Three horsemen galloped around the curve in the road that half circled the house and the corral and the stables at Emerson Mead’s ranch. One of them swung his hat and shouted a loud “Whoo-oo-oo-ee!” But there was no response from the house. Doors and windows were closed and not a soul appeared in sight.
“That’s queer,” said Tuttle. “What’s become of Billy Haney?”
“Boys, there’s a man lyin’ beside the door!” exclaimed Mead. “Somebody is either drunk or dead!”
They swung off their horses and rushed to the prostrate figure, which lay almost on its face.
“Great God, boys, it’s Wellesly, and he’s dying of thirst!” cried Mead. “Nick, bring water, lots of it, cold from the pump! Here, Tom, help me put him in the hammock.”
They laid him in the hammock, in the cool shade of the cottonwoods, where he had slept, to his own undoing, three days before. They moistened his black, protruding tongue and let a few drops of the cool liquid trickle down his parched throat. They poured water carefully over his head and neck andon his wrists, and then drenched him from head to foot with pailful after pailful of the fresh, cold water.
The patient moaned and moved his head. “He’s alive, boys. We’ll save him yet,” said Mead.
Through dim, half-awakened consciousness Wellesly heard the swish of the water as it poured over his body, and felt the cool streams trickling down his face. He gasped and his dry, cracked lips drew back wolfishly from his teeth as he threw up his hands and seized the cup from which Mead was carefully pouring the water over his head. Mead’s fingers closed tightly over the handle and his arm stiffened to iron.
“Softly, there, softly,” he said in a gentle voice. “I can’t let you drink any now, because it would kill you. You shall have some soon.”
With a choking yell Wellesly half raised himself and clung to the cup with both hands, trying to force it to his mouth. Nick Ellhorn sprang to his side and took hold of his shoulders.
“Sure, now, Mr. Wellesly,” he began, and the Irish accent was rich and strong in his coaxing, wheedling tones, “sure, now, you don’t want to be killin’ yourself, after you’ve held out this far. Just you-all do as we say and we’ll bring you through all right. Sure, and you shall be after havin’ all the water you want, but you must take it on the outside first. Ah, now, but isn’t this shower bath nice!”
While he talked he gently forced the patient backand as Wellesly lay down again Mead poured a little water into his mouth.
“If he goes luny now that’s the end of him,” said Emerson in a repressed, tense voice. “We must not let him get excited. Nick, you’d better stand there and keep him quiet, if you can, and pour water over his face and head and put a little in his mouth sometimes.”
Tuttle carried the water for their use, two pailsful at a time, and Mead kept his body well drenched. Ellhorn stooped over the hammock and continued his coaxing talk, drawling one sentence after another with slurred r’s and soft southern accents. With one hand he patted the patient’s head and shoulders and with the other he dashed water over his face or trickled it, drop by drop, into his mouth. After a while they gave the half-conscious man some weak tea, took off his wet clothes and put him to bed. There they looked after him carefully, giving him frequent but small instalments of food in liquid form and an occasional swallow of water. After some hours they decided he was out of danger and would recover without an illness. Then Nick Ellhorn mounted a horse and rode away. When he returned he carried a burden tied in a gunny sack, which he suspended from the limb of a tree and carefully drenched with water many times before he retired. The next day he anxiously watched the bag, keeping it constantly wet and shaded and free to the breezes. And in the afternoon,with a smile curling his mustache almost up to his eyes, he spread before Wellesly a big, red watermelon, cold and luscious. With delight in his face and chuckling in his voice he watched the sick man eat as much as Emerson would allow him to have, and then begged that he be given more. To get the melon Ellhorn had ridden fifteen miles and back, to the nearest ranch beyond Mead’s.
“I never saw a man look happier that you-all do right now,” he said as he watched Wellesly.
“And you never saw anybody who felt happier than I do with this melon slipping down my throat,” Wellesly responded. “I feel now as if I should never want to do anything but swallow wet things all the rest of my life. By the way, did one of you fellows stand beside me a long time yesterday, coaxing me to lie still?”
“Yes,” said Nick, “it was me. We had to make you keep quiet, or you’d have gone luny because we wouldn’t give you all the water you wanted to drink. It would have killed you to drink the water, and if you had yelled and fought yourself crazy for it I reckon you’d have died anyway.”
“Well, I guess you saved my life, then. For if you hadn’t kept me quiet I’d have fought all creation for water. The notion took hold of me that I was a helpless baby and that my mother was beside me, turning a crank and making it rain into my mouth, and that all I had to do was to lie still and listen to her voice and hold my mouth open so thatthe drops could trickle down my throat. Lord! How good they did feel! That was how I happened to lie still so contentedly.”
“Nick could quiet a whole insane asylum when he gets on that Blarneystone brogue of his,” said Emerson.
