The Blood Mesa

CHAPTER ONE

We were double-crossed, plain and simple. If not for what Murph Skinner did, might not any of it would have happened the way it did. But it did, and before we knew it, it was way too late to change things. That's always the way, seems like.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It was a while after we all got together in '17 that the real trouble started. The first few months the Tacker Gang rode, things went just fine. We walked into that bank in Flat Rock as bold as brass and smooth as silk, and nobody inside dared move a muscle when we drew our guns and Roy said in a loud voice, "This is a holdup. Everybody just stay still, and nobody gets hurt."

Seven of us went into that bank. Roy Tacker, he was our leader, and the oldest one of the bunch, around forty-five years old. Tall and a little on the skinny side, with as much gray in his hair and mustache as black, but I'd as soon tackle a wolf with my bare hands than get in a fight with Roy. Then there was his little brother, Jace. Half brother, really, since Roy's mother had died a long time before and Roy's daddy up and married him a younger woman when he was getting on in years, and they had Jace.

But that never affected the way Roy felt about Jace. They were as close as any full-blood brothers you ever saw.

Aaron Gault was from California—Bakersfield, I think. He'd drifted east after some trouble out there, just like I'd drifted west from Texas, and we both wound up in Nevada and fell in with Roy. Aaron was a good-looking fella with blond hair, and the gals all loved him as soon as they saw him. That never gave him a big head, though. He was down-to-earth, and a good man to ride with.

Big Boy was with us too, of course. Wherever Roy was, Big Boy wasn't far off. His real name was Alfred Guinness, but he never cared for it—the Alfred part, I mean. And Big Boy suited him just fine, since he was so tall and wide we used to rib him by saying it'd take a man on horseback a day just to ride around him. He'd been riding with Roy the longest, even longer than Jace.

The last two who went into the bank were the Gunderson brothers, a couple of Swedes who had just joined up with us. This was their first job. Outside, seeing to the horses, was Murph Skinner. Roy never gave that chore to a new man. It was too important. Being able to keep a cool head while you were inside a bank robbing it was pretty important too, but you sure as hell wanted your horses to be there waiting for you when you came out. And Murph was cool-headed, right enough. A treacherous son of a buck, but not prone to panic.

So we all had our guns out, but there were more of us than there were other people in the bank. A manager, a couple of tellers, and an old man standing at one of the tellers' windows were the only folks there, and they were all gawping at us like they'd never seen a gang of outlaws in dusters and Stetsons, with bandannas tied over their faces, before.

And maybe they hadn't, since it was 1917, after all, and most people thought the Wild West was dead and buried. Some of the streets were paved now, even in a little burg like Flat Rock, and there were gaslights on every block. Flivvers were parked along the boardwalks, instead of buckboards.

But there were still hitching posts along the street too, because this was ranching country and a lot of cowboys still rode their horses into town on payday—which was, of course, the very next day, and that was why the bank was full of money today.

"Nobody gets hurt," Roy said again. "All we want is the cash."

The bank manager was a dried-up little prune of a man, and he puffed up like a toad and said, "Well, you can't have it, you hooligan."

Roy pointed his gun at the man's face and said, "You best think about that for a minute, mister, but no longer, 'cause we ain't got the time."

The bank manager swallowed hard as he stared down the barrel of that Colt. Then he looked over at the tellers. "Give 'em what they want."

"Figured you'd see the light of reason," Roy said.

Big Boy and the Gunderson brothers holstered their guns and took canvas bags from under their dusters. They went behind the counter and started emptying the cash drawers in the tellers' cages. While they were doing that, Roy said to the manager, "You'd best open the vault now."

"I . . . I can't. The key's not here—"

"Sure it is. I never saw a banker yet who couldn't get into the vault whenever he wanted. I'll bet you like to go in there and just look at all those greenbacks. Makes you feel all nice and tingly inside, don't it?"

The bank manager heaved a disgusted sigh. Roy had him pegged, all right. "The key's in my pocket," he said. "I'll get it out."

"You do that."

