A Noose for the Desperado (6 page)

Everything was very businesslike, like sending a bunch of coolies out
to lay a few miles of railroad. It was hard to believe that Basset had
just explained his plans for wholesale murder.

I went out of the office, collared the bartender, and found out where
Bama, the gentleman of the old South, slept off his drunks. It turned
out that he was a neighbor of mine. He bunked over the saloon in a
cigar-box room just like mine, except that it was dirtier.

He was asleep on the bed when I found him, one boot off and one on,
the dead bottle still in his hands. I got the front of his shirt and
shook him.

“Wake up, Bama!”

He grunted and tried to fight me off, being careful not to drop the
empty bottle. The whisky smell in the room was thick enough to carry
out in buckets.

“Wake up. Basset says we've got to earn our keep.”

He came out of it slowly and stared vaguely around the room. Looking
into his eyes was like looking into the windows of a deserted house.
After a while he brought me into focus, reached out like a sleepwalker,
and took my shoulders.

“Ah, the famous Tall Cameron!” He smiled crookedly. “Welcome to my
humble...”

“Snap out of it,” I said. “We've got a little job of robbing to do.”

“Robbing?” He thought about it for a while. “Oh, you mean another
raid. God, I need a drink.”

“Your bottle's empty. Get your stuff together and we'll get a drink
downstairs.”

That brought him out of it. He pulled himself up, then went
unsteadily over to the washstand and poured a pitcher of water over his
head.

“All the damn stuff's good for,” he said thickly. “Where's my other
boot?”

I found the boot for him and helped him put it on. His pistol was
under the bed. I found it and buckled it on him.

“Are you ready?”

He licked his dry lips with a coated tongue. “God,” he said, “I wish
I had the guts, I'd blow my brains out. This rotten, maggoty mess of
filth and corruption and death that I call brains, I'd splatter them
all over these filthy walls!” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm
and almost fell.

“Come on,” I said. “You need that drink worse than I thought.”

He was better after he'd had a couple of glasses of the stuff. His
eyes cleared, his hands became steady.

“How do you feel?” I said.

He looked at me. “How do I feel? I can't tell you, Tall Cameron, but
maybe by sundown you'll know.” He took the bottle off the bar and
walked out of the place swinging it in his hand. He was the
goddamnedest guy I ever saw.

We went around to the livery barn where our horses were, and as the
liveryman saddled up for us he slipped boxes of cartridges into our
saddlebags.

“Compliments of Basset,” Bama said dryly. He swigged from the neck of
his bottle and then put it in his saddlebag with the ammunition. As we
rode out of town he began to sing in that thick, black drawl of his:

“Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me,

For I'm goin' to Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”

“But her name wasn't Susanna,” he said. “It was Myra. And I won't be
going to Alabama, with anything.”

It wasn't a long ride to the foothills of the Huachucas. Bama knew
all the short cuts, and before long the town was far behind and there
were just those naked, dark hills of rocks and boulders and cactus and
greasewood. We climbed higher and higher until we got into the
mountains themselves, and the going got slower.

“We won't be able to make it today,” Bama said. “It'll be near
sundown before we'll meet Joseph and Kreyler and the rest of Basset's
army. The battle won't start before tomorrow, I guess.”

I wondered if it was going to be as bad as Bama made it out to be. I
doubted it. But something kept me from asking questions.

We rode for a long while without saying anything. Every half hour or
so Bama would take a belt at the bottle.

“You know,” he said finally, “this stuff doesn't really do any good
unless you've got enough to make you sleep the deep and dreamless sleep
of the dead.” He shook the bottle thoughtfully. “There's not enough
here for that.”

“Then why do you drink it?”

He smiled sadly. “I'm afraid,” he said mildly.

“You're also crazy.”

He bobbed his head up and down, soberly, as if I had just said
something very profound.

