The Desperado

Chapter 10

I couldn't see who was holding the gun, and I didn't turn around to look. The slightest movement, I knew, would only get me a sudden trip to Boothill.

Marshal Langly started to breathe again. He stopped sweating and shaking, and his face began to get some color. Suddenly he sat back and laughed out of pure relief.

“Pappy Garret,” he chuckled after he caught his breath. “The notorious gunman!” Then his voice barked. “Unbuckle your cartridge belts and drop your pistols to the floor!”

Or I would get a bullet in the back, his eyes said.

For an instant I wondered if Pappy really cared what happened to me, as long as he could take his revenge out on Langly. But I didn't have to wonder long. Wearily, he unbuckled the belts and the pistols dropped at his feet.

“All right, Jim,” he said tiredly. “I guess you've got it going your way now.”

Langly had his own .38 out now. “You bet I have, Pappy. I've got it going my way and that's the way it's going to stay.” He sat back, looking pleased with himself. “You didn't think your old friend Jim Langly would be the one to bring you to your knees, did you? Well, you were wrong, Pappy. You haven't got any friends— not even that kill-crazy kid you've been riding with. Sooner or later he would have turned on you, because he's just the same as you are.”

He was enjoying himself now. Him with a pistol in his hand and Pappy's .44's on the floor. And me with a gun in my back. He wasn't afraid of anything now. He was a hero and enjoying every minute of it. But the crowd in the saloon was still too stunned to be sure that is wasn't a joke.

“You know what you are, Pappy?” the marshal smiled. “You're a mad dog. You kill by instinct, the way a mad dog does. I'll be doing the whole country a favor by locking you up and turning you over to the Texas authorities.”

My stomach sank. I might as well die here as on a carpetbag gallows.

But Pappy didn't move. He said, “I don't suppose the price on my head had anything to do with it.”

Langly went on smiling. He could afford to smile now. He got up from the table and said, “All right, Bass, take the kid's guns and we'll lock them up.”

The man behind moved around in front. When he got around to face me I was too startled to guess what was going on in Pappy's mind. The man was Bass Hagan.

He must have come into Abilene right behind me and Pappy, but he hadn't used the same trail we had. He stood there with the pistol in my belly, grinning that wide grin of his.

“The pistols,” he said. “Hand them over, kid.”

And then I began to get it. Pappy still had his back turned to me, but I knew what he must be thinking. I reached very carefully for my right-hand pistol, slid it out of the holster.

“Butts first,” Hagan grinned. He was the careful kind. He was standing back far enough so that I couldn't rush him, even if I wascrazy enough to rush a man with a cocked pistol in his hand. “Just hand them over, kid,” he said.

If he had known more about guns and gunmen he would have done as Langly had done, ordered me to unbuckle my belts. But he didn't know. I took the pistol by the barrel, slipping my finger into the trigger guard, and held it out. It had been a beautiful maneuver when Pappy had done it. But this time it wasn't Pappy. And the gun in my belly was loaded and cocked.

Maybe I would have handed the gun over if he hadn't been grinning. But he kept on grinning and I thought, There never would have been this trouble if it hadn't been for you. And my hand did the rest.

The pistol was just a blur as it whirled forward. The hammer snapped back as it hit my thumb on top of the turn, and fell forward.

I think Bass Hagan began to die before the bullet ever reached him. I could see death in his eyes even before the muzzle blast jarred the room, before the bullet slammed into his chest and he reeled back without ever pulling the trigger.

The shot affected the saloon customers like a stunning blow of a pole ax on a steer. They stood dumb, watching Hagan go to his knees and die, then fall on his face. Even Langly couldn't seem to move.

But Pappy could. He sliced across with the edge of his hand and sent the marshal's little .38 clattering to the floor. A split second was all it took. I wheeled instinctively to turn my pistol on Langly, but Pappy said sharply:

“No, son!”

For some reason, I held my fire. Nobody but Pappy could have stopped me then. But Pappy's voice did it. I held the hammer back and my finger relaxed a little on the trigger.

Pappy said, “He's not worth wasting a bullet on.” But his eyes, not his voice, put the real bitterness into the words. “Come along, son,” he said, picking up his guns. “I guess Abilene's not our town after all.”

