Chapter Six

Dawn was breaking off in the hazy east when Trent met the stage hustling along through, upcountry toward Daggett. He left the road to avoid all that ensuing dust and he waved indifferently at the whip and the guard, who had waved to him first.

Not often did people envy passengers on those pitching vehicles trying to sleep and avoid being bruised by the everlasting plunging and swaying, but this morning Trent envied them. He was badly in need of sleep. Not rest, he’d gotten that back at Daggett, sitting and waiting, but sleep he hadn’t gotten and now, seven miles southward, Chalmers’s bitter coffee was wearing off.

He got back on the road and went along, his steeldust briskly walking through this good coolness, his thoughts bridging the years back as far as Trent’s first manhunt, then jumping ahead into the elusive but probable future.

It was odd to be riding along with his thoughts drifting beyond control. He had been thinking of that first chase, wondering if that outlaw was still imprisoned or not, and the next moment he was remembering Troy Warfield as he’d been the last time Trent had seen him, remembering Warfield’s crime and all the vivid impressions that killing had made upon him. Then his thoughts jumped far ahead into the predictable future and made bold pictures that could, or could not, be true. Meanwhile, the endless desert firmed up out of its nighttime shroud and turned deceptively mild and benevolent and inviting with its dawn freshness and its soft-lighted delicately molded landscape.

The stage road ran as straight as a mottled old snake. The next town was Fulton, thirty-two miles south of Daggett in the heartland of all this empty waste. Chalmers had said the only thing that kept Fulton alive was the stage line and the freighters. There was a good spring at Fulton. It was the halfway mark. Water sold for 10¢ a gallon but everything else was priced competitively.

Chalmers had had a few dry comments to make concerning Lem Bricker, who ran the town of Fulton, and one of them was that Bricker had a lucrative sideline that the strategic location of his town made possible. Even outlaws had to have water. Bricker never denied them, but there was a special rate for outlaws in Fulton—$2 a gallon.

Chalmers had said for lawmen the price remained a dime. He’d told Trent that Lem Bricker once said to him that his scheme was foolproof—if he was ever called to account, he could prove that he’d invariably helped the side of law and order by selling his water to lawmen for 10¢, while selling it for $2 to outlaws. What he’d neglected to tell Chalmers—but then he hadn’t had to be this explicit—was that he knew very well lawmen couldn’t afford more than 10¢ but that outlaws, fleeing with their plunder and running for their lives, not only could pay more, but would pay more.

Well, Trent thought as he fought sleep, only a fool crossed bridges before he came to them. The important thing, whether Chalmers had agreed with him or not, was that he had to arrive in Fulton before Warfield pulled out, and Warfield would hit Fulton. He had to. It was as simple as ABC. A man could not cross this desert without water.

But physical exhaustion does things to a man. Trent began to resent the quick, alert gait of his animal. He resented the growing warmth as the sun lifted above its far-away barrier. He resented the grueling ride ahead, but most of all he resented Troy Warfield.

To kill a man is not a difficult thing, providing one does not afterward make the everlasting mistake of going up to look into the face of death. Everlasting, because then a man never forgets, and the face of death is a curse that stays and stays, coming back to him in odd moments. Trent had his share of memories because when you kill a man over the width of a barroom, you can’t avoid seeing his astonishment as life winks out. And Trent was human with all the frailties of humankind.

He hadn’t wanted to kill that yellow-haired cowboy back in Daggett. There had been others like that one he’d avoided killing, also. But now he rode along with all the crushing weight of his own discomfort, his own suffering and deprivation, directly attributable to one man, and now he wished he could kill Warfield and get this over with. He wanted to kill him.

The sun climbed higher, turned a faded color, changed gradually from its earlier benignity to become a leering foe. Its scorch built up steadily making the air smell of brimstone and taste of old iron. It drove lizards and snakes and huge hairy desert spiders—tarantulas—into the panting shadeless shadows at the base of paloverdes, Joshua trees, and baking boulders.

