A Noose for the Desperado

Chapter Five

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke to the sound of sloshing water behind the thin partition that separated Bama's room from mine. I got up and sloshed water on my own face, drying it on the tail of one of Bama's shirts. Then I went into the hall and knocked.

“Bama, are you up?”

He opened the door, bleary-eyed, licking his cracked lips. “Well,” he said. “I was wondering what happened to you.”

“I spent the night in your room. It seemed easier than trying to move you. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he said thickly. “Like I always feel on mornings like this.” He touched the knot behind his ear and winced.

“That's where I hit you.”

“I know,” he said. “You didn't bring a bottle along, did you?”

“Don't you think it's about time to lay off the stuff for a while?”

He looked at me hazily. He sat on the bed, holding his head as if he thought maybe it would roll off his shoulders if he didn't. “God,” he said flatly, “what a rotten, lousy life. You killed the Indian, didn't you?”

“The sonofabitch asked for it.”

Then he thought of something. “The girl—Marta— where is she?”

“How should I know? I guess she went home, down in the Mexican section. I don't care where she went.”

“She—she wasn't with you last night?”

“Not after we got you up here.”

He thought for a while, then he said a funny thing. “Maybe there's some hope for you, Tall Cameron. As unlikely as it seems, maybe there's some hope for you, after all.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

But he seemed to have forgotten what he was talking about. “Sometimes I think that memories are the only things that are real. I wish they were. Are you sure you haven't got a bottle?”

Then I remembered that bottle of greaser poison that Marta had used oh my wrist. I dug it out from under some dirty clothes and poured him a small one. “I'm sorry about that lick I gave you,” I said. “But you butted into something that was none of your business.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I did.” And then he polished off the drink and shuddered. “But that temper of yours,” he said when he got his breath, “you ought to learn to control it. It'll turn on you like a bad woman, and that will be the end of Tall Cameron.”

“Let me worry about my temper,” I said. Suddenly I began to get an idea—or rather, an old idea that had been floating around in the cellar of my mind suddenly came to the top. I said, “Bama, if you hate this place so much, why don't you get out of it?”

He just looked at me.

“What's holding you here?” I asked. “Take your cut of the silver that we got off the smugglers and go down to Mexico somewhere like I'm going to do.”

I was telling Bama something that I hadn't even admitted to myself. I was telling him that I was tired of being alone, that I was even afraid of being alone. I was asking him to ride with me. God knows why a man like me would want Bama with him. He would be no earthly good, and his drinking would probably cause trouble wherever we went.

Then it hit me that maybe I could feel the day coming when I would look around me and discover how far down I had gone. When that day did come I would want somebody around that I could still look down on. And that somebody was Bama.

I think he could see the way my mind was working, but there was no anger in his eyes, except possibly an old anger at himself. He started to say something, but he changed his mind at the last moment and had another drink.

“Think it over,” I said. “Maybe I could use some company if you want to ride along.”

Looking at the bottle, he said, “Do you really think you'll get out of Ocotillo?”

“Why shouldn't I? I've got enough money coming to keep me below the border for a while. After that, something will show up.” Then I said, “Speaking of money, I think I'll go down and pick up my cut from Basset. Do you want to come along?”

He reached for the bottle again. “I think I'll just sit here for a while, if you don't mind. Anyway, I got my cut last night.”

So I left him sitting there, getting an early start on the road to nowhere.

The bartender was leaning on a broom, contemplating a dark brown splotch on the saloon floor, when I came in. I said, “I want to see Basset,” and his head snapped up as if he had never seen me before.

“Sure. Sure,” he said. “Wait a minute, I'll see if Basset's up yet.”

He went back to the rear of the saloon, where I guessed Basset had a sleeping room next to his office—he struck me as being the kind of man that wouldn't like to get too far away from his business. After a minute the bartender came back.

“It's all right. He's in the office.” He was still sitting, fat and sweaty, behind his desk when I went in, looking exactly the same as the last time I had seen him. “Well,” he wheezed, “I guess you came by your reputation honest. You can handle guns, I'll say that for you. You've got a bad temper, though. You'll have to learn to hold onto that if you're going to work for me.”

“I'm not going to work for you,” I said. He sat back, blinking folds of fat over those buckshot eyes. “Now, look here,” he panted. “What's the matter?”

“I don't like wholesale murder and I don't like robbing people,” I said. “I just want to get out, like I told you. Now if you'll just figure out my cut of the silver...”

He lurched his hulk over in the chair and sat there blinking those eyes at me, breathing through his mouth. “Well,” he said. “If that's the way you feel about it. Sure, you can have your cut. No hard feelings.”

He pulled out the big bottom drawer of his desk and opened a strongbox with a key. He took out a heavy-looking, clanking canvas bag and shoved it across the desk toward me.

“Here it is,” he said. “You sure you don't want to change your mind?”

