A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter One

I SCOUTED THE TOWN for two full days before going into it. There hadn't been any sign of cavalry, and I figured the law wouldn't be much because nobody cared what happened to a few Mexicans. There it stood near the foothills of the Huachucas, a few shabby adobe huts and one or two frame buildings broiling in the Arizona sun. But to me it looked like Abilene, Dodge, and Ellsworth all rolled into one.

It had been a long trail from Texas, and my horse was sore-footed and needed rest and a bellyful of grain. I was beginning to grow a fuzzy beard around my chin and upper lip, and I had a second hide of trail dust that was beginning to crawl with the hundred different kinds of lice that you pick up in the desert. I was ready to take my chances on somebody recognizing me, just so I could get a bath and a shave and maybe a change of clothes.

So that was how I came to ride into this little place of Ocotillo, on that big black horse that used to belong to my pal Pappy Garret. I had Pappy's rifle in the saddle boot and Pappy's guns tied down on my thighs. But that was all right. Pappy didn't have any use for them. The last time I saw him had been on a lonely hilltop in Texas. He had died the way most men like that die sooner or later, I guess, with a lawman's bullet in his guts.

It was around sundown when we hit this place of Ocotillo, and it turned out that it was on the fiesta of San Juan's Day. I didn't know that at the time, but it was clear that they were having a celebration of some kind. The men were all in various stages of drunkenness, some of them singing and pounding on heavy guitars. Some of the young bucks were dancing with their girls in the dusty street or in the cantinas. A fat old priest was grinning at everybody, and the kids were crying and shouting and singing and rattling brightly painted gourds. It was fiesta, all right. It was like riding out of death into life.

I pulled my horse up at a watering trough and let him drink while the commotion went on all around us. Three girls in bright dresses danced around us, giggling. The big black lifted his nose out of the trough and spewed water all over them and they ran down the street screaming and laughing. Everybody seemed to be having a hell of a time.

Another girl came up and slapped the black's neck, looking at me.

“Hello, gringo!” she said.

“Hello, yourself.”

“You come to fiesta, eh?” she said. Then she laughed and slapped the black again.

“Is that what it is, fiesta?”

“Sure, it's fiesta. San Juan's Day.” She laughed again. “Where you come from, gringo? Long way, maybe. You plenty dirty.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Can I find anybody sober enough to give me a shave and fix a bath?”

“Sure, gringo,” she grinned. “You come with me.”

I had been looking around, not paying much attention to the girl. But now I looked at her. She was young, about eighteen or nineteen, but she wasn't any kid. Her dark eyes were full of hell, and when she flashed her white teeth in a grin you got the idea that she would like to sink them into your throat. She wore the usual loud skirt and fancy blouse with a lot of needlework on it that Mexicans like to deck themselves out in on their holidays.

“Look!” she yelled. Then she started jumping up and down and laughing like a kid.

Somebody had turned an old mossy-horn loose in the street and everybody was scattering and screaming as if a stampede was bearing down on them. The old range cow shook its head, bewildered; then some kids came up and began prodding it down the street. The yelling and screaming kept up until the cow disappeared down at the other end. That seemed to be a signal for everybody to have another drink, so all the menfolks started crowding into the cantinas.

“Does that end the fiesta?” I asked.

“Just beginning,” she said. “At night they go to church and burn candles and pray to San Juan that their souls may be saved.” She laughed again. “Then they drink some more. Tomorrow they go back to the fields and work until next San Juan's Day.”

“How about that bath and shave?” I said.

“Sure, gringo. Come with me.”

I left my horse at the hitching rack, but I took the rifle out of the saddle boot. The girl led me between two adobe huts, then through a gate in a high adobe wall. The wall completely surrounded a little plot at the back of the hut. A dog slept and some chickens scratched under a blackjack tree.

“This is a hell of a place for a barbershop,” I said.

“No barber,” the girl grinned. “I shave.” She cut the air with her hand, as if slicing someone's throat with a razor.

“No, thanks,” I said.

She laughed. “No worry, gringo. I fix.”

She took my arm and led me into the house. The thick adobe walls made the room cool, and there was a pleasant smell of wine and garlic. It was like walking into another world. There was nothing there to remind me of the fiesta, or of the lonesome desert, or Pappy Garret. In this house I could even forget myself. I felt a little ridiculous wearing two pistols and carrying a rifle.

“Whose house is this?” I said.

She stabbed herself with a finger. “My house.” Then she yelled,“Papacito!” When she got no answer, she shrugged. “Come with me.”

The house had only two rooms. The first room had a fireplace and a charcoal brazier for cooking and a plank table and three leather-bottom chairs. In one corner there were some blankets rolled up, and I figured that was where Papacito slept when he was home. The other room had a mound of clay shaped up against one wall with some blankets on it, and that was the bed. A rough plank wardrobe and another leather-bottom chair completed the furniture.

