Desert of the Damned

by Nelson Nye

  Reifel groaned in the grip of his fear for her safety, in his mind’s eye seeing the white flesh of her body under the lecherous hands of that blasphemous Crowdy; and then a great gust of smoke obscured the cell window. The smell of the stuff filled the corridor, half strangling. And the roar of those towering distant flames was like the sound of a fast freight crossing a trestle, entirely engulfing that outside shouting; and suddenly, through it, he caught the dim cries of men in the office, the muffled blast of a sixgun, the thinner, more vicious crack-crack of a rifle.

  Something struck the floor heavily and again that sibilant saddle gun spoke with a rattling clatter of falling glass. Smoke mushroomed upward with a whoosh of trapped air and a blinding sheet of pure lavender flame completely filled the uncovered archway connecting these cells with Seeb Dawson’s office.

  Reifel’s mind, translating these things swift as lightning, got an appalling picture of their true significance. One of Devil Iron’s crew must have tied that burning theater to Lafe’s prisoner and grasped the whole pattern of the sheriff’s ingenuity. Before the old man could put his jailbreak in motion this fellow, perhaps with others, had invaded the office and gunned him down. Consistent with orders from Lamtrill then they had shattered Seeb Dawson’s hanging lamp, turning that office into a blazing inferno.

  There was no back door to this jail and Ben knew it. There were no windows low enough to be of any use. There was just one way to get out of this place — straight through the glare of that oil-soaked front office.

  He was scared, more scared than he’d thought a man could be. With shaking hands he thrust the bit of metal Lafe had given him into the lock, already convinced that in the sheriff’s abstraction he’d been given the wrong key. But it worked. The door opened and he was in that bright corridor, recoiling from the blast of heat that swept toward him.

  Life to Reifel was as precious as it is to most men, yet he was not thinking in that moment of himself. His mind was occupied with Gert, held helpless, at the mercy of men like Crowdy and Breen to whom the word “virtue” was nothing but a jest to be shared with lewd fellows.

  He threw his arms above his head and lunged through the flames, crashing into Dawson’s desk, caroming off it and tripping over Lafe’s body just inside the outer door. It flung him headlong, arms wide, sprawling, spilling all the saved breath out of him; but instinct pulled him onto his knees and that way, crawling, he crossed the outer threshold and slid bumping down the two plank steps and between the legs of a man dashing fireward with two buckets of water.

  A lot of that water went over Ben Reifel and nothing had ever been half as welcome. He was onto his feet almost swift as the man was, knocking the half-lifted gun from his hand. The man’s snarling mouth was stretching wide in a yell when Ben’s left fist, coming up from his bootstraps, toppled him backward into the dust of the street. Reifel, stumbling away, walked straight into a tierack and only then realized there were horses before him. They were wild with excitement, two were squealing and kicking, a third had its head back trying to yank loose.

  Reifel caught that one’s reins just as the horse jerked them free. He got a hand on the horn before the animal could wheel and the crash of a Winchester made him quit trying to quiet it. He got a toe set in stirrup just as the bronc tore into a run.

  Behind him that saddle gun beat up the echoes and the fronts of near buildings flung them back in lost fragments. When he no longer heard the swish and slap of blue whistlers Reifel wearily pulled himself erect on the leather. Taking hold of him then he drove the horse east on a speed-blurred tangent designed to intersect the rutted wagon road to Devil Iron, praying deep inside him that he would not be too late.

  No one had ever told him how far it was to Lamtrill’s, nor had he any kind of notion how far he’d actually come when he saw the lemon glimmer of Devil Iron’s lamps. Once he had believed the most ecstatic moment he could ever hope to know would come when he was facing Breen across a leveled sixgun. Now, with that moment only negligibly distant, both the man and the meeting were in the nature of a chore — a burden laid on him, a cross he had to bear. All his thoughts were saved for Gert.

  Twice in the last half mile he’d vaguely caught the rumor of hoofbeats; he had given this no attention nor did he listen for it now. What difference who came? Let their paid gun-hands snarl. He would find a girl’s brown eyes smiling at him from beneath shining hair the color of pulled taffy and he would carry her away from this castle built with stolen dollars. It was a thought which cut deeply into him, startling him — not the carrying away but this matter of stolen dollars. His mind backtracked to Gert but did not find her smiling now. There was a mask between her eyes and his, the folds of a raised bandanna, and she seemed to be trying to tell him something but strangely he could not read her lips and he could not hear her through the crash and pound of thundering hoofs.

  How blind he had been when she’d asked for his aid and he had gone sneaking off for a bitch in heat who had nothing behind what stolen dollars could buy for her. Christ, Reifel thought, how big a fool can a man get to be? Marta May was mirage where Gert stood for honesty, a man’s kind of woman with the courage to do what had to be done. There was no hankypanky about Gert Kavanaugh.

