From where he sat against one of the other walls, MacDonald laughed. He said, “Hearin’ you say that don’t surprise me the least bit, Costello. You’re sweet on the gal yourself. I bet if you ever got the chance, you’d like to—”
“Shut your filthy mouth, MacDonald,” Costello interrupted. “I’m old enough to be that girl’s father, and you know it.”
“That don’t make any difference. Not when she’s the only female this side of Packsaddle who ain’t an Apache.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Costello told the Jensen brothers. “He’s just a brute, and not a very smart one, at that. If he was, once he got away from here, he never would have slowed down until he had put at least fifty miles behind him.”
MacDonald got to his feet. “You’re not an officer anymore, Costello. Until the major busts me and makes it official, I outrank you now. So I don’t have to put up with your guff.” He balled his hands into fists. “Let’s settle this . . . and once that’s done, I’ve got a score to settle with those Jensen boys, as well!”
He jerked his rock of a chin toward Ace and Chance.
Costello put his hand on the ground to brace himself and then pushed upright. “Why don’t you let it alone, MacDonald?” he said. “We’re all locked up in here together, so we might as well try to get along.”
MacDonald shook his head. “I’m not interested in getting along with the likes of you.”
With that, he rushed through the gloom with a fist cocked back to throw a punch at Costello.
As MacDonald’s fist shot forward, Costello ducked under the blow. Considerably shorter than MacDonald to start with, the former lieutenant had no trouble avoiding the blow. He stepped in and hooked a right and a left into MacDonