She didn't bat an eye. “I think you plenty fast with gun,” he grinned. “You don't be killed.”
“I'll be killed if you keep telling people I'm a government marshal. What the hell did you do that for, anyway? And after that, why did you bother to warn me that somebody was waiting for me? Do you just like to hear guns go off and see men get killed?”
She threw her head back and laughed, as if that was the best one she'd heard in a long time. “Maybe you buy Marta drink, eh?”
“Maybe I'll kick Marta's bottom if she doesn't leave me alone.”
But I didn't mean it and she knew it. She laughed again and I poured her a drink of the white poison. She poured salt in the cup between her thumb and forefinger, licked it with her tongue and then downed her drink in one gulp. She looked more at home here in the saloon than some of the fancy girls. And she was a lot better looking than any of the doxies. But I noticed a funny thing. None of the men looked at her. They seemed to go to a great deal of trouble
“Another one, gringo?” she said, holding up her empty glass.
“Not for me.” But I reached for the bottle and poured her another one. She downed it the same way she had the first one.
“Where you go, gringo?”
“To find a bed. There's a big desert out there and I've been a long time crossing it. I'm tired.”
She took my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Come with me, I fix.”
“Isn't there a hotel over the saloon here?”
“You no go there. You come with Marta.”
God knows she made it clear enough, and she was the best-looking girl I had seen for longer than I liked to remember—but there was something about it that went against me. I felt a sickness that I hadn't felt in a long time, and memories popped up in my mind, sharp and clear like a magic-lantern show I had seen once. We were outside now, on the dirt walk in front of the saloon. At the end of the building there was an outside stairway that went up to the second floor, and on the corner of the building there was a sign: “Rooms.” For no particular reason I began to get mad. I gave her a shove, harder than I'd intended, and she went reeling out into the dusty street.
I headed for the livery barn to get my saddlebags and she cursed me every step of the way in shrill, outraged Spanish. But I didn't hear. I was listening to other voices. And other times.
Other times and other places.... I went through the motions of looking after my horse and getting my saddlebags and going up the shaky stairs over the saloon to see if I could get a room, but they were like the motions that you go through in a dream. They didn't seem to mean anything. I remembered the big green country of the Texas Panhandle, where I was born. I remembered my pa's ranch and the little town near it, John's City. And Professor Bigloe's Academy, where I had gone to school before the war, and the frame shack at the crossroads between our place and John's City called Garner's Store where I used to listen to the bitter old veterans of the war still cursing Sherman and Lincoln and Grant, and reliving over and over the glories of the lost Confederacy. And, finally, I remembered a girl.
But she was just a name now, and I had said good-by to her for the last time. Good-by, Laurin. I had hurt her for the last time, and lied to her for the last time, and I tried to be glad that she was married now and had put me out of her life. Maybe now she would know a kind of quiet peace and happiness that she had never had while I was around. I tried, but I couldn't feel glad, or sorry, or anything else. Except for an aching emptiness. I could feel that.
At the top of the stairs I pounded on a door and woke up a faded, frazzle-haired old doxie, who, for a dollar, let me have the key to a room at the end of the dusty hall. The room was just big enough to undress in without skinning your elbows on the walls. There was a sagging iron bed and a washstand with a crock pitcher, bowl, and coal-oil lamp on it. A corner of a broken mirror was tacked on the wall over the washstand. There was an eight- penny nail in the door, if you wanted to hang up your clothes.
It wasn't the finest room in the world, but it would do. I raised the window and had a look outside before I lighted the lamp. I was glad to see that there was no awning or porch roof under the window, and there was nobody out in the street that I could see. I lighted the lamp, took the straw mattress off the bed, and put it on the floor in front of the door. I was dead tired and I didn't want any visitors while I slept.
Automatically I went through a set routine of checking my guns, putting them beside me on the mattress, stretching out with my feet against the door. If that door moved I wanted to know about it in a hurry. Small things, maybe, but I had learned that it was small things that kept a man alive. Trimming a fraction of a second off your draw, filing a fraction of an inch off your gun's trigger action, keeping your ears and eyes and nerves keyed a fraction higher than the next man's. A heartbeat, a bullet. They were all small things.
For a long while, in the darkness, I rocked on the thin edge of sleep while almost forgotten faces darted in and out of my memory, flashing and disappearing like fox fire in a sluggish swamp. Laurin's face. And Pappy Garret. The fabulous Pappy Garret whose name was already beginning to appear in five-cent novels, and history books, and maybe even the Sunday newspaper supplements back East. My pal Pappy, who had taught me everything I knew about guns. I tried to imagine what Pappy would say if he could see how famous I had become. Would he smile that old sad smile of his if he could see the bright look of admiration in small boys' eyes as they read the “Wanted” poster?
At some unsure point half thoughts became dreams, and then the dreams vanished and there was nothing for a while.
I don't remember when I first felt the pressure of the door on my feet, but when I felt it. I was immediately awake, wide-eyed, staring into the darkness. There wasn't a sound. Not even from the saloon below. At first, as I lay rigid, I thought that I must have imagined it, but then the door moved inward again, slowly, carefully.
For just a moment I lay there wondering who in Ocotillo wanted to kill me. Kreyler? Maybe, but I didn't think he would try it while Basset was trying to get me on his payroll. Could I have overlooked somebody in the saloon that had something against me? A brother or cousin or friend of somebody I had killed? That was possible. I managed to roll off the mattress without making any noise. I wasn't scared, now that I knew what was going on. I was awake, but whoever it was at the door didn't know it. When he found out, he would be too close to death for it to make any difference.
I eased the mattress away as the crack in the door widened. A figure slipped into the room without a sound. I still couldn't tell who it was. White moonlight poured on the bed, but the rest of the room was in darkness, and for a moment that empty bed confused the killer.