“Wait here,” the girl said.

She went out and I heard her shaking up the coals in the fireplace, and pretty soon she came back lugging a big wooden tub. “For bath,” she said. On the next trip she brought a razor and a small piece of yellow lye soap. “For shave.”

I grinned. “I can't complain about the service.”

“You wait,” she said.

I was too tired to try to understand why she was going to so much trouble. Maybe that's the way Mexicans were. Maybe they liked to wait on the gringos. I was beginning to feel easy and comfortable for the first time since I had left Texas. I pulled off my boots, sat in the chair, and put my feet on the clay bed. I was beginning to like Arizona just fine.

“Say,” I called, “have you got anything to drink?”

She came in with a crock jug and handed it to me. “Wine,” she said.

I swigged from the neck and the stuff was sweet and warm as it hit my stomach. “Thanks,” I said. Then I had another go at the jug, and that was enough. I never took more than two drinks of anything.

That was partly Pappy Garret's teaching, but mostly it came from seeing foothills filled with gunmen who could shoot like forked lightning when they were sober, but when they forgot to set the bottle down they were just another notch in some ambitious punk's gun butt.

The girl came in with a crock bowl of hot water. I got up and she put the water on the chair and a broken mirror on the wardrobe.

“Bath before long,” she said, and went back into the other room.

She had a way of knocking out all the words except the most essential ones, but she spoke pretty good English.

I went over to the wardrobe and inspected my face in the mirror. It gave me quite a shock at first, partly because I hadn't seen my face in quite a while, and partly because of the dirt and beard and the sunken places around the cheeks and eyes. It didn't look like my face at all.

It didn't look like the face of a kid who still wasn't quite twenty years old. The eyes had something to do with it, and the tightness around the mouth. I studied those eyes carefully because they reminded me of some other eyes I had seen, but I couldn't place them at first.

They had a quick look about them, even when they weren't moving. They didn't seem to focus completely on anything.

Then I remembered one time when I was just a sprout in Texas. I had been hunting and the dogs had jumped a wolf near the arroyo on our place, and after a long chase they had cornered him in the bend of a dry wash. As I came up to where the dogs were barking I could see the wolf snarling and snapping at them, but all the time those eyes of his were casting around to find a way to get out of there.

And he did get out, finally. He was a big gray lobo, as vicious as they come. He ripped the throat of one of my dogs and blasted his way out and disappeared down the arroyo. But I heard later that another pack of dogs caught him and killed him.

“What's wrong?”

The girl came in with a kettle of hot water and poured it into the tub.

“Nothing,” I said, and began lathering my face.

I started to leave my mustache on, thinking that it might keep people from recognizing me, but when I got the rest of my face shaved my upper lip looked like hell. It was just some scraggly pink fuzz and I couldn't fool anybody with that. The girl poured some cold water in the tub on top of the hot, and filled it about halfway to the top.

“Ready,” she said. “Give me clothes.”

“Nothing doing. I take a bath in private or I don't take one at all.”

“To wash,” she added.

These Mexicans must be crazy, I thought. Why anybody would want to take a saddle tramp in and take care of him I didn't know. But it was all right with me, if that was the way she wanted it.

“All right,” I said. “You get in the other room and I'll throw them through the door.”

She stood with her hands on her hips, grinning. “Gringos!” But she went in the other room and I began to strip off. When I threw the things in the other room she picked them up and went outside.

I must have soaked for an hour or more there in the tub, twisting and turning and scrubbing every inch of myself that I could reach. It was dark outside, and the only light in the house came from the fireplace in the other room.

“Say,” I called, “are those clothes dry yet?”

“Pretty soon,” she said. Her voice was so close it made me jump. Instinctively, I made a grab for my pistols, which I had put on the chair and pulled up beside the tub, but she laughed and I stopped the grab in mid-air.

“Get the hell out of here,” I said.

She was leaning against the wardrobe laughing at me, and with the red light from the fireplace playing on her face. She must have found my tobacco and corn-shuck papers in my shirt, because there was a thin brown cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth. That shook me, because I had never seen a woman smoke before, except for the fancy girls in Abilene or Dodge or one of the other trail towns.

I saw that she wasn't going to get out until she got good and ready. I couldn't figure her out. One minute she seemed to be a simple Mexican girl, almost a child, with a straightforward eagerness to help a stranger out; and the next minute she was voluptuous and cynical and as wise as Eve. I didn't know enough about women to know what to do with her. I had looked into big-eyed muzzles of .44's without feeling as helpless as I did when I looked at her.

“All right,” I said, “you've looked. Now how about getting my clothes?”

She dragged deep on the cigarette and let it drop to the packed clay floor. “Sure, gringo.”

