But it's funny the way a man's mind works on things like that. I had never had anything to do with robbing people. Killing—that was different. A man had to kill sometimes in this wild country. In the bitter, hate-sick Texas that had been my home, it had been the accepted way of settling arguments between men. Life was cheap. The lank, quiet boys of Texas had learned that when they rode off to fight for the Cause and the Confederacy, when most of them didn't even know what Confederacy meant, or care. Killing had become a part of living. But robbing people—that was something new that I had to get used to.
There were only the bartender and one other man in the saloon when I got down there. The bartender was kicking the wreckages to one side and making a few passes with a broom, the other man was eating eggs and side meat at the bar. The place was dark and sick with the stale, sour smell of whisky and smoke and unwashed bodies. The man looked at me quietly as I came in and stood at the end of the bar. The bartender glanced at me and said:
“Eggs?”
“Fried on both sides, and some of that side meat.”
The man smiled wearily and pushed his own plate away half finished and stood up. “Eggs and side meat,” he said. “Side meat and eggs. It wouldn't surprise me if I didn't start cacklin' like a chicken before long, or maybe gruntin' like a hog. Sometimes I think I'll get myself a Mexican woman, like some of the other boys, and let her cook for me. But I can't stand that greaser grub, either.” He smiled a thin, pale smile. “Lordy, what I'd give for a mess of greens and a pan of honest-to-God corn bread!”
“Eggs sound good to me,” I said, “after living out of my saddlebag, on jerky, for a spell.”
He smiled again, that sad, faraway smile. “Wait till you've choked 'em down as long as I have.”
The bartender went back to the rear somewhere and I began to smell grease burning. The man who didn't like side meat and eggs glanced lazily at my scratched face and bandaged wrist, but his pale eyes made no comment.
He was about thirty, I guess, but no more than that. His voice was as thick and sirupy as molasses—a rich black drawl of the deep South. Everything he did, every move he made, was with great deliberation, without the waste of an ounce of energy. Lazily he shoved a filthy, battered Confederate cavalryman's hat back on his head and a lock of dry, sand-colored hair fell on his forehead.
He smiled slowly. “Welcome to Ocotillo,” he said as if he were reading leisurely from a book, “the Garden Spot of Hell, the last refuge of the damned, the sanctuary of killers and thieves and real badmen and would-be bad-men; the home of the money-starved, the cruel, the brute, the kill-crazy....” His voice trailed off. “Welcome to Ocotillo, Tall Cameron.” He waved a languid hand toward a table. “Shall we sit down? I take it you're one of us now. Perhaps you'd like to hear about this charming little city of ours while you eat your side meat and eggs.”
I shrugged. He was a queer galoot, there was no doubt about that, but there was something about him I liked.
We sat down and the bartender brought me three eggs and three limp slabs of side meat and some cold Mexican tortillas. I dug in, and while I chewed I said, “How did you know my name?”
He looked quietly surprised. “Why, you're a famous man, didn't you know that? The protege of Pappy Garret, the wizard of gunplay, our country's foremost exponent of the gentle art of bloodletting. May I speak for our quiet little community and say that we are greatly honored to have you among us?”
I looked quickly into those pale eyes to see if he were laughing at me. He wasn't laughing. The thoughts behind his eyes were sad and far away.
“Let me introduce myself,” he drawled. “Miles Stanford Bonridge, one-time cotton grower, one-time captain of the Confederate Cavalry—Jeb Stuart's Cavalry, suh— one-time gentleman and son of a gentleman. I hail from the great state of Alabama, suh, where, at one time, the name of Miles Stanford Bonridge commanded more than small respect. The boys here in Ocotillo call me Bama.”
I said, “Glad to make your acquaintance, Bama.”
He nodded quietly and smiled. He made a vague motion with his hand and the bartender came over and put a bottle of the raw, white whisky on the table. “One thing about working for Basset,” Miles Stanford Bonridge said, pouring some into a glass, “is that he pays his men enough to stay drunk from one job to the other. Not that he can't well afford it—he profits by thousands of dollars from our smuggler raids.” He downed the whisky and shuddered. “Have you ever been on a smuggler raid, Tall Cameron?”
“I didn't know there was such a thing until Basset mentioned it.”
He poured again, held the glass up, and studied the clear liquid. “You were too young, I suppose, to have fought in the war,” he said finally. “And there is no parallel to these raids of ours, except possibly some of the bloodier battles of Lee's eastern campaign. For days after one of our raids the sky above the battleground is heavy with swarms of vultures; the air is sick with the sweet, rotting stink of death; the very ground festers and crawls with unseen things wallowing in the filth and blood.... Please stop me,” he said pleasantly, “if I am ruining your appetite.”
“You're not.”
He nodded again, and smiled, and drank his whisky in a gulp.
I had already decided that he was crazy—probably from too much whisky, and a sick conscience, and maybe the war. What it was about him that I liked I couldn't be sure. His manner of speaking, his slow, inoffensive drawl, his faraway, bewildered eyes—or maybe it was because I just needed somebody to talk to.
“Would you mind,” he asked abruptly, “if I inquired your age, Tall Cameron?”
If it had been anybody else I would have told him to go to hell. But after a moment I said, “Twenty. Almost.”
He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and seemed to think. “The day I became twenty years old,” he said, “I was a second lieutenant in the Army of Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg commanding. Holloway's Company, Alabama Cavalry.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe you remember September nineteenth, 1863. There we were on the banks of the Chickamauga, which was to become the bloodiest river in the South, and old Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland was on the other side, so close that we could see the pickets throwing up their breastworks.” He broke off suddenly. “No,” he said, “you wouldn't remember that.”
“I remember hearing about the battle of Chickamauga,” I said, “but I don't remember who was there—or exactly where it was, as far as that goes.”
Miles Stanford Bonridge shook his head. “It doesn't make any difference now.”
I couldn't help wondering how a man like Bama could wind up in this God-forgotten country of southern Arizona. He wasn't a gunman—I knew that—no matter how many men he had killed during the war. His pistol was an old .36-caliber Leech and Rigdon that looked dusty from lack of handling, and he wore it high up under his right arm where he would have a hell of a time getting to it if he ever needed it in a hurry.
He smiled that quiet smile of his while I looked him over, and I had a queer feeling that he was reading my mind.
“All I know about guns,” he said, “is what I learned in the Cavalry. I'm not a bad shot with a carbine. Not worth a damn with a pistol, although I killed a man once with one. A damned Treasury agent, after the war was over. He was trying to cheat me out of twenty bales of cotton, so I shot him four times right in the gut. Have a drink?”