“ONCE HE CAME UPON HUMAN BONES, WITH SHREDS OF CLOTHING.”—p. 179“ONCE HE CAME UPON HUMAN BONES, WITH SHREDS OF CLOTHING.”—p.179
All that day they did not allow Wellesly to do much talking, but kept him lying most of the time in the hammock, in the shade of the cottonwoods, where he slept or luxuriously spent the time slowly swallowing the cool drinks the others brought to him.
In the early evening of the next day, when he had sufficiently recovered his strength, they heard his story. He lay in the hammock, with the mountain breeze blowing across his face and a pitcher of cold tea beside him, and told them all that had happened to him from the time he started for Las Plumas until consciousness failed him, with his hands against the solid wall of Mead’s house. The three tall Texans listened gravely, Mead and Tuttle sitting one on each side of the hammock and Ellhorn leaning against the tree at its foot. They said nothing, but their eyes were fastened on his with the keenest interest, and now and then they exchanged a nod or a look of appreciation. When he finished silence fell on the group for a moment. Then Mead stretched out a sun-browned hand and shook Wellesly’s.
“I’ve never been a friend of yours, Mr. Wellesly,”he said, “or considered you one of mine. But I want to say, right now, that you’ve got more grit than anybody I know in the southwest, and I’m proud to have had the chance to save as brave a man as you are.”
Tuttle seized Wellesly’s other hand and exclaimed, “That’s so! That’s straight talk! I’m with you there, Emerson!”
Ellhorn walked up to Wellesly’s side and put his hand in a brotherly way on the invalid’s arm.
“I tell you what, Mr. Wellesly, we’ve fought you and the cattle company straight from the shoulder, and I reckon we’re likely to keep on fightin’ you as long as you fight us, but if you’re goin’ to give us the sort of war you showed that desert—well, I reckon Emerson will need all the help Tom and me can give him!”
Wellesly laughed in an embarrassed way and Ellhorn went on: “Now, just see how things turn out. There’s been another war over in Las Plumas and we-all have been fightin’ you and your interests and the cattle company and the Republicans for all we were worth. They arrested Emerson again on that same old murder fake, to say nothin’ of me for bein’ drunk and disorderly, which I sure was, and there was hell to pay for two days. They tried to take Emerson out of town, and Tom and me held up the train they had him on. I buffaloed the engineer while they took care of Daniels and Halliday, and then we pulled our freight. Andhere we ride up to the ranch, fugitives from justice, just barely in time to save you-all.”
Wellesly laughed. “I am very glad you did it. My only regret is that you didn’t break jail several days earlier.”
“I don’t know whether or not you-all understand the position I take about that Whittaker case,” said Mead. “I reckon likely you think I break jail every time you get me in just out of pure cussedness. But I don’t. I do it because I think you-all haven’t any reason but pure cussedness for puttin’ me in. I consider that you haven’t any right to arrest me on mere suspicion, and I shall keep on resistin’ arrest and breakin’ jail just as long as you fellows keep on tryin’ to run me in without any proof against me. Why, you don’t even know that Will Whittaker’s dead! Now, Mr. Wellesly, I’ll make a bargain with you.” Mead’s eyes were fastened on Wellesly’s with an intent look which gripped the invalid’s attention. Wellesly’s eyelids suddenly half closed and between them flashed out the strips of pale, brilliant gray.
“All right, go on. I must hear it before I assent.”
“It is this: I won’t ask you to have any evidence that I had a hand in the killing of Will Whittaker, if he is dead. But whenever you can prove that he is dead and show that he died by violence, I give you my word, and my friends here, Tom Tuttle and Nick Ellhorn, will add theirs to mine, I give you my word that I’ll submit quietly to arrest and will standtrial for his murder. But unless you can do that I shall keep on fightin’ you till kingdom come!”
Tuttle and Ellhorn nodded. “He’s right!” they exclaimed. “We’ll stick to what he says.”
Wellesly considered Mead’s challenge in silence for a moment. He was wondering whether this was the courage of innocence or whether it was mere bluffing audacity. It was very like the former, but he decided that it must be the latter, because he was quite convinced that Mead had killed Whittaker.
“Of course,” he said, “after what you have done for me here—you have saved my life and showed me the greatest kindness and generosity—I can not allow any further proceedings to be taken against you, if I can prevent them, which is not—”
“Oh, hang all that!” Mead interrupted with a gesture of irritation. “I don’t expect and don’t want anything we have done just now to make any difference with your feelings toward me, or change the policy of the Fillmore Cattle Company. And I don’t want it to influence the actions of the Republicans in Las Plumas, either. We didn’t do it for that purpose, and I’m not buying protection for myself that way. What we did was the barest humanity.”
“No, Mr. Wellesly,” Nick Ellhorn broke in, “you needn’t have it on your conscience that you must be grateful to us, because if we hadn’t saved you the Republicans over in Plumas would have said thatwe killed you. We sure had to save you to save our own skins.”
