Catlow (1963)

by L'amour, Louis

Armijo thrust out his hand. "Very well, senor. Vaya con dios!"

  Ben Cowan went down the steps and into the street. His prisoners, roped together, stood waiting for him. The two Mexicans stood to one side, under separate guard.

  He went to them. To the Mexican who had ridden with Bijah, he said, "I could do nothing for you, although I tried. Nor for you," he said to the other. "You are Mexican nationals, and I had no claim upon you as prisoners."

  Pancho shrugged. "It is nothing, senor. It is the way of fortune. The Army or prison, does it matter?" He smiled. "I think it will be the Army. I am a good soldier, and the General, he knows this. He will say much, there will be the guardhouse, but then I shall be a soldier again. You will see."

  Ben Cowan checked his pockets for money. Little enough was left. "I'm taking you boys back on the stage," he said to the men, "but all I can do is pay your fare to Tucson. If you eat, you'll have to feed yourselves."

  "I'm wearin' a money belt," Bijah said, "an' you might as well help yourself. What's the fare by stage?"

  "Ten dollars per head, from here."

  "I'll pay my own way. If I'm headin' for jail I might as well go in style."

  They could see the church at Fronteras for some time before they reached the town. The church was built on the very brow of a hill, with the town scattered around it, and the houses-- most of them ruined adobes--were built along the side of the hill.

  When the stage rolled into town, Ben Cowan stepped down and looked around carefully. The first person he saw was Rosita Calderon.

  On this day it was a black horse she rode, an animal as fine as the brown. Her white buckskin skirt was draped over its side. Her yellow silk blouse showed off her olive skin, and her black hair and eyes to striking effect.

  "How did you get here?" he asked, startled by her unexpected appearance.

  "We have a ranch near Fronteras, and I came north with my father. It is much faster by carriage, and on the main trail."

  The cramped prisoners had slowly been unloading from the stagecoach. All wore handcuffs.

  "If we can be of assistance, my vaqueros are nearby," Rosita said.

  "Thanks, no. All we want to do is eat and keep rolling."

  Her eyes were enigmatic. "You leave Mexico, then?"

  "I must take them back."

  "I--we shall be sorry to see you go. You have many friends in Sonora."

  He looked up at her. "It is time for me to go. If I were to remain, I might forget that I am only a man with a horse and a gun."

  "My ancestor," she said quietly, "who first came to Mexico, came with Cortez. He was only a man with a horse and a sword ... he founded a family."

  Ben hesitated, for he was a man of few words, and unaccustomed to women. "I am a gringo, he said, "and the badge I wear is all I have."

  "In New Mexico," Rosita said gently, "I have a cousin, whose name was Drusilla Alvarado. She married a gringo who wore a badge ... she is very happy, senor."

  Ben Cowan looked down at his boot toes. He looked up the street and down the street, and then he looked up at her, and thought nobody had ever lived who was so beautiful. He said, "I'll come back."

  He turned quickly toward the restaurant, then stopped and looked around. "And I won't be gone long!"

  He led them all inside and seated them and ordered bull beef for them, with frijoles and tortillas and plenty of coffee. He had no appetite himself. He just sat there staring out of the window.

  Bijah Catlow looked at him. "Ben, I swear I never saw the like. The most beautiful girl in Sonora, an' you almost muffed it! I'd a notion to slug you!"

  "Shut up," Ben said, politely.

  When he had herded them out to the waiting stage he felt for the derringer. That hideaway gun he had taken from Bijah was the only weapon he had ... but he would need no other for these men as long as he was in Mexico. They all knew what would happen if they escaped in Mexico, and were captured again.

  They were handcuffed two by two except for Bijah, and on him Ben had leg irons as well. Bijah was rather proud of them and kept showing them off. "Figures I'm a dangerous man," he would say, grinning. "Either that, or mighty fast afoot."

  It might have been the last thing he ever said. He said it to a girl and her mother who were also waiting for the stage, and when he said it he was not looking around. That was why he did not see the man standing on the corner some fifty feet away.

  "I told you," the cold voice cut in, "that I'd choose the time."

  Bijah turned around and looked at Miller, who was standing there with a gun in his hand, and he was smiling.

  If Miller saw the girl on the horse who rode slowly down the street toward them, he paid no attention. She was a stranger, and he had no reason to think of her.

  Ben Cowan stepped out on the street, and Miller had reason to think of him, but Ben wore no gun-belt, and there was no gun tucked into his waistband. Ben thought of the derringer in his pocket, useless at the distance, and for the first time he knew what despair was. He had been frightened in his time, but he had never known despair; but he knew the sort of man he faced, and Bijah was in irons and helpless, and so was he, without a gun.

  Miller knew it. "You too, Marshal? Well, why not?"

  Rosita Calderon had grown up on a cow ranch, and the horse she rode was a good cutting horse that was a fast starter. She touched him with a spur and he lunged into a dead run from a walking start. His powerful haunches seemed to squat and he was off, charging like a bullet.

