Rio Bravo

by Leigh Brackett

  He saw his own face reflected in the surface and he stopped and stared at it, fascinated by the accusing eyes that glared up at him out of the water. And all at once there was another reflection looming over his, stooping down as a hawk stoops, and a man’s voice said softly, “Take a good look while you’re at it.” And there was a force, swift and violent, at the nape of his neck and the water leaped up at him, pouring icy-cold into his nose and mouth and ears. He saw the bottom of the trough quite clearly, all cracked and silvered with sun from its time of dryness, and the terror of strangulation tore at him. He clawed for his guns. His feet were kicked out from under him and he fell with an agonizing jar to his knees, the edge of the trough catching him hard across the belly. His ears roared. He was dying. He floundered wildly, splashing great quantities of water, and then just as the last dark was beginning to close over him he was hauled up into the light and air again. He choked and coughed, gasping. The sun struck his eyes through a dazzle of water drops. He saw the blurred shape of a second man and the second man had his guns. Dude turned against the arm that held him. He flung himself upon the man who had pushed him into the water. And the second man stepped up and struck him neatly with the barrel of his own gun.

  Dude sagged. They caught him between them. “Get his hat,” said the second man, and the first man reached out and grabbed it with his free hand. They hustled Dude swiftly into the stable and closed the door.

  Fear and anger both helped to clear Dude’s head. He saw two more men coming toward him in the shafts of dusty sunlight that fell through broken window shutters. The four of them must have been waiting in here since long before daylight. He did not know any of them by sight. A desperate strength came to him. He lurched forward suddenly, tearing his arms free. He tried to get back to the door. But the four of them ran quickly and hemmed him in. He snarled and fought them with bitter ferocity. All he had was his fists and his booted feet. They used other things, and it was not until they had him down on the floor where it was easy that they used their boots to tromp him into the dirt. It did not take long. From a very great distance he heard someone say, “—kill him now. Harvey was a friend of mine.” Dude did not know who Harvey was. A second voice said, “Later. Don’t mess things up.”

  Somebody, presumably Harvey’s friend, kicked Dude under the jaw and he passed out with the taste of blood in his mouth.

  The men went to work. They worked fast. In a very few minutes the one of them that was the closest to Dude’s size was wearing Dude’s black shirt. He buckled on Dude’s guns and placed Dude’s hat with the shot-up crown on his head. He went to the door and looked out. He nodded to the other three and said, “Get going.” Then he went out across the stableyard to the edge of the road and sat down on the big rock, his back to the town.

  The three men went out the rear of the stable and hurried down along a dry wash to where they had left their horses. Only a couple of Mexicans saw them and they did not care.

  Dude lay and bled quietly into the dirt.

  EIGHTEEN

  Stumpy was sweeping up. The street door of the jail was open and Chance was standing guard while Juanito, now without his drum and carrying on another one of his professions, fetched in buckets of water. Finally Stumpy decided they had enough, and Chance reached into his pocket for a coin to pay the boy.

  Juanito waved it grandly away. “No, Señor Sheriff, you do not pay me,” he said, and smiled an angelic smile. “Soon you will have made many funerals and I will be a rich man.”

  “How do you know?” Chance said.

  “My father, my uncles, they talk much. They say much killing is to come.”

  “Who do they say will win?”

  Juanito shook his head hard. “They are wise men but they do not know you as I do, Señor. I know you will win. Let Señor Burdette send many men! I will make many dollars.”

  He ran away on his thin bare feet, still looking like an angel. Stumpy grunted.

  “Well, as the feller said, it’s an ill wind that don’t blow something to somebody.”

  Chance stood in the doorway looking away down the road to where Dude sat on the big stone.

  “Did he have a bad night?”

  “He sure as hell did,” Stumpy said, leaning on his broom. “Worst yet. I reckon his mind is starting to work again. He’s seeing what he done to himself and he ain’t finding it very pretty.”

