A Noose for the Desperado

that would have given the whole thing away. There was still the silver to be taken care of. Not even Johnny Rayburn came ahead of that.

I went back to the office and locked the door and put a chair against it. Then I walked the floor, waiting for something to happen. From the sound of things, the men were getting pretty drunk in the saloon. But there was still Kreyler, goddamn him.

Well, I could still take care of him. When he ran out on me I swore I would kill him. And I might do it yet.

Somewhere in that confusion of thoughts there was a knock at the back door. I opened up and there stood four grinning Mexicans, all teeth and eyes in the darkness. They all started jabbering that spick lingo at me, and I told them to shut up and start moving those bags.

They grunted, surprised at the weight6i the stuff. But I finally got them loaded up and they went staggering off into the darkness. They only got about half of it the first time around, and I waited for what seemed a week for them to come back. What if they got curious as to what was in those bags? You can't trust Mexicans. You can't trust anybody with that much money.

But I guess they weren't the curious kind. They came back finally, puffing and grinning, and I loaded them up again. I went around to the livery barn and got that black horse of mine and a sturdy little bay for the kid, and I headed down the alley toward the Mexican part of town.

I knew that part of town pretty well by now, so I went around the back way and came in between the high adobe walls to the back door of Marta's place. Through the open door I could see the Mexicans puffing and wiping their faces as they stared blankly at the pile of silver on the kitchen floor.

“Mr. Cameron?”

“Are you all right, kid?”

“Sure,” he said, and came out into the little walled-in yard where I was.

“How's Bama?”

“He looks pretty good,” he said. “That girl washed the wound and bandaged it up and gave him some broth. He looks better than he did on that travois.”

“Let's go in and look at him,” I said. “We haven't got much time, though.”

The kid held back as if he weren't any too anxious to go back inside.

“What's the matter?”

“It's the old man,” he said. “Marta's pa. He doesn't like gringos to start with, and he especially doesn't like them coming in and taking his house over.”

We could fix that, I thought. I'd give him a handful of silver and that would shut him up. Anyway, we went in and there was Bama stretched out on the earth bed with a cigarette between his lips. His face had been washed and his leg had a clean bandage. He looked like a new man.

But he hadn't really changed. He spat the cigarette out and drawled, “Welcome to our little sanctuary, Tall Cameron,” and I remembered that long spiel he had made the first time I saw him. “Welcome to Ocotillo, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be badmen; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” At the time I thought he had been joking. But it was no joke. I had seen them and lived with them. I was one of them.

“How's the leg?” I cut in on him.

He closed his eyes. “The leg's all right. It's a hell of a thing, isn't it, to have a body that's seemingly indestructible, when you're dead inside?”

“I guess you're all right. You still talk crazy, which is normal for you, I guess.”

Bama laughed. “How about Kreyler and the boys? Are they going to let you just walk out with their silver?”

“They don't know yet that I've walked out with it. By the time they find out, I mean to be on my way to Mexico.”

Bama had no comment to make on that. He just lay there with his eyes closed. All the time we had been talking there had been a lot of jabbering going on in the other room. I went to the door and saw that it was Marta paying off my baggage boys. They backed out of the house, grinning and bowing, clutching the silver in their hands.

“Where are they going?” I asked.

Marta laughed. “They go cantina.”

That was fine. Tomorrow morning they would wake up with a headache and a bad memory.

I wondered how long it would take Kreyler to discover that I had pulled out with the silver. Not long, probably, but after he did find out he would have to find us to do anything about it. We had an hour, I figured, to take care of the silver and get out of Ocotillo.

They say that money can be a burden, and for a minute it looked as if that was what that silver was going to be to me. We couldn't load our horses down with it. And we couldn't put it on a pack horse and take it with us, because that would slow us down, too. The only thing to do was to go somewhere and have the silver shipped to us.

But now? No freighting company would touch it, even if there had been a freighting company in Ocotillo. We could bury it, maybe,, and come back after it later. But we needed the money now. Anyway, I'd had enough of Ocotillo to last a lifetime.

Then the whole thing exploded pretty and clean in my mind and I knew how we were going to take care of that silver.

I yelled, “Marta!” and she was standing right at my elbow. “Look,” I said, “do you still want to go with me?”