A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter Eight

WE DIDN'T SAY much as we rode out of Ocotillo and into those barren, angry-looking foothills of the Huachucas. Bama was nursing the bottle again, and the kid wasn't doing much of anything, except that once in a while he would look wide-eyed all around him as though he couldn't understand how he had ever got here. I tried to do some thinking and planning, but my mind kept shooting off on sharp tangents and winding up in strange, long-forgotten places.

I guess we were all thinking pretty much the same thing—the wild Nueces River brush country, the wide green lands of the Texas Panhandle, and Miles Stanford Bonridge's state of Alabama. Home, for all of us, was a long way off. Farther than the poles, farther than those foreign lands on the other side of the ocean, because the distance that separated us from home was more than miles. It couldn't be measured and it couldn't be crossed.

The sun was about two hours high when we finally reached the big rock ledge, and there were six or eight horses already grazing down the canyon while the riders hunkered together under the shelf, waiting. We unsaddled and unbitted and put our horses out to graze, and then Bama went up to the head of the canyon to check off the names as the men rode in.

Johnny Rayburn said, “Is there anything I ought to do, Mr. Cameron?”

He still had that lost look and I began to wish that I had left him back somewhere.

I said, “There's nothing to do now but wait.”

I went up for a while to see how Bama was doing. The men were coming in slowly, grim-faced, reluctant.

Bama checked off a name and said, “Twelve. They're coming, but they don't like it worth a damn.”

I said, “They're getting paid for it. They don't have to like it.”

“Just the same, I've got a feeling that all our trouble won't come from the smugglers. This isn't exactly the smartest play in the world, and the men know it. They're beginning to say that they should have put Kreyler in as boss.”

“The more they talk, the less they'll do.” But I wasn't so sure.

“It's the Indians they don't like,” Bama was saying. “It would be better if you called this raid off and waited for another train to come up.”

“And give Kreyler a chance to work on the kid in the meantime?”

Talking about the kid reminded me that Kreyler's men could be working on him right now, for all I knew. I turned and half ran down the canyon. But nothing had happened. He was squatting with his back against the rocky wall. There was a ragged tally book on his knee, and he was writing painfully in it with the nub end of a pencil. He didn't see me until I was right in front of him, and when he looked up his face got red, as if he had just been caught stealing pennies from a poor box.

“I—well, I guess I was kind of writing my girl a letter,” he said. “I know there's no place to mail a letter around here, but when I get back to Tucson I can do it.”

I don't know why he thought it was necessary to tell me about it, but he kept stumbling on, telling me about his girl. I guess he didn't notice the look on my face—or maybe I had learned to hide the things I felt.

“You think a lot of this girl, don't you?” I put in. “Why, sure. Well, we've even got it planned to get married—sometime.” Sometime....

I should have done something right then. I should have put him on a horse and sent him back to Texas. And I caught myself thinking, That's exactly what I'll do— sometime.

It wasn't Johnny Rayburn that I was interested in, it wasn't even the money—because if this was to be the last raid it didn't make any difference what happened to the ledger. I was afraid—I admitted that. But the queer thing about it was that it wasn't the prospect of getting killed that scared me, it was the business of living and being alone.

It was crazy, and I guess there's no good way to explain it, but I didn't have the feeling when the kid was around.

I guess he was what they call a symbol. A symbol of other times. Better times.

The kid was still talking, rambling on. Now that he had got started, he didn't seem to know how to stop.

“I wouldn't expect anybody else to knew how I feel about that girl of mine,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn't think she was so much to look at, but she's prettier than a new colt to me. Yes, sir, I'm going to go back there someday. We're going to stake out a little place down on the Rio Grande that I know about and raise some beef cattle and some grain.” He laughed. “And some kids too, I guess.”

“What you do is your own goddamned business,” I said, “except just keep it to yourself. I don't want to hear about it.”

The bitterness in my voice surprised me almost as much as it did the kid. I didn't know why I had said it and I didn't know how to explain it. I just knew that I didn't want to hear about his girl, or his plans, or anything else.

I left him sitting there with a startled, bewildered look in his eyes. As I turned I almost ran into Bama, who was standing behind me.

“Well, what do you want?”

Bama ran a hand over that bearded, weak-looking chin of his. “It looks like the last of your men are in,” he said. “Kreyler came in just a while ago. The scouts just got in, too.” He rummaged in his shirt pocket and took out a section of the map that he had drawn. He put his pencil on the throat of a funnel-shaped canyon. “Here is where the train ought to be around noon tomorrow, according to the scouts. It'll be an all-night ride, and then some, if we get there in time.”

“We'll get there.”

“Look at this,” he said, holding his tally book in front of me. “Twenty men is all we've got, and they're already beginning to lose their guts for this thing. According to the scouts, the smugglers have around thirty outriders, most of them Indians.”

