Even though it was early October the temperature on the western edges of Death Valley was still in the low hundreds. The heat shimmered and danced off the dazzling array of rainbow rocks, making the far-off mountains tremble in the haze. The only thing moving was a small lizard, darting from one tiny patch of shade to another, its eyes flickering around for a sight of any potential enemy.
The man called Crow moved away from the window of the only saloon in the settlement of just eleven houses, walking quietly to sit at a corner table where the shadows hung deepest. He put the glass of warm beer on the chipped table in front of him, leaning back and pulling his black hat lower over his deep-set eyes. If anyone had walked in the saloon they would hardly have noticed him, black on black, and if they had noticed him they’d have figured that he was either drunk or asleep.
Hobson’s Hole had been christened by an Englishman who had come to the Valley during one of its rare rainy days and found a pool of sandy water there. However, for all but three or four days of the year the hole dried up, yet it was still enough in that arid waste at the fringes of the Mohave Desert to attract travelers.
Crow was just passing through. Moving up towards the Sierras, hoping to pass across them before the deep snows of winter came and closed down all the trails for nearly a thousand miles. He had a fancy to get out to the West Coast, not having been near San Francisco for some years.
There had been food to go with the beer. Tacos and burritos, filled with spicy hunks of gristle that could have been anything, even rattlesnake. On second thoughts he decided that from his experience he had never eaten a rattler that was that tough.
There were three men locked in a penny game of poker, getting themselves steadily more drunk and more evil-tempered with each other, with the flies and with the heat. At the table nearest the door, as if they wanted to be ready to make a quick escape from the saloon, was a party of four people, looking as out of place as a scorpion on an altar-cloth. Crow had observed them as they entered, with much panting and beating of their smart clothes, complaining endlessly to the stocky, taciturn Navaho who served them.
The man was in his mid-forties, carrying around fifty pounds more weight than was healthy for him, dressed in a suit that wouldn’t have looked out of place up on Beacon Hill in the expensive quarter of Boston. A city that he referred to at least once in every sentence, when comparing where they’d been to this stinking hovel in the middle of nowhere. Not that he put it quite as bluntly as that. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles that were constantly becoming fogged up, necessitating his removing them every few minutes to wipe them on a linen kerchief that had once been purest white and was now stained red with the desert’s dust.
His wife sat next to him, constantly rubbing at her red-rimmed eyes where the dust had made them sore. She was a good ten years younger than the man, barely into her middle thirties, with bleached yellow hair and pale blue eyes. Her dress was torn at the hem and her gloves were tattered at the finger ends; Crow guessed that it probably came from biting at them. She seemed very nervous and ill at ease, looking around the room and then back at her hands if she noticed anyone returning her gaze.
The couple had two children.
A fat, surly boy of about seventeen, with an upturned nose that gave him an even more hoggish look, and little currant eyes that almost disappeared in rolls of fat. He didn’t speak very much but when he did it was to whine and complain that he was too hot and he was hungry and he was thirsty.
His brother seemed a year younger. Thin where the other boy was fat, with a face like a disgruntled rodent. Narrow eyes perched above a questing beak of a nose, his mouth thin-lipped and disapproving. He talked the most, keeping up a monotonous series of questions, most of which his parents ignored.
‘When can we go, Pa?’
‘Pa. Can I have some water?’
‘I want to go out back, Pa?’
‘When we goin’, Pa?’
‘Huh, Pa, when, Pa?’
The irritating drone finally reached the short-temper of one of the card-players, who threw his hand down on the table with an audible snap, clearing his throat and gobbing at a filthy, overflowing spittoon. Missing it.
‘For Jesus Christ’s sake, Mister. Shut the fuckin’ mouth of that screechin’ kid!’
‘What?’
‘I said get him to shut the fuck up!’
‘There is a lady present,’ said the father, pompously, obviously used to putting down men of the lower classes. It might have worked well enough on Beacon Hill but at Hobson’s Hole it didn’t mean a thing.
‘I see her, but she’s keepin’ her fuckin’ mouth fuckin’ shut so I’m not complainin’ about her.’
‘If you don’t guard your tongue then …’
Crow sighed to himself. Knowing what was going to happen and not feeling much like doing a thing about it. Part of Crow’s character was that he didn’t suffer fools very gladly. Truth was, he didn’t generally suffer them at all.
The man at the table kicked back his chair, standing unsteadily up. He was in his early twenties, with a lean look to him. A small moustache sprouted beneath his nose and he carried a Peacemaker low on his right hip. A touch too low, Crow thought.
‘I guess you and me’s got some sort of argument, Mister,’ he said, threateningly.
‘Don’t let him talk to you like that, Pa. You won’t, will you, Pa?’
‘Keep out of this, Arthur,’ said his father, also beginning to stand.
Crow poured himself another shot from the bottle on his table, settling himself back. Wondering vaguely if there was any law around the settlement, and deciding immediately that there probably wasn’t. The barkeep was also fight-wise and he had begun stolidly to move glasses and bottles from the shelves behind the counter, stacking them neatly out of sight and out of the way of any lead that might start flying around.
