“Are you Marta?”
You come with me, gringo.”
“Si.
She stepped out into the street, in the dancing firelight, but I didn't move. She crossed the street, waving her arms and yelling something to the big guy. I saw the man nod. Then she motioned for me to come on.
The man didn't look very dangerous to me. He had the usual pistol on his hip, but I figured that he was too old and too fat to be very fast with it. Anyway, I was curious, so I walked across the street.
The man didn't miss a thing, not even a flick of an eyelash, as I came toward him. As I got closer I began to change my estimate of him—he could be dangerous, plenty dangerous. It showed in his flat eyes, the aggressive way he stood. It showed on the well-worn butt of his .44. He wore a battered, wide-brimmed Texas hat with a rawhide thong under his chin to keep it on. His shirt was buckskin and had been pretty fancy in its day, but now it was almost black and slick with dirt and wear. He kept his hand well away from his pistol to show that he wasn't asking for trouble. I did the same.
The girl was standing spraddle-legged, hands on hips, grinning at us, but under that grin I had a feeling that there was disappointment. The man jerked his head, dismissing her, as I stepped up to the dirt walk. She melted away in the darkness somewhere.
“This your horse?” the man said, nodding his head at the black.
“That's right.”
“I was thinking maybe I'd seen him somewhere before. Texas, maybe.”
“You've had time to make up your mind, the way you've been standing here gawking at him.”
He blinked his eyes. He was used to getting more respect than that, especially from boys not out of their teens yet. “A tough punk,” he said flatly. “If there's anything I can't stand it's a tough punk.”
The way he said it went all over me. It was like cursing a man, knowing that he was listening and not having enough respect for him to lower your voice. Before he knew what hit him I had the barrel of my pistol rammed in his belly almost up to the cylinder. “Goddamn you,” I said. “I don't know who you are, but if you use that word again I'll kill you. That's one thing in this world you can depend on.”
I had knocked the wind out of him and he sagged against the hitching rack gasping. His flat eyes became startled eyes, then they became hate-filled eyes. I should have killed him right then and got it over with, because I knew that he would never quite get over it, being thrown down on by a kid, and someday he would try to even it up. Pappy Garret would have killed him without batting an eye, if he had been in my place. But like a damn fool, I didn't.
“Jesus Christ!” he gulped. “Get that pistol out of my stomach. I didn't mean anything.”
“Not until I find out why you were sucking around my horse. You were waiting for me to come out, weren't you? All right, why?”
“Sure, sure, I was waitin' for you to come out,” he said. “Word got around that a stranger was in town, and we don't go much for strangers here in Ocotillo. Basset sent me down to have a look. He figured maybe you was a government marshal, or maybe one of them Cavalry intelligence men.”
“What gave him a smart idea like that?”
“That girl you was with. She come around a while ago and told Basset she was holdin' you at her house. It was her idea that you was a government marshal.”
That was fine. While I had been taking a bath and thinking that she was quite a girl, she had been working up a scheme to get me killed. “Who is Basset?”
“You haven't been in Arizona long if you don't know who Basset is. He about runs things in this part of the territory.”
“What does the Cavalry do while Basset runs Arizona?”
“Hell, the Cavalry's too busy with the Apaches to worry about us. Now will you take that pistol out of my stomach?”
I pulled the pistol out enough to let him breathe. I hadn't bargained for anything like this. What looked to be just another little Mexican town was turning out to be a hole-up for the territory's badmen.
“What do you think about me now?” I said, “Do you still think I'm a government man?”
“Hell, no. I spotted that horse of yours right off. The last time I saw that animal was in Texas, about two years ago, and Pappy Garret was ridin' him. We heard Pappy was killed not long ago, but the”—he almost said “punk”—“the kid that was ridin' with him got away.”
“Did the kid have a name?” I said.
“Talbert Cameron, according to the 'Wanted' posters. Jesus, I never saw anybody pull a gun like that, unless maybe it was Pappy himself.”
Well, that settled it. I couldn't outride my reputation, so I might as well try to live with it. At least until I thought of something better. I holstered my pistol because it looked like the fuss was over for the present. The big man pulled himself together and tried to pretend that everything was just fine. But no matter what he did, he couldn't hide the smoky hate in the back of his eyes.
“Let's go,” I said.
“Where?”
“I want to see the man that runs things around here, Basset.”
He didn't put up any argument, as I expected. He merely shrugged. And I unhitched the black.
The fiesta had left the streets and had gone into the native saloons, or maybe the church, wherever it was. The bonfire was dying down and the night was getting darker. The street was almost deserted as we went up to the far end, and the ragged Huachucas looked down on the desert and on the town, and I had a feeling that those high, sad mountains were a little disgusted with what they saw.
After a minute I got to thinking about that girl, Marta. What was she up to, anyway? First she tells a gang of outlaws that I'm a government marshal, and then she tells me that there's somebody waiting to kill me.
I said, “What about that Mexican girl back there, the one called Marta? What was her cut for going to Basset and telling him I was a government man?”
The big man darted a glance at me and kept walking. “She's crazy,” he said. “Let her alone. If you want to get along in Ocotillo, let that girl alone.”
He said it as if he meant it.
At the end of the street there was a two-story frame building that was all out of place here in a village of squat adobe huts. From the sound of the place I could tell that it was a saloon of some kind—one with a pretty good business, if the noise was any indication. On the other side of the saloon there was a circle corral and another frame building that I took to be a livery barn.
“My horse needs grain and a rubdown,” I said.
My partner shouldered through the doors of the saloon and picked out a Mexican with a jerk of his head. “Take care of the horse outside,” he said. Then to me, “Wait here. I'll see if Basset wants to see you.”
He marched down to the far end of the saloon, opened an unmarked door, and disappeared.
It was quite a place, this saloon. There were big mirrors and glass chandeliers that must have come all the way around the Horn and then been freighted across the desert from San Francisco. Part of the place was done in fancy oak paneling and the rest of it finished out in rough planking, as if the owner had got disgusted after the first burst of enthusiasm and decided that it was a waste of money in Ocotillo. What surprised me was that anybody could have been so ambitious in the first place.