I knew that part of town pretty well by now, so I went around the back way and came in between the high adobe walls to the back door of Marta's place. Through the open door I could see the Mexicans puffing and wiping their faces as they stared blankly at the pile of silver on the kitchen floor.
“Mr. Cameron?”
“Are you all right, kid?”
“Sure,” he said, and came out into the little walled-in yard where I was.
“How's Bama?”
“He looks pretty good,” he said. “That girl washed the wound and bandaged it up and gave him some broth. He looks better than he did on that travois.”
“Let's go in and look at him,” I said. “We haven't got much time, though.”
The kid held back as if he weren't any too anxious to go back inside.
“What's the matter?”
“It's the old man,” he said. “Marta's pa. He doesn't like gringos to start with, and he especially doesn't like them coming in and taking his house over.”
We could fix that, I thought. I'd give him a handful of silver and that would shut him up. Anyway, we went in and there was Bama stretched out on the earth bed with a cigarette between his lips. His face had been washed and his leg had a clean bandage. He looked like a new man.
But he hadn't really changed. He spat the cigarette out and drawled, “Welcome to our little sanctuary, Tall Cameron,” and I remembered that long spiel he had made the first time I saw him. “Welcome to Ocotillo, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be badmen; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” At the time I thought he had been joking. But it was no joke. I had seen them and lived with them. I was one of them.
“How's the leg?” I cut in on him.
He closed his eyes. “The leg's all right. It's a hell of a thing, isn't it, to have a body that's seemingly indestructible, when you're dead inside?”
“I guess you're all right. You still talk crazy, which is normal for you, I guess.”
Bama laughed. “How about Kreyler and the boys? Are they going to let you just walk out with their silver?”
“They don't know yet that I've walked out with it. By the time they find out, I mean to be on my way to Mexico.”
Bama had no comment to make on that. He just lay there with his eyes closed. All the time we had been talking there had been a lot of jabbering going on in the other room. I went to the door and saw that it was Marta paying off my baggage boys. They backed out of the house, grinning and bowing, clutching the silver in their hands.
“Where are they going?” I asked.
Marta laughed. “They go cantina.”
That was fine. Tomorrow morning they would wake up with a headache and a bad memory.
I wondered how long it would take Kreyler to discover that I had pulled out with the silver. Not long, probably, but after he did find out he would have to find us to do anything about it. We had an hour, I figured, to take care of the silver and get out of Ocotillo.
They say that money can be a burden, and for a minute it looked as if that was what that silver was going to be to me. We couldn't load our horses down with it. And we couldn't put it on a pack horse and take it with us, because that would slow us down, too. The only thing to do was to go somewhere and have the silver shipped to us.
But now? No freighting company would touch it, even if there had been a freighting company in Ocotillo. We could bury it, maybe,, and come back after it later. But we needed the money now. Anyway, I'd had enough of Ocotillo to last a lifetime.
Then the whole thing exploded pretty and clean in my mind and I knew how we were going to take care of that silver.
I yelled, “Marta!” and she was standing right at my elbow. “Look,” I said, “do you still want to go with me?”
Her head bobbed. There was nothing she would like better—especially since I had come into a fortune of silver. Marta's old man had been quiet through the whole thing until now. He had been sitting at a rough plank table holding his head in his hands. Every once in a while he would fumble at some wooden beads around his neck and mumble a prayer, and from the look of hate in his eyes I figured he was praying for lightning, to strike us all. Now his head jerked up and he glared at me. He didn't understand a word of what I had said, but somehow he knew.
“This is what we're going to do,” I said. And I was talking to the old man as much as to Marta. “We've got to get out of Ocotillo and we've got to leave the silver here. The old man's got some burros, hasn't he?” She nodded, puzzled.
“All right, we'll go somewhere—” And then I remembered a place on that map that Bama had drawn for me. “We'll go to Three Mile Cave down near the border. Do you know where that is?” She knew. “We'll go there and wait two days, and in the meantime Papacito can load the silver and bring it to us. He can cover it with wood or something to fool anybody who may get curious. I don't care how he does it, just so he does it.”
She was beginning to get it now. Her eyes lit up, and I guess she was seeing herself as the belle of Sonora, dressed in silks and satins and cutting quite a figure. The real reason I wanted her along never occurred to her.
But it did to the old man. He jumped up from the table and began to jabber in that spick language, and I could see that he was telling Marta that he wasn't going to do it. But Marta was still seeing herself with all the things that silver could buy. That was one picture that she liked, and she wasn't going to have it ruined, Papacito or no Papacito. Before I knew it, the whole thing got out of control. Marta's eyes spat fire and they stood there in the middle of the room yelling at each other.
I had to break it up myself. I stepped in and shoved Marta against the wall. The old man yelled louder than ever, so I shoved him down in his chair and whipped my hand back and forth across his mouth, crack, crack, like a mule skinner two days behind schedule and laying on the leather.
That quieted things down for a minute. Marta stood against the wall, her eyes still flashing. She hadn't liked the way I shoved the old man around, and I hadn't enjoyed it much myself. But sooner or later somebody was going to have to step in and declare himself boss. So that was what I did.
I got hold of Marta's arm and quieted her down. “I'm sorry,” I said. “But we can't stand here yelling at each other. We haven't got time for it. For all I know, Kreyler and his boys may be right outside the door getting ready to shoot hell out of everything.”
I said, “Has the old man got it straight what he's to do with the silver? We pull out of here tonight and head for Three Mile Cave. Tomorrow he loads the silver on his burros and meets us at the cave the next day. Tell him again.”
She shrugged and told him again, and the old man didn't like it any better this time than he had the first.
“We'd better do something to impress it on his mind,” I said. “Tell him we're taking you as hostage. If he doesn't show up with the silver he'll never see you again.”