“The things I want can't be bought,” he said.
I lay there for a long while looking over my rifle, across the field of fire. He was right, of course. Bama was almost always right, and that's what made me so mad at times.
Bama looked up at the sun and said, “It won't be long now.”
As if that had been a signal, we began to hear the metallic sounds of cartridges being jacked into rifles. They would fight, I thought grimly. Maybe they wouldn't like it, and maybe their guts were crawling like a bagful of snakes, but goddamn them, they would fight because they were more afraid of me than they were of the smugglers.
I looked up and Bama was staring at me in that disconcerting way of his, as if he had been reading my thoughts. But he didn't say anything. He lay down again, motionless, looking over his rifle, and after a moment he began singing softly:
“The years creep slowly by, Lorena,
The snow is on the grass again...”
It was an old war song, sugary and sentimental as most of those songs were. I had heard the long, awkward boys of Texas singing it as they marched the dusty roads with Hood to fight in strange and foreign lands for the Confederacy. I had heard it again as they came straggling back after Appomattox, what was left of them.
“We loved each other then, Lorena,
More than we ever dared to tell;
And what we might have been, Lorena,
Had but our lovings prospered well....”
I don't know, maybe it was the song that started me thinking about Texas again. “And what we might have been, Lorena.” It was so goddamned cloying and sickeningly sentimental that it was almost enough to make a man throw up—and still, that just about summed it up....
Sometimes, after I had finished with my ranchwork, I used to ride over to Laurin's place, which was only about two miles from our own Panhandle ranch house. And more than likely I would use the excuse of looking for strays, because her brother thought I was wild, as he called it, and never liked for me to be hanging around. But he couldn't keep me from seeing her. We were both pretty young then and we didn't do much except talk a little, but we understood from the first the way it was. I remember on my seventeenth birthday Pa had given me four head of beef cattle and I couldn't wait to tell her about it. “This is just the start,” I said. “Those four cows will grow into one of the biggest ranches in Texas. It'll be our ranch.”
I guess we were pretty happy then.
It wasn't my fault that there was a war. It wasn't my fault that the carpetbaggers and bluebellies moved into Texas looking for trouble. I hadn't been the only hothead who decided that it was better to live a life of my own outside the law than to live within the law and have a bluecoat's boot heel on my neck.
But I hadn't known that it was going to work out like this. In the back of my mind I had always planned on going back and having that ranch and family just the way we had planned. But I never would. It was too late.
“It matters little now, Lorena,
The past is in the eternal past....”
“Will you stop that goddamn noise!” I said, and my voice was shriller, louder than I had intended.
Then we all began to hear the bright, faraway little sounds of bells, and I heard somebody say, “Get ready, here they come,” and the word was passed all along the line. I looked around and everything seemed to be all right. All the men were down, covered up with brush. Nothing looked out of place.
The bell sounds became mingled with the clatter of hoofs on the rocky ground, and then I could see them coming.
“By God, it's just like I figured. Right down the middle.”
Bama didn't say anything. He looked frozen, and he was gripping his rifle hard enough to put dents in it. The smugglers' advance guard was getting close now, three Mexicans riding in line with about twenty yards between them. Behind them came a fat old geezer on a dappled horse, all decked out in a white sombrero and a scarlet sash and silver bangles. He was almost as fat as Basset, but he was mean and tough and he carried two six-guns and a knife and he had a scar from the top of his left ear to the point of his chin to prove it. Flanking him there were a couple of saddleless riders with dirty rags around their heads, and I guessed they were the Indians who were scaring everybody to death.
They didn't look so tough to me. They rode heavily, slouched on their ponies, in the way of all Indians. Most of them wore dirty hickory shirts that they had picked up somewhere, and a great variety of pants, most of which were torn off or cut off just below the knee. There were a great many knives and hatchets and a few old cap-and- ball pistols that must have been relics of the Mexican War.
After the advance guard, and the head smuggler and his personal bodyguard, there came the train of little gray mules and the outriders. It was pretty much my first raid all over again, except for the Indians. There was nothing much we could do now except lie there and hope that they didn't see us until we had the whole train in our field of fire.
After they all came into line I saw that the picture wasn't as bad as the scouts had painted it. After some fast counting I saw that there were only twenty Indians and four Mexicans, including the head man, so they only had us outnumbered twenty-four to twenty. Which wasn't bad, considering that we had our twenty in ambush.
I could feel Bama tighten up as the outriders began to come by. They were damn near close enough to shake hands with.
