The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [40]
Shelby’d been fifteen when he had his first woman, a whore on the Mexican side of Nogales. He and Dick Larson had taken turns with the whore and then robbed her of all her cash and headed back into Arizona.
Dick Larson had an old dime novel, dog-eared and yellowed, about the great train robber Zach Provo, and after reading the whole thing Dick Larson had decided it was easy, the next thing they’d do was rob a train. But the express guard had opened up on them and killed Dick Larson and Shelby had barely got away with his skin.
He’d been lonely after that, almost as much as when his mother had walked out on him. It proved to Shelby that you couldn’t depend on anybody for long. He’d lone-wolfed it, strictly, ever since.
He’d done all right until last year when that stupid storekeeper knocked the gun out of his hand and turned him in for armed robbery. Two or three other storekeepers turned up and identified him for several previous crimes, including one he hadn’t done, but they convicted him of that one too. He’d gone to Yuma and about the only worthwhile, thing about that was meeting Zach Provo.
Shelby had remembered the name from the old dime novel, and meeting Provo in the flesh had been something like meeting royalty. Too much water had gone under the bridge for Shelby to try to team up with Provo the way he had with Dick Larson; anyhow Provo wasn’t the type who encouraged hangers-on. But Shelby knew he could learn a lot by watching Provo and studying how Provo worked, He was only, nineteen and with luck he had a lot of years ahead of him, but if he was going to survive he had to learn everything there was to learn. Provo was about as good a man to study as any, even if he had been caught and spent twenty-eight years in Yuma. Everybody had bad luck now and then. It didn’t mean Provo was anybody’s fool.
Dawn came slow. There was a lot of wind-lifted dust in the air and a heavy brownish sky hung over the eastern horizon for half an hour before the sun started to red up. George Weed said, “What this place needs is a lot more saloons.” His tongue and gums, smiling, were startlingly pink in the black face.
The country was all chopped-up redrock and clay. Shelby didn’t know the area at all but then neither did many other people except the Navajos. The sky seemed a thousand miles wide and the desert just as big. It was high here, several thousand feet of elevation, but the sun came up molten, and by noon Shelby knew it would be far above a hundred degrees on the plain. He felt sullen and cranky and more whacked-out exhausted than he’d ever been in his life.
Provo was up front, leading them. Behind Provo were Taco Riva and Will Gant and Quesada, who was leading the girl’s horse. Behind the girl rode Portugee Shiraz. Shelby was next, and Weed was behind him, and a little ways back rode Cesar Menendez. There was no particular reason for everybody to ride single-file now, there was plenty of room to spread out, but they’d got in the habit on the narrow switchback trails in the Mogollon country behind them.
They came up out of a depression in the ground and Shelby saw a great looming monster of a rock four or five miles out ahead. Red-walled, flat-topped, it soared a good thousand feet above the plain. Its shadow ran out a long way along the desert. At the foot of it, hard to see in the shadows, was enough greenery to suggest the presence of water. Provo called back along the line: “Castle Butte. Little Navajo town down there. We’re going in. Everybody act real friendly.”
The Navajo Reservation was bigger than most Eastern states. Here and there, at a crossroads or a good water source, a little community could be found, centered around an Agency trading post and a Navajo Agency police