Mojave Crossing (1964) (15 page)

Nobody needed to tell me what I'd be going into, and I had no plan, no idea of what to do. Like I said, I never was much account at plotting or planning or working things out. All I know is to go bulling in and do whatever comes natural. Only thing I regretted was Nolan Sackett being there.

It went against me to fire on a Sackett of the blood. It would go hard to take lead from him, or to shoot him down where he stood. Even a Clinch Mountain Sackett was kin, and I wanted no shooting between us. Still, he had chosen his side, and now it was up to me.

Odd thing, the way a man is.

Trouble waited me there, I knew, maybe injury and death, but I turned around and started down the street, and headed right into x. Maybe I just didn't know any better.

Pausing on the corner, I taken out my six-shooter and spun the cylinder. She worked smooth and easy. A passerby gave me a sharp glance and hurried on past.

That man who took one look and hurried on was the smart one. He saw trouble and avoided it.

Only he didn't have all that gold awaiting him.

Tao's place was sure jumping. I mean, there were a lot of folks there, all of them gambling or drinking. By the time I reached the bar they had me spotted. Until that moment I'd have sworn I didn't know any but one or two of the men who had followed me out on the Mojave, but right away I recognized two of them here.

That black-eyed gunman was standing at the bar when I walked up to it, and he had a taunting, challenging sort of look to him that riled me. "You tell Dyer," I said, "that Tell Sackett is here, and wants to see him."

"He knows you're here."

Two men had walked over to a table near the door, where they sat down. Two other men strolled up to a card game and stood by, watching the play. A man playing at that table glanced around thoughtfully, then laid down his hand and cashed in his chips. He got up, kind of careless-like, and went out the door. He was a wise one ... he knew enough to get out before things busted wide open.

Nobody needed to tell me, after all, where to find Sandeman Dyer. The minute I saw him, I knew him.

He was sitting at a table in a little alcove, a man of less than medium height, with square shoulders, and a kind of angular face with high cheekbones. When a body first laid eyes on him it seemed that his face was out of kilter somehow, that maybe it was misshaped, but you couldn't find any one thing about it that was wrong by itself. It was just an impression you got.

He was smiling now, smiling easy and friendly.

And then I thought back to Shiloh, and I felt reason to worry, for when this man smiled he was dangerous indeed.

"Well, now, Sackett, it has been a long time. A very long time." And he held out his hand to me.

When I took it I knew how it would feel ... cold, and clammy. For I had shaken this man's hand before, and it meant no more now than it did then. He was a great one for shaking hands. I didn't make the mistake of forgetting his little tricks; only knowing Dyer, I knew it would not be now.

Sandeman Dyer--we called him Sandy then-- was a talker. He was a man with a love for the sound of his own voice. He was not only a talker, but a man who liked to parade what he knew, and he was almighty sure that he knew a whole lot more than anybody else. That easy smile of his, that easy laugh, they sort of covered the contempt he felt for anybody and everybody.

He was a bright man, all right, and a shrewd one. He was cunning like an animal ... it was a savage cunning ... but when the Good Lord put him together something went wrong. For he was a man without mercy, a man with cruelty so deeply ingrained in him that it was the most important part of his life. He was made up of cruelty and self-importance, I guess, in about equal amounts.

Yes, he loved to talk, to parade his smartness, but the trouble was he could stop talking awful sudden. ... He could break off in the middle of a sentence and kill you, or have you killed.

I'd seen it happen, for back there at Shiloh we were in the same outfit. The first time I saw it happen--the first time he shot an unarmed prisoner--I thought he'd gone wild from the pounding of the guns. Cruelty was a rare thing in the war. Fireside folks who talk about war and read about it, they figure it's cruel more often than not, but it simply isn't so. When you kill in war it is usually impersonal, except when you've seen a friend shot down, and then you strike back and hard ... if you can.

You kill in war because it is your job, and because you want to survive, and not because of any desire to kill. Cruelty takes time, and there is mighty little of that in war. But Sandy Dyer was a different kettle of fish.

The second time it was a major we'd captured, a handsome man of thirty-five, a gallant gentleman, who when trapped had surrendered. Come right down to it, he was my prisoner. That was what made me mad.

But when Dyer started talking to him nice and friendly like, I thought nothing of it. There were six of us there, and the prisoner. But mighty soon that talk of Dyer's began to take on a nasty edge I didn't care much for, and I said so. He paid me no mind.

"Got a family, Major?" Dyer asked, ever so gentle.

"Yes. I have a wife and two sons."

"Those boys, now. They in the army?"

"They are too young, sir. One is six and one is twelve."

"Ah ..." He looked up, innocent as a baby, and he looked right into t major's eyes and he said, "I wonder how many times your wife has been raped since this war started?"

It came so sudden we all sort of jumped, and three, four of us, we started to bust in. That major's face had gone white and he stepped forward and drew back his hand to strike, and Dyer stepped back out of reach and he said, "Major ... you ain't never going to know."

Well, I'd heard of men getting a gun out fast, but I'd never seen it. In the high-up mountains it was mostly rifles we used, and the repeating pistol was scarce twenty-odd years old, and mighty few of us had even seen one.

He just drew that pistol and shot that major right in the belly.

Me, I knocked him down.

He hit ground all in a heap and then he went sort of crazy. Rightly speaking, I expect he was crazy all the time. Later on, when the story was told around I began to hear of other things he'd done. Anyway, he came off the ground and rushed at me, and I hit him again.

There was trouble over that, and a sort of drum-head court-martial and he was discharged out of the service.

