“I walked around, but nobody’s seen them.” Gonzales coughed, then pulled his feet up so Jensen had no direct look at the deputy.
“You described the girl? Blonde, green eyes, a favorite?”
“I did. And her john. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. Get your girl back and find the owlhoot I’m after since he seems to want the girl and Cooley dead.” Gonzales coughed again, a rumble from deep in his chest, and then spat over the railing.
“I’ll pay plenty to get Mandy working here again.” Madam Morgan sounded smug. “And you owe me for taking such good care of you when you needed it most.”
The deputy laughed harshly. “You want human flesh. I want horseflesh. They stole my horse. I’m sure it had to be them.” He paused and said in a lower voice, “I can’t be bought, but I owe you a favor or two for what help you’ve offered. You sure you don’t know where they might be holed up?”
Jensen perked up. He listened harder. The deputy was doing his work for him. Although Gonzales sought Cooley and Mandy because he thought they’d lead him to that fierce desperado Lars Jensen, he could stay out of sight long enough to grab the map. The deputy wanted him, but the lawman never mentioned the map. If he had no idea the map even existed, Poke would have no trouble finding the payroll since the lawman never expected his brother to show up.
Jensen crouched down and rested the six-shooter on the edge of the porch, waiting to take a shot. Then he drew back. The deputy was on foot. The safe thing was to kill Gonzales, but he was hunting Cooley. Too many possible outcomes collided in his dazed mind. Jensen sank down. If the lawman hadn’t found his fugitives by now, he wasn’t likely to. So shoot him down. Now. But Gonzales posed no real threat all shot up and recovering and lacking a horse.
Jensen sat at the end of the porch, thinking hard. If Cooley hadn’t come back to Oasis, the only other place he might be found was the Trafalgar Mine up in the hills. He had no reason to hightail it out of the county since he thought his worst nightmare—Jensen smiled, liking the notion he lived in Cooley’s mind, chipping away at his courage—had been killed.
He made his way back to the stable and his horse. Leaving the deputy alive galled him, but killing him could wait for another day. Finding Cooley and the map for Poke was his foremost duty. He swayed about in the saddle but hit the trail for the mine. It was his last, best hope to find Cooley.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DON’T KILL ME. Take her, take her!” John Cooley gagged when Lars Jensen grabbed him around the neck and started strangling the life from him.
He thought he was a goner when the outlaw jerked. Falling away, he dropped to hands and knees. Blood pounded in his ears, but he thought he’d heard a gunshot. A quick check showed he was still in one piece. Cooley got to shaky feet and frantically hunted for the best direction to run away. Then, from a long ways off, he heard someone calling his name.
“John! Snap out of it. Come on!”
He jerked away from the hand grabbing his arm. Off-balance, he stumbled, caught his heel on a rock and sat heavily. Still dazed, he threw up his arms to protect his face.
“John!”
He lowered his arms and saw Mandy standing over him. The last puff of gun smoke slipped from the barrel of a gun.
“Mine?” He pointed at the six-gun she clung to so fiercely.
“Yes. Now, come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You killed him?” He hardly believed it was possible. Mandy a murderer? But the first time he fired a gun at another he’d killed No Shadow. That scared him as much as anything ever had, and yet Mandy seemed to know what to do now.
“We have to get out of here. Didn’t you hear what he said?”
“I . . . What do you mean?”
“He said he was taking you to his brother. There’s another one like him roaming around hunting for us.”
“We need to go,” Cooley said, finally seeing through the veil of shock that had clouded his mind. “Now!”
He grabbed what little they had in camp and stuffed it into a sack. By the time he’d finished, Mandy came with the mule and her horse.
“Where do we go?” He was thinking clearer now. “Not back to town. There’s nobody there who can help us.”
“That deputy is in Madam Morgan’s backroom, but he was still in a bad way. And returning to your mine’s no good. There’s nothing for us there.”
“I don’t know where England Dan is. Off looking for the Lost Banshee Mine.”
“What? Oh, the mine on your map. I thought you called it the Irish Lord.” She put her heels to her horse’s flanks and splashed around in the water a few seconds before heading upstream. He trailed her, realizing this was the best way to distance themselves from the body lying on the ground. There wouldn’t be hoofprints to give them away if Jensen’s brother came hunting for them.
They had ridden for a few minutes when a thought hit Cooley.
“His gun! I should have taken his gun.” He started to turn Mabel around to head back the way they came. Mandy held up his gun and waved it around.
“We’ve got this one. Don’t go back. The shot may have alerted his brother. I heard Madam Morgan gossiping about a man who got out of Yuma Penitentiary. That must be his brother. Anybody sent to Yuma’s one bad hombre. Real bad.”
“I’m not afraid of crossing him,” Cooley said. “I shot an Indian. And I would have taken care of Jensen if you hadn’t.”
Mandy let him come even with her in the stream. She handed him the six-shooter. “You take it. I’m tired of lugging around this heavy iron, and you’ve got a holster.”
“Don’t you fret none. If I see trouble coming, I’ll keep you safe.”
