A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter Two

I DON'T KNOW WHAT kind of man I expected Basset to be but I never would have figured him as the man he really was. Basset, it turned out, was a greasy-looking man not much over five feet tall and weighing not much under three hundred pounds. He was sprawled out in a tilt-back chair, in front of a roll-top desk, as I came in. He peered at me with dark little eyes that were almost squeezed out between enormous rolls of fat.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, panting as if he had just finished a long run.

He was alone in the room. He looked completely harmless, but I shied away from him like a horse shying away from a snake.

“My man Kreyler says you're the Cameron kid,” he wheezed. “Says you used to ride with Pappy Garret. Hell with guns.”

“That's what your man Kreyler says,” I said.

“What do you say?”

I took a cane-bottom chair, the only other chair in the room. “Maybe.”

Basset shifted abruptly and sprawled in the other direction. “What did you want to see me about?”

I wasn't sure why I had wanted to see him. So I said, “I'm not sure. Maybe I just wanted to see what the boss of Arizona looks like.”

“Ha-ha,” he said, panting. He just spoke the words, he wasn't laughing. “All right, out with it, do you want a job?”

“That depends on what I have to do.”

“Have you got any money?”

“Twelve dollars,” I said. That was left from a job of trail driving I had done almost six months ago. I hadn't had a chance to spend it.

“Ha-ha,” Basset said again. “Let me tell you something, Cameron. I knew Pappy Garret. If you can handle guns the way he could, I'll make a rich man out of you. A rich man.”

“I don't hire my guns,” I said.

I'd had about enough of Basset. Watching his enormous, shaking belly made my skin crawl. I made a move to get up, but he waved me down.

“Just a minute,” he wheezed. “Let me tell you about our charming little village here, Ocotillo.” He settled back, smiling and breathing through his mouth. His lips were red and wet and raw-looking, like an incision in a piece of liver. “Ocotillo,” he said again. “It was just a little village of Mexican farmers, a few sheep herders, until a few years ago, when some sourdough thought he had discovered a vein of silver up in the foothills. Overnight, you might say, civilization came to Ocotillo. You wouldn't believe it, but two years ago this whole area was covered with tents and shacks and wagons, and fortune hunters crawled over the hills as thick as sand lice.”

He chuckled for a minute, remembering.

“Well, it turned out there wasn't any silver there after all, except some 'fool's silver,' traces of lead ore and zinc. Before you knew it Ocotillo was as empty as a frontier church. The fortune hunters all moved on, and for a while I'll admit I was worried. You saw the wood in my bar out there? Redwood from California. My wheels, pool table, gambling equipment, shipped clean from New York around the Horn and freighted across the desert. Cost thousands of dollars, this saloon, and for a while it looked like it wouldn't bring a penny.”

I rolled a cigarette while he talked. As I held a match to the corn-shuck cylinder, Basset smiled and nodded.

“I remember Pappy used to smoke his cigarettes Mexican style like that. Anyway, here I was with this saloon and nobody for customers except a few poor Mexicans. Then one day I got another customer.”

He slouched back in the chair, smiling, waiting for me to ask the question. “And this customer was...” I said.

“Black Joseph,” he said with satisfaction.

I wasn't particularly surprised. I hadn't heard of the famous Indian gunman for a year or more, so I knew that if he wasn't making buzzard food of himself he had to be in New Mexico or Arizona. I had never seen him, but I knew him by reputation. The artists' drawings on “Wanted" posters always showed him as a hungry-eyed, hawk-nosed, Osage, with a battered flat-crowned hat pushed down over his black, braided hair. He had been a scout for the Union Army during the war, but it seemed that even the bloody battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga hadn't blunted his craving to kill. He was supposed to be fast with a gun. According to some men who ought to know he was the fastest. I didn't know about that, and I didn't care. Black Joseph didn't have anything against me, and I had nothing against him.

