The Wild Bunch Read online

  Suddenly a new West had emerged

  Suddenly it was sundown for nine men

  Suddenly their day was over

  Suddenly the sky was bathed in blood

  Warner Bros.-Seven Arts presents

  A Phil Feldman Production

  starring

  William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine,

  Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates

  Released through Warner-Pathé

  Panavision®, Technicolor®

  The Wild Bunch

  They roamed like a wolf pack, hunting gold, and they slaughtered wantonly whoever came between them and their prey. Men called them The Wild Bunch.

  Pike Bishop led them. Clever and ruthless, loyal to his band of marauders and demanding in return the loyalty of men like Dutch, who enjoyed living, loving and killing; the Gorch brothers, who cared only for each other; and Angel, the fiery young Mexican who rode with them for his own ends.

  Deke Thornton had ridden with them once. Now he had sworn to destroy The Wild Bunch to save his own neck, and Thornton was a man who kept his word. He and his bounty-hunters trailed The Wild Bunch out of Texas into Mexico—vultures hunting wolves. It was the beginning of the end for Pike and his gang, and when the end came they wrote their epitaphs in the blood of friend and foe alike.

  Cast of the Film

  William Holden, Pike

  Ernest Borgnine, Dutch

  Robert Ryan, Thornton

  Edmond O’Brien, Sykes

  Warren Oates, Lyle Gorch

  Jaime Sánchez, Angel

  Ben Johnson, Tector Gorch

  Emilio Fernández, Mapache

  Strother Martin, Coffer

  L. Q. Jones, T.C.

  Albert Dekker, Harrigan

  Bo Hopkins, Crazy Lee

  Bud Taylor, Wainscoat

  Jorge Russek, Zamorra

  Alfonso Arau, Herrera

  Chano Urueta, Don José

  Sonia Amelio, Teresa

  Aurora Clavel, Aurora

  Elsa Cárdenas, Elsa

  First published in the United States by

  Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation, 1969

  Published in Great Britain by

  Universal-Tandem Publishing Company Ltd, 1969

  Copyright © 1969 by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  The Garden City Press Ltd., Letchworth, Herts.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The day of the San Rafael massacre was hot as the hinges of hell. The border country had baked under the brutal, malevolent rays of the desert sun for weeks. Massacre Day dawned tired upon short tempers, yet uneventfully, as most summer days start in any border town. People roused early in airless rooms, ate their morning meals and went about their chores, cursing quietly to themselves about its going to be another hot one.

  Mayor Wainscoat was particularly unhappy. His unhappiness stemmed from the usual source—his wife. Mary was forty-five, stout, tight-mouthed. Every time he looked at her he wondered why he had ever married her. And why he never wearied of the wonder.

  She was dressed this morning in white and adorned with a long blue ribbon that looped across one shoulder and down to tie at her waist on the other side. On the wide blue strip were letters in gilt—WCTU.

  The ribbon was a reminder and an insult. That the Reverend Bibbs had brought his revival tent into San Rafael at all was bad enough. But the mayor’s wife had then browbeaten her husband into giving the temperance ladies a permit to hold a parade.

  He had not been told what they intended but he had the sneaking suspicion that they might march on the Lone Star, the leading saloon in town.

  That would be too bad. Bill Jordan wouldn’t like it a little. Bill owned the Lone Star and was considered one of San Rafael’s leading citizens. But the Mayor could do nothing—if he wanted to continue to live with his wife in any degree of truce.

  He pushed back from the table. He almost cautioned her about the parade but shrugged and said nothing. Any word on the subject would surely lead to argument.

  He walked resignedly down the street to the city hall, deliberately turning his mind to happier thoughts, the future of San Rafael. The town was the seventh oldest in that part of the country. It had been founded in seventeen hundred and three and its buildings still showed a lot of the old Mexican influence. Most were adobe mud—lumber was scarce in this arid land—and the business section ran around the original dusty central plaza. The coming of the railroad had awakened the drowsy little pueblo community and now it was increasing in population. With any luck the townies would soon number over three thousand.

