Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories (3 page)

Just past the canyon bend, Juan angled toward the shadowy vein of a crevice, the base overgrown
with brush, which entered into a defile twisting through a squeezed-in narrowness to finally emerge in open country again at the base of the mountain.

From the ledge, Struggles' gaze lifted to the thin spire of rock, then dropped slowly, inching down with the speck that was Juan Solo descending the steep, narrow path of a rock slide that made a sweeping angle from the peak to the ledge where Struggles stood, then lost itself completely in a scatter of boulders on a bench fifty feet below. Struggles moved to the edge and glanced at the animals on the bench then on down the grade to the canyon they had left a few hours before, squinting hard, before looking back at Juan Solo.

And as the Indian reached the ledge, Struggles shook his head, then pressed his sleeve against his forehead and exhaled slowly. “I'm worn out just watching you,” he said.

The Indian swung from his shoulder a blanket gathered into the shape of a sack. “Climbing for such that is up there is never wearing,” he said. He untied the blanket ends and let them drop, watching Struggles, as the surgeon looked with astonishment at the dull-gleaming heap of candlesticks, chalices and crosses; all ornately tooled and some decorated with precious stones.

“These and more were placed in the sepulchre of Tomas Maria,” Juan Solo said. “Along with the sil
ver that had already been fashioned into bars when the restoration took place.”

Struggles picked up a slender cruciform and ran his fingers over the baroque carvings. “It's unbelievable,” he said, looking at Juan Solo. “These articles should be in a museum.”

Juan Solo shook his head and there was the hint of a smile softening the straight lips of his mouth. “Then what would Tomas Maria have? These were only for if your mind doubted,” he said, gathering the blanket and swinging it over his shoulder. “Now I will get your silver.” And started up the slope.

Struggles felt a tingle of nervousness now; a restless urge to move about or at least face the solidness of the rock wall, as if by not seeing, the sprawling openness of the grade would not make him feel so naked. It stretched below him in a vast unmoving silence that seemed to hold time in a vacuum.

For a few minutes he watched Juan Solo almost a hundred feet above him. And when he again looked out over the slope, he saw it immediately, the thin dust thread in the distance on what only a few minutes before was a landscape as still as a painting. He watched it grow as it approached, squinting hard until he was sure, then he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Juan!” sharply. And when he saw the figure look down, he pointed out to the
dust trail until he was certain Juan saw it, then went over the ledge, sliding down to the bench in a shower of loose gravel that made the animals shy at their halters and back away from the slope.

He moved them in quickly as best he could under a jutting of rock and pulled his carbine from its boot before moving back to the ledge.

 

T
HE BENCH WAS
a good thousand yards up the slope from the basin floor, and from there the riders were only dots against the ragged country, indistinguishable, disappearing behind brush now and again; but finally Struggles could make out six of them following the switchbacks single-file up the grade. He pushed his carbine out over the rocks watching the front door close as they approached. There was no back door. He had no doubt as to who they were, and still they kept coming, making no attempt to stay behind cover. From a hundred yards they all looked Mexican. One of them started to wave his sombrero and suddenly there was a pistol shot from above.

Struggles looked up, going flat behind the rocks, and saw Juan Solo down on the ledge again swinging his pistol in an arc before firing twice more; and when Struggles lifted his head above the rocks, he saw only a lone figure running after the horses that
were scattering far down the grade. Nothing moved along the slope where the riders had been. Beyond the scattered rock and brush, the solitary figure was slowly rounding up the horses one at a time and leading them behind the shelter of a rise.

Struggles swung his carbine across a straight line waiting for something to move. They couldn't stay down forever. But for the next few minutes nothing happened.

Then, he saw the sombrero lift hesitantly above a rock for a full second before disappearing. After a few moments, the crown was edging up again when the pistol shot sounded from above and echoed back from down the slope. The hat disappeared again and someone yelled, “Hold your fire!” and next a white cloth was waving back and forth over the rock.

A man stepped out from behind the covering holding the cloth and motioned to the side until another man moved out hesitantly to join him as he started up the grade waving the cloth. He carried only a holstered pistol, but the second man held a Winchester across the crook of his arm. They came on slowly until they were in short-pistol range.

Struggles put his sights square in the center of the first man's chest and thought how easy it would be, but then he called, “That's good enough!”

The one with the rifle hesitated, but the other didn't break his stride.

“I said that's far enough!”

