Carmody 5

by Peter McCurtin

  Milo was an old-timer; he drank as much as he could. Carmody didn’t like the way his prisoner drank so much tequila. He was a long way from Mexico, a long way from the south Texas towns where they sold tequila and white men drank it. There were two more quarts in his saddlebags, but he hadn’t figured on breaking into his reserve supply so early. Still, he allowed Milo to drink. Some men found their courage when they were liquored up; Milo, he figured, would be one of the others.

  It was too bad about the goddamned pork, Carmody thought. Milo gagged, glared at Carmody with the blood still dripping from his smashed left elbow. Carmody held the .44 on him steady while he rolled a smoke with his right hand. That was a dude’s trick, Carmody knew, and no matter how smart you rolled it, the cigarette was still loose and burned fast, but it would have to do for now.

  “Feeling better, Milo?” he asked when the wounded badman let the open bottle sag away from his mouth.

  Milo called Carmody a name he would have been killed for, if he’d been sober. It had to do with Carmody’s mother, and though Carmody couldn’t remember his mother it was a deadly insult. Carmody smiled at Milo, at his bleeding bulk; the insult to his unremembered mother could wait.

  Milo repeated the insult to Carmody’s mother, hoping through the tequila fog to die quick and easy. Carmody’s mother was white but she’d been taken young by the Comanches: it was hard to hurry that heritage.

  Carmody’s brown-paper Mexican cigarette had burned down. He forgot about it until the blue-burning paper scorched his fingers. Looking at the bushwhacker, he dropped the end of his cigarette and heard it hiss and let it die in the wetness there, in the cold mountain grass.

  Milo was tough now, made tougher by all the tequila, old and wounded and bleeding and finished; still very tough—he thought.

  “Where’s Frank?” Carmody asked.

  The wounded bushwhacker told Carmody to do unmentionable things to himself.

  Men full of tequila did that; Carmody smiled. “You’re hurt bad, Milo,” he said. “Even so, you and me has to have a talk. About Frank, you understand, Milo?”

  “Frank who?” Milo sneered, the tequila numbing the pain, giving him temporary courage. When the tequila wore off the pain would be worse than before, and there wouldn’t be any more courage to draw on.

  Carmody thought he knew his man; he hoped he did. Working on Milo with the knife was something he’d just as soon not do.

  “That’s no way to be, Milo,” he said, taking out the knife.

  Chapter Four

  Carmody used the wide blade to scrape the burned pork off the stone, into the fire. The blackened meat fizzed and crackled. Slicing off another hunk of meat, he put it on the hot stone to fry. The wind coming down from the peaks made him shiver in his damp clothes. He thought how good a cup of boiled-black coffee would be.

  There was no point in doctoring Milo; asking about it, though, might give the bushwhacker some hope of getting out of this with no additional holes in him.

  The tequila hadn’t worn off yet. Bright-eyed with hate, the bushwhacker told Carmody what he could do with his offer of help. Then he topped his remarks by saying something else about Carmody’s mother. Talk like that seemed to be a habit with Milo. Allowing for the situation, for the two bullet holes in the other man, to Carmody it was still a deadly insult. And he would do something about it—but not yet.

  He had a drink, then corked the bottle, hammering in the cork with the heel of his hand, and put it back in his saddlebag. That was supposed to make Milo think, and it did.

  “You had yours,” Carmody told him. “Let’s not be a hog about this thing.”

  Milo was starting to come apart as the pain started to come back. A little more time should turn him into a fairly reasonable man.

  Carmody used the time to prod at the sizzling pork with the point of his knife. Whatever Milo did or didn’t do, he was hungry. The meat looked to be done about right. He speared it on the knife and set it down on the grass to cool.

  Milo groaned.

  “What about Frank?” Carmody asked. “Where is he and how long since you seen him?”

  Milo cursed him. The tequila had made Milo’s face redder than it was naturally, but now there were patches of white on the forehead and around the eyes. Soon it would be as grey-white as a weathered gravestone.

  The bushwhacker gave Carmody more bad-mouth, but his heart wasn’t in it. The obscenities trailed off like slop dripping from a cookhouse step.

