At first the old man with the perpetually twitching eyes was just another customer––excepting that he was dirtier and smellier than most. Kate was the only woman free so it was her lot to cater to his wishes. As the madam she only worked these days when business was such that demand exceeded supply. Like tonight, a Saturday. She forced a smile when he lurched into the doorway, enveloped in a cocoon of liquor fumes. She pulled him into the bordello––Kate’s Cathouse as it was nicknamed by the locals––threw her arms round his unwashed neck and rolled her breasts around his chest. He angled his head in an embarrassed fashion and the nervous twitching of his eyes increased.
‘Come on. You’re not shy, are you?’ she purred. ‘You’ve made it this far.
You know what you want, don’t you? Guys only come here for one thing.’
Half an hour later they were lying side by side in a rickety cot in one of
the small rooms. It was obvious he could only manage the once––and that had been an effort on her part to arrange––so Kate was anxious to get him out. She sensed he hadn’t been near a woman for a long time.
‘Well, that’ll be five dollars, honey,’ she said, pulling on her fur-collared silken dressing gown. The usual rate was two dollars but he was seven seas over and a stranger in town.
He beamed drunkenly and pushed twenty dollars into her hand. ‘Take it all, sweetheart.’
‘What do you mean––all of it? Is that all you got?’
‘Yeah,’ he slurred. ‘But you take it.’
Normally she would have left it at that––she didn’t look gift horses in the mouth––but she was interested in this man. ‘You mean you ain’t got no more money at all?’
‘Not a cent in the whole world. But I don’t care.’
‘Don’t care about being broke? That’s just the booze talking.’
‘No it ain’t, ma’am. I’m genuine.’
Lest he had second thoughts and asked for some change, she kept quiet from that point. Better to let him ramble.
He giggled to himself. Eventually he came out with: ‘But in a few days I’ll be one of the richest men in the Territory.’ His voice trailed off under the soporific influence of the alcohol. Even his eye twitch had abated.
She bent close to his ear and shook him gently but firmly. ‘What do you mean?’
His eyes resumed their nervous flickering as he tried to concentrate and he turned his head. ‘Four years ago I did a job. A payroll job. The biggest haul I ever made. And I been in the knock-over business a long time. Nigh on $15,000, I’m talking about.’
She looked him up and down. He didn’t seem capable of the physical effort for that kind of venture. But maybe there was something in it, so she encouraged him to continue. ‘Yes?’
‘But the law got me. Put me in the pen. Four years they gave me.’ Then his mind went off at a tangent. ‘The law’s got funny priorities, ain’t it? Four years for robbery, only five for murder––and hanging for hoss-stealing. I ask you––’
Kate interrupted him. ‘Never mind that! You were telling me about $15,000.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ His face broke into a grin and he patted the side of his nose with a finger. ‘But I fooled ‘em. Buried it afore they caught me.’
‘Where?’ she asked in a tone suddenly as silken as her gown. ‘Where did you bury it?’
His state of drunkenness had swamped all thoughts of caution. ‘Ah, ah.’ He patted his shirt pocket. ‘It’s all on my little map.’
‘Haven’t any lawmen followed you from the pen?’ she asked. ‘They won’t have forgotten a sum of money like that.’
‘Might have done,’ he whispered almost inaudibly. ‘But I been zigzagging all over the place for a week. There’s nobody on my trail now.’
‘Does anybody else know about the cache?’
‘No––’ With that he slumped over onto his chest, breathing heavily.
She tried to turn him over but he was too heavy. She rose quietly––although it would have taken an earthquake to rouse him now––blew out the oil lamp and left the room.
Seth Handley was the man of the house with the job of protecting the girls and ejecting rowdies. According to an unwritten agreement with the town council he was supposed to eject minors––but he only did so when they hadn’t got the money. In his fancy-armbanded shirt he was sitting in a back room smoking when Kate entered.
She related her discovery. ‘Get the map,’ she concluded, ‘so we can see what it’s all about. You’ll have no trouble. He’s out to the world, but a mite too weighty for me. And be quiet about it.’
Minutes later they had the map flattened out on the table. Although the location was sixty-seventy miles to the west the names of the crayoned landmarks were familiar to them. Flat Top Mountain, Bottle Creek––and close to The Devil’s Eyeball, a big X.
‘Couldn’t be any plainer,’ she whispered.
Seth licked his dry lips. ‘What next, boss?’
She looked into his eyes, drilling deep to assess his commitment to her. Eventually she said: ‘Get rid of him.’
‘How?’
‘There are enough pillows in there. Suffocate him.’
Seth hadn’t realized it would take so long to kill a man by suffocation. The ex-jail-bird writhed and twisted five minutes with the pillow held in vice-like fashion over his face. After the movement had stopped, Seth held the pillow in place for another five minutes just to make sure.
They stripped the body of any clues to identification and dropped it miles out of town before first light.