There was a general laugh at this, and Mead added quietly: “As it was my men who were to blame for your condition, I suppose I would have been, in a way, responsible.”
Tuttle rose and began walking about uneasily. “When are we goin’ to start after ’em, Nick?” he said.
“I’m ready whenever you are.”
“All right. To-morrow morning, then.”
Wellesly looked up in surprise. It was the first word he had heard from either of the three concerning his captors, and he was startled by the calm assurance with which Tom had taken it for granted that he and Nick would “go after ’em.” “You two won’t go alone!” he exclaimed.
“We’re enough,” Tuttle replied, a grim, expectant look on his big, round face.
“You bet we are!” added Nick. “If they see Tom and me comin’ they’ll know they’ve got to give up. They’ve seen us shoot, and that scrub, Haney, has got some sense, though I reckon Jim would be just fool enough to get behind a rock and pop at us till we blowed his brains out.”
“Oh, I say, now! This is a foolhardy scheme! Let them go, and if they come out of there alive we’ll get hold of them somehow. It would be dangerous to the last degree for you two alone to attempt to bring them out across that desert.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Nick. “We ain’t ’lowing to bring ’em out.”
The next morning Tuttle and Ellhorn, with two loaded pack horses, set out on their journey to the Oro Fino mountains, where they felt sure the two kidnappers would still be engaged in their hunt for the lost Winters mine. Mead had already sent word to the Fillmore ranch that Wellesly was at his house and that some one might meet them at Muletown that afternoon and carry him on to Las Plumas.
When the two men parted they looked each other in the eyes and shook hands. Wellesly began to acknowledge his debt of gratitude. Mead cut him short.
“That’s all right, Mr. Wellesly,” he said, “but I don’t want you to think for a minute that I expect this little affair to make any difference in our relations. In the cattle business I still consider you my enemy, and I propose to fight you as long as you try to prevent what I hold to be just and fair dealing between the Fillmore Company and the rest of us cattle raisers. We still stand exactly where we did before.”
Wellesly smiled admiringly. “Personally, I like your pluck, Mr. Mead, but, if you will pardon my saying so, I think it is very ill-advised. I’ll frankly admit that you’ve beaten us this year at every turn. But you can’t keep up this sort of thing year after year, against the resources and organization of abig company. The most distinctive commercial feature of this period is the constant growth of big interests at the expense of smaller ones. It is something that the individual members of a big concern can’t help, because it is bigger than they are. Our stock-holders will undoubtedly wish to enlarge their holdings and increase their profits, and I, being only one of a number, can have no right to put my personal feelings above their interests. You ought to see that the result is going to be inevitable in your case, just as it is everywhere else. The little fellows can’t hold their own against the big ones. I am telling you all this in the most friendly spirit, and I assure you it will be to your interest to take my advice and compromise the whole matter. I’ll guarantee that the Fillmore people will meet you half way, and I am sure it will cost you less in the long run.”
As he listened to Wellesly the good-natured smile left Mead’s face, his lips shut in a hard line, and the defiant yellow flame, the light of battle, which his friends knew to be the sign that he would fight to the death, leaped into his eyes. He stared into Wellesly’s face a moment before he spoke.
“Compromise! I’ve got nothing to compromise! I reckon that means that you want my two water holes and grazing land that join yours! Well, you can’t have them! But if you want any more fight over this cattle business you can have all you want, and whenever you want it!” And he turned on hisheel and walked away. “I reckon they would like me to compromise,” he said to himself. “It would be lots of money in their pockets, and holes in mine. It’s a pity that a man with Wellesly’s grit should be such a hog!”
Wellesly shrugged his shoulders and climbed into the carriage that was to take him to Las Plumas. “I can’t help it,” he thought, “if he chooses to look at it that way. I told him the truth, and I put it in the kindest way. The little fellows are sure to go down before the big ones. That is the law that governs all commerce nowadays. He is bound to be eaten up, and he ought to have sense enough to see it. He’d save himself trouble and money if he would take my advice, compromise, and get out now with what he can. He can’t stop things from taking their natural course, and the more he fights the sooner he’ll go under. Of course, I don’t like to do anything against him, after he has saved my life, but my private sentiments can’t interfere with the company’s interests, and measures will have to be taken before next fall’s round-up to put a stop to this whole thing. I offered the olive branch, and he refused it, and now he can have all the war he wants. He is the head and backbone of all the opposition to us, and if we were rid of him the Fillmore Company could double its profits. I don’t doubt for a minute that he killed Will Whittaker, and if we could prove it that would solve the whole matter. He said he would submit to arrest and trial if wecould prove that Will died a violent death. That means, of course, that nobody saw him commit the murder and that he has hid the body where he thinks it can’t be found.
