Well, it was pitch dark. And, like me, them soldiers had been drinking a mite, and the misnamed Honest Abe Rohrbough didn’t serve nothing but the worst forty-rod rotgut he brewed hisself at that gambling palace.
Suffice to say that I made it across the Colorado River and into California, and I don’t think I’d killed nobody, so I reckon I could still make my presence known in Arizona at some later date. Not Fort Mojave or Beal’s Crossing, but down south or somewheres. Besides, I’d been calling myself Corbin—nothing else, just Corbin—so I figured that Micah Bishop would likely be free from lawdogs, and if that son of a bitch Corbin—never caught his first name—who almost got me hung in Las Vegas, happened to ever show up at Beal’s Crossing and got bruised and maybe even bloodied and possibly even killed, good for him.
Not sure how long it would take the ferry man to get his boat back to the Arizona side, and how angry them bluecoats was at me, I pushed the buckskin gelding I’d borrowed into a fast lope across the Mojave. At night, the desert gets cold. I’d never been to California, so I kept to the military road for a spell, then turned off toward the northwest, thinking that might fool the infantry boys was they bound and determined to catch up with me.
I doubted if they would. Remember what I said about my luck playing out? I’d left most of my piles on that poker table—betting that Honest Abe Rohrbough, the cheat, had already taken a healthy cut for his house percentage—along with the Remington over-and-under .41 derringer, which was empty when I dropped it by my tumbler of Rohrbough’s barleycorn. Gamblers would be wiser if they’d pocket something other than a derringer. I mean, two shots ain’t gonna turn away five angry poker players. I’ll have to remember that next time I set down at a layout and deal with a marked deck.
The only thing I’d managed to leave Beal’s Crossing with—not including my hide, hair, and life—was my black hat, my vest, my boots, and that Spiller & Burr, which I had emptied along the path from Rohrbough’s and then on the ferry.
But I did have a canteen hanging from the saddle horn and a good buckskin gelding.
Had, that is.
Turned out, shortly before dawn, I realized that them infantry boys had gotten some good training in marksmanship at Fort Mojave after all. Since turning off the military road, I had given the gelding some breathers, slowing down, easing my way through unfamiliar country. Now some of them boys at Rohrbough’s, and even Honest Abe hisself, had mentioned this mining camp in the California desert, around something they called the Painted Hills, that was named Calico. Big silver strike there, and I was just dumb enough to try to find it. I mean, I didn’t have much in the way of possessions, as I just told y’all, but I think I forgot to mention that I did have a deck of cards in my vest pocket. And them cards was marked to my liking.
Way I remembered it, Calico was about a week’s ride from Fort Mojave, so with the sky lightening up in the east, I figured we might as well make a beeline for Calico. How hard could them Painted Hills be to find? I’d been sitting in the saddle, letting the buckskin catch his breath, my left leg hooked over the horn, when I decided it was time to ride some more. So I lowered my leg, found the stirrup, and give the gelding a little kick.
Instead of moving forward, he started to fall. I leaped off the saddle, not wanting to have an eight-hundred-pound horse roll over me, and the horse just collapsed. Lifted his head once, snorted, and expired.
Well, I cussed that horse and cussed my luck and cussed them bluecoats from Fort Mojave. Turned out, a couple of them had aimed well enough to put two bullets through that buckskin. I’ll say one thing for that horse, though. He carried me farther than he had no right to. Got me out of Beal’s Crossing.
I looked up.
To this.
When the sun appeared, I got a good look-see at a spartan wasteland that stretched out in all directions. Couldn’t see no Painted Hills, but, by jacks, I’d only covered maybe ten miles since the Colorado River. That left me a hundred and thirty or thereabouts to cover. Afoot. With one canteen.
Now, knowing what I know today, what I should have done was simple. Just backtrack my way to the Colorado River. I could have followed the river south, perhaps all the way to Yuma, a right far piece to walk, but I would have had water all the way down. Or even just wait a spell and sneak across the river at Beal’s when the soldier boys was marching and drilling and sweating at the fort. What I done, of course, being the stubborn fool and thinking so much about plucking some greenbacks from dumb silver miners in a stupid town called Calico, was simple:
I just fetched that canteen, pulled my hat down low, and set out walking west.