She went into the other room and threw my pants through the doorway. They were still damp, but I didn't care. I put them on. She came in with my shirt, threw it at me, and leaned against the wardrobe again.

“You look better after shave.”

“I feel better.”

She must have brushed her hair or combed it while I was taking the bath. It shone as black as the devil's heart in the red light of the fire, and it was pulled back tight away from her face and rolled in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her mouth was ripe and red and those eyes of hers seemed to be laughing at something.

“What are you looking at?” I said.

“I thought you was man,” she said. “With beard gone you're just boy.”

I thought quickly that maybe I should have left the mustache on. Maybe I should have left the beard on too. “I'll grow up,” I said. I fished in my pocket and found a silver dollar and flipped it at her. “That's for the bath and shave.”

I had my shirt and boots on now, and was buckling on my guns. I didn't know where I was going exactly. I just wanted to go out and look at people and see if I couldn't get to feel like a human being again. I picked up my rifle and got as far as the door.“Adios,” she said. “Adios.”

“I hope you shoot good,” she said. “It is bad to die young.”

That stopped me. “What are you talking about?”

“The man in the street, by your horse,” she said calmly. “I think maybe he shoot you. If you don't shoot first.”

I felt my stomach flip over. Could it be possible that the federal marshals had trailed me all the way from Texas? I went out the back door, across the walled-in yard, and through the gate. There was a lot of singing somewhere, and some drunken yelling and laughing. Fiesta was still going on. The adobe huts seemed jammed closer together in the darkness, but the Mexicans had a bonfire going out in the street, so I could see enough to pick my way between them. A dog barked. Somewhere in the night a girl giggled and a man made soft crooning noises. After a while I could stand in the shadows and see my horse across the street. Sure enough, a man was there.

He wasn't Mexican and he wasn't anybody I had ever seen before. He was a big man with flabby features and he didn't seem to be much interested in the fiesta or anything else, except that big black horse of mine. Then somebody came up behind me. It was the girl. “Who is he?” I said. “I never saw him before.” She seemed surprised. She seemed suddenly to scrap all the opinions that she had formed about me and start making brand-new ones. “You sure?” she asked after a pause.

“I tell you I never laid eyes on him before. What is he, somebody's hired gunny?”

She did some quick thinking. “I think Marta make big mistake,” she said.

“Are you Marta?”

You come with me, gringo.”

“Si.

She stepped out into the street, in the dancing firelight, but I didn't move. She crossed the street, waving her arms and yelling something to the big guy. I saw the man nod. Then she motioned for me to come on.

The man didn't look very dangerous to me. He had the usual pistol on his hip, but I figured that he was too old and too fat to be very fast with it. Anyway, I was curious, so I walked across the street.

The man didn't miss a thing, not even a flick of an eyelash, as I came toward him. As I got closer I began to change my estimate of him—he could be dangerous, plenty dangerous. It showed in his flat eyes, the aggressive way he stood. It showed on the well-worn butt of his .44. He wore a battered, wide-brimmed Texas hat with a rawhide thong under his chin to keep it on. His shirt was buckskin and had been pretty fancy in its day, but now it was almost black and slick with dirt and wear. He kept his hand well away from his pistol to show that he wasn't asking for trouble. I did the same.

The girl was standing spraddle-legged, hands on hips, grinning at us, but under that grin I had a feeling that there was disappointment. The man jerked his head, dismissing her, as I stepped up to the dirt walk. She melted away in the darkness somewhere.

“This your horse?” the man said, nodding his head at the black.

“That's right.”

“I was thinking maybe I'd seen him somewhere before. Texas, maybe.”

“You've had time to make up your mind, the way you've been standing here gawking at him.”

He blinked his eyes. He was used to getting more respect than that, especially from boys not out of their teens yet. “A tough punk,” he said flatly. “If there's anything I can't stand it's a tough punk.”

The way he said it went all over me. It was like cursing a man, knowing that he was listening and not having enough respect for him to lower your voice. Before he knew what hit him I had the barrel of my pistol rammed in his belly almost up to the cylinder. “Goddamn you,” I said. “I don't know who you are, but if you use that word again I'll kill you. That's one thing in this world you can depend on.”

I had knocked the wind out of him and he sagged against the hitching rack gasping. His flat eyes became startled eyes, then they became hate-filled eyes. I should have killed him right then and got it over with, because I knew that he would never quite get over it, being thrown down on by a kid, and someday he would try to even it up. Pappy Garret would have killed him without batting an eye, if he had been in my place. But like a damn fool, I didn't.

“Jesus Christ!” he gulped. “Get that pistol out of my stomach. I didn't mean anything.”

“Not until I find out why you were sucking around my horse. You were waiting for me to come out, weren't you? All right, why?”