“I'm sure,” I said. I didn't bother to count the silver. I just picked it up and walked out, hoping that I had seen the fat man for the last time.

I went back up to my room and Bama was still there, drunk, as I had expected. I heard him talking to somebody as I came up the hall, and when I got to the door I saw that it was Marta.

“What's she doing here?”

Bama shrugged, “Maybe she's in love with you,” he said, waving his arms. “Maybe she can't bear to have you out of her sight.”

“She'd better start getting used to it, because I'm going to put Ocotillo behind me.”

I threw the sack of silver on the bed and she stood there looking at me. She seemed to come and go like night shadows, and every time I saw her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.

“I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was it, Tall Cameron?”

“No,” I said, “it wasn't.”

“See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved something.

The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.

But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped the bottle and dozed off.

I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”

“You need Marta,” she said.

“I don't need anybody.” But she didn't believe me.

And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”

For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor. But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past, because men like us have no future.

The mood hung on and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt completely lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness. There was no turning back, and I wondered if maybe Bama had found the answer in whisky.

It even occurred to me that maybe Marta was the answer for me, that maybe she was right and I needed her. But that wouldn't work either, and I knew it. The best thing to do was to get out of Ocotillo.

I threw some more stuff into the saddlebag, then I went over to the bed and rolled Bama over to give me room to count the silver. I hadn't bothered to guess how much my cut would be, but I had seen the pile of money we had got off the smugglers and I knew that a fair cut would be enough to take care of me for quite a while.

Bama grunted and lurched up in bed as I untied the sack and dumped the contents on the blanket.

For a minute I just looked at it. There were some adobe dollars there, all right, but there was a lot of other things too. I scattered the stuff around and picked up a handful of round brass disks with holes in the middle. On one side they had the names E. E. Basset stamped on them, and on the other side there were the words “Good for One Dollar in Trade.”

For a minute I thought there had been a mistake and Basset had given me the wrong sack. But then, from the look on Bama's face, I knew that it was no mistake. This was the way the fat man paid off: He collected the silver and gave his men a pile of worthless brass buttons. Quickly I scattered the stuff some more and sorted it out, and when I had finished I had thirty-five adobe dollars and sixty-five pieces of brass.

Finally I straightened up, and what was going on inside of me must have been written on my face.

Bama seemed suddenly sober. “Take it easy, kid.”

“Is this the way Basset pays all his men?”

“I thought you knew,” Bama said.

“Look at that!” I kicked the bed and brass and silver went flying all over the room. “Is that what he calls a fair cut? I saw the money they sacked up on that raid— fifteen thousand dollars, at least. Maybe twenty thousand. And he hands me thirty-five dollars and sixty-five pieces of brass. Even if it was all silver. It would still be a long way from a fair cut.”

By the time the money hit the floor, Marta was on her knees gathering it up in her skirt. Bama sighed deeply.

“That's the way it is when you work for men like Basset. That's why I was wondering how you meant to get out of Ocotillo. Anyway, that brass is as good as the silver, if you spend it in the saloon.”

“I don't intend to spend it in the saloon,” I said. Then I wheeled and headed for the door. Marta was standing there, the silver and brass in her skirt, holding it out.

I said, “Keep it. Spend it on saloon whisky, or take it home, or throw it to the chickens. I won't need it.”

Her eyes lit up and she smiled a smile like a kid who had just found a wagonful of candy.

Bama lurched across the room and grabbed my sleeve as I was about to walk out. “Don't go down there half-cocked,” he said. “Don't you think Basset has had this kind of trouble before? He knows what he's doing and he knows how to take care of himself.”

“I don't want any trouble,” I said, “but I'm going to get what's coming to me if I have to choke the stuff out of him.”

I shook Bama off and went down the stairs three at a time and burst into the saloon. The bartender was still leaning on his broom. He didn't seem exactly surprised to see me and he didn't try to stop me when I marched straight on back to Basset's office. I kicked the door open and said, “Goddamn you, Basset, I want what's coming to me...”

But I left the words hanging. Basset had been receiving company while I'd been upstairs jawing with Bama. Kreyler, the fat man's right-hand gun, was leaning against the wall near the door. I guessed that Bama knew what he was talking about; Basset had experience in handling situations like this.

Kreyler didn't have his guns out, but he had his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, and all he had to do was cup his hand around the pistol butt if there was some shooting to be done. Basset was still sitting where I had left him, smiling that wet smile of his. He sat back wheezing and coughing.

“Why, son, what seems to be the matter? Ha-ha. You look all worked up about something. Doesn't he, Kreyler?”

Kreyler didn't say anything; he just looked at me with those flat, hate-filled eyes.

I said, “I came after my cut of that silver that we took in the smuggler raid. And don't try to talk me out of it, because I'm going to get it one way or another.”