“Then it must be very much out of the way, where he is sure nobody would think of looking for it. Probably it isn’t any where near the traveled road, the cattle ranges, nor the ranches in the foothills. It must be in some out of the way corner of the Fernandez plain. Whittaker says the searching parties have been all over this part of the country, so it must be farther up toward the north. The White Sands are up that way, I remember, and if a body were buried there, deep enough, it might as well be at the bottom of the sea. Yes, I think that’s a pretty good idea. Whittaker must send a searching party up to the White Sands as soon as he can get one together. If we can find that body—there’sadiosto Emerson Mead and the fight against us. He’ll have to hang or go to the penitentiary for life.”
When Wellesly reached Las Plumas he found the town basking in peace and friendliness. Colonel Whittaker and Judge Harlin were enjoying a midday mint julep together over the bar of the Palmleaf saloon; John Daniels and Joe Davis were swapping yarns over a watermelon in the back room of Pierre Delarue’s store, while Delarue himself was laughing gleefully at their stories, and Mrs. Harlin was assisting Mrs. Daniels in preparations for theswellest card party of the summer, which the sheriff’s wife was to give that afternoon.
In the late afternoon Wellesly sat beside Marguerite Delarue on her veranda and told her the story of his abduction and of his fight, which he had come so near to losing, with the fiends of heat and thirst. He showed her the bent and bloody pin which had helped to liberate him from his captivity in the canyon and in soft and lover-like tones told her that he owed his life to her and that a lifetime of devotion would not be sufficient to express his gratitude. But he stopped just short of asking her to accept the lifetime of devotion. She was much moved and her tender blue eyes were misty with tears as she listened to the story of his sufferings. He thought he had never seen her look so sweet and attractive and so entirely in accord with his ideal of womanly sympathy. When he told her how Emerson Mead and his two friends had worked over him and by what a narrow margin they had saved him from severe illness and probably from death, her face brightened and she seemed much pleased. She asked some questions about Mead, and was evidently so interested in this part of the story that Wellesly, much to his surprise, felt a sudden impulse of personal dislike and enmity toward the big Texan. That night, as he sat at his window smoking and looking thoughtfully at the lop-sided moon rising over the Hermosa mountains, he wasthinking about Marguerite Delarue and the advisability of asking her to marry him.
“Undoubtedly,” he owned to himself, “I think more of her than I usually do of women, because I never before cared a hang what their feelings were toward other men. I must have been mistaken in thinking there was anything between her and Mead. Her heart is as fresh as her face, and I can go in and take it, and feel there have been no predecessors, if I want to. Do I want to? I don’t know. She’s handsome and she’s got a stunning figure. Her feet aren’t pretty, but they would look better if she didn’t wear such clumsy shoes. Well, I’d see that she didn’t. She seems to be sweet and gentle and sympathetic, and the sort of woman that would be absorbed in her husband and his interests. She’s overfond of flattery, moral, mental and physical. Gets that from Frenchy, I suppose, for you can start him strutting like a rooster any time with a dozen words. But that isn’t much of a fault in a wife, after all, for if a fellow can only remember about it it’s the easiest way in the world to keep a woman happy. Well, I’ll think about it. There are no rivals in the field, and it will be time enough to decide when I make my next visit to Las Plumas.”
The next day he went to tell Marguerite good-bye and sat talking with her a long time upon her veranda. Las Plumas had noticed the frequency of his calls at the Delarue house on his last trip to the town, and when it saw him there again two days insuccession it felt sure that a love story was going on under the roses and honeysuckles. The smoke of the engine which carried him away had scarcely melted on the horizon before people were saying to one another that it would be a splendid match and what a fine thing it was for Marguerite Delarue that so rich a man as Wellesly had fallen in love with her.
Judge Harlin at once drove out to Emerson Mead’s ranch in order that he might learn, from Mead’s own lips, exactly what had happened to Wellesly and what sort of a compact Mead had made with him concerning the finding of Will Whittaker’s body. They sat under the trees discussing Wellesly’s character, after Mead had told the whole story down to their parting at Muletown.
“By the way,” said Harlin, “they are saying, over in town, that Wellesly is stuck on Frenchy Delarue’s daughter, and that they are to be married next fall. She is a stunning pretty girl, and as good as she is pretty, but it seems to me rather odd for Wellesly to come down here to get a wife. He’s the sort of man you would expect to look for money and position in a wife, rather than real worth.”
When Thomson Tuttle and Nick Ellhorn reached the little canyon in the Oro Fino mountains they saw that the two would-be kidnappers must have been there since Wellesly’s departure for three of the four horses were quietly grazing, with hobbled feet, beside the rivulet. They speculated upon what the absence of the fourth horse might mean while they staked their own beasts and started on the trail of the two men. Up the larger canyon a little way they saw buzzards flying low and heavily.
“That looks as if one of ’em was dead,” said Nick.
“It would be just like the scrubs,” Tom grumbled, “for both of ’em to go and die before we get a pop at ’em. I want to see the color of their hair just once. Confound their measly skins, they might have got Emerson into a worse scrape than this Whittaker business.”