I looked up and the sun was almost gone, and long, cool shadows were reaching into the canyon, and pretty soon it would be dark. I said, “Out of these twenty men of mine, is mere anybody we can trust if the going gets tough?”

Bama thought about it. “There's maybe four or five that ought to string along.”

“All right, this is what we'll do. When we ride out of here you'll stay with Kreyler in the van of things, and you'd better keep a couple of those men with you. Have the others somewhere in the middle of the column when we hit the mountain trails, and tell them to report to me it anybody starts acting up. I'll be back in the drag with the kid.”

We didn't move out until Bama went through the motions of contacting the boys he thought-would stick; then finally he gave me the sign and we began to round up our horses.

It was dark by the time we rode out of the canyon, traveling in a column of twos and looking like the ragged, whipped-out remnants of some defeated army. After a while a pale moon came out, looking aloof and cold as only a mountain moon can look, and I began to feel the uneasiness of the men.

Maybe an hour went by, and then we reached a wide place in the trail where one of the men had dropped out to tighten his girth. “Cameron.”

I got a look at his face in the moonlight and recognized him as one of the men that Bama had singled out to be trusted. I motioned to the kid to pull up beside me and I said, “Yes?”

He looked all around as the column wound on down a rocky grade, and he lowered his voice.

“In about an hour,” he said, “we're goin' to hit a flat stretch of country at the bottom of this grade. There's talk up ahead, among the men.”

“What kind of talk?”

“They're goin' to make a break for it. They haven't got the guts for a raid like this, I guess. They plan to leave you sittin' high and dry.”

For a minute I just sat there. “Who's behind this talk? Kreyler?”

“Kreyler's in no condition to do anything. It's all he can do to stay on his horse.” He pondered for a minute. “Maybe he's behind it, at that. I guess he is. But it's Bucky Fay that's doin' the talkin', gettin' the men stirred-up.”

I guessed that Bucky Fay was one of the men I had inherited from Basset, but I didn't know him. Not by name, anyway. I figured it was about time we got acquainted.

I said, “I don't think they've got the guts to make a break for it, but I'll ride up just to make sure. I'll see that you get taken care of when we make the cut on the silver.”

He grinned. That's what he had been waiting for. He was about as dependable as a cardboard dam in a flash flood. But maybe the silver would hold him as long as I needed him.

I brushed my black horse with the rowels of my spurs and we spurted toward the head of the column. We threaded in and out between riders along the narrow trail, and it didn't take long to see that something was going on. I rode up behind one man and heard him saying:

“By God, it's suicide. Nobody but a damn fool would try to attack smugglers in Funnel Canyon. Personally, I never took myself to be that kind of fool. How about the rest of you boys?”

By that time I was riding alongside him, and I said, “Are you Bucky Fay?”

His voice shut off suddenly, like the squawk of a chicken on a chopping block. I had seen him in the saloon and his face was familiar, even if his name wasn't. He was one of Kreyler's buddies, all right, just like I figured—one of those tight, nervous, flint-faced little bastards that I never liked anyway, and that was going to make my job that much easier.

We were on the moon side of the mountain and everything was light enough to see what was going on. The column limped along like a dollar watch with a busted spring, then suddenly it stopped. Everybody was looking, and that was the way I wanted it.

“Bucky Fay?” I said again, and I found that it was getting harder to keep my anger shoved down where it ought to be.

He got over his first shock of seeing me there beside him. He started to sneer—it was just the beginning of a downward twitch around his puckered little mouth, and I guess he thought he had me just where he wanted me. His eyes shifted from one side to the other and he saw that most of the men were on his side and that gave him the confidence he needed.

He started to say something—maybe it was to answer my question, or maybe it was just to hold my attention while somebody else tried to put a bullet in me. It doesn't make any difference now, because he never got it said.

There's only one way to handle things like that. I would have shot him, maybe, if it had been another time, another place, but now I didn't want to rouse half of Arizona by burning a cartridge uselessly. I had him on my near side and my pistol was in my lap for a saddle draw. I leaned over slightly, my pistol jumped in my hand, and I slammed the heavy barrel across his head.

It made a sound like dropping an overripe pumpkin on a flat rock, and his eyes popped out as if they had been punched from behind with a pool cue. I didn't know if I had killed him and I didn't particularly care. I just knew that when he fell out of the saddle he was going to lie there for a long time and he wasn't going to bother me or anybody else.

It all happened pretty fast, without the bickering back and forth that usually goes before a fight. I raised up in the saddle so that I could see every startled, gutless face in the column, and I knew the less said about it, the better. Let them think about it. By the time they got through thinking about it the raid would be over.