Oh, there was hills. And washes. And rocks. And creosote and cholla. And one intense sun on my back. But I’d lived in harsh country before, and I knowed that this being summer, monsoons oftentimes brought down real gulley washers in the afternoon. I also knowed that a desert might look lifeless, but you could always find a seep or a spring with some good water. Hell, even a Mojave rattlesnake needs water to live. You just had to know where to look.
Alas, I didn’t.
I was also wise enough, experienced enough, to know that only a fool walks across the desert in the heat of the day. So when the sun got too high, I found myself a patch of shade, stretched my legs out, and taken a sip of water. A small sip. Figured I’d better save some of that water for the days to come.
Funny thing about taking a sip of water on a hot day in a barren desert. It makes you thirstier. So I had myself another sip. And then another. Before I made myself put the stopper back in that canteen.
Then I fetched my deck of cards from my vest and dealt a little one-handed vingt-un.
I slept some—being a gambler, I am used to sleeping in the day, but usually I sleep in a hotel bed or at least in a wagon yard, and not in a desert where all sorts of things might kill me. When the sun finally dipped behind them hills waiting for me out west, I got up, taken another sip of water, and started walking.
Made sense, you see, to wander through this country in the dark. You didn’t have to worry about dying of heat stroke. Just stepping onto one of them green serpents. Folks say that the Mojave rattler is the deadliest snake you’ll run into out west. Then there was man-killing scorpions. Or just stepping into a hole and breaking your leg, or neck.
That first day and night wasn’t too bad. Second day fared passably well, too.
After that, though, things get a bit fuzzy. I recollect singing. “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” and “Home on the Range,” two tunes I never really cared about. Maybe I disremember. Maybe my mind was gone.
Truth is, I don’t know how many days I wandered out in the Mojave. It felt far. Felt like forever. Somewhere along the trail—if you could call anything around me a trail—I had shed my vest. I’d even tossed that deck down some hole, and it was a good deck. Hardly even the best sharper could have noticed how I’d marked them pastecards.
Water run out. Oh, I kept the canteen, for a while, that is. Must have dropped it, or pitched it, or just forgot all about it somewhere between where the buffaloes was roaming and the zephyrs was so free. Anyhow, at some point, in the heat of the day—reckon by that time I’d done forgot about walking at night and resting in the daytime—I savvied that I was done for, so I sat down, back against a boulder, and tried to put that Spiller & Burr in my mouth. But didn’t have the strength, or a paper cartridge and copper cap.
Along about that time, sounds come to me. The squeaking of wagon wheels, the creaking of harness leather, and good, fine American cussing.
But I didn’t care. Closing my eyes, I decided that this was a good place and time to die.
Only a short while later, or maybe it was a day or two, a shadow crossed my face, and I heard this voice say:
“Reckon you owe me one, mister.”
My eyes fluttered open, and I spied this shadow that was speaking at me. The silhouette wore a flat-brimmed, low-crowned hat and held the longest snake I’d ever seen in his left hand. Course, it wasn’t
a snake, just a blacksnake whip, but I didn’t know no better. Not as dead as I was. He certainly wasn’t some angel, unless he was “The Angel of Death.”
I tried to answer him, to tell him, “Yes, sir, I reckon I surely do owe you one, mister,” but my tongue had gotten so fat, my lips so cracked, my face so blistered, I couldn’t say nothing. Which is exactly what I said.
The shadow leaned beside me, and he yelled something to some hombres somewhere behind him, or in front of him, or maybe he was just talking to hisself, as far as I knowed at the time.
“It’s your lucky day,” the specter told me.
Turned out, it sure was. Because instead of dying alone in the middle of the Mojave, I was plucked back into the living world by a gent called Whip Watson.
