A Noose for the Desperado by Clifton Adams Page B

night shadows, and every time I saw
her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she
had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street
with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.
    “I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She
thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was
it, Tall Cameron?”
    “No,” I said, “it wasn't.”
    “See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved
something.
    The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and
I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a
woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.
    But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something
about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way
she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama
lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him,
staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to
give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped
the bottle and dozed off.
    I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why
don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't
you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”
    “You need Marta,” she said.
    “I don't need anybody.” But she didn't believe me.
    And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten
memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said
the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in
Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”
    For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger
that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor.
But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We
weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past,
because men like us have no future.
    The mood hung on and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt completely
lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness. There was
no turning back, and I wondered if maybe Bama had found the answer in
whisky.
    It even occurred to me that maybe Marta was the answer for me, that
maybe she was right and I needed her. But that wouldn't work either,
and I knew it. The best thing to do was to get out of Ocotillo.
    I threw some more stuff into the saddlebag, then I went over to the
bed and rolled Bama over to give me room to count the silver. I hadn't
bothered to guess how much my cut would be, but I had seen the pile of
money we had got off the smugglers and I knew that a fair cut would be
enough to take care of me for quite a while.
    Bama grunted and lurched up in bed as I untied the sack and dumped
the contents on the blanket.
    For a minute I just looked at it. There were some adobe dollars
there, all right, but there was a lot of other things too. I scattered
the stuff around and picked up a handful of round brass disks with
holes in the middle. On one side they had the names E. E. Basset
stamped on them, and on the other side there were the words “Good for
One Dollar in Trade.”
    For a minute I thought there had been a mistake and Basset had given
me the wrong sack. But then, from the look on Bama's face, I knew that
it was no mistake. This was the way the fat man paid off: He collected
the silver and gave his men a pile of worthless brass buttons. Quickly
I scattered the stuff some more and sorted it out, and when I had
finished I had thirty-five adobe dollars and sixty-five pieces of
brass.
    Finally I straightened up, and what was going on inside of me must
have been written on my face.
    Bama seemed suddenly sober. “Take it easy, kid.”
    “Is this the way Basset pays all his men?”
    “I thought you knew,” Bama said.
    “Look at that!” I kicked the bed and