Chapter Eight
WE DIDN'T SAY much as we rode out of Ocotillo and into those barren, angry-looking foothills of the Huachucas. Bama was nursing the bottle again, and the kid wasn't doing much of anything, except that once in a while he would look wide-eyed all around him as though he couldn't understand how he had ever got here. I tried to do some thinking and planning, but my mind kept shooting off on sharp tangents and winding up in strange, long- forgotten places.
I guess we were all thinking pretty much the same thing—the wild Nueces River brush country, the wide green lands of the Texas Panhandle, and Miles Stanford Bonridge's state of Alabama. Home, for all of us, was a long way off. Farther than the poles, farther than those foreign lands on the other side of the ocean, because the distance that separated us from home was more than miles. It couldn't be measured and it couldn't be crossed.
The sun was about two hours high when we finally reached the big rock ledge, and there were six or eight horses already grazing down the canyon while the riders hunkered together under the shelf, waiting. We unsaddled and unbitted and put our horses out to graze, and then Bama went up to the head of the canyon to check off the names as the men rode in.
Johnny Rayburn said, “Is there anything I ought to do, Mr. Cameron?”
He still had that lost look and I began to wish that I had left him back somewhere.
I said, “There's nothing to do now but wait.”
I went up for a while to see how Bama was doing. The men were coming in slowly, grim-faced, reluctant.
Bama checked off a name and said, “Twelve. They're coming, but they don't like it worth a damn.”
I said, “They're getting paid for it. They don't have to like it.”
“Just the same, I've got a feeling that all our trouble won't come from the smugglers. This isn't exactly the smartest play in the world, and the men know it. They're beginning to say that they should have put Kreyler in as boss.”
“The more they talk, the less they'll do.” But I wasn't so sure.
“It's the Indians they don't like,” Bama was saying. “It would be better if you called this raid off and waited for another train to come up.”
“And give Kreyler a chance to work on the kid in the meantime?”
Talking about the kid reminded me that Kreyler's men could be working on him right now, for all I knew. I turned and half ran down the canyon. But nothing had happened. He was squatting with his back against the rocky wall. There was a ragged tally book on his knee, and he was writing painfully in it with the nub end of a pencil. He didn't see me until I was right in front of him, and when he looked up his face got red, as if he had just been caught stealing pennies from a poor box.
“I—well, I guess I was kind of writing my girl a letter,” he said. “I know there's no place to mail a letter around here, but when I get back to Tucson I can do it.”
I don't know why he thought it was necessary to tell me about it, but he kept stumbling on, telling me about his girl. I guess he didn't notice the look on my face—or maybe I had learned to hide the things I felt.
“You think a lot of this girl, don't you?” I put in. “Why, sure. Well, we've even got it planned to get married— sometime.” Sometime....
I should have done something right then. I should have put him on a horse and sent him back to Texas. And I caught myself thinking, That's exactly what I'll do— sometime.
It wasn't Johnny Rayburn that I was interested in, it wasn't even the money—because if this was to be the last raid it didn't make any difference what happened to the ledger. I was afraid—I admitted that. But the queer thing about it was that it wasn't the prospect of getting killed that scared me, it was the business of living and being alone.
It was crazy, and I guess there's no good way to explain it, but I didn't have the feeling when the kid was around.
I guess he was what they call a symbol. A symbol of other times. Better times.
The kid was still talking, rambling on. Now that he had got started, he didn't seem to know how to stop.
“I wouldn't expect anybody else to knew how I feel about that girl of mine,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn't think she was so much to look at, but she's prettier than a new colt to me. Yes, sir, I'm going to go back there someday. We're going to stake out a little place down on the Rio Grande that I know about and raise some beef cattle and some grain.” He laughed. “And some kids too, I guess.”
“What you do is your own goddamned business,” I said, “except just keep it to yourself. I don't want to hear about it.”
The bitterness in my voice surprised me almost as much as it did the kid. I didn't know why I had said it and I didn't know how to explain it. I just knew that I didn't want to hear about his girl, or his plans, or anything else.
I left him sitting there with a startled, bewildered look in his eyes. As I turned I almost ran into Bama, who was standing behind me.
“Well, what do you want?”
Bama ran a hand over that bearded, weak-looking chin of his. “It looks like the last of your men are in,” he said. “Kreyler came in just a while ago. The scouts just got in, too.” He rummaged in his shirt pocket and took out a section of the map that he had drawn. He put his pencil on the throat of a funnel-shaped canyon. “Here is where the train ought to be around noon tomorrow, according to the scouts. It'll be an all-night ride, and then some, if we get there in time.”
“We'll get there.”
