The Last Hard Men Read Free Page A

Didn’t glimpse them. They all sat in the thick dark and trembled with cold until the train started up with banging couplings and slowly picked up steam. Provo waited until he couldn’t stand the cold any longer, and then he hummed the Owl Song to himself and waited another fifteen or twenty minutes, and when Menendez joined the chorus of groans in the dark Provo smiled, because no one could see his face, and said under his breath, “Not half bad for a fifty-two-year-old half-breed,” and got up and shoved the sliding door open and said, “You bastards start heaving that ice out of here before we all turn blue.”
    The train started to slow down for Gila Bend about six in the morning. When it was half a mile out, Provo slid the right-hand door open and nodded to Menendez. Menendez jumped—landed running like a cat. Provo poked the rest of them out, fast, with his riot gun and went out last, after pulling the door as nearly shut as he could and still squeeze through. Maybe they wouldn’t find the warm icebox car until Tucson or maybe even El Paso.
    He hit easy on both feet, legs bent against the fall, went over on his shoulder and rolled. He didn’t lose his grip on the riot gun. His shoulder was a little banged up and he’d bruised one heel, but that was all right. He bellied down in the brush and watched the long train clatter past. The caboose went by and he waited until it was into town beyond the outskirt laborers’ shacks; then he spoke softly and gathered them around him and said, “We make for the nearest shack up yonder. We get inside it and we wait for dark. Move.”
    He let Menendez lead the way. He waited until they had all crawled past before he fell in at the back of the line. Broken chains rattled on their ankles. Provo hung back a little: better not to let any of them see he was favoring his right foot from, the jump. They kept to a line of approach that interposed the cluster of shacks between them and the town. Nobody was likely to see them, but Menendez moved bent double and the rest followed suit, dodging from greasewood bush to paloverde. Clump to clump.
    Menendez stood up against the corner of the weather-blasted gray shack, eeled around the corner and disappeared. Provo tensed, squinting into the morning sun. But after a minute the back shutter flapped open and Menendez waved them in.
    Provo came in last and pulled the warped door shut behind him. The nine men made a dense crowd in the little shack; it was barely big enough to accommodate two occupants. He could smell the sweat already, and the day hadn’t started to warm up yet. Under the tarpaper roof it would get up to a hundred and twenty in here by mid-afternoon.
    Young Mike Shelby said, “Maybe we ought to split up some. Take a couple more cabins, three men in each one.”
    “We stick together,” Provo said.
    “Why?”
    “I want you all where I can see you.”
    Lee Roy Tucker said, ‘“for how long?”
    “Until we get rid of these irons and get ourselves into clothes everybody won’t recognize.”
    “Sounds reasonable,” Mike Shelby said, and sat down on one of the two cots. There was a rickety table with a lamp and washbasin. Shelves nailed on one wall—a few boxes and cans of food. George Weed, blackskinned and full of disgust, slid his back down the wall in the front corner until he was sitting with his shoulders wedged in. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got a deck of cawds.”
    Provo studied them covertly, one at a time, measuring them. He took his time.
    Menendez: little, fox-quick, cruel, practical. Mike Shelby: young, level-headed, good-humored, a friendly face and a shaggy head of chestnut hair and big tough hands. Lee Roy Tucker: slat-narrow, buck-toothed, a complainer, but Lee Roy had handled blasting caps, working in a quarry, and knew explosives. Portugee Shiraz: part Portuguese, part Negro, eighteen years into a thirty-year noncommutable sentence for having knifed his wife and two children, one of whom had