The Last Hard Men Page 2

  Someone urinated into the river nearby—the trickle was plainly audible. The ferry came across on its guy ropes, gasoline engine chattering, carrying two horseless carriages and a horse-drawn victoria and a dozen pedestrian passengers. Provo took a strong grip on the piling and held on while the ferry rammed into the slip and made everything shake. It didn’t knock anybody off. The ferry got rid of its load and a new California-bound load came aboard. Provo couldn’t see it; he could hear it. Someone’s boots tramped the dock heavily and he heard a hard voice talking to the boatman: “Keep an eye on the river tonight, Charley—God knows maybe they’ll try to come down on rafts or something.”

  “How many of them convicts you boys got back?”

  “Picked up three on the Gila and a half dozen Mexes down south of town. The Chief just telephoned in from Quartzsite, they got five or six pinned down in a ranch house halfway up there, holdin’ out with the rancher’s guns. We’ll get ’em soon as they run out of cartridges. Last I heard the dogs picked up another bunch that went west across the river. Prob’ly round them up by sunup. Just a matter of time, Charley, just a matter of time. We’ll get ’em all, just as sure as they’s a hole in your ass.”

  The boots tramped back to hard ground and the ferry chugged away. Menendez said in Provo’s ear, “I hope that es-sonomabitch is wrong, hey? They ain’t gon get us now, are they, Zach?”

  “Not me they ain’t,” Provo murmured. “Not until I make Sam Burgade sweat some blood, they ain’t.”

  It worked fine. A railroader opened the side door and flashed an electric torch around quickly and slammed the zinc door shut. Didn’t glimpse them. They all sat in the thick dark and trembled with cold until the train started up with banging couplings and slowly picked up steam. Provo waited until he couldn’t stand the cold any longer, and then he hummed the Owl Song to himself and waited another fifteen or twenty minutes, and when Menendez joined the chorus of groans in the dark Provo smiled, because no one could see his face, and said under his breath, “Not half bad for a fifty-two-year-old half-breed,” and got up and shoved the sliding door open and said, “You bastards start heaving that ice out of here before we all turn blue.”

  The train started to slow down for Gila Bend about six in the morning. When it was half a mile out, Provo slid the right-hand door open and nodded to Menendez. Menendez jumped—landed running like a cat. Provo poked the rest of them out, fast, with his riot gun and went out last, after pulling the door as nearly shut as he could and still squeeze through. Maybe they wouldn’t find the warm icebox car until Tucson or maybe even El Paso.

  He hit easy on both feet, legs bent against the fall, went over on his shoulder and rolled. He didn’t lose his grip on the riot gun. His shoulder was a little banged up and he’d bruised one heel, but that was all right. He bellied down in the brush and watched the long train clatter past. The caboose went by and he waited until it was into town beyond the outskirt laborers’ shacks; then he spoke softly and gathered them around him and said, “We make for the nearest shack up yonder. We get inside it and we wait for dark. Move.”

  He let Menendez lead the way. He waited until they had all crawled past before he fell in at the back of the line. Broken chains rattled on their ankles. Provo hung back a little: better not to let any of them see he was favoring his right foot from, the jump. They kept to a line of approach that interposed the cluster of shacks between them and the town. Nobody was likely to see them, but Menendez moved bent double and the rest followed suit, dodging from greasewood bush to paloverde. Clump to clump.

  Menendez stood up against the corner of the weather-blasted gray shack, eeled around the corner and disappeared. Provo tensed, squinting into the morning sun. But after a minute the back shutter flapped open and Menendez waved them in.

  Provo came in last and pulled the warped door shut behind him. The nine men made a dense crowd in the little shack; it was barely big enough to accommodate two occupants. He could smell the sweat already, and the day hadn’t started to warm up yet. Under the tarpaper roof it would get up to a hundred and twenty in here by mid-afternoon.

  Young Mike Shelby said, “Maybe we ought to split up some. Take a couple more cabins, three men in each one.”

  “We stick together,” Provo said.

  “Why?”

  “I want you all where I can see you.”

  Lee Roy Tucker said, ‘“for how long?”

