Lassiter, p.1
Lassiter, page 1
Chapter One
THEY WATCHED HIM come off the dry lake, seeing him first as a black fly speck moving alone on the white alkali. They watched because there was nothing else to look at, but they didn’t believe. It was mid-afternoon and the heat waves rolling up from the level packed floor made vision and the judging of distance unreliable. Heat drugged the town that wormed along the tracks between the lake and the towering row of mountains hedging in its rear.
They sat on their heels, their backs against the buckling walls of the raw wood buildings, sat like waiting buzzards hopeful that some carcass would fall at their feet.
They sat because it was Saturday and any rider must come to town on Saturday. They sat because they had already expended their small money stock and there was nothing else to do in Puente.
Puente had four excuses for existing where it did. The railroad engineers had found the lake and welcomed the long, flat shoreline, had veered their grade down the eastern mountains and run their line for thirty miles on the level before they had to take it up again through the pass in the western wall. They had built their division point here. There were springs here, fed by the underground river that followed down the mountain’s bedrock and lost itself in the insatiable sand. There were mines back in the hills and fertile valleys made green by small rushing streams, sheltering ranches where cattle fed.
The railroad, the springs, the mines, the ranches fathered the bastard town. One single building deep, three blocks long, the shacks that grew up around the railroad yard huddled along the curving rails, facing across them toward the endless, arid lake. Someone had called the collection Puente. No one remembered why, nor cared. There was no ghost of civic pride. Not one of the people who used the place as home would not move out at the whisper of a chance.
Lassiter walked into the town from the dry lake. Seventy miles he had walked. In the wrong direction. He was glad to be there. He stepped across the tracks, crossed the road and came up onto the wood sidewalk. He turned and followed it. He passed in front of the row of watching men without appearing to notice them. He walked a straight course in the shambling straightness of a tireless bear. The boots were worn out. They had a right to be. He had walked them for eighteen hours. They were not his, nor were the shapeless clothes that looked as if they belonged to a shorter, heavier man. They had.
He did not know the name of the town. He did not care. He was glad it was there. He had crossed the lake that the sheriff had said nobody could cross on foot. He had walked it, in a country where a man seldom traveled a hundred yards without climbing on his horse. He was alive. He meant to stay alive.
The men he passed watched with grave interest, trying to read the sign. They were curious, but in this land no one asked. He walked, and this they did not understand. He looked as if he had walked far. He had come off the lake, but where had he entered it? They thought he must have dropped off a passing freight somewhere outside of town, but no freight had passed that afternoon, and they had first seen him a mile out on the scorching lake. The thermometer on the hotel wall said a hundred and twenty-eight.
They studied his dusty, ill-fitting clothes, his blistered face half-concealed in the black whiskers four days old, his broken hat, his broken boots, his lack of gear, lack of a canteen. Their minds would not even suggest that he had walked from Harmony, seventy-two miles straight across the lake.
Mostly they stared at his waist. He wore no gun belt. He had no gun. No man except a bum traveled this country without a gun.
Lassiter reached the hotel. He did not turn in at the narrow, dark lobby, into the superheated, trapped air. He went into the alley, littered with blown tumbleweed, papers, cans, filth, that ran beside the building and dead-ended in the sharp mountainside just behind it.
A wash bench sat against the rear wall, a granite basin and three buckets filled with water. Lassiter stopped before the nearest bucket. He raised it and drank. He drank from the brim, slow, in measured swallows. Held the water in his mouth, let it trickle back. His throat was too parched for the muscles to have control. He allowed himself three drinks. His body begged in spasms for more.
He put the bucket on the bench, bent and buried his head in it. The water was tepid, stale, sulfurous. But it was wet. It stung the blistered skin under his mat of beard. He held his face in it until he had to breathe. He came up, water coming with him. It coursed down into his neck, across the sorry clothes. He savored that. He plunged hands and forearms into the pail. Displaced water slopped over the rim. He held out his boot to catch it, tipped the pail to spill into the other boot.
His hands were large, big knuckled, with long, square tipped fingers, strong. He flexed them in the water, letting the cured skin soak up as much as it would hold. He withdrew his hands and lifted the bucket to his mouth again.
He was being observed by a woman from an upper hotel window. He did not care. Again he ducked his head and this time scrubbed some of the alkali from his beard and hair. Finally he straightened. He had not had enough water. His body told him it would never again have enough water. He knew he dared not drink more now.
He poured water down the back of his shirt. He stretched the waist of his pants and emptied the bucket down the inside of his legs. He turned back to the street, feeling the damp clothes act like an olla, the evaporation cooling his body somewhat. Such was the heat that before he reached the saloon door his clothes were dry.
The squatting men watched as he passed again. When he turned into the saloon they were surprised. Some rose to follow.
The room was shadowed. That was the best to be said for it. It stank of human sweat, damp sawdust, spilled beer that gave back the smell of urine. Tobacco smoke added to the hot air made it difficult to breathe. Yet there were a dozen men at the scarred bar.
Lassiter stopped just inside the batwing door. He knew that the men from the street were behind. He did not turn. He knew what was in their minds. They were bored with the heat, with inaction. They were looking for trouble.