They were both silent for some moments, watching the buzzards as they swooped low over some dark object on the floor of the canyon. As they came nearer they saw that the dead thing on which the birds were feeding was the missing horse.
“They killed it for meat,” said Nick, pointing toa clean cut which had severed one hind leg from the body.
“Yes, and not so very long ago, either,” Tom assented, “or the buzzards wouldn’t have left this much flesh on it, and it would be dried up more.”
“Say, Tom, they brought this beast up here to kill it, and they sure wouldn’t have brought it so far away if they had wanted the meat down there in that canyon. They must have changed camp.”
“Then there’s water higher up. They’re in here yet, Nick, and we’ll find ’em. We must keep our eyes and ears peeled, so they can’t get the first pop.”
They picked their way carefully up the canyon, watching the gorge that lengthened beyond them and the walls that towered above their heads, listening constantly for the faintest sounds of human voice or foot, speaking rarely and always in a whisper. The floor of the canyon was strewn with boulders large and small, and its sides rose above them in rugged, barren, precipitous cliffs. Nowhere did they see the slightest sign of vegetation to relieve the wilderness of sand and rock and barren walls. Not even a single grass blade thrust a brave green head between forbidding stones. Above them was a sky of pure, brilliant blue, and around them was the gray of the everlasting granite. Except for the sound of their own footsteps, the canyon was absolutely silent. There was no call of animals one to another, or twitter of birds, or whirr of feathered wings, or piping of insects. Now andthen a slender, graceful lizard darted silently out of the sunshine to hide beneath a stone, and far behind them in the canyon the buzzards wheeled in low, awkward flights above the carcass of the dead horse. But aside from these no living creature was to be seen.
The sun shone squarely down upon the canyon and the baking heat between its narrow walls would have dazed the brains and shaken the knees of men less hardy and less accustomed to the fierce, pounding sunshine of the southwest. Tuttle stole several inquiring glances at Nick’s face. Then he stopped and cast a searching look all about them, carefully scanning the canyon before and behind them and its walls above their heads. He looked at Nick again and then threw another careful glance all about. He coughed a little, came close to Nick’s side, wiped the sweat from his face, and finally spoke, hesitatingly, in a half whisper:
“Say, Nick, what do you-all think about Will Whittaker? Do you reckon Emerson killed him?”
Ellhorn shut one eye at the jagged peak which seemed to bore into the blue above them, considered a moment, and replied: “Well, I reckon if he did Will needed killin’ almighty bad.”
“You bet he did,” was Tom’s emphatic response.
They trudged on to the head of the canyon and explored most of the smaller ones opening into it. But no trace of human presence, either recent or remote, did they find anywhere. When night cameon they returned to their camp somewhat disappointed that they had seen no sign of the two men. Early the next morning they started out again, and searched carefully through the remaining canyons that were tributary to the large one, climbed again to its head, and clambered over the ridge at its source. There they looked down the other side of the mountain, over a barren wilderness of jagged cliffs and yawning chasms, with here and there a little clump of scrub pines or cedars clinging and crawling along the mountain side. They examined the summit of the peak and walked a little way down the eastern slope, looking into the gorges and searching the scrub-dotted slopes until the sinking sun drove them back to their camp. But they found neither water, save some strongly alkaline springs, nor any trace of human beings. As they discussed the day’s adventures over their supper, Tom said:
“There must have been some reason why they killed that horse just where they did.”
“Yes,” said Nick, “if they had moved their camp to some other canyon higher up, or on the other side of the mountain, they might just as well have driven the beast farther up before they killed it.”
“If they had wanted the meat down here,” added Tom, “they wouldn’t have driven it so far away. They must have wanted it right there.”
They looked at each other with a sudden flash of intelligence in their puzzled eyes and Nick thwackedhis knee resoundingly. Then he spoke the thought that had burst into each mind:
“There must be a trail up the canyon wall!”
“YOU’VE NOTHING TO FEAR FROM ME. I’LL BE DEAD IN TEN MINUTES.”—p. 206“YOU’VE NOTHING TO FEAR FROM ME. I’LL BE DEAD IN TEN MINUTES.”—p.206
Early the next morning they were examining more closely than they had done before the walls of the canyon near the carcass. On the right hand side, the same side on which was the canyon where they had their camp, they found a narrow ledge beginning several feet above the boulders which strewed the floor of the canyon at the base of the wall. They found that with care they could walk along it, although in some places it was so narrow that there was scarcely room for Tuttle’s big bulk. Nick was in constant fear lest his friend might topple over, and finally insisted that Tom should go back and wait until he reached the top of the wall or the end of the ledge. Tuttle blankly refused to do anything of the sort.
