“Look at this,” he said, holding his tally book in front of me. “Twenty men is all we've got, and they're already beginning to lose their guts for this thing. According to the scouts, the smugglers have around thirty outriders, most of them Indians.”
I looked up and the sun was almost gone, and long, cool shadows were reaching into the canyon, and pretty soon it would be dark. I said, “Out of these twenty men of mine, is mere anybody we can trust if the going gets tough?”
Bama thought about it. “There's maybe four or five that ought to string along.”
“All right, this is what we'll do. When we ride out of here you'll stay with Kreyler in the van of things, and you'd better keep a couple of those men with you. Have the others somewhere in the middle of the column when we hit the mountain trails, and tell them to report to me it anybody starts acting up. I'll be back in the drag with the kid.”
We didn't move out until Bama went through the motions of contacting the boys he thought-would stick; then finally he gave me the sign and we began to round up our horses.
It was dark by the time we rode out of the canyon, traveling in a column of twos and looking like the ragged, whipped-out remnants of some defeated army. After a while a pale moon came out, looking aloof and cold as only a mountain moon can look, and I began to feel the uneasiness of the men.
Maybe an hour went by, and then we reached a wide place in the trail where one of the men had dropped out to tighten his girth. “Cameron.”
I got a look at his face in the moonlight and recognized him as one of the men that Bama had singled out to be trusted. I motioned to the kid to pull up beside me and I said, “Yes?”
He looked all around as the column wound on down a rocky grade, and he lowered his voice.
“In about an hour,” he said, “we're goin' to hit a flat stretch of country at the bottom of this grade. There's talk up ahead, among the men.”
“What kind of talk?”
“They're goin' to make a break for it. They haven't got the guts for a raid like this, I guess. They plan to leave you sittin' high and dry.”
For a minute I just sat there. “Who's behind this talk? Kreyler?”
“Kreyler's in no condition to do anything. It's all he can do to stay on his horse.” He pondered for a minute. “Maybe he's behind it, at that. I guess he is. But it's Bucky Fay that's doin' the talkin', gettin' the men stirred- up.”
I guessed that Bucky Fay was one of the men I had inherited from Basset, but I didn't know him. Not by name, anyway. I figured it was about time we got acquainted.
I said, “I don't think they've got the guts to make a break for it, but I'll ride up just to make sure. I'll see that you get taken care of when we make the cut on the silver.”
He grinned. That's what he had been waiting for. He was about as dependable as a cardboard dam in a flash flood. But maybe the silver would hold him as long as I needed him.
I brushed my black horse with the rowels of my spurs and we spurted toward the head of the column. We threaded in and out between riders along the narrow trail, and it didn't take long to see that something was going on. I rode up behind one man and heard him saying:
“By God, it's suicide. Nobody but a damn fool would try to attack smugglers in Funnel Canyon. Personally, I never took myself to be that kind of fool. How about the rest of you boys?”
By that time I was riding alongside him, and I said, “Are you Bucky Fay?”
His voice shut off suddenly, like the squawk of a chicken on a chopping block. I had seen him in the saloon and his face was familiar, even if his name wasn't. He was one of Kreyler's buddies, all right, just like I figured—one of those tight, nervous, flint-faced little bastards that I never liked anyway, and that was going to make my job that much easier.
We were on the moon side of the mountain and everything was light enough to see what was going on. The column limped along like a dollar watch with a busted spring, then suddenly it stopped. Everybody was looking, and that was the way I wanted it.
“Bucky Fay?” I said again, and I found that it was getting harder to keep my anger shoved down where it ought to be.
He got over his first shock of seeing me there beside him. He started to sneer—it was just the beginning of a downward twitch around his puckered little mouth, and I guess he thought he had me just where he wanted me. His eyes shifted from one side to the other and he saw that most of the men were on his side and that gave him the confidence he needed.
He started to say something—maybe it was to answer my question, or maybe it was just to hold my attention while somebody else tried to put a bullet in me. It doesn't make any difference now, because he never got it said.
There's only one way to handle things like that. I would have shot him, maybe, if it had been another time, another place, but now I didn't want to rouse half of Arizona by burning a cartridge uselessly. I had him on my near side and my pistol was in my lap for a saddle draw. I leaned over slightly, my pistol jumped in my hand, and I slammed the heavy barrel across his head.
It made a sound like dropping an overripe pumpkin on a flat rock, and his eyes popped out as if they had been punched from behind with a pool cue. I didn't know if I had killed him and I didn't particularly care. I just knew that when he fell out of the saddle he was going to lie there for a long time and he wasn't going to bother me or anybody else.
It all happened pretty fast, without the bickering back and forth that usually goes before a fight. I raised up in the saddle so that I could see every startled, gutless face in the column, and I knew the less said about it, the better. Let them think about it. By the time they got through thinking about it the raid would be over.
I noticed Kreyler up near the front and he looked pretty sick about the whole thing. I couldn't tell what hurt