Basset seemed to think that the Indian's name should have done something to me. Maybe I should have started sweating, or loosened my guns, or something. When I didn't, the fat man seemed slightly annoyed.

“You've heard of Black Joseph, haven't you?” he panted.

“I've heard of him,” I said.

That seemed to make him feel a little better. “Well,” he said, “I began to get an idea the minute that Indian murderer rode into Ocotillo—not that I've got anything against him,” he added quickly. “It's just that he doesn't bother to think before he shoots. Anyway, I figured maybe there were a lot of boys like him, things getting too hot for them back in Texas.”

He smiled that damp smile, as if to say, “You ought to know, Cameron.”

I said, “Has all this got anything to do with me?”

“That depends on you,” Basset said carelessly. “Now, you look like a man on the run. Would you like to have a place to settle down for a while and give the United States marshals a chance to forget about you? Would you like to be sure that you won't run into my cavalrymen? Would you like to have some insurance like that?”

“You can't get insurance from a United States marshal,” I said, “or the Cavalry, either.”

Basset lurched forward in his chair, got a cigar from a box on his desk, and rolled it between his wet lips. “You just don't know the right man, son,” he said, breathing heavily. “The Cavalry—no. But, then, the Cavalry is busy up north with the Apache uprising. There's no call for them to come down here unless somebody like a federal marshal put them up to it.”

And what makes you think that some deputy marshal won't do just that?”

He went on smiling, holding a match to his cigar, puffing until it was burning to suit him. Then he threw the match on the floor and shouted, “Kreyler!”

The door opened and the big, slab-faced man came in. The last time I saw him he had been headed out of the saloon—but when Basset called, he was there.

“Yeah?”

“Show this boy who you are, Kreyler,” Basset said.

Kreyler frowned. He didn't like me, and whatever it was that Basset had on his mind, he didn't like that either. But he didn't have the guts to look at the fat man and tell him so. Reluctantly he went into his pocket and came out with a badge—a deputy United States marshal's badge.

“That will be your insurance,” Basset said, as Kreyler went out, “if you choose to stay with us here in Ocotillo.”

The whole thing had kind of taken my breath away. I had only known one United States marshal before. He lived, breathed, and thought nothing but the law. I hadn't known that a man like Kreyler could worm his way into an office like that.

Suddenly I began to appreciate the kind of setup Basset had here. In Ocotillo a man could live in safety, protected from the law, his identity hidden from the outside world. I thought of the long days and nights of running, afraid to sleep, afraid to rest, forever looking over my shoulder and expecting to see the man who would finally kill me. Here in Ocotillo I could forget all that—if I wanted to pay the fat man's price.

Basset smiled, puffing lazily on his cigar.

I said finally, “Insurance like that must come pretty high.”

“Not for the right men, like yourself.” He bent forward, his jowls shaking. “Have you ever heard of the Mexican smuggling trains?”

I shook my head.

“There are dozens of them,” he said. “They come across the international line, taking one of the remote canyons of the Huachucas. Thousands of dollars in gold or silver some of these trains carry. They trade in Tucson for merchandise that they smuggle back across the border, without paying the heavy duty, and sell at fat profits. In a way,” Basset smiled, “you might say that Kreyler is upholding his oath to the United States, for he is a great help to us in stopping this unlawful smuggling of the Mexicans.”

I was beginning to get it now, but I wasn't sure that I liked it.

“Take your time,” the fat man said. “Make up your mind and let me know. Say tomorrow?”

“All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

I was glad to get out of the office. The bath that I'd had not long ago had been wasted. I felt dirtier than I had when I first rode into the place.

I stopped at the bar on my way out and had a shot of the white poison that the Mexicans were drinking. Business had picked up while I was in the office. Most of the fancy girls had found laps to sit on, and their brassy, high-pitched giggles punched holes in the general uproar like bullets going through a tub of lard. I studied the men in the place with a new interest, now that I knew who they were and what they were doing here. I didn't see anybody that I knew, yet I had a feeling that I knew all of them. Their eyes were all alike, restless, darting from one place to the other. They laughed hard with their mouths, but none of the laughter ever reached their eyes. I didn't see anybody drunk enough to be careless about the way his gun hand hung. And I knew I wouldn't. My friend Kreyler, the deputy United States marshal, wasn't around. Probably he was in some corner, waiting for Basset to yell for him.

