There was a bookshelf beside the bed, and a coal-oil lamp. I picked up one of the books, and it wasThe Complete Works of William Shakespeare. There was also a limp-backed Bible there, and I tried to imagine Basset reading a few chapters of Luke or John before going to bed every night, but the picture wouldn't work out. There were also two big volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy and pictures of devils and angels and a lot of people suffering in one kind of hell or another. Well, I thought, Basset ought to be right there among them about now.
There were a lot of other books there, but I didn't look at them. I began to count the money that the saloon had taken in for the night, and it was a little over two hundred dollars. I was just beginning to appreciate what a good thing I'd come into. I made a mental note to ask somebody where Basset had got his whisky supply for the saloon, but I figured it would probably be Mexico. Then I started figuring how money would be coming in every month from the saloon and the smuggler trains, and the amount it came to was staggering.
I paced up and down the room with figures running through my mind, and every once in a while I would stop and look at that picture of Napoleon and I knew just how he felt. There was only one way to look—straight ahead.
That was before I found out what happened to Napoleon in Russia.
But I was feeling pretty good about it then, and the feeling hung on as long as I kept thinking of money and had that picture to look at. It was only after I had undressed and blown out the lamp that something different began to happen.
There in the darkness things began to look different. I began to think about the day and the things that had happened and I couldn't believe it. Here I was in Basset's room, in Basset's bed, and the fat man was dead and buried—but none of it seemed real.
Maybe, I began to think, it was because I didn't want it to be real. I lay there for a long time and I could hear Bama saying, “What has happened to you?” And that was what bothered me. I didn't know. Things had happened too fast to know much of anything. It was like having a comet by the tail and not being able to let go.
Abruptly, I got out of bed, fumbled for matches, and lit the lamp. I looked at the picture again, but that didn't help. The cocky little man on the white horse didn't seem so cocky now, and I doubted that he was as sure of himself as he tried to make people believe.
I went into the office and fumbled around in the dark until I found the whisky that Bama had left. I poured and downed it. I poured again and downed that. I began to feel better.
I took the bottle and glass back into the room and sat on the bed and had another one. I was beginning to feel fine. Another drink or two and I would be ready to kick Napoleon off that white horse and climb on myself.
I don't know how long I sat there, with my mind going up in dizzy spirals, skipping from one place to another like a desert whirlwind. But after a while it hit me and I realized what I was doing. Nothing ever hit me any harder.
Suddenly I could understand Bama, because I was on the road to becoming just like him. Miles Stanford Bon-ridge, gentleman and son of a gentleman. Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.
But not for me. I hammered the cork into the bottle and took it back into the office and there it would stay.
Not for me. But the effort left me weak as I went back and sat on the bed and tried to piece together a lot of loose ends that didn't seem to fit anywhere.
But they did fit when you worked at it long enough. And the first loose end was that smuggler raid. Killing was one thing, but killing like that was something else and would never really be a part of me. I should have known that when I went back to my room and messed up the floor, and maybe I had known, in the back of my mind.
I sat there for a long time, getting a good look at myself and it wasn't very pretty. It was like that first day that I rode into Ocotillo and Marta had taken me to her house and fixed me up with the stuff to shave and take a bath with. I remembered the shock I'd got when I looked into that mirror. The face I'd seen was a stranger's face, and I guess I was experiencing the same thing all over again.
Except that I was looking deeper. Maybe I had a hold of that dark, illusive thing that they call a soul. But I turned loose of it in a hurry, just as I had looked away from the mirror.
Chapter Seven
IT'S FUNNY HOW everything seems different in the light of day. Most of your doubts and fears go with the darkness, and after a while you forget about them completely.
The kid, Johnny Rayburn, got back to Ocotillo late the next day. I came out of the office and there he was standing at the bar, gagging on a shot of tequila.
I said, “You made a quick ride. Did things work out all right in Tucson?”
“Sure, Mr. Cameron.”
Then Kreyler came into the saloon and I said, “Wait a minute. All this is for the Marshal's benefit, so he might as well hear about it.”
The three of us went back to the office, and I could feel Kreyler's eyes on my back, looking for a soft spot to sink a knife in. But he didn't bother me now. I had him where I wanted him and he knew it. Or he would know it pretty soon.
I said, “All right, kid, let's have it. Tell Mr. Kreyler just exactly what you've been doing for the past day and night.”
The Marshal gave the kid a quick look. Then he sat in a chair and waited, and he might as well have been wearing a mask, for all the expression you could read on his face.
“Well,” the kid said, “I rode into Tucson, like you said, and I gave the ledger to—to the man Bama told me about. I gave him five hundred dollars and asked him if he would hold onto the book as long as I kept coming back every month to give him another hundred, and he said sure, he'd be glad to. Then I came back to Ocotillo.”
I said, “Tell us what's going to happen if we miss giving him the hundred dollars every month.”
“He'll turn the book over to the U.S. marshal's office,” the kid said.
I expected Kreyler to do something then, but he didn't. He just sat there with that slab face not telling me a thing.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like you're working for me, Kreyler, whether you like it or not.”
“It would seem that way,” he said flatly.
“It doesn't seem any way. You're working for me and you'll keep on working for me until I get tired of having you around.”
“All right, I'm working for you.”
I didn't like the way things were going. I had expected a hell of a racket about that ledger, but there he was sitting there as if he didn't care about it one way or the other. There was something going on behind those eyes of his, and I thought I knew what it was.