A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter Ten

IT WAS DARK again when we got to Ocotillo, and the town seemed nice and peaceful and sleepy-looking there at the bottom of the foothills. It seemed a shame to ride in there and get everything all stirred up again. But it had to be done. A few Mexicans came out and watched as we rode into town, and I imagined that their faces had a dull, angry look.

It was a funny thing, but I had never thought of the Mexicans' resenting us and hating us. Well, I thought, they wouldn't be bothered long with me and the kid, and if they got tired of Kreyler and his bunch they could rise up and knock them down. I wondered why they hadn't done it before now.

As we pulled up in front of the livery barn, beside the saloon, the Mexicans sort of melted away in the darkness and I forgot about them. I watched the men while they unsaddled and lugged their saddlebags and war bags back to the rear of the saloon and into the office. After they were all finished we had silver scattered all over the middle of the room and it looked like a hell of a lot of money stacked up there in one big pile. The men were all ganging up in the room to watch the split. Something had to be done about that.

So I said, “It looks like a pretty good haul, doesn't it?” And everybody agreed. I laughed and kicked the saloon door open and yelled for the bartender to set them up.

That broke it up. They all flocked out and ganged up around the bar—all but Kreyler, that is. He stayed in the office with me and the kid, and I had an uneasy feeling that he had picked my brain and knew as much about my plans as I did.

I said, “You might as well get your share of the free drinks.”

But he shook his head. He leaned against the door-jamb, looking careful and crafty, but not very healthy.

“Well, I am,” I said. I looked at the kid and we went into the saloon and left Kreyler in the office. He couldn't carry off much of that silver by himself, if that was what he had in mind.

Everybody had had a round or two by the time we got to the bar, and it looked like a real celebration was on the way. I motioned to the bartender and he slid a bottle down, and I guess it was the bottle that reminded me.

“By God, we forgot Bama!”

I went out the door and the first thing I knew a couple of arms came out of the darkness and grabbed me. Probably I would have killed her and learned who it was later, if she hadn't laughed. But she did laugh and I knew it was Marta.

“Goddamnit, don't you know better than to jump on a man like that?” She was pawing me and kissing me and she seemed as happy as a pup with a bone.

“You glad to see Marta?”

“Sure,” I said, “I guess I'm glad.”

But just the same I shook her off and got my back against the wall and got my gun hand ready. In the back of my mind I was reasoning, that somebody out there in the darkness could have put a bullet in me while a fool girl was hanging around my neck. It was just a passing thought, but I didn't like it.

Marta's laughter lost its bright edge. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter. I just like to be careful.”

“You no trust Marta.”

“I no trust anybody. That's how I got to be as old as I am.”

“You no like Marta.”

I was beginning to get tired of this. “Sure I like you,” I said. “I'm crazy about you. Now, just come along with me. I've got a job for you.”

“What job?”

“Never mind, just come along.”

I took her arm and led her around toward the livery barn, the kid right behind us like a shadow. We found the horse, and Bama was still lashed to the stubby travois poles. He was pretty shaken up but his tourniquet was still in place and the bleeding had stopped. We left him on the travois but untied the poles and lowered him to the ground. The kid felt of his face and forehead while I loosened the tourniquet.

“He's got a fever.”

“Then he's all right. What we've got to do is get him somewhere and keep him warm before the chills begin.” I thought for a minute and began to get an idea. “Kid, do you think you and Marta can get Bama down to her house without advertising it?”

He rubbed his chin. “Well, sure, I guess so. She can take the feet and I can—”

“That's all I want to know. Marta, have you got some friends—friends with strong backs and not too many brains?”

She nodded, frowning.

“Round them up,” I said. “Have them come around to the back of the saloon where the office is. I've got some things I want them to carry down to your place, and I want them to be quiet about it. Tell them it's worth five dollars in silver after the job's over.”

She began to get it then, and so did the kid. Marta's face broke up in a grin. “Marta think you plenty rich!”

“Marta thinks too damn much.”

“You leave Ocotillo, maybe?”

“My plans are my own. Now, pick up that travois before we have a dead man on our hands.”

“You take Marta with you?”

“Good God, yes, I'll take you with me. Anything, just get going.”

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be tied down to a girl like that, but I had to tell her something. And it seemed to satisfy her.

Johnny Rayburn hadn't decided if he was satisfied or not. He was thinking about Bama, I guess, and wondering how we were going to get out of Ocotillo with a wounded man and several hundred pounds of silver. He didn't know it yet,, but Bama wasn't going with us. I hadn't figured out a way yet to take care of the silver. But I would.

Using the travois like a stretcher, they picked it up and marched off into the darkness. I waited a few minutes until I was pretty sure that they were going to make it, and then I went back to the saloon.

Kreyler was standing in the doorway. I was going to walk right past him, but he turned and followed me to the bar. His face was grim as he said: “Wasn't Marta with you out there?”

I had almost forgotten that the Marshal was still crazy about the girl. Well, he could have her as soon as I got out of Ocotillo.

I said, “There wasn't anybody out there. I was just looking after Bama.”

