A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter Nine

IT DIDN'T TAKE long to see why the men held such a deadly respect for the Indian's fighting ability. There was no period of surprise when I stood up and yelled, there was no time wasted in shock, and they didn't wonder what to do. They just did it. One instant they were riding in deep lethargy under the broiling sun, and the next instant they were screaming insanely and firing point-blank down our throats.

I had never seen anything like it. I fell back and lost sight of my target completely, and the next thing I knew, an Indian was trying to split my skull with a hand ax. I must have shot him, but I can't be sure about anything that happened then. I had dropped my rifle somewhere and was clawing for my pistols, and across the flats I could hear the sharp volley of fire as Kreyler's men let go with their first rounds.

Vaguely, I saw the fat old smuggler slide from his horse and come charging at us with both pistols blazing. He went down holding his gut. The Mexicans milled senselessly, wondering what had hit them, but the Indians were chopping us to pieces. And the crazy thing about it was that you could shoot them but they would keep coming and slash your throat and laugh at you before they died. It was a nightmare of screams and smoke, and men wandering aimlessly with bullet holes in them like lost souls in limbo.

It couldn't have lasted long, but time like that isn't measured by the ticks of a clock. A lifetime can be lived by the time a bullet travels twenty paces. In the instant it takes a hammer to fall and a cartridge to explode you can grow to be an old man. I felt like an old man right then. My hands shook. I wasn't certain of anything. I kept falling back and more Indians went down in front of my guns. Then my pistols were empty and I scooped one out of a dead man's hand and kept on firing. Then I heard Bama yelling, and I looked around and saw him kneeling behind one of those little gray mules, his rifle to his shoulder.

Somehow I got over to him and he gave me covering fire while I punched out-my empties and reloaded. We seemed to be the center of attention now as four or five Indians spotted us and rushed us. We beat them off that time. I dropped one and Bama got one with his rifle, and they turned and got behind rocks to think up something better. That was when I began to notice that we were all alone out there.

I didn't see any of the men anywhere. It was just me and Bama and maybe a half-dozen Indians. And I had a feeling that pretty soon it would be just the Indians.

“My God,” I said, “are all the others dead?”

Bama laughed. It wasn't a pretty sound. He pointed behind us, and the men were running—what was left of them. They were running for the high ground and the Indians had decided to let them go and concentrate on us.

For a long moment I cursed. I used all the vilest words I'd ever heard, and they weren't half enough to say what I wanted to say. And then our friends the Indians were coming again. This time they had spread out and were coming at us from three sides, and they must have picked up some of our rifles because their shooting was getting better all the time.

They had changed their tactics too. They had learned that charging us wasn't the answer, so they were creeping up on us from behind rocks and bushes, and even dead animals and men. They seemed to flit across the ground like cloud shadows in front of a racing wind, and they were gone before you realized they were there.

I took some shots just to keep my nerve up, to feel the pistols in my hands, but I wasn't doing any good. I looked back at the high ground just in time to see Kreyler and his men clawing their way up the steep embankment.

“The bastards! The goddamn no-good bastards!”

Bama laughed that wild laugh again.

“Shut up, goddamn you! Shut up and let me think!”

The wildness went out of Bama's face and he just looked tired. Very sober and very tired, and he looked as if he didn't give a damn what happened.

“I'll get them,” I said tightly. “If it's the last thing I do, I'll kill every last one of them.”

And Bama said flatly, “Yes, I guess you would, Tall Cameron.”

“Iwill!”

Somehow I would get out of this mess. I didn't know how yet, but I would, and when I did...

“Watch it!” Bama said.

I caught just a glimpse of an Indian as he shuttled from one rock to another. I burned a cartridge just because I wanted to shoot at something, not because I thought I would hit anything. I started reloading again, filling the cylinders all the way around, six cartridges to a pistol. I finished one gun and got three in the other one and that finished my belt.

That was when the sun stopped giving off heat. That was when cold sweat started popping out on my neck and my insides felt as if it had been washed with ice water. Bama's .36-caliber ammunition wouldn't fit my pistols, and anyway, he was out too.

“How many rounds have you got for that rifle?”

He checked the magazine and there were two.

“Well, that gives us eleven shots between us. Have you got any ideas?”

“I guess you could pray, if you go in for that sort of thing.”

That seemed to end the conversation. Things didn't look too bright, but they could be a lot worse. For one thing, Bama was getting his guts back—I could tell by the way he talked—and guts was just the thing that might save us. My brain still burned when I thought of Kreyler and his boys running out on us, but I'd have to wait a while to take care of that. The Indians moved in a little more.

“How many do you make out there?” I said.