  “Well, he’s got to sweat it out,” Chance said. “And don’t let him cry on your shoulder, either.”

  “He ain’t tried to,” Stumpy said fiercely, “and anyway, what makes you so damned ornery? You been ridin’ Dude ever since he—”

  “All right,” said Chance. “Be nice to him. And he’ll fall apart in little pieces.”

  Stumpy grumbled, poking the broom around. “Well, maybe so. Seems to me when a feller’s having a hard time a helping hand is what he needs and not a kick in the behind, but I ain’t going to argue with you. You know him better’n I do. I guess some folks are built that way, but I can tell you one thing, I ain’t. Wouldn’t work with me nohow.” He began to sweep furiously, whacking the dust every whichway as though he hated it. “No reason at all why you can’t give me a kind word once in a while ’stead of snapping at me all the time. All I have to put up with here—cooking and sweeping and nurse-maiding that killer back there, and never one solitary word of thanks from anybody …”

  Chance was in a fine mood that morning, still walking three feet off the ground.

  “Stumpy,” he said, “you’re right. You’re a treasure. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” He bent and gave Stumpy a solemn kiss on the forehead.

  Then he ducked fast.

  The broom hit the door just as he slammed it shut. He could hear a considerable torrent of language coming after him too. He locked the door and walked away grinning. “I bet he won’t try that again very soon,” he thought.

  The Deguello dogged his footsteps with its martial threat of murder. It did not bother him. He did not think that anything could bother him this morning. He was sure that Juanito was right.

  In the middle of the street he stopped. Three men had appeared on the road, riding toward Dude. Dude stood up and motioned to them. They pulled up, the dust rising under their horses’ hoofs. In a minute they rode over to the fence and began taking off their gunbelts.

  Satisfied, Chance walked on toward the hotel. He was thinking of breakfast. He had been late getting up and he had gone directly to the jail. A mug of Stumpy’s powerful coffee had kept him going, but he needed solid food. He wondered if Feathers was down yet.

  Colorado came out on the hotel porch as Chance mounted the steps. Chance had a feeling the boy had been waiting to intercept him. Colorado nodded pleasantly and said, “Morning, Sheriff,” and Chance said, “Morning. How are the boys doing?”

  “Sleeping with the wagons,” Colorado said. “Getting a little restless. Some of ’em are figuring to move on.” He began to roll a smoke.

  Down the road, the three men finished hanging up their gunbelts and rode slowly toward town.

  “How about you?” Chance asked.

  “Not me. I’m going to wait for what’s mine.” Colorado rolled tobacco and paper between his fingers, shaping a neat cylinder, frowning at it. “I’ve been hearing a lot of talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Mostly about you telling Burdette what would happen to Joe if trouble started around the jail. I guess he didn’t expect to be told that.” Colorado licked the edge of the paper reflectively. “Kinda new to me, too.”

  “Would you do it any different?”

  “No. If I was in your shoes I’d do the same thing.” He glanced sidelong at Chance. “He can’t take a chance on whether you’d really do it or not. Would you?”

  Chance said, “I’m fresh out of tobacco.”

  Colorado grinned and handed him the makings. Chance leaned his rifle carefully against one of the posts that held up the porch. There was no sign of menace, only the normal moveme
nts of the townspeople and three unarmed men riding slowly, already checked and passed by Dude. Chance began to build a cigarette.

  Colorado was looking at the rifle. “You always keep that cocked.”

  “Only when I’m carrying it.”

  “How come you carry a rifle, anyway?”

  Chance grinned. “Found out early in life there was a lot of men faster than me with a short gun.”

  “Oh,” said Colorado. He grinned too. He held the cigarette still unlighted between his lips, going through his pockets. Now he said, “Don’t suppose you’ve got a match, either.”

  Chance shook his head. He handed back the papers and tobacco. Colorado said, “I’ll get some.” He went back into the hotel.

  The three men rode up to the steps. One of them was bent over a little, holding his hand to his side. Another one of them said, “You the sheriff?”