“Didn't the kid go out with you?”

“What the hell is this? If you've got something in your craw, spit it out.”

Suddenly he smiled, and I didn't like that at all. What if he had his boys out there laying for the kid? It was something to worry about, but there wasn't much I could do. Of course, I could have gone running after them, but that would have given the whole thing away. There was still the silver to be taken care of. Not even Johnny Rayburn came ahead of that.

I went back to the office and locked the door and put a chair against it. Then I walked the floor, waiting for something to happen. From the sound of things, the men were getting pretty drunk in the saloon. But there was still Kreyler, goddamn him.

Well, I could still take care of him. When he ran out on me I swore I would kill him. And I might do it yet.

Somewhere in that confusion of thoughts there was a knock at the back door. I opened up and there stood four grinning Mexicans, all teeth and eyes in the darkness. They all started jabbering that spick lingo at me, and I told them to shut up and start moving those bags.

They grunted, surprised at the weight6i the stuff. But I finally got them loaded up and they went staggering off into the darkness. They only got about half of it the first time around, and I waited for what seemed a week for them to come back. What if they got curious as to what was in those bags? You can't trust Mexicans. You can't trust anybody with that much money.

But I guess they weren't the curious kind. They came back finally, puffing and grinning, and I loaded them up again. I went around to the livery barn and got that black horse of mine and a sturdy little bay for the kid, and I headed down the alley toward the Mexican part of town.

I knew that part of town pretty well by now, so I went around the back way and came in between the high adobe walls to the back door of Marta's place. Through the open door I could see the Mexicans puffing and wiping their faces as they stared blankly at the pile of silver on the kitchen floor.

“Mr. Cameron?”

“Are you all right, kid?”

“Sure,” he said, and came out into the little walled-in yard where I was.

“How's Bama?”

“He looks pretty good,” he said. “That girl washed the wound and bandaged it up and gave him some broth. He looks better than he did on that travois.”

“Let's go in and look at him,” I said. “We haven't got much time, though.”

The kid held back as if he weren't any too anxious to go back inside.

“What's the matter?”

“It's the old man,” he said. “Marta's pa. He doesn't like gringos to start with, and he especially doesn't like them coming in and taking his house over.”

We could fix that, I thought. I'd give him a handful of silver and that would shut him up. Anyway, we went in and there was Bama stretched out on the earth bed with a cigarette between his lips. His face had been washed and his leg had a clean bandage. He looked like a new man.

But he hadn't really changed. He spat the cigarette out and drawled, “Welcome to our little sanctuary, Tall Cameron,” and I remembered that long spiel he had made the first time I saw him. “Welcome to Ocotillo, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be badmen; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” At the time I thought he had been joking. But it was no joke. I had seen them and lived with them. I was one of them.

“How's the leg?” I cut in on him.

He closed his eyes. “The leg's all right. It's a hell of a thing, isn't it, to have a body that's seemingly indestructible, when you're dead inside?”

“I guess you're all right. You still talk crazy, which is normal for you, I guess.”

Bama laughed. “How about Kreyler and the boys? Are they going to let you just walk out with their silver?”

“They don't know yet that I've walked out with it. By the time they find out, I mean to be on my way to Mexico.”

Bama had no comment to make on that. He just lay there with his eyes closed. All the time we had been talking there had been a lot of jabbering going on in the other room. I went to the door and saw that it was Marta paying off my baggage boys. They backed out of the house, grinning and bowing, clutching the silver in their hands.

“Where are they going?” I asked.

Marta laughed. “They go cantina.”

That was fine. Tomorrow morning they would wake up with a headache and a bad memory.

I wondered how long it would take Kreyler to discover that I had pulled out with the silver. Not long, probably, but after he did find out he would have to find us to do anything about it. We had an hour, I figured, to take care of the silver and get out of Ocotillo.

They say that money can be a burden, and for a minute it looked as if that was what that silver was going to be to me. We couldn't load our horses down with it. And we couldn't put it on a pack horse and take it with us, because that would slow us down, too. The only thing to do was to go somewhere and have the silver shipped to us.

But now? No freighting company would touch it, even if there had been a freighting company in Ocotillo. We could bury it, maybe,, and come back after it later. But we needed the money now. Anyway, I'd had enough of Ocotillo to last a lifetime.

Then the whole thing exploded pretty and clean in my mind and I knew how we were going to take care of that silver.

I yelled, “Marta!” and she was standing right at my elbow. “Look,” I said, “do you still want to go with me?”

Her head bobbed. There was nothing she would like better—especially since I had come into a fortune of silver. Marta's old man had been quiet through the whole thing until now. He had been sitting at a rough plank table holding his head in his hands. Every once in a while he would fumble at some wooden beads around his neck and mumble a prayer, and from the look of hate in his eyes I figured he was praying for lightning, to strike us all. Now his head jerked up and he glared at me. He didn't understand a word of what I had said, but somehow he knew.

“This is what we're going to do,” I said. And I was talking to the old man as much as to Marta. “We've got to get out of Ocotillo and we've got to leave the silver here. The old man's got some burros, hasn't he?” She nodded, puzzled.

