Elmore Leonard - Hombre

I know he shook his head. He said, “When you learn to shoot better.” He raised his hand from his side and there was blood on it.

“You didn’t do so good.”

“I tried to do better,” Russell said. “I think you moved.”

“Moved,” the Mexican said. “How do you like them, tied to a tree?”

“On a horse,” Russell said. “Like your friend.”

The Mexican grinned. “You like to pull the trigger.”

“I can do it again for you,” Russell said.

“You could,” the Mexican agreed, staring up at Russell, studying him and judging the distance between them. “I have to talk to this other one first. This Favor.”

He pronounced it Fa-vor, like it was a Spanish word.

“He can hear you,” Russell said.

“If he can’t you tell him,” the Mexican said. “This. He gives us the money…and some of the water. We give him his wife and everyone goes home. Ask him how he likes that.”

“You’re out of water?”

“Almost.” The Mexican grinned. “That Early. He put whisky in his canteen. He thought it would be easy.”

Russell shook his head. “It will get even harder.”

“Not if this Fa vor gives us the money.”

“He doesn’t have it,” Russell said.

The Mexican grinned again. “Tell me he hid it.”

Russell shook his head. “He gave it to me.”

The Mexican nodded, looking up at Russell like he was admiring him. “So now you steal the money.” He shrugged his shoulders. “All right, we trade with you then.”

“She’s not my woman,” Russell said.

“We give her to you.”

“What else?”

“Your life. How’s that?”

“Tell Braden how things are now,” Russell said.

“What’s the difference who has the money?” the Mexican said. “You give it to us or we shoot that woman.”

“All right,” Russell said. “You shoot her.”

The Mexican kept staring at him. “What about the rest of them? What do they say?”

“They say what they want,” Russell said. “I say what I want. Do you see that now?”

He didn’t see it. He didn’t know what to think, so he just stood there, one hand on his side, the other holding that truce flag.

“Tell Braden how it is,” Russell said. “Tell him to think some more.”

“He’ll say the same thing.”

“Tell him anyway.”

The Mexican hadn’t taken his eyes off Russell for a second, sizing him up all the while they talked. “Maybe you and I finish something first,” he said. “Maybe you come down here a little.”

“I’m thinking,” Russell said, “whether to kill you right now or wait till you turn around.”

Do you know what the Mexican did? He smiled. Not that unbelieving kind of smile, but like he appreciated Russell or enjoyed him. It was about the strangest thing I ever saw. He smiled and said, “If I didn’t believe you, I think you would do it. All right, I talk to Braden.”

He turned and walked away dragging the truce flag, not with his shoulders hunched like he expected something, but as calmly as he had walked up.

Russell waited until the Mexican was almost down to the bottom. He got his blanket roll and the saddlebags, just glanced at us, and moved off. He didn’t tell us what he had planned. If we wanted to follow him that was up to us.

We didn’t expect this. We thought he would talk to them again. But who could be sure what Russell was thinking? We knew we couldn’t sit in that draw forever. Sooner or later Braden would try to get at us. But was going on right then the best way? Russell must have thought so, though he wasn’t telling us why.

We followed him. What choice had we?

That was a funny thing. I felt closer to Dr. Favor than I did to Russell. Dr. Favor might have stolen government money and left his wife to her own fate; but it was something you had to think about before you realized it. He never admitted either right out.

Russell was something else. He had said to the Mexican, not caring who heard him, “All right, shoot her.” Like she was nothing to him, so what did he care? Do you see the difference? Russell was so cold and calm about it, it scared you to death. Also, if he didn’t care about her, what did he care about us?

Now it was almost like the whole thing was between Braden and Russell and we were in it only because there wasn’t any place else to go. Like it was all Russell’s fault and he had dragged us into it.

I would say we walked three miles from the time we left that draw until we stopped again, though we did not gain more than one mile in actual distance. We kept pretty much to ridges, high up as possible in the cover of pinyon pine and scrub, and when we stopped it was because flat country opened up at the end of the canyon not far ahead of us. It was a good two or three miles across the openness before the hills took up again.

Russell didn’t say it and nobody asked, but we knew he planned to wait for dark to cross that open part. It was no place to be seen in daylight by three men riding horses. (We did not know then whether Russell had killed one or two of their horses.)

We had climbed a pretty steep grade to reach this place we camped at (high up the way Apaches always camp, whether there is water or not) with thick pinyon on three sides of us and the slope, with some cliffrose and scrub, on the open side.

Russell had made it hard for them to follow. If they came directly on our sign, they would have to come up the open slope. If they came any other way, it would take them hours to work around, and then they would be taking a chance of not finding us. So, we figured, they would come directly when they came. All right, but to come up that open slope they would have to wait until dark. Which was what we would be waiting for to slip off through the trees.

Do you see how Russell figured to stay one jump ahead of them? I estimated we would reach the old San Pete mine some time during the night; Delgado’s if we were lucky, some time during the next afternoon or evening. Then home. It didn’t seem far when you looked ahead. The trouble was you had to keep looking back.

After the little sleep we had had it was good to lie down again. Everybody picked out a spot. We couldn’t make a fire so we ate some more of the biscuits, which were pretty hard by now, and the dried strip meat which never was very good.

We did not drink any water though. John Russell had said we would have to wait until night. It was midafternoon now. Imagine not having had a drink since that morning. The salty beef didn’t help your thirst any either. But what could we do?

I kept picturing myself sitting on a shady porch with a big pitcher of ice water, sitting there in a clean shirt having just shaved and taken a bath. Boy!

Mendez looked ten years older, his eyes sunken in and his face covered with beard stubble. Dr. Favor’s big, broad face, framed by that half-moon-shaped beard, was sweaty looking. The McLaren girl and John Russell were the only ones who didn’t look so bad, I mean not as dirty or sweaty as the rest of us. With her hair too short to muss and her dark skin, she looked like she was taking it all right. John Russell was dusty, of course, but had no beard to make his face look dirty. You could tell he had pulled out the stubbles Indian-fashion when he first started to get a beard, years ago, and now he’d never have one.

Russell stayed mostly by the open side, lying down but propped on his elbows and looking down the way we had come up. I guess he was resting and doing his thinking now, taking time to see things clearly. Whatever he saw in his mind, it got him up on his feet after a while.

He brought the saddlebags over to me and dropped them. He didn’t say guard them, but that’s what his look meant. All he said was he would go have a look at things and he left, taking only the Spencer carbine; no water or anything else. He didn’t go straight down the slope but headed off through the pinyon, I guess to keep high up as he scouted the ground we had covered from the draw.