The room was noisy with forced laughter, men trying to prove to themselves that they were having a good time. They weren’t.
Lassiter advanced to the bar. Boots behind him shuffled through the sawdust. A man came against the counter on either side of him. Both were bigger than he was. He stood only five feet eleven.
The man on his right said, “Stranger, ain’t you?”
Lassiter looked at him.
“Saw you come off the lake. Lose your horse?”
“I walked.”
The man’s eyes darkened. “Across that lake? Walked? Nobody ever did that.”
“I did.” Lassiter turned away.
“I don’t like a liar. Do you like a liar, Abner?” The man’s voice was up. It carried down the crowd. It stopped the laughter. The men waited. Lassiter knew what they waited for. A fight. The free entertainment of a fight.
He was too tired for anger. He turned very slowly. He reached out, almost a friendly gesture. The fingers of his right hand touched the man’s forearm just below the elbow. The man looked uncertain. Lassiter’s left hand shot out and caught the wrist. The man jerked back, but both Lassiter’s hands bit into the arm. With a sudden movement he raised the arm and brought it down against the edge of the bar. Hard.
The bone snapped. It sounded like a dry stick snapping. The sound crossed the room before the sharp yelp of pain drowned it.
Lassiter threw the man into the two men standing behind him. He turned back to the startled bartender.
“Set them up. For the house. Whiskey for me.”
A concerted stalking had begun, closing in. It stopped. How could you take a man who was buying you a drink? The room was quiet. Down the bar they stood looking at him. An unexpected host. Even the man with the broken arm straightened and stared.
As the drinks were poured some raised their glasses in silent salute. Lassiter acknowledged them only by lifting his glass and draining it, motioning for a refill.
“Do it again.”
The bartender hurried. Nothing like this had happened in Puente in a long time.
Lassiter finished his drink while the bartender was still busy pouring others. He put down the glass and moved toward the door. The man with the broken arm watched him, silent. Lassiter was shoving the door apart when the bartender saw him.
“Hey …”
Lassiter pointed a finger at the man farthest along the bar. “He’s buying.”
The bartender looked at the man.
The man straightened. “Hell,” he said out of surprise. “I never saw him before.”
The bartender scooped up the bung starter. “Let’s get him.” He started for the door. No one else moved.
The bartender erupted into the sun-charged street in his dirty apron. He expected Lassiter to be running. He wasn’t. He stood in the shade of the wooden awning, looking at nothing.
The bartender stopped. You didn’t just rush up and hit a man with a bung starter if he was just standing there, not looking at you. Not if you remembered the broken arm. He went forward warily.
“Why the hell did you do that to me?”
“I needed a drink.”
“You didn’t have to set up for the whole town.” Anger made the bartender’s voice thick.
‘Would you have given me a drink if I’d asked?”
“No, but …”
“But you slopped it out fast enough when you thought I’d pay for the house. And I had to stop that fight.”
“What fight?”
“The one that would have started in the next second. Think about it. Your spot would have been wrecked.”
Lassiter turned his back and walked toward the yellow railroad station. The bartender opened his mouth to yell. Then he stopped. There would have been a fight, that was so. The saloon would have been wrecked. It had been wrecked before. He swore and went back inside. No one paid attention to him. They were gathered around the man with the broken arm. Their boredom was broken. They had something to amuse them.
Lassiter passed the tower with its dropped signal board. He crossed the maze of tracks of the yard. At the far end were the roundhouse, the shops and the offices of the division superintendent. No one looked at him twice. They were used to bums. He sat down in the shade of an ore car that was shunted onto a siding, waiting to be moved up the branch line to one of the mines.
He pulled his hat over his eyes, leaned his elbows on his knees and went into a comatose rest that was not sleep. He was aware of what went on around him, but his mind was on the lake he had just crossed.
It had been pure hell. In twenty-five years of wandering across the land he had never gone through anything like it. The furnace heat. The relentless sun. The glare reflected against his burning eyeballs by the alkali crust. The crust itself, like skim ice, cracking under his weight, the knife sharp edges cutting at the old boots. The endless moving. Eighteen hours of constant walking. It was a nightmare that would live with him. He would keep it alive until he found answers. He had the questions.
Why had it been necessary? Why had he been singled out to die? Why had a man he barely knew set him up as a pigeon to hang for a killing he had not done?
He meant to find out. He had to find out. Was it sheer accident that he alone of the five had been captured and tried? Or had some enemy he didn’t know about chosen this way to get rid of him? He had to know which if he meant to go on living. If he wasn’t to spend his life suspecting every man and woman in it.
The mountains around the lake purpled into night. The stars came out and the lake surface shimmered in the deep glow. Two passenger trains, one going east, one west, made their scant call at the yellow station. Lassiter watched. He sat unmoving as a cat. The whiskey began to loosen the coiled nerves within him.
Chapter Two
THE FREIGHT WAS carrying cattle. You could smell them in the hot air, hear their bellowing despair at being crammed into the racketing cars, their bellowing for water that no one gave them.
