The Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  Pappy said softly, “Now wait a minute. We're not starting anything. We just dropped in for a hot cup of coffee.”

  The man spat. “Like hell,” he said. “You ride up and in ten minutes the whole camp's in an uproar.” He looked at Pappy. “You ever hear of Buck Creyton?”

  “I heard of him,” Pappy said.

  “He's comin' after you,” the man said, grinning suddenly. He looked as if he expected Pappy to turn pale and start running at the mention of Buck Creyton. When Pappy didn't move, his eyes were suddenly angry again.

  Pappy began rolling another cigarette. “It's not me he's after,” he said. Then he nodded at me. “It's him.”

  The man stared. He was a short, round, hard little Irishman, with a baby-pink face and a blue-red nose. The herd's trail boss, I guessed. He didn't believe that an eighteen-year-old kid would stand still when he knew that a man like Creyton was gunning for him. He wheeled back on Pappy, about to call him a liar, when there was the sound of boots again, coming out of the darkness.

  “The firelight, son,” Pappy said softly. “Don't frame yourself.”

  I moved away, to the edge of the canvas shelter.

  “Further,” Pappy said.

  I moved out into the rain. The rain hit my face like slender silver spikes driving out of a black nothingness. I felt empty and all alone out there, away from the fire's warmth, the canvas's shelter, Pappy's friendliness. There was just me and the night and the rain, and the sound of boots coming toward me. I thought: This is the way it had to be, Laurin. You understand that, don't you?

  There was little comfort in the night's answer. The boots were getting closer. From the corner of my eye I could see Pappy standing there under the shelter, looking into the darkness. And the pink-faced little trail boss, with his mouth working angrily, but no sound coming out. The sound of the boots stopped. A voice came out of the night.

  “Pappy, I want to see that killing little bastard you ride with.”

  I thought I could see Pappy smile. A sad, forlorn smile. I reckon you'll see him, Buck, if you just keep walking.”

  “Where is he? Hid out to shoot me in the back, the way he did Paul?”

  I heard myself saying, “I'm not hid out. I'm here in the rain, just like you are. And I didn't shoot your brother in the back. But I shot him.”

  I heard him swearing. “You won't shoot anybody else, punk. Not after tonight.”

  He started walking forward again, slowly now, carefully. I suppose I should have stayed where I was, stood still, with my pistols out. That way I could have followed the sound, and that would have cut down Creyton's advantages. But suddenly I didn't want any advantage. Pappy never asked for one. All he ever asked for was an even break, and I could get that here in the darkness. I started walking toward the sound.

  I heard Pappy give a grunt of dismay. The trail boss said hoarsely, “My God, stop it! This is crazy!”

  But we didn't stop. It couldn't be stopped now. With every step we got closer together and I expected to see him. My eyes began to jump from peering so hard into the darkness. I didn't dare close them for an instant, even to blink away the water that was caught on my lashes. An instant was all it took with a man like Buck Creyton.

  Pappy, and the trail boss, and the nickering firelight seemed to fade off into the distance and disappear completely. There was just me and a sound out there in the night. I wondered if Creyton had drawn yet. I wondered if that sighting-before-shooting technique of Pappy's worked in the rain. Would anything work in the rain? This was a hell of a place for a gun fight, in the rain and darkness where you couldn't see anything. I thought: If you don't stop thinking about it, Buck Creyton's going to spill your guts in the mud. And then I saw him looming out of the darkness.

  He looked as big as a mountain. He had his slicker pulled back behind the butts of his pistols and water was pouring in a sheer veil off the brim of his hat. His face shone faintly over the shapeless bulk of his body, as cold and distant as the moon. I imagined that I could see those icy eyes of his. But that was only imagination. Everything happened too fast, and it was too dark, to make out details.

  His hands were just a blur going after his pistols, and I thought: He's fast. He's fast, all right. Pappy himself, on the best day he ever saw, was never any faster than that. Then everything in my mind became crystal clear and painfully sharp. It was that instant in a lifetime that a few people experience once, and most not at all—that instant of walking the razor-sharp edge of time and space, knowing that if you fall there is nothing but disaster all around you. Even my hearing was tuned sharper than the best-bred hunting dog's. I imagined that I could hear every raindrop hit. I could hear the double clicks as the hammers of Creyton's pistols were jerked back. And I thought: So this is the way it is. It's almost worth getting killed just to be a part of the excitement of dying. And then the night exploded into sound and fire.

  I was vaguely aware of the pistols in my hands, and the roaring in my ears drowning all other sound. It was almost like being drunk, but no man had ever been drunk the way I was for that instant. Not on anything that came out of a bottle. For that moment I wasn't afraid of Buck Creyton, nor of any man on earth. I just held my guns and they did the rest, one crash crowding another until the night was crazy with sound. And after a time there were hollow, empty clicks as hammers fell on empty chambers, and I looked up ahead and there was only a shapeless hulk on the ground where Buck Creyton had been standing. I stood there gasping for breath, as if I had been running hard until my lungs couldn't take it any longer. And over the monotonous beat of the rain, I could hear the trail boss saying, “My God! My God!” over and over, as if he had to say something and those were the only two words he knew.

