“I’ll do that.”
Gus went, hobbling a little; a colt had stomped his foot once, he had lost a toe, and after that he had taken up desk work. He hated horses—“One end bites and the other kicks”—and hadn’t ridden one in thirty years. But then, Burgade thought, How long since I got aboard a horse? Last year, the statehood parade. He couldn’t remember a time since then.
He looked at the paper again and then, with sudden resolve, stood up and marched out onto the boardwalk, full of dignity, with the folded newspaper under his arm. He tugged his hat down and walked around the corner, where a blast of dry hot wind struck him across the quarter; tucked his face toward his shoulder and let the wind blow him down the street past the old, disused whipping post to the courthouse.
God had made Sheriff Noel Nye as ugly as He could and then hit him in the face with a shovel. Nye had arrived in Tucson twenty years ago like a whipped dog, a down-at-the-heels Nebraskan with one bad lung. Burgade had taken him on to do desk work and run chores. Nye had followed him onto the Territorial Police, learned the work diligently, grown robust in health, made headlines by shooting it out with one of the Clanton offshoot gangs, and got elected sheriff of Pima County on a wave of hero-worship. He had kept the job through subsequent elections by maintaining a superb record of peace-keeping, arrests, and convictions. Nye was loud and blasphemous; shaggy and folksy and garrulous on the surface, but in fact he was whip-smart. The long hair fell all over his malformed face in an effort to conceal the cauliflowered ears and forceps-elongated head; it exposed the squashed pug nose and the long pointed chin. The eyes were good eyes, warm, intelligent, the color of rusty iron.
Nye got up and came around the desk to welcome him. “Hot damn. Good to see you, Captain. Come on in and set.” Nye had called Burgade “Captain” since the Territorial Police days.
“I don’t mean to take up your time, Noel.” Burgade stood stiffly, embarrassed by the knowledge that he had no official capacity here any longer. The sad realization tended to emphasize his austere demeanor; he was distant and aloof anyway, it had always been difficult for him to establish close human contacts—his closest friends were all dead and he had not made new ones. Only Burgade’s daughter, Susan, remained inside the defensive shell.
Nye said impatiently, “I always got time for you, Goddamnit—hell, Captain, I owe you everythang I——”
“That’s neither here nor there. You’ve got work to do and if I’m in the way, just——”
“Balls. Shut up and set yoseff down, y’hear? Christ, the way you take on, Captain, you’d think you was the fucking town drunk or something. You don’t never need apologize to me.”
Burgade turned the chair and sat down, at attention.
“I guess you been readin’ about Zach Provo bustin’ out of Yuma.”
“Yes. That’s why I came. Any more word?”
“Not a whisper. That half-breed’s like some kind of mirage. Him and eight others, includin’ that Mixican Cesar Menendez, you recall it was him burnt down the Santa Cruz jail. Them two make a mean cock-suckin’ pair.”
Burgade had the newspaper open on his lap. He adjusted his reading glasses and ran his finger down the page. “Gant, Quesada, Weed, Shiraz, Riva, Tucker, Shelby. I remember two or three of them.”
“Some of ’em most lakly come along after your time,” Nye said, and immediately clamped his mouth shut as if he had said the wrong thing.
“Likely,” Burgade drawled evenly. “Look, Noel, Yuma’s a long way from your jurisdiction, but I had a few thoughts on this. I guess I knew Zach Provo as well as anybody at one time.”
Nye sat back. He wore a bowler hat. It was his office hat. When he went outside he always changed hats, put on an olive-drab flat-brimmed Army hat with four dents in the crown. He pushed the bowler onto the back of his head and said, “I’ll be obliged to hear it, Captain.”
“I remember Quesada and Lee Roy Tucker. Tough enough, but hot long on brains. If they had split up by themselves they’d have been caught by now. Gant and George Weed, maybe they’re smart enough to stay out of sight. I can’t speak for the others listed here. But Quesada and Tucker, they’d have fallen into the net by now if they were on their own.”
“I think I follow your meanin’, Captain, but go on.”
“Two guards dead means two guns missing. Did either gun turn up among the convicts they’ve recaptured?”
“No. We got a telegraph ware on that. Armed and dangerous. Ain’t neither gun showed up. They was riot guns, by the way, big motherfuckin’ twelve-gauges, pump-slides.”
“Then it’s damn good odds Zach Provo has got at least one of those guns.”
“Uh-huh. And lakly Menendez got the othern.”
“Possibly. My point is, the rest of those convicts aren’t armed. They wouldn’t have a prayer by themselves. They’re probably sticking close to Provo.”
“Sure. Lak you say, if they wasn’t all stuck together in one bunch, we’d have run a few of ’em down by now.”
“Nine men in a bunch, sticking together. That suggest anything to you, Noel?”
“Sure. I’m catching up on you, Captain. Nine men, you got to feed them, you got to get transpo’t for them, you got to get them clothes.”’
“And guns,” Burgade said. “They’ll have to hit someplace where they can get enough guns to equip everybody.”
“In other words, they ain’t hiding out in the sticks someplace. They got to head for a town.”
“Pretty soon they do. Or a big ranch, but that’s less likely—too many tough men around a working ranch, and too much chance of running into armed resistance. No. They’ve got to raid a town. They’ve only got two guns now, and not much ammunition, so they can’t hold a whole town up at gunpoint. They’ll go in at night, on the sly. Try to break into a gun store and a drygoods and a food store. Get themselves outfitted and then steal horses out of a livery stable.”
“You’re dead right, Captain. Ain’t but one way for them to do it. Of course, it could be any town between here and California, on this side of the Border or down below in Mexico.”
“No. We can narrow that down a lot more than that. They had to use the railroad, Noel. Either that or they’re still in Yuma.”
Nye sat bolt upright. “Railroad? But they done searched ever’ car on ever’ train in and out of Yuma.”
“Then they’re still in Yuma, holed up. Or they hid somewhere on a train where nobody found them. Either way, it narrows down. West of Yuma in California what have they got? Calexico, San Diego. East of Yuma they’ve got Gila Bend, Phoenix Junction, on up toward Flagstaff or down this way—Tucson, Benson, Lordsburg, El Paso. But I doubt they’d go as far as El Paso on a train. Too risky, and they’d be too nervous to stay put on a train that long.”
“Then what you figure? Calexico? Right on the Border, might be the most lakly bet. Easy to crawl acrosst to Mixico.”
“I doubt it. They couldn’t go anywhere from there. It’s isolated. Sand-dune desert on one side and Baja California to the south—nothing down there but rocks and cactus, they’d die of thirst in that country. No. Either they went all the way to San Diego, which is doubtful, or they came east into Arizona.”
Nye scowled at him. Nye liked to bake his opinions in a slow oven before serving them up. Now he said, “Maybe you going a little too faist. How do we know they on a train?”
“Because they’ve been using dogs to track them. They’d have turned up by now if they were still on foot.”
“Two rivers down there, Captain—the Gila and the Colorado. Dogs can’t follow them in a river.”
“The Gila’s dried up. The Colorado—they couldn’t move upstream against that current, and if they moved downstream much past Yuma they’d get swept up in the tidal bore and drowned.”
“You got it all pieced out, ain’t you? Jesus, I forgot how faist your mind works, Captain.”