The Wild Bunch Page 5

  The bunkhouse concentrated the smells. The laborers were gone but their rank sweat permeated the wooden building and the men who had replaced them—unmarried employees of the railroad with no other homes—had contributed garlic, tobacco, whiskey fumes.

  Under the merciless noon sun the room was an oven, the heavy air more foul even than the cells at Yuma. Harrigan was too furious, too intent to notice. He stalked to a desk, pulled a ledger from a drawer, opened it and stabbed a finger at a column of figures.

  “The hard money value of the two-bit wanted men you killed back there—less my commission—amounts to one hundred and fifty dollars.”

  He glared at his men.

  T.C. Nash’s soft southern tone was disgusted.

  “That’s not very much.”

  “You’re damn right. You let the big ones ride away.” He reached into the drawer again, slammed down four posters, one at a time. “Pike Bishop. Dutch Engstrom. Lyle Gorch. Tector Gorch. Those four together are worth four thousand five hundred hard American dollars. Any one of those pelts, any single one, would have cleared you all of what the company advanced you and given you a bundle of cash to raise hell with.”

  Nash licked his lips.

  “How about another little advance, Mr. Harrigan? Some liquor money for tonight?”

  “There won’t be any money or liquor tonight. You’re going after them, now. Get Bishop. Get that bastard and you’ll be rich. But I’m warning you. If one of you quits on me—I’ll pay a thousand-dollar bonus to the man who kills you. Get ready. You ride in ten minutes.”

  They scattered to pack their saddlebags. Harrigan jerked his head to Thornton and took him out to the empty railroad yard.

  “You think you can catch up with Bishop’s bunch before they cross the line?”

  “I told you back in town. It depends on how bad they’re hurt.”

  Harrigan took time to light a cigar. He did not offer one to Thornton. Through the smoke he studied Thornton, malice in his eyes.

  “What you’d like to do would be to join Bishop again—right?”

  Thornton showed no emotion.

  “What I like and what I do are two different things. I am not going back to prison—and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life ducking your wolfers all over Mexico.”

  Harrigan nodded, satisfied.

  “That’s good.”

  “But if I’m going to get Pike I need good men behind me, not these vultures. Half of these will turn ass and run from a knockdown fight.”

  “You’ll use what there is. These men are all I’ve got now. And don’t miss this time.”

  “What if they get across the border? The country down there is crawling with irregulars and these buzzards have worked it, hunting scalps. They’ve made a lot of enemies. Say we run into the wrong crowd. We’d have a war on our hands that we couldn’t handle.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “No, Harrigan. It’s yours. You want Pike. I want him, because he’s my only ticket to freedom. But we won’t get him by chasing him down there. I’m out of date on him but he’s probably got a thousand friends in Mexico by now.”

  “How else can you do it?”

  “Tempt him back north. He won’t bite on a railroad payroll again but there’ll be something else. When he learns that what he thought was a big strike is a dud, he’ll be hungry for a real one to match it. They can’t get hunk in Mexico. The rebels have stripped the country clean. So he’ll have to come back up.”

  “Where?”

  “It will depend on what he’s after.”

  Harrigan was not convinced.

  “Nobody on the border has any real money except the railroad.”

  “Let me think about it. There has to be an angle.”

  “You’d better think good. And fast. I gave you thirty days. That’s all.”

  “I heard you. I gave my word.”

  Of all that he had been and that had been stripped from him in these last five years, the integrity of his word alone was left.

  Harrigan laughed.

  “We’ll see what it’s worth.”

  Thornton was suddenly white with anger.

  “Tell me, Mr. Harrigan. How does it feel to stand here—safe in your railroad yard—and get paid to hire your killing done? With the arms of the law around you? How does it feel to be so damned right?”

  Harrigan smiled coldly.

  “It feels good, Mr. Thornton. Very good.”

  “You dirty son of a bitch.”

  Harrigan’s grin widened. It pleased him to get under Thornton’s skin.