  Many people were on the street at this early hour, getting their shopping done before the heavy heat set down. He noted some strangers. Three men in army uniform lounged on one side of the square, three on the opposite.

  Their presence was not surprising in this year of nineteen-thirteen. The confusing troubles below the line had brought in a lot of American troops to guard the border and watch the activities of the Mexican revolutionaries. The mayor regarded Mexican soldiers of all factions as no better than bandits. He was glad to see American uniforms.

  He turned in at the city hall, passed his own office and walked back along the dim corridor to the marshal’s quarters in the jail section.

  Simpkins was already at his desk, his shirt stained with sweat even at this hour. Fray, the deputy, was indolently cleaning his gun. Both officers looked up as the mayor came in.

  The marshal lifted a single finger by way of greeting. He had been marshal for a long time. The job was easy, unexciting. Aside from an occasional drunken cowboy, there was little disturbance in his bailiwick.

  “Morning, Mayor. Something on your mind?”

  Wainscoat sat down, using a handkerchief on his forehead.

  “Could be a little trouble.”

  The marshal picked up a letter opener, began to clean his nails. He was not impressed.

  “This weather’s enough to spark some, all right.”

  “Yeah, but that evangelist who put his tent up on Third Street last night—you know?”

  “Sure. What of it?”

  “They’re going to have a temperance meeting there this morning.”

  “I know. My wife’s going. Guess every woman in town will go. I don’t know what that Christer has but it’s something that sends the females. Let them meet. Let them jaw. I’d rather they jawed in his tent than have to hear it when I get home.”

  “They’re going to have a parade, too. Eleven o’clock.” The mayor blew his nose noisily. “Mary bulldozed me into giving a permit—otherwise I’d have you stop it.”

  “So let them parade. In this heat maybe they’ll march off some of the lard. What you worried about?”

  “Well,” Wainscoat shifted restlessly in the chair. “I’ve got a dirty hunch they’re set to march down on the Lone Star.”

  “It’s a nice hike in the sun.”

  “Yes—if they just march, okay. Jordan can put up with it even if they go in and make speeches. But what if they do like that Carry Nation woman did up in Kansas? What if they wreck the place?”

  Fray cawed a laugh.

  “Old Bill wouldn’t like that—and a saloon man controls a lot of votes, don’t he? You want us to close him up for the day?”

  The mayor said quickly, “Don’t do that. Mary will know I talked if they find him closed. The parade is supposed to be a surprise—to catch everybody before they can escape hearing it.”

  Simpkins chuckled.

  “I know. My wife swore me to shutting my face when she told me to have the band at the tent at eleven. I’m the trombonist, remember. Quit stewing.”

  The mayor was not enthusi
astic. He had heard Simpkins play.

  “So how does that help us?”

  The marshal tossed the letter opener on his desk and relaxed in his chair, grinning.

  “I’ll be right up front with the band, leading the parade. I’ve got the authority to stop them if it looks to me like they mean to go in the Lone Star. We’ve got a town ordinance—no ladies allowed to enter a saloon in San Rafael.”

  Slowly the mayor began to smile. The day wasn’t going to be so bad after all. He had to admire Marshal Simpkins.

  Sometimes, he had to admit, the old boy could outthink him.

  • All of San Rafael sweltered but on the roof of the building across from the railroad offices the temperature was at broiling heat. The roof was tin. The sun reflected off the metal in waves even through the thick dust coat. Where feet had scuffed the dust away, stabbing rays bounced up blindingly.

  Deke Thornton shifted position, fuming. He burned his hand on the tin and swore in a bitter undertone. This was the damnedest crazy deal he had ever been caught in—perching up here for thirty hours. He wished that the man who first thought up covering a roof with tin had fried on it. He felt almost worse than on the rockpile at Yuma Penitentiary.