  And there was no hankypanky about this deal coming up. There’d be gunsmoke and blood and a hell of a racket; but Gert was the main thing — get her clear. Stealth they’d expect and be on the alert for. But who would look for the man they all hated to ride straight up and pound his fist on the door?

  His bright stare swept the face of Lamtrill’s headquarters where it sat in a grove of wind-tossed willows with the big house in front, the lesser buildings drawn up behind like a squad of foot soldiers taking their ease. But Ben was not fooled — there’d be no ease here. More than one pair of eyes would be watching him come and the way that he did it could make all the difference between getting in and dying outside. Lamtrill, sure in the power he’d enjoyed for so long, would not creep or crawl in a deal like this but would have the girl right there in his house where he could enjoy her plight, playing cat-and-mouse with her till she was willing to deed over all her old man had left. That, at least, would probably be his intention. But when he learned how stubborn she could be he would try other things … the kind of things Breen and Crowdy were good at.

  He had quite a shack here, more than ninety feet long. Of a bastard Spanish style of construction, it was unusually ornate for this country and time — it even had a sun deck built above its open gallery, and a man was on it watching him, a guard posted there with a rifle. There’d be others, no doubt, posted round that dark yard, but he held his horse to its wide-open gait, flogging it over the hard-packed earth like hell wouldn’t have him.

  Flinging wild looks behind him, with its last ounce of run he drove his horse through the gate and pointed it up the dark shrub-bordered lane which turned past the house’s broad gallery. He was playing the faithful courier now for that wart of a man peering down from the sun deck and any others of Lamtrill’s bleach-eyed crew who might be watching his coming with lifted guns.

  But the foam-flecked horse abruptly fell apart under him and he flung his feet from the stirrups and rolled, gun in hand, to come staggering upright twenty strides from the house. “Quien es?” cried the fellow who was perched on the rooftop, and “What’s up?” called another anxious voice from the shadows. And he could hear men running across the yard behind the house.

  “El patron!” he muttered. “El patron — ” he gasped, breathless, and then with chin burrowed into his chest to hide his features he went lurching toward the gallery like a man bad hurt.

  Twenty strides — sixty steps no matter how you took them — was a long way to go with that rataplan rumble of hoofs in your brain and the running boots thumping the ground all around. Lanterns bobbed among the willows and the night was hoarse with shouting but Reifel, still in motion, at a shambling run did the best he was able to get onto that gallery and lose himself in the mile-deep shadow
s that congregated blackly beneath its overhanging roof.

  He came within an ace of making it. He had but ten feet to go when he heard the door skreak and saw it flung open, spilling a bright wedge of light across the gallery’s plank floor, across the lane as well and even into the salt cedars that flanked the lane’s far side. He stood trapped in a frozen silence that was no wider and no longer than that damned blaze of light streaming round Lamtrill’s shape where he stood in the doorway with Breen’s bulging eyes staring over his shoulder.

  “You brash fool,” Lamtrill shouted, “you’re going to swing this time ‘f I have to yank the rope myself!”

  “Where is she?” Reifel said, and Breen shook loose of his fright. He pulled new breath deep into his lungs and sent his yell sailing over the yard: “Drop that feller!” and ducked behind Lamtrill, dragging frantic at his guns.

  The man on the roof tried to cut Reifel down and one of Ben’s slugs slammed him screaming through the railing. At the yard’s far side there was a sudden burst of firing and from the direction of the gate a Winchester began to lay flat crashes of sound against the roundabout buildings. A strangling horse coughed twice and a nearer gun exploded, the airlash of that bullet whining past Ben’s hatless head.

  And then he was whirling, flinging himself sideways to get away from Breen’s pistols and diving forward, doubled over, to get out of that light. He saw Lamtrill stagger and shot the still-good leg from under him and Breen, white with fright, ducked out of sight behind the door-frame. From the darkness, yards behind him, Reifel heard a man yell: “Mossman!” but he gave it no attention. Intent on finding Gert he jumped Lamtrill’s groaning shape and flung himself headlong into the room. Breen’s gun roared twice from a doorway at the left, both of those shots missing Reifel by inches. The door was slammed shut as the hammer of Reifel’s gun punched into an empty shell.

  He flung the useless gun away, quartered back and snatched up Lamtrill’s. Without bothering to reach for the knob of the door he kicked it open, went through crouched low and dived for another directly across from it. This one was thrown open before he reached it and he fired on the instant, hearing Crowdy’s terrified yell in the darkness, then the clatter of glass as Crowdy jumped through a window.

