A Noose for the Desperado (2 page)

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?”

“Si.
You come with me, gringo.”

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.

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.