I stood alone at the end of the bar, wondering where I was going to sleep that night and listening to three Mexicans sing a sirupy love song in Spanish, when she said:

“Hello, gringo!”

I don't know where she came from. But now she was standing next to me, grinning as if nothing had happened.

“Get away from me,” I said. “When I get tired of living I can get myself killed. I don't need your help.”

She didn't bat an eye. “I think you plenty fast with gun,” he grinned. “You don't be killed.”

“I'll be killed if you keep telling people I'm a government marshal. What the hell did you do that for, anyway? And after that, why did you bother to warn me that somebody was waiting for me? Do you just like to hear guns go off and see men get killed?”

She threw her head back and laughed, as if that was the best one she'd heard in a long time. “Maybe you buy Marta drink, eh?”

“Maybe I'll kick Marta's bottom if she doesn't leave me alone.”

But I didn't mean it and she knew it. She laughed again and I poured her a drink of the white poison. She poured salt in the cup between her thumb and forefinger, licked it with her tongue and then downed her drink in one gulp. She looked more at home here in the saloon than some of the fancy girls. And she was a lot better looking than any of the doxies. But I noticed a funny thing. None of the men looked at her. They seemed to go to a great deal of troublenot to look at her.

“Another one, gringo?” she said, holding up her empty glass.

“Not for me.” But I reached for the bottle and poured her another one. She downed it the same way she had the first one.

“Where you go, gringo?”

“To find a bed. There's a big desert out there and I've been a long time crossing it. I'm tired.”

She took my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Come with me, I fix.”

“Isn't there a hotel over the saloon here?”

“You no go there. You come with Marta.”

God knows she made it clear enough, and she was the best-looking girl I had seen for longer than I liked to remember—but there was something about it that went against me. I felt a sickness that I hadn't felt in a long time, and memories popped up in my mind, sharp and clear like a magic-lantern show I had seen once. We were outside now, on the dirt walk in front of the saloon. At the end of the building there was an outside stairway that went up to the second floor, and on the corner of the building there was a sign: “Rooms.” For no particular reason I began to get mad. I gave her a shove, harder than I'd intended, and she went reeling out into the dusty street.

I headed for the livery barn to get my saddlebags and she cursed me every step of the way in shrill, outraged Spanish. But I didn't hear. I was listening to other voices. And other times.

Other times and other places.... I went through the motions of looking after my horse and getting my saddlebags and going up the shaky stairs over the saloon to see if I could get a room, but they were like the motions that you go through in a dream. They didn't seem to mean anything. I remembered the big green country of the Texas Panhandle, where I was born. I remembered my pa's ranch and the little town near it, John's City. And Professor Bigloe's Academy, where I had gone to school before the war, and the frame shack at the crossroads between our place and John's City called Garner's Store where I used to listen to the bitter old veterans of the war still cursing Sherman and Lincoln and Grant, and reliving over and over the glories of the lost Confederacy. And, finally, I remembered a girl.

But she was just a name now, and I had said good-by to her for the last time. Good-by, Laurin. I had hurt her for the last time, and lied to her for the last time, and I tried to be glad that she was married now and had put me out of her life. Maybe now she would know a kind of quiet peace and happiness that she had never had while I was around. I tried, but I couldn't feel glad, or sorry, or anything else. Except for an aching emptiness. I could feel that.

At the top of the stairs I pounded on a door and woke up a faded, frazzle-haired old doxie, who, for a dollar, let me have the key to a room at the end of the dusty hall. The room was just big enough to undress in without skinning your elbows on the walls. There was a sagging iron bed and a washstand with a crock pitcher, bowl, and coal-oil lamp on it. A corner of a broken mirror was tacked on the wall over the washstand. There was an eight-penny nail in the door, if you wanted to hang up your clothes.