  “Think what you want but don’t make any mistake. You have your thirty days. You are my Judas goat, Thornton, and you know it and you cannot help yourself. You want freedom, earn it. And one more thing. After you get the job done, bring these curs with you back, heads down over their saddles. Dead. I don’t want them blabbing in the nearest ginmill—involving my company with how I’ve had to work this. You ought to like that part, Mr. Thornton. You hate every damn one of them.”

  Thornton opened his mouth to protest.

  But Harrigan said, “Thirty days—” and walked away whistling.

  Five minutes later the men were in the saddle. Thornton led them south.

  They had no trouble picking up Pike’s trail. It was plain to see. Bold. Like the old days. Thornton smiled. Whether Pike had been too pressed for time to hide his tracks or was certain there would be no pursuit did not matter. He and Deke had ridden like this together, taunting danger, trusting their wits, their strength and their comrades. There had been fun on the frontier then—and friendship, humor and tolerance among the Wild Bunch.

  How different from the ragtail, filthy lot at his back now. There was not an ounce of loyalty in one of them. They would rob the corpse if one of their numbers died. They would slit the throat of a wounded comrade for the few silver coins in his pocket.

  He pushed them hard, noting a place where Pike had rested, hoping it meant that someone was wounded enough to slow Pike down.

  They rode through sparse brush and reached the rim of a dry wash and looked down into rubble bed where nothing grew. A man’s body was a dark, still shape there.

  Thornton put his horse down the bank, stopped at the corpse’s side and stepped out of the saddle. He took off his hat and slashed with it at the swarm of flies that blackened the dead man’s head.

  The face was a bloody mask, still damp. Thornton wiped at it with a gloved hand, trying to make out the features. He did not know the man. The wounds must have been made by a shotgun but they were not what had killed. The single hole in the forehead was the injury the dead man had not survived.

  The bounty hunters were on the ground, crowding in to see. Thornton squatted back, his hands hanging between his knees, his tone coldly mocking.

  “All right, how many of you are going to claim you shot this one?”

  Coffer was closest.

  “I knowed I wounded three. Probably he’s one of them. I—”

  Thornton laid his eyes on Coffer, then turned his head and called, “Jabali.”

  The old Navajo pushed forward, a man who had been run out of his tribe long ago as a white scavenger among the dead. His face was blank, shiny as wet leather. Thornton stood up, touched the dead man with his toe.

  “This pelt ought to clear up what the railroad advanced you. Take him to Harrigan and collect. And tell him to get me a list of every army garrison and payroll schedule along the border.” An idea had come to him earlier on the ride but he had not wanted to waste time in turning back. “Coffer, give Jabali a hand getting this on his horse.”

  Coffer opened his mouth to press his claim but the set of Thornton’s face stopped him. He shrugged, reached for the corpse’s feet. The Indian took the hands and they swung the body over the animal’s rump. It was still limp, still warm.

  Thornton mounted again.

  “We’ve got a couple more hours of daylight. Maybe they stopped over the next hill to count thei
r take.”

  He spoke through a knife-thin smile. Worrying about gain was not Pike’s way of life but the language was one these men understood.

  They scrambled up and took off, not waiting for him, racing each other. Thornton followed just off the pace. He let them go for two miles, then sent a shrill whistle after them. They stopped reluctantly, waited for him.

  “Get down,” he said. “If we run into them I want the horses to have some wind left. We’ll rest a little. Nash, get a fire going.”

  Nash gathered an armful of dried greasewood and Coffer set a coffee pot over the quick blaze. Nash moved to where Thornton had sat down, leaning against a rock.

  “How close do you think we are?”

  Thornton shrugged.

  “Not close enough. They’ve crossed the border by now unless something held them up.”

  Coffer came to join Nash, mopping his face with his sleeve.

  “You rode with Bishop, Thornton. What kind of man are we up against?”

  Deke Thornton took his time, not wanting to talk about Pike to these people, yet needing to warn them if he wanted the job done.

  “The best.” He said it softly. He looked off into the distance. “He’s never been caught. And he won’t be unless you look alive.”

  Fess came over to ask, “How was the riding in the old days?”

  Thornton ignored the sly dig at his years, knowing Fess could not have lived them. A silence ran on. Finally Nash made a grunting noise.

  “Not like now,” he said. “There wasn’t all these troops—all this fighting down south.”

  Coffer did not want the subject changed.

  “What will Pike do now? Will he split the bunch?”

  Thornton moved a shoulder.

  “I doubt it.”

  “How come?”

  Thornton did not answer. He did not tell them that Pike had gotten nothing. He did not want his men backing off here to wait for another ambush. He wanted it over with.

  The coffee was ready. They drank it, kicked out the embers of the fire and rode on. After sundown they came to the railroad and saw where Pike’s crowd had crossed the rail line beside the culvert.

  Deke Thornton stopped on the north side. He felt hot and filthy with dust and sweat. Tired in his body and in his mind. His eyes swept across the empty land to the south. Nothing moved there as far as he could see. No dust cloud rose against the horizon. The scene was dead and silent.

  Coffer pulled up beside him, eyeing the culvert in apprehension.

  “That looks like a good place for us to get bushwhacked from.”

  Thornton brought his bleak gaze around. Pike Bishop would never throw his time away sitting in that hole, waiting for maybe a cavalry troop to ride down on him. But Deke saw the fear in Coffer and his lips twitched.

  Thornton drew his gun.

  “Could be. Ride and find out.”

  Coffer looked into Thornton’s eyes for humor and read death there. He was visibly jarred. Here was a side of the man who led them he had not seen before.

  He swallowed, pulled his own gun, eased his horse aside and rode gingerly toward the dark mouth of the culvert. He was not shot at. He dropped from his saddle and eased into the opening, drew back and remounted. He rode back, dropping his gun into its holster, sounding plainly relieved.

  “Nobody there.”

  Thornton’s gun was still in his hand. He turned his head toward each of the men in the half circle around him.

  “The next time I want advice from any of you I’ll ask for it. Until then keep your mouths shut and do as you’re told.”

  He let a silence drag out until he was sure of them, then shoved his gun into the holster, dismounted and went to stand in the draft that came through the small tunnel. The breeze was not cold but it was cooler than the sunset air.

  “Coffer, you’ve been in Mexico. Where’s the line go through?”

  “Right here, Mr. Thornton. From now on it’s all Mexico.”

  “You know this area?”

  The man nodded.

  “What are the nearest towns where Bishop could get supplies?”

  “Well, Agua Verde is over west—maybe two, three days. Juarez is the other way but there’re mountains between it and here. Maybe a six-day ride.”

  “So they’ll go to Agua Verde. What’s in Agua Verde?”

  Coffer grinned.

  “Mexicans. What else?”

  Thornton spun to face him, his hand on his gun. Coffer stopped grinning.

  “It’s headquarters for the Huerta regulars fighting Obregon. A bandit named Mapache is leading them. He’s a bad hombre.” Coffer drew a quick breath. “We ain’t going there, are we?”

  “No.” Thornton had made up his mind. “We’ll wait for Pike to come north.”

  Nash’s eyes widened on the vast emptiness around them.

  “How long do we wait?”

  “Twenty-eight days,” Thornton told him and went back to his horse.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pike led his decimated party into the small rancho at sunset. The place had been their headquarters for two months but he had no sense of homecoming. Abandoned by its original owners trying to escape the Huerta forces, the ranch had been appropriated by a Mexican family—an old man, his wounded son, two younger children and the old man’s wife.

  Pike had never paid much attention to any of them. He and his men pulled into the yard, dropped down and hauled the saddlebags off the horses, dumped them in a pile on the gritty ground. The Mexican boy silently gathered the animals and took them off toward the pole corral at the rear. Pike’s crew was not talking. Theirs had been a costly day. They were tired and out of sorts.