“All right, we'll go somewhere—” And then I remembered a place on that map that Bama had drawn for me. “We'll go to Three Mile Cave down near the border. Do you know where that is?” She knew. “We'll go there and wait two days, and in the meantime Papacito can load the silver and bring it to us. He can cover it with wood or something to fool anybody who may get curious. I don't care how he does it, just so he does it.”

She was beginning to get it now. Her eyes lit up, and I guess she was seeing herself as the belle of Sonora, dressed in silks and satins and cutting quite a figure. The real reason I wanted her along never occurred to her.

But it did to the old man. He jumped up from the table and began to jabber in that spick language, and I could see that he was telling Marta that he wasn't going to do it. But Marta was still seeing herself with all the things that silver could buy. That was one picture that she liked, and she wasn't going to have it ruined, Papacito or no Papacito. Before I knew it, the whole thing got out of control. Marta's eyes spat fire and they stood there in the middle of the room yelling at each other.

I had to break it up myself. I stepped in and shoved Marta against the wall. The old man yelled louder than ever, so I shoved him down in his chair and whipped my hand back and forth across his mouth, crack, crack, like a mule skinner two days behind schedule and laying on the leather.

That quieted things down for a minute. Marta stood against the wall, her eyes still flashing. She hadn't liked the way I shoved the old man around, and I hadn't enjoyed it much myself. But sooner or later somebody was going to have to step in and declare himself boss. So that was what I did.

I got hold of Marta's arm and quieted her down. “I'm sorry,” I said. “But we can't stand here yelling at each other. We haven't got time for it. For all I know, Kreyler and his boys may be right outside the door getting ready to shoot hell out of everything.”

I said, “Has the old man got it straight what he's to do with the silver? We pull out of here tonight and head for Three Mile Cave. Tomorrow he loads the silver on his burros and meets us at the cave the next day. Tell him again.”

She shrugged and told him again, and the old man didn't like it any better this time than he had the first.

“We'd better do something to impress it on his mind,” I said. “Tell him we're taking you as hostage. If he doesn't show up with the silver he'll never see you again.”

She wasn't so sure that she liked that, but she understood that it was the only way of being sure of that silver. So she told him.

The old man stared at me for a long while with those hate-filled eyes, and then he started breaking up in little pieces. He dropped his head on the table and his shoulders began shaking. The silver would arrive on time.

But in the meantime we couldn't just leave it piled up in the middle of the room. I walked around the house, but there wasn't any place there to hide it. I went out in the yard and kicked around for a few minutes, waking up a hound dog and a few chickens. The chickens gave me an idea.

“Bring the stuff out here,” I called. “Johnny, give Marta a hand.”

I had the chickens scattered and squawking all over the place by the time they came out with the first load, but I also had a couple of empty chicken coops, which were just what we needed. We piled the silver in the back of the coops and shooed the chickens back in.

That about nailed things down. All we had to do now was to get out of Ocotillo, and we couldn't do it too fast to suit me. We went back in the house and I said, “Well, Bama, I guess this is good-by.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Good-by to Ocotillo,” he said lazily. “I've been saying that ever since I got her, but I never left the place. Maybe I never will now.”

“Sure you will,” I said. “I'll have the old man give you some silver. All you can carry. When your leg gets better you can pull out of here. Maybe we'll meet up in Mexico sometime. You can't tell who you'll run into down there, they tell me.”

The kid came into the room just as I was finishing my speech. I turned and said. “We've got to get a horse for Marta. I'll have to see if I can get back to the livery barn—if Kreyler's men haven't already missed us and started tearing things up.”

“You mean two horses, don't you, Mr. Cameron?” the kid said. “Bama hasn't got a way to travel.”

“Bama's not going,” I said.

I don't think he even heard me, or if he did, he didn't believe me. “He sure can't stay here,” he went on. “He would be the only one left who knew about the ledger, and you know what Kreyler would do to him about that.”

“Kreyler can have the ledger,” I said. “It doesn't make any difference now.”

But he still couldn't believe that I was going to leave Bama behind. Bama was my friend. Bama was a man you could put your trust in. You didn't go off and leave friends to wait for what was almost certain death.

“Look,” I said. “We've got a long ride ahead of us and it's no kind of trip for a man with a hole in his leg.” I could have gone on arguing, trying to justify it, but what good would it do? It was a hard world, and sooner or later the kid had to learn that.

He began to get a stubborn look. He wanted to argue. Bama was watching us in a disinterested sort of way, as though he thought it might be kind of interesting to see how it-came out. But not too interesting.

Nothing at all happened, the way things worked out. Outside, I heard one of the horses stamp nervously. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary. But just the same, it gave me a funny feeling. Uneasiness started walking up my back with cold feet, so I went to the door and looked out.

Things were pitch-dark out there and I couldn't see a thing. But that feeling was still with me. I stepped outside, brushing my palms against the butts of my pistols, just to make sure that I had them.

That wasn't enough. I should have pulled them and started shooting.