  Almost. Not quite. He had spent all the hours, days and years he intended to in the hellhole.

  He was no longer young and the brutalizing of the prison had scarred him deeply. But the price he was being made to pay for freedom choked his craw.

  Yet he was going to pay it, even though the new liberty could never be what freedom had been in the old days when he, Pike Bishop and some other free souls had ridden where they pleased, taken what they wanted, laughing at the law’s scuttling out of sight when the gang turned up.

  The changes he had seen in the short time he had been out shocked him. Not only he was older. The world was older. The country was filling up, tightening up, being harnessed and hobbled. And Deke Thornton resented the change, despised it.

  He despised Pat Harrigan even more. The man was an unrepenting sadist. Thornton read a sickness to this elaborate ambush Harrigan had set up to trap Pike Bishop and his Wild Bunch. There was evil lust in Harrigan’s insistence that Pike must die by the hand of his old friend and partner, Deke Thornton.

  Deke and Pike had killed men in the past but never for pleasure. They had struck when they had to, when someone had stood in the way of what they were taking, or threatened their liberty.

  Harrigan wanted Pike dead. The wish was understandable—a part of the game. Bishop had raided the railroad too often to go ignored by the road’s chief guardian. Pike had forced Harrigan to admit failure in protecting the line and forced him to revamp his methods. To lose the kind of war Pike waged was hard for a rigid man to swallow.

  But Harrigan was not simply fighting a battle. He was gloating. He had gone about setting up this day with relish. He had sniffed out where Pike was holed up at an abandoned rancho below the border. He might have staged a fair raid down there—but Harrigan was stiff-necked about the legality of crossing the border. He had preferred to weave a devious but legitimate web.

  He had sought out the man who had known Pike Bishop best—Deke Thornton, doing twenty years with five behind him in Yuma prison.

  Memory of his first meeting with Harrigan seared through Thornton. He had been chained against the bars between the cells in the prison yard, stripped naked, whipped until he fell unconscious. He had been thrown into the pit for thirty days. Ten days down there could drive a man insane. The round, domed cave had been dug under the bank against which the cell blocks were built. The ceiling was too low for a man to stand upright. The only light was a glimmer through the tiny air hole at the top. The darkness was shared by poisonous desert vermin and snakes tossed in by vicious guards.

  He had been unchained from the wall at Harrigan’s request and hauled out, filthy, unshaven, starved and thirsty. Guards had herded him across the yard, ankle chains clanking, shoved him into the warden’s office. His eyes had still been shut tightly against the painful sun.

  He had sensed the dimness of the room on his eyelids, had raised them and seen Harrigan for the first time, a dapper man, his back turned, looking out through the narrow window. Over Harrigan’s shoulder Thornton had seen the prison detail digging a fresh grave in the hard ground of the cemetery. A burlap-wrapped figure had waited for burial on the barren slope between the rivers. Thornton guessed that another of the consumptives had died.

  The rate of consumption among the prisoners was high and guards and warden were terrified of contagion. A man who coughed was immediately transferred to an isolation cell to die. The cell was more dreaded than the pit itself.

  Harrigan had turned, arrogance in the set of his shoulders, in the long, bold sweep of his eyes.

  “So you’re the big, bad Deke Thornton.”

  Dull anger had burned in Thornton at the mocking tone. He had wanted to drive a fist into the smirking face. But he had still worn chains. Like an animal.

  The voice had continued.

  “Must be pretty tough for a man who’s swung the wide loop you did to be cooped up like this. What would you do to get out?”

  Thornton had been disappointed too many times to take the bait. He had lifted his shoulders, dropped them.

  Harrigan had laughed.

  “You’ve got the chance. I’ve talked with the territorial governor. They will release you into my custody. And if you will do the job I want I will get you a pardon.”

  The prisoner had closed his eyes. He had thought he would faint. To be free—never again to have to squat in the pit, stifling in his own dirt—to see the sun, to feel the wind. What would he not do?

