I don't know how long I sat there on the springless bed, nursing my arm and letting the anger burn itself out. But finally the red haze began to lift and I could think straight again.
She had tried to kill me! That was the thing that got me, when I began to think about it. But why? I didn't know enough about women to answer that. A lot of people had tried to kill me at one time or another, but, before tonight, never a woman. Maybe she was just plain crazy. I remembered that Kreyler had said that when I had asked him about her. Maybe Kreyler knew what he was talking about.
My wrist was still giving me trouble. The pain was no longer located in any one particular spot; the whole arm throbbed and ached all the way to the marrow of the bone. I got up and washed it again in water and tried to do a better job of bandaging it, but I couldn't tell any difference in the way it felt. That was when I heard somebody on the stairs. Footsteps in the hall.
I found my pistol and blew out the lamp. When the footsteps stopped in front of my door I was ready. I jerked the door open and stepped to one side, my pistol cocked.
It was the girl again, Marta.
She had washed the blood off her face but she was still a long way from being a beauty. Her face was swollen, her lips were split and puffed all out of shape. But she had found a clean blouse from somewhere to replace the one I had torn off of her—and in her hands she had a bottle of whisky.
“Whisky good for arm,” she said flatly. “I fix.”
There was no fight left in her. Her eyes had the vacant, weary look that you see in the eyes of very old people, or perhaps the dying. I felt like a fool holding a gun on her, and in the back of my mind I suppose I felt sorry for what I had done to her, even if she had tried to kill me. What could I do with a girl like that? I couldn't hate her. I couldn't feel anything for her but a vague kind of pity.
And I was dead tired and maybe I did need the whisky.
“All right,” I said. “Wait until I light the lamp again.”
I lit the lamp and she came into the room, almost timidly. She took the bowl of bloody water, threw it out the window, and filled the bowl up again from the pitcher. “Come,” she said.
She unwrapped my arm and washed the wound again. Then she opened the bottle and poured the whisky over my wrist and I almost hit the ceiling.
“Bad now,” she said, “but good tomorrow.”
“If I live until tomorrow. At the rate things are going, there's a good chance that I won't.”
She began bandaging the wrist again, without saying anything. I turned the bottle up and drank some of the clear, coal-oil-tasting fluid. It was the raw, sour-mash stuff that the Mexicans make for themselves, and when it hit my stomach it was almost as bad as pouring it in the wound.
“Where did you get this?”
“My house.”
“It may be fine for wounds, but it's not worth a damn to drink.”
“Papacito drink,” she said.
“You like saloon whisky, don't you? Saloons and saloon whisky and gringos. Why don't you stay in your own part of town?”
For a moment she looked at me with hurt eyes, then went on with her bandaging. I didn't give a damn what she did. I was just talking while the whisky cooled in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was a crazy trick, letting her back into the room. Maybe she had another knife hidden on her somewhere.
“That good?” she said.
She finished with my arm, then poured some whisky on a rag and cleaned the blood off my face.
I had a look in the mirror. “That's fine. My face looks like something left on a butcher's block. I might as well throw away my off-side gun, for all the good it's going to do me. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Are you just plain crazy or did you have a reason for trying to get that knife into me?”
She looked down and said nothing.
“Out with it,” I said. “I'm not mad now, I just want to know what you've got against me.”
She still didn't say anything, so I grabbed her arm and jerked her around. Then I got a handful of her hair and snapped her head back.
“Tell me, goddamnit! Did somebody pay you to try a trick like that?”
We stood there breathing in each other's faces. Finally she said, “No.”
“Then why?”
She shrugged. “I hate you—for a little while. You shove Marta away. I think maybe I kill you.”
It took me a minute to get it, and after I finally did get it I didn't understand it. Just because I hadn't wanted to go to bed with her, she tried to kill me!
She was looking down again. Her eyes still had that dull, beaten look in them, and I had a queer feeling that she was crying and the tears were falling on the inside. I didn't know what to make of her. It made me uncomfortable just looking at her.
She said flatly, “I go now.”
“That's fine.” I went over and opened the door. She waited a long minute, watching me, as if she thought maybe I was going to change my mind and ask her to stay.
I didn't. All I wanted was to get her out of here and never see her again.
After she had gone I lay a long while trying to figure her out. But I couldn't do it, and along toward dawn I lost interest and tried to get some sleep. And at last I did sleep, and dreamed restless dreams, mostly of my home in Texas.
Fiesta was over when I woke up the next morning. Most of the Mexicans had gone back to their one-mule farms or their sheep herds, or wherever Mexicans go when fiesta is over. My room was a mess, with blood all over the floor, and the bed knocked around at a crazy angle, and everything I had scattered from one corner to the other. My wrist was swollen stiff and hurt like hell.
I picked up some of the things, shirts and pants and a change of underwear that had been kicked out of my saddlebags in the scuffle, and put them back where they belonged. I stood at the window for a while, looking down on the gray scattering of mud huts that was Ocotillo, and for a minute I almost made up my mind to get out of there. The place was crazy, and everybody in it was crazy. I didn't want any more to do with it.
But where would I go? Back to Texas and let some sheriffs posse decorate a cottonwood with me? To New Mexico or California, and take my chances with the Cavalry or United States marshals?
I didn't think so.
It looked like Ocotillo was the end of the line, whether I liked it or not. And that proposition of Basset's—I'd have to listen to that, too, whether I liked it or not, because I didn't have any money and I didn't know of anybody that I could go to for help.
For a week, maybe, I thought. Or a month at the most. I could stand it that long. When I got some money together I could find a place to hole up until the law lost interest in me. Maybe I'd go across the line into Sonora, or Chihuahua, or some place like that. But it would take money.
There was one pretty thing about this business of Basset's. Robbing Mexican smuggling trains wasn't like robbing an express coach or a bank or anything else that the local law had an interest in. The law didn't give a damn if a smuggling train was robbed. They probably took it as a favor.