Well, if that was the way Pappy wanted it... I started toward the doors, moving sideways, trying to keep my eyes on both sides of me and on the bar mirror on the opposite wall. Then Pappy said:

“Just a minute, son. The marshal will be going with us.”

I began to get it then. With the marshal dead, our chances of getting out of Abilene would be cut down to nothing. But with the marshal going with us, under the threat of sudden death if anybody tried to stop us, then maybe we could do it.

I waited, covering Pappy's retreat. Langly's mouth was working again. He looked as if he was going to be sick on the floor.

“Pappy, for God's sake, can't you take a joke?” he said quickly. “You don't really think I'd turn you over to the Texas police, do you?”

Pappy's face didn't show a thing. He reached out with a clawlike hand, grabbed the front of the marshal's ruffled shirt, and gave him a shove toward the door. Then he paused for just a moment to address our stunned audience.

“I don't guess it will take a lot of figuring,” he said, “to guess what will happen to the marshal if anybody tries to follow us out of town.” He waited another moment to make sure that they had it clear. Then he said, “All right, son, let's be moving.”

I waited at the doors, keeping the crowd covered, while Pappy got our horses in the street. He said something under his breath and Langly got on a gray mare that had been hitched beside Red. It was funny, in a way. Men with guns on both hips, pushing and shoving in both directions on the plank walk, and none of them bothering to give us a second look. I slammed the batwings then, turned and vaulted up to Red's back.

We fogged it down Texas Street in a wedge formation, Langley in the point and me and Pappy on both sides. Pappy let out an ear-splitting yell like a crazy man, then drew one pistol and emptied it in the air. But Pappy wasn't so crazy. The crowd in the street, thinking we were drunk trail hands, scattered for the plank walks, and we had a clear road to travel out of Abilene.

“Make for the dust!” Pappy yelled, pointing toward the low-hanging red clouds rising up from a herd coming in for shipment. I crowded Langly on my side, turning him to the west. I looked back once as we went into the dust, but nobody was coming after us yet.

I didn't like the idea of making a getaway along the trail of incoming herds. Too many people could see us. But pretty soon night came on and we didn't have to depend on the dust for concealment. Then we swung to the west, Langly still in the middle.

At last we came to a creek, and we stopped there to let our horses blow. Pappy seemed to be in good spirits again. He kept looking at the marshal with that half-grin of his.

“Jim,” he said, “it looks like your friends in Abilene are going to take our advice and look after your health.” Then he added with mock soberness, “They sure must love you, Jim. But you always did have a way with people, I remember.”

The marshal had got over his scare. I guess he already saw himself as good as dead, and there wasn't anything to be afraid of after that.

He said, “You'll never get away with it, Pappy. They'll get you. No matter where you go, they'll get you.”

“Maybe,” Pappy said mildly, “but I doubt it. I hear law dogs don't go snooping around much in No Man's Land, down in the Oklahoma country.”

Langly spat. “No Man's Land is a long way off.”

I could almost see Pappy grinning in the darkness. I caught a glimpse of steel as he drew his right-hand pistol, and I thought, without any emotion at all, This will be one more to add to Pappy's score.

But he didn't shoot. There was a blue blur in the night, and then a sodden thud as the pistol barrel crashed the marshal's skull. Langly dropped leadenly out of the saddle and hit the ground. Casually, Pappy bolstered his .44.

“Now why the hell did you do that?” I said. “You're not going to leave him alive, are you?”

Pappy said, “Jim will do us more good alive than dead. When he gets back to Abilene, maybe he'll send a posse down to No Man's Land. But he'll have a hell of a time finding us there.” He looked over to the east. “The Osage country,” he said, “down in Indian Territory. That's where we'll make for. The Osages like the cavalry about as well as we do, and white man's law even less.” He nodded. “That's the place to make for.”

It was a long ride—half the width of Kansas—from Abilene to the northeastern border of the Oklahoma country. But Pappy had traveled it before and he knew every foot of the trail, even at night. We left Langly on the creek bank with a knot on his head and without any pants. Taking the marshal's pants had been something that Pappy had thought of on the spur of the moment, and he still grinned as he thought about it. “Losing his pants,” Pappy chuckled, “will be almost as bad on Jim as getting killed. Besides, he won't get back to Abilene in such a hurry if he has to scout around for a horse and another pair of pants.”

