A Noose for the Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  A Noose for the Desperado

  Clifton Adams

  He came forward slowly, in that curious toe-heel gait that Indians have. With a big left hand, he grabbed Marta by the hair and jerked her half out of the chair.

  I hit him in the face and pulled Marta behind me.

  “Keep your damn hands off her if you want to go on living,” I said.

  He was surprised. The next thing I knew his gun was coming out of the holster.

  I made my grab and didn't bother to aim.

  I didn't hit him. I didn't even come close.

  But I didn't need that first bullet. Just the muzzle blast.

  And the Indian knew it. His mouth flew open as he slammed back under the impact, and before he could swing that pistol on me again, he was as good as dead.

  A Noose for the Desperado

  Clifton Adams

  Copyright 1951 by Clifton Adams

  Chapter One

  I SCOUTED THE TOWN for two full days before going into it. There hadn't been any sign of cavalry, and I figured the law wouldn't be much because nobody cared what happened to a few Mexicans. There it stood near the foothills of the Huachucas, a few shabby adobe huts and one or two frame buildings broiling in the Arizona sun. But to me it looked like Abilene, Dodge, and Ellsworth all rolled into one.

  It had been a long trail from Texas, and my horse was sore-footed and needed rest and a bellyful of grain. I was beginning to grow a fuzzy beard around my chin and upper lip, and I had a second hide of trail dust that was beginning to crawl with the hundred different kinds of lice that you pick up in the desert. I was ready to take my chances on somebody recognizing me, just so I could get a bath and a shave and maybe a change of clothes.

  So that was how I came to ride into this little place of Ocotillo, on that big black horse that used to belong to my pal Pappy Garret. I had Pappy's rifle in the saddle boot and Pappy's guns tied down on my thighs. But that was all right. Pappy didn't have any use for them. The last time I saw him had been on a lonely hilltop in Texas. He had died the way most men like that die sooner or later, I guess, with a lawman's bullet in his guts.

  It was around sundown when we hit this place of Ocotillo, and it turned out that it was on the fiesta of San Juan's Day. I didn't know that at the time, but it was clear that they were having a celebration of some kind. The men were all in various stages of drunkenness, some of them singing and pounding on heavy guitars. Some of the young bucks were dancing with their girls in the dusty street or in the cantinas. A fat old priest was grinning at everybody, and the kids were crying and shouting and singing and rattling brightly painted gourds. It was fiesta, all right. It was like riding out of death into life.

  I pulled my horse up at a watering trough and let him drink while the commotion went on all around us. Three girls in bright dresses danced around us, giggling. The big black lifted his nose out of the trough and spewed water all over them and they ran down the street screaming and laughing. Everybody seemed to be having a hell of a time.

  Another girl came up and slapped the black's neck, looking at me.

  “Hello, gringo!” she said.

  “Hello, yourself.”

  “You come to fiesta, eh?” she said. Then she laughed and slapped the black again.

  “Is that what it is, fiesta?”

  “Sure, it's fiesta. San Juan's Day.” She laughed again. “Where you come from, gringo? Long way, maybe. You plenty dirty.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Can I find anybody sober enough to give me a shave and fix a bath?”

  “Sure, gringo,” she grinned. “You come with me.”

  I had been looking around, not paying much attention to the girl. But now I looked at her. She was young, about eighteen or nineteen, but she wasn't any kid. Her dark eyes were full of hell, and when she flashed her white teeth in a grin you got the idea that she would like to sink them into your throat. She wore the usual loud skirt and fancy blouse with a lot of needlework on it that Mexicans like to deck themselves out in on their holidays.

  “Look!” she yelled. Then she started jumping up and down and laughing like a kid.

  Somebody had turned an old mossy-horn loose in the street and everybody was scattering and screaming as if a stampede was bearing down on them. The old range cow shook its head, bewildered; then some kids came up and began prodding it down the street. The yelling and screaming kept up until the cow disappeared down at the other end. That seemed to be a signal for everybody to have another drink, so all the menfolks started crowding into the cantinas.

  “Does that end the fiesta?” I asked.

  “Just beginning,” she said. “At night they go to church and burn candles and pray to San Juan that their souls may be saved.” She laughed again. “Then they drink some more. Tomorrow they go back to the fields and work until next San Juan's Day.”

  “How about that bath and shave?” I said.

  “Sure, gringo. Come with me.”

  I left my horse at the hitching rack, but I took the rifle out of the saddle boot. The girl led me between two adobe huts, then through a gate in a high adobe wall. The wall completely surrounded a little plot at the back of the hut. A dog slept and some chickens scratched under a blackjack tree.

  “This is a hell of a place for a barbershop,” I said.

  “No barber,” the girl grinned. “I shave.” She cut the air with her hand, as if slicing someone's throat with a razor.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  She laughed. “No worry, gringo. I fix.”