  He had been a rebel from his earliest memory. Revolt had taken him to the outlaw trail and he had drifted like an iron filing drawn to a magnet into the Wild Bunch. There he had met two kindred souls—Pike Bishop and a man named Sykes. The three had come together in a joyful recognition of their brotherhood. They had ridden together wherever the winds of chance had taken them. They had been as free as the soaring eagle.

  “Anything you want. What do I do?”

  Harrigan had come toward him slowly, said in a tone so low it had not reached the warden:

  “Kill Pike Bishop.”

  Thornton had jumped as if he were being branded. He had heard no word of Pike in five years, since this prison gate had bitten down on him. Somehow he had thought of Pike as being dead.

  “I don’t know where to find him.”

  Harrigan’s thin lips had held a cynical smile.

  “I’ll bring him to you. I’m setting a trap. I want him to walk in and find that he’s in a trap and see that there’s no escape. I want him to see you and know that his old partner is killing him. You’re both alike. I want him to die knowing what kind of animals you are.”

  “You’re crazy.” Thornton’s lips had formed the words soundlessly. He had been washed with the knowledge that he would do what this man asked. He would have done anything to get out of Yuma.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pat Harrigan still looked dapper in spite of the heat and the dust. He was on his knees, peering carefully over the top of the false store front above the tin roof. He had been watching the street ever since they had taken up this position thirty hours ago. No one in San Rafael knew they were here. They had come in through the rear of the empty store with bedrolls, water and sandwiches and had climbed through the skylight.

  Harrigan was a patient plotter but the long wait had drawn his nerves taut. His perch afforded him a panorama of the town—the railroad office directly across, the whole square, the white tent on the side street.

  Women in white were heading toward the tent from all directions and he had no trouble making out the letters on the banner sign.

  WCTU

  He had no interest in the women or in the tent and dismissed both from his mind. His attention focused on the square where a good number of people moved back and forth, entering stores, leaving them, going about their e
rrands in their normal way.

  He saw three soldiers at one side of the square, loafing in the shade of buildings. Another three idled on the opposite side. Neither group seemed to be aware of the other. The country was full of soldiers. Harrigan studied them for a long moment, then looked elsewhere.

  He was expecting Pike Bishop, waiting for Pike Bishop. Pike had made a fool of him before his superiors. Pike had raided the railroad camps at will. Pike had almost gotten him fired. And Pike would pay today.

  Harrigan’s mind was busy. He knew he could not have made any mistakes, yet he kept going over the pattern to be sure. His spies had told him that Bishop was resting at an old ranch south of the border, had ten or a dozen men with him. The outlaw would not come north unless he had good reason to think the coming would be profitable.

  Profit was Harrigan’s bait and he had left nothing to chance. He had learned of a boy at the ranch, a dimwit called Crazy Lee, whom Pike sent into San Rafael when he needed supplies. An educated guess had told Harrigan that, besides running errands, Crazy Lee served as eyes and ears for Pike. The boy would carry back to the outlaw camp anything he might hear in the town.

  Harrigan had dropped a rumor where the boy had heard it. The railroad was months behind in paying its employees because the operations had been dislocated by the movement of the Mexican revolutionaries. It was now bringing in the whole back payroll. The fabrication was credible. It would bring Pike Bishop north to raid once more.

  And now Harrigan was waiting. His plan was simple. It was foolproof. But Pike was overdue.

  He spoke aloud without meaning to.

  “Where the hell are they?”

  Thornton, baked through, resenting the trap he himself was in, hating Harrigan and hating the vermin group of bounty hunters Harrigan had recruited to handle Pike’s bunch, swore at him.

  “I told you yesterday it was stupid to spend the night up here. You said you wanted me in this because I knew Pike, how he thinks, how he works. Then you won’t listen. Pike never sneaked in like a burglar to crack a safe. He’s proud. He chooses his time to strike.”