‘You come from out East?’
‘It is my business why I am here.’
‘Sure. That wife of yours looks like she’s not feelin’ so good.’
One of the other card-players also stood up. A Mexican with a mouth filled to overflowing with gold teeth that sparkled and gleamed as he bowed to the woman, holding his sombrero, rimmed with tinkling silver coins, across his body.
Crow watched him from hooded eyes. It was common knowledge along the frontier in the South that when a Mex held his hat like that it was a fair bet he was getting ready to draw his gun behind it. For the first time Crow noticed that the Easterner was wearing a pair of guns. Nice looking, matched Colts, with what appeared to be fancy silver inlay on the butts. They looked like they had never been drawn in anger, neat and oiled as when he bought them from some smart store in Boston.
‘The lady is pretty, no?’
The woman turned away, blushing furiously, her hands knotting in her lap with nerves at suddenly becoming the centre of attraction. Her husband looked angrily at the short Mexican.
‘You would do well to keep your filthy observations to yourself. In a dago country it might be agreeable to talk to your nigger whores like that. But not to my wife, if you please.’
‘What if he don’t please, Mister?’ asked the third of the players, standing to join his two friends. ‘I guess that Garcia here might not please at all, and where does that leave you?’
This was the leader. Crow recognized that. Taller and broader than the boy or the Mex, aged about thirty. With the weatherworn look of a man who’s been around some. The gun was the ubiquitous Peacemaker, but it wasn’t a fancy rig, or tied too low on the thigh. It was a clean, simple model, the butt polished from use, in a cutaway holster.
‘Listen here, gentlemen,’ said the Easterner, just beginning to recognize that whatever money and position he might have back home didn’t count a lot out in the middle of nowhere.
‘Seems she is missing a good man with him,’ said the Mexican, still smiling at the woman.
‘Maybe we ought to show her how to do it right and proper,’ leered the younger man. ‘Just take her out yonder and show her. What about it, Jay?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Don’t let them, Richard,’ said the woman, tension making her voice harsh.
‘Why don’t we all have a drink and forget about this small …’
‘Why don’t you stick that drink up your ass? Your fuckin’ brats are a pain, Mister, and you done insulted us all with your fuckin’ high and mighty ways. We don’t take to that, do we?’ The other two nodded. ‘And I guess better’n a drink is goin’ to be me and my friends here kind of honorin’ your good lady wife by layin’ her.’
‘You dog! I’ll …’ stammered the man, reaching clumsily for the pair of pistols. In the shadows, Crow narrowed his eyes, waiting for the crack of gunfire.
But the Easterner was so slow that it was easy for the Mexican to move the sombrero and show the gun in his hand. And for the young man to stoop and draw in a fluid, easy movement. The leader of the trio never moved, beyond taking a half step to one side, eyes watching Crow, just warning him that he knew he was there. Crow acknowledged that with a half-wave of his hand. Shrugging off any responsibility or involvement.
And he wasn’t involved at all.
He didn’t have any reason to be.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus. Please, gentlemen.’ The man had gone sheet-white, his hands falling to his sides. His sons sat frozen, seeing their father facing death and the woman covered her eyes with her fingers.
The tableau didn’t change for several seconds. The young man and the Mexican grinning at each other at the ease with which they’d won, and there wasn’t any doubt in anyone’s mind that they had certainly won.
‘You done a foolish thing there, Easterner,’ said the boy.
‘Sure. We could shoot you and nobody say nothing. You draw first, no?’
‘But you threatened me.’ Suddenly he caught sight of the silent figure of Crow. ‘You, sir. You must have seen and heard what happened.’
‘I saw you try and go for your pistols before they did,’ replied Crow, honestly.
‘Then you are as bad as they.’
‘Go out back, lady. There’s a kind of shed there. Get your clothes off and wait for us.’
The woman looked at the leader of them as though she had been stricken with deafness. ‘You cannot … cannot mean what you say?’
‘We mean it, lady. You got just five seconds then Garcia and the kid here are going to each put a bullet in your husband’s belly. Five seconds later in your oldest boy and then the other kid. We don’t joke about fucking, lady.’
The Navaho behind the bar stood still, knowing from long experience that in a razored situation like this one the first man to move might be the first one to collect a bullet.
‘I’ll pay you if you let us all go. We only got stuck here because a guide ran off and left us. As soon as we can find someone else to guide us into the mountains then we’ll go. Please leave us alone.’
‘How much?’ asked the leader.
‘Hundred dollars each.’
‘You got that much?’
‘Of course I have. And more.’
Crow sighed again. If ever he’d seen a man eager to get his wife raped and his whole family butchered then this was the one. If he’d just sat down and had a drink and kept quiet, there was a fair chance that the three would have taken their pleasure of the woman a few times and then maybe left them all alone. But he’d just opened his mouth in the biggest way, revealing that he was carrying a sizable sum of money.
‘I’ll pay you two hundred dollars each to let us be,’
‘You’ll pay six hundred dollars, Mister?’ asked Crow quietly.
All of a sudden he had himself a reason to get involved in the action.