  “Yeah.” The men were strangers. They had tough hard-bitten faces, but few wandering cowboys looked like schoolgirls.

  “Sheriff,” the man said, “we ran into some trouble on the road. Al here’s hurt, his horse threw him. Your deputy said there was a doctor here.”

  “Just down the street, four, five doors to the right.” Chance moved one step toward his rifle and reached out his hand. “What kind of trouble?”

  He did not actually quite finish the last word because the man said in a low hard quiet voice,

  “Hold it, Sheriff—no closer to that gun.”

  He put his hand to his shirt and now Chance saw under the cloth the outlines of a gun. The injured man had slid his hand right inside his shirt and was ready to draw. The third man was smiling, bending over in the saddle, and his hand too was at his waist.

  “We left the belts out there,” he said. “Not the guns.”

  Chance looked down the street at the distant form of Dude sitting quietly on the rock.

  “And,” said the first man, “that ain’t your deputy.”

  Everything, nerves, muscles and guts inside Chance bunched up tight and got cold, and his face changed the way a mountain changes when a cloud comes and shuts off the sun, so that it looks bleak and lonesome and very cruel.

  Inside the hotel Colorado came back to the door with the matches, and Feathers was with him. There was nobody else in the lobby or bar. Feathers too was thinking of breakfast, and Chance. She looked especially pretty, with a kind of shining about her that made Colorado keep staring at her and envying Chance. He thought he knew quite a lot about girls, but she was something new. He was so busy looking at her that he almost stepped into what was going on outside before he saw it. At the last second he caught it—the rigid pose of Chance’s back and the way his hand had not finished picking up the rifle, the forward-bending position of the riders, a certain tight quivery feeling in the air like just before lightning. Colorado threw out his arm and whipped the girl aside from the doorway, putting his other hand over her mouth.

  “Quiet!” he whispered urgently. “Quiet!”

  She stiffened in his arm and looked at him with wild startled eyes.

  He could hear and see pretty well. Chance said in a voice that scared him it was so soft, “What did you do to him?” And one of the riders said, “Worry about yourself. He’s all right—now. But he won’t be and neither will you unless you do what you’re told.”

  Feathers gave a convulsive leap toward the door. Colorado held her. “Goddamn it,” he whispered, “stay still. You want to get him shot?”

  Outside, one of the riders said, “Step down into the street.”

  Chance went down the steps and the three men spread out a little so that they covered him from the front and both sides. And it was all being done so smoothly and quietly that none of the few people on the street had noticed anything wrong. The sheriff was merely talking to three unarmed men.

  Feathers panted in Colorado’s grasp. He thought maybe he was suffocating her and let up with his hand over her mouth, and she whispered fiercely, “Are you just going to stand there?”

  Colorado did not answer. He did not know what he was going to do.

  The leader of the three men was talking to Chance. Colorado strained his ears to hear.

  “—over to the jail. We’re going to take Joe Burdette, or you and your deputy both are going to stop worrying about the whole thing.”

  Chance said harshly, “So that’s the way Nathan figured to do it.”

  “Nathan?” said the man in a tone of great surprise. “We got nothing to do with Nathan. We’re friends of Joe’s. And all you have to do is let him out.”

  Colorado made his decision. It was against all common sense and reason, against everything his father had taught him about not being afraid to stay out of other peoples’ fights. A man that’s really good, his father said, doesn’t have all the time to be proving it. And this was certainly the sheriff’s fight, not his. Colorado was never sure afterwards just what decided him, whether it was the sudden vivid memory of Pat Wheeler lying in the dust, or the sound of the Deguello from Burdette’s saloon, or the way Chance was standing out there alone with the three men around him. Or maybe it was Feathers asking him very plainly what kind of a man he was. Maybe it was all of them. Anyway he found himself speaking to Feathers, pointing first to an ornate pot with a little cactus in it and then to the big window in the front of the bar.