  Reifel struck a match and its flame showed a bedroom but there was no one in it except himself. Somewhere he’d got off Breen’s track — or had he? Wouldn’t Breen have shoved Crowdy into Ben’s bullets just as he had tried to shove Lamtrill into them? He was a slink, a twister, the sort who — if the chance came up — would even hide behind a woman; and there was Ben’s dilemma. He had no idea whereabouts in this house a mind like Lamtrill’s would have had Gert hidden. All he could be sure of was that Breen would know, that Breen would use her if he could to buy or shoot his way out and that, if pressed too hard, the man was capable of almost anything.

  This house was built with the living-room at its center and a somewhat larger wing leading off at either side. That left only one more room at this end. The door was beyond that bed over there and likely opened into Lamtrill’s office. Was Breen in there now and was Gert in there with him or had he slipped out into the night and departed?

  Ben Reifel didn’t know. He was scared almost to move a hand lest whatever he tried should imperil Gert’s safety. The odds looked bad any way he eyed them. But he had to do something.

  He killed the match. He took off his boots with an infinite care. He approached the door warily with Lamtrill’s gun lifted and paused two feet from it, listening intently. There were still a few random shouts outside but the guns had quit and in this uneasy quiet he reached a hand toward the knob. He did not quite touch it. Something warned him Bo Breen was behind that door.

  He put the hand out again, his forward-stretched fingertips lightly brushing the door’s half-inch panel. Breen’s tense whisper came instantly at him: “That you in there, Ben?”

  Reifel held himself completely still, hating the man yet terribly afraid to explode another cartridge. Gert might be in there — probably was — and who could control a shot fired blindly?

  Perhaps the quiet worried Breen, perhaps he got rattled. A board groaned under his moving weight and jounced a panicky curse from his throat and crazily then, throwing care to the winds, he crossed the room at a lumbering run.

  Reifel, crouched on his haunches, flung open the door but froze in his tracks when Breen’s voice cried: “Come one step further’n I’ll bash in her head!”

  He’d do it, too. He was that kind of bastard.

  “What do you want?” Reifel said at last.

  “I want out,” Breen growled. “Burt Mossman’s outside — I heard somebody call him. You go tell that damn Ranger to call off his crowd. Tell him I’ve got Sug Kavanaugh’s brat an’ he either gets out of here fast or I bump her! You got that?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “There’s a haystack out back. Put a match to it, bucko, so I can see them guys leave. When they’ve gone, fetch two horses to the back of this office an’ then stand in the light where I can get a good look at you.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “I’ll drop her off at the border. Now put your gun on the floor an’ get goin'.”

  A lot of desperate thoughts flashed through Reifel’s mind but he didn’t dare try them with a skunk of this stripe. He put his gun on the floor with his mouth twisted bitterly and then stood erect, prepared to do as Breen ordered. But even as he straightened a pair of lifted lanterns flung their light through the windows and exposed Breen crouched behind the desk, entirely alone.

  Mossman said: “All right, Badger. Drop your guns and come out of that.”

  • • •

  One of Mossman’s men told Reifel he would find Gert in the kitchen, and he did. Old Black was with her, chafing the circulation back into her rope-scarred arms. Ben said, “I’ll take care of that now,” and the old man, chuckling, went out to help Mossman.

  A constraint fell between them then and Reifel, uneasy, said, “That guy seems to think a whole lot of you.”

  “Yes. He was Dad’s wagon boss. In the old days.” She rubbed her wrists, not bothering to glance at him; and he stood there awkwardly, finding it hard to put his thoughts into words, looking what he was in that sweat-streaked shirt with the ingrained dust lying black in its creases. He didn’t much blame her for being riled the way he’d treated her, turning down cold every offer she’d made him.

  He finally said a little stiffly, “I’m turnin’ back that money I’ve got banked at Douglas an’ Deming. Mossman is goin’ to sell Cog Wheel for me an’ apply whatever it brings to easin’ the folks who’ve been hurt by that bank run. I don’t figure a man could go very straight on crooked money. Do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “Well, that’s my stand. I reckon you know the kind of guy I’ve been … a pretty bad lot … but if you’re willin’ to believe I’m on the right track, that from here on out I’m for the straight an’ narrow — ”

  “Haven’t you got the wrong girl?”

  “I know what I’m doin'. I’ve come a long way to put my rope on you an’ I’d sure hate to have to take no for an answer — ”

  “Have you got every bit of that girl out of your head?”

  “That’s as far as she got — my head,” Reifel scowled. “She never got near the part I’m offerin’ you.”

  “On that understanding,” Gert said, “I’ll take it.”

  THE END

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  Copyright © 1952 by Nelson Nye. Cop
yright © renewed 1980 by Nelson Nye. Published

  by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency. All rights reserved.

  Cover Images ©www.123rf.com

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-4904-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4904-5

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-4902-8

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4902-1