  From far away, it seemed, I heard the sound of alarm and the crazy bawling and the pound of hoofs. And a voice in the darkness shouted, “Stampede!” and the running boots headed for the chuck wagon suddenly stopped, wheeled, and ran toward the remuda pen for the horses. Over it all, the trail boss was bellowing wildly, but it all seemed far away and no concern of mine.

  Pappy came out from under the shelter, looking at me strangely. Then he went over to what was left of Buck Creyton.

  “Jesus Christ, son,” Pappy said, “did you have to shoot him all to pieces?”

  “I couldn't stop,” I said. “I started shooting and something got ahold of me, and I couldn't stop.”

  Pappy looked at me again in that strange way. I couldn't tell what was behind those gray expressionless eyes of his. I couldn't tell if he was glad or sorry that it had worked out the way it had. For a moment, as he looked at me, I thought there was fear in those eyes. But I must have been mistaken about that.

  “Do you feel like riding?” Pappy said at last.

  “Sure,” I said. “But why should we ride anywhere?”

  He jerked his head toward the bedground where all the noise and commotion was going on. All hell was breaking loose, but I was just beginning to become conscious of it. It was almost like returning suddenly from a long visit in a strange place, and it took a while to get used to things as you used to know them. The cattle had broken toward the north, running blind and wild with fear. The riders, some of them just in the underwear they had been sleeping in, were riding hard on the flanks, trying to turn them.

  “After starting this ruckus,” Pappy said, “the least we can do is help them turn the herd.”

  Pappy started in an awkward half-lope toward his horse beside the chuck wagon. In a moment I came out of it. I ran toward Red, and on the way I passed the bloody, shapeless form that had been Buck Creyton a few minutes before. He lay twisted, in the mud, looking straight up, with the rain in his face. There were bright, shimmering puddles forming all around him.

  I hit the saddle hard, and Red switched his head in angry protest. He didn't want to move. He had lulled himself into a kind of stupor there in the rain, and he just wanted to be let alone. I drove the iron to him and he reared sharply. Finally I pulled him around and he
fell into a quick, ground-eating run to the north.

  We caught Pappy on the herd's flank just as the break began to settle down to a real stampede. There wasn't time to be scared, the way they say you always are after a fight. There was just the blind race along the flanks of the herd, and once in a while I could feel Red slide and fight for his footing again in the mud, and I tried not to think what would happen if he put a hoof down on a loose rock or into a prairie-dog hole. Red and Pappy's big black spurted ahead of most of the other riders. Up ahead, I could hear the trail boss yelling and cursing.

  He was trying to turn them by himself as Pappy and I came up alongside him. He drove his rugged little paint into the van of the stampede. Leaning far over his pony he shoved the muzzle of his pistol behind the shoulders of the lead steer and fired.

  The big animal thundered down, rolling and churning the mud, slowing the herd's rush. Without looking back to see who we were, he roared, “Turn 'em, goddammit!”

  I thought I could make out that faint grin of Pappy's as he drove his big black into the point of the herd. I shoved Red in after him, and the trail boss came in on our heels. The startled cattle began to slow down their crazy rush for nowhere. The point began to give, began to edge to the left as Pappy and the trail boss pushed in, yelling and firing their pistols over the animals' heads.

  There wasn't much to it after the point began to give. We cut them over and headed them back until we had two columns of cattle going in opposite directions; then the riders came up and milled them in a wide circle.

  After the riders got the mill going, there was nothing for me and Pappy to do. We pulled up the slope a way to let our horses blow after the hard run. I noticed then, for the first time, that it had stopped raining.

  “One steer lost,” I said. “It could have been worse.”

  Pappy looked at me. “One steer and one rider,” he said dryly. He nodded toward the bottom of the slope to where a rider was coming toward us. It was the trail boss.

  Surprisingly, he didn't seem mad this time. He just looked relieved to get his herd under control with the loss of only one steer. He pulled up in front of us, mopping his face with a rain-soaked bandanna.

  “By God,” he said wearily, “I ought to turn the two of you over to the bluebellies.”

  Pappy straightened in the saddle. “What makes you think the bluebellies want us?”

  The little Irishman laughed roughly. “You're Pappy Garret, the boys tell me. And this kid's name's Cameron, ain't it?” Without waiting for an answer, he took a folded, soggy square of paper from his hip pocket. It was too dark to read, but a sinking feeling in my stomach told me what it was.

  “Reward,” the trail boss said pleasantly. “For killin' off some bluebelly cavalry down in northern Texas. Ten thousand for Garret, five for the kid. Here, read it for yourself.”

  Pappy made no move to take the paper. “Are you aiming to make a try for that reward money?” he asked softly.

  The trail boss laughed abruptly. “Hell, no.” Then his voice got serious. “It's no concern of mine if the army wants to take you in. I'm short of hands and good horses. From the way you two jumped in and turned that herd, it looks like my problem is taken care of. That is, if you want a job.”

