“Now, let's see,” Kreyler said looking at me. “Would it be better to work on you or the kid?” He wasn't in any hurry. He seemed to have all the time in the world, and this was a delicate problem and he was going to figure it out if it took him all night.
“I think the kid,” he said finally. “You're right fond of him, aren't you, Cameron? You wouldn't like to see him with his face all messed up and maybe an eye knocked out, now, would you, Cameron? Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. You just tell me where that ledger is and I won't even lay a hand on him. I give you my word.”
Kreyler's word would be about as good as a counterfeit dime. But I couldn't tell him that now. He had guessed right about the kid. I wasn't going to let anything happen to him, if I could help it.
“Can I sit up?” I said.
Kreyler shrugged. “Sure. Let him sit up, Bucky.”
Bucky took another step back and lined his pistol up again, this time at some invisible spot between my eyes. My co-ordination must have been getting better, because I made it all the way to a sitting position the first try. But it wasn't without effort. I sat there gulping in air and wiping blood off the side of my face. I felt of my head, and there were two good-sized bumps and a nasty cut, but I figured I would live. For a little while, anyway.
Marta was over by the cook table trying to comfort her old man. Papacito seemed to be taking it harder than anybody in the room. Tears were rolling down his face and getting into his dirty mustache, and he kept fumbling at those wooden beads around his neck and jabbering some kind of prayer over and over, and for some reason that made me madder than anything else. What the hell did
“For God's sake, shut him up,” I said to Kreyler. “How can I think with that racket going on?”
It must have been getting on Kreyler's nerves too, although he hadn't shown it. He said, “Watch things, Bucky.” Then he stepped over and knocked the old man clear off his stool and sent him rolling against the wall.
Marta was on him like a panther, clawing and scratching and spitting out curses in that language of hers. But this was the Marshal's night to do all the things that he had been wanting to do for a long time. Me, the kid, the old man and now Marta. He was taking care of all of us and loving it. Every dog has his day, they say. This one belonged to Kreyler.
He made short work of Marta. He backhanded her hard enough to cross her eyes and then he grabbed her shoulder and shook her until her teeth rattled. “Goddamn you!” he said hoarsely, and I didn't realize until then how mad he really was. Maybe he would have killed her if she had kept fighting. But I guess she had all the fight knocked out of her. He let her go and she dropped down at the table and started crying.
That surprised me. I wouldn't have thought that there were any tears in a girl like that.
Anyway, Kreyler had quieted things down. Now he came back to me.
“What's it going to be, Cameron? Are you going to tell me about the ledger or do I work on the kid some more?”
By now I had discovered that my guns were gone, which was no surprise. What was I going to tell him? I couldn't take much more. And neither could the kid. Of course, there was Bama in the next room, and they could work on him if they killed both of us.
I said, “What good is it going to do me if I tell you where the ledger is?”
Kreyler smiled. “You can go, after that. The ledger's all I want.”
“And the silver?”
“You can have that, too, if you can figure a way to get it out of Ocotillo.”
He was lying and we both knew it. Once he knew where the ledger was, he would kill all of us—except Marta, maybe—and take the silver for himself, the way I had been going to do. It would be easy. He could tell the men that I had double-crossed them, and not even Bucky would be alive to tell them any different.
I said, “Would you mind telling me why the men aren't yelling their heads off about their cut? They must have found out by now that the silver's gone.”
“The trouble with you, Cameron,” he said, “is that you don't know how to handle men. I knew what happened to the silver as soon as I found out it was missing. But I didn't tell the men about it. I told them to go on drinking and we'd make the cut in the morning.”
It was all very pretty. I would be missing, and so would the silver, and two and two is always four—anyway, most people think so.
Bucky was still standing there with his .44 pointed at a place between my eyes, and he was probably thinking what a lucky guy he was, because Kreyler was going to split that pile of adobe dollars with him.
Like hell Kreyler was going to split with him. Bucky would wind up with the rest of us, in some shallow grave where we would stay until the coyotes dug us up a year or two from now.
For a minute I thought maybe Marta could help us. I could get a signal to her and she could rush Bucky. Then the kid could keep Kreyler busy for a minute while I got Bucky's gun and finished the job. That was the way things were beginning to shape up in my mind. Johnny Rayburn seemed to be reading my thoughts, because he nodded his head when I looked for just the right spot to make the tackle. But when I looked at Marta I tore the plans up and threw them away.
Marta was a smart girl. I had forgotten how smart.
Marta was through with me. She was through with me, and Bama, and Johnny Rayburn. The money was blowing in a new direction, and Marta was drifting with the wind. The Marshal was her man now.
She had stopped her bawling and thought things over, and she had come to the conclusion that Tall Cameron's future wasn't exactly the bright and shining star to hitch her ambitions to that she had once thought. But Kreyler— that was something else again. From here on out, Kreyler would be boss. Besides that, he would have that pile of silver and could buy her all the pretties her black heart desired.
She thought about that. She liked it. She looked at me and sneered, and she looked at Kreyler and smiled.
