It was a crazy, gaudy kind of place to be stuck out here in the desert, off all beaten trails and a hundred miles away from anything like civilization. I went over to the bar and ordered beer. The Mexican bartender served it up in a big crock mug and I pushed my face into the foam.
From the minute I walked into the place I became the main attraction, but I figured that wasn't unusual, considering what Basset's hired man had said about strangers. The customers all made a big to-do about carrying on with their talking and drinking as usual, but from the corners of their eyes they were cutting me up and down. They studied my two guns. They noticed that I used my left hand to drink, leaving my right one free. They didn't like me much, what they could see of me. They were thinking that I was damn young to tote so much iron.
They were thinking that somebody ought to get up and slap hell out of me just to teach me not to show off —but nobody got up.
I finished my beer and let the customers gawk until my friend with the dangerous eyes came back.
“Basset says come on in,” he grunted, and he went on out the front door without waiting to see if I had anything to say about it.
Chapter Two
I DON'T KNOW WHAT kind of man I expected Basset to be but I never would have figured him as the man he really was. Basset, it turned out, was a greasy-looking man not much over five feet tall and weighing not much under three hundred pounds. He was sprawled out in a tilt-back chair, in front of a roll-top desk, as I came in. He peered at me with dark little eyes that were almost squeezed out between enormous rolls of fat.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said, panting as if he had just finished a long run.
He was alone in the room. He looked completely harmless, but I shied away from him like a horse shying away from a snake.
“My man Kreyler says you're the Cameron kid,” he wheezed. “Says you used to ride with Pappy Garret. Hell with guns.”
“That's what your man Kreyler says,” I said.
“What do you say?”
I took a cane-bottom chair, the only other chair in the room. “Maybe.”
Basset shifted abruptly and sprawled in the other direction. “What did you want to see me about?”
I wasn't sure why I had wanted to see him. So I said, “I'm not sure. Maybe I just wanted to see what the boss of Arizona looks like.”
“Ha-ha,” he said, panting. He just spoke the words, he wasn't laughing. “All right, out with it, do you want a job?”
“That depends on what I have to do.”
“Have you got any money?”
“Twelve dollars,” I said. That was left from a job of trail driving I had done almost six months ago. I hadn't had a chance to spend it.
“Ha-ha,” Basset said again. “Let me tell you something, Cameron. I knew Pappy Garret. If you can handle guns the way he could, I'll make a rich man out of you. A rich man.”
“I don't hire my guns,” I said.
I'd had about enough of Basset. Watching his enormous, shaking belly made my skin crawl. I made a move to get up, but he waved me down.
“Just a minute,” he wheezed. “Let me tell you about our charming little village here, Ocotillo.” He settled back, smiling and breathing through his mouth. His lips were red and wet and raw-looking, like an incision in a piece of liver. “Ocotillo,” he said again. “It was just a little village of Mexican farmers, a few sheep herders, until a few years ago, when some sourdough thought he had discovered a vein of silver up in the foothills. Overnight, you might say, civilization came to Ocotillo. You wouldn't believe it, but two years ago this whole area was covered with tents and shacks and wagons, and fortune hunters crawled over the hills as thick as sand lice.”
He chuckled for a minute, remembering.
“Well, it turned out there wasn't any silver there after all, except some 'fool's silver,' traces of lead ore and zinc. Before you knew it Ocotillo was as empty as a frontier church. The fortune hunters all moved on, and for a while I'll admit I was worried. You saw the wood in my bar out there? Redwood from California. My wheels, pool table, gambling equipment, shipped clean from New York around the Horn and freighted across the desert. Cost thousands of dollars, this saloon, and for a while it looked like it wouldn't bring a penny.”
I rolled a cigarette while he talked. As I held a match to the corn-shuck cylinder, Basset smiled and nodded.
“I remember Pappy used to smoke his cigarettes Mexican style like that. Anyway, here I was with this saloon and nobody for customers except a few poor Mexicans. Then one day I got another customer.”
He slouched back in the chair, smiling, waiting for me to ask the question. “And this customer was...” I said.
“Black Joseph,” he said with satisfaction.
I wasn't particularly surprised. I hadn't heard of the famous Indian gunman for a year or more, so I knew that if he wasn't making buzzard food of himself he had to be in New Mexico or Arizona. I had never seen him, but I knew him by reputation. The artists' drawings on “Wanted' posters always showed him as a hungry-eyed, hawk- nosed, Osage, with a battered flat-crowned hat pushed down over his black, braided hair. He had been a scout for the Union Army during the war, but it seemed that even the bloody battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga hadn't blunted his craving to kill. He was supposed to be fast with a gun. According to some men who ought to know he was the fastest. I didn't know about that, and I didn't care. Black Joseph didn't have anything against me, and I had nothing against him.
