Desert of the Damned Read Online Free

express box. The shot made quite a racket. Frenston threw back the lid and they could all see the stacks of wrapped coins and greenbacks.
    Breen didn’t bother to look. Belligerent, dissatisfied, his cat’s yellow eyes kept digging at Reifel. Ben’s easy acceptance of their suddenly swapped status took much of the pleasure away from Breen’s coup.
    He said, tough and wary: “Throw them socks in the kitty.”
    Reifel considered him another long moment before he got them from his pocket and tossed them to Frenston.
    “Make the count,” Breen said, and chucked him Schmole’s wallet.
    Reifel tossed him the dude’s. He knew a small triumph when Breen’s eyes flared and narrowed.
    Breen took a step toward him. “Where the hell’d you get that?”
    “Drummer.” Reifel smiled. “I took that other one off the express guard.”
    Frenston, crouched above the box, suddenly dropped Schmole’s wallet as though recoiling from a rattler. He lurched to his feet with blanching cheeks and Bo Breen, twisting his head about, cried with an exasperated fury:
“Now
what?”
    Frenston licked at his lips. “That goddam guard was a
deputy marshal!”
    • • •
    Reifel watched that knowledge scald its way through startled faces. These were all hard men, a tough minded lot long inured to violence and the anarchistic concept that whatever they wanted they could damned well take. He had always known they were not his kind but had carelessly accepted them as diamonds in the rough, free thinkers, rebel spirits of too adventurous a turn to unprotestingly accept the stultifying laws and prescribed standards of conduct contrived by barons intent on keeping lesser men tied firmly in their places. Wolves of the chaparral he had humorously dubbed them but now, stripped of pretense, he recognized too late that these were nothing but jackals — two-legged coyotes tricked out in wolves’ clothing.
    Disgusted, he turned away from them, reaching for the reins of his ground-hitched horse.
    Breen’s voice plowed after him. “Come back here, damn you! You got us into this and — ”
    Reifel spun wickedly. His body sloped from the waist and he stood that way, watching, right hand spread and ready. Crowdy, peering over Breen’s shoulder, wildly jumped to one side, flinging himself away from Breen with a contagion of fright starkly mirrored in other faces.
    “Go on,” Reifel said. “Let your dogs see the rabbit.”
    Breen appeared locked in some kind of paralysis. Reifel’s sudden aggression had thrown him into confusion. Abandoning guile he slammed both hands at his pistols but they froze inches short of the bonehandled grips. The full tide of Breen’s rage could not drive them nearer and he stood, visibly trembling, like a hamstrung bronc.
    Reifel laughed harshly. He went over to his horse. But with a hand on the horn he looked back at Breen dismally. “When a marshal gets killed, Bo, the law don’t forget it. You better bust this bunch up and start scatterin’ pronto.”
    He watched the flush crawl up Breen’s unwashed neck, smiled at him grimly and climbed into the saddle. He put the flats of his hands firmly down on the pommel and looked at Breen dourly, remembering again the supple shape of the girl. He saw the shine of sweat on Breen’s frozen face and Frenston’s elaborate appearance of boredom and, behind them, the stiffly schooled cheeks of the others.
    “They’re all yours, Breen,” he said — “I wish you joy of them.”
    Crowdy, shuffling his feet, lifted eyes that were bright with a nervous cupidity. “Feelin’ like you do … I mean — ” he swallowed, “what about your cut? You still figgerin' — ?”
    Reifel writhed to think he could ever have been part of this confederacy of scoundrels. “You better give it to the killer. He’s like to have need of it.”
    He refocused his attention on Breen who, recovered, stood sullenly watchful, the sneer on his lips not quite hiding his malevolence.
    “I’m riding out