I left Red at the side of the house, and the back door opened.
“Joe, is that you?”
Then I stepped into the light, and Laurin gasped. Her hands and arms were white with flour, and there was a pale powdery smudge on the side of her nose. She was just beginning to bake the week's supply of bread.
“Tall!” Her voice was frightened. “Tall, you can't come here. The cavalry left only an hour ago, looking for you.”
“The cavalry can't keep me away from you,” I said. “Nothing can.”
Quickly, she dusted her hands and arms on her apron and came down the steps. I put my hands on her shoulders and I could feel her shiver as I drew her close and held her tight. “Oh, Tall,” she cried, “it's no good. Meeting this way, in darkness, afraid to be seen together.”
I kissed her lightly and we stood there clinging to each other. I pressed her head to my shoulder and the clean smell of her hair worked on me like fever. “I'll come back,” I said. “It won't always be like this.” Then I asked the question that I was half afraid to ask. “Laurin, will you wait for me? Will you trust me to straighten things out in my own way?”
For a moment she didn't say anything. Her body was rigid against me and I knew that she was crying.
“You know I'll wait,” she said at last. “Forever, I suppose, if I have to. It's just that I'm afraid... something awful and wrong is happening to us.”
I knew she was thinking about those three men.... She didn't know about the fourth. “Can't you see, I had to do it?” I said. “I couldn't just stand by and let them get away with it—doing what they did. You see that, don't you?”
“I don't know,” she breathed. “I just don't know.”
“I'm not going to get into any more trouble,” I said. “Don't be afraid of that. I'll join a trail herd and go up to Kansas until the bluebellies are out of Texas courts. Then I'll come back and stand trial.”
She raised her head and looked at me for a long tune. And at last she began to believe it.
“I'll wait,” she said quietly. “If you'll do that, I'll wait as long as I need to. It won't be too long.”
That was the way I remembered her, the way she looked as she said, “I'll wait.” And then her face softened, and for a moment it seemed that she was almost happy. “I'll get you some bacon,” she said, “and some fresh bread. You'll need something to eat while you're traveling.”
“We'll get supplies,” I said. I didn't want to go, but the time had come and I couldn't put it off any longer. Then I kissed her—hard enough to last as long as it had to last. “Don't you worry,” I said. “I'll come back.” It seemed that I was saying that more often than was necessary to convince her. Maybe I was trying to convince myself.
I looked back once as I rode away, and she was still standing there with the lamplight streaming out the door and falling over her like a veil of fine silk. She half lifted her hand, as if to wave, and then let it drop. After a while, she went back into the house and that was the last I saw of her.
It was a quiet trip riding back to the shack. There was no sign of soldiers or police anywhere, and I made up my mind to get out of this part of Texas as soon as I got back to where Pat Roark was. I was afraid that we had stretched our luck about as far as it would go.
I judged that it was about midnight by the time we reached the hills. I nudged Red down into the gully that was Daggert's Road and stopped for a moment to listen, but there was still no sound except the faint night wind and the faraway bark of a coyote. We had almost reached the cabin when Red started shying away from something in the darkness.
I pulled up again and listened. There still wasn't anything that I could see or hear, but that didn't mean that there was nothing out there in the darkness. I felt of Red's ears. They were pricked up, stiff, his head cocked to one side. I reached far over and felt of his muzzle. It was hot and dry.
That worried me. Normally a horse's nose is cool and moist; it's only when he senses danger that it gets that hot, dry feel. Then I felt little ripples of nervousness in the long muscles of his neck. I knew something was wrong. But before I could do anything about it, a voice shouted:
“Throw up your hands, Cameron. We've got you surrounded!”
Instinctively, I drove the steel in Red's ribs and he jumped forward with a startled snort. I didn't know who was doing the shouting, but I could guess. I dumped out of the saddle as we neared the cabin, and Red spurted on like a scared ghost, heading for higher ground. I hit the ground hard, rolled, and scrambled for the door of the shack. If I had stayed on Red, they would have cut me down before he could have taken a dozen jumps, and besides, that gully of a road led to a dead end about a hundred rods up in the hills.
A rifle bellowed in the darkness, another one answered it, and then the whole night seemed to explode to life. Carbines, I thought as I crawled the last few yards to the doorway on my hands and knees. Cavalry carbines. Why the hell doesn't Pat shoot back?
Then my foot hit something soft and wet and sticky, and I had my answer. Pat Roark was dead. I didn't have to make an inspection to know that. I tried hurriedly to roll him over and it was like rolling a limp sack of wet grain. I let him stay where he was, got the door closed, and fumbled in the darkness for the window.
The shooting had stopped now. They saw that they had missed me on the first try, and now they were ready to think up something else. I wondered why they hadn't placed a man in the shack to shoot me as I came in—but I got my answer to that, too, as I was fumbling around looking for an extra box of cartridges. There was a man in here.
