I knew that—no matter how many men he had killed during the war. His pistol was an old .36-caliber Leech and Rigdon that looked dusty from lack of handling, and he wore it high up under his right arm where he would have a hell of a time getting to it if he ever needed it in a hurry.
He smiled that quiet smile of his while I looked him over, and I had a queer feeling that he was reading my mind.
“All I know about guns,” he said, “is what I learned in the Cavalry. I'm not a bad shot with a carbine. Not worth a damn with a pistol, although I killed a man once with one. A damned Treasury agent, after the war was over. He was trying to cheat me out of twenty bales of cotton, so I shot him four times right in the gut. Have a drink?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
He poured himself another one and downed it. “Then I had to kill a Yankee soldier, and there was hell to pay after that. For a while it seemed like the whole damned bluebelly army was after me, but I had some friends and they got me up to New Mexico, and finally I wound up here.” He laughed softly, without humor. “I was luck
y, I guess.”
I knew how he felt. With a little switching around his story could have been mine, except that I had taken up with a famous gunman and got the same kind of reputation for myself.
“I had the prettiest little gal you ever saw,” Bama said sadly, “but I had to leave her. I wonder what she's doing now....”
I wished he hadn't said that, because it brought back too many almost forgotten days, almost forgotten faces. And a name that I couldn't forget—Laurin.
I pushed my plate away and Bama watched as I rolled a cigarette and put fire to it. At last he said, “Do you mind if I offer a little advice?”
“I'll listen, but I won't promise to take it.”
“Leave the girl alone,” he said quietly. “The Mexican girl named Marta. She's poison, and a little crazy, too. I've been here for quite a while now, and every man she has looked at always ended up the same way, dead in some gulch or some alley, with a bullet in his back.”
His face was deadly serious.
There was nothing I wanted more than to keep that female wildcat out of my life. But what was all the fuss about? First Kreyler had warned me to stay away from her, and now Bama. Curiosity was beginning to get the best of me.
“Does that mean that somebody's got a claim staked out on her?” I said.
Bama nodded slowly and poured himself another drink. “Black Joseph,” he said. “And he doesn't like you. He doesn't like you at all.”
I was beginning to get impatient with all this hoodoo.
“How the hell does he know he doesn't like me? I've never even seen this famous Indian gun-slinger.”
Bama gulped his drink. “Maybe you ought to meet him,” he said. “He's standing right behind you.”
Chapter Three
WHEN I TURNED, the first thing I saw was a pair of the darkest, emptiest, most savage eyes I had ever seen. There was absolutely no expression in them. They were like twin bottomless wells filled to the brim with black nothingness. His face was dark, angular, beardless, also without expression. A wide-brimmed flat-crowned hat sat squarely on his head, and ropy braids of black hair hung down on his chest almost to his shirt pockets. He didn't say a word. I couldn't tell if he were looking at me or through me. After a moment he turned and went through the door to Basset's office.
“He doesn't like you,” Bama said again.
“I think you're right. Maybe I'll have a drink of that stuff, after all.”
“He makes your flesh crawl, doesn't he?” Bama said, pouring a drink in his glass and shoving it over to me.
I felt cold, as if Death itself had just walked by. How he had managed to walk into the saloon and get that close without me hearing him I didn't know. I downed the whisky quick and in a minute I felt better, except that I somehow felt unclean just having looked at him.
“God, how does she stand it?” I said.
“The girl?” Bama raised his eyes sleepily. “She doesn't have anything to say about it. Black Joseph took a fancy to her, and that's that. Have you met Kreyler?”
I nodded.
“He's crazy about that girl—really crazy. You can see insanity crawl up behind his eyes and stare out like a wild beast when the Indian touches her. Kreyler would have killed him long ago if it had been anybody but Black Joseph.” He stood up, cradling the bottle in his arms. “I think I'll try to get some sleep,” he said. “Joseph's been up in the mountains scouting the canyons for smuggler trains. Probably he's spotted one and we'll be starting on another raid before long.”
He weaved across the floor and out the door, still holding tight to the bottle.
I sat there for a while waiting for the Indian to come out of Basset's office. Some of the fat man's hired men drifted into the saloon to drink their breakfast, and along about noon the fancy girls sneaked in and began putting on their paint for the afternoon trade. I didn't see Marta, and the Indian still hadn't come out of Basset's office. I got tired of waiting, so I went back and knocked on the door.