He stopped then, less than fifty feet away. A willow-root straw was down close to his eyes shading his features, but you could see that he was an American. There was an easiness about him, standing in the open in a relaxed slouch; and Struggles thought,
He looks like a red-dirt farmer leaning against the corner on Saturday night. Only there's no match-stick in his mouth and a gun's only six inches from his hand.

The one with the Winchester, a Mexican, moved up next to him and stood sideways so that the cradled barrel was pointing up to the ledge. The American followed the direction of the barrel, then looked where he thought Struggles to be.

“Tell that crazy Indian to do something with his nerves,” he called.

Struggles lifted his head slightly from the rear sight. “You're the one making him nervous, not me.”

“There doesn't have to be trouble—that's what I mean.” He pushed the straw up from his eyes. “Why don't you come out in the open?”

Struggles' cheek pressed against the stock again. “You better get to the point pretty soon.” And with the words saw the American's face break into a smile.

“Well, the point is, you're sitting on a pile of silver and I want it.” His smile broadened and he
added, “And the edge of the point is that we're six and you're two.”

“Only when you come to get us, it's going to cost you something,” Struggles said.

“Not if we sit back in the shade and wait for your tongues to swell up.”

“You look a little too skinny to be good at waiting.”

The American nodded to the ledge. “Ask Juan how good I am at waiting. I used up a lot of my patience while my vaqueros scratched for your sign, but I still got some left.”

Struggles admitted, “It didn't take you too long at that.”

“Your boy isn't the only one who knows the country.” He was waving the white cloth idly. “Look,” he said. “Here's how it is. You either sit and die of thirst, or else get on your mounts and ride the hell out. Of course, for my own protection I'd have to ask both of you to leave your guns behind.”

Struggles said, “You don't have a high regard for our reasoning, do you?”

The man shrugged. “I'm not talking you into anything.” He waited a few moments, then turned and walked down the slope. The Mexican backed down, keeping the Winchester high.

Struggles fingered the trigger lightly and wondered what that principle was based on—about not shooting a man in the back. And when the straw hat was out of range he still had not thought of it.

Through the heat of the afternoon Struggles' mind talked to him, making conversation; but always an argument resulted, and his mind was poor company because it kept telling him that he was afraid. When the heat began to lift, a breeze stirred lazily over the bench and made a faint whispering sound as it played through the crevices above. And finally, the bench lost its shape in darkness.

It was cool relief after the glaring white light of the afternoon; but with the darkness, the slope that was still a painting now came alive and was something menacing.

Struggles crawled back to the slope and stood up, cupping his hands to his mouth, and whispered, “Juan,” then gritted his teeth as the word cut the silence.

He waited, but nothing happened. He brought up his hands again, but jumped back quickly as a stream of loose shale clattered down from above. And as if on signal, two rifles opened up from below. Struggles went flat and inched back to the rim as the firing kept up, spattering against the flinty slope.

 

W
HEN IT STOPPED,
he raised his head above the rocks, but there was only the darkness.
They're not a hundred feet away,
he thought.
Waiting for us to move.
He settled down again, pressing close to the rock barrier. Well, they were going to have a long wait. But now he wondered if he was alone. Since the firing there had been no sound from above. Had something happened to Juan?

Time lost its meaning after a while and became only something that dragged hope with it as it went nowhere.

Sometime after midnight, Struggles started to doze off. His head nodded and his chin was almost on his chest, but even then a consciousness warned him and he jerked his head up abruptly. He moved it from side to side now, shaking himself awake; and as his face swung to the left he saw the pinpoint of a gleam up on the mountainside.

He came to his feet, fully awake now, but blinked his eyes to make sure. The light was moving down with crawling slowness from the peak, flickering dully, but growing in intensity as it inched down the rock slide path that Juan Solo had climbed earlier.

After a few minutes Struggles saw a torch, with the flame dancing against the blackness of the
slope, and as it descended to the ledge the shape of a man was illuminated weirdly in the flickering orange light it cast.

The figure moved to the edge, holding up a baroque cross whose end was the burning torch—the figure of a man wearing the coarse brown robes of a Franciscan friar.

He held the cross high overhead and spoke one sentence of Castilian, the words cold and shrill in the darkness.

“Leave this Blood of the Saint or thus your souls shall plunge to the hell of the damned!”

His arm swung back and the torch soared out into the night and down until it hit far below on the slope in a shower of bursting sparks. The figure was gone in the darkness.

Quiet settled again, but a few minutes later gunfire came from down the slope. And shortly after that, the sound of horses running hard, and dying away in the distance.