But he was dead, the same as Pat. The hard-visored forage cap on the floor told me that he was a soldier, probably a cavalryman. I felt for his head and jerked my hand back as I touched the clammy sticky mess that had leaked out of the hole in his skull. Well, they had done a good job on each other, I thought grimly.
I went back to the window and tried to see something. They hadn't started to move in yet. Probably, they were in positions on high ground overlooking the cabin, but I hadn't had time to notice that much when the shooting was going on. There was a little clearing all around the shack and I could watch three sides from the windows and door. But the rear was blind.
I took another look to make sure that they hadn't decided to rush me, then I went to the rear wall and began to knock out the 'dobe plaster between the logs. In a minute I had a porthole cleaned out big enough to shoot through and see through. But I wasn't sure how much good that was going to do me. I couldn't be in four places at once.
“Come out with your hands up, Cameron,” the same voice shouted, “and we'll see you get a fair trial in court!”
I could imagine what kind of a trial I'd get in a carpet-bag court, after killing three state policemen. I went back to the west window and looked out carefully. The voice, I judged, was coming from behind a rock up above the gully. An officer, probably.
“This is your last chance, Cameron!”
“Go to hell,” I shouted. “If you want me, come and get me.”
Nothing happened, and I began to wonder what they were waiting on. They had me surrounded. I wasn't questioning their word about that. Then why didn't they close in and begin shooting me to pieces? That's what I would have done if I had been in their place. Or maybe burn the cabin down. That would make a clean job of it.
But they were still waiting on something. I felt my way across the shack again and got my other pistol out of Pat Roark's dead hand. I rolled the soldier over against the wall to get him out of the way, and, as I was giving him the last nudge with my boot, the answer came to me.
The reason they were reluctant to start any wild shooting or burning was that they thought their man was still alive. I went back and inspected Pat Roark a little closer this time. Sure enough, he was still warm, lying there in the doorway with a bullet in his gut. It all began to make sense now. I could almost see it, the way it must have worked.
Pat had been out of the cabin for some reason when the ambus
h had been set, and when he came back, there was the soldier waiting to take him. I could imagine the way Pat Roark's face must have looked. He probably never even lost his grin as he jerked that .44 and shot the trooper's brains out. But not before he got a carbine slug in the gut for his trouble.
The others must have been wondering where I was and had set themselves to catch me when I came back—if I came back. Anyway, there was the dead cavalryman, and Pat, who must have lived two or three hours with a hot lead slug in his belly, waiting for me to come back and save him. But I hadn't got back in time. And I couldn't have saved him anyway. I couldn't even save myself now.
The best I could do was to try to keep things going the way Pat had started it, by making the cavalry believe that their man was still alive.
“All right,” the voice behind the rock called. “We gave you your chance, Cameron. Now, we're coming after you.”
I shouted, “Try it and this trooper of yours gets a bullet in his brain.”
I had guessed right. That had them worried.
“How do we know he's not already dead?” the voice wanted to know.
“Why don't you come in and see for yourself?”
But they didn't accept the invitation. They were going to think it over a while longer, and in the meantime I had some time for thinking myself. I wondered how they found this shack so quick. Probably some turncoat had told them about it. I kept forgetting that Texas was full of traitors. I remembered Pappy Garret saying once, “One mistake is all a man is allowed when he's on the run.” It looked like I had made mine early.
I kept moving from window to window, from the door to the rear of the shack, but I still couldn't see anything to shoot at. The waiting began to get on my nerves. I couldn't very well make a deal with them. I couldn't get away without a horse, and from the way Red was going the last time I saw him I guessed he must be close to Kansas by now.
So we waited some more. From time to time the voice would yell for me to come out or they were coming after me. But they kept holding off. Then, as the first pale light began to show in the east, I knew they had finally made up their minds. I could hear them moving around out there, and the officer giving orders in a low, hushed voice. They had decided their man was dead. There was no use for them to wait any longer.
I could hear them spreading out, circling the cabin. It was light enough to see by now, but they were behind rocks or brush, waiting for the signal to rush. I waited by the west window, thinking, So this is the way it's going to end—when the shooting and yelling started at the rear of the cabin. I jumped over to the rear wall and got a pistol through the crack. I shot twice before I saw that there was nothing to shoot at.
It was a trick. They had planted two or three men back there to draw my attention while the others started rushing from the front and two sides. I wheeled and headed back for one of the windows, but I could already see that it was too late. They were almost on me before I could get a shot off. I remember thinking coolly all the time, I'll have time to get one of them, maybe two. They'll have to pay for me if they get me. And I fired point blank into a cavalryman's face. The man running beside him fell away to one side, hit the ground and scrambled for the cabin. Behind me, I heard the others closing in on my blind sides.