It turned out that Basset was alone, after all, and Black Joseph must have gone out the back way. The fat man looked up impatiently when I came in. He was poring over a list of names, checking one off every once in a while after giving it a lot of thought. “Sit down,” he wheezed, “sit down.”
I sat down and he checked off one or two more names, then turned and smiled that wet smile of his.
“Well?”
“I'm here to talk about that job.”
“Ha-ha,” he said dryly. “Your twelve dollars didn't last long, did it? Well, that's all right. You'll have plenty of money before long, plenty of money.”
“How much is that?”
He blinked. His little buckshot eyes looked watery and weak behind the folds of fat. “That depends,” he said. “Whatever the smuggler train is carrying, all the boys get a cut, fair and square. Share and share alike.”
“Including yourself?”
He blinked again. “Now look here, I'm the man that organized everything here. I see that you boys don't get bothered by the federal marshals, and keep the Cavalry off our backs. Everything's free and easy here in Ocotillo, thanks to me. I take half of whatever you get from the Mexicans. The rest you split among yourselves, fair and square, like I say.” He paused for a few minutes to catch his breath. “Now, do you want the job or don't you.”
“I have to take it whether I want it or not. You knew that to start with.”
“Ha-ha. Well, all right. That's more like it. There's something I'd better tell you, though. Joseph didn't want me to hire you, even when I told him who you were. I'll tell you the truth, I wouldn't hire you if I wasn't short on men. The last raid cut us down. I want to tell you here and now that it's no fancy tea party you're going on, robbing smuggler trains. What has Black Joseph got against you?”
“I don't know.”
Basset clawed at his fat face, looking faintly worried. “The Indian's a good man,” he said. “Fastest shot with a pistol I ever saw. Dead shot with a rifle, too. He'd as soon kill a man as look at him—maybe he'd rather. I think he actually enjoys killing.”
He sounded like a man who had a tiger by the tail and didn't know how to let go. He was afraid of the Indian. It showed in his watery eyes, on his sweaty face. It showed in the way his hands shook when he reached for a cigar.
He was afraid of the Indian and he wanted me to get rid of him. He wantedme to get rid of him, but he didn't know how to go about it. Maybe he figured that by just throwing us together he could manage it somehow.
I remembered those deadly Indian eyes and the way they had looked at me. It occurred to me that maybe Basset had already started dropping hints that I was making a play for Joseph's girl. That would throw us together, all right, if the Indian ever got wind of it.
And then Basset saw what I was thinking, and he didn't like that much. He changed the subject.
“Our scouts have spotted a smuggler train coming up from Sonora,” he said. “So you'll be able to earn your money quicker than you thought. Have you got a good horse?”
“His ribs stick out a little, but he's all right.”
“Good. That's one thing you need, is a good horse. And a good rifle.”
“I've got them.”
“Good,” he said again. He sat back and breathed through his mouth. “You can start for the hills as soon as you get your horse ready. The boys pull out of town one or two at a time and meet in the hills with Joseph and Kreyler. We have to keep it as quiet as we can. You can't tell about these damn Mexicans. One of them might try to get to the smugglers and warn them.”
He sat back and panted after the speech. “You can ride out with Bama and he'll show you where the meeting place is. You met Bama, didn't you?”
“I met him.”
“All right, I guess that's all, then. You'll get your cut when you get back.”
Everything was very businesslike, like sending a bunch of coolies out to lay a few miles of railroad. It was hard to believe that Basset had just explained his plans for
wholesale murder.
I went out of the office, collared the bartender, and found out where Bama, the gentleman of the old South, slept off his drunks. It turned out that he was a neighbor of mine. He bunked over the saloon in a cigar-box room just like mine, except that it was dirtier.
He was asleep on the bed when I found him, one boot off and one on, the dead bottle still in his hands. I got the front of his shirt and shook him.
“Wake up, Bama!”
He grunted and tried to fight me off, being careful not to drop the empty bottle. The whisky smell in the room was thick enough to carry out in buckets.
“Wake up. Basset says we've got to earn our keep.”
A Noose for the Desperado Page 4