Desert of the Damned

a division of F+W Media, Inc.

For
FRANK JENNINGS
who knows which end
of the horse gets the grass!

I
T WAS
crowding four o’clock of as hot an afternoon as the San Simon country had endured in forty summers when the boss of the outfit — still with that crusty look on his cheeks — climbed into the saddle and kneed his gaunt buckskin up the clatterous slope. At its crest those knees telegraphed the yellow horse into a stance of complete immobility while their owner, screened by the ferny blue foliage of salt cedar, watched the Overland Mail westbound from El Paso throwing up its plume of dust against the deepening purples of the Peloncillo Range.

Though it was three miles away and perhaps two hundred feet below him, Ben Reifel had no trouble picking out the shotgun guard where he sat beside the driver. It wasn’t Fratz or Lonnigan or any of the boys he’d seen before and he wondered how they’d happened to put a new man on this run.

No reason in the world why he should get worked up over anything so trifling as a last-minute change in stagecoach personnel. The regular guard may have gone on a bender or have turned up sick or been put on some other run. Everything else had gone according to schedule. They
had
pulled off the escort — just as he’d been told they would — in the hope of making it appear to outsiders that the Crown King smelter payroll was being fetched in by some other means.

And maybe it was, Ben Reifel thought darkly.

He peered again at that man beside the driver and wondered why nothing had been said about him. He knew well enough it could have slipped Charley’s mind, but what if the Company had got onto old Charley and fixed up a deal to show the truth of his allegiance? Supposing that goddam Abbott-Downing was loaded to the rockers with a crew of Company smokepolers!

Reifel’s long solid lips pinched in at the corners and the dissatisfied look that was harrowing his cheeks became more pronounced. Sweat cracked through the backs of his hands. Strong hands these, darkly burned by the sun and scarred by the ropes that had run through his fingers.

It was never the big things a man stubbed his toes on; those you watched out for and were able to cope with. It was the little things that tripped a man up and Ben had lived too long on the slippery side of danger to ignore as unimportant deviations from the normal.

Too many little things had roweled him lately and each of their cries had been a plain warning. Only so much luck was in the cards for any man and none but a fool would crowd it past reason. Tempers were getting mighty short around this country and a man might do worse than roll his cotton.

He’d been tramping around the edges of this notion quite a spell and more than once had felt the urge to pack up his belongings. Ever since Bo Breen and himself had sat in on that prayer meeting over to Charleston he had not rested easy in his mind about this business.

Breen’s sharp eyes didn’t miss very much. Only the other night in his saturnine fashion Breen derisively had asked if he were about to get religion and turn over another leaf.

Come right down to it, he thought it might be pretty nice to be done with ducking posses, to own a spread of his own perhaps and able to do his snoring in a bed with both his eyes shut. Be nice to have a woman, too….

This country was getting fed up with outlaws. Look at Russian Bill and Black Jack Ketchum! They had swung handsome Bill from a diningroom rafter. Feeling the breeze Jack Ketchum had boarded a fast bronc to Folsom but, like most of their kind, he’d had to have one last try. To get him a stake he had stopped one more train and that had been the end of him.

“Who lives by the gun will perish that way.”

He remembered that line from the sky pilot’s sermon. Maybe that old cadger knew what he was talking about. A lot of Ben’s acquaintances had died that way and three rustlers had been lynched in the past ten days and yesterday, at Bowie, a caught bank robber had kicked out his life at the end of a rope. The law was moving into this region. A different breed was running things now, plowpushers mostly who were plenty content to raise crops for a living and leave hell-raising to the ghosts of the past. These weed-benders, damn them, weren’t in no mood for fooling and just the thought of those stiffs twirling round in the breeze was enough to knock the shine off of anything.

He stared at the oncoming stage again, scowling, unable to shake the feeling of impending disaster. Scorn could not drive the cold out of his marrow any more than cerebration could dispel his dark forebodings. Yet, come right down to it, what was there to be scared of?

