The Desperado by Clifton Adams Read Free Book Online

it made me burn. It was in that offhand sort of
way—the way you'd tell a kid to go on to bed, you had important things
to do. Maybe he thought my eighteen years made me a kid. Maybe, I
thought, Ray Novak could go to hell.
    But I didn't try to make anything of it. Beginning tonight, I didn't
intend to ride with him any more. I spread my saddle blanket and sat
leaning back against my saddle. I wasn't particularly sleepy, and,
anyway, I wanted to see what Ray would do when he finally figured out
who the stranger was.
    Maybe fifteen minutes went by without either of us making a sound.
Then, suddenly, Ray Novak made a little grunting noise and started to
shove himself away from the cottonwood.
    “All right,” I said.
    “All right what?”
    “Who is our gun-loving friend? You've been working on it ever since
he first stuck that carbine in our faces.”
    That took the wind out of him. “How did you know that?”
    I shrugged. What difference did it make?
    “Well, you were right,” Ray said softly. “I should have figured it
out a long time ago, but the beard and broken nose were things the
government dodger on him didn't show. But I pegged him finally. He's
Garret. Pappy Garret.”
    I didn't believe it at first. Pappy Garret was one of those men that
you hear about all your life, but never see. The stories they told
about him were almost as wild as the ones about Pecos Bill, or if you
live in the north country, Paul Bunyan. He was wanted by both North and
South during the war for leading plundering guerilla bands into the
Kansas Free State. There wasn't a state in the Southwest that hadn't
put a price on his head. Pappy Garret had the distinction of being
probably the only thing in the world that the North and South saw alike
on. They were out to get him.
    Twenty notches was Pappy's record, as well as records of men like
that could be kept. Some put the number of men who had gone down under
Pappy's guns as high as thirty. But most claimed it was twenty, more or
less, with some few claiming that he was overrated as a bad man and had
never killed more than fifteen men in his life. No one, but Pappy
Garret, would know for sure about that. And maybe Pappy didn't even
know. The story was that he had a hideout up in the Indian Territory
where he lived like a king by robbing the westbound wagon trains. Some
people said that he lived with an Indian princess, the youngest
daughter of the head chief of the Cheyennes. Others had it that he had
been killed during the war fighting for the Confederacy—or the Union,
depending on who was telling the story—and the real killer was Pappy
Garret's son, a child of his by the Indian princess.
    But most people didn't put much stock in that story. They figured
that such a child couldn't be more than five or six years old, and a
boy that age wasn't apt to be doing much killing. Not even a son of
Pappy Garret's.
    Still others had it that Pappy had gone to South America shortly
after the war and was settled down there on a big plantation as
respectable as you please, and all the killings that were laid to him
were done by men who just happened to look a little like Pappy. Many
such stories sprang up from time to time. Nobody really believed them,
but it gave them something to talk about. The peace officers probably
had the best idea of what Pappy was really like. He had killed two
marshals on the Mexican border, and one up in the Panhandle country not
long before, when they tried to arrest him. They saw Pappy Garret as a
killer, without any fancy trimmings.
    It was hard to believe that the lank, hungry-looking man not twenty
yards away could be Pappy Garret, but Ray Novak didn't make mistakes
about things like that. I knew one thing, however: Pappy hadn't been
living like a king up in the Indian Territory, or anywhere else. He
looked like he hadn't had a full belly since he was a child. Lying
there with his eyes closed, with his head on the saddle,