I noticed Kreyler up near the front and he looked pretty sick about the whole thing. I couldn't tell what hurt him the most, his sore groin or seeing his plans blow up in his face. I motioned down the line for Bama to get things started again.

“Forward ho-o-o!” Bama called, as if he were still Lieutenant Miles Stanford Bonridge of the Army of Tennessee.

There wasn't any trouble when we hit the flats at the bottom of the grade. We crawled on up into the mountains and around daybreak the column halted again and Bama lifted his arm.

“All right, kid,” I said, “let's have a look.”

“This is it,” Bama said when we reached the point, and he made a vague gesture toward the rocky lowlands below us. At first I didn't believe him, because there was no canyon there at all; it was just a rocky tableland between two small mountain ranges a mile or so apart. Bama must have seen the dismay on my face, and he didn't look very happy about it himself.

I said, “By God, this is a hell of a place to try to ambush somebody.”

He grinned, but it looked a little sickly to me. “That's what the men have been thinking all along. Do you want to go through with it?”

“We've got to go through with it.”

But I didn't like it. We'd have to go right down and meet the smugglers on their own battleground, and I didn't like to think what the odds would be on getting out alive.

“Isn't there a better place than this?” I asked. “That map of yours showed a neck on this canyon.”

Bama wiped his face. “What looks to be a neck on paper can cover a lot of land on actual ground.” He was on the verge of telling me, “I told you so,” but he didn't. He just sat there and let me sweat.

“Well, we can't sit here and let the men lose what few guts they've got left.” I motioned for the column to start moving and we began slipping and sliding down the side of the mountain.

When we hit bottom it didn't look much better, but at least there were a few rocks and bushes that the men could hide behind.

“Maybe you ought to wait and hit them tonight,” Johnny Rayburn said, and it seemed to me that it was the first time he had opened his mouth in an hour or more.

“By night they'll be out of the mountains and into the desert,” Bama said. “We couldn't get within a mile of them.”

I rode out a hundred yards or so to get the lay of the land, and after I had done that I decided that the situation wasn't hopeless. I motioned for the men to come after me and we rode right out to the middle of the rugged mountain valley.

“It stands to reason,” I said as Bama pulled up alongside. “That they'll come right down the middle of this draw, fanning their outriders a hundred yards or so on both sides. Anyway, we've got to count on that and make our lines.” I motioned for Kreyler to come up, and his face was gray with sickness and hate, and maybe fear.

“Here's where we make our stand,” I said. “When the smugglers come down the middle we'll hit them from both sides from behind rocks and bushes or whatever you can find to get behind. We'll have to depend on surprise. Come to think of it, maybe this isn't as bad as it looks, because they're not going to be expecting an attack in a place like this. Anyway, Kreyler, you take half the men and I'll take the others, and we'll leave about four hundred yards of open space between our lines. When you began to lose your guts, just think of that silver.”

He didn't say a word, but he cut me wide open with a look that was barbed with hate.

“All right,” I said, “get your men and move out.”

There was one thing I almost forgot—the horses. I called to Johnny Rayburn and my dependable man, whose name was Lawson, and got them to round up the horses and take them up to the high ground until the fracas was over. Anyway, that would keep the kid out of the line of fire and away from Kreyler.

It took about a half hour to get everything set, scattering the men out in a wavery line and piling brush in front of them and on top of them to make them as inconspicuous as possible. On the other side of the flat I saw that Kreyler was doing the same thing, and finally everything was set. All we needed now was the smugglers.

By the time the sun was well on its way to looking like a blast furnace, and Bama was lying belly down behind a rock, mopping his face nervously with his neckerchief.

“Pull your guts together,” I said, and dropped, down beside him. “Hell, we should have picked places like this all along. These narrow canyons practically advertise an ambush, but they sure won't expect anything in a place like this.”

But Bama wasn't happy. His lips were dry and cracked and his eyes had a desperate look to them. “I wish you'd told me you were going to drive the horses off,” he said.

“If it's the bottle you're worried about, you can get it when this business is over.”

He licked his lips. “I'm not sure that it will do me any good then.”

Up until now I had been too busy keeping the men under control to find time to be scared. But now there wasn't anything to do but wait and think about it, and I began to get some of that uneasiness that I had felt on all sides of me.

“Was that smart,” Bama said, “giving Kreyler half the men? Do you think they'll fight?”

“They'll fight,” I said. “They'd better.”

Bama sighed and I knew he was still wishing for his bottle. I jacked a cartridge into the chamber of my rifle and said, “I don't like this any more than you do, but we've got to have that silver.”

“Sure,” Bama said.

“What's the matter with you? Don't you want to get away from this? Don't you want the safety and security that silver can buy?”

“The things I want can't be bought,” he said.

I lay there for a long while looking over my rifle, across the field of fire. He was right, of course. Bama was almost always right, and that's what made me so mad at times.

