like I said, and I was born there and lived there all my life—until the last month or so.” He hesitated until he became convinced that it was all right to talk. “Well, hell,” he said, “I guess I got into some trouble. There was a dance in Lost Creek—that's a town by our place—and I guess some of the boys kind of got liquored up and there was a fight. The first thing you know there's a deputy sheriff dead on the floor, and then the first thing I know they're claimin' I was one of the boys that done it.”
He looked at us to see what we thought about it. “I didn't have anything to do with it,” he said, “but they locked me up anyway, along with the others. And when they have the trial the jury says manslaughter and sentences all of us to three years on the work gang.” He grinned uncertainly. “But the jail they was holdin' us in wasn't much, so I lit out of there as fast as I could. God knows how I wound up in Arizona.”
For a minute there was silence and I sat there thinking about myself, a kid who had started running just about the same way, and was still running. Then, for no reason I could think of, I began to get mad, and I wanted to get up and shake that kid until his teeth rattled and knock some sense into his head. I wanted to tell him that there were worse things than the work gang. I wanted to tell him how it was when you ran and ran until you couldn't run any more, but you knew that if you stopped it would be all over. There were a lot of things I could tell him— things I wished somebody had told me.
I think Bama's mind was working about the same way mine was, but he just sat there waiting for me to do something. But all I did was to sit back in the chair and say, “Do you want a job?”
“With you, Mr. Cameron? Gosh, yes!”
I looked at him and then looked away. He was building me up in his mind as a big hero, but I didn't feel like a hero right then.
I said, “Bama, give him the ledger and tell him what to do,” and I threw out the sack of Basset's with the five hundred adobe dollars in it. “This ought to be enough to take care of the lawyer.”
Bama took the money and waited a minute for me to look at him. But I didn't look at him.
That night after the saloon had emptied and things had quieted down. I went back to my new quarters behind the office and tried to get things straightened out. The room was a plain affair with the usual bed and chair and washstand. On one wall there was a big framed picture that showed a bunch of battered, dejected, half-frozen soldiers marching through the snow. They had rags tied around their heads and rags on their feet, and they looked as if they had about a bellyful of war. But off to one side there was a cocky little man sitting on a big white horse, and just by looking at him you knew that he was the boss and the war wasn't going to be over until he said so. Down at the bottom of the picture there was some small print that said, “Napoleon in Russia.”
There was a bookshelf beside the bed, and a coal-oil lamp. I picked up one of the books, and it was
There were a lot of other books there, but I didn't look at them. I began to count the money that the saloon had taken in for the night, and it was a little over two hundred dollars. I was just beginning to appreciate what a good thing I'd come into. I made a mental note to ask somebody where Basset had got his whisky supply for the saloon, but I figured it would probably be Mexico. Then I started figuring how money would be coming in every month from the saloon and the smuggler trains, and the amount it came to was staggering.
I paced up and down the room with figures running through my mind, and every once in a while I would stop and look at that picture of Napoleon and I knew just how he felt. There was only one way to look—straight ahead.
That was before I found out what happened to Napoleon in Russia.
But I was feeling pretty good about it then, and the feeling hung on as long as I kept thinking of money and had that picture to look at. It was only after I had undressed and blown out the lamp that something different began to happen.
There in the darkness things began to look different. I began to think about the day and the things that had happened and I couldn't believe it. Here I was in Basset's room, in Basset's bed, and the fat man was dead and buried—but none of it seemed real.
Maybe, I began to think, it was because I didn't want it to be real. I lay there for a long time and I could hear Bama saying, “What has happened to you?” And that was what bothered me. I didn't know. Things had happened too fast to know much of anything. It was like having a comet by the tail and not being able to let go.
Abruptly, I got out of bed, fumbled for matches, and lit the lamp. I looked at the picture again, but that didn't help. The cocky little man on the white horse didn't seem so cocky now, and I doubted that he was as sure of himself as he tried to make people believe.
I went into the office and fumbled around in the dark until I found the whisky that Bama had left. I poured and downed it. I poured again and downed that. I began to feel better.
I took the bottle and glass back into the room and sat on the bed and had another one. I was beginning to feel fine. Another drink or two and I would be ready to kick Napoleon off that white horse and climb on myself.
I don't know how long I sat there, with my mind going up in dizzy spirals, skipping from one place to another like a desert whirlwind. But after a while it hit me and I realized what I was doing. Nothing ever hit me any harder.
Suddenly I could understand Bama, because I was on the road to becoming just like him. Miles Stanford Bon- ridge, gentleman and son of a gentleman. Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.
But not for me. I hammered the cork into the bottle and took it back into the office and there it would stay.
Not for me. But the effort left me weak as I went back and sat on the bed and tried to piece together a lot of loose ends that didn't seem to fit anywhere.
But they did fit when you worked at it long enough. And the first loose end was that smuggler raid. Killing was one thing, but killing like that was something else and would never really be a part of me. I should have known that when I went back to my room and messed up the floor, and maybe I had known, in the back of my mind.
I sat there for a long time, getting a good look at myself and it wasn't very pretty. It was like that first day
