A Noose for the Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  There were a lot of other books there, but I didn't look at them. I began to count the money that the saloon had taken in for the night, and it was a little over two hundred dollars. I was just beginning to appreciate what a good thing I'd come into. I made a mental note to ask somebody where Basset had got his whisky supply for the saloon, but I figured it would probably be Mexico. Then I started figuring how money would be coming in every month from the saloon and the smuggler trains, and the amount it came to was staggering.

  I paced up and down the room with figures running through my mind, and every once in a while I would stop and look at that picture of Napoleon and I knew just how he felt. There was only one way to look—straight ahead.

  That was before I found out what happened to Napoleon in Russia.

  But I was feeling pretty good about it then, and the feeling hung on as long as I kept thinking of money and had that picture to look at. It was only after I had undressed and blown out the lamp that something different began to happen.

  There in the darkness things began to look different. I began to think about the day and the things that had happened and I couldn't believe it. Here I was in Basset's room, in Basset's bed, and the fat man was dead and buried—but none of it seemed real.

  Maybe, I began to think, it was because I didn't want it to be real. I lay there for a long time and I could hear Bama saying, “What has happened to you?” And that was what bothered me. I didn't know. Things had happened too fast to know much of anything. It was like having a comet by the tail and not being able to let go.

  Abruptly, I got out of bed, fumbled for matches, and lit the lamp. I looked at the picture again, but that didn't help. The cocky little man on the white horse didn't seem so cocky now, and I doubted that he was as sure of himself as he tried to make people believe.

  I went into the office and fumbled around in the dark until I found the whisky that Bama had left. I poured and downed it. I poured again and downed that. I began to feel better.

  I took the bottle and glass back into the room and sat on the bed and had another one. I was beginning to feel fine. Another drink or two and I would be ready to kick Napoleon off that white horse and climb on myself.

  I don't know how long I sat there, with my mind going up in dizzy spirals, skipping from one place to another like a desert whirlwind. But after a while it hit me and I realized what I was doing. Nothing ever hit me any harder.

  Suddenly I could understand Bama, because I was on the road to becoming just like him. Miles Stanford Bon-ridge, gentleman and son of a gentleman. Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.

  But not for me. I hammered the cork into the bottle and took it back into the office and there it would stay.

  Not for me. But the effort left me weak as I went back and sat on the bed and tried to piece together a lot of loose ends that didn't seem to fit anywhere.

  But they did fit when you worked at it long enough. And the first loose end was that smuggler raid. Killing was one thing, but killing like that was something else and would never really be a part of me. I should have known that when I went back to my room and messed up the floor, and maybe I had known, in the back of my mind.

  I sat there for a long time, getting a good look at myself and it wasn't very pretty. It was like that first day that I rode into Ocotillo and Marta had taken me to her house and fixed me up with the stuff to shave and take a bath with. I remembered the shock I'd got when I looked into that mirror. The face I'd seen was a stranger's face, and I guess I was experiencing the same thing all over again.

  Except that I was looking deeper. Maybe I had a hold of that dark, illusive thing that they call a soul. But I turned loose of it in a hurry, just as I had looked away from the mirror.

  Chapter Seven

  IT'S FUNNY HOW everything seems different in the light of day. Most of your doubts and fears go with the darkness, and after a while you forget about them completely.

  The kid, Johnny Rayburn, got back to Ocotillo late the next day. I came out of the office and there he was standing at the bar, gagging on a shot of tequila.

  I said, “You made a quick ride. Did things work out all right in Tucson?”

  “Sure, Mr. Cameron.”

  Then Kreyler came into the saloon and I said, “Wait a minute. All this is for the Marshal's benefit, so he might as well hear about it.”

  The three of us went back to the office, and I could feel Kreyler's eyes on my back, looking for a soft spot to sink a knife in. But he didn't bother me now. I had him where I wanted him and he knew it. Or he would know it pretty soon.

  I said, “All right, kid, let's have it. Tell Mr. Kreyler just exactly what you've been doing for the past day and night.”

  The Marshal gave the kid a quick look. Then he sat in a chair and waited, and he might as well have been wearing a mask, for all the expression you could read on his face.

  “Well,” the kid said, “I rode into Tucson, like you said, and I gave the ledger to—to the man Bama told me about. I gave him five hundred dollars and asked him if he would hold onto the book as long as I kept coming back every month to give him another hundred, and he said sure, he'd be glad to. Then I came back to Ocotillo.”

  I said, “Tell us what's going to happen if we miss giving him the hundred dollars every month.”

  “He'll turn the book over to the U.S. marshal's office,” the kid said.

  I expected Kreyler to do something then, but he didn't. He just sat there with that slab face not telling me a thing.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like you're working for me, Kreyler, whether you like it or not.”

