I watched him, then I looked at the bartender.
The bartender was a Mexican lad that I’d known for some time. He made a motion with his right hand, then jerked his head toward the man I was watching.
I stiffened up a bit and got back into the shadows.
After a while, the bartender sidled over toward me.
“He’s looking for you, Señor Zane,” he said.
“What’s he want?”
“Señor, I do not know, but he wants to see you, and he is impatient.”
I get along with those Mexicans pretty well because I can speak their language well enough to savvy their psychology. I knew the bartender for a tough egg, but he professed to be my friend, and now he seemed to be proving it.
“If he is impatient,” I said, “let him wait until I come in again.”
And I sat back in the shadows of a corner and watched him.
He drank ten whiskies inside of twenty minutes, and he complained about the quality of the stuff. I watched him drink, and waited for him to get a little loose about the mouth, waited for the eyes to get watery.
Nothing happened.
His eyes were as hard as ever, and his mouth was a thin line over a bony jaw.
I tipped the bartender the wink and went out the back door.
Back doors in Mexicali open onto some funny places, and I walked through a cement courtyard that had little doors opening on either side, and then swung to the right, into a sun-swept street, turned the corner and walked in the front door.
“Here,” said the bartender, speaking English in a voice loud enough for me to hear, “is Señor Zane.”
The tall man with the brittle eyes dropped the elbow that was halfway to the mouth and looked me over. I walked up to the bar.
“Humph,” said the tall man.
I ordered a beer.
The tall man set his glass of whisky on the bar, turned to face me, and then walked over.
“Bob Zane?” he asked.
I nodded.
He shot out his hand.
“Karg’s my name, Harry Karg.”
I took his hand. He hunched his shoulder, tried to squeeze my bones flat, just to show me how hard he was. I knew then he was strong, awfully strong.
I arched my hand, sort of cupping the knuckles, and let him squeeze until he was tired. Let your knuckles stay straight, and pressure may get one of ’em in and another out and hurt like the devil. Arch your hand, and a man can squeeze until his muscles ache.
Karg squeezed.
When he got tired he let go of the hand, swung his left over to the whisky glass, raised it, downed the whisky, slid the wet glass across the top of the mahogany bar and snapped an order at the bartender.
“Fill it up again and fill up Mr. Zane’s glass. Then we’ll drink.”
I drank my beer.
The bartender filled the glass, then he filled Karg’s whisky glass, and he shot me a flickering glance out of his smoky eyes.
It was a warning glance.
Some of those bartenders get pretty wise at sizing up character quick.
“Finish this, and have another and we’ll talk,” said Karg.
“I don’t drink over two in succession, and I don’t talk,” I told him. “I listen.”
He tossed off the whisky.
Lord knows how many he’d had, and it was hot. But he didn’t show it. He looked cold sober, beyond just a faint flush of color that darkened his face with a sinister look.
“Come over here to a table,” he said. “Bartender, bring me the bottle and a glass. It’s rotten stuff, but it kills germs, and I had a drink of water a while ago. The water wasn’t boiled.”
I sat down at the table with him.
He tilted the bottle until the glass was full, and leaned toward me.
“I’m a hard man,” he said.
He wasn’t telling me anything. I’d known that as soon as I saw him.
“And I don’t like to be monkeyed with,” he went on.
I didn’t even nod. I was listening.
He waited for a minute, and then flashed his hard, gray eyes into mine.
“That’s why it didn’t make any hit with me to have the bartender tip you off I was looking for you,” he said.
He waited for me to color up, or deny it, or explain.
If he’d kept on waiting until I turned color he’d have been waiting yet. Harry Karg was nothing to me, and if he didn’t like my style he could go to hell.
When he saw it was falling flat, he let his eyes shift.
“I knew he tipped you off, and I knew you were studying me,” he said.
I kept right on listening. I didn’t say a thing.
And his eyes slithered away from my face, over the top of the table, and then stared at the floor for a minute.
Right then I had him classified.
He was from the city, and his hardness was the hardness of the city. If he could get another man on the defensive, he’d ride him to death. But when the other man didn’t squirm, Harry Karg felt uncomfortable inside.
“Well,” I said slowly. “You wanted to see me. Now you’re here, and I’m here.”
He laughed uneasily, took a big breath, and got hard again.
It had just been a minute that he’d squirmed around uncomfortably, but that had been enough to show me the weakness that was in him. I remembered it, and let it go at that.
“They tell me you know the desert,” he said.
“I’m listening,” I told him.
“Like no other man knows it, that you can get by in the desert where another man would starve to death and die of thirst,” he said, and his tones were insinuating.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“People will tell you lots of things, if you’ll listen,” I said.
He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a map.
It was a page that had been torn from an atlas, and it showed the desert southwest of the United States and a part of Mexico. There was one little spot on it that was sort of greasy, as though somebody had been rubbing it with a moist finger.
He put his finger on the spot.
It was down over the border, in the Yaqui country of Mexico.
“Could you go there?” he asked.
I studied the spot.
“Yes,” I said. “Lots of men have gone to that section of the country.”
He looked surprised.
“Lots of men?” he asked.
I nodded. “Quite a few, anyway.”
“Then I wouldn’t need you to guide me to get there?”
“You’d need some one that knew the desert country.”
“But I could get there?”
“Yes, I think you could.”
“And back?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I told him, “I didn’t say anything about coming back. Lots of men have been there, but I only know of one who came back.”
“Who,” he asked, “was that?”
“Myself,” I said.
He spread the map on the sticky surface of the dirty table. Outside, the blare of drowsy music sounded through the sun-swept street. Inside it was darker and the flies buzzed around in circles. He tapped the spot on the map impressively.
“You’ve been there?”
I nodded.
“And back?”
I nodded again.
“What did you find?”
I leaned a little toward him.
“I found a section of the country that the Yaqui Indians want to keep people out of. I found thirst and suffering, and guns that popped off from concealed nests in the rocks, and sent silver bullets humming through the air.
“I found a man, dead. Some one had driven a sharp stake in the ground, leaving about four feet of it sticking up. Then they had sharpened the point and hardened it in fire. After they’d done that, they’d sat the man down on the stake. The sharpened point was sticking out, just back of his neck.