  “If you want to do something,” he said, “wait until I get out on the porch, in the clear, and then throw that flowerpot through the window, there. Understand? And duck after you throw it.”

  She nodded. Her eyes were kind of dazed-looking but she seemed to know what she was doing. Colorado let her go and she ran at once and picked up the flowerpot.

  Colorado walked out the front door, a fresh-faced kid without a care in the world.

  He looked extremely surprised when one of the riders said, “Just keep coming, mister.”

  They were all watching him. Chance turned half around and Colorado saw his face and knew right then for sure that he was where he wanted to be.

  “Me?” he said. “But—”

  “Yes, you,” said the man.

  Colorado took a step forward.

  The flowerpot came flying out through the window with a crash so loud and sudden that it even startled Colorado. He saw the three riders jump in their saddles, turning instinctively toward the noise. Colorado moved fast. He picked up Chance’s rifle and threw it with his right hand. His left-hand gun was clear of the holster and operating before Chance had finished catching the rifle in mid-air. Chance crouched, firing from an open stance at close range. The heavy slam of the rifle rolled like thunder between the building walls, and now both Colorado’s guns were going. The horses reared, neighing in shrill terror of the guns, and then suddenly it was quiet again, very quiet, and there was no sound or movement in the street except where a couple of the horses ran without riders. And then even they stood still.

  Colorado looked without quite believing it at the bodies of the three men who had not had time to fire a shot.

  Down the road the man who was wearing Dude’s clothes had vanished.

  Chance wiped his sleeve across his eyes as though to clear them of sweat and ran into the middle of the street.

  The man appeared again riding Dude’s horse. He came fast out of the stableyard, spurring away.

  Chance set the rifle to his shoulder and fired.

  The man rocked in the saddle, fell out of it, and hit the road with the limp finality of a dropped sack.

  “That’s another reason why I carry a rifle,” Chance said in a flat matter-of-fact voice. He strode to one of the horses and flung himself into the saddle and tore off down the road, flogging the horse across the withers with the reins.

  Feathers had come out on the porch. “Where’s he going?” she asked, as though she were asking the time of day.

  “To see what’s happened to his deputy,” Colorado said, and then he looked at her and saw how white she was, and how carefully she kept her head averted from the
street. He put his guns away. His hands were slippery with sweat, and shaking. People who had dived for cover a few moments ago were beginning to come out and they were all staring at him and at the three bodies in the street, and he thought, “I’ve done my first killing.”

  He did not want to look at their faces.

  “Come on,” he said to her. “Come on inside, you look bad. A drink is what you need.”

  He took her arm and pushed her ahead of him, and his face was as white as hers.

  Down the road in the stable Chance was bending over Dude.

  NINETEEN

  They had tied his hands and feet and shoved a wadded neckcloth in his mouth. Chance pulled the cloth out gently because it was stained with blood.

  “You all right?” Chance said.

  “I heard shooting,” Dude mumbled. “What’d they do?”

  He was still dazed. He was wet to the waist and filthy with dirt from the stable floor, his face covered with mud and blood and his hair plastered in it. He tried to get up and Chance said, “Wait a minute.” He got out his knife and went to work, talking while he did it.

  “They got me cold. They were going to make me open the jail—figured Stumpy wouldn’t shoot Joe because if he did they’d shoot me. Might have worked, too, if I’d gone along with ’em.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t have to make the decision. Colorado gave me a hand.”

  “Colorado,” Dude said, and licked the blood off his lips and spat. “Colorado.”

  He was free now. He got up onto one knee and then hung there, breathing hard. Chance took hold of him under the shoulder and he struck the hand away. “I can get up by myself,” he said.

  With a lurch and a heave he did it and stood with his feet wide apart, swaying. Chance did not offer his hand again. Instead he picked up the shirt that the man had left lying there and gave it to Dude, who put his arm mechanically into the sleeve.

  “I let ’em get me,” he said. “I let ’em walk right up and stick my head in a horse trough.”