“Seeing it coming is the hard part,” she said. Mandy urged her horse to keep splashing along in the cold water until it began shivering. She looked left and right, then cut to her left up a canyon.
Cooley started to ask why she’d picked this direction; then he realized there wasn’t a difference. One way was as good as the other, as long as it was away from where Lars Jensen lay dead. He settled down and began to enjoy the ride, watching Mandy bounce along on the horse. Without any fuss, she began choosing the direction they traveled. His attention was on the woman, and a fine sight for sore eyes she was, too. Because of that, when sundown cast long shadows across the canyon floor they rode, he had no idea how they had gotten here.
“Time to camp,” he said. “Over there looks like a good place.”
“We need to keep riding, John. There. See it?” Mandy pointed to the ground.
“It’s getting dark. What are you looking at?” He hopped down from astride Mabel and then dropped to his knees. Mandy had been far more attentive than he to see the scuffed moccasin tracks.
Cooley began counting and thought he made out at the tracks of at least four Indians.
“Big Ear,” he whispered.
“They went deeper into the canyon. We should retrace our path.”
“Blundering around in the dark is dangerous,” he said. “Who knows what’s out there hunting? Big Ear’s moving deeper into the canyon, ahead of us. Unless he doubles back, he’ll never see us.” Cooley laughed. “It’s like we’re hunting him.”
“What if this is a box canyon? The hunters won’t find any game and will come back.”
“Or they might be herding a lot ahead of them to kill in the box. That’d mean they have a lot of dressing to do and meat to pack for the rest of their tribe. That takes time.”
“If there’s that much game, they’d send a runner back to the tribe to get help carrying it out. The runner’d come right on past us.”
Cooley’s mouth turned to cotton. The Mogollons hunted the man who had killed No Shadow. It might not matter much to them what white man they found. They’d blame anyone they came across. That he was in their way and actually had shot the loco No Shadow was a
twist of fate he wanted to avoid.
He knew any of the Indians would immediately recognize the horse Mandy rode as having belonged to their chief. Revenge for No Shadow or not, the theft spelled trouble for anyone caught with the pony.
“It would be best for us to backtrack,” he said. Cooley stepped up onto the mule, but Mabel wouldn’t budge. Her long ears swiveled back and forth, and the way she snorted warned him she heard someone else along the canyon floor. From the evidence he’d found, four Indian hunters were the most likely to be coming.
“Ride!” Cooley sawed at Mabel’s bit. The mule bucked once, then broke out in a rapid walk. He tried to encourage the mule to a quicker gait, but the travel that day had been long and tiring. Mabel wasn’t going to be pushed faster than she wanted.
Mandy passed him in the dark. He started to call out to her, but the echoes in the canyon deterred him. Big Ear might not know he had them on the run. If they reached the mouth of the canyon and escaped down another, they could elude the hunters entirely. He touched his almost empty six-shooter. If the Mogollon chief caught wind of them, even though he was on foot, he’d run them into the ground.
Worse, the Indians would consider Mandy to be an escaped slave. Cooley would end up scalped and left for dead, but the girl’s fate would be sealed for years to come. He bent low over the mule’s neck and whispered words of encouragement. Mabel might not know what he said, but she responded. From what he said so urgently, he’d certainly scared himself.
“See how the stars are blocked on either side but clear in the sky directly ahead?” Mandy pointed. Cooley wasn’t interested in what was in the sky as much as he was in the Indians catching up with them. He had seen how they ran faster than a horse. With the mounts picking their way gingerly in the dark, a brave on foot traveled lots faster.
“Keep riding.”
“We’re almost at the mouth of the canyon, John. The open space shows the sky. The canyon walls aren’t blocking the view.”
“Go to the left. I remember another canyon branching off in that direction.”
They exited the canyon. He felt as if he had been freed from chains. The high canyon walls held in heat and piped sound. Here, the air was cooler and nocturnal forest sounds greeted him. Not allowing Mabel to slow, he veered to the left into the canyon he remembered. They should have come this way earlier, but Mandy had insisted on the one filled with a hunting party.
These canyon walls were farther apart, but sounds still echoed. When he felt the mule faltering, he came even with the girl and said, “Slow down. Not so much sound.”
“My horse needs to rest, too,” she said. She hopped off the horse and led it along. Cooley followed her example, though his legs turned shaky within a few minutes. He was getting close to the end of his rope and needed to catch his breath.
“You think we outfoxed them?” Mandy sat beside him and took his arm. She laid her head on his shoulder.
“They never knew we were behind them. If Lady Luck’s smiling on us, they kept going up the canyon and can leave at the far end. There’s nothing to say that was a box canyon.”
He went over everything he had thought. It was all wild guesswork. Big Ear knew the Superstition Mountains and had no reason to blunder down a box canyon. While the chief hunted the man who had killed No Shadow—and possibly even sought his escaped slave—the band went after food to feed the rest of the tribe.
“John,” Mandy said softly, “somebody’s out there. To your left.”
He jerked around in time to see a dark figure rise from behind a tree stump and sprint away. Without thinking, he shoved Mandy away, got his pistol out and fired. The report deafened him as surely as the foot-long tongue of yellow-orange flame blinded him.