It wasn't the finest room in the world, but it would do. I raised the window and had a look outside before I lighted the lamp. I was glad to see that there was no awning or porch roof under the window, and there was nobody out in the street that I could see. I lighted the lamp, took the straw mattress off the bed, and put it on the floor in front of the door. I was dead tired and I didn't want any visitors while I slept.

Automatically I went through a set routine of checking my guns, putting them beside me on the mattress, stretching out with my feet against the door. If that door moved I wanted to know about it in a hurry. Small things, maybe, but I had learned that it was small things that kept a man alive. Trimming a fraction of a second off your draw, filing a fraction of an inch off your gun's trigger action, keeping your ears and eyes and nerves keyed a fraction higher than the next man's. A heartbeat, a bullet. They were all small things.

For a long while, in the darkness, I rocked on the thin edge of sleep while almost forgotten faces darted in and out of my memory, flashing and disappearing like fox fire in a sluggish swamp. Laurin's face. And Pappy Garret. The fabulous Pappy Garret whose name was already beginning to appear in five-cent novels, and history books, and maybe even the Sunday newspaper supplements back East. My pal Pappy, who had taught me everything I knew about guns. I tried to imagine what Pappy would say if he could see how famous I had become. Would he smile that old sad smile of his if he could see the bright look of admiration in small boys' eyes as they read the “Wanted” poster?

At some unsure point half thoughts became dreams, and then the dreams vanished and there was nothing for a while.

I don't remember when I first felt the pressure of the door on my feet, but when I felt it. I was immediately awake, wide-eyed, staring into the darkness. There wasn't a sound. Not even from the saloon below. At first, as I lay rigid, I thought that I must have imagined it, but then the door moved inward again, slowly, carefully.

For just a moment I lay there wondering who in Ocotillo wanted to kill me. Kreyler? Maybe, but I didn't think he would try it while Basset was trying to get me on his payroll. Could I have overlooked somebody in the saloon that had something against me? A brother or cousin or friend of somebody I had killed? That was possible. I managed to roll off the mattress without making any noise. I wasn't scared, now that I knew what was going on. I was awake, but whoever it was at the door didn't know it. When he found out, he would be too close to death for it to make any difference.

I eased the mattress away as the crack in the door widened. A figure slipped into the room without a sound. I still couldn't tell who it was. White moonlight poured on the bed, but the rest of the room was in darkness, and for a moment that empty bed confused the killer.

I don't know why I waited. I could have squeezed the trigger and killed him before he knew what hit him. But for some reason I didn't.

I saw a knife glint dully as he began to move forward. Then I saw who it was.

I must have given a grunt of surprise, because the figure wheeled quickly in my direction. I didn't see a thing, but instinct told me to do something and do it in a hurry. I started to dive, and as I moved to one side the knife flashed and glittered, cutting the air down over my head. There was a sudden thud as it buried itself in the wall. I heard the quivering, disappointed whine of well-tempered steel. Then I slammed into a pair of legs and we crashed to the floor.

The would-be killer was Marta, the Mexican girl.

I heard clothing tear as we went down. I made a grab for her arms but she jerked away and gouged bloody holes in my face with her fingernails. I grabbed again and this time I got her down, my hands on her shoulders and my knee in her stomach. Her body was smooth and hot, and somehow hard and soft at the same time, like gun steel covered with velvet. Neither of us made a sound. We had landed near the window, and cold moonlight fell on her sweating face. Her blouse had come apart in the fight, and from her waist up she was mostly naked. She twisted her head to one side and sank those white, gleaming teeth in my wrist.

I heard myself howl as she broke loose and dived across the floor for one of my guns. But I grabbed her hair and jerked her back, scratching and clawing like some wild animal. I could feel warm blood running down my arm, and when she tried to bite me again I hit her. I hit her in the mouth as hard as I could. I felt her lips burst on my knuckles and blood spurted halfway across the room.

