The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [36]
“Turn them upside down, they all the es-same,” Menendez replied with Mexican indifference to cruelty.
Portugee gave a bray of laughter. “Look, she’s sweating,” he said, pleased. “We got her scared. You scared, lassie? Scared maybe we gonna mo-lest you? Haw!”
“Wouldn’t want to get her upset,” Menendez said. “She might wet her pants.”
“Aw, naw, we wouldn’t want that. Naw, you just take it easy now, lassie. Don’t fret yo’seff none.” To Menendez he added, “I always say, a contented cow gives the sweetest milk.”
From up ahead of Quesada, Provo’s voice came floating back: “Shut up back there. Leave her alone.”
She had kept her eyes shut; she kept them shut now. She didn’t know why Provo had any interest in protecting her from the rest of them but whatever his motive she was remotely glad of it.
Provo called a halt in the greasewood at the edge of the hardpan flats. Out across the valley she could see the dark ribbon of greenery that marked the course of the river. There was a tall structure of some kind, made of metal that glittered in the early sun. Probably a windmill, its blades flashing the reflections.
Provo pointed at it. “That ought to be Vestal’s horse ranch. Well ride in and swap for fresh animals. Anybody puts up an argument, show some iron—but don’t kill anybody unless we have to. I ain’t a butcher.”
She saw him look around at the rest of them. “You’ve had all night to think on my offer. What about it? George?”
George Weed said, “I could use three thousand. But where’s this place where the law can’t get after us?”
“Redrock country,” Provo told him. “My people’s place. Arizona law got no jurisdiction there.”
“Maybe—but who says those Navajos will let us come in?”
“As long as you’re with me, they’ll let you stay.” Provo’s glance moved on. “Portugee?”
“I guess.”
“Quesada? Will?”
Nobody said no.
“Let’s go, then.”
Six
The sun burned everywhere it struck and the air was like coarse wool, so hot it was hard to breathe, and the dust was in Sam Burgade’s teeth. Sunday, late afternoon: the heat lay in an intense shimmering layer along the high plateau, and dust devils funneled erratically in yellow wheelings of sand, twigs, and leaves.
Burgade’s eyes were raw with fatigue. He was filled with the agony of muscles that cried out from punishment after long disuse. He pulled up his dirt-caked horse on the hillside and tasted the posse’s dust and unslung his field glasses for perhaps the thousandth time.
Down across the shallow bowl, past a fringe of scrubby trees, there was a sun-scraped ranch house. It had been painted, probably less than two years ago, but the ravenous sun had bleached all color out of it. The field glasses brought it up close and clear: the eaves hung with cobwebs and the man who sat on the porch was as filthy and ramshackle as the place itself—a gaunt gray-stubbled figure in a black clawhammer coat, dusty and drab and shiny from long years of wearing. The man had one leg bandaged and propped up on a small wooden crate; a bottle of whiskey hung in one clawed gray hand.
“The tracks go down there,” said Sheriff Nye.
“So do we,” Burgade said, and put his horse forward.
The old-timer on the porch had veinshot eyes. He spat tobacco juice off the porch and waited for the posse to come in. Then his face changed and he said, “If it ain’t Sam Burgade.”
Burgade tried to make out the features in the porch shade. The old man cackled: “Shit, Sam, you don’t recognize me.”
“Rinehart. Dutch Rinehart.”
“Sure I am.”
It was beyond belief. This old caved-in wreckage of a man. Burgade remembered him: full of spit and beams, top horse-wrangler on the Hatchet ranch. Burgade wiped a hand across his face to conceal his awe and the dismal rage of knowing he was himself just as old and used-up as the half-drunk human carrion on the porch.
Burgade was looking at the bandage wrapped unsanitarily around the spindly old leg. The old man was a strange sight in clawhammer coat and dirty white drawers, no trousers. “You all right, Dutch?”
“Ain’t but a bullet hole. Went through