  “Until we get rid of these irons and get ourselves into clothes everybody won’t recognize.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Mike Shelby said, and sat down on one of the two cots. There was a rickety table with a lamp and washbasin. Shelves nailed on one wall—a few boxes and cans of food. George Weed, blackskinned and full of disgust, slid his back down the wall in the front corner until he was sitting with his shoulders wedged in. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got a deck of cawds.”

  Provo studied them covertly, one at a time, measuring them. He took his time.

  Menendez: little, fox-quick, cruel, practical. Mike Shelby: young, level-headed, good-humored, a friendly face and a shaggy head of chestnut hair and big tough hands. Lee Roy Tucker: slat-narrow, buck-toothed, a complainer, but Lee Roy had handled blasting caps, working in a quarry, and knew explosives. Portugee Shiraz: part Portuguese, part Negro, eighteen years into a thirty-year noncommutable sentence for having knifed his wife and two children, one of whom had died; Portugee had the snout of a mountain wolf and he loved knives, all kinds of knives; he had worked in a slaughterhouse. Will Gant: a very big brute with a belly on him, not quite as slow in the head as he seemed. George Weed: black, square-built, his hair like a wire-wool skullcap, lazy eyes; contained and quiet except for occasional bursts of anger. Taco Riva: ex-mountain bandit, ex-vaquero; Taco loved horses, in all possible ways. Joaquim Quesada: a big-nosed brute with thick shoulders and a deep chest, a gray monk’s fringe around his bald head, his face purple with tiny broken blood vessels—an alcoholic, an incorrigible petty criminal, and in spite of his bulk, an expert sneak-burglar.

  And the ninth man. Zach Provo. He didn’t need to size up himself.

  His attention went back to Cesar Menendez. Menendez had quick spidery hands and a cynical mouth. His face and hands were slightly fire-scarred: he had burned down the Santa Cruz County jail around him in a fit rage, and been sentenced to six years for arson. In a way Menendez was the key. No one man could handle a squad this big by himself; a man had to sleep sometime. There had to be a second-in-command who could be depended on. Shelby might be dependable, as far as it went, but Shelby was too young and too easy-going to command their respect. The rest of them, prison dregs, were born followers. Or maybe loners. But not leaders. Menendez was the only leader, himself aside. He didn’t know, or care, whether Menendez liked him; but he had the feeling Menendez respected him—not out of fear, but out of admiration for his brains.

  Provo licked his upper lip, like a cat washing itself. It was worth a try, anyway. Menendez was over at the door, watching Gila Bend town through cracks in the splintered boards. The sun was hitting that face of the shack and the others had crowded away toward the cool side of the room, squatting around in little knots of dulled talk. Provo moved casually to the door and spoke in a voice calculated to reach no farther than Menendez’s ears:

  “You willing to stick by me a while longer?”

  “You asking or telling?”

  “Asking.”

  Menendez glanced at him out of the edge of his eye. “What you got in mind?”

  “You’ll see. Just back me.”

  “I don’t know, Zach. If it’s about Sam Burgade—”

  “What if it is?”

  “I got nawthing against Sam Burgade. That’s your fight, not mine.”

  “What if it gets you a free ticket out from under the law?”

  “How?”

  “Just stick by me.”

  Menendez thought it over. “Orrai. For a while, anyhow. I’ll es-stick aroun’ until I see how it blows.”

>   “Sure. You never know, you might even get your hands on that cache of railroad money I buried twenty-eight years ago.”

  “Hell, you prob’ly don’ even remember where you put it, that long ago. I never believed moch in that rumor.”

  “It came to pret’ near forty-eight thousand dollars. In gold eagles. Two hundred pounds of gold. They got me but they never got the money back.”

  “You making me an offer, Zach?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You better es-spell it out a little clearer, then.”

  “This ain’t the time. But you just keep it in mind.”

  “Ahjess. I’ll do that.”

  Provo moved away in the center of the shack. “All right,” he said, and got their attention. “Tonight Menendez goes into town for a hacksaw and some food and clothes. Well get fixed up to look like civilians. After that you-all are figuring to steal horses, split up and run for it. That’s all right for them as want it. I don’t particularly recommend it. What chance you going to have, without a cent in your kick? You’ll just get rounded up one at a time. Nothing to show for it but shriveled guts and saddlesores and a few days running like hell through the brush.”

  Mike Shelby said, “You’re talkin’ like you got something better to offer.”