The rest of the night Struggles asked himself questions. He sat unmoving with the dead cigar stub still in his mouth and tried to think it out, applying logic. Finally he came to a conclusion. There was only one way to find out the answers to last night's mystery.

At the first sign of morning light he rose and started to climb up the slope toward the ledge.

This would answer both questions—it was the only way.

He was almost past caring whether or not the American and his men were still below. Almost. He climbed slowly, feeling the tenseness between his shoulder blades because he wasn't sure of anything. When he was nearing the rim, a hand reached down to his arm and pulled him up the rest of the way.

“Juan.”

The Indian steadied him as he got to his feet. “You came with such labor, I thought you sick.”

And at that moment Struggles did feel sick. Weak with relief, he was, suddenly, for only then did he realize that somehow it was all over.

He exhaled slowly and his grizzled face relaxed into a smile. He looked past Juan Solo and the smile broadened as his eyes fell on the torn blanket with the pieces of rope coiled on top of it.

“Padre, you ought to take better care of your cassock,” Struggles said, nodding toward the blanket.

Juan Solo frowned. “Your words pass me,” he said, looking out over the slope; and added quickly, “Let us find what occurred with the American.”

Struggles was dead certain that Juan knew without even having to go down from the ledge.

Not far down the grade they found him, lying on his face with stiffened fingers clawed into the loose sand. Near his body were the ashes of the cruci
form, still vaguely resembling—even as the wind began to blow it into nothingness—the shape of a cross.

Struggles said, “I take it he didn't believe in the friar, and wouldn't listen to his men who did.”

Juan Solo nodded as if to say,
So you see what naturally happened,
then said, “Now there is plenty of time for your silver, Señor Doctor,” and started back up the grade.

Struggles followed after him, trying to picture Tomas Maria, and thinking what a good friend the friar had in Juan Solo.

H
E HAD PICKED
up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention. The two riders moved slowly, one behind the other.

Entering Stockman Street, Paul Scallen glanced back at the open country with the wet haze blanketing its flatness, thinking of the long night ride from Huachuca, relieved that this much was over. When his body turned again, his hand moved over the sawed-off shotgun that was across his lap and he kept his eyes on the man ahead of him until they
were near the end of the second block, opposite the side entrance of the Republic Hotel.

He said just above a whisper, though it was clear in the silence, “End of the line.”

The man turned in his saddle, looking at Scallen curiously. “The jail's around on Commercial.”

“I want you to be comfortable.”

Scallen stepped out of the saddle, lifting a Winchester from the boot, and walked toward the hotel's side door. A figure stood in the gloom of the doorway, behind the screen, and as Scallen reached the steps the screen door opened.

“Are you the marshal?”

“Yes, sir.” Scallen's voice was soft and without emotion. “Deputy, from Bisbee.”

“We're ready for you. Two-oh-seven. A corner…fronts on Commercial.” He sounded proud of the accommodation.

“You're Mr. Timpey?”

The man in the doorway looked surprised. “Yeah, Wells Fargo. Who'd you expect?”

“You might have got a back room, Mr. Timpey. One with no windows.” He swung the shotgun on the man still mounted. “Step down easy, Jim.”

The man, who was in his early twenties, a few years younger than Scallen, sat with one hand over the other on the saddle horn. Now he gripped the horn and swung down. When he was on the ground
his hands were still close together, iron manacles holding them three chain lengths apart. Scallen motioned him toward the door with the stubby barrel of the shotgun.

“Anyone in the lobby?”

“The desk clerk,” Timpey answered him, “and a man in a chair by the front door.”

“Who is he?”

“I don't know. He's asleep…got his brim down over his eyes.”

“Did you see anyone out on Commercial?”

“No…I haven't been out there.” At first he had seemed nervous, but now he was irritated, and a frown made his face pout childishly.

Scallen said calmly, “Mr. Timpey, it was your line this man robbed. You want to see him go all the way to Yuma, don't you?”

“Certainly I do.” His eyes went to the outlaw, Jim Kidd, then back to Scallen hurriedly. “But why all the melodrama? The man's under arrest—already been sentenced.”

“But he's not in jail till he walks through the gates at Yuma,” Scallen said. “I'm only one man, Mr. Timpey, and I've got to get him there.”

“Well, dammit…I'm not the law! Why didn't you bring men with you? All I know is I got a wire from our Bisbee office to get a hotel room and meet you here the morning of November third. There
weren't any instructions that I had to get myself deputized a marshal. That's your job.”

“I know it is, Mr. Timpey,” Scallen said, and smiled, though it was an effort. “But I want to make sure no one knows Jim Kidd's in Contention until after train time this afternoon.”