  She took my arm and led me into the house. The thick adobe walls made the room cool, and there was a pleasant smell of wine and garlic. It was like walking into another world. There was nothing there to remind me of the fiesta, or of the lonesome desert, or Pappy Garret. In this house I could even forget myself. I felt a little ridiculous wearing two pistols and carrying a rifle.

  “Whose house is this?” I said.

  She stabbed herself with a finger. “My house.” Then she yelled,“Papacito!” When she got no answer, she shrugged. “Come with me.”

  The house had only two rooms. The first room had a fireplace and a charcoal brazier for cooking and a plank table and three leather-bottom chairs. In one corner there were some blankets rolled up, and I figured that was where Papacito slept when he was home. The other room had a mound of clay shaped up against one wall with some blankets on it, and that was the bed. A rough plank wardrobe and another leather-bottom chair completed the furniture.

  “Wait here,” the girl said.

  She went out and I heard her shaking up the coals in the fireplace, and pretty soon she came back lugging a big wooden tub. “For bath,” she said. On the next trip she brought a razor and a small piece of yellow lye soap. “For shave.”

  I grinned. “I can't complain about the service.”

  “You wait,” she said.

  I was too tired to try to understand why she was going to so much trouble. Maybe that's the way Mexicans were. Maybe they liked to wait on the gringos. I was beginning to feel easy and comfortable for the first time since I had left Texas. I pulled off my boots, sat in the chair, and put my feet on the clay bed. I was beginning to like Arizona just fine.

  “Say,” I called, “have you got anything to drink?”

  She came in with a crock jug and handed it to me. “Wine,” she said.

  I swigged from the neck and the stuff was sweet and warm as it hit my stomach. “Thanks,” I said. Then I had another go at the jug, and that was enough. I never took more than two drinks of anything.

  That was partly Pappy Garret's teaching, but mostly it came from seeing foothills filled with gunmen who could shoot like forked lightning when they were sober, but when they for
got to set the bottle down they were just another notch in some ambitious punk's gun butt.

  The girl came in with a crock bowl of hot water. I got up and she put the water on the chair and a broken mirror on the wardrobe.

  “Bath before long,” she said, and went back into the other room.

  She had a way of knocking out all the words except the most essential ones, but she spoke pretty good English.

  I went over to the wardrobe and inspected my face in the mirror. It gave me quite a shock at first, partly because I hadn't seen my face in quite a while, and partly because of the dirt and beard and the sunken places around the cheeks and eyes. It didn't look like my face at all.

  It didn't look like the face of a kid who still wasn't quite twenty years old. The eyes had something to do with it, and the tightness around the mouth. I studied those eyes carefully because they reminded me of some other eyes I had seen, but I couldn't place them at first.

  They had a quick look about them, even when they weren't moving. They didn't seem to focus completely on anything.

  Then I remembered one time when I was just a sprout in Texas. I had been hunting and the dogs had jumped a wolf near the arroyo on our place, and after a long chase they had cornered him in the bend of a dry wash. As I came up to where the dogs were barking I could see the wolf snarling and snapping at them, but all the time those eyes of his were casting around to find a way to get out of there.

  And he did get out, finally. He was a big gray lobo, as vicious as they come. He ripped the throat of one of my dogs and blasted his way out and disappeared down the arroyo. But I heard later that another pack of dogs caught him and killed him.

  “What's wrong?”

  The girl came in with a kettle of hot water and poured it into the tub.

  “Nothing,” I said, and began lathering my face.

  I started to leave my mustache on, thinking that it might keep people from recognizing me, but when I got the rest of my face shaved my upper lip looked like hell. It was just some scraggly pink fuzz and I couldn't fool anybody with that. The girl poured some cold water in the tub on top of the hot, and filled it about halfway to the top.

  “Ready,” she said. “Give me clothes.”

  “Nothing doing. I take a bath in private or I don't take one at all.”

  “To wash,” she added.

  These Mexicans must be crazy, I thought. Why anybody would want to take a saddle tramp in and take care of him I didn't know. But it was all right with me, if that was the way she wanted it.

  “All right,” I said. “You get in the other room and I'll throw them through the door.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips, grinning. “Gringos!” But she went in the other room and I began to strip off. When I threw the things in the other room she picked them up and went outside.

  I must have soaked for an hour or more there in the tub, twisting and turning and scrubbing every inch of myself that I could reach. It was dark outside, and the only light in the house came from the fireplace in the other room.

  “Say,” I called, “are those clothes dry yet?”

  “Pretty soon,” she said. Her voice was so close it made me jump. Instinctively, I made a grab for my pistols, which I had put on the chair and pulled up beside the tub, but she laughed and I stopped the grab in mid-air.

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said.

  She was leaning against the wardrobe laughing at me, and with the red light from the fireplace playing on her face. She must have found my tobacco and corn-shuck papers in my shirt, because there was a thin brown cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth. That shook me, because I had never seen a woman smoke before, except for the fancy girls in Abilene or Dodge or one of the other trail towns.

  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?”

  You come with me, gringo.”

  “Si.

  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.”