Bama looked up at the sun and said, “It won't be long now.”

As if that had been a signal, we began to hear the metallic sounds of cartridges being jacked into rifles. They would fight, I thought grimly. Maybe they wouldn't like it, and maybe their guts were crawling like a bagful of snakes, but goddamn them, they would fight because they were more afraid of me than they were of the smugglers.

I looked up and Bama was staring at me in that disconcerting way of his, as if he had been reading my thoughts. But he didn't say anything. He lay down again, motionless, looking over his rifle, and after a moment he began singing softly:

“The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the grass again...”

It was an old war song, sugary and sentimental as most of those songs were. I had heard the long, awkward boys of Texas singing it as they marched the dusty roads with Hood to fight in strange and foreign lands for the Confederacy. I had heard it again as they came straggling back after Appomattox, what was left of them.

“We loved each other then, Lorena,

More than we ever dared to tell;

And what we might have been, Lorena,

Had but our lovings prospered well....”

I don't know, maybe it was the song that started me thinking about Texas again. “And what we might have been, Lorena.” It was so goddamned cloying and sickeningly sentimental that it was almost enough to make a man throw up—and still, that just about summed it up....

Sometimes, after I had finished with my ranchwork, I used to ride over to Laurin's place, which was only about two miles from our own Panhandle ranch house. And more than likely I would use the excuse of looking for strays, because her brother thought I was wild, as he called it, and never liked for me to be hanging around. But he couldn't keep me from seeing her. We were both pretty young then and we didn't do much except talk a little, but we understood from the first the way it was. I remember on my seventeenth birthday Pa had given me four head of beef cattle and I couldn't wait to tell her about it. “This is just the start,” I said. “Those four cows will grow into one of the biggest ranches in Texas. It'll be our ranch.”

I guess we were pretty happy then.

It wasn't my fault that there was a war. It wasn't my fault that the carpetbaggers and bluebellies moved into Texas looking for trouble. I hadn't been the only hothead who decided that it was better to live a life of my own outside the law than to live within the law and have a bluecoat's boot heel on my neck.

But I hadn't known that it was going to work out like this. In the back of my mind I had always planned on going back and having that ranch and family just the way we had planned. But I never would. It was too late.

“It matters little now, Lorena,

The past is in the eternal past....”

“Will you stop that goddamn noise!” I said, and my voice was shriller, louder than I had intended.

Then we all began to hear the bright, faraway little sounds of bells, and I heard somebody say, “Get ready, here they come,” and the word was passed all along the line. I looked around and everything seemed to be all right. All the men were down, covered up with brush. Nothing looked out of place.

The bell sounds became mingled with the clatter of hoofs on the rocky ground, and then I could see them coming.

“By God, it's just like I figured. Right down the middle.”

Bama didn't say anything. He looked frozen, and he was gripping his rifle hard enough to put dents in it. The smugglers' advance guard was getting close now, three Mexicans riding in line with about twenty yards between them. Behind them came a fat old geezer on a dappled horse, all decked out in a white sombrero and a scarlet sash and silver bangles. He was almost as fat as Basset, but he was mean and tough and he carried two six-guns and a knife and he had a scar from the top of his left ear to the point of his chin to prove it. Flanking him there were a couple of saddleless riders with dirty rags around their heads, and I guessed they were the Indians who were scaring everybody to death.

They didn't look so tough to me. They rode heavily, slouched on their ponies, in the way of all Indians. Most of them wore dirty hickory shirts that they had picked up somewhere, and a great variety of pants, most of which were torn off or cut off just below the knee. There were a great many knives and hatchets and a few old cap-and-ball pistols that must have been relics of the Mexican War.

After the advance guard, and the head smuggler and his personal bodyguard, there came the train of little gray mules and the outriders. It was pretty much my first raid all over again, except for the Indians. There was nothing much we could do now except lie there and hope that they didn't see us until we had the whole train in our field of fire.

After they all came into line I saw that the picture wasn't as bad as the scouts had painted it. After some fast counting I saw that there were only twenty Indians and four Mexicans, including the head man, so they only had us outnumbered twenty-four to twenty. Which wasn't bad, considering that we had our twenty in ambush.

I could feel Bama tighten up as the outriders began to come by. They were damn near close enough to shake hands with.

I let about half the train go by and said, “Suck your guts in and pick out a target.” Then I got an Indian's head in the V of my rear sight. I waited an instant while the knob of my front sight settled on his ear. I should have squeezed the trigger. Bama was waiting for it, white-faced, but I couldn't seem to make my finger move.

This was a hell of a time to think about ethics, but I simply couldn't kill a man like that, without giving him a chance in the world to fight back. I lowered my rifle. Before I realized what I was doing I was standing up and yelling—and that, I guess was when hell moved to Arizona.