“How many men on my payroll would fall in with Kreyler?”
“Five, maybe six. You find malcontents wherever you go, but I couldn't point them out for you.”
Then I went to the map that I had tacked on the wall of the office and said what I had meant to say in the first place.
“We've got a scout report that a smuggler train has entered here, at a place called Big Mouth Canyon, about twenty-four hours ago. Heavily loaded, according to the scout, with maybe a record load of silver or gold. How soon can you get the men together?”
Bama stared at me. “You can't attack in a place like that. They'll be traveling over open country. Their outriders will be fanned out and they'll shoot us to pieces.”
“We can't string it out any longer,” I said. “This is the raid we have to make. And it will be the last one.”
Bama looked at me, and then at the map, and then he sighed again and got up from his chair. “Well, I'll round up as many as I can find,” he said, “and tell them we'll meet at the same place tonight.”
That was one thing about Bama, you didn't have to talk all day to get an idea across. One raid, that was all I wanted, and then we'd find a place to start all over again —not, as Bama had said, that it made much difference about us. But the kid still had that girl waiting for him, and Bama knew how I felt about that.
It all began much the same as the last raid, except that I was the boss now and not just another rider. But I didn't have the knack for organizing the way Basset had had. I didn't have the patience to sit down with paper and pencil and check off all the names of men I could depend on. I left that job to Bama while I took Johnny Rayburn around to the livery barn to get our rigs in shape.
I didn't like the idea of bringing the kid along on the raid, but I couldn't very well leave him back in Ocotillo making bullet bait of himself. The stableman brought my black in, and a bay for Johnny Rayburn, and then we heard a commotion outside and Bama came in.
His face was worried and he was wiping nervous sweat off the back of his neck with a dirty handkerchief. I waved the stableman out of the place and said, “What's going on?”
“You've got to send somebody out,” he said, “and call your men in, because the raid is off.”
“Like hell,” I said.
He wiped his neck some more and then brought the handkerchief across his mouth. “Maybe you'd better come out and see for yourself.”
I went out, with the kid on my heels, and saw maybe a dozen men ganged around in front of the saloon. In the middle there were two horses, and it didn't take me long to see what the excitement was about. As I began to shove men aside I heard Kreyler saying. “Morry, get yourself a partner and ride out to the meeting place and tell the men to come back in.”
By that time I was in the middle of things. I said, “Just stay where you are, all of you.” One of the horses was nervous, snorting and pawing the ground, the way animals will do at the smell of blood. He started to rear up but I grabbed the reins and jerked him down good and hard, and then I stroked his neck for a minute until he quieted down. After all that I finally got around to inspecting the thing in the saddle.
It had been a man once, but now it wasn't much of anything. He lay belly down across the saddle, his feet and hands tied with a strip of rawhide under the horse's belly to hold him in place.
“Somebody give me a knife.”
A knife appeared from somewhere and I cut the rawhide thongs. The body slid out of the saddle and sprawled out in the dust at my feet. He was one of my scouts, a little man with a mangy beard and a pair of wide- open eyes that seemed to be staring about a thousand miles into space. He had been shot all to pieces and there was no use feeling of his pulse to see if he was dead.
I went around to the other horse where the second body was, and I cut him down. This one had been my chief scout, the lanky, tobacco-chewing man who had thrown his weight on my side the day I shot Basset. He was bleeding from almost a dozen wounds, wounds that at first looked as if he had been caught in the haphazard blast of a scatter gun. But then I saw that there was nothing haphazard about it. He had been shot to death scientifically, by an expert rifleman, with the bullets just missing the really vital parts of his anatomy. It was the hard way to die, the way he had died. It was the long way.
I don't know how long I stood there looking at him before I began working up some kind of feeling about it. I had never known him very well. He was just a man on the run, like the rest of us, and his name was Malloy, and he was a pretty good scout who did his job without asking too many questions. That was about as much as I knew about him. But, seeing him sprawled out in the dust, I seemed to know him better that I had ever known him before. And for a moment something like fear struck in my guts, and I had the crazy idea that it was myself that I was looking at. I could almost feel the pain that was still a silent scream in the scout's eyes, I could almost feel the darkness closing in....
Then Bama said hoarsely, “My God, he's still alive!”
I snapped out of it, and I looked into the scout's eyes, and I saw that Bama was right.
“Get hold of him and take him into the saloon,” I said. “Take him back to the office and put him on my bed. Bama, see if you can find Marta. She's pretty good at this kind of thing.”
But I knew that neither Marta nor anybody else could help him now.
Four men picked him up as easily as they could and took him into my room and put him on my bed. Somebody brought some water and rags.
“Whisky.”
Somebody brought the bottle, but I knew that the scout would never be able to drink it. I soaked a rag and washed his face and that was about all I could do for him. It occurred to me then that it had been meant all along for him to live until he got back to Ocotillo. Such careful shooting wouldn't have been necessary if they had meant only to kill him.
“How do you feel, Malloy? Can you swallow some whisky?” They were both stupid questions, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. For a moment his eyes lost their glassiness, and he looked at me and at the men