  Freddie Sykes limped around the corner of the house, his spindly body shrunken under the ranch clothes that looked as if he had worn them for years. His eyes lighted as they saw the bulging saddlebags and he headed for Pike, grinning.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Rough. They had the office staked out. Men on a roof across the street. Men in the alley.”

  Silently Sykes counted the dusty crew.

  “Where’re the rest of the boys?”

  “They won’t be coming.” Pike was short. “Have the old woman get up some chow.”

  “There ain’t much left.”

  “It’ll have to do. We haven’t eaten all day.”

  Sykes moved away. He had ridden with Pike long enough to know when not to ask questions.

  Pike sat down on the hard ground. The old leg wound was giving him hell. It had taken effort to lift himself out of the saddle. But soon he would have no need for more riding—only enough to find himself a hole and crawl into it. He had his stake. He looked at the bags, too tired even to investigate them just now.

  He was not the only one interested in what they had gotten. Lyle, Tector and Angel were grouped around the bags in silent speculation. Dutch had unrolled a poncho, was spreading it beside the pile.

  Finally Lyle cleared his throat.

  “About the sharing up—how do we figure it?”

  Pike’s voice was weary. “Just like always—share and share alike. And there aren’t so many of us now.”

  “Too many.” Lyle’s eyes were bold, challenging. “Angel’s only been with us a little while and Sykes was too old to ride this time.”

  “He wasn’t.” Pike lied to protect his old partner. “I left him down here to get us some more horses, so we’d have something fresh to ride out on in a hurry if we had to.”

  “They still don’t deserve a full share. We say it ain’t fair. You hear me. Pike?”

  Pike stood up, straightened to face the man fully. His hand was fast, drawing the knife, flipping it to bury the blade in the ground between Lyle’s feet.

  “If you boys don’t like equal shares—why don’t you just take it all?”

  Startled, they glared at him, silent, tensing like coiling snakes.

  Dutch, watching, drifted a little to one side of Pike. Sykes had reached the door of the hou
se on his way to find the woman. His buffalo gun leaned against the jamb. He reached for it and turned, surprisingly quick.

  The air in the yard was electric with showdown. The brothers knew without turning their heads that they were covered on three sides.

  Angel announced himself as the fourth. He stood behind them, laughing softly.

  Pike’s voice grated.

  “Well, why don’t you answer me? You damned yellow-haired trash. Go ahead. Take it.”

  The moment drew out fine, frozen, explosive. Lyle licked his lips.

  “Ah—Pike—you know—”

  Pike’s voice had the crack of a snapping whip. “I don’t know a damned thing except I either lead this bunch or I end it. Right now.”

  Lyle had had enough.

  “No. We divide it. Just like you say.”

  For a little longer Pike held their eyes, then he walked forward, stooped and pulled his knife from the ground. He reached for the closest saddlebag, fished a tightly packed railroad sack out of it and in a single slash split it, letting the contents spill onto the poncho.

  A cascade of steel washers clinked down into a little mound.

  Again they stood frozen, gaping.

  Tector choked.

  “Steel rings.”

  Dutch corrected him in a flat tone.

  “Washers.”

  For a long moment Pike held the sack, the knife, unmoving. His expression did not change. Then he dropped the sack, shoved the knife into its sheath and turned away. His shoulders were a little more drooped than they had been.

  Lyle abruptly collapsed to his knees, snatched up a second saddlebag and with hands that trembled shook out the sacks. He ripped one open and spilled more washers onto the others.

  Behind him Pike said quietly, “Son of a bitch.”

  Lyle uncoiled to his feet, swung a boot and sent the slugs flying in a winking spray.

  “Washers. We shot our way out of that stinking town for a dollar’s worth of washers.” He swung to face Pike, his eyes crazy with rage. “Didn’t we?”

  Pike said evenly, “They set us up.”