  Pappy looked at me. He was thinking the same thing I was. “I kind of figured,” he said, “that you'd be sore because the boy killed off one of your riders.”

  The trail boss snorted. “It was small loss. Creyton was trouble from the first day I signed him on. He thought he was Godamighty with them two pistols of his... and I guess he had everybody else thinking it until tonight.” He looked at me with much the same expression that I had seen in Pappy's eyes. “I'll tell you the truth,” he said. “I never expected you to beat Buck Creyton, son. I was expecting we'd be burying a kid of a boy in the morning.” He shrugged. “But I guess you never know.”

  He pulled his paint around and studied the herd for a minute. “Think it over,” he said. “If you want to sign up, I'll see you at the chuck wagon for breakfast.”

  He rode down the slope again and into the darkness. I looked at Pappy and he was shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I guess it's like the man says,” he said soberly. “You never know.”

  It was too good a thing to pass up. With fifteen thousand dollars on our heads, every soldier in the Territory was a potential bounty hunter. The next morning we were at the chuck wagon and Bass Hagan, the hard pink-faced little trail boss, signed us on. Somebody must have buried Buck Creyton, but there was no mention of it at breakfast. There was no talk of any kind, for that matter. The riders regarded Pappy with a kind of dumb awe, and me ... I couldn't be sure just what they were thinking about me. I could feel their eyes on me when they didn't think I was looking. Curious eyes, mixed with a kind of fear, I thought. They ate their breakfast quickly and silently as a cold sun began to come up in the east. Then, with elaborate casualness, they sauntered down to the remuda pen to get their horses.

  It took a while to get used to that kind of treatment, but I finally did, as one long, weary, dust-filled day dragged into another. The men let me and Pappy strictly alone. And I began to appreciate how Pappy had lived all these years with that reputation of his. It was like being by yourself on the moon. You couldn't have been more alone. In every man you looked at, you saw that same mixture of curiosity and fear—like men partially hypnotized by a caged and especially deadly breed of snake. They couldn't take their eyes off it. But they knew better than to get into the cage with it.

  That was the way it was after getting a reputation by killing a man like Buck Creyton.

  Bass Hagan, the trail boss, was the only man who didn't seem to be afraid of us, but he spent most of his time up in the van, and Pappy and I ate dust back in the drag. And it wasn't long before I learned to hate the nights, when time came for sleeping. I learned to sleep the way Pappy did, always keeping a corner of my mind open, never letting myself slip into complete unconsciousness. I learned to sleep—if you could call it sleeping—on my back, with a cocked pistol in my hand. I kept thinking of that reward money. I wondered how long it would be before somebody tried to collect.

  I learned a lot of things in those days as we pushed from the Canadian up to North Cottonwood in Kansas. Pappy was my teacher. A little at a time, every day, he showed me the little tricks that men like us had to know to stay alive. The first rule, the most important rule of all, was to trust no one. Accept it as truth that every man you met was scheming to kill you, that every footstep behind you was a man ready to shoot you in the back. Never get caught off guard. Never relax. Never take more than two or three drinks, and let women alone. Never let anyone do you a favor without paying for it, never become obligated to anybody.

  And that was only the beginning. He coached me on how to enter a door, any door. First you listened; if it sounded all right, then you stepped inside fast, with a quick step to the side so as to get your back against a wall and not frame yourself against the light. There was a certain toe-heel way to walk when you didn't want to be heard, and a way to block your spur rowels to keep them from jangling. Little things, all of them. Things that ordinary men would pay no attention to, but with Pappy they were matters of life and death.

  I learned to value my pistols above all other possessions, and to take care of them before seeing to anything else. My horse came next, almost as important as the pistols. I learned that my own comfort was almost of no importance at all. A thousand things came ahead of that, if I wanted to keep living.

  What Pappy had to teach me, I learned fast, the way I learned to shoot. Already, among the trail hands, there was talk of Davis being removed from the governor's chair in Austin, and that meant that military rule and the Davis police would go with him. It was important that I learn everything that Pappy could teach me, because I had to stay alive, to go back to Texas.

  North Cottonwood was the settling-up place for the cattlemen before going the last thirty-five miles to Abilene. It was there that
the riders were paid off and discharged, unless they happened to belong to the drover's own outfit, and then they went on to the railhead with the herd. It was there that all the scrawny and sickly cattle were cut out of the herd and left to fatten before going to market. It was a crazy patchwork of wagons, and dust, and bawling cattle, and cow camps. Punchers who hadn't had a drop to drink and hadn't seen a woman for more than two months began peeling off their filthy trail clothing, bathing, shaving, and putting on their one clean pair of serge pants that they had brought in their saddlebags all the way from the Rio Grande, maybe.

  I could see Pappy's eyes take on new life after we finally got the herd rounded up on a bedground that suited Bass Hagan.

  “This is the place, son,” he said. “You haven't seen a town until you've seen Abilene.”

  He even found a clean pair of pants and a shirt with all the buttons on it, and put them on to celebrate the occasion. But Pappy got a jolt that afternoon as the riders were being paid off. Bass Hagan called us over to one of the supply wagons where they had set up headquarters.