“No, I don't think so.”
He seemed to forget about the hospital. I rolled a cigarette for him and put it in his mouth. “I've been thinking about the war,” he said as I held the match. “I wonder if anything was decided by it. There's a theory that wars are inevitable because the natural blood lust in a man demands them. What do you think about that?”
“I don't know anything about wars.”
“But you know about killing. It's the same thing.”
“It's not the same thing. Do you want to know how I got a reputation as a gunman? It all started one day in a little town in Texas. A drunk Davis policeman pushed me off the plank walk. A little thing like that. Well, I hit him and that raised a big racket, but Pa managed to get things quieted down, and we thought it would blow over. But then another guy hit a cavalryman, and that made two of us, and the Yankees figured they'd have to do something about it. The first thing I knew, the bluebellies were wanting to put me on the work gang, so I had to light out. The federals came out to our ranch and wanted to know where I was, and when Pa wouldn't tell them they tried to beat it out of him. They killed him.”
I hadn't thought that I could ever talk about it without getting crazy with anger, but all that happened a long time ago. It was almost like telling a story about somebody else, some person that I only slightly knew.
“That was the way it started,” I said. “I came back home and killed the bluebelly. Then it seemed like everywhere I went people were hunting me. They never learned, goddamn them—they would just make me kill them.”
It was quiet for a minute. And Bama was right about one thing—I began to smell it.
“I went back once,” I said, “to that place in Texas. It was a crazy thing to do, I guess, but there was a girl there and it seemed like I just had to see her. But I shouldn't have done it, I had teamed up with a famous gunman, Pappy Garret, and got myself a reputation, and things weren't the same any more. She was afraid of me. If I had touched her I think she would have fainted. Anyway, she was going to marry somebody else. I guess I'll never go back again.”
I had never told those things to anybody else. I don't know why I told them to Bama, unless maybe it was to get his mind off his leg.
“I wonder,” Bama said, “what would have happened if you hadn't run away.”
“I would have put in two years on the work gang.”
“Would that have been so bad?”
I knew that he was talking about Johnny Rayburn, not me. I got up and went to my own bunk.
It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, and our tongues were beginning to get too big for our mouths, when Marta's old man finally showed up. Around noon I went up on the bluff that formed the south wall of our cave, and there he was, him and his two burros, about three miles away and looking like three bugs crawling up the side of a mountain. He had the silver, all right, I could tell that by the heavy way the burros moved. There was nobody with him, and nobody following him.
“Here he comes,” I shouted down to the others. “Johnny, you gather up the horses.” Then I went down and we all waited in the mouth of the cave.
The old man was puffing and blowing and the burros were all lathered up as they pulled in. Marta swung onto Papacito's neck and they both began to jabber away in Spanish. I went around punching the big leather pack bags, and they all seemed solid and heavy enough, so I guessed that all the silver was there. Marta had found a canteen somewhere and was swigging from the neck when I came up and took it out of her hands. “No!” she yelled. “For Marta!”
“It's for all of us,” I said.
The kid was coming up with the horses, so I gave him a drink, then I poured a little in my hand and let the horses wet their muzzles. “Get the horses stripped down,” I said, “and throw away everything but the saddles and guns. You can start getting those pack bags split up and we'll divide the load between us.”
Bama was sitting with his back against a rock as I came up with the canteen. “Have a drink of this,” I said.
He turned the canteen up and gulped. His leg didn't look any better. The flesh around the wound was beginning to turn a dark purple, like a deep bruise, and he had that wild look that fever puts in a man's eyes.
When I got the canteen there was about a mouthful of water and some dregs in it. I emptied it and hung it over my shoulder.
“Do you feel like riding?”
He shrugged. He should have been in bed. He should have had a good doctor and a roomful of nurses, and maybe a few preachers to say some prayers. But he was going to ride, because there was nothing else to do. “How far are we from the border?” I said. “Only a few miles,” he said, “if we go straight south. But we can't go that way. Federal marshals and Mexican soldiers patrol that country. We'll have to ride into the mountains and take one of those canyons that the smuggler trains use.”
“How far will it be that way?”
“Fifty miles, maybe. It's pretty rough country, but you have to go the long way around with the load we've got. We wouldn't be much good if it came to a horse race.”
Bama was right, as usual. All right, we would go the long way around. Fifty miles wasn't so far. Not for the rest of us, but for Bama it was going to be a long, long trip. Of course, I could lighten our load by leaving Bama behind. It would make things a lot easier for me, and chances were Bama would never last the trip anyway.
But I didn't have the stomach for it. I said, “I'll have the kid bring your horse around and we'll put you in the saddle.”
There was one more way to lighten our load, but I was going to wait until the last minute to do it. I went up to the mouth of the cave and helped get the silver loaded. A lot of it we got in the saddle bags, and the rest of it we had to lash on behind the saddles. It was a clumsy way to do it, and the horses could hardly walk, much less run,
