my stomach it was almost as bad as pouring it in the wound.
“Where did you get this?”
“My house.”
“It may be fine for wounds, but it's not worth a damn to drink.”
“Papacito drink,” she said.
“You like saloon whisky, don't you? Saloons and saloon whisky and gringos. Why don't you stay in your own part of town?”
For a moment she looked at me with hurt eyes, then went on with her bandaging. I didn't give a damn what she did. I was just talking while the whisky cooled in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was a crazy trick, letting her back into the room. Maybe she had another knife hidden on her somewhere.
“That good?” she said.
She finished with my arm, then poured some whisky on a rag and cleaned the blood off my face.
I had a look in the mirror. “That's fine. My face looks like something left on a butcher's block. I might as well throw away my off-side gun, for all the good it's going to do me. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Are you just plain crazy or did you have a reason for trying to get that knife into me?”
She looked down and said nothing.
“Out with it,” I said. “I'm not mad now, I just want to know what you've got against me.”
She still didn't say anything, so I grabbed her arm and jerked her around. Then I got a handful of her hair and snapped her head back.
“Tell me, goddamnit! Did somebody pay you to try a trick like that?”
We stood there breathing in each other's faces. Finally she said, “No.”
“Then why?”
She shrugged. “I hate you—for a little while. You shove Marta away. I think maybe I kill you.”
It took me a minute to get it, and after I finally did get it I didn't understand it. Just because I hadn't wanted to go to bed with her, she tried to kill me!
She was looking down again. Her eyes still had that dull, beaten look in them, and I had a queer feeling that she was crying and the tears were falling on the inside. I didn't know what to make of her. It made me uncomfortable just looking at her.
She said flatly, “I go now.”
“That's fine.” I went over and opened the door. She waited a long minute, watching me, as if she thought maybe I was going to change my mind and ask her to stay.
I didn't. All I wanted was to get her out of here and never see her again.
After she had gone I lay a long while trying to figure her out. But I couldn't do it, and along toward dawn I lost interest and tried to get some sleep. And at last I did sleep, and dreamed restless dreams, mostly of my home in Texas.
Fiesta was over when I woke up the next morning. Most of the Mexicans had gone back to their one-mule farms or their sheep herds, or wherever Mexicans go when fiesta is over. My room was a mess, with blood all over the floor, and the bed knocked around at a crazy angle, and everything I had scattered from one corner to the other. My wrist was swollen stiff and hurt like hell.
I picked up some of the things, shirts and pants and a change of underwear that had been kicked out of my saddlebags in the scuffle, and put them back where they belonged. I stood at the window for a while, looking down on the gray scattering of mud huts that was Ocotillo, and for a minute I almost made up my mind to get out of there. The place was crazy, and everybody in it was crazy. I didn't want any more to do with it.
But where would I go? Back to Texas and let some sheriffs posse decorate a cottonwood with me? To New Mexico or California, and take my chances with the Cavalry or United States marshals?
I didn't think so.
It looked like Ocotillo was the end of the line, whether I liked it or not. And that proposition of Basset's—I'd have to listen to that, too, whether I liked it or not, because I didn't have any money and I didn't know of anybody that I could go to for help.
For a week, maybe, I thought. Or a month at the most. I could stand it that long. When I got some money together I could find a place to hole up until the law lost interest in me. Maybe I'd go across the line into Sonora, or Chihuahua, or some place like that. But it would take money.
There was one pretty thing about this business of Basset's. Robbing Mexican smuggling trains wasn't like robbing an express coach or a bank or anything else that the local law had an interest in. The law didn't give a damn if a smuggling train was robbed. They probably took it as a favor.
But it's funny the way a man's mind works on things like that. I had never had anything to do with robbing people. Killing—that was different. A man had to kill sometimes in this wild country. In the bitter, hate-sick Texas that had been my home, it had been the accepted way of settling arguments between men. Life was cheap. The lank, quiet boys of Texas had learned that when they rode off to fight for the Cause and the Confederacy, when most of them didn't even know what Confederacy meant, or care. Killing had become a part of living. But robbing people—that was something new that I had to get used to.
There were only the bartender and one other man in the saloon when I got down there. The bartender was kicking the wreckages to one side and making a few passes with a broom, the other man was eating eggs and side meat at the bar. The place was dark and sick with the stale, sour smell of whisky and smoke and unwashed bodies. The man looked at me quietly as I came in and stood at the end of the bar. The bartender glanced at me and said:
“Eggs?”