By this time, doing the impossible, crossing half of Kansas when every law officer in the territory was out to get us, didn't surprise me. I had come to expect the impossible from Pappy. I began to suspect that he would live forever, even with the net drawing tighter and tighter around him all the time, because he knew instinctively what to do at exactly the right time. While Langly, and maybe the army, were cutting tracks all over southeastern Kansas and No Man's Land, we were heading for Indian Territory.

And we made it, in that walk-canter-gallop system of march that Pappy had developed, traveling only at night and going to elaborate pains to cover our trail. We came to the wild-looking hill country, bristling with pine and spruce and hostile Indians—a place where not even the government agents dared to go without military escort. And not often then.

We found a natural cave about ten miles from the border, and Pappy said that was good enough. There was plenty of wild game to keep us eating, and water in a small stream for us and the horses.

I remember the day we rode into the place. Pappy stood in the mouth of the cave, grinning pleasantly, not bothered at all at the possibility of having to stay here for months before we dared venture out into civilization again.

“Well, son,” he said, “this is going to be our home for a spell. We might as well settle down to getting comfortable.”

I felt an emptiness inside me. A kind of hopelessness. I felt as if I had cut away the very last remaining tie to the kind of life I had known before. This was living like an animal, killing instinctively like an animal.

I tried to keep the sickness out of my voice as I said:

“Sure, Pappy. This is our home.”

That was spring, in June, and it wasn't so bad at first. We made friends with some of the Osages. They were on our side the minute they learned that we were enemies of the white man's government. Sometimes they would bring us pieces of government issue beef, but not often, because the government didn't give them enough to stay their own hunger. Mostly, Pappy and I lived on rabbits that we trapped, or sometimes shot. Occasionally the Osages would bring us a handful of corn, and we would parch it over a fire and then grind it up and make a kind of coffee. Once in a great while, an Indian would overhear snatches of conversation about the white man's world and would relay the information to us.

It was in August, I remember, when we first heard that Davis was no longer the governor of Texas. But that didn't solve all my problems as cleanly as I had once thought it would.

Pappy said, “Now don't try to rush things, son. It's going to take time to get the army out of Texas, even if Davis isn't governor any longer. And don't forget the Texas Rangers; they'll be taking the army's place. And the United States marshals...” Then he looked at me with those sad, sober eyes of his, and I knew the worst was yet to come.

He said slowly, “It won't ever be the same as it was before, son. They won't be forgetting that bluebelly cavalryman you killed, especially the government marshals.”

I felt that old familiar sickness in the pit of my stomach.

Pappy said, “Forget about this John's City place, son. You won't ever be able to go back there again. We'll head for the New Mexico country, or maybe Arizona, where nobody knows us.” He laughed abruptly. “Who knows, maybe we'll turn out to be honest, hard-working citizens.”

But he knew what I was thinking. And he said, “Forget about the girl, too, son. It will be the best for both of you.”

I knew Pappy was right. I could look ahead and see how things would be from now on. But I couldn't forget Laurin. She was a part of me that I couldn't put away. Then Pappy's words hit me and I saw a new hope. We'll head for the New Mexico country, Pappy had said. Why couldn't Laurin go with us? If she loved me, if she believed in me, she would do that. I'd change my name and we could homestead a place in New Mexico. We could live like other people there....

Pappy was looking at me with those eyes that seemed to know everything. “Forget about her, son. Women just don't take men like us.”

For a moment, I wondered if Pappy was speaking from experience. But that thought soon passed from my mind. The idea of Pappy ever being in love was too ridiculous to consider seriously. Besides, I couldn't forget Laurin any more than I could forget that I had a right arm. She was a part of me. She would always be a part of me.

And I suppose that Pappy saw how it was, and he didn't try to change my mind again.

But he insisted that we stay in our cave until the last of the cattle drives were made in the fall. By then, he said, the army should be out of Texas. If I was bound to go back to John's City, he said, winter would be the best time.