The fella reached into his coat and brought out a gun instead of the key to the vault. I don't know what he thought he was going to do with one piddling little pocket pistol against four Colts, but he never got a chance to do much of anything. As always, Roy had told us that there wouldn't be any shooting unless it was to save our lives, so he jumped at that bank manager and cracked the barrel of his gun across the gent's scrawny little wrist. The manager yelped and dropped his pistol before he could even come close to getting a shot off. Roy whacked the little gun with the side of his boot and sent it sliding across the floor, well out of reach.

"That was a damned stupid thing to do," he told the bank manager, who was bent over holding his broken wrist and whimpering. Roy reached into the man's coat, found the vault key, tossed it to Jace. Jace opened the vault door, and Big Boy went in there with his sack, leaving the Gundersons to finish cleaning out the tellers' cash.

Big Boy came out a few minutes later and held the sack up to let us know he was finished. Nobody ever talked while we were pulling a job except Roy. That was the rule, and we followed it as closely as possible.

That day, though, Aaron had to break it, because he had backed off to keep an eye out through the bank's front window, and he said sharp-like, "Men coming."

Roy stepped back so he could look out the window too. "They're still a block away. Let's go."

Those of us still holding guns holstered them, and Aaron opened the door. Roy looked at the bank manager and the other three men in the room and said, "Just remember, we could have killed all of you." Then he turned and went out onto the boardwalk, not hurrying. The rest of us followed him.

There was a time, I suppose, when the sight of a bunch of masked men in dusters coming out of a bank would have instantly alerted the folks in a town to what was going on. But like I said, nobody expected such a thing to happen in this modern day and age, so the men down the street just stopped and stared at us in confusion for a few seconds as we mounted up. Then one of them yelled, "Hey! What the hell!"

The bank manager popped his head out the door and squalled, "Stop them! They robbed the bank!"

Roy palmed his Colt out slick as you please and put a bullet in the doorjamb about a foot above the manager's head. The fella screamed like he'd been shot and vanished back inside the building. More yelling came from down the street, but we didn't pay any attention to it. We just put the spurs to our horses and rode like blazes out of there.

Most of the side streets weren't paved. Roy swung into the first one he came to, and almost before you knew it, we were out of town. The street we were on petered out into a broad, open fiat covered with short-grown sage. On the far side of the flat was a line of green trees that marked the course of a creek, and beyond the creek the terrain started to slope up toward the Prophet Mountains, which rose gray and purple against a blue sky. As I rode along with the others, I pulled down my bandanna so that the wind could blow in my face.

God, what a beautiful day!

Where we went, there weren't any roads. Sooner or later the people back in Flat Rock probably came up with the idea of getting together a posse on horseback, but by then it was too late, of course. They were used to turning to the law for help whenever there was trouble, instead of handling things themselves. Flat Rock had a deputy sheriff stationed there, but he was the sort who didn't like to go anywhere that he couldn't get to by automobile. Roy had checked into that before we decided to hit the bank. The deputy likely ran around for a while like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to figure out how he could use his car to chase us into the mountains, and by the time he realized he couldn't, we were long gone. We never saw any sign of pursuit at all.

We took a little over sixteen thousand dollars out of that bank. Two thousand a man, share and share alike. Everybody was happy.

Well, nearly everybody.

We made camp that night way up in the high lonesome of the Prophets, not lighting a fire just in case somebody was looking for us, and as we sat around gnawing on jerky and biscuits and washing it down with whiskey, Roy said to Big Boy, "How much did you leave in the vault this time?"

"Don't know for sure," Big Boy said. "Four or five thousand, I reckon."

Roy nodded. "Good. That ought to be enough to tide folks over."

Murph spoke up, saying, "I still don't see why the hell we have to leave anything. We were robbing the damn bank, f' Christ's sake. You ought to've just cleaned it out."

"If we had, then every cowhand around Flat Rock would've had to do without a whole month's pay," Roy said. "How much credit you think the bartenders and the whores would extend to them under those circumstances? This way, when we leave a little cash behind, at least they still get a couple of bucks to jingle in their pockets. It ain't much, but it's better'n nothin'."