“Six, seven, eight, maybe more.”

He was a big help. But he still had his guts, and a rifle and two cartridges, and that was something. “When they get close enough, they'll have to rush us,” I said. “I guess that will tell the story.”

“I guess so,” Bama said. He didn't even sound interested. He scrunched down behind the little mule and began fumbling at his pockets. After a while I got my own makings out and gave them to him. It seemed that the whole world held its breath while he built a cigarette and held a match to it, and I caught myself jumping every time the wind rattled a piece of dry grass. Take it easy, I told myself. Just take it easy and let them come. There won't be anything to it then; all you have to do is shoot.

I took my guns out and laid them on the mule where they would be handy and then I took the tobacco and corn-shuck papers and built a cigarette for myself. It was so quiet that I began to wonder if the Indians were really out there. I looked out at the battlefield and for the first time I saw it as it actually was. The most pitiful things there were the little mules with the bells around their necks. The men didn't seem to mean much, dead or alive—but those mules, they hadn't asked for any of this.

As far as I could see, they were all dead. The ones that hadn't been shot for breastworks had run into stray bullets. When I thought back on it, it seemed a wonder that anything was still alive. The battle seemed long ago. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't over yet.

“Watch it!” Bama hissed.

And about that time four Indians jumped up and started at us in a crazy-legged gait, as silent as ghosts. It didn't seem right that they didn't make any noise. They ought to yell, I kept thinking, but they didn't. One of them had a rifle and he fired once, and that snapped me out of it. The other three could have had guns if they had wanted them—there were plenty of them scattered around—but they seemed to favor knives and hatchets. They were almost on top of us before I got my guns to working. I heard my pistols roaring, and after a moment I heard the empty click of my off-side gun, so I dropped that one.

I stopped the one with the rifle and two of the others. I thought Bama had the last one, but the bullet went in and out without even slowing him down. He came charging over the mule, a bloody mess and a scream. Then Bama swung his rifle and the stock made a sickening, mushy sound as it smashed into the Indian's skull.

I thought we would be swarmed then, but the others decided to sit this hand out. When I turned around Bama was wiping the blood off his rifle and making a higher breastwork by putting the Indian on top of the mule.

I had three rounds left for my right-hand pistol, and Bama had one for his rifle. I wondered how many Indians were still out there. There was no way of telling. They seemed to come out of the ground like weeds.

Bama was puffing and blowing after his skirmish. He hunched down in an awkward, one-sided position, his face as white as a frog's belly, and that was when I noticed that he had been hit.

It was his leg, about halfway between the knee and the hipbone. The Indian rifleman, I guessed, must have done it with that single shot that he let go with.

“Well,” Bama said between puffs, “I guess this about frays it out, Tall Cameron. You'd better make a run for it. There can't be many more of them left. I've still got a bullet. I can stop one of them.”

“Shut up and give mea knife.”

He didn't have a knife, but the Indian on top of the mule had one, and I used it to slit Bama's trousers up to the hip. There was a lot of blood and it was coming out in spasmodic little spurts, and I figured that an artery or something had been hit. But still it wasn't too bad, everything considered. There was a clean hole where the bullet had gone in and come out. There didn't seem to be any bones broken.

I said, “Just keep your eyes open and watch our friends out there.” Then I hacked off the leg of his trousers, wound it up, and tied it loosely above the bullet hole. I got my empty pistol between the leg and the bandage for some leverage, and began to twist. After a minute the spurting stopped.

I took his rifle and put it on top of the mule where I could get to it.

“Just take it easy for a few minutes and we'll be out of here.”

But Bama didn't believe it, and I guess I didn't either. As Bama had said, it began to look as if our string had about frayed out. I could see them moving around out there again—or rather, I could feel them. They were getting closer all the time, but they never showed enough of themselves to shoot at. It was very quiet.

And then it wasn't quiet any longer because they were coming after us.

Bama just sat there looking at them. They split the afternoon wide open with their yelling and shooting—six of them, and I remember thinking that it might as well be six hundred.

They came at us from three sides and it seemed to take them a year to reach us. I had the impulse to shoot as fast as I could at anything that moved, but I choked it down and took my time. I made the one cartridge in Bama's rifle good, but it didn't even slow them down. Bama seemed to have completely disconnected himself from the whole business. He sat there smiling that half-smile of his, as if a hole had suddenly opened up for him and he could look right through that impenetrable barrier that separates the living from the dead. I don't know what he saw there on the other side, but whatever it was, he had reconciled himself to it, and he was waiting for it with no bitterness and no regret.