With one of the girls left in charge of the business, the two headed west the following day. Trekking sixty odd miles and digging up desert was man’s work but Kate had given no thought to letting Seth go by himself. Although the breasts which now bounced around under her cotton shirt proclaimed she was a woman, there was little softness to her character. She was calculating, ruthless, untrusting.
They reached Bottle Creek in the cool of the evening and made camp under the weird shape of a Joshua tree. In the morning Kate condescended to the womanly chore of cooking breakfast. After washing in the trickle of the creek Seth mounted the bank and looked out across the desert.
The night mist, which had brought droplets of life-giving moisture to the desert’s inhabitants, was quickly dissipating in the rising sun. As if by magic Flat Top Mountain appeared on the horizon, pinpointing the direction they had to travel.
They pushed into the inhospitability of the desert and reached their destination by late afternoon––the Devil’s Eyeball, a colossal round boulder poised on the outcroppings that marked the foot of the mountain. Too excited to rest they dismounted and Kate pulled out the vital map. The location of the hidden cache was indicated by a three-pointed star, precisely measured in footsteps from three clearly set out points.
It took Seth twenty minutes to pace the three lines out. The old payroll robber had done his work well. The intersection was unambiguous. Kate sat in the shade of a Saguaro cactus while he set to with his spade under the gaze of the Devil’s Eyeball which silently countenanced their villainy. Seth’s fancy shirt, incongruous away from the frills of civilization, absorbed the sweat of the man unused to physical labor. The job was made especially difficult because he had to dig wide to compensate for the sand which had a tendency to trickle back down after he’d shifted it; but after an hour he hit something firm.
Kate heard the faint thud and an avalanche of sand accompanied her as she leapt excitedly into the cavity. Seth cleared away some sand from the object. It was a saddlebag. He heaved it out. It was satisfyingly heavy. He gave a whoop and they scrambled up the slope carrying the burden between them.
At the top Seth wrenched at the straps and flung the lid open. It was jam-packed with bills. He upended the bag to confirm their good fortune and whooped again.
They knelt opposite each other and laughed uncontrollably like a couple of kids who’d broken into a candy store. So jubilant were they, scooping up the bills and letting them flutter to the ground––that neither of them saw the shapes flitting from rock to rock in progression down the mountain.
There was a strange hissing sound and a thud. Kate’s form went rigid and her eyes opened wider than Seth would have thought physically possible, giving her face the appearance of some grotesque night owl. With an ugly-sounding exhalation of breath she slumped lifeless over the fortune.
He saw the arrow in her back. For a split second afterwards he also saw Indians behind her with raised bows. Then two arrows smacked into his chest knocking him backwards. Slowly, on his back, he slithered head first down the sandy slope into the grave of his own digging.
Six feathered figures cautiously approached and stood over their victims. One, clearly a chief by his age and attire, stepped forward and in a language that would have been incomprehensible to Kate or Seth, had they been alive, he said,’ It is their own fault. The whites have been notified of our intention.’
‘What do we do with the bodies, chief?’
‘Take them and deposit them on the other side of the creek. On the white man’s side where they belong.’
A young brave dropped to one knee and ran his fingers over the pile of paper currency. ‘And what do we do with the white man’s money?’
The chief smiled wryly. ‘We spend it, of course, like the white man. It will buy much food and clothes.’
‘The red bastards.’ The man who spoke was the younger of two on horseback beside Bottle Creek. Before them lay a pair of three days’ old corpses––a man and a woman. Flies buzzed around the broken arrow shafts that protruded from the bodies. Bottle Creek marked the agreed boundary of the Indian reservation and, from the markings in the sand, the bodies had clearly been brought across and dumped on the white man’s side.
‘Goddamn it, Pa. Why don’t government troops ride in and wipe ‘em out?’
The older man shook his head. ‘It’s a pity all right. But you gotta learn to see things from others’ point of view, son. The Indians have lost the fight for their lands. They’ve been decimated and herded into a small, infertile tract. The ones that are left are realistic––they’ve accepted the inevitable.’
The two men got down and prepared to hoist the bodies onto the backs of their horses.
‘But to retain some element of dignity for his tribe,’ the old man went on, ‘the Chief has stated that they’ll kill any white folks that trespass. That’s harsh but understandable. It’s been two years since the place was made into an exclusive reservation and the Chief had given us plenty of warning. Their territory, granted to them by whites, starts at Bottle Creek and the authorities tacitly accept the situation. Means the other side of the Creek onward Indian law prevails. If it prescribes execution for trespass––trespass over a line that we’ve agreed to––there’s little our government can do. So it’s entirely up to us locals to keep people out.’
‘But we can’t warn everybody, pa.’
‘No. There’s gonna be some unfortunate casualties. Like these poor schmucks; that’s inevitable, too.’
He looked closer at the corpses. ‘The two must have been strangers to the area.’
‘Not only that, they must have kept themselves to themselves; otherwise any local would have warned them of the situation. And why should they have kept themselves to themselves?’
The old man nodded. ‘And, for the life of me, can’t think what they could want out there anyway. There ain’t nothing but rock and sand.’