  “I have. But maybe you people would rather let them surround you with telephone messages and posses out of every county seat from here to Oklahoma. Maybe you’ve had enough of my ideas.”

  Shelby said what Provo knew he’d say. “You done all right up to now, Zach. Let’s hear what you got in mind.”

  Provo glanced casually at Menendez, met a glance of bland unconcern, and squatted on his haunches. “We’re going to get ourselves a healthy stake and take care of some personal business and then we’re going to head for a hideout where the law can’t touch us. All of us. We stick together all the way through, just like we’ve stuck together up to now. How about it?”

  They exchanged glances among themselves. Lee Roy scowled at him but didn’t say anything. Finally Mike Shelby said, “Go ahead, Zach.”

  “In a minute. What I’ve got in mind, it’s going to take timing and planning. It’ll take all of us to bring it off. But it’s just like getting out of Yuma—I can’t have any of you people hearing me out and then deciding you don’t want to do it. Nobody cuts out on me. Anybody wants to leave, say so right now, and we’ll wait till after dark when he’s gone to talk about the rest of it. How about it? Anybody want to call it quits?”

  He looked around, without expression. Implying if anybody wanted to quit, there’d be no hard feelings. It was a lie: if anybody tried to back out, Provo would kill him. But there wasn’t much point in saying so.

  “Lee Roy?”

  “I don’t rightly know. I don’t hanker to ride out alone and git my ass blowed off. I don’t rightly know this country arand here. How long this binness take?”

  “Three, four days, A week maybe.”

  “We split up after that?”

  “After that,” Provo said, “I don’t give a shit what you do Lee Roy. But whatever it is, at least you’ll have a stake to do it on.”

  “How bit of a stake?”

  “A few thousand, at the least.”

  Will Gant said, “Seems to me that’s worth thanking about.”

  Lee Roy said, “I expect I’ll go along, Zach.” His tone said he didn’t like it much but he liked the alternatives even less. That was all right; Provo didn’t care about his motives. But Lee Roy could handle explosives and Provo needed him especially.

  Portugee Shiraz said, “I’d surely admire to get my belly around some food.”

  Two

  Sam Burgade waited on the wooden curb for a steam automobile to pitch by. He waited a while longer, until the dust from its passage had settled back down onto the unpaved surface of Meyer Avenue, and then he stepped down into the powder and walked across the intersection to J. S. Mansfield’s new depot. By the time he got there, his boots had a fine film of silver dust on them, but underneath you could still make out the gloss of expensive leather.

  The clerk greeted him by name, with respect, and asked after Susan, and remarked it was going to be a scorcher, and Sam Burgade nodded and said Susan was fine and yes indeed it wasn’t much for wet but it was all hell for hot. After this ritual, the clerk got out Burgade’s reserved copy of the morning Star and gravely accepted Burgades five-cent piece in his palm, and Burgade went up the length of the block and across the street into the dim cool lobby of Orndorff’s Cosmopolitan Hotel.

  His crinkly outdoor eyes squinted against the dimness. He picked at the white shirt-front under his suit coat, pulling it away from his damp chest, and tipped his black hat back to cool his brow, and walked to his regular stuffed armchair by the front window. Maggie the waitress was just straightening up, having set down his saucer and cup of hot black coffee, and when she turned, sweeping a stray strand of colorless hair back from her face, she smiled and said, “Right on time, Mr. Burgade.”

  “Morning, Maggie.”

  She went away toward the kitchen, smiling fondly, perhaps because she liked him, perhaps because he tipped her dependably at the end of each month when he paid his $1.50 bill for coffee and whatever bills he had run up in the saloon bar.

  By the Seth Thomas clock over the registry it was seven thirty. Sam Burgade, bored, settled his elbows on the arms of the chair, crossed his legs, laid the newspaper across his upended knee, and reached for his coffee without looking at it. As he ran his eyes over the various front-page adverts and headlines, he kept glancing up to see if anybody he knew had come into the lobby.

  The headlines were dispassionate and dull.

  CARRANZA REVOLT GATHERS FORCE

  IN MEXICO.

  BALKAN WAR DISPATCHES:

  BULGARIA ATTACKS SERBO-GREEK

  POSITIONS.