“What’re you doing, you fool!” Mandy got to her feet and took a step in the direction of the spy. “Even if you killed him, the rest heard the shot and will come running.”
Cooley closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure if the pounding he heard was his heart hammering away or the moccasined feet of the retreating Indian.
Or was the sound from a half dozen sets of moccasin-sheathed feet rushing toward them?
He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand. There weren’t many bullets left. Working up the courage to count how many rested in the cylinder lay beyond his nerve. “What are we going to do?”
“Try to lose them,” Mandy said. “Lead your mule. Come on, John, come on!” She tugged at his arm and got him moving.
Mabel balked, having been frightened by the gunshot. Cooley threw his arms around the mule’s neck and pushed with all his strength. The animal had turned . . . mulish.
“Come on, or I leave you behind,” he said. “The Indians will eat you!”
The threat got the mule moving. Whether the mule understood or not was of no concern. Cooley was making tracks toward the branching canyon. He never slowed when he reached the wall and careened around it. With a jump, he landed astride Mabel and forced the mule to an even faster pace. Mandy kept up with him, the stolen Indian pony she rode barely straining.
“We did it. We got away,” he said after a few minutes.
“John. Wait. Listen.” Mandy cupped her ear with her hand.
Cooley took in a dozen things all at once. Both the mule and the horse twisted their ears around toward the back trail. Then he heard deep gasping as if someone had run miles and miles but kept slogging away. His imagination added the pounding of Indian feet on the hard, rocky ground. Big Ear had found their tracks and come for them.
“We can outrun them. Come on.” He tried to get more speed from the mule and failed. He glanced over and wondered if Mandy’s horse could take two on its back and make faster time. Abandoning Mabel rankled Cooley, but she had been taken by Big Ear earlier and rescued with no ill effects. He could do it again.
Facing the hunting party was another way out. He touched his gun. He had one or two bullets left, if that. If he got in a good shot and hit one Indian, the rest might take cover or turn and run away. Or they might rush him. He’d be dead in a heartbeat if that happened. There was no way he was skilled enough to tackle even one Indian armed with a knife or a war club. And the entire band had arrows. He ran his hands over his chest. He was only seconds away from looking like a pincushion.
“What are we going to do?” asked Mandy.
Cooley stared at the woman. She expected him to get them out of this fix. For a moment, pride filled him. Then fear took over. If he took her horse and left her behind, he could get away.
Two quick steps took him to her side. The horse tried to rear, but she held it down. Somehow, the animal’s fright calmed his.
“What would Dan do?”
“Well, what’s the answer?” Mandy sounded peeved rather than scared. This buoyed him up.
He drew his six-gun and faced the darkness where Big Ear and his braves advanced on them. The decision came to him. It scared him as much as it puffed him up with pride that he had made it.
“Go on, vamoose. I’ll hold them back as long as I can.”
“You’d do that for me, John?” She gave him a kiss, the first one he’d ever gotten from her that carried real passion. She broke off, panting. “We’ll stand them off together.”
He lifted his six-shooter and fired when the first of the Indians loomed in the darkness. The second time he pulled the trigger proved a dud. The hammer fell on a spent cartridge. He hefted the gun to use as a club. Then all his courage disappeared. From behind, from deeper in the canyon, came the banshee’s howl.
“Big Owl! It’s Big Owl!”
He wondered who shouted the warning, then realized his throat was sore from the effort.
“They’re running away, John! They’re turning tail and leaving us alone!”
He turned from the hunting party and faced into the canyon. The echo from the banshee’s shriek rolled on and on and on until his blood froze
in his arteries. One of them was doomed to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ENGLAND DAN SLID and slid and . . . crashed into a solid rock wall. Lying stunned, he tried to figure out if his eyes were open or not. He blinked. There wasn’t any difference between closed and open. Groaning, he moved. He ached all over. Carefully checking himself, he found only strained muscles. No broken bones. Nothing but a few bloody scrapes. Not even a headache. For that, he was glad. A concussion meant he’d die down here.
“Where’s here?” He began feeling around in the pitch black until he judged that the pit was about six feet wide. The walls matched those of the mine shaft above. But one side sloped drastically. The other was more gradual. “Which side did I come down?”
He failed to figure that out. He had turned around and flopped and gotten banged up so much that he was disoriented. He felt around for the candle he had carried. It had been extinguished when he fell into the pit and was nowhere to be found.
Trying to think through his dilemma got him nowhere until he remembered the lucifers he’d found with the candle. He drew one out and lit it. The eye-dazzling flare showed him how bad off he was. One side of the pit was steeper than the other. The more gradual slope still presented quite a climb. He used the last match to position himself for his escape. Rocks slid under his boots as he scrambled. Faster and faster, he worked and kept sliding back to the bottom of the pit. Out of breath, he sat in the dark and worked out a plan. When he regained his breath, he found one wall and felt around for rock outjuts. He edged up the slope, using the solid wall for support. Gradually inching his way up, he finally slipped and slid and flopped onto the solid mine floor.
Lost Banshee Mine Page 18