  “It would seem that way,” he said flatly.

  “It doesn't seem any way. You're working for me and you'll keep on working for me until I get tired of having you around.”

  “All right, I'm working for you.”

  I didn't like the way things were going. I had expected a hell of a racket about that ledger, but there he was sitting there as if he didn't care about it one way or the other. There was something going on behind those eyes of his, and I thought I knew what it was.

  He kept looking at the kid, and then I realized that just three of us knew where that ledger was, me, Bama, and Johnny Rayburn, and if Kreyler wanted to find out where it was he would have to get it out of one of us. I didn't have to do much figuring to guess which one he would work on.

  I jerked my head at the kid and said, “Go somewhere and get some sleep.” Then it hit me that just “somewhere” wouldn't be good enough. He had to be someplace where Kreyler wouldn't have a chance to work on him. So I said, “Get your stuff and bring it down here. We'll put up a cot or something and you can bunk with me until we figure out something better.”

  “Well, gosh,” the kid said. “Sure, if you want me to, Mr. Cameron.” As he went out of the place he seemed to be walking about a foot off the floor, and he had suddenly developed a curious kind of toe-heel way of walking that reminded me of a cat with sore feet. It wasn't until later that I realized that I walked the same way, because I had learned that it was the quietest way to walk. And with a gunman, the quietest way of doing a thing is the safest way.

  It began to dawn on me that Johnny Rayburn was imitating me. A thing like that had never happened before. I had never thought of myself as much of a hero, and it had never occurred to me that anybody would want to pattern his life after mine. But there it was, and there was something about it that pleased me—the same way, I guess, that a man is pleased to have some bawling, yelling brat named after him. It was something like being assured that a part of me would go on living, no matter what happened to Talbert Cameron.

  I thought about that, and then I became aware of Kreyler sitting across the desk from me, watching me, reading the thoughts going around in my mind.

  “There's something we'd better get straight right now,” I said. “If anything happens to that kid, I'll kill you. All
the cavalry and United States marshals in Arizona won't be able to save you.”

  He sat there for a while, half smiling. Then he got up and walked out.

  It took Bama and the two scouts eight days to make the kind of map I wanted, but when they finally got back and put the finished product on my desk I saw that they had done a good job. The chart was drawn in six different sections, but Bama had the pieces lettered and numbered and the whole thing made sense when he put it together. There were almost a dozen natural traps that Bama had already marked, and there wasn't much for me to do except to post scouts along the various canyons and wait until a smuggler train was spotted.

  “And what do we do,” Bama asked, “if the Mexicans decide not to use one of these particular canyons?”

  “We'll wait. They'll take one of them sooner or later, and when they do, they won't have a chance.”

  “No,” he said wearily, “I guess not. Do you want a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do.” And he went to the bar and came back with a bottle and glass. “Did the kid take care of the ledger all right?”

  “Sure, he did fine.”

  Very deliberately, Bama poured the tumbler brimful and then sat there looking at it. “I saw him out in the saloon,” he said, “when I came in. I thought he was you at first. He walks like you, talks like you, even dresses like you.”

  I knew that it didn't mean a thing, but still I couldn't help being pleased that somebody else had noticed. “He picked the new rig out in Tucson,” I said, “with his own money. It's funny that he'd get just the kind of things I wear.”

  “Funny?” Then Bama picked up the glass and drained it without taking a breath. He was tired and dirty and his eyes were red-rimmed from long hours of riding in the sun. He said, “I guess I don't see anything very funny about it.”

  “What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? You know what I mean.”

  “I don't know anything,” he said, “except that I just saw a kid out there blown up with his own conceit and making a goddamned pest of himself. Eight days ago he was just another punk kid who had got off the right track but not so far off that he couldn't have been put back on again. Now he's swaggering like a fighting rooster that hasn't got sense enough to know that he hasn't been equipped with gaffs. But I suppose you're doing something about that. What are you doing to him, anyway— giving him lessons in gun slinging?”

  “I'm not doing a damn thing to him,” I said, and in spite of all I could do I was letting him get under my skin again. I stood up and grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted it. “Look,” I said tightly, “there's something we'd better have an understanding about. You're just working for me, like Kreyler and all the others. When I want you to say something or do something, I'll let you know. Until that time, you'll keep your goddamned mouth shut.”

  As usual, I was sorry after I had said it. He just stood there looking at me with those sad old eyes and I knew that I would never be able to hate him.

  “I'm sorry, Bama,” I said. “I didn't mean what I said, but why do you have to keep prodding me until I fly off the handle that way?”