  RUMANIA AND TURKEY ENTER WAR

  AGAINST BULGARIA.

  GOV. GEORGE P. HUNT ANNOUNCES

  ARIZ.

  1912 COPPER OUTPUT REACHED

  200,000 TONS.

  PRESIDENT WILSON PROPOSES

  FEDERAL RESERVE BANK SYSTEM.

  SOLONS LODGE OBJECTIONS TO NEW

  FEDERAL INCOME TAX.

  NEW ELECTORAL REFORM LAW IN

  EGYPT.

  Sam Burgade swallowed a yawn, and some coffee, and blinked, and then his eyes fell on the two-column item near the bottom corner of the page:

  PRISON BREAK AT YUMA: TWO

  GUARDS MURDERED,

  CONVICTS ESCAPE. FOURTEEN

  DESPERATE MEN STILL

  AT LARGE. LATEST DISPATCHES

  BY TELEPHONE.

  His instincts and interests stirred, he folded the paper to read the article. He took the reading glasses out of their pocket case and wiped them with methodical deliberation, hooked them over one ear at a time, and settled down to read.

  Sam Burgade was a striking man, a straight-backed long-legged figure with thick white hair, deeply tanned saddle-leather face, hand-tailored black business suit, old-style wing collar and cravat, glossy black walking boots. He wore his white hair bushy at the back, in a mane. Deep creases, knotted muscularly, ran like painful wounds from the nostrils to the lip-corners of his seamed brown face. All his bones were long; he was lean, but his chest hadn’t caved in with age. Eyes were the color of quicksilver, slotted between sun-shuttered lids. He was an old man now, sixty-one, but folks still said there was moss growing down his north side. Not that it mattered much what folks said. Sam Burgade was an anachronism, all used up. There wasn’t much call for overage ex-fighting men. With the help of rich acquaintances for whom he had done work in the old days—railroad bosses, bankers, corporate managers of big stock ranches—he had run his savings and pension up into a tidy sum for his old age, but clipping coupons and living in comfort didn’t make up for the boredom.

  When he got up to shave each morning he was a little startled: he still expected to see a young face staring back at him out of the mirro
r. He didn’t feel old. It didn’t seem so long ago he had ridden scout for Crook in the campaigns against Geronimo. Hired on with the railroad to head up their train-robber-busting crew. Gone to work for the Inca Land and Cattle Company to demolish the hole-in-the-wall outlaw towns of Jack-Mormon rustlers that made an industry out of stealing beef by the herd from the Hatchet and the Arrowhead. Headed up the Arizona Territorial Police from 1902 to 1910. Organized the militia march into Bisbee to knock the steam out of the strikers’ bombings and assassinations at the great open-pit copper mines. Stumped for George Hunt in the campaign for Arizona’s first governorship after statehood.

  That was just last year, that campaign. But when he’d got up to make speeches the crowd had treated him like an elder statesman—courteous respect, but inattention. Look at that poor old man, son, he used to be the toughest son of a bitch in Arizona, but that was before your time, that was in the Old Days.

  Life had settled into dreary ritual. Mornings in the hotel, afternoons sitting on the sheriffs front porch or playing horseshoes with the old boys who’d soon move into the Pioneers’ Home, evenings in the genteel rubbed-oak-and-leather dimness of the Stockmen’s Club, reminiscing about Old Times with other old-timers.

  Sam Burgade was in a mood all the time now, he didn’t care anymore one way or the other: a why-not mood of indifference. Nothing mattered very much. The century had turned thirteen years ago and Sam Burgade did not belong in this new one.…

  The newspaper story took him back. It was Zach Provo’s name that did it. My God, I thought he was dead. Then he thought about it and did some arithmetic in his head, and realized Provo wasn’t all that old, after all. Provo had been almost a kid when Sam Burgade ran him to earth in 1885. Provo didn’t have to be much over fifty years old, even now. Think of that. Still a young man, after having spent three fifths of his life in the Yuma Penitentiary. What did a man feel like, busting out into this newfangled world after all that time?

  It didn’t matter much, he supposed. They’d have Provo back soon enough. Not like the old days. In these modern times nobody could outrun the telephone and the horseless carriage, the railroads, the telegraph all over the place. The state militia up in Phoenix was even trying out one of those new flying machines.