“Goddamn you!” I heard myself saying. She was limp on the floor, but I still had a hold of her hair, holding her head up. “Goddamn you!” I let go of her hair and her head hit the floor like a ripe melon. She was as limp as a rag, and I didn't give a damn if she never got up.

I fumbled around the dark room in my underwear until I finally found my shirt and got some matches. After a while I got the lamp burning and poured some water into the crock bowl and began washing the blood off my arm. But I couldn't stop the blood that kept gushing out of the deep double wound on my left wrist. The pain went all the way up to my shoulder and down to my guts. Anger swarmed all over me like a prairie fire.

“Get up, goddamn you!” I said. But she didn't move. I went over and gathered up my guns and her knife, trailing blood all over the place. Then I jerked off half her blouse and wrapped it tightly around my forearm. Pretty soon the bleeding stopped.

After a while she began to stir. She lifted herself slowly to her knees, shaking her head dumbly like a poleaxed calf.

“Get out of here,” I said tightly. “And stay out. So help me, if you ever try a thing like that again I'll kill you.”

She looked at me for a long time with those stupid eyes. She looked like hell. Her mouth was bloody and her lips were beginning to puff. She didn't look so damned wild and deadly now.

I went over to the door and flung it open. “Go on, get out of here.”

She managed to get to her feet, swaying, almost falling on her face again. She put one foot out, as if it were the first step she had ever taken. Then she tried the other one. After a while she made it to the hallway. I slammed the door and locked it.

I don't know how long I sat there on the springless bed, nursing my arm and letting the anger burn itself out. But finally the red haze began to lift and I could think straight again.

She had tried to kill me! That was the thing that got me, when I began to think about it. But why? I didn't know enough about women to answer that. A lot of people had tried to kill me at one time or another, but, before tonight, never a woman. Maybe she was just plain crazy. I remembered that Kreyler had said that when I had asked him about her. Maybe Kreyler knew what he was talking about.

My wrist was still giving me trouble. The pain was no longer located in any one particular spot; the whole arm throbbed and ached all the way to the marrow of the bone. I got up and washed it again in water and tried to do a better job of bandaging it, but I couldn't tell any difference in the way it felt. That was when I heard somebody on the stairs. Footsteps in the hall.

I found my pistol and blew out the lamp. When the footsteps stopped in front of my door I was ready. I jerked the door open and stepped to one side, my pistol cocked.

It was the girl again, Marta.

She had washed the blood off her face but she was still a long way from being a beauty. Her face was swollen, her lips were split and puffed all out of shape. But she had found a clean blouse from somewhere to replace the one I had torn off of her—and in her hands she had a bottle of whisky.

“Whisky good for arm,” she said flatly. “I fix.”

There was no fight left in her. Her eyes had the vacant, weary look that you see in the eyes of very old people, or perhaps the dying. I felt like a fool holding a gun on her, and in the back of my mind I suppose I felt sorry for what I had done to her, even if she had tried to kill me. What could I do with a girl like that? I couldn't hate her. I couldn't feel anything for her but a vague kind of pity.

And I was dead tired and maybe I did need the whisky.

“All right,” I said. “Wait until I light the lamp again.”

I lit the lamp and she came into the room, almost timidly. She took the bowl of bloody water, threw it out the window, and filled the bowl up again from the pitcher. “Come,” she said.

She unwrapped my arm and washed the wound again. Then she opened the bottle and poured the whisky over my wrist and I almost hit the ceiling.

“Bad now,” she said, “but good tomorrow.”

“If I live until tomorrow. At the rate things are going, there's a good chance that I won't.”

She began bandaging the wrist again, without saying anything. I turned the bottle up and drank some of the clear, coal-oil-tasting fluid. It was the raw, sour-mash stuff that the Mexicans make for themselves, and when it hit my stomach it was almost as bad as pouring it in the wound.