Course, now that I have time—five to seven years, the judge told me—to think about how things played out, I’ve studied on that bit of fortune. How I was to ride with Whip Watson, how I was to come right smack between him and another freighter named Candy Crutchfield, how an Oriental princess named Jingfei, which means “Quiet Not,” and a passel of mail-order brides, was to come into my life. How I was played for a fool, flayed, flimflammed, flummoxed, flaxed out, and, finally, incarcerated here at Folsom.
Hell, I’d have been better off had I just died out in the Mojave Desert.
CHAPTER TWO
Like I said, I didn’t die. Now, them first few days riding in the back of one of Whip Watson’s freight wagons is about as forgotten as my Moses-like wanderings across the Mojave Desert. Had me some wild dreams, rare for me, some disturbing nightmares, but I’ve never been one for remembering such things. I do recollect this woman in white with black hair and a huge Mojave rattlesnake hanging around her neck feeding me soup. Least, she called it soup. It tasted like dung. And I recalled floating on a ship, sailing the high seas, and then I’d wake up, fearing that I’d been shanghaied, and finding myself lying in that freight wagon next to crates and crates of tools and kegs of gunpowder. And I’d start to sit up, but then I’d just fall back onto somebody’s bedroll, and I’d close my eyes and go back to sleep.
Till one evening, I woke up.
The wagon wasn’t moving. I smelled a campfire somewhere beyond the canvas tarp, heard voices speaking Mexican and what some folks might even call English.
“Evening,” a voice said.
I turned my head.
A candle had been lit, and sat flickering atop one of the crates—not the kegs of gunpowder, or course—so I seen the gent real good.
He dressed hisself in a fine Boss of the Plains, black as my soul but with a fancy horsehair-hitched headband. He wore a blue silk shirt, double-breasted black vest, black-and-white polka-dot bandanna, black-striped woolen britches with the thighs and seat reinforced with black corduroy, the legs of which was tucked inside high-topped stovepipe boots, blacker than the ace of spades except for the red crescent moons inlaid in the tops. It was a right fancy outfit. Especially when you got a gander at the two nickel-plated Colts shoved into a black sash, their ivory grips butt forward, facing me.
His eyes was black as night, too, like most of his duds, but his hair was white, like bones that’ve been bleaching underneath the Mojave sun for years. A real contrast, if you was to ask me, black outfit, black eyes, but white hair. Like there was good and evil in this man. I’d soon come to know better than think that. Sun and wind had bronzed his face, but there wasn’t not a hint of beard on his cheeks. I knowed why. I could smell the soap on him. Here’s a guy, in the middle of nowhere, who shaves before supper. Hell’s fire, he probably shaved before breakfast, too. I smelled something else, too.
My eyes found the bowl he held in his left hand. Steaming hot. Smelling mighty fine.
“Where’s . . . ?” My voice cracked. Had to swallow down some spit. “Where’s the lady that’s been feeding me?” I asked.
He laughed so hard he almost spilt the soup, which would have been a tragedy. Placing the bowl near my bedroll, he wiped his nose with the back of his left hand, and laughed some more. “I haven’t seen a lady since Prescott,” he said.
I give him the dumb look.
“I’ve been feeding you, mister.”
“Oh.” Sure couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. Because he dressed real fine, kept hisself clean and shaved, but this guy, iffen you was to ask me, was uglier than sin.
“Brain must’ve been playing tricks on me,” I told him. “I saw this woman feeding me soup. With the damnedest, longest black snake hanging around her neck.”
“Like this?” He pointed at the floor.
Which is when I saw the whip. Well, they do call those whips “blacksnakes.”
I laughed.
“It bites, sure enough,” my savior said. “Kills like a sidewinder. Eat your soup, if you’re able.”
Well, knowing that this wasn’t some goddess saving my worthless hide but an ugly man with two pistols and a whip, I managed to get myself into a seated position, back against the wagon’s side, and tasted the soup. I’ve tasted better, but I smiled politely. And kept right on eating.
“That’s good to see,” the man said. He pointed a slim finger at me and the bowl and the spoon. “Thought you was gonna die on me. That would have set me back a spell.”
