The pause was brief. They moved on, and the sun was hot; cicadas hummed in the greasewood. They saw the trail where three peccaries had crossed the road. Once a rattler sounded off from the shade of a rock as they rode by. Above them a lone buzzard circled lazily against the vault of the brassy sky. Spanyer was thinking of the men he had left, knowing how they felt right now.
“Well,” he said aloud, “good luck to them.”
Lennie glanced at him. She had no need to ask of whom he spoke, for she had been thinking of them, too—of Considine at least, and the way the dark hair curled over his forehead.
How quietly he had faced her father, neither asking for nor refusing trouble! Nor had he made any excuses. The only words had been to clear her, the simplest words he could have spoken, and without apology. “Pa … “
He looked over at his daughter, aware of the change in her, for she was no longer angry with him.
“Do you think they’ll make it?”
He considered that in the slow way he had; considered the town of Obaro, and then he thought about Considine. After a while he commented, “He’ll do it if anybody can.” He paused briefly “The trouble is, Kitten, that’s only the beginning. After that they chase you, and you run, if you’re smart. Maybe you get away that time, but you can’t always get away. When a man lifts his hand outside the law, he sets every man’s hand against him. “And you don’t make anything. Leaving honesty out of it, you just can’t make it that way. Mighty few outlaws ever sit down to figure out how little they make over the years.
“Knew a big-time outlaw once … a man everybody talked about as being smart. Why, that man had spent a third of his grown-up life in prison, had two death sentences hanging over him, and he was living on handouts from other outlaws and folks.”
Spanyer narrowed his eyes at the horizon where the heat waves shimmered above the desert. In the southwest, a smoke was rising…
CHAPTER VI
Considine looked at his big silver watch. “You boys come into town at twenty minutes to one. I can promise you ten minutes … fifteen maybe.” Hardy shot him a quick glance. “That’s a long fight—He’s a tough man.” He grinned at them, a reckless grin they all knew. “And I’d better be.” He eased himself in the saddle. “And no shooting. Only if it is absolutely necessary. Once the shooting starts, you boys will be bucking some of the best shots in the West. I know—I’ve shot against them in target matches.” He started off, looked back once and saw them wave, and it gave him a turn to realize what he was leading them into … and they were good men. Good men, and tough.
His thoughts turned to Lennie. It was strange, how right something like that could seem when he had only met the girl. It came to him suddenly that he could not remember ever feeling that way about Mary … Had it simply been that he was young and Mary was the prettiest girl around?
Or was it that he had finally grown up? His father had said something to him once that he had never forgotten. “Folks talk a lot about the maternal feeling in women, but they say nothing about man’s need to protect and care for someone; yet the one feeling is as basic as the other.”
There could be something to that. When he was a youngster he had believed his father was out of date and didn’t know what was going on, but as he grew older he realized it had been he himself who didn’t know what it was all about. And now he had nobody to care for, and nobody who cared a thing about him. He had drifted into crime when it seemed like a prank. The trouble was, it wasn’t any prank. When you threaten men or steal their property it no longer is a prank. It’s man stuff, and not very good man stuff, either… Maybe that was why Lennie appealed to him, because she needed somebody. She needed a man and she needed a home. Maybe it was because he wanted to give her the things a woman needs … and no woman was much account without a home or a man, or both. Anything else was unimportant. All the rest was play-acting. He drew rein when he came near enough to see the town, and there was little enough of it to see. There were three long streets and a few cross streets, and the bank was there on the main street, right in plain sight. The corral at the livery stable was at the other end of town.
If people knew he was in town they would be expecting a fight, and everybody would be excited and ready for it. The first thing was to let them know he was in town, and the second was to make Pete Runyon good and mad. That would not be easy, for Pete was a cool-headed man who thought things out carefully. Mary, though … he must see Mary. That would make Pete mad if anything would. The crowd would gather fast, once word of the fight got around. The fight would draw everybody down near the corrals, and probably only one man would be left in the bank. The holdup should take no more than five minutes. It could be a smooth, fast job, and with luck they would be off and away before the fight was over.
If something happened so that guns were fired, then he would lose his crowd fast, and he would have to get out of town the best way he knew how. But what if Pete grew suspicious and started putting two and two together? Then his tail would really be in the crack.
Considine started his horse again. He drew his gun and spun the cylinder, then checked the spare gun he always carried in his saddlebag. The horse he was riding was strange to him, but Honey Chavez said it was the fastest he had. Their own horses would be waiting for them at the box canyon hideout, so they could run these hard getting away, make a quick switch, and head south on their fresh horses.
The great difficulty, of course, was in these things for which one could not plan successfully—the unexpected, the mistakes made by others which could not be foreseen. A man packing a gun might walk into the bank at the wrong time; somebody might leave the bank and then return; or somebody with a rifle handy might be in one of the second-floor windows.
Runyon might score a lucky punch and knock him cold … or, just as bad, he might knock Runyon out. The fight must last ten minutes at the very least. He looked off to the west, and saw smoke rising. He swore bitterly, remembering that Spanyer and Lennie were traveling that way. His thoughts reverted to the problem before him, and he ticked off one by one some of the things he must consider and for which they had tried to plan. Mrs. O’Beirne, for instance. That woman never missed a thing, and she kept a shotgun handy. She had used it on a bunch of Indians once with terrible effect. She was nobody to take lightly; after the death of her husband she had put on pants and roped and branded her own stock.
Tilting his hat back so his face could be plainly seen, he drew up on the edge of town and rolled a cigarette. His mouth felt dry, and there was a tightness in his stomach. Straightening himself in the saddle, he rode around the end of the corral and into the street.
In his mind he saw the whole vast area around the town as though he soared above it. Here lay the town; to the west rode Spanyer and his daughter. Behind him, soon to turn off in this direction, rode Hardy, Dutch, and the Kiowa. These were the small parts of a machine that had already started to move inexorably toward a given point in time.
He was not on the wanted list in Obaro. It was known that he had robbed those trains long ago, but there had been no evidence. He could ride freely into the town.
Here he had lived. These people he knew. He also knew that if he successfully robbed their bank they would pursue him as far as they could, they would capture or kill him if possible; but secretly they would be pleased that, since it had been done, one of their own boys had done it.
He knew the peculiar philosophy of these people, knew the part that daring and excitement played in their lives. And he knew with a pang that all that was changing.