“It's surprising how much of the stuff you can drink when you're
afraid,” he went on. “For instance,” he said abruptly, “I was awake
last night when hell broke loose in that room of yours. I heard the
girl in there and I thought to myself, Well, there's one more scalp the
Indian can hang on his belt. Of course, I didn't know at the time that
my neighbor was the famous Tall Cameron. He'll kill you, you know. The
first chance he gets.”

“He can go to hell,” I said. “I don't want any part of his girl.
She's crazy, like everybody else in this Godforsaken place. Last night
she tried to kill me.”

For a moment Bama looked at me. Then he threw his head back and
howled with laughter. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” he said
when he got his breath. “No, my friend, I'm afraid your days are
numbered. If the Indian doesn't kill you, there's always Kreyler. To
get that girl, Kreyler would kill you in a minute, if Black Joseph was
out of the way.”

“I tell you I don't want anything to do with her. Joseph or Kreyler
can have her.”

There was another long silence while Bama studied the contents of his
bottle. He allowed himself a short drink, corked it good and tight, and
put it away. “Why don't you tell me about her?” he said finally. “Maybe
it will do you good to get it off your chest.”

“Tell you about who?”

“The girl you left back in Texas, or wherever you came from. The girl
you grew up with and loved and planned to marry. The girl who loved you
once but can't stand the sight of you now because you're a killer. The
girl who will be the mother of another man's children because—”

He must have seen the anger and sadness in my eyes, because he
stopped abruptly and dropped his head.

“Goddamn you,” I said, “if you ever mention her again I'll kill you.
So help me God, I'll kill you.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

We finally reached a place where a great stone ledge reached out over
a barren canyon, and that was the marshaling ground for Basset's army.

An army was just what it was. There must have been fifteen or twenty
horses grazing down the canyon on the short, dry sprays of bunch grass.
And under the ledge the men hunkered or sat or slouched, like so many
soldiers awaiting their orders to march into battle. There were a few
small fires, and with the smell of horses and sweat there was the
heavier, richer smell of boiling coffee and frying bacon. Kreyler was
standing at the entrance of the canyon, tally book and pencil in his
hands, checking the riders off as they came in.

Bama was watching me, smiling that lazy, crooked smile of his. “What
do you think of our little army?” he said.

I shook my head. I hadn't expected anything like this.

We unsaddled our horses and turned them loose with the others; then
we sat down to wait. Riders came drifting in from different directions,
a few of them Mexicans, but most of them were run-of-the-mine hardcases
and hired gunmen. They kept coming until there must have been thirty of
them. As the sun began to die in the west I helped Bama build a small
fire and we cooked some bacon that he had thought to bring along. We
washed it down with some greasy coffee that we boiled in a skillet.
Bama's eyes were twin, silent screams for whisky, but he made no move
to uncork the bottle again.

At last, when the sun disappeared, leaving a cold bloody streak along
the horizon, Kreyler passed the word along to saddle up.

“I thought the Indian was supposed to be Basset's right-hand man,” I
said.

Bama shook his head. “The Indian's guns keep the men in line, but
Basset and Kreyler are the ones who really run things. It's a nice
arrangement for Kreyler; that deputy United States marshal's badge
makes him practically bulletproof. A man would think a long time before
he killed a United States marshal in this country.”

I knew what he meant. There are some people that you just can't kill
and get away with it, and a United States marshal is one of them. Even
a crooked one like Kreyler.

Well, it didn't make any difference to me. I didn't intend to kill
Kreyler, or anybody else, if he kept his nose out of my business.
Anyway, after this job was over I meant to leave Kreyler and the whole
business far behind.

That gave me something to think about as we started riding west
again, farther up into the mountains. To get away—that was what I
wanted. To go someplace where nobody knew who I was, and stay there
until things in Texas cooled off. And then I'd go back.

I'd go home.

The very word was enough to turn me sick with longing. The big
country of Texas, the people I knew, the kind of life I wanted to live.
And Laurin....

But I knew all along that I'd never go back. Not even to die.