  Carmody picked up the piece of meat. It was still hot. After he blew on it, he said quietly, “No more talk like that, Milo, or I’ll shoot the two eyes out of your head. You understand that, do you?”

  The bushwhacker glared at him, the glitter in his eyes turning sick, the white patches on his beefy face growing larger.

  The hot salt pork tasted good in the bright cold of the mountains. He turned the knife while he ate the meat.

  “For Christ’s sake, give me a drink,” Milo begged, coming asunder all at once.

  Carmody didn’t answer right away. First, he wiped the grease from his mouth with the back of his hand. Building a smoke stretched it out a little longer.

  “Sure, Milo,” he said. “After we talk about Frank. About where he is, what he’s doing—all the interesting details.”

  The bushwhacker’s face was all white now—white and grey—and his eyes were dull with pain. His mouth opened to curse Carmody, but he thought better of it. “I don’t ride with Frank no more,” he started to say.

  Carmody was getting tired of Milo. He was cold in the damp clothes, and still hungry. He wished he had cooked more meat. A man needed hot, fat meat in this cold country. Hot coffee, too.

  “You just shot at me for practice?” he said.

  Milo was biting his lip to keep from yelling. It was cold, but beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. “I thought you were the law,” he gasped. “Jesus, man, give me a drink.”

  “You get the whole bottle when you tell me what I want to know, old pard,” Carmody said. “I figure Frank hasn’t left the state. I figure he’s up at the old Dutchman’s place, above Silver City. I’d hate to come all this way to hear he wasn’t.”

  Pain twisted Milo’s thick body, driving out the last of the courage. Milo was on the wrong side of fifty; trying to stay tough was all he had left. He tried to hold out, and didn’t make it. He caved in suddenly.

  “Okay,” he gasped. “It’s like you said. Frank’s up at the Dutchman’s place. The drink!”

  Carmody got the bottle of tequila and shook it. The clear liquid bubbled slightly in the bottle. To make Milo want it even more, he drank some of it himself.

  “What about the girl?” he asked.

  With his eyes on the bottle, Milo nodded his head. “Frank’s got her.”

  “How many men up there with Frank?”

  Milo spoke quickly. The pain choked off the words here and there. “Five,” he said. “Three of the old bunch, two new ones. For God’s sake, Carmody!”

  “Sure,” Carmody said and walked around the fire. The bushwhacker tried to reach for the bottle, but the hole in his shoulder had stiffened up his right arm.

  “Don’t try,” Carmody said, setting the bottle to Milo’s mouth. The thick throat convulsed as the tequila went down. Carmody held the bottle steady, tilting it. When Milo began to choke he took it away. “Want a smoke?” he asked.

  He put the cigarette in Milo’s mouth and touched a light to it. The glare came back into the dull eyes. It would take Milo about five minutes to finish his smoke. He knew it wouldn’t be smart to leave Milo behind him on the trail, and it wouldn’t be right either. Hurt bad and untended as he was, Milo wouldn’t have a chance.

  The bottle was empty and Carmody threw it away. It made no sound as it fell in the waving grass. Full of tequila, Milo glared at him. “You stinking son of a bitch,” he said. “I told Frank you were never one of us.”

  Carmody said, “Well now, Milo, I take that as a real compliment.”
/>   Milo’s eyes were starting to droop when Carmody’s .44 came out and killed him.

  ~*~

  Riding out of there, Carmody figured to make Silver City in about two days. It was the best part of forty miles due west, and two days time was about right for the kind of country he was travelling. It looked like his hunch had paid off; that is, unless Milo was lying, and Carmody didn’t think he was. Frank was still in Colorado, high up in the Sangre de Cristos, up above Silver City with the girl in the old Dutchman’s place.

  He remembered the Dutchman’s stone and log cabin far back at the end of a narrow, twisting gorge. It was the kind of place nobody but a crazy old miner would think to build a cabin. The old man had been dead or vanished for years, and not even the few drifters and misfits left in Silver City knew exactly where the cabin was. People said the Dutchman had found a rich vein of silver up there in the snowy peaks. That was how Silver City got started, and there were traces of silver but not enough to make any difference. The mining camp had been abandoned for years.