  Miller saw her, but his attention was concentrated on the men before him. If he thought anything, it was only that she was somebody trying to get out of the way.

  "Ben!"

  At the cry, Miller's eyes turned briefly. Ben reached up and snared the flying, shining object that came spinning toward him. He caught it in mid-air, as he had caught many a gun doing the border shift, and the .44 Colt struck his palm solidly, his fingers closing around it. He saw the startled fear in Miller's eyes, and saw flame burst from the muzzle of Millers gun, and then Ben Cowan was walking in firing. He must, at all costs, keep Miller's gun on him. Not a shot must be fired at Catlow, who could not fight back.

  Miller was a cornered wolf. He felt a bullet smash his hip and he went down; felt a bullet whiff past his head. He took dead aim and saw dust leap from Ben Cowan's jacket.

  Then he felt a violent blow on the skull and he fell back against the porch post, to which he clung, a blazing light in his brain. Squinting his eye, he lifted the gun and felt something smash into his chest, drawing a clear thread of pain through him. His gun hammered into the dust, and he watched the tiny spurts of dust leap from the street in front of him. He kept on clinging to the post with one arm and holding the gun with the other, and he had no idea that he was dead.

  Ben Cowan swayed on his feet, and a curious weakness in his knees made them give way. He fell forward, losing his grip on the silver-plated, ivory-handled gun.

  For a long moment there was silence in the street, and then Bijah Catlow shuffled forward and, stooping, went into Ben Cowan's pocket for the keys to his irons. First he unfastened the handcuffs, then the leg irons. Then he took up the silver-mounted gun and holstered it.

  When he looked up he looked into a Winchester in the hands of Rosita Calderon. It was aimed right between his eyes, and he knew she would shoot.

  "Ma'am," he said, "you don't need that. We're goin' to fix this gent up, you an' me, and then we're all goin' over the border so he can turn us in."

  He unpinned the badge from Cowan's chest. "I'll just wear this here and appoint myself deputy, so it'll all be official."

  Ben Cowan was looking out of the window for a long time before he realized it. His eyes had opened on a sunlit vista; a lace curtain was stirring gently in the softest of breezes, and he had a feeling of tremendous comfort and complete lassitude such as he had never known before.

  The bed was the biggest bed he had ever slept in, and it was the first time he had ever looked out a window with lace curtains.

/>   When he had been lying there for some time watching horses playing on the green field, the oddity of it began to worry him. What could he be doing in such a place? What had happened to him?

  Behind him a door opened and when he turned his head he looked into a pair of wide, startled black eyes. He heard an astonished squeal and then the middle-aged Mexican woman was running away, calling to someone.

  When he looked around again at the sound of footsteps, he looked into the eyes of Rosita Calderon.

  He rolled on his back, clasped his hands behind his head, and smiled up at her. "First time I ever received a lady, lyin' in bed," he said.

  A faint flush showed under the olive of her skin. "Maria," Rosita said, "you had better see to him yourself. I think the senor is recovering more rapidly than we expected."

  He was sitting up eating a bowl of soup when Bijah Catlow came in. He was wearing the badge.

  Cowan looked at it skeptically. "Where'd that come from?"

  "It's yours," Catlow said cheerfully. He shoved his hat on the back of his head and hung his thumbs in his belt. "Figured it would look better, me takin' your prisoners over the border to turn them in."

  "You took them over?"

  "Sure did."

  "Who'd you turn them over to?"

  "Well"--Bijah's forehead wrinkled with an expression of mock worry--"that there part bothered me some. I didn't rightly know who to turn them over to, so I went to sleep studyin' about it; and you know, when I woke up they were gone! The whole kit an' kaboodle of them!"

  Ben ate soup in silence.

  After a minute, Bijah said quietly, "So far's I knew, you had nothing on them, anyway. Not in the States. When they got away it was down near Pete Kitchen's place. I figured the only prisoner you really had anything on was me. And here I am."

  Ben finished his soup. "Bijah, I'm going to be here a while. You give me that star, and you ride to El Paso and turn yourself in to the office of the U.S. Marshal there. There's a man there temporarily at least, and he'll handle your case. You do that, d'you hear?"

  "Sure." Catlow unpinned the badge. "Liable to get myself shot wearin' that, anyway."

  Two weeks later, while Ben Cowan was sitting on the porch at the Hacienda Calderon, Rosita placed a letter in his hand.

  El Paso

  Dear Ben:

  I take pen in hand to inform you we are all pleesed to heer you are comin along fine. Abijah Catlow, on the Wanted List, showed up here and said you said he was to turn himself in. He done it.

  He also handed us your report on Miller. He also handed us a paper from Millers pocket locatin the Army payroll stole by Miller. Most of it recovered.

  Yrs. Trly,

  Will T. Lasho, Dep.

  P.S. Catlow broke jail. Aint seen hide nor hair of him.

  The first postcard came a year later, from Malheur County, in Oregon.

  It said simply: We named the first one Ben.

  And down Sonora way a boy rides the range whose name is Abijah.