“Where did you get this?”

“My house.”

“It may be fine for wounds, but it's not worth a damn to drink.”

“Papacito drink,” she said.

“You like saloon whisky, don't you? Saloons and saloon whisky and gringos. Why don't you stay in your own part of town?”

For a moment she looked at me with hurt eyes, then went on with her bandaging. I didn't give a damn what she did. I was just talking while the whisky cooled in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was a crazy trick, letting her back into the room. Maybe she had another knife hidden on her somewhere.

“That good?” she said.

She finished with my arm, then poured some whisky on a rag and cleaned the blood off my face.

I had a look in the mirror. “That's fine. My face looks like something left on a butcher's block. I might as well throw away my off-side gun, for all the good it's going to do me. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Are you just plain crazy or did you have a reason for trying to get that knife into me?”

She looked down and said nothing.

“Out with it,” I said. “I'm not mad now, I just want to know what you've got against me.”

She still didn't say anything, so I grabbed her arm and jerked her around. Then I got a handful of her hair and snapped her head back.

“Tell me, goddamnit! Did somebody pay you to try a trick like that?”

We stood there breathing in each other's faces. Finally she said, “No.”

“Then why?”

She shrugged. “I hate you—for a little while. You shove Marta away. I think maybe I kill you.”

It took me a minute to get it, and after I finally did get it I didn't understand it. Just because I hadn't wanted to go to bed with her, she tried to kill me!

She was looking down again. Her eyes still had that dull, beaten look in them, and I had a queer feeling that she was crying and the tears were falling on the inside. I didn't know what to make of her. It made me uncomfortable just looking at her.

She said flatly, “I go now.”

“That's fine.” I went over and opened the door. She waited a long minute, watching me, as if she thought maybe I was going to change my mind and ask her to stay.

I didn't. All I wanted was to get her out of here and never see her again.

After she had gone I lay a long while trying to figure her out. But I couldn't do it, and along toward dawn I lost interest and tried to get some sleep. And at last I did sleep, and dreamed restless dreams, mostly of my home in Texas.

Fiesta was over when I woke up the next morning. Most of the Mexicans had gone back to their one-mule farms or their sheep herds, or wherever Mexicans go when fiesta is over. My room was a mess, with blood all over the floor, and the bed knocked around at a crazy angle, and everything I had scattered from one corner to the other. My wrist was swollen stiff and hurt like hell.

I picked up some of the things, shirts and pants and a change of underwear that had been kicked out of my saddlebags in the scuffle, and put them back where they belonged. I stood at the window for a while, looking down on the gray scattering of mud huts that was Ocotillo, and for a minute I almost made up my mind to get out of there. The place was crazy, and everybody in it was crazy. I didn't want any more to do with it.

But where would I go? Back to Texas and let some sheriffs posse decorate a cottonwood with me? To New Mexico or California, and take my chances with the Cavalry or United States marshals?

I didn't think so.

It looked like Ocotillo was the end of the line, whether I liked it or not. And that proposition of Basset's—I'd have to listen to that, too, whether I liked it or not, because I didn't have any money and I didn't know of anybody that I could go to for help.

For a week, maybe, I thought. Or a month at the most. I could stand it that long. When I got some money together I could find a place to hole up until the law lost interest in me. Maybe I'd go across the line into Sonora, or Chihuahua, or some place like that. But it would take money.

There was one pretty thing about this business of Basset's. Robbing Mexican smuggling trains wasn't like robbing an express coach or a bank or anything else that the local law had an interest in. The law didn't give a damn if a smuggling train was robbed. They probably took it as a favor.

But it's funny the way a man's mind works on things like that. I had never had anything to do with robbing people. Killing—that was different. A man had to kill sometimes in this wild country. In the bitter, hate-sick Texas that had been my home, it had been the accepted way of settling arguments between men. Life was cheap. The lank, quiet boys of Texas had learned that when they rode off to fight for the Cause and the Confederacy, when most of them didn't even know what Confederacy meant, or care. Killing had become a part of living. But robbing people—that was something new that I had to get used to.