They were then in the narrowest place they had found, and it was only by flattening their bodies against the rock and clinging with all the strength in their fingers to the little knobs and crevices which roughened the wall that they could keep their footing. Nick, standing flat against the precipice with a hand stretched out on each side, looked over his shoulder at Tom, who was a few feet in the rear. He also was facing the wall, clinging with both hands and shuffling his feet along sidewise, a few inches at each step. Beyond, the ledge rose in a gradual incline to the top of thecliff, perhaps six hundred feet farther on. Below, the wall dropped abruptly a hundred feet to the boulder covered floor of the canyon.
“Tommy,” said Nick, “you-all better go back. It ain’t safe for a man of your size.”
“Go back! Not much!”
“Well, I shan’t go any farther until you do!”
“Then you’ll have to hang on by your eyelids till I get past you!”
“Tom, don’t be a fool!”
“Don’t you, neither.”
“Tom, you’re the darnedest obstinate cuss I ever saw in my life. You’ll tip over backwards first thing you know.”
“Nick, if Emerson was here it would sure be his judgment that we-all can get to the top of this cliff. So you shut up and go on.”
“I tell you I won’t do it till you go back! Darn your skin, I wouldn’t be as pig-headed as you are for a hundred dollars a minute!”
“Well, I wouldn’t be as big a fool as you are for a thousand!”
“Tommy, if you-all don’t go back, I’ll be no friend of yours after this day!”
“Well, if you don’t go on and shut up that fool talk I don’t want to be friends any longer with any such hen-headed, white-livered—”
“Tom!”
“Well, then, shut up and go on, or I’ll call you worse names than that!”
“You obstinate son of a sea-cook, I tell you I won’t go on unless you go back!”
“Nick, it will take me just about half a minute to get near enough to push you off. And I’m goin’ to do it, too, if you don’t hold your jackass jaw and go on.”
There was silence for the space of full twenty seconds while Ellhorn watched Tuttle edging his way carefully along the narrow shelf. Then he spoke:
“Well, anyway, Tom, don’t you try to take a deep breath or that belly of yours will tip the mountain over and make it mash somebody on the other side!” Then he turned his head and shuffled along toward the top of the cliff.
The shelf widened again presently and they found the rest of it comparatively easy traveling. At one place there were some drops of dried blood on the ledge and in another a bloody stain on the wall at about the height of a man’s shoulders. This confirmed their belief that Haney and Jim had found and climbed this narrow ledge with the meat and camp supplies on their backs. When they reached the top Nick held out his hand and said:
“Say, old man, I reckon we-all didn’t mean anything we said back there.”
Tom took the proffered hand and held it a moment:
“No, I guess not. I sure reckon Emerson would say we didn’t. Nick, what made you get that foolnotion in your head that I didn’t have sand to get through?”
“I didn’t think you didn’t have sand, Tommy. I thought—the trail was so narrow, I thought you’d tumble off.” A broad grin sent the curling ends of his mustache up toward his eyes and he went on: “Tom, you sure looked plumb ridiculous!”
Shaking hands again, they turned to their work. They stood on the steep, sloping side of the mountain, which was cracked and seamed with a network of chasms and gulches. A ridge ran slantingly down the mountain and the intricate, irregular network of narrow, steep-sided cracks and gulches which filled the slope finally gave, on the right hand, into the deep, gaping canyon which had been their thoroughfare, and on their left into another, apparently similar, some distance to the south. Farther up, toward the backbone of the ridge, there seemed to be a narrow stretch, unbroken by the gulches, which extended to the next canyon. They made their way thither and walked slowly along, stopping now and then to scan the mountain side or to sweep with their eyes the visible portions of the canyons below and behind them. They had covered more than half the distance between the two canyons when Tom, who had been studying one particular spot far down the mountain, exclaimed:
“Nick, there’s water down there! See where the top of that pine tree comes up above the rocks, away down there, nearly to the divide?”
“You’re sure right,” said Nick, looking carefully over the ground which Tom indicated. A moment later he went on: “That’s the head of the spring in the canyon where our camp is! You can follow the course of the gulch right along. I reckon that’s where we’ll find what we’re looking for!”
They turned to retrace their steps, their faces eager and alert and their feet quickening beneath them, when through the silence came the dull, far-away thud of a pistol shot. It was behind them and seemed to come from the canyon toward which they had been walking. With one glance at each other they drew their pistols and ran toward its head. They clambered over the boulders and, with reckless leaps and swings, let themselves down to its floor. Pausing only a moment to reconnoiter, they hurried down the gulch, casting quick glances all about them for the first sign of a living being. After a little they stopped and listened intently, each holding a cocked revolver, but not the faintest sound broke the midday stillness.
“Do you reckon it was in this canyon?” said Tom in a hoarse whisper.
“Got to be,” Nick replied, poking out his lower jaw. “We’ve been sniffing the trail long enough. We’ll give them a bait now.”
