A Noose for the Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  He came out of it slowly and stared vaguely around the room. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the windows of a deserted house. After a while he brought me into focus, reached out like a sleepwalker, and took my shoulders.

  “Ah, the famous Tall Cameron!” He smiled crookedly. “Welcome to my humble...”

  “Snap out of it,” I said. “We've got a little job of robbing to do.”

  “Robbing?” He thought about it for a while. “Oh, you mean another raid. God, I need a drink.”

  “Your bottle's empty. Get your stuff together and we'll get a drink downstairs.”

  That brought him out of it. He pulled himself up, then went unsteadily over to the washstand and poured a pitcher of water over his head.

  “All the damn stuff's good for,” he said thickly. “Where's my other boot?”

  I found the boot for him and helped him put it on. His pistol was under the bed. I found it and buckled it on him.

  “Are you ready?”

  He licked his dry lips with a coated tongue. “God,” he said, “I wish I had the guts, I'd blow my brains out. This rotten, maggoty mess of filth and corruption and death that I call brains, I'd splatter them all over these filthy walls!” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm and almost fell.

  “Come on,” I said. “You need that drink worse than I thought.”

  He was better after he'd had a couple of glasses of the stuff. His eyes cleared, his hands became steady.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  He looked at me. “How do I feel? I can't tell you, Tall Cameron, but maybe by sundown you'll know.” He took the bottle off the bar and walked out of the place swinging it in his hand. He was the goddamnedest guy I ever saw.

  We went around to the livery barn where our horses were, and as the liveryman saddled up for us he slipped boxes of cartridges into our saddlebags.

  “Compliments of Basset,” Bama said dryly. He swigged from the neck of his bottle and then put it in his saddlebag with the ammunition. As we rode out of town he began to sing in that thick, black drawl of his:

  “Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me,

  For I'm goin' to Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”

  “But her name wasn't Susanna,” he said. “It was Myra. And I won't be going to Alabama, with anything.”

  It wasn't a long ride to the foothills of the Huachucas. Bama knew all the short cuts, and before long the town was far behind and there were just those naked, dark hills of rocks and boulders and cactus and greasewood. We climbed higher and higher until we got into the mountains themselves, and the going got slower.

  “We won't be able to make it today,” Bama said. “It'll be near sundown before we'll meet Joseph and Kreyler and the rest of Basset's army. The battle won't start before tomorrow, I guess.”

  I wondered if it was going to be as bad as Bama made it out to be. I doubted it. But something kept me from asking questions.

  We rode for a long while without saying anything. Every half hour or so Bama would take a belt at the bottle.

  “You know,” he said finally, “this stuff doesn't really do any good unless you've got enough to make you sleep the deep and dreamless sleep of the dead.” He shook the bottle thoughtfully. “There's not enough here for that.”

  “Then why do you drink it?”

  He smiled sadly. “I'm afraid,” he said mildly.

  “You're also crazy.”

  He bobbed his head up and down, soberly, as if I had just said something very profound.

  “It's surprising how much of the stuff you can drink when you're afraid,” he went on. “For instance,” he said abruptly, “I was awake last night when hell broke loose in that room of yours. I heard the girl in there and I thought to myself, Well, there's one more scalp the Indian can hang on his belt. Of course, I didn't know at the time that my neighbor was the famous Tall Cameron. He'll kill you, you know. The first chance he gets.”

  “He can go to hell,” I said. “I don't want any part of his girl. She's crazy, like everybody else in this Godforsaken place. Last night she tried to kill me.”

  For a moment Bama looked at me. Then he threw his head back and howled with laughter. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” he said when he got his breath. “No, my friend, I'm afraid your days are numbered. If the Indian doesn't kill you, there's always Kreyler. To get that girl, Kreyler would kill you in a minute, if Black Joseph was out of the way.”

  “I tell you I don't want anything to do with her. Joseph or Kreyler can have her.”

  There was another long silence while Bama studied the contents of his bottle. He allowed himself a short drink, corked it good and tight, and put it away. “Why don't you tell me about her?” he said finally. “Maybe it will do you good to get it off your chest.”

  “Tell you about who?”

  “The girl you left back in Texas, or wherever you came from. The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry. The girl who loved you once but can't stand the sight of you now because you're a killer. The girl who will be the mother of another man's children because—”

  He must have seen the anger and sadness in my eyes, because he stopped abruptly and dropped his head.

  “Goddamn you,” I said, “if you ever mention her again I'll kill you.So help me God, I'll kill you.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  We finally reached a place where a great stone ledge reached out over a barren canyon, and that was the marshaling ground for Basset's army.

  An army was just what it was. There must have been fifteen or twenty horses grazing down the canyon on the short, dry sprays of bunch grass. And under the ledge the men hunkered or sat or slouched, like so many soldiers awaiting their orders to march into battle. There were a few small fires, and with the smell of horses and sweat there was the heavier, richer smell of boiling coffee and frying bacon. Kreyler was standing at the entrance of the canyon, tally book and pencil in his hands, checking the riders off as they came in.

  Bama was watching me, smiling that lazy, crooked smile of his. “What do you think of our little army?” he said.

  I shook my head. I hadn't expected anything like this.

  We unsaddled our horses and turned them loose with the others; then we sat down to wait. Riders came drifting in from different directions, a few of them Mexicans, but most of them were run-of-the-mine hardcases and hired gunmen. They kept coming until there must have been thirty of them. As the sun began to die in the west I helped Bama build a small fire and we cooked some bacon that he had thought to bring along. We washed it down with some greasy coffee that we boiled in a skillet. Bama's eyes were twin, silent screams for whisky, but he made no move to uncork the bottle again.

  At last, when the sun disappeared, leaving a cold bloody streak along the horizon, Kreyler passed the word along to saddle up.

  “I thought the Indian was supposed to be Basset's right-hand man,” I said.

  Bama shook his head. “The Indian's guns keep the men in line, but Basset and Kreyler are the ones who really run things. It's a nice arrangement for Kreyler; that deputy United States marshal's badge makes him practically bulletproof. A man would think a long time before he killed a United States marshal in this country.”

  I knew what he meant. There are some people that you just can't kill and get away with it, and a United States marshal is one of them. Even a crooked one like Kreyler.

  Well, it didn't make any difference to me. I didn't intend to kill Kreyler, or anybody else, if he kept his nose out of my business. Anyway, after this job was over I meant to leave Kreyler and the whole business far behind.

  That gave me something to think about as we started riding west again, farther up into the mountains. To get away—that was what I wanted. To go someplace where nobody knew who I was, and stay there until things in Texas cooled off. And then I'd go back.

  I'd go home.

  The very word was enough to turn me sick with longing. The big country of T
exas, the people I knew, the kind of life I wanted to live. And Laurin....

  But I knew all along that I'd never go back. Not even to die.

  The night was coming down on us now and the horses stumbled along Indian file over dangerous, almost forgotten trails. The men were silent as they rode, and some of them, I guess, were thinking as I was, of home. And some of them would be counting in their minds the money that they would get from their cut of the loot. Some of them, like Bama, would be scared sick, dreading death and somehow welcoming it at the same time.

  But it was Texas that I thought of. Smoky nights as still as the grave. The fierce winters of blinding snow. The blazing summers. And the little town of John's City, which was as old as the Sante Fe Trail, as old as the West. I thought of the days of the war, and the bitterness after the war—the carpetbaggers, the treasury agents, the scalawags and turncoats. The blue-suited army. The State Police.

  They were all on their way out now, and before long Texas would again be the kind of place I wanted it to be —noisy with giant herds of cattle, dirty with trail drivers, rich and head-high. The strong, patient men would live to see Texas that way again. But not Tall Cameron. And not Miles Stanford Bonridge, once proud landowner in the proud state of Alabama. And not any of the other men who rode in the dark, wrapped in their own thoughts. The impatient, the money-hungry, the kill-crazy. Basset's army.

  At last word passed back that the column was halting and the men were to take their positions up ahead. We dismounted and turned our animals over to men that Kreyler had appointed horse-holders; then we climbed single file up a rocky trail until we finally reached the tip of a shallow canyon.

  Everything was done with army-like precision, and every man but me, it seemed, knew exactly what was expected of him.

  Bama said, “You might as well follow me. It's going to be a long wait until morning.”

  We picked our way along the rim of the canyon, and now I could see the war party splitting in two parts, half the men slipping silently down the wall of the canyon and up the other side. The rest of us spread out on our side at four- or five-yard intervals and got behind rocks or bushes or whatever protection we could find. Bama found a rock, and I lay down behind a clump of needle-sharp cholla not far from him.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “We wait,” Bama said quietly. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait. And finally the Mexicans will come down this canyon, and then we kill.”

  “Just like that?”

  “It's not as simple as it sounds. We've had scouting parties out for days, following the Mexicans up from Sonora. They never take the same route twice, but once they've picked themselves a trail to follow, they're stuck with it. But everything has been taken care of now. All we have to do is wait here and pretty soon they'll come along.”

  “I don't get it. They must know that we're waiting for them. At least, they mustguess that we're here. Do they plan to just ride along and let us shoot the hell out of them?”

  “They know,” he said. “And they'll do something about it. We'll just have to wait and see.”

  So we waited, like Bama said. A pale moon came out and washed those raw mountains with a false cleanness, and a stiffening, bone-chilling cold settled down on us. I wanted a cigarette but I was afraid of striking a match. I wanted a drink, but Bama had left his bottle in his saddlebags.

  “How much of this waiting have we got ahead of us?” I said.