I heard afterward he'd joined Quantrill or Bloody Bill Anderson or one of those.

And now here he was, facing me across the table, and I knew he hadn't forgotten those times I'd hit him. I also knew he was dangerous as a cornered rattler and would strike, like a rattler in the "blind," without warning.

He was no rational man, and those others with him, they would do what he said.

Under my shirt I could feel cold sweat on my body, and I was scared. This here was a man I'd hoped never to see again, and I had walked right into hm. Only I had one advantage over the others he might have tangled with. I knew that when he started talking soft and easy, I'd have to be careful.

Another thing I knew. Before we parted one of us was going to die. There just couldn't be any other way.

"Thought you were an eastern man, Dyer," I said. Drawing back a chair, I sat down, but where none of them could get behind me without my seeing them. "I didn't expect to run into y out here."

"I don't expect you wanted to see me, did you, Sackett?"

"Why not?" I said carelessly. Then I added, "I hear one of your boys was good enough to bring my gold in off the desert. I take that kindly."

He smiled, and this time there was something like real humor in the smile. I could see he liked my way of putting it.

"I believe there was some mention of gold," he said, "but I understand it was found on the desert. I had no idea it belonged to you." He went on smiling at me. "I suppose you can identify it?"

Now I could see he was taunting me, being sure there was no way of identifying raw gold, but in that he was wrong. Truth was, I knew mighty little about such things, only what a body hears talking with miners and prospectors, but he didn't have to know that.

"Matter of fact," I said, "I can identify it. So can any good assayer. The amount of silver and other mineral associated with gold varies from place to place."

He didn't like that. Not so much because he thought I could identify the gold, as because he hadn't known this fact.

Sitting there, casual like and easy on the surface, I was doing some fast figuring. This was an unbalanced man, deadly fast with a six-shooter, andwitha hair-trigger temper. A normal man can be understood to some extent; but this man, though shrewd and calculating up to a point, was apt to do some damned fool thing--some damned deadly thing--on a momentary whim. It was like sitting on a keg of dynamite with a wet fuse.

You knew it was going to go, but you didn't know when.

The men he had with him were bandits, adventurers, drifters, men out to make easy money, or money that sounded easy, and they followed him because he had brains and daring, and because they feared to cross him. He had come south hunting money and trouble, and they were with him all the way.

The chances were that most of those men were good with guns.

Some were renegades left over from the War Between the States, others were just outlaws he'd picked up.

The way to whip a man is to keep him off-balance, and it seemed to me my best chance to get out of this alive, or with a shooting chance, was to keep him from thinking about it.

"'Member that time we met that outfit of Gray-backs on Owl Creek?" I said.

Glancing across the table at the others, I went on, "I never saw the like. Dyer here was on my left. There were six of us moving up to the creek in the late evening. It was coming up to dark, and it was still ... so still you could hear our clothes rustling as we walked.

"Dyer, he had himself a pair of Remington .36-31libre six-shooters that he spent a good part of his time polishing up. He had those guns belted on, and we all carried rifles.

"Well, sir, we were a-walking along, moving like a pack of Mescaleros, when suddenly we stepped into a clearing. And just as we done so, a party of Rebs came in from the other side, at least twenty in the outfit.

"They were as surprised as we were, only Dyer here, he acted quicker'n you could say scat.

He dropped his rifle where he stood and outs with those Remingtons ... you never heard such fire.

You'd have thought he had him one of those Smith-Percival magazine pistols that fire forty shots.

"He just opened up and went to blasting with both guns at once, and that whole party cut and run ... why, I don't think ary of us got off a shot, only Dyer. He downed three of them, wounded I don't know how many."

Folks somehow have a feeling when something is about to happen, and you'd be surprised how business had fallen off in just those few minutes since I came in. That first man who cashed in his chips, he began it. Maybe a dozen had drifted out since then.

But Sandeman Dyer was a man who liked to hear himself talked about. He sat back and ordered drinks, and we started talking up old times.

Yet all the time I was realizing that the fewer outsiders were in that place, the less chance I'd have. Not that Dyer would care much for witnesses. When it came on him to kill, nothing in the world was going to stop him ... it was a kind of madness.

The worst of it was, he was fast.

Was I quicker with a gun? I surely didn't know. The fact of the matter was, it wouldn't make an awful lot of difference, because when the shooting started, if he didn't get me the rest of them would. Only I made up my mind that no matter how much lead I took, I was going to keep shooting long enough to take him with me. For if ever a man needed to die, it was Sandeman Dyer.

So we talked the afternoon away, and finally I knew I had to let go of the bull.

What I mean is, I had a bull by the tail and I was safe as long as I hung on, but I had to let go sometime, and it was better to pick my own time than to wait until he got impatient.

So finally I said, "Well, it's been friendly, seeing you after all these years, but I've got to start back for Arizona. If you'll hand over my gold, I'll leave out of here."

His expression changed ever so little, his lids flickering just an instant as he adjusted to what I'd said. Our talk had kind of lulled everybody else into quiet. They were kind of scattered out, busy with their own activities, drinking, talking, sure there'd be no trouble.

They didn't know Dyer like I did.

"Why, sure!" He smiled at me with all the warmth of a hungry wolf. "I intended you to have it all the time." He turned his head to the man behind the bar. "Joe, open the safe and bring that sack of gold over here."

And right then, I knew.

It had to be when I put my hand on that gold ... or when I reached the door with it.

More than likely it would be the last, for he would want to drag it out. He might shoot me in the back, but it was more probable he'd let me get almost to the door, drawing his gun behind my back, and then he'd speak to me, and when I turned he would let me have it.