“Maybe you won’t have to bury me,” I told him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t have buried you, mister. Takes too much time. I would have just tossed your body to the buzzards. You would have set me back ten dollars had you croaked. Juan Pedro said you’d surely die before we reached Calico. I bet against that old Mex.”
“I’m glad Juan Pedro lost his bet.” Then his words struck me. I finished the soup, lifting the bowl and draining the rest. “You’re going to Calico?”
He motioned at the crates and kegs. “That’s where we’re selling this.” He took the spoon and bowl, tossed them through the opening in the back of the wagon. “Juan Pedro!” he shouted. “More dishes for you. And you owe me ten dollars, old man.”
His black eyes lighted back on me. “You owe me, too.”
“I’m your servant,” I told him, and give him this slight bow.
With a grin, he moved back, taking his whip with him, sitting on one of the kegs.
“That’s good to hear,” he said. “Because I can use a man like you.”
Which made me a bit nervous, more wary.
“You know me?”
“I know enough.” He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a fine cigar—not one of them two-cent jobs I was prone to smoke, but a real fat expensive cigar—and fetched the candle, lighting the smoke, and him sitting on a keg of gunpowder with six or seven more kegs well within reach of some random spark.
Didn’t offer me one of them cigars, but I don’t think I would’ve lit it up if he had. I’m a gambler, but I don’t take chances that might get me blowed to perdition.
When the cigar’s tip was glowing, he moved the candle back atop the crate marked “Hammers” and exhaled a long stream of smoke toward the top of our canvas roof.
“I find you half-dead, more like three-quarters dead, fried, soles of your boots worn to nothing, clothes threadbare, alone in the desert. No horse.” He stared at me, waiting for some response.
“Had a buckskin,” I told him. “Died on this side of the Colorado River.” Figured there was no point in telling him how that horse had expired.
“Most people would have returned to Arizona Territory.”
I smiled. “I’ve been to Arizona. Never seen California.”
Which satisfied him, I reckon, ’cause he moved on.
“No canteen, either,” he said.
I looked around, like this white-haired man dressed in black would have fetched my canteen and left it within my reach. Like I told y’all, I didn’t remember shucking it, but it sure wasn’t in with the hammers and pans and powder in this wagon.
Give up looking. I turned back to my savior with a sheepish look on my face. “I had one,” I told him. “Don’t know what I done w
ith it.”
“You’ve never been in the desert before,” he told me, and puffed on his stogie.
Oh, I had. Had almost died in what, in New Mexico Territory, they call the Jornado del Muerto, the “Journey of the Dead,” which is just as deadly, just as miserable, and just as barren as the Mojave. If I didn’t have the canteen no more, I sure knowed why. Even empty, canteens feel heavy, and for a fellow afoot with no water, they weigh as much as a dead man’s bloated body. But I didn’t say none of this. Something about this guy’s demeanor told me that he didn’t cotton to arguments or getting hisself contradicted or corrected.
“So I ask myself, we found you lying against some rocks,” the man in black with the white hair said. “What kind of man is it, who with no water, no horse, nothing except a ratty old hat. . . .”
I reached up for my ratty old hat, which sure wasn’t as fancy as my rescuer’s Stetson, and give him another one of my sheepish looks.
He had stopped to draw on his cigar, pushed the blue-gray smoke up toward the canvas roof again, and he finished his question.
“I ask myself, what kind of man is it, who alone in the desert, no horse, no gun, no chance . . . what kind of man is it who still carries a revolver?”
With that, his left hand snaked behind his back, and he pulled out that old .36. With a grin, he flicked the antique toward me. I ducked, let it slam into the wooden slats. Then I reached over and picked it up.
“A cap-and-ball antiquity that, by my guess, even empty—as it was—weighs more than an empty canteen.”
“Sister Rocío,” I told him, “always told me I had more luck than sense.” Instinctively, I looked down at my knuckles, almost feeling the good nun’s ruler rapping them hands of mine. She could wield a ruler like a sledgehammer.
“Your sister?” he asked.
I shrugged. Didn’t see no need in giving him any information he might be able to use against me somewhere down the line. “Just a woman I knowed,” I told him, “back when I was a kid.”
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