  “Only the scouts could guess at that. I'd say they'll be along in the morning sometime. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”

  I didn't think I could stand it that long. My legs became cramped from staying in one position too long. My wrist began to throb and I thought of the girl and cursed her. I checked the loading of my rifle over and over and up and down the line I could hear other nervous men doing the same thing. If this was the way wars were fought I was glad that I never had to fight in one. It wasn't so bad when it happened quickly, when you were mad at somebody or they were mad at you and all you had to do was shoot. But this waiting—that was something else.

  Bama must have gone to sleep. There wasn't a sound from behind the rock as the night crawled by. The cold got worse and ate right into my guts, and I had a feeling that all this was unreal and pretty soon I would wake up and discover that it had been a dream.

  But it wasn't a dream. Ever minute of that thousand-year night was real. But finally it ended. Morning came in the east, bloodshot and angry, and after a while a broiling sun shoved itself over the ridges and beat down on us. By noon we were baked dry and there was no water anywhere. And if there had been water we couldn't have moved as much as a foot to get it. At every move, at every sound a man made, word would be passed down the line:

  “Kreyler says goddamnit, be quiet!”

  As we lay there, I learned to hate the Marshal. I hated every line in his dry, sun-cracked face. By noon I could cheerfully have killed him.

  “Take it easy, kid,” Bama said softly.

  “Where does he get off bossing us around like that? He's just one of Basset's hired help, isn't he? Like the rest of us.”

  “Think of something else,” Bama said. “This sun bakes a man's brains. It gives him crazy ideas sometimes.”

  For a while we lay there. I could see the Indian and his half of the party oh the other side of the canyon, and I began hating them too, every damned one of their sweaty, grim faces.

  “Listen,” Bama said.

  And after a minute we all began to hear the faraway sound of bells—small bells, cool little silver sounds in the blazing afternoon. Along the rim of the canyon there were brisk metal sounds of cartridges being jacked into rifles. Bama's face was tight and gray as he lay on his belly, sighting along the short barrel of his carbine. He looked as if death had already touched him—as if the grave and he were old friends.

  Then the mule train rounded into the canyon. One after the other they came, as if there was no end—gray, sure-footed little mules with bells around their necks and tall, awkward-looking aparejos strapped to their backs. Along the flanks came the outriders, brown-faced, hard-eyed men, heeled up with rifles and pistols and knives, looking as if they were begging for a fight. In front of the whole business rode a grinning old Mexican on a pale horse, dressed fit to kill in a tall spiked sombrero decorated with silver bangles, flashing light and spitting fire every time he moved his head. His big-bottomed pants were of cream-colored buckskin with more silver bangles and pearl buttons down the seams. A gawdy serape and high-heeled boots finished off his outfit, along with a fancy-handled six-shooter at his side and a long-barreled rifle resting across the pommel of his saddle. He looked like hell, all right. He could have been a gay old ranchero on his way to visit the most beautiful senorita in all of Sonora, from the way he was dressed. I wondered how that grin of his would stand up if he knew that thirty rifles were aimed at the back of his head.

  Still the mule train kept coming, and the outriders kept watching the hills with restless eyes. I wondered how they could fail to see us. Did they have any outriders up in the hills looking down on us? If they did, it would be too bad, because they already had more men than we had. Thirty-five, maybe forty outriders were in view by the time the tail of the train had rounded into the canyon.

  Word came down: “Hold your fire until Kreyler gives the word.”

  Bama was dead white. He didn't even seem to be breathing. I wanted to look behind me, but I didn't dare move. The palms of my hands were wet. It seemed almost impossible that in the next few seconds I would be killing men I had never seen before in my life, killing them without giving them a chance in the world. The thought lay heavy and unreal and dull on my mind—but it didn't have time to become an idea.

  From somewhere—I didn't know where at first—came a wild, savage scream, and suddenly rifles were beating down on us from above. In the back of my mind I knew that what I had been afraid of had happened: Some of the outriders had got behind us and had discovered us before we could open fire. The ne
xt minute I heard one of our own men scream, and Kreyler was yelling, and gunfire seemed to explode from everywhere. I saw Mexicans go down in the first volley, and we fired again and more went down before they could bring their guns on us. But the rifles up above were raising hell.

  “Make for the canyon!” I yelled at Bama.

  He was pumping bullets into the Mexicans as fast as he could lever and pull the trigger. After a minute he lay down and began to reload. A bullet whined, kicking dirt up at his feet.

  “In the canyon!” I yelled again.

  “You're crazy!”

  “It's better than getting shot in the back!”

  Another bullet slammed into the rock beside his head. “Maybe you're right!”

  The others were pouring down the canyon walls now, shooting as they slipped and skidded and fell to the bottom. The Mexicans were shooting their mules and using them for breastworks. It was all a crazy uproar of shooting and screaming and cursing, and there didn't seem to be any sense to anything. I felt the slight tug of a bullet going through the sleeve of my shirt and I snapped a shot into a brown, grinning face. The bullet hit in his mouth and exploded brains through the back of his head.