  He kept looking at me and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was pitying me, and if there was anybody in the world that I didn't want pity from, it was Bama. I sat down and said, “Go on, have another drink and forget it.”

  I poured one for him and shoved it across the desk, but he shook his head and said, “I can forget about us because I guess we're not very important to anybody now. But that kid is different.”

  I was getting impatient again, but I forced myself to sit tight until he got it off his chest.

  Bama said, “Why don't you send him back to wherever he came from? He'd listen to you. Just tell him to go back and put in his time on the work gang and give himself a chance to live like a human being.”

  I said, “I'm not holding him here. He can do anything he wants to do.” But that wasn't answering Bama's question and we both knew it. “Anyway, he's the one who has to take care of that ledger.”

  Bama sat back and closed his eyes. “Of course, what I think doesn't amount to much, but I was wondering if it wouldn't be better for all of us if we let the kid go—and the ledger, and the smuggler trains, and all the rest of it.”

  “Now, that's a hell of an idea. Look, one raid is all we need to make. That will give us enough money to keep a hideout until the law forgets that we were ever alive. But that money, we've got to have that.”

  “But is money the most important thing?”

  I got up, tired of the senseless bickering that was getting us nowhere. “By God, you're crazy,” I said. “That's the only way to explain the way your brain works.”

  And Bama smiled that faraway smile and I knew that he wasn't mad at me, and never would be, really. “Sooner or later it always gets around to that, doesn't it? Everybody's crazy.” He finished off the drink I had poured for him. “Well, maybe that's the right answer. I don't know any more.”

  I got to thinking about it later and decided that maybe Bama had been right on a few points. For one thing, the kid was carrying this imitating business too far. God knows where he found them, but somewhere he had picked up a couple of old Prescott revolvers. Navy revolvers, they were called, but the Navy had never bought any of them, and neither had anybody else who had any idea what a good pistol was supposed to be. But the kid had them buckled on with a couple of cartridge belts that I figured he had made himself, and he had his holsters cut away like a real badman and tied down at his thighs.

  He was in the saloon talking to Marta when I first saw him in that getup, and I figured it was about time we had a talk.

  Marta was laughing at something when I came up, and I said, “I'm glad to see that everybody's in a good humor for a change.”

  She laughed again and pointed at Johnny. “Juanito say he be big man like you someday.” The kid's face turned red and he fiddled with a whisky glass that was about a quarter full of clear tequila. “Maybe bigger, he say,” and Marta's eyes had the devil in them again, that look she got whenever she got two men together. It was the kind of look that you see in Mexicans' eyes when they take their roosters to the fighting pit and start roughing them up before the battle.

  But I knocked a hole in some of her fun when I said, “Yes he'll be a bigger man than me.” Which, after all, wasn't saying so much. “But not the way he means,” I went on. “Not with guns.”

  The kid's face had started to brighten, but it fell quickly. Then it took on a half-angry, defiant look. “I never said anything about it,” he said, “but I was considered a pretty good shot down in the Nueces River country. I guess I know as much about guns as most people.”

  “You don't know a hell of a lot,” I said, “or you wouldn't be making a fool of yourself with those old Prescotts.”

  Blood rushed to his face as if I had just slapped him. “Look,” I said, any my voice was as deadly serious as I could make it. “I hired you on as a messenger boy, not a gunman. When you're heeled you're just advertising for trouble. On the other hand, there aren't many men—not even in Ocotillo—who would take a shot at a man who didn't have a chance to shoot back.”

  The kid stiffened. “Mr. Cameron,” he said, “I guess you don't know much about Ocotillo, even if you do run it.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Then he took off his hat and I saw the bump over his left ear, and an open cut about an inch long that was just beginning to scab over.

  I must have sat there for a minute or more before I could think of anything to say. The thing jarred me because I thought I had everything under control—I had Kreyler nailed down, most of the men were satisfied, and I had two men, the kid and Bama, that I could trust. And still somebody was working against me.

  At last I jerked my head at Marta and said, “Go home or somewhere. I want to talk to Johnny alone.”

  She didn't like that much, being brushed away like a bothersome fly. But then she saw that I meant business
and she got up from the table and sort of melted away.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me about it and don't leave out anything.”

  He shrugged. “Well, it was last night. I was in the saloon for a while, and—well, I guess I kind of made friends with that girl, Marta. After a while she said why didn't I walk to her house with her, down in the Mexican part of town, and I said sure, I'd like to. That was the way it started. I got to her house, all right, but her pa raised such a hell of a racket that I didn't stay.” He grinned a little. “I don't understand much of that greaser talk, but I understood enough to know that her old man doesn't like gringos. Well, after that I started back for the saloon, and the streets down there are as dark as hell. That's where they jumped me.”