I wheeled away from the window and took a shot out of the door. Then I saw a crazy thing. One of them stumbled, grabbed his belly and fell—not the one I was shooting at, but another one. Then I saw another one fall, and another one.
I didn't try to understand what was happening. For a moment I stood there dumb with surprise, and, by that time, panic had taken hold of the cavalry and they scrambled again for cover, what was left of them. I circled the inside of the cabin, counting the soldiers that hadn't made it back to cover. There were six of them. That stunned me. I had accounted for only one of them. I was sure of that. Then who had killed the other five?
Probably the cavalry was wondering the same thing. I could hear the officer shouting angrily, trying to get his men grouped for another rush. And after a minute they came again. Their force was cutto half this time, but they came running and yelling from all sides. Before I could raise my pistols, one went down. Then another one.
I didn't even bother to shoot again. The cavalry had had enough. They turned and scattered like scared rabbits, and there wasn't any officer to pull them together this time. The officer, a lieutenant, lay outside my window with a rifle bullet in his brain.
It had happened too fast to try to understand it. I only knew that there were eight dead men outside the shack, and I had killed only one of them. I heard the cavalry detail—what was left of it—scrambling down in the gully, and pretty soon there was the clatter of hoofs and the rattle of chain and metal as they lit out for the south. By this time they probably figured that the cabin was haunted, that there was a devil in there instead of an eighteen-year-old kid. And I wasn't so sure that they were so far wrong.
I should have known, I suppose, with that kind of shooting—but Pappy Garret never entered my mind until I saw him coming down from the high ground, astride that big black horse with the white diamond in the center of its forehead. He was riding slouched in the saddle, looking more like a circuit-riding preacher than anything else, except for that deadly new rifle, still cradled in the crook of his arm. In one hand he held a pair of reins, and that big red horse of mine was coming along behind.
Pappy rode up in the clearing in front of the cabin, looking at me mildly, with that half-grin of his. Then he snapped the leaf sight down on his rifle, and sighed. Like a woodsman putting away his ax after a good day's work.
“Son,” he said soberly, “you sure as hell have got a lot to learn.”
“Where did you come from?” I blurted. “How did you know I was here?”
“Now don't start asking a lot of damnfool questions,” he said. “You'd better just climb on this horse, because we've got ourselves some hard riding to do.”
It was incredible that Pappy would stick his neck out like this to help a kid like me. But there he was. And if I wanted to be smart, I'd just be thankful and let it go at that.
I managed to say, “Thanks, Pappy. If you ever need a favor... well, I owe you one.”
I went in the cabin and gathered up the extra cartridges and grub and rolled it all up in a blanket. In a few minutes I had it all tied behind the saddle and was ready to go.
Pappy looked at me, and then at Red. He said, “We'll see now if that red horse was worth killing for.” Then he added, “He'd better be.”
For the next four days, I learned what hard riding really was. Pappy had it worked out to a science. Walk, canter, gallop. Walk, canter, gallop. Rest your horse five minutes every hour. Water him every chance you got, but be careful not to let him have too much at once. Steal grain for him. Raid cornfields or homestead barns. Take wild chances—chances that a man wouldn't dare take for money—just to get a few ears of corn for your horse.
We didn't have time to eat, ourselves. The horses were the important things. I wanted to stop and cook some bacon, but Pappy said no. He had some jerky that he saved for times like this, so we chewed that while we rode. We traveled cross-country, never touching the stage roads except to cross them. Skirting all towns and settlements. Avoiding communities where we saw telegraph wires strung up.
Then, on the fourth day, we saw red dust boiling up ahead of us like low-hanging clouds. And as we got closer we could hear the bawling of cattle and the hoarse cursing of trail hands. At last we pulled up on a small rise and looked down on the constant stream of animals and men. It didn't look like an easy way to get to Kansas, but it was the best way for us. The law didn't bother trail herds. The big ranchers and cattle buyers saw to that. Their job was to get cattle to the railheads in Kansas, and they weren't particular about the men they hired, as long as they got the job done.
“Well, Pappy?” I said.
Pappy shook his head. “This is still dangerous country. Probably those cattle were gathered around
Uvalde. They'll travel along the eastern line of army posts until they get to Red River Station. We'll push on east and catch a herd coming up the Brazos.”
So we headed east and north, skirting the main trails until we got to Red River Station. The Station was a wild, restless place, milling with bawling cattle, and wild-eyed trail bosses trying to keep their herds in check until their time came to make the crossing. Herds from all over Texas gathered here to make their push through Indian Territory—shaggy brush cattle from along the Nueces, as wild and murderous as grizzlies; scrawny, hungry-looking steers all the way from Christi; fat, well-fed ones from the Brazos. Wild cattle and the near-wild men that drove them, all took advantage of the Station's limited facilities to break the monotonous, fatiguing routine of trail life.
The Desperado Page 10