  Carmody wondered if Mike Halsted still ran what passed for Silver City’s one and only saloon. The sign outside called it a saloon; inside it was nothing more than a mud-chinked cabin with a packed-dirt floor and two wide boards laid across sawhorses to make a bar. Halsted was from back East someplace, and the only reason he stayed on in Silver City was the money he made off the Garrison bunch. Nothing happened in or around Silver City that Mike Halsted didn’t know about. And right after he knew about it, so did Frank Garrison.

  The wind dried Carmody’s clothes as he rode. If Frank had posted Milo as a lookout so far back on the trail, there would be other lookouts when he got close to Silver City. That didn’t mean they would try to kill him. He figured it had been more of a personal thing with Milo.

  There was no way to go after the girl except head-on. They would have him spotted long before he reached Silver City. If the lookouts on the trail were from the old bunch he’d rode with years before, they might kill him just to be cautious, or they might let him ride through. It would be that way with Garrison himself. There had been no hard feelings—hard feelings out in the open, that is—when Carmody left the gang after that last bank hold-up in Arizona. Frank Garrison always did what he felt like doing, no matter how crazy it was. They had gone on some good drunks together in Tombstone, San Antonio, and El Paso. Frank might welcome him back like a brother—or he might reach for his gun the moment he saw him. Frank was fast as a snake, but Carmody thought he could take him. That wasn’t the point. The point was to collect the girl. As yet, he had absolutely no idea how he was going to go about it.

  He figured there would be another lookout about ten miles along the trail from where Milo had bushwhacked him by the pool. Unless things had changed, that was how Frank would do it. Taking his horse off the grown-over wagon trail, he climbed a long ridge and came down the other side through a dense stand of pole pine, His horse’s hooves made no sound in the thick, wet carpet of rotting leaves. When he came out on the other side, he was high above the trail. He moved higher, then stayed level with the trail. As soon as he saw the cluster of huge rocks on both sides of the trail, he figured that was where the next lookout would be.

  He rode the horse into the shadow of a cottonwood and tied it there. The lookout—if there was one—would be watching the trail, not the slopes; he was counting on that. Holding the Winchester, he moved farther along the slope until he was above and behind the big rocks. At first, he didn’t see the small man lying in a dark crevice in the rocks. The man moved his hand to scratch his head and Carmody saw him.

  The lookout’s head must have been good and itchy, because he laid down the rifle and took off his hat. By the time he put the hat back on, Carmody was fifteen feet behind him.

  “Stay still,” Carmody said. The lookout didn’t stay still. Surprise jerked him around but the muzzle of the Winchester steadied his nerves.

  “Carmody!” he said.

  “Howdy, Eli,” Carmody said. It sure was a day for mean old faces. “Leave the rifle and climb down here. Leave the belt-gun too.”

  Eli West was a little weasel of a man, with a caved-in face and watery, blue eyes. Eli wasn’t his real name, but that was what Garrison called him, and so did everybody else. Carmody couldn’t remember a whole lot about him. He was good with horses and mules; he didn’t drink or smoke or otherwise throw away the money he stole as part of Garrison’s gang. They said he had his money buried in an iron pot somewhere. It was a big joke with the boys. Carmody couldn’t think of any pressing reason why he should kill him. Besides, he couldn’t start killing all Frank’s boys.

  “I’ll be damned,” Eli said, climbing down from the big rock. He was too much of an old-timer to tell Carmody he didn’t need the rifle. There was no telling why Carmody might need the rifle.

  “You wouldn’t have shot me, would you, Eli?” Carmody asked him.

  Eli gave a gappy grin. “I don’t know, Carmody. I guess not.”

  “How’s Frank?”

  “Just fine, Carmody. You fixing to join up again with Frank, are you?”

  “That’s it, Eli. ’Course I don’t know how Frank will take to that idea. What do you think?”

  Eli kept his hands up. “Hard to say, Carmody. Frank took it kind of personal, you walking out like that. Still and all, that was some time back. Your guess is as good as mine. You know Frank better’n I do.”

