Desert of the Damned Read Online Free PDF Page A

good-sized holler from Naco on the border. A lot would depend on what he learned about that girl who “could write her name on butcher paper and get enough cash to buy up half this country.” He reckoned it would give a guy a pretty important feeling to know that he was able to do a thing like that.
    He shook his head. Probably more than half bull — one of that drummer’s windies. But that girl had plenty of style, all right. She had more damn style than an ace-full on kings and, barring acts of God and other like misfortunes, he had already made his mind up that him and her were going to meet again.
    He passed Bud Fuller’s, garish with lanterns, and flung up a hand at staring Jim Johnson as he guided the buckskin around a spring wagon and noticed Jack Dall’s was packed to the batwings. Something pulled his glance back to the man on the wagon — tall, rawboned and tobacco-chewing — and he heard wrangling voices drifting out of Gerdy Nell’s.
    Across the way, in front of Slemson’s, two inebriated miners were having a fist fight and through the open door of the barber shop he could see Bowring Benson getting his whiskers scraped off.
    Reining Bucky around to the back of Nick Babcock’s he unloosened the cinches and left him on grounded reins in the sycamores. It tugged him to part like this with old Bucky but a rope round his neck would tug a lot worse.
    He started to go through Babcock’s and then changed his mind. Turning away from the door he moved into the mouth of the trash littered alley that ran between Nick’s and the Lone Star Mercantile, steering a careful and roundabout way through the glint of cans and broken bottles. He couldn’t think why he was suddenly so edgy or what obscure instinct so strongly urged stealth. The feeling got worse. He had to fight back an impulse to panic.
    The street when he reached it showed no lessening of traffic. Rumbling ore wagons lurched heavily toward him through a lemon fog of risen dust that hung hat high across the fronts of the buildings. Skylarking riders whirled hilariously through it yip-yip-yipping like a bunch of coyotes and, in front of the barber shop with hatbrims touching, a number of maudlin range hands were lugubriously extolling the fate of Little Joe. Stamping boots and the high wail of fiddles provided competition from the next-door dancehall and two gents at a hitch rack were savagely swearing as Reifel strode past on his way to Cy Turner’s.
    Cy had his business back of Carradine’s brothel where the gulch widened out beyond the Mercer Hotel. The Frenchman’s building with its tall false front and the sycamore tops spread romantically above it shut away the corrals and vast mound of baled hay in an impenetrable murk of black shadows which gave the lantern-hung entrance, when he came in sight of it, the stark unreality of the backdrops used in the Mare’s Nest theater.
    Paused in the gloom at the east side of Carradine’s he examined his surroundings with a narrowed stare. About to roll up a smoke he let tobacco and paper flutter out of his hand. He could discern no movement, no least bit of motion. This appearance of desertion might be customary and harmless but he could not bring himself to like it. All his nerves cried out their distrust of this stillness. He’d be a goldfish swimming in a glass of water the minute he stepped into the light of that lantern.
    Yet what else could he do?
    He could damn well get out of here. He could cross off his share of that cash they had hidden and climb on a bronc and bust a breeze for the border. He could sure as hell do that.
    But even as this occurred to him he knew he wasn’t going to. Three thousand dollars was three thousand dollars and he wasn’t going to leave it for any bastard like Breen!
    All this while he had been motionless, listening. Now his stare probed the blackness beyond the reach of the lantern. There wasn’t any sway or any give to that blackness and there was no other way he could