The night was coming down on us now and the horses stumbled along
Indian file over dangerous, almost forgotten trails. The men were
silent as they rode, and some of them, I guess, were thinking as I was,
of home. And some of them would be counting in their minds the money
that they would get from their cut of the loot. Some of them, like
Bama, would be scared sick, dreading death and somehow welcoming it at
the same time.

But it was Texas that I thought of. Smoky nights as still as the
grave. The fierce winters of blinding snow. The blazing summers. And
the little town of John's City, which was as old as the Sante Fe Trail,
as old as the West. I thought of the days of the war, and the
bitterness after the war—the carpetbaggers, the treasury agents, the
scalawags and turncoats. The blue-suited army. The State Police.

They were all on their way out now, and before long Texas would again
be the kind of place I wanted it to be —noisy with giant herds of
cattle, dirty with trail drivers, rich and head-high. The strong,
patient men would live to see Texas that way again. But not Tall
Cameron. And not Miles Stanford Bonridge, once proud landowner in the
proud state of Alabama. And not any of the other men who rode in the
dark, wrapped in their own thoughts. The impatient, the money-hungry,
the kill-crazy. Basset's army.

At last word passed back that the column was halting and the men were
to take their positions up ahead. We dismounted and turned our animals
over to men that Kreyler had appointed horse-holders; then we climbed
single file up a rocky trail until we finally reached the tip of a
shallow canyon.

Everything was done with army-like precision, and every man but me,
it seemed, knew exactly what was expected of him.

Bama said, “You might as well follow me. It's going to be a long wait
until morning.”

We picked our way along the rim of the canyon, and now I could see
the war party splitting in two parts, half the men slipping silently
down the wall of the canyon and up the other side. The rest of us
spread out on our side at four- or five-yard intervals and got behind
rocks or bushes or whatever protection we could find. Bama found a
rock, and I lay down behind a clump of needle-sharp cholla not far from
him.

“Now what?” I said.

“We wait,” Bama said quietly. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait. And
finally the Mexicans will come down this canyon, and then we kill.”

“Just like that?”

“It's not as simple as it sounds. We've had scouting parties out for
days, following the Mexicans up from Sonora. They never take the same
route twice, but once they've picked themselves a trail to follow,
they're stuck with it. But everything has been taken care of now. All
we have to do is wait here and pretty soon they'll come along.”

“I don't get it. They must know that we're waiting for them. At
least, they must
guess
that we're here. Do they plan to just
ride along and let us shoot the hell out of them?”

“They know,” he said. “And they'll do something about it. We'll just
have to wait and see.”

So we waited, like Bama said. A pale moon came out and washed those
raw mountains with a false cleanness, and a stiffening, bone-chilling
cold settled down on us. I wanted a cigarette but I was afraid of
striking a match. I wanted a drink, but Bama had left his bottle in his
saddlebags.

“How much of this waiting have we got ahead of us?” I said.

“Only the scouts could guess at that. I'd say they'll be along in the
morning sometime. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”

I didn't think I could stand it that long. My legs became cramped
from staying in one position too long. My wrist began to throb and I
thought of the girl and cursed her. I checked the loading of my rifle
over and over and up and down the line I could hear other nervous men
doing the same thing. If this was the way wars were fought I was glad
that I never had to fight in one. It wasn't so bad when it happened
quickly, when you were mad at somebody or they were mad at you and all
you had to do was shoot. But this waiting—that was something else.

Bama must have gone to sleep. There wasn't a sound from behind the
rock as the night crawled by. The cold got worse and ate right into my
guts, and I had a feeling that all this was unreal and pretty soon I
would wake up and discover that it had been a dream.

But it wasn't a dream. Ever minute of that thousand-year night was
real. But finally it ended. Morning came in the east, bloodshot and
angry, and after a while a broiling sun shoved itself over the ridges
and beat down on us. By noon we were baked dry and there was no water
anywhere. And if there had been water we couldn't have moved as much as
a foot to get it. At every move, at every sound a man made, word would
be passed down the line: