Nothing at all happened, the way things worked out. Outside, I heard one of the horses stamp nervously. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary. But just the same, it gave me a funny feeling. Uneasiness started walking up my back with cold feet, so I went to the door and looked out.
Things were pitch-dark out there and I couldn't see a thing. But that feeling was still with me. I stepped outside, brushing my palms against the butts of my pistols, just to make sure that I had them.
That wasn't enough. I should have pulled them and started shooting.
Chapter Eleven
YOU NEVER KNOW, I guess, just what's the right thing to do. You either do it or you don't. And that time I didn't do it.
I stepped outside and something hard and solid connected with the back of my head and bright showers of pain flew out in all directions. I took another step—or I thought I did—and I walked right into that black pit that has no sides and no bottom and I started falling.
It was a long trip. My head hit something two or three times on the way down. Then something slammed in my middle and my stomach jumped up and tried to shove my Adam's apple out of the way and get in my mouth. I fought it, but after a while it didn't seem to be worth the trouble. I let the darkness have its way.
We got to be old friends, me and the darkness. I got to like it down there. It was cool and comfortable and the smothering black fog closed over me and around me and—all I had to do was sleep. The trials and tribulations of the world were away and gone and I didn't have to worry about scrabbling around in the dirt for money or life, because money and life didn't mean anything down there. I should have stayed there. And maybe I would have if I had known what it was going to be like when I got back. But I didn't know it then. I didn't know anything.
I started fumbling in the blackness, and after a while I found a little slit of light about an inch long and about as wide as a thread of silk split four ways—-and that was my consciousness, I suppose. Anyway, I clawed and scratched until I got a hold in the slit, and then, with an effort that left me sweating, I ripped the darkness wide open.
I was sprawled out in Marta's kitchen, and a lamp was being held over me. The sudden light hit my eyeballs like hammers and I rolled over and tried to curse, but all that came out was a groan. I heard somebody saying, “By God, he's got a hard head, all right. That's one thing you can say for him.” Somebody else said, “Just watch him, and if he tries to get up let him have it again.”
I didn't recognize the first voice, but the second one belonged to Kreyler. I lay there for what seemed a long while, trying to get the mud out of my brain. Kreyler... It looked like I had fooled away too much time in Ocotillo when I should have been on the road. The Marshal was either smarter than I thought he was, or I was dumber than I thought I was. It didn't make much difference now. He had found out about the silver, and he had caught up with me, and somebody had damn near beat my brains out with a pistol barrel—if I'd had any brains to begin with.
I tried to move again, and that was a big mistake. The stupor that had me sealed up in a little world all my own, like sod on a grave, suddenly disappeared and I broke into the world of reality, full of aches and pains. My head was the big trouble. It felt like an October gourd that had been stepped on—smashed and empty.
The room began to swim, and my stomach started crowding into my throat again. I raised my head as high as I could, but all I could see was boots and spurs and the packed clay floor. I was ready to give up. I was sick, and tired to death, and blood was getting in my eye, and I couldn't figure out a way to stop it. Kreyler could have the silver. He could have the girl. All I wanted was to be left alone.
But it wasn't as simple as that. Through the sickness I heard the sodden sound of bone and flesh hitting more bone and flesh. Somebody laughed—the man who was supposed to give me another pistol whipping if I tried to get up, I guess. I heard Marta make a tight little sound, and then something hit the floor, solidly, like a sack of oats being dumped off a wagon.
I had a pretty good idea what was happening, but I was in no position to do anything about it. I lifted my head again and the room tilted up on one corner and spun around a few times. Finally it settled down. Things came into focus.
It was about the way I had figured it. Johnny Ray-burn was sitting on his rump, with a bloody mouth and a dazed look in his eyes, and Kreyler was standing over him, grinning, rubbing his right fist in the palm of his left hand. “I can keep this up all night, kid,” the Marshal said. “Do you want to tell me who has that ledger, or do you want to go through this all over again?”
The kid just sat there looking stupid. Kreyler jerked him up by the front of his shirt and hit him again. Away down in the cellar of my mind a spark set off an explosion of anger. I rolled over on my face. I got my hands under me and began to push. My stomach turned over and tied itself into a knot. I pushed some more and sweat popped out all over me. Somebody had gone to Austin and brought the capitol building to Arizona and tied it on my back. But I was going to get up anyway. And when I did, I was going to see if Kreyler could take it as well as he handed it out. I wanted to see how he would stand up under a pistol whipping. I was going to find out—as soon as I managed to get off the floor.
My intentions were all right, but something went wrong with my arms. They gave away and I fell on my face again. For a moment I just lay there with my head ringing, blowing as if I had run all the way from El Paso. I must have put on quite a show. Anyway, it seemed to amuse Kreyler and his pal. They had a good laugh about it. Then Kreyler came over and turned me on my back with the toe of his boot. “Well,” he said, “the great Tall Cameron doesn't look so tough now.” And everybody had another round of laughs.
Anyway, I had pulled Kreyler's attention off the kid for a few minutes. And I finally got a look at the Marshal's pal.
He was a frail little man not much over five feet tall, with pale watery eyes and a thin little mouth that was always just about to break into a smile, but never quite made it. When he laughed it was just a sound that he made with his mouth, ha-ha, something like the kind of sound that Basset used to make. He was standing over me with the muzzle of a .44 shoved in my face, looking as big as a rain pipe. I think he would have pulled the trigger just to feel the gun buck, if Kreyler hadn't stopped him... Well, I wasn't the only one in the company with a hard head. Kreyler's gunny was Bucky Fay, the man I had knocked out with my pistol barrel and who was supposed to have been stretched out in the mountains somewhere with his skull split open.
“Not yet, Bucky,” the Marshal said soothingly, as though he were talking to a backward child, “I'll tell you when, Bucky, but first we've got some things to do. Remember?”
Bucky thought about that for a while, and finally he did remember. He stepped back one pace, almost smiling, and held his pistol just about on a line with my heart.