But not me. I hadn't gone to all this trouble only to be cut down by a few savages. All I had to do was hold onto my guts. I raised my pistol and waited until it seemed that I had the muzzle in an Indian's mouth. Then I pulled the trigger. He was the fast one of the bunch. He was the eager one with a whetted taste for blood, and I could almost smell his rancid breath in my face as the pistol jerked in my hand.

I could count him out. He was traveling the road to hell on a fast horse, and now I could turn my attention on the others and try to figure out a way to make two bullets do the job of one. That was what I was thinking, and the next thing I knew he was hacking at my skull with a hand ax.

I don't know how he did it. I'd never seen a man take a .44 bullet in the face before, and keep coming after you, still determined to kill you. We went down in a bloody tangle of arms and legs and my pistol went flying out of my hand. Something hit the side of my head then. It felt like a mountain falling on me, but I guess it was just a glancing blow from the Indian's hatchet. A smothering black fog rolled in. It was a cool, comfortable fog where there was no noise and no pain, and the most pleasant thing in the world would be just to lie down and let it wash over me.

But I kept fighting. Reflex, I guess, took over where the brain left off, and I grabbed hold of an arm and held on until the fog drifted off somewhere. We seemed to wrestle for a week, kicking, biting, scratching there on the rocky ground. He was gouging at my eyes and giving me the knee every chance he got, but I still held onto that arm. I seemed to be covered with blood and I couldn't tell if it was coming from me or him, or maybe both of us. I held onto that arm.

When it was over it was over all of a sudden. He went limp and the hatchet dropped out of his hand and that's all there was to it. I shoved him away. I knelt on my hands and knees and tried to gulp all the air in Arizona into my lungs. “Well,” I heard somebody say, “the sonofabitch finally decided to die.” It didn't sound like my voice, but it was, I guess. And then—finally—I remembered the other Indians.

I couldn't move. I squatted there like a poled steer and wondered why I wasn't dead. What had happened to the other Indians that had been in on the charge? It worried me, but I didn't have the strength to do anything about it.

I gulped some more air into my lungs. My stomach was sick and fluttery and the muscles in my legs were as weak as buttermilk. Maybe a minute went by while I got a hold on myself. I was pretty sure that those Indians hadn't decided to knock off work and go home just when they had us where they wanted us. Maybe it was one of those miracles that you hear about but almost never see. Like Daniel and the lions. But I didn't put much stock in it. I hadn't led the right kind of life for that sort of thing.

I had a few more theories, but I discarded them. It was time to take a look.

The first thing I saw was Bama. He was still sitting there behind the mule, holding onto the bandage around his leg. He looked as if he knew the answer, but he wasn't saying anything unless I asked him, and I was still too addled to think up words to put into questions. I stood up, finally, and saw that the Indians had been taken care of. They were scattered around carelessly like dirty laundry in a bunkhouse, and just as lifeless. One of them had reached our mule fortress and had died with a knife in his hand just as he was about to go over the top. His trouble had been two rifle bullets in the chest, spaced almost a foot apart. Not very good shooting. But good enough. By that time I had the answer. Johnny Rayburn was walking across the flat with a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm.

I don't know how he did it, but he must have slipped down from the high ground some way and then crawled for about a quarter of a mile on his belly across the flats. The important thing was that he had done it. While all the others had been running, he had been figuring out a way to save my hide.

I guess I hadn't realized before just how close I had been to dying. The thought of it put a watery feeling in my guts.

“He's going to be a big help to you, isn't he, Tall Cameron?” Bama said dryly.

The words jarred me, because that was exactly what I was thinking as the kid came toward us. With some training, with some of the greenness rubbed off and some experience rubbed in, he would be a big help. He would be somebody I could trust; that was the important thing.

That was when I started changing my plans, putting the kid into them, taking Bama out of them. Bama couldn't help me. Not with that leg. But the kid... That was something else again.

Johnny Rayburn grinned nervously as he came up to where we were. He looked awed by the thing he had just done.

“I thought I told you to stay with the horses,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I figured the horses could take care of themselves. Anyway, I wasn't crazy about staying up there on the bluff with Kreyler's men.” He shifted hands with his rifle. “I didn't do wrong, did I?”

I laughed, not because anything funny had happened, but just because it felt good to have a kid like that on my side. I said, “No, you didn't do anything wrong.”

“I told you once I was a pretty good shot.”

“Not too damn good,” and I nodded at the dead Indian, “when you space them a foot apart.” I knew that Bama was listening. And I didn't give a damn. I said, “But there's nothing wrong with your shooting that can't be fixed. And I'll fix it.”

He couldn't have been more pleased if I had just handed him Texas with a fence around it.

