Desert of the Damned Read Online Free Page B

from the scene of the hold-up. Be another hour anyway before Perkins got there and at least three more before the law found their tracks. If the boys had followed their usual procedure, each one departing in a different direction….
    He got unsnarled from his thinking and settled down to the business in hand. There wasn’t anyone going to catch him if he kept his head. All he wanted of fate right now was to get his share of that cached mazuma, a change of garb and Cy’s roan gelding, and he would be plumb ready to help the law hunt.
    He felt better for the notion, more like his old self, and much of the strain he’d been under went out of him. He put his mind to his riding with a closer attention. He wasn’t too familiar with this part of the mountains, always before coming in from the west. But he shouldn’t be too far off from it now.
    Paradise. About as far-fetched a monicker as a fellow could chance on for this boom camp thrown up in Silver Creek Canyon from the stuff pulled out of Curly Bill’s old stronghold. The perverse streak in this country cropping out again. Wide open, Paradise had been for several months a kind of unofficial rendezvous for much of the Territory’s non-conformist element and was made up, mostly, of hon-keytonks and brothels whose whiskered proprietors would have gladly served the devil so long as he packed hard cash in his pockets.
    The moon was up when Reifel quit the timber and, coming down a long spur, he saw its shine reflected in a creek off there below him. Farther out he saw, behind its stubble of live oak and juniper, the wide stony mesa which was all that was left of Galeyville after the packrats and movers had done with it. Stark and black in the west towered the bulk of the Cherrycows, solemn, forbidding, majestic.
    He approached the creek through a tangle of ash and sycamore spooky with shadows and, except for the gurgle and swish of the water, quiet as a tomb. The pungent smell of wet earth came to him and then he was splashing his way through the stream, pausing a moment to let his horse drink sparingly, pulling its head up after three or four swallows. Bucky wanted more but Reifel kneed him out of it.
    Straight ahead in the moonlight he could see the remains of John Galey’s old smelter, little left of it now but a few scraps of tin and a red-rusted mass of unlovely machinery.
    As he rode on into the trough of the canyon he caught occasional snatches of sound, mostly gunfire, which proved he was headed in the right direction. Hardly ever did thirty minutes go by in that boisterous place without some brand of six-shooter music, most of it the result of exuberant spirits but all of it careless and some of it deadly — particularly if you didn’t happen to duck quick enough.
    Soon he could see the scattered lights of the town. He debated whether it were better to ride boldly into the place, have a couple drinks and then get on with his business, or to try to get the job done without being seen. That last would take a bit of maneuvering and he finally decided he couldn’t spare the time. He was known around here as “Curly Ben", a two-bottle man who dealt in horses, was “hell with the heifers” and a bad man to cross. The last had got about when he had pistol-whipped Tatron for dealing a hand which had turned up five aces.
    But Tatron was gone and there was no real reason why he should waste time slinking through a camp of this sort where every third man had heard the owl hoot. It was not too likely that any law would come here. Ranger law, maybe, but no lesser kind — and, even if it did, he should be long gone by that time.
    He hadn’t yet decided which direction he would travel. There were more than plenty of choices. He could, for instance, keep right on going northwest through these mountains; or straight north, for that matter. He could cut south through Apache into the San Bernardino or southwest to Pirtleville or on into Bisbee which was hardly a whoop and a