Jim Kidd had been looking from one to the other with a faintly amused grin. Now he said to Timpey, “He means he's afraid somebody's going to jump him.” He smiled at Scallen. “That marshal must've really sold you a bill of goods.”

“What's he talking about?” Timpey said.

Kidd went on before Scallen could answer. “They hid me in the Huachuca lockup 'cause they knew nobody could get at me there…and finally the Bisbee marshal gets a plan. He and some others hopped the train in Benson last night, heading for Yuma with an army prisoner passed off as me.” Kidd laughed, as if the idea were ridiculous.

“Is that right?” Timpey said.

Scallen nodded. “Pretty much right.”

“How does he know all about it?”

“He's got ears and ten fingers to add with.”

“I don't like it. Why just one man?”

“Every deputy from here down to Bisbee is out trying to scare up the rest of them. Jim here's the only one we caught,” Scallen explained—then added, “alive.”

Timpey shot a glance at the outlaw. “Is he the one who killed Dick Moons?”

“One of the passengers swears he saw who did it…and he didn't identify Kidd at the trial.”

Timpey shook his head. “Dick drove for us a long time. You know his brother lives here in Contention. When he heard about it he almost went crazy.” He hesitated, and then said again, “I don't like it.”

Scallen felt his patience wearing away, but he kept his voice even when he said, “Maybe I don't either…but what you like and what I like aren't going to matter a whole lot, with the marshal past Tucson by now. You can grumble about it all you want, Mr. Timpey, as long as you keep it under your breath. Jim's got friends…and since I have to haul him clear across the territory, I'd just as soon they didn't know about it.”

Timpey fidgeted nervously. “I don't see why I have to get dragged into this. My job's got nothing to do with law enforcement….”

“You have the room key?”

“In the door. All I'm responsible for is the stage run between here and Tucson—”

Scallen shoved the Winchester at him. “If you'll take care of this and the horses till I get back, I'll be obliged to you…and I know I don't have to ask you not to mention we're at the hotel.”

He waved the shotgun and nodded and Jim Kidd went ahead of him through the side door into the hotel lobby. Scallen was a stride behind him, holding the stubby shotgun close to his leg. “Up the stairs on the right, Jim.”

Kidd started up, but Scallen paused to glance at the figure in the armchair near the front. He was sitting on his spine with limp hands folded on his stomach and, as Timpey had described, his hat low over the upper part of his face. You've seen people sleeping in hotel lobbies before, Scallen told himself, and followed Kidd up the stairs. He couldn't stand and wonder about it.

Room 207 was narrow and high-ceilinged, with a single window looking down on Commercial Street. An iron bed was placed the long way against one wall and extended to the right side of the window, and along the opposite wall was a dresser with washbasin and pitcher and next to it a rough-board wardrobe. An unpainted table and two straight chairs took up most of the remaining space.

“Lay down on the bed if you want to,” Scallen said.

“Why don't you sleep?” Kidd asked. “I'll hold the shotgun.”

The deputy moved one of the straight chairs near to the door and the other to the side of the table opposite the bed. Then he sat down, resting the shot
gun on the table so that it pointed directly at Jim Kidd sitting on the edge of the bed near the window.

He gazed vacantly outside. A patch of dismal sky showed above the frame buildings across the way, but he was not sitting close enough to look directly down onto the street. He said, indifferently, “I think it's going to rain.”

There was a silence, and then Scallen said, “Jim, I don't have anything against you personally…this is what I get paid for, but I just want it understood that if you start across the seven feet between us, I'm going to pull both triggers at once—without first asking you to stop. That clear?”

Kidd looked at the deputy marshal, then his eyes drifted out the window again. “It's kinda cold too.” He rubbed his hands together and the three chain links rattled against each other. “The window's open a crack. Can I close it?”

Scallen's grip tightened on the shotgun and he brought the barrel up, though he wasn't aware of it. “If you can reach it from where you're sitting.”

Kidd looked at the windowsill and said without reaching toward it, “Too far.”

“All right,” Scallen said, rising. “Lay back on the bed.” He worked his gun belt around so that now the Colt was on his left hip.

Kidd went back slowly, smiling. “You don't take any chances, do you? Where's your sporting blood?”

“Down in Bisbee with my wife and three youngsters,” Scallen told him without smiling, and moved around the table.

