Chapter 9
The two men continued to argue. They had been at it ever since the wagon came through, changed horses, and left them way out in the middle of that bleak nowhere. A place that had no name. A way station between Tucson and Fort Bowie, but not on any known trail or road that either man knew of or gave a damn about. Someplace on the distant edge of a ranch, they figured, a line shack no longer used by any white man.
A dust devil swirled across the flat above the spring, and the horses in the pole corral neighed, flattened their ears at the sound, like a great whisper in a hollow room. Miles of nothingness stretched out in all directions around the homely adobe, and Larry Tolliver, yoked with two wooden pails of springwater, paused to watch the swirling dust as if that was an event to break the monotony, a rent in the fabric of sameness that dogged his days in isolation.
Danny Grubb sat outside the adobe shack, whittling on a piece of mesquite, his eyes squinted against the glare of the falling sun, a wad of plug tobacco bulging out his cheek like some hidden growth distorting his lean, angular face. The
Tolliver, puffing from exertion, slipped the yoke from his shoulders and set the pails down in front of Grubb. The water sloshed over the rims, stained the ground for a second before it disappeared, sucked up by the wind and sucked down by the thirsty earth, like ink vanishing under the pressure of a blotter.
“Go on ahead, Larry, spill ever’ damn drop of that water,” Grubb said.
“While you sit on your skinny ass, Danny.”
“Hell, I might make a whistle outta this stick of mesquite and play you a tune come dark.”
“You can stick that whistle square up your ass, Danny.”
“I might stick it up yours, you keep flappin’ your sorry mouth.”
“You could carry this water inside, out of the dust.”
“I could, but I been cuttin’ the wood. It’ll be colder’n a well-digger’s ass once that sun goes down.”
The incoming wagon had brought them two cords of firewood. Danny had been splitting sticks of kindling for their cookstove, so he didn’t see where Tolliver had any room for complaints. He had also fed the six horses in the corral. The wagon had also brought grain. When it returned, with Rawlins and Cavins, it carried their prisoner, one Ted O’Hara, an army lieutenant wearing shabby civilian clothes. Grissom had been with them, too, and Danny had begged him to stay at the shack and let him go back with the wagon into Tucson.
“I got my orders, Danny,” Grissom had said. “Hiram says you boys got to stay another month.”
“What for?”
“For thirty a month and found,” Grissom had said with a vicious little laugh that still irritated Danny when he thought about it. Everything irritated him, especially Tolliver.
“Who’s going to fix supper?” Danny asked.
“My turn, I reckon,” Tolliver said.
“My belly hurts already.”
“Look, Danny, I don’t like bein’ out here anymore’n you do, but we got to make the best of it. You don’t like it, you can slap a saddle on one of them horses and ride on back to town.”
“When I think of Rawlins and Cavins swillin’ down beer and whiskey in the cantina,” Danny said, “I get plumb burned. They ought to try this shit for a time.”
“Hiram said we’d take turns. They might come back in a couple of weeks.”
“That’ll be the day,” Danny said, and threw down the stick of whittled wood, closed his Barlow knife and stuck it in his pocket.
Larry Tolliver cooked supper and opened a can of peaches. After they ate and Danny washed the tin plates, the knives, forks, and spoons, they sat outside. Larry smoked and Danny chewed on a cut plug of tobacco. The sunset was as sweet as the night was depressing. The bright clouds had turned to ash and then faded to black as the sky sparkled with stars and the wind turned chill.
“You hear anything?” Danny asked after a while. He spat a plume of tobacco into the dust.
Larry watched the smoke from his cigarette twist into ghostly shapes that resembled small animals in the lantern light, snakes and mice and tiny gray birds. They unfolded in the breezeless air like paintings on parchment.
“Nope,” he said. But he listened. It got spooky out there at night, and they hadn’t heard the coyotes sing as they usually did. There was a quiet that made the silence seem loud.
There wasn’t so much as the crunch of a boot on sand, nor the clink of an overturned rock, but there he was, standing in front of them, dressed all in black like an undertaker, his eyes shaded by his hat brim so that they couldn’t see them. He wore a big Walker Colt on his hip, and the way he stood there, as if he had come out of nowhere, made both men freeze as though thunderstruck.
“Just set there easy,” Zak said, and his voice carried authority. It was low-pitched and firm, vibrated in his throat with a hypnotizing hum. The voice didn’t even seem to come from him, but from somewhere else, from somewhere above him.
Tolliver’s throat went dry as the dirt under his feet, but he managed to squeak out a question.
“Damn, where’d you come from?”
Zak said nothing. He looked at the two men. Both were armed, but they didn’t look ready to defend anything they might have inside the adobe or on their persons.
“Mister, you oughtn’t walk up on a man like that,” Grubb said. “You could get yourself killed for no good