  Carmody had to take a chance with Eli. He could kill Eli, probably kill the other lookouts, and where would that get him?

  “Put your hands down, Eli,” he said. “Sorry about throwing down on you that way.”

  Carmody took the fixings out of his pocket and passed the sack and papers to the other man. Eli’s bony hands didn’t shake as he rolled and gummed a cigarette. Carmody fired a match and lit it for him.

  “No hard feelings, Carmody,” the little man said, his face caved-in even more as he sucked on the cigarette. “Good to have you riding with us again.”

  “Thanks, Eli,” Carmody said. “Now suppose you tell me how I’m supposed to get by the other lookouts.”

  Eli grinned at him. “Sure, Carmody.” The little man dug into his pocket and came up with some strips of bright red silk. He cackled. “This was once part of a lady’s dress,” he said. “Just tie a piece round your left arm and that’ll get you through. Pretty neat, ain’t it?”

  “What’ll they think of next?” Carmody said.

  Chapter Five

  Silver City clung to the side of the mountain, looking as if even a small rock would sweep it away. Above it the face of a thousand foot cliff went straight up. Carmody passed the third lookout about a mile from town. The lookout was squatting on top of a tall rock. He didn’t challenge Carmody; he didn’t do anything. After that the trail slanted up between narrow rock walls, then it widened again, and there was Silver City.

  Some years had dragged by since Carmody saw it last. It was hard to believe that in its heyday this sprawl of wrecked and burned and decaying buildings had been sweet home for fifteen hundred miners, whores, cardsharps, saloonkeepers, Chinamen, and gunslingers. There never was much silver, even less city. They had called it another Panamint; it didn’t last half as long. The ore, at best, was low grade—not worth hauling heavy refining machinery into the middle of the Sangre de Cristos. As it was, the town wouldn’t have lasted long as it did if its life hadn’t been stretched out by lies and rumors. Finally, even the most optimistic diggers had drifted on, leaving Silver City to the human scavengers and the wolves.

  Carmody rode past the burned-out Tabor Hotel, once the pride of Silver City. The old Ninebark Saloon next door had perished in the same fire. The sandstone jail and town marshal’s office still had walls, but the roof was gone. Someone was beating on iron with a hammer inside the roofless jail. An old man in patched miner’s duds came out and stared at Carmody as he rode past.

  There were two horses tied at the rail outside Mike Halsted’s place. Carmody still thought of
it as Mike Halsted’s place. The roughly painted sign nailed up over the door was somewhat more weathered; that was about the only change. Carmody hitched his horse and went inside.

  The years between might not have happened. Mike Halsted was standing behind the splintered plank bar, his thick hairy hands on top of it, a cold cigar stub pasted in the corner of his wide mouth. Halsted always wore a black frock coat and a false-front dickey without collar or tie. The coat was always sprinkled with grey cigar ash, the dickey always looked clean. That’s how he was dressed now. Carmody figured Halsted must have bought up every clean dickey in Silver City before the town closed down.

  Halsted was a heavy, dirty, lazy man who never moved more than he had to. He talked so much that he didn’t seem to have any energy left for much else except grubbing for money. He loved money as much as he hated to wash.

  There were two men standing at the bar. They turned around when Halsted spoke past them to Carmody. “Don’t ask for beer, Carmody,” the saloonkeeper said. “The last of the suds ran out some years back and there ain’t enough trade to keep up a brewery. Ain’t that a fact, boys?”

  The last remark was directed at the two hard cases at the bar. They had been shaking dice for the drinks when Carmody walked in. They didn’t answer Halsted. They didn’t do anything except look at Carmody.

  He didn’t know them. To Halsted he said, “Whisky—you got anything to eat?”

  Halsted set out a bottle and a glass. Carmody decided that Halsted’s shirtfront was the only clean thing about him. Halsted wore a gray wool shirt under the dickey, winter and summer. Carmody didn’t think he had chinked in since the last time he saw him. Halsted smelled bad, and that hadn’t changed, either.

  Halsted said, “I can give you a two-dollar steak. Better make that a five-dollar steak.”

  Carmody drowned a drink and poured another. “What’s the difference?” he asked.