Trent had come half the distance. Sweat made his shirt limp. He dozed off and jerked awake, doing this mile after mile. The burden of existence was almost more than a man could bear in this midday summertime desert if he was fully attuned to it, but Trent wasn’t; he was traveling on guts alone. But it takes a lot more. The desert isn’t a place where one ever finds excuses or compassion or pity. The desert is a world of death. It is steeped in an endless, depthless silence. In midday summertime nothing moves, nothing changes, there is neither perspective nor limit. The summertime desert is infinity and to brace into its overwhelming immensity unprepared is fatal.

A thousand years of mankind had made only one scratch on all that changlessness—a road. And every winter the wild winds covered those roads, obliterating in a week what mankind had taken laborious generations to create. The desert never compromised.

Trent was a speck moving with painful slowness down through all that. He had his canteen but frequent injections even of the sole substance in this arid place that could prolong life were not enough. Unless a man was physically prepared in all ways, water, like the sun itself, produced not the necessary sustaining power, it produced instead illness. That’s what Trent’s canteen was doing to him.

He was two-thirds of the way along, the sun had begun to assume that pinkish glow from afternoon’s dust-laden, metallic-scented atmosphere, when his stomach rejected water. He dismounted, leaned upon his horse, and gasped until the inner retching was over. Then he walked on for a mile beside the horse. That helped somewhat because he walked slowly. But in a clear moment, as he paused to look from slitted eyes out through the dancing distances, it dawned on Trent that he wasn’t going to make it.

He didn’t argue with this sudden, and solid, realization. He couldn’t accept it because, like all men, Trent had a secret belief in his own immortality, his own indestructability, but he also, in a very human and contradictory manner, knew that he could die, that someday he would die. But the trouble with these conflicting thoughts was simply that Trent, like most men of strength and imagination, just would not believe that this was the place.

A man should die with guns blazing, with great ideals at stake, with his courage and his convictions vindicated. He should die with glory and honor—not out in the middle of a god-forsaken desert like a rat dies or a lizard or a snake, not by simply falling down in the endless silence and yielding up his soul for nothing, so that, when he’s afterward found, he’s shriveled from the sun like a piece of discarded leather, burned black, and with his swollen tongue protruding making him appear in death both ridiculous and unheroic.

It was the indignation, the scorn for this kind of a death that kept Trent going. He swore at the desert, at the sun, at Troy Warfield. Even at the steeldust horse, blaming all of them for the conspiracy that had gotten him out here like this. He marched along with anger and nothing else sustaining him until three horsemen, sitting motionlessly across the roadway, gravely watching his approach, brought him to a final halt.

He peered at those burned-black desert riders. They stared back. The sun was falling away toward the west. There were thin shadows creeping out here and there across the desert’s floor. One of those men was raw-boned and sparse. He had eyes as cold as the eyes of a snake; they seemed as lidless, too, because this man never blinked. On either side of him were men with more weakness, more moral frailty in their faces. But that one in the middle showed iron and unrelenting resolve.

This one finally said to Trent: “Mister, you ain’t going to last long, the shape you’re in. How come you didn’t wait until sundown? What’s your hurry, mister?”

Trent flagged outward with a stiff arm. “Get off the road,” he snarled, his voice so hoarse it was barely audible. “Get out of my way.” He added a fighting epithet to that, but those three horsemen sat up there, gazing downward, untouched.

“Where’s his hat?” one of them quietly asked. “Look at his danged eyes … burned nearly closed and puffed up like he was bee-stung.”

The raw-boned, leathery man in the center said nothing, but his companion to the right said: “Hell, Lem, I got my doubts about botherin’ with this one. He’s near done for.”

But Lem knew better. “He’ll make it all right. He’ll be blind as a damned bat for a day or two, but this one’s tough. He’s mean and he’s tough. You don’t see these angry ones go down on their whimpering hands and knees. Go put him on his horse, tie him up there, and let’s get back.”

Both the other men swung down, and, as they approached Trent, one of them said over his shoulder: “I’ll look through his gatherin’s.” And he did that with Trent making futile, blind swings as those two manhandled him, rummaged his pockets, appropriated his wallet, his papers. Then one of them swore a strong oath and stepped away holding a bright-shining little German-steel badge on his palm.