He raised his revolver to shoot into the air, but even before his finger touched the trigger, a pistol shot resounded from down the canyon and its echoes rolled and rumbled between the walls. An instantlater they saw the smoke curling upward and dissolving in the still, clear air, perhaps half way toward the canyon’s mouth. But they could see no sign of man, nor of any moving thing in its vicinity. They hurried on, cautiously watching the walls and the canyon in front of them, and now and then turning for a quick backward glance, to guard against attack in the rear. As they neared the point from which the smoke had risen, they saw that one of the narrow, deep chasms in the mountain side opened there, with a wide, gaping mouth, into the canyon. A mound of debris was heaped in front. Stepping softly, they peered around the pile of rocks and saw, lying in the mouth of the chasm, a man with a revolver gripped in his right hand. Blood stained his clothing and ran out over the rocks and sand. He was a tall man with a short, bushy, iron-gray beard covering his face. Tuttle and Ellhorn covered him with their revolvers and walked to his side. He put up a feeble, protesting hand.
“It’s all right, strangers. You’ve nothing to fear from me. I’ll be dead in ten minutes.”
“Who killed you?”
“Was it the two ornery scrubs we’re after?”
“I’ve put the last shot in myself. If you’d been half an hour earlier I might have had a chance.”
“What’s the matter? What’s happened? Tom, give him a drink out of the flask.”
“No, give me water,” said the man. “I emptied my canteen this morning.”
Nick lifted his head and Tom held their canteen to his lips. He drank deeply, and as he lay down again he looked at Tom curiously.
“Two days ago I had a fight with two men, and I’ve been lying here ever since. They did me up, so that I knew I’d got to die if no help came. And I knew that was just about as likely as a snowstorm, but I couldn’t help bankin’ on the possibility. So I laid here two days and threw rocks at the coyote that came and sat on that heap of stones and waited for me to die. This morning I drank the last of the water and I said to myself that if nobody came by the time the sun was straight above that peak yonder I’d put a bullet into my heart. I had two left, and I used one on the coyote that had been a-settin’ on that rock watchin’ me the whole morning. I was bound he shouldn’t pick my bones, he’d been so sassy and so sure about it. You’ll find his carcass down the canyon a ways. That tired my arm and I waited and rested a spell before I tried it on myself. But I was weaker than I thought and I couldn’t hold the gun steady, and the bullet didn’t go where I meant it to. But I’m bleedin’ to death.”
“The two men—what became of them? I reckon they’re the ones we’re lookin’ for!” exclaimed Nick.
“Are you? Well, I guess you’ll find ’em scattered down the canyon, or else up there,” and he pointed to the mountain side above. “They couldn’t get very far.”
“Did you kill ’em?” asked Tom anxiously.“You’ve spoiled a job we’ve come here for if you did.”
The man scanned Tom’s face again and a light of recognition broke into his eyes. “I reckon I did,” he replied complacently. “Anyway, I hope so.”
“What was the matter? Did they do you up?”
“Well, I’ll tell you about the whole business. My name’s Bill Frank, and I’ve been here in the mountains since—well, a long time, huntin’ for the lost Dick Winter’s mine. I found it, too. It was right in here behind me, but he’d worked it clean out. I reckon it was nothin’ but a pocket, but a mighty big, rich one, and then the vein had pinched. So then I went to work and hunted for the gold he’d taken out. I found it all, or all he told me about. You see, I knew Dick. I was with him when he died, and he told me what he’d got. There was a Dutch oven and a pail and a coffee pot, all full of lumps, and two tomato cans full of little ones, and a whisky flask full of dust, and a gunny sack full of ore that was just lousy with gold. Much good it will do me now, or them other fellows, either, damn their souls! Well, I’d hid the coffee pot and the pail and the Dutch oven and the whisky flask and one tomato can down by the spring, where I had my camp. I knew pretty well where the rest of it was, after I’d found that much, and I came up here two days ago, in the morning, and looked around till I found the gunny sack. I brought it here and threw it inside this place, which poor Dick Winters had blastedout, never dreamin’ of such a thing as that anybody would show up. Then I went away again to find the other tomato can, and when I came back two men were here packin’ out my sack of ore.”
“What did they look like?” Nick exclaimed.
“One was tall and thin and youngish like, with a bad look, and the other was short and stout and a good deal older, and he had a red, round face.”
“The damned, ornery scrubs! They’re the ones we’re after,” Tom exclaimed, jumping up. “You didn’t kill ’em, stranger?” he added pleadingly.
“I guess I did. I sure reckon you’ll find ’em scattered promiscuous down the canyon. I drew my gun and told ’em to drop it, that it was mine. They began to shoot, and so did I, and I backed ’em out, and made ’em drop the sack, and started ’em on the run. They couldn’t shoot as well as I could, and I know I hit one of ’em in the head and the other one mighty near the heart. I poked my head out for a last blaze at ’em, to make sure of my work, and the short one, he let drive at me and took me in the lung, and that’s the one that did me up. But they’d broken one leg before.”