I told Kreyler with a look that he could go to hell. If he wanted to make his draw, it was all right with me. But nothing happened for a minute. The fat man and the Marshal looked at each other and I began to get the idea that they were cooking something between them, but I didn't know what. Basset wasn't armed, as far as I could see, and even if he did have a gun on him, I figured it would take him a week to find it among all the folds of fat. If it was just Kreyler's shooting ability that I had to worry about, I was all right.

“Well, now,” Basset said, “this is very irregular. Very irregular indeed, isn't it, Kreyler? I was under the impression that you had picked up your cut this morning, Cameron.” He didn't seem worried, and that in itself was something for me to worry about. “However,” he went on, “we always try to keep the men happy here in Ocotillo. Even the ungrateful ones. Of course, it will mean going into my own pocket, but just so there won't be any hard feelings, I'm willing to add a little to your cut. Say another thirty-five dollars. In silver.”

I said, “I was thinking that five hundred dollars would be about right.”

He didn't like that. Those little eyes began to narrow and I got the feeling that this was the time to be careful.

“Well, now,” he said, “that's a lot of money. But, like I say, we try to keep the men happy.”

Grunting, he reached across his desk and pulled the cigar box over. “I think maybe it can be done,” he said vaguely. “Five hundred. Yes, I think it can be done, don't you, Kreyler?”

And while he was talking he was opening the cigar box and fumbling around in it. I had seen him do it before, just the way he was doing it now, and it hadn't meant a thing. But this time it did. Something prodded me in the back of my mind and I knew that it wasn't a cigar that he was fumbling for.

It was a little double-barreled derringer, probably, but he didn't get to use it. I guess he intended to let me have both barrels right through the lid of the box, and it wasn't such a bad idea, at that, because one of those little belly guns can do damage out of all proportion to its size. It was a nice setup, all right. In another second he would have shot my belt buckle right through my backbone. If he had lived that long.

At times like that you appreciate your training, and when it came to guns I had one of the best educations in the world. My right hand took over where my brain left off, and what came next was as natural as reciting the multiplication tables. More natural for me.

So I shot him. It was as simple as that, and I didn't wait to see where the bullet hit, because I already knew. When Pappy Garret trained a man, he didn't leave any margin for doubt about things like that. After I had pulled the trigger I moved one foot just enough to pull my body around and lay the pistol on Kreyler.

As a gunman, maybe the Marshal was all right as long as he stayed in his own class, but he hadn't had the advantage of studying with an expert, the way I had. As it was, I had all the time in the world. I could have shot him twice before the front sight of his pistol cleared his holster, and Kreyler knew it. I guess there was an instant there when he was already seeing himself frying in hell, because his eyes got that sick look and he lost heart and didn't even try to get his pistol out.

There's one thing about gun fighting, when you start shooting it's hard to stop. The first thing a gunman learns is to start shooting the minute his hand hits the gun butt—that is, he starts cocking his pistol the instant he starts his draw. If he's good enough he's got his pistol cocked and is squeezing the trigger by the time he clears leather, and from then on it's almost automatic. You cock again as the gun goes down from recoil, shoot again, cock again, until you're out of ammunition.

That's the way it usually goes. That's the way Kreyler expected it to go this time, and from the way he looked, he was already feeling the shovels hit him in the face as they covered him up in some boothill grave. But about that time something stopped me. I broke off right in the middle of the cock-trigger action and just stood there looking at him.

For a while he didn't believe it. And neither did I. I couldn't think of any good reason why I shouldn't shoot him. He had been drawing on me. He and the fat man had set a nice little trap for me. On top of that, I should have shot him just because of the principle of the thing, if for no other reason, because in the school I had attended they taught never to pull a gun on a man unless you meant to kill him.

This was the second time I had pulled on Kreyler. And he wasn't dead yet.

But finally I began to understand what had happened. In the heat of the fight I had forgotten that Kreyler was a U.S. marshal, and I guess it was instinct alone that held my trigger finger just in time.

After a minute Kreyler began to realize why I hadn't killed him, and I think it crossed his mind that maybe he could make his draw and shoot me while I was worrying about it. But it was just a fleeting thought. I didn't want to kill him, but I would if he forced it. And he knew it.

No more than two or three seconds had passed since I had put a bullet into Basset, but at that moment it seemed like years ago. I realized that I had been holding my breath, so now I let it go.

I said, “Just move easy, unbuckle your belt, and kick your pistol over here.” —

He hesitated a moment, then his pistol hit the floor and he kicked it over. I heard somebody running in the saloon, so I stepped over to the door and saw the bartender diving under the bar. After a shotgun, I figured. But he got peaceful when he saw me standing there, and all he came up with was a rag.

“Go over to one of those tables,” I said, “and sit there until I think of something for you to do.”