There were only the bartender and one other man in the saloon when I got down there. The bartender was kicking the wreckages to one side and making a few passes with a broom, the other man was eating eggs and side meat at the bar. The place was dark and sick with the stale, sour smell of whisky and smoke and unwashed bodies. The man looked at me quietly as I came in and stood at the end of the bar. The bartender glanced at me and said:

“Eggs?”

“Fried on both sides, and some of that side meat.”

The man smiled wearily and pushed his own plate away half finished and stood up. “Eggs and side meat,” he said. “Side meat and eggs. It wouldn't surprise me if I didn't start cacklin' like a chicken before long, or maybe gruntin' like a hog. Sometimes I think I'll get myself a Mexican woman, like some of the other boys, and let her cook for me. But I can't stand that greaser grub, either.” He smiled a thin, pale smile. “Lordy, what I'd give for a mess of greens and a pan of honest-to-God corn bread!”

“Eggs sound good to me,” I said, “after living out of my saddlebag, on jerky, for a spell.”

He smiled again, that sad, faraway smile. “Wait till you've choked 'em down as long as I have.”

The bartender went back to the rear somewhere and I began to smell grease burning. The man who didn't like side meat and eggs glanced lazily at my scratched face and bandaged wrist, but his pale eyes made no comment.

He was about thirty, I guess, but no more than that. His voice was as thick and sirupy as molasses—a rich black drawl of the deep South. Everything he did, every move he made, was with great deliberation, without the waste of an ounce of energy. Lazily he shoved a filthy, battered Confederate cavalryman's hat back on his head and a lock of dry, sand-colored hair fell on his forehead.

He smiled slowly. “Welcome to Ocotillo,” he said as if he were reading leisurely from a book, “the Garden Spot of Hell, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be bad-men; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” His voice trailed off. “Welcome to Ocotillo, Tall Cameron.” He waved a languid hand toward a table. “Shall we sit down? I take it you're one of us now. Perhaps you'd like to hear about this charming little city of ours while you eat your side meat and eggs.”

I shrugged. He was a queer galoot, there was no doubt about that, but there was something about him I liked.

We sat down and the bartender brought me three eggs and three limp slabs of side meat and some cold Mexican tortillas. I dug in, and while I chewed I said, “How did you know my name?”

He looked quietly surprised. “Why, you're a famous man, didn't you know that? The protege of Pappy Garret, the wizard of gunplay, our country's foremost exponent of the gentle art of bloodletting. May I speak for our quiet little community and say that we are greatly honored to have you among us?”

I looked quickly into those pale eyes to see if he were laughing at me. He wasn't laughing. The thoughts behind his eyes were sad and far away.

“Let me introduce myself,” he drawled. “Miles Stanford Bonridge, one-time cotton grower, one-time captain of the Confederate Cavalry—Jeb Stuart's Cavalry, suh— one-time gentleman and son of a gentleman. I hail from the great state of Alabama, suh, where, at one time, the name of Miles Stanford Bonridge commanded more than small respect. The boys here in Ocotillo call me Bama.”

I said, “Glad to make your acquaintance, Bama.”

He nodded quietly and smiled. He made a vague motion with his hand and the bartender came over and put a bottle of the raw, white whisky on the table. “One thing about working for Basset,” Miles Stanford Bonridge said, pouring some into a glass, “is that he pays his men enough to stay drunk from one job to the other. Not that he can't well afford it—he profits by thousands of dollars from our smuggler raids.” He downed the whisky and shuddered. “Have you ever been on a smuggler raid, Tall Cameron?”

“I didn't know there was such a thing until Basset mentioned it.”