“Sure, sure, I was waitin' for you to come out,” he said. “Word got around that a stranger was in town, and we don't go much for strangers here in Ocotillo. Basset sent me down to have a look. He figured maybe you was a government marshal, or maybe one of them Cavalry intelligence men.”

“What gave him a smart idea like that?”

“That girl you was with. She come around a while ago and told Basset she was holdin' you at her house. It was her idea that you was a government marshal.”

That was fine. While I had been taking a bath and thinking that she was quite a girl, she had been working up a scheme to get me killed. “Who is Basset?”

“You haven't been in Arizona long if you don't know who Basset is. He about runs things in this part of the territory.”

“What does the Cavalry do while Basset runs Arizona?”

“Hell, the Cavalry's too busy with the Apaches to worry about us. Now will you take that pistol out of my stomach?”

I pulled the pistol out enough to let him breathe. I hadn't bargained for anything like this. What looked to be just another little Mexican town was turning out to be a hole-up for the territory's badmen.

“What do you think about me now?” I said, “Do you still think I'm a government man?”

“Hell, no. I spotted that horse of yours right off. The last time I saw that animal was in Texas, about two years ago, and Pappy Garret was ridin' him. We heard Pappy was killed not long ago, but the”—he almost said “punk”—“the kid that was ridin' with him got away.”

“Did the kid have a name?” I said.

“Talbert Cameron, according to the 'Wanted' posters. Jesus, I never saw anybody pull a gun like that, unless maybe it was Pappy himself.”

Well, that settled it. I couldn't outride my reputation, so I might as well try to live with it. At least until I thought of something better. I holstered my pistol because it looked like the fuss was over for the present. The big man pulled himself together and tried to pretend that everything was just fine. But no matter what he did, he couldn't hide the smoky hate in the back of his eyes.

“Let's go,” I said.

“Where?”

“I want to see the man that runs things around here, Basset.”

He didn't put up any argument, as I expected. He merely shrugged. And I unhitched the black.

The fiesta had left the streets and had gone into the native saloons, or maybe the church, wherever it was. The bonfire was dying down and the night was getting darker. The street was almost deserted as we went up to the far end, and the ragged Huachucas looked down on the desert and on the town, and I had a feeling that those high, sad mountains were a little disgusted with what they saw.

After a minute I got to thinking about that girl, Marta. What was she up to, anyway? First she tells a gang of outlaws that I'm a government marshal, and then she tells me that there's somebody waiting to kill me.

I said, “What about that Mexican girl back there, the one called Marta? What was her cut for going to Basset and telling him I was a government man?”

The big man darted a glance at me and kept walking. “She's crazy,” he said. “Let her alone. If you want to get along in Ocotillo, let that girl alone.”

He said it as if he meant it.

At the end of the street there was a two-story frame building that was all out of place here in a village of squat adobe huts. From the sound of the place I could tell that it was a saloon of some kind—one with a pretty good business, if the noise was any indication. On the other side of the saloon there was a circle corral and another frame building that I took to be a livery barn.

“My horse needs grain and a rubdown,” I said.

My partner shouldered through the doors of the saloon and picked out a Mexican with a jerk of his head. “Take care of the horse outside,” he said. Then to me, “Wait here. I'll see if Basset wants to see you.”

He marched down to the far end of the saloon, opened an unmarked door, and disappeared.

It was quite a place, this saloon. There were big mirrors and glass chandeliers that must have come all the way around the Horn and then been freighted across the desert from San Francisco. Part of the place was done in fancy oak paneling and the rest of it finished out in rough planking, as if the owner had got disgusted after the first burst of enthusiasm and decided that it was a waste of money in Ocotillo. What surprised me was that anybody could have been so ambitious in the first place.

About half the customers were Mexicans, which was about right, since the Mexican border wasn't more than a day's ride to the south. There were four or five saloon girls sitting at tables in the back of the place, near the roulette wheels, chuck-a-luck, and card tables. There was even a pool table back there, and I hadn't seen one of them since Abilene.

It was a crazy, gaudy kind of place to be stuck out here in the desert, off all beaten trails and a hundred miles away from anything like civilization. I went over to the bar and ordered beer. The Mexican bartender served it up in a big crock mug and I pushed my face into the foam.

From the minute I walked into the place I became the main attraction, but I figured that wasn't unusual, considering what Basset's hired man had said about strangers. The customers all made a big to-do about carrying on with their talking and drinking as usual, but from the corners of their eyes they were cutting me up and down. They studied my two guns. They noticed that I used my left hand to drink, leaving my right one free. They didn't like me much, what they could see of me. They were thinking that I was damn young to tote so much iron.

They were thinking that somebody ought to get up and slap hell out of me just to teach me not to show off—but nobody got up.

I finished my beer and let the customers gawk until my friend with the dangerous eyes came back.

“Basset says come on in,” he grunted, and he went on out the front door without waiting to see if I had anything to say about it.