His Adam's apple went up and down a few times, as if he were trying to swallow his stomach, then he went over to a table and sat down, still holding onto the rag. Then there was a commotion outside the saloon and in a minute Bama and Marta came bursting through the batwings. They hurried on back and stopped at the doorway of Basset's office, looking in.

“My God,” Bama said weakly. He wiped his hand across his mouth, looking as if he needed a drink. Marta didn't do anything except stare at me.

I said, “Keep an eye on the bartender, Bama. How much racket did I make?”

“Plenty,” he gulped. “My God, did you have to kill him?”

“Of course I had to kill him. He was getting ready to shoot me with that derringer in his cigar box.”

I turned them and glanced at Basset for the first time. He was sprawled out in his chair, as formless as three hundred pounds of lard in a hot room, and getting more formless all the time. There was a black little hole about nine inches below his left shoulder, but there wasn't any blood to speak of.

I said, “You've been around here a while, Bama. How much excitement is this going to cause?”

“Plenty when Basset's men find out. That will take a little time, though. We heard the shooting upstairs, but I doubt if anybody else did.”

“Anyway, that gives us some time to figure out something. First there's the silver. I'm going to get my cut of that before I do anything else.”

Bama had opened Basset's cigar box. Something happened to his face as he stared into it. I don't know just what it was, but suddenly he looked very tired and very old. I pulled the box over and had a look at it. Then I heard myself saying, “Well, I'll be damned.”

There hadn't been any derringer in it, after all.

It was a shock at first. Then it occurred to me that it had been a lot bigger shock to Basset. There was something in it that seemed funny to me at just that moment, and I laughed a little and said again, “Well, I'll be damned. There wasn't any gun in there at all, he was just reaching for a cigar.”

Bama looked at me with those old eyes. “You can kill a man like that, and then laugh at it?”

I was keyed up, I guess, or I wouldn't have paid any attention to him. But as it was, it went all over me.

I said, “What areyou crying about? You shoot Mexicans in the back, don't you, for a few lousy pieces of silver? What makes you think that you've got a right to read a sermon to me?”

It hit him like a kick in the gut, and I was sorry after I had said it. I would have taken it back if I could, but I couldn't, so I tried to pass it off the best way I could.

“Why don't you go on out and take a look at the bartender?” I said. “If anybody comes into the saloon, let me know.”

That left me with Kreyler, and the problem of what to do with him. But first there was the silver, so I said, “All right, where does Basset keep his money?”

Kreyler gave me a flat look. “He doesn't keep any money, not here. After a raid he has it expressed to a bank in Tucson, under another name.”

“But he must have some money here,” I said. “Enough to pay me what he owes me.” I dumped Basset out of his chair and he hit the floor like a wagonload of mud. Then I began going through the drawers of his desk until I found what I was looking for.

It was in the strongbox that I had seen earlier in the morning, and I had to go through the dead man's pockets to get the key. After I got the box open, there it was, about five hundred adobe dollars.

“That will just about do it,” I said, and I sat down in Basset's chair and raked the silver coins into a canvas sack.

Kreyler was watching me, and he didn't look exactly brokenhearted because the fat man was dead. But I could understand that. With Basset dead, and the Indian dead, I had opened the road for the Marshal to sit down at the boss's desk and take over the business for himself.

“You really owe me a great deal,” I said. “I've done you two big favors since I've been in Ocotillo, getting rid of Basset and the Indian. To say nothing of not shooting you when I should have.”

“You haven't got the guts to shoot a United States marshal,” he said flatly.

Every man makes a mistake once in a while, and Kreyler made one right then. I had my money gathered up and was ready to leave everything just the way the Marshal wanted it—but when he opened his mouth he ruined it.

The idea must have been in the back of my mind all the time. Maybe it was even there when I shot Basset. I don't know for sure, but the idea jumped up too fast and too full-blown to have come from nowhere, and I guess I was just waiting for a chance to do something about it.

“Bama!” I yelled. “Come here!”

I was sitting at the fat man's desk, feeling pretty pleased with myself, as Bama came up and stopped in the doorway.

“Bama, how do I look?”

His eyes were puzzled. “You look all right, I guess. Why?”

“I mean how do I look sitting here at Basset's desk?”

“I guess I don't know what you're talking about.”

But Kreyler did. I grinned at him and he started swelling up like a toad and you could fairly see the angry fires behind those eyes of his.

“Bama,” I said, “I want you to go out and pass the word around that Basset is dead. Find all his men you can. Tell them I killed Basset and from now on I'm the boss of these smuggling raids. If they don't like it, just remind them what happened to the Indian. Oh, yes, and tell them that from now on they get the fair cut that Basset promised them but didn't give them, and that it will all be in silver or gold, whatever the smugglers have on them. But the thing I want you to impress them with is that I'm the boss. And I'll be the boss until a faster gunman comes along to change my mind.”