Murph shook his head. "Still seems mighty wasteful to me. What do I care whether or not some cow nurse can buy a drink or a whore?"

"You were never a cowboy," Roy said. "I was. I know what it's like."

And he did. Roy had ridden for several spreads in Colorado and Wyoming before heading out to Nevada to become a badman. He and Big Boy had punched cows together on one of those ranches, which was how they met. Roy didn't talk about himself much, but I'd heard some yarns about those days from Big Boy. It seemed that Roy had found himself with an almighty powerful crush on the daughter of one of the men he'd worked for, and she felt the same way about him, but that rancher hadn't been about to let his little girl get hitched to some no-account line rider. So Roy took off, and Big Boy, being Big Boy, went with him.

Roy had always had a bit of a reckless streak, and if he'd been able to do anything in the world that he wanted to, he'd have ridden with the Wild Bunch. But by that time, Butch Cassidy and Harry Longbaugh, the one they called the Sundance Kid, had already sailed off to South America with Etta Place, and the Wild Bunch was no more. Roy and Big Boy rustled a few cattle and robbed a store now and then, but they did some honest work too, prospecting and the like. I figure that in the back of his mind, Roy always thought that he'd hit it big somehow and then go back to Wyoming for that girl, but the years went by and he never did. His folks died back in Kansas, taken by a fever, and Roy and Big Boy went to see about Jace, who rode back to Nevada with them, not much more'n a kid, but with the same wild streak that Roy had. They must have gotten it from their old man.

I don't know who first came up with the idea to rob a bank. I've got a feeling it was Jace, after he'd been listening to Roy talk about Butch and Sundance and the old days, the days that Roy had been born just a little too late for. Big Boy told me that Roy pondered over the idea for a long time before they finally did it, and it was during that time that Roy came up with the rules he had for bank robbing, such as how nobody talked but him (so that if there was ever any question about it, the law couldn't prove that any of the rest of us had even been there), and how there'd be no shooting unless we just had to, and how we'd always leave a little money instead of cleaning out the vault entirely. Some might call him good-hearted for thinking up those rules, despite his being a bank robber, but that wasn't really why he came up with them. He just didn't think it was fair to do things any other way.

Aaron and I met up with Roy and Jace and Big Boy about a week apart, as it happened. Each of us had pulled a few small jobs on our way to Nevada, but we weren't what you'd call hardened criminals. We were just young fellas down on our luck, and to tell you the truth, neither of us saw much wrong with lifting a few bucks from a store owner now and then. We were crooks, right enough, and I know now we were in the wrong, but it didn't seem that way at the time. Everybody carries their past around with them, and there's not a blasted thing anybody can do to change it.

Other gents came and went, riding with Roy and the rest of us for a while and then going their own way. Murph Skinner had been with us for a few months when we robbed the bank in Flat Rock, and like I said, the Gunderson brothers were new. The Swedes never said much, but Murph complained all the time, and I was already getting tired of it. So was Roy.

"That's enough," he said when Murph started in again a few minutes later about leaving some of the cash behind in the vault. "You know the way we do things, Murph. If you don't like 'em, you're free to leave. I never forced a man to ride with me, and I don't intend to start now."

"Never said I wanted to leave," Murph groused. "I just don't see any point in losin' out on an extra five hundred bucks a man."

Big Boy shoved a bottle in Murph's hand. "Here. Have a drink and quit your bitchin', why don't you? I don't know about you, but I feel downright rich."

So did I. I couldn't remember ever having two thousand dollars in my pocket before. It seemed like just about all the money in the world.

Wanting to keep peace in the gang, Roy came up with an idea that I figured was aimed mainly at making Murph happy. He leaned forward, and I saw him grin in the moonlight. "Why don't we pay a visit to Harrigan's place?" he suggested.

That brought a grunt from Murph, but when he spoke he sounded happily surprised. "That's a damned good idea," he said.

One of the Gundersons asked, "Vat is this Harrigan's?"

Big Boy laughed and gave him a friendly little slap on the shoulder, which nearly knocked the big Swede off the log where he was sitting. "You'll see," Big Boy said, "and you'll be mighty pleased when you do."