From that moment, I guess, it was just me and Johnny Rayburn against the world. Or rather me and Johnny Rayburn, and a fortune in silver. That reminded me— we had to do something about the silver.

We didn't have any horses, and we sure couldn't carry the stuff on our backs. I looked up at the high ground and saw that Kreyler and some of his boys were still up there. I guess they had time to get their guts in shape, and probably they had just been waiting for me and the Indians to finish each other off so they could come back down and take the silver for themselves. But I had something else planned for them.

I stepped out in the open and cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled for them to come on down. I hadn't forgotten the way they had run out on us, but I could take care of that when the time came. This wasn't the time.

They must have been pretty disappointed to see me come out of it alive, and they must have had a pretty good idea that it wasn't purely an act of brotherly love that prompted me to call them back into the fold. I could see them talking it over. There was some arguing, I guess, but in the end they came down, as I knew they would. The silver was still down there and they couldn't resist the temptation of that easy money.

As they started down the slope, I went over our battlefield and found my rifle and salvaged some .44 cartridges for my pistols. I was ready for them by the time they rode up, and there wasn't much doubt as to who was still boss.

Kreyler looked like a man who had been outvoted. Silver wasn't as important to him as it was to some of the others, but he couldn't very well tell them to go to hell, because he still had ideas of running the business himself someday.

I said, “Well, men, we did it. All we've got to do now is get this silver back to Ocotillo and split it up. Let's get at it.”

That jarred them a little. They had expected a good cussing at the very least, and here I was practically patting them on their backs. But they got over their shock. A yell went up and they went scurrying over the battlefield, cutting open the silver-filled aparejos and stuffing the adobe dollars into saddle pouches and war bags. But Kreyler wasn't fooled. He knew that I had to have them, if I wanted to get that money back to Ocotillo.

But there was nothing much he could do about it. Anyway, all that silver was putting a hungry look in his eyes, and the first thing I knew, he was as busy as any of us. Bama sat quietly through all of it, his face getting whiter and whiter. After a while I had the kid bring the horses down, and I found Bama's bottle and gave it to him.

“Here,” I said, “you'd better have a drink of this.”

He took the bottle and looked at it blankly. He turned it up and drank as if it were the last whisky he would ever see. Then he sloshed a little of it on his wound. But not much.

He sat back and closed his eyes for a minute until the pain let up. “You're not fooling Kreyler,” he said.

“I'm not fooling anybody.”

“You're not going to split that silver, are you, when you get back to Ocotillo?”

I just grinned.

“That's what I thought. I guess there's no use telling you that the men won't stand for it. But they won't. You've pushed them around about as long as they'll take it.”

“Why don't you let me worry about that?”

He hit the bottle again. Loss of blood and shock and whisky were beginning to hit him. His eyes were bleary. His mouth didn't seem big enough to hold his tongue. He took another long drink and let the empty bottle slip out of his hand. “You and the kid,” he said thickly, “ought to make quite a team.”

“We might, at that.”

He looked at me for a while. Then he slid over on his elbow. He must have passed out then, because his arm gave way and he fell on his face.

The tourniquet on his leg came loose and blood began spurting again. I grabbed it and tightened it, and stretched him out as well as I could. I looked up and the kid was standing there beside me.

“Get the horses,” I said, “and bring them over here. Then find one of those Indian hatchets and cut a pair of blackjack poles long enough to make a travois.”

He didn't ask a lot of fool questions. In a few minutes he was back with the horses and poles. The poles weren't nearly long enough, but it was the best he could do in this kind of country. We lashed them to Bama's saddle and laced them with a reata that one of the men had. Then we tied Bama on it.

By the time all that was done, the men were ready to go. The silver had all been gathered up and they were anxious to get home and make the split.

So we rode out of the valley and into the high Huachucas, the thud of hoofs mingled with the heavy jouncing of silver. I didn't look back this time. The death and stink of battle seemed a long way off, and I wanted to keep it that way if I could. The kid rode beside me, his eyes thoughtful, and I could see the question coming long before he got up nerve enough to ask it.

“I was just wondering about something,” he said finally. “Did you really mean it, what you said back there? When you said you'd fix up my shooting?”

We rode on for quite a while before I answered. And in my mind there was the memory of empty days and long nights. Tight-wound days and tighter nerves, when the sound of a snapping twig or the rustle of brush was always a cavalryman, or a marshal, or maybe just a reputation-hunting punk anxious to get a notch in his gun butt. Sounds were always sharper when you were on the run, and alone.

But who could you trust when you had a price on your head?

Well, I guessed I had found somebody at last. So I said, “Don't worry about it, kid. I meant it, all right.”