A Noose for the Desperado Read Online Free Page B

“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