A Noose for the Desperado Read Online Free Page A

forget all that—if I wanted to pay the
fat man's price.
    Basset smiled, puffing lazily on his cigar.
    I said finally, “Insurance like that must come pretty high.”
    “Not for the right men, like yourself.” He bent forward, his jowls
shaking. “Have you ever heard of the Mexican smuggling trains?”
    I shook my head.
    “There are dozens of them,” he said. “They come across the
international line, taking one of the remote canyons of the Huachucas.
Thousands of dollars in gold or silver some of these trains carry. They
trade in Tucson for merchandise that they smuggle back across the
border, without paying the heavy duty, and sell at fat profits. In a
way,” Basset smiled, “you might say that Kreyler is upholding his oath
to the United States, for he is a great help to us in stopping this
unlawful smuggling of the Mexicans.”
    I was beginning to get it now, but I wasn't sure that I liked it.
    “Take your time,” the fat man said. “Make up your mind and let me
know. Say tomorrow?”
    “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
    I was glad to get out of the office. The bath that I'd had not long
ago had been wasted. I felt dirtier than I had when I first rode into
the place.
    I stopped at the bar on my way out and had a shot of the white poison
that the Mexicans were drinking. Business had picked up while I was in
the office. Most of the fancy girls had found laps to sit on, and their
brassy, high-pitched giggles punched holes in the general uproar like
bullets going through a tub of lard. I studied the men in the place
with a new interest, now that I knew who they were and what they were
doing here. I didn't see anybody that I knew, yet I had a feeling that
I knew all of them. Their eyes were all alike, restless, darting from
one place to the other. They laughed hard with their mouths, but none
of the laughter ever reached their eyes. I didn't see anybody drunk
enough to be careless about the way his gun hand hung. And I knew I
wouldn't. My friend Kreyler, the deputy United States marshal, wasn't
around. Probably he was in some corner, waiting for Basset to yell for
him.
    I stood alone at the end of the bar, wondering where I was going to
sleep that night and listening to three Mexicans sing a sirupy love
song in Spanish, when she said:
    “Hello, gringo!”
    I don't know where she came from. But now she was standing next to
me, grinning as if nothing had happened.
    “Get away from me,” I said. “When I get tired of living I can get
myself killed. I don't need your help.”
    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 not to look at her.
    “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.