He’d pulled a dozen deals more chancey than this. The only thing wrong with this layout was the damfool notions which had got in his head. A man would ride a long way to find as smooth a deal as this was. There was old Perkins half asleep on the box. And not another dust anyplace on the whole horizon.

He ought to be bored for the simples or given a string of spools to play with if he was fixing to let a few lynched bunglers screw up a deal that had been weeks in the planning. His bunch knew their parts to the last friggin detail. How could there be any hitch to the business? And what if there was? You didn’t stretch hemp just for stopping a stage! All that got you was a loafing spell at Yuma — unless, of course, some fool got killed.

His men knew where he stood on that. They’d turned their hands to a lot of damned things but never, by God, to killing. He had made that rule and stood firm on it through all the time he had led this bunch. “Lose the haul if you have to,” he’d pronounced repeatedly, “but don’t kill nobody without you’re ready to take a whack at killin’ me.”

It had paid off, too. Folks could forget a whole lot of things where they wouldn’t forget a killing. There were some pretty tough monkeys in his outfit but none so tough they wanted to cross guns with him. Ben Reifel could punch the pips from a playing card at fifty feet without even aiming.

But, like that preacher had told him, there was always a first time. No man’s luck was going to hold out forever. Already the bunch was drawing hard looks and he reckoned a heap of talk was being sifted round about them. More than just a few folks had their sneaking suspicions where his livelihood was corning from. But suspicions were one thing, proof something else. Until a man was proved guilty he was let alone in this country, free to go his way, free to fraternize with anyone.

The coach was getting nearer. In another five minutes it would be lumbering up this ridge.

Reifel felt a strong reluctance to give the awaited signal which must start his bunch through the brush and rocks. One time, when he was younger, he’d put in three-four months as a mine’s powder monkey and known this same feeling every time he’d crimped a cap.

Inexorably, cheeks tightening, he watched the stage swing into the grade and commence the hard-pulling uphill climb. A disc of copper at his back, the sun, low down, struck a bright-shining glint from the twin sawed-short barrels of the Greener that lay across the new man’s knees. The jingle and clank of trace chains came up to him, the strike of shod hoofs, the rattle and bang of the iron-rimmed wheels lurching into and out of the dust-filled potholes.

It wasn’t yet too late to pitch in this hand, but even as the thought set up its scratchy nagging Reifel knew he was going through with it. He’d been at too much pains and a heap too long a planning to turn his back with the prize so near.

But this would be his last job he promised God grimly and raised his right hand in the prearranged signal.

He was a man to remember with his stubborn jaw and piercing stare, the case-hardened product of a constant vigilance and mighty few scruples. He’d an aversion to killing that was almost a phobia — a fixation well known by way of several demonstrations which had also made his rep. Particularly remembered was the case of Aaron Phipps, a ci-devant bully, who had tried his tricks on Ben and got both legs broke for his trouble, not to mention loss of teeth and a dislocated shoulder. At Stein’s Pass they still dated time from that encounter, accounting “Curly Ben” a first rate gent to steer away from.

He was able now to see Perkins spit and a majority of the pertinent details of the guard on the seat beside him. Considerable experience in the ballistics of human character discovered little which seemed remarkable in the man who was holding the shotgun. He was about average height with a tobacco-stained straw-colored mustache that jumped up and down across the front of his face as he munched, long-horn fashion, on a cheekful of twist. He didn’t look like he would give much trouble.

Reifel couldn’t tell from where he sat his red-maned buckskin if there were one man or forty inside the rumbling coach. He was confident, however, that the thirty-five hundred he’d get out of this deal would be quite a help in turning over that new leaf.

He took a final look around and pulled the neckerchief over his nose.

The slow-climbing stage was less than forty yards away when he lifted the Winchester out of his scabbard and eased the gaunt gelding out into the road.

Perkins saw him first and stopped the coach without a word. The guard with the sun glare bright in his eyes sent the whip a puzzled expression as the old man bent to wrap the lines around his brake. In the comparative quiet his words came plainly. “What’s the big idear of — ”

“Grab for the clouds,” Ben rasped through the muffling folds of his neckerchief. “Get onto your feet and never mind that scattergun.”

The guard’s look was ludicrous. His jaw hung down like a blacksmith’s apron. He seemed incapable of movement but when a slug from Ben’s rifle blew a hole through the box he rolled his tail out of that seat in a hurry.

“Now kick that scattergun over the side.”

Belatedly the guard appeared to recall his responsibilities. His look got stubborn. Perkins started sweating. “Don’t be a total fool,” he growled. “You’re near enough to hell to smell the smoke right now.”

The fellow’s eyes turned sullen but he kicked the Greener over.

Neither he nor Perkins wore any gun belt. Reifel, sweltering behind the folds of his bandanna, decided to get this over with as quickly as possible.

“I’m going to be quite frank with you,” he said to the pair with his glance bleak as agate. “There’s more guns than mine keeping tabs on this coach. If you want to get hurt just start fooling around.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Perkins answered.

“I’m not about to. What name does your walrus-faced friend go by? Schmole? All right, Schmole — help Perkins pitch that strongbox down. That’s fine,” he encouraged when the box struck the ground. “The passengers will now get out on this side and, with their dewclaws grabbing the ozone, will line themselves up against that rust-colored rock. All right, in there — let’s get started!” he said sharply.

The first gent out was a corpulent drummer in the middle forties whose skin-tight pants of black-and-white check looked just about ready to burst at the seams. His coat, of the same material, was slung over his arm like a wilted bar rag and his jowls jounced and jiggled like a plateful of jelly as he carefully let himself down from the step. Still facing the coach and with his glance glued inside it he made a considerable ceremony of proffering the other arm to a hesitant member of the frailer sex.

About all that Reifel could make out about her in that first startled moment was a swirl of frills and faradiddles as she inclined her head to get her hat through the door. It was the damndest hat he had ever clapped eyes on — a scrambled concoction of tier on tier of silk and lace perched atop the brim like a ruined castle. But when she finally was standing in the dust of the road with a hand timidly resting on the fat drummer’s arm, he forgot all about her fantastic hat in awed admiration of the charms it had been hiding.

In that place and time these were enough to awe anyone. Despite the sophistication of her outlandish garb — some frenchified fashion from the East he reckoned — any nump could have told she was made for loving. An earlier age would have probably called her “ravishing.” To the forthright Reifel she was pretty as a spotted dog under a red wagon and so sweet bee trees “was gall beside her.”

She had that thin and fragile highbred look that is set off so well by a red coat and riding crop. And there were piquant shadows underneath her blue eyes that lent a kind of challenge to the look she gave him. The whole effect was heightened by the rich and glowing luster of hair as black as ebony.

“Permit me, madam,” the drummer said with heavy gallantry, and wheezingly escorted her over into the shade of the rust-colored rock. She had a parasol, of course, but the sun was too low for it to be of much use to her. Ben marveled at her mincing steps and the dainty way her gloved left hand held aside the voluminous folds of her skirt. Every contour of her body held the grace of rhythm and certain of those contours very nearly took his mind away from what he’d stopped the stage for.

He chucked a lightning-quick glance at the guard and driver but they were still as he had left them with their hands above their stetsons.

He delighted himself with another look at beauty and said to the drummer, “Pitch your wallet over here and get out of them shoes.”

The fat man gave him a perspiring scowl but reluctantly tossed the article over then sat down in the dust of brittle weeds to tug off his polished footgear.

The girl, Reifel thought, would be about sixteen — not over eighteen, certainly. Obviously the product of considerable refinement she was scared, like enough, half out of her wits. He tried to dig up some words which might set her mind at rest but, before he could locate any group choice enough, she told him: “All I’ve got to offer you is this brooch that was my Mother’s — ”

“Hell’s fire, lady,” he said with embarrassment, “I ain’t down to robbin’ the women and kids yet.”

She thanked him with a tremulous smile and it wasn’t for several moments he realized the brooch might have a functional purpose and that perhaps he had been hasty in not letting her unfasten it.

He scowled at the dude. “Pick up them shoes,” he grumbled, “and put ’em over by that wallet. Now get back where you was and fold your arms behind you.”