One of the cars had a hot box. Smoke was coming from the housing around the axle. There were a lot of lanterns bobbing in the dark yard, a lot of men, a lot of discussion. Then the train was ready to roll on. Lassiter looked at the sky and saw that it was after midnight.
He stood up. There was pain in his belly. It held nothing but the whiskey and water. He was in no hurry. The long train jerked; its couplings clanked down its length as the locomotive tried to drag it into motion.
When it was moving out he went forward with a restored catlike grace, caught the handrail of the car just ahead of the caboose and swung himself to the step. He hung there, making no move to climb until they were well clear of the yard, snaking toward the pass through the mountains, heading west. It was going in the wrong direction. His direction was south.
He clawed to the top of the lurching car. The track was hastily, badly laid, the wheels were not entirely round. The couplings jarred, the train rocked, the cattle bawled. Ahead, the stream of sparks spewing from the bell stack as the stoker shoved in wood looked like a geyser fed from hell.
A shadow appeared from the caboose and climbed the ladder. Lassiter did not try to hide. There wasn’t any place.
The freight conductor saw him and came along the catwalk, swaying easily with the jerking rhythm of the train. He carried a bullseye lantern in one hand, a short, heavy club in the other. He made the jump from the caboose and advanced on Lassiter cautiously.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Riding,” Lassiter said.
“Not on this railroad. The orders are to throw you bums off in the desert. Thats why we don’t bother you in town. Jump.”
Lassiter looked down on the lake bed, hard, shining, white. He looked at the railroad man.
“I walked seventy miles across that. That’s enough.”
The man did not believe him. “Jump, or I’ll knock you off.”
Lassiter’s shoulders moved in a helpless gesture. He started toward the ladder. He had almost reached it. The conductor was crowding him. Lassiter knew what would happen. As soon as he went down, had both hands on the top rung, the man would use his club against his knuckles.
Lassiter made a sudden twist. One hand reached out and caught the wrist that held the club. He wrenched it and the stick fell to the car top and rolled away. His other hand grabbed the man’s shirt. He jerked him from his feet and held him up, a struggling rabbit. He used his free hand to find the gun in the conductor’s pocket. It was small, a thirty-two. He threw the man off the train. The train went on. In the starlight Lassiter saw the conductor land on the white lake and roll, then struggle to his feet and shake his fist, yelling. The yells faded and the jumping figure melted into the night.
Lassiter sat down on the catwalk. The air rushing at him was still hot, but it moved. It felt good. It felt good to sit quiet and watch the awful lake sweep by. Then the tracks veered away from it and the locomotive began the climb into the pass. The grade twisted, sharpened. The speed of the train slowed.
Lassiter climbed down the ladder. Two men played poker at the folding table in the caboose, played with greasy cards, coins and a few crumpled bills between them. He guessed who they were, the punchers sent along with the cattle shipment to feed and water the animals. They had not bothered with the job in the hot sink of the Puente stop.
They did not look up as he opened the door and stepped in, clattering noise and a backwash of soot coming with him. The man with his back to the door spoke without turning.
“That took you long enough.”
The second man looked up from the cards, saw the gun in Lassiter’s hand and his mouth fell open. He tried to get words out and couldn’t. His partner saw the expression and turned.
Lassiter said, “Hands on the table. All of them.”
The men sat still. He allowed a fast glance around the cramped, swaying room. Four bunks built against one wall. A small wood stove, skillet, black coffee pot. The riders’ gear, saddles, ropes, blanket rolls piled in one corner. Guns and belts lay on top of the pile.
The puncher facing him was close to Lassiter’s size. He wore a hickory shirt, jeans nearly new, handstitched boots. Lassiter particularly approved of the boots. He said, “Stand up,” and watched the man rise.
“Strip”
The puncher’s eyes bugged. “What?”
“Undress.” Lassiter leveled the gun.
The man looked from the eye of the muzzle, up, into the two black eyes that directed it. Hastily he began to peel off his clothes.
“Out on the platform now. Jump.”
The naked man stared. “Like this?”
“Like that. It’s warm out.”
“I’ll be killed.”
“We’re only moving ten miles an hour. Out.”
The puncher moved toward the door. Lassiter stepped to one side, waiting for him to make a grab for the gun. He didn’t. He glared, and pulled the door open, went out, and hesitated on the windy, cinder strafed platform. Lassiter put his boot against the bare buttocks and pushed. The puncher went over the railing. He lit on the right of way, somersaulted and came up to his knees.
Lassiter’s back was turned to the card table. He heard the chair scrape and faced around. The second man was on his feet, diving forward, hands widespread to wrap Lassiter in a bear hug.
Lassiter stepped inside the embrace. The light gun broke the punchers nose, flattened the bridge, sent blood spurting downward. The gun wasn’t heavy enough. It didn’t knock the man out. In spite of the dazing pain the puncher came on, arms closing around Lassiter, momentum forcing him out to the platform.
Lassiter came up against the rail. For a moment they both swayed over it. The right lurch of the train would throw them both over. Instead, the next lurch favored Lassiter. He got his footing and brought his knee up full force into the crotch. The hurt bent the man forward, broke his hold.