There were no grips on the window frame. Standing with his side to the window, facing the man on the bed, he put the heel of his hand on the bottom ledge of the frame and shoved down hard. The window banged shut and with the slam he saw Jim Kidd kicking up off of his back, his body straining to rise without his hands to help. Momentarily, Scallen hesitated and his finger tensed on the trigger. Kidd's feet were on the floor, his body swinging up and his head down to lunge from the bed. Scallen took one step and brought his knee up hard against Kidd's face.

The outlaw went back across the bed, his head striking the wall. He lay there with his eyes open looking at Scallen.

“Feel better now, Jim?”

Kidd brought his hands up to his mouth, working the jaw around. “Well, I had to try you out,” he said. “I didn't think you'd shoot.”

“But you know I will the next time.”

For a few minutes Kidd remained motionless. Then he began to pull himself straight. “I just want to sit up.”

Behind the table Scallen said, “Help yourself.” He watched Kidd stare out the window.

Then, “How much do you make, Marshal?” Kidd asked the question abruptly.

“I don't think it's any of your business.”

“What difference does it make?”

Scallen hesitated. “A hundred and fifty a month,” he said, finally, “some expenses, and a dollar bounty for every arrest against a Bisbee ordinance in the town limits.”

Kidd shook his head sympathetically. “And you got a wife and three kids.”

“Well, it's more than a cowhand makes.”

“But you're not a cowhand.”

“I've worked my share of beef.”

“Forty a month and keep, huh?” Kidd laughed.

“That's right, forty a month,” Scallen said. He felt awkward. “How much do you make?”

Kidd grinned. When he smiled he looked very young, hardly out of his teens. “Name a month,” he said. “It varies.”

“But you've made a lot of money.”

“Enough. I can buy what I want.”

“What are you going to be wanting the next five years?”

“You're pretty sure we're going to Yuma.”

“And you're pretty sure we're not,” Scallen said. “Well, I've got two train passes and a shotgun that says we are. What've you got?”

Kidd smiled. “You'll see.” Then he said right after it, his tone changing, “What made you join the law?”

“The money,” Scallen answered, and felt foolish as he said it. But he went on, “I was working for a spread over by the Pantano Wash when Old Nana broke loose and raised hell up the Santa Rosa Valley. The army was going around in circles, so the Pima County marshal got up a bunch to help out and we tracked Apaches almost all spring. The marshal and I got along fine, so he offered me a deputy job if I wanted it.” He wanted to say that he started for seventy-five and worked up to the one hundred and fifty, but he didn't.

“And then someday you'll get to be marshal and make two hundred.”

“Maybe.”

“And then one night a drunk cowhand you've never seen will be tearing up somebody's saloon and you'll go in to arrest him and he'll drill you with a lucky shot before you get your gun out.”

“So you're telling me I'm crazy.”

“If you don't already know it.”

Scallen took his hand off the shotgun and pulled tobacco and paper from his shirt pocket and began rolling a cigarette. “Have you figured out yet what my price is?”

Kidd looked startled, momentarily, but the grin returned. “No, I haven't. Maybe you come higher than I thought.”

Scallen scratched a match across the table, lighted the cigarette, then threw it to the floor, between Kidd's boots. “You don't have enough money, Jim.”

Kidd shrugged, then reached down for the cigarette. “You've treated me pretty good. I just wanted to make it easy on you.”

The sun came into the room after a while. Weakly at first, cold and hazy. Then it warmed and brightened and cast an oblong patch of light between the bed and the table. The morning wore on slowly because there was nothing to do and each man sat restlessly thinking about somewhere else, though it was a restlessness within and it showed on neither of them.

The deputy rolled cigarettes for the outlaw and himself and most of the time they smoked in silence. Once Kidd asked him what time the train left. He told him shortly after three, but Kidd made no comment.

Scallen went to the window and looked out at the narrow rutted road that was Commercial Street. He pulled a watch from his vest pocket and looked at it. It was almost noon, yet there were few people about. He wondered about this and asked himself if
it was unnaturally quiet for a Saturday noon in Contention…or if it were just his nerves….

He studied the man standing under the wooden awning across the street, leaning idly against a support post with his thumbs hooked in his belt and his flat-crowned hat on the back of his head. There was something familiar about him. And each time Scallen had gone to the window—a few times during the past hour—the man had been there.

He glanced at Jim Kidd lying across the bed, then looked out the window in time to see another man moving up next to the one at the post. They stood together for the space of a minute before the second man turned a horse from the tie rail, swung up, and rode off down the street.

The man at the post watched him go and tilted his hat against the sun glare. And then it registered. With the hat low on his forehead Scallen saw him again as he had that morning. The man lying in the armchair…as if asleep.