He poured again, held the glass up, and studied the clear liquid. “You were too young, I suppose, to have fought in the war,” he said finally. “And there is no parallel to these raids of ours, except possibly some of the bloodier battles of Lee's eastern campaign. For days after one of our raids the sky above the battleground is heavy with swarms of vultures; the air is sick with the sweet, rotting stink of death; the very ground festers and crawls with unseen things wallowing in the filth and blood.... Please stop me,” he said pleasantly, “if I am ruining your appetite.”

“You're not.”

He nodded again, and smiled, and drank his whisky in a gulp.

I had already decided that he was crazy—probably from too much whisky, and a sick conscience, and maybe the war. What it was about him that I liked I couldn't be sure. His manner of speaking, his slow, inoffensive drawl, his faraway, bewildered eyes—or maybe it was because I just needed somebody to talk to.

“Would you mind,” he asked abruptly, “if I inquired your age, Tall Cameron?”

If it had been anybody else I would have told him to go to hell. But after a moment I said, “Twenty. Almost.”

He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and seemed to think. “The day I became twenty years old,” he said, “I was a second lieutenant in the Army of Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg commanding. Holloway's Company, Alabama Cavalry.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe you remember September nineteenth, 1863. There we were on the banks of the Chickamauga, which was to become the bloodiest river in the South, and old Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland was on the other side, so close that we could see the pickets throwing up their breastworks.” He broke off suddenly. “No,” he said, “you wouldn't remember that.”

“I remember hearing about the battle of Chickamauga,” I said, “but I don't remember who was there—or exactly where it was, as far as that goes.”

Miles Stanford Bonridge shook his head. “It doesn't make any difference now.”

I couldn't help wondering how a man like Bama could wind up in this God-forgotten country of southern Arizona. He wasn't a gunman—I knew that—no matter how many men he had killed during the war. His pistol was an old .36-caliber Leech and Rigdon that looked dusty from lack of handling, and he wore it high up under his right arm where he would have a hell of a time getting to it if he ever needed it in a hurry.

He smiled that quiet smile of his while I looked him over, and I had a queer feeling that he was reading my mind.

“All I know about guns,” he said, “is what I learned in the Cavalry. I'm not a bad shot with a carbine. Not worth a damn with a pistol, although I killed a man once with one. A damned Treasury agent, after the war was over. He was trying to cheat me out of twenty bales of cotton, so I shot him four times right in the gut. Have a drink?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

He poured himself another one and downed it. “Then I had to kill a Yankee soldier, and there was hell to pay after that. For a while it seemed like the whole damned bluebelly army was after me, but I had some friends and they got me up to New Mexico, and finally I wound up here.” He laughed softly, without humor. “I was lucky, I guess.”

I knew how he felt. With a little switching around his story could have been mine, except that I had taken up with a famous gunman and got the same kind of reputation for myself.

“I had the prettiest little gal you ever saw,” Bama said sadly, “but I had to leave her. I wonder what she's doing now....”

I wished he hadn't said that, because it brought back too many almost forgotten days, almost forgotten faces. And a name that I couldn't forget—Laurin.

I pushed my plate away and Bama watched as I rolled a cigarette and put fire to it. At last he said, “Do you mind if I offer a little advice?”

“I'll listen, but I won't promise to take it.”

“Leave the girl alone,” he said quietly. “The Mexican girl named Marta. She's poison, and a little crazy, too. I've been here for quite a while now, and every man she has looked at always ended up the same way, dead in some gulch or some alley, with a bullet in his back.”

His face was deadly serious.

There was nothing I wanted more than to keep that female wildcat out of my life. But what was all the fuss about? First Kreyler had warned me to stay away from her, and now Bama. Curiosity was beginning to get the best of me.

“Does that mean that somebody's got a claim staked out on her?” I said.

Bama nodded slowly and poured himself another drink. “Black Joseph,” he said. “And he doesn't like you. He doesn't like you at all.”

I was beginning to get impatient with all this hoodoo.

“How the hell does he know he doesn't like me? I've never even seen this famous Indian gun-slinger.”

Bama gulped his drink. “Maybe you ought to meet him,” he said. “He's standing right behind you.”