“U.S. marshal, Lem. Look here.”

Lem leaned from the saddle, took the small badge, and gazed at it for a long time. He eventually dropped it into a pocket, saying brusquely: “Hurry up, will you? We got to be back in town before evening.”

They got Trent into the saddle but he still writhed and twisted, making the matter of tying him up there almost impossible, so, as Lem led the steeldust by the reins, the other two rode close on either side of Trent, balancing him up there.

After a while Trent’s resistance dwindled. He sank into a kind of sick stupor. From there, all the way into the desert town of Fulton, he was like a sack of meal. They had to push him upright and keep a light hold of him, but he offered no further resistance. Finally, after something like ten or eleven hours, Trent’s will had atrophied, leaving him like a vegetable—alive and functioning, but helpless and senseless.

They were within sight of the dusk-shadowed town when Lem said: “They don’t send U.S. marshals after common horse thieves, boys.”

One of the others agreed with this. “I never before seen one down here. I’ve seen deputy U.S. lawmen, sure, but not full marshals.”

“Does that put you in mind of anything?” Lem asked.

The other man shrugged. “Should it?” he countered.

Lem snorted. “Yes, it should!” he exclaimed. “If you had the brains of a goat. A full-fledged U.S. marshal’s after someone big … someone like maybe a bank robber or a big-time, stage hold-up man. Someone who’s done something besides shoot a gambler or steal a horse. Now do you get it?”

The other rider’s eyes brightened. “Sure,” he retorted. “I get it. Somewhere there’s a big-time outlaw and this here U.S. lawman’s trailin’ him. And that big-time outlaw’s probably got a pair of saddlebags bulgin’ with banknotes or raw gold … enough to patch hell a mile.”

Lem smiled, swung to gaze approvingly backward, and didn’t say any more because they were nearing the environs of town. He led them around to the east so that they didn’t pass down Fulton’s main roadway. He obviously wished to keep Trent a secret from the rest of the town. He took them to a meandering, filthy back alley and down it to a rickety, warped horse shed and got stiffly down in front of this building, walked back to steady Trent until his companions also got down, then he walked on into the old shed.

“Fetch him in here for now,” he commanded. “After full dark we’ll take him into the saloon’s back room.” He stepped aside as his grunting companions strained on past. Trent’s feet dragged lifelessly, making two uneven squiggles in the dust.

They put him in a corner upon an ancient manure pile and Lem stepped up to gaze at Trent. “Sure a mess,” he said. “All right, you boys stay with him. Wet some rags and put ’em over his face. Don’t give him anything to drink. That’s half his trouble now … too much water under an overheated hide. And keep him quiet. This one’s ours. No one else is going to know. You understand?”

The two sweating cowboys nodded, watching Trent. One of them said: “When he comes around, he’ll tell us all about that.”

The other unkempt man tucked in his shirt tail and spat aside before he said: “Yeah? And supposin’ this feller he’s after’s already rid on past? It could happen, if he started out say late yesterday afternoon. And that feller’ll be smart, too. They don’t put no U.S. marshals on the trail of simpletons.”

“Then,” said Lem in his usual, cold, hard, and thoughtful way of speaking, “we’ll go after him.” He looked at the other two. “We’ll get him, don’t you worry about that. We’ll find him and I don’t give a damn where he goes … we’ll get him.” Lem pointed at Trent. “But this one’s the key, so you fellers baby him like he was your damned brother. I’ll be inside … if he says anything you come tell me. Otherwise, stay with him and keep him cool until night, then we’ll give him better quarters inside.” Lem chuckled as he turned away. “This one’s worth a fortune to us, I figure, so he deserves the best we got.”

Lem stopped in the doorway, gazed outward for a moment, then said over his shoulder: “Get those damned horses out of the sun. ’Specially his horse.” He walked on out of the shed, heading over toward the rear of a building no more than thirty feet off on his left. He entered there, looking perfectly blank and expressionless everywhere except in the eyes; there, he looked mightily pleased about something.