The Desperado Read Online Free PDF

ever since he was old enough to know
what a sheriff's star was. And he couldn't remember the time when his
pa hadn't worn a star. Which was all right, as far as I was concerned
—I'd never heard anything against Marshal Martin Novak. But all this
talk of Reconstruction Law, as the turncoats called it, was beginning
to disgust me.
    I said, “Look, if you're so goddamned set on law and order, what are
you running for? After you hit that cavalryman why didn't you go right
on down to the jail and give yourself up? You seem to be forgetting one
thing: Right now I'd be back on the ranch in my own bed if it hadn't
been for you. If you hadn't come running like a wall-eyed coot and got
me mixed up in it. Why did you run in the first place, that's what I
want to know, if you're so damned set on the law being enforced?”
    The more I talked the madder I got, and I said things that I wouldn't
have said if I hadn't been so hot. It was as much my fault as his. If I
hadn't clubbed that carpetbagger the Yankees wouldn't have been so
worked up. Ray would have got off with a few days in jail and that
would have been the end of it. But now it meant six months on the work
gang, if they caught him. And me too. And I didn't intend to spend six
months on the work gang, no matter whose fault it was.
    For a long minute Ray Novak said nothing. In the first pale light of
dawn, I could see his face getting hot and red, and I knew the smart
thing to do would be to let him alone. But I was wound up and my
mouth was running ahead of my thinking.
    “Well,” I said, “what are you going to do about it?”
    He just stood there, getting hotter, and doing nothing. I guess Ray
Novak wasn't used to being talked to like that. He was a lot like his
pa—the quiet, serious kind, commanding respect but not making a show
of it. He didn't know what to do now, with an eighteen-year-old
standing up and the same as calling him yellow. For a minute I thought
he might go for his gun, and at that point I didn't care one way or
another.
    He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and I could almost see
him taking hold of himself. He said softly, “I guess we both need some
sleep. We'd better be riding on.”
    “Just a minute,” I said. “I want to know what you're going to do.
You'd better know now that if we run into any law I'm not giving myself
up for a spell on the work gang. If you don't feel the same way about
it, we'd better split up here and now.”
    He gave it careful thought before answering. “Tall,” he said finally,
“I told you once I was sorry for dragging you into this. That's all I
can do. If I had been smart, I would have given myself up in John's
City. But I wasn't smart. Now it looks like we'll have to hide out for
a little while. I'll hide out but I don't intend to fight the law, if
it comes to that. If you don't want to ride with me, we'll split up,
and no hard feelings.”
    He was a hard guy to hate for a long stretch of time. He was so dead
serious about everything. “Oh, hell,” I said. “Let's go.”
     
    So we rode on, neither of us saying anything. For a while I amused
myself by thinking of the cavalry, and how foolish they must look
pounding up and down the arroyo and wondering what had happened to us.
I enjoyed that. It was the same as a military victory, for the war was
not over in Texas. It would never be over as long as Sheridan sent men
like Throckmorton and his bluebelly generals to rule Texas with
soldiers. Or men like Pease, who threw out all the judges and sheriffs
and mayors who might have been able to keep some semblance of law and
order and put in his own scalawags who didn't give a damn for anything
except to bleed the ranchers and farmers and cotton growers, and fatten
their own bank accounts back in New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania or
wherever they came from. And even worse, men like E. J. Davis.
    E. J. Davis, the “reconstruction governor.” Colonel Davis,