The Last Hard Men (3 page)

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 mirror. 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.…