“Can’t you-all pull through if we tote you out of here?” asked Nick.
Bill Frank shook his head. His breath was beginning to fail and his voice sank to a whisper with each sentence.
“No; I’m done for. You can’t do nothin’ for me.” Then he turned to Tom. “Pardner, I didyou a bad trick when I saw you before, though I had to do it. And when I told you good-bye I said I hoped that if I ever saw you again I could treat you whiter than I did that time. Well, I’ve got the chance now. That tomato can and that gunny sack are over there behind your pardner, and you and him can have ’em. The other tomato can and the whisky flask and the coffee pot and the pail and the Dutch oven are under some big rocks behind a boulder south from the spring, if them two thieves didn’t carry ’em away, and you and your pardner can have it all. The trail takes you to the spring.”
Tom was staring at him in wide-eyed amazement, trying to recall his face. Nick exclaimed hurriedly:
“Hold on, pard! Ain’t you-all got some folks somewhere who ought to have this? Tell us where they are and we’ll see that they get it.”
The man shook his head. His breath was labored, and he spoke with difficulty as he whispered: “There ain’t anybody who’d care whether I’m dead or alive, except to get that gold, and I’d rather you’d have it. You’re white, anyway, and you’ve treated me white, both of you, and I’ve always been sorry I had to play Thomson Tuttle here that mean trick, because he was a gentleman about it, and sand clean through.”
Tom was still staring at him. “Stranger,” he said, “you’ve got the advantage of me. I can’t remember that I’ve ever set eyes on you before.”
The death glaze was coming in the man’s eyesand his failing whisper struggled to get past his stiffening lips.
“I held you up, and held a gun on you-all one night, last spring, up near the White Sands.”
“Oh, that time!” Tom exclaimed. “That was all right. I reckoned you-all had good reason for it.”
Bill Frank nodded. “Yes,” he whispered, “we had to—in the wagon—” Some of his words were unintelligible, but a sudden flash of inspiration leaped through Nick’s mind.
“Did you have Will Whittaker’s body? Who killed him? Tom, the whisky, quick! We must keep him alive till he can tell!”
The man’s lips were moving and Nick put his ear close to them and thought he caught the word “not,” but he was not sure. Bill Frank’s head moved from side to side, but whether he meant to shake it, or whether it was the death agony, they could not tell. Tom put the flask to his lips, but he could not swallow, and in another moment the death rattle sounded in his throat.
They waited beside the dead man’s body until every sign of life was extinct. They closed his eyes, straightened his limbs, and folded his hands upon his breast. Then said Tom:
“Nick, he was too white a man to leave for the coyotes. We must do something with him.”
“You’re sure right, Tommy. But what can we do? This sand ain’t deep enough to keep ’em from diggin’ him up, even if we bury him.”
Tom looked about him and considered the situation a moment. “We’ll have to rock him up in here, Nick, in Dick Winters’ mine.”
At one side of the wide, blasted out mouth of the deep crack in the mountain from which Dick Winters had taken his gold, and level with the bottom of the crevice, there was a long, oval hollow, half as wide as a man’s body. The solid rock had cracked out of it after some giant-powder blast. They laid the body of Bill Frank in this shallow crypt and began to pile rocks around it. Suddenly Tom stopped, looked at Nick inquiringly, hesitated and cleared his throat.
“Say, Nick,” he blurted out, “it ain’t a square deal to put a fellow away like this. Somebody ought to say something over him.”
“No, you bet it ain’t a square deal,” said Nick. “We wouldn’t like it if it was one of us. But what can we do? There ain’t no preacher here.”
“I was thinkin’, Nick,” Tom hesitated and blushed a deep crimson, “I was sure thinkin’ that maybe—well, I thought—that you-all could say something. You know you always can say something. You-all better say it, Nick.” And without waiting for denial or protest Tom took off his hat and bent his head. Nick flashed a surprised look at his companion, waiting in reverent attitude, hesitated an instant, and then doffed his hat, bent his head and began. And the good Lord who heard his prayer did not need to ask his pedigree, for theIrish intonation with which he rolled the words off his tongue in honey-like waves told his ancestry:
“Good Lord, sure and Ye’ll rest this poor man’s soul, for he was white clean through. Sure, and he was no coward, and no scrub, neither. But the other two—Ye’d better let them fry in their own fat till they’re cracklin’s. You bet, that is what they deserve, and we can prove it. Amen.”
They built a close wall of rock around Bill Frank’s resting place high enough to reach the over-hanging rock, and so heavy and secure that no prowling coyote could reach the body, or even dislodge a single stone. After it was all finished they decided that there ought to be something about the grave to show whose bones rested within it. Nick Ellhorn tore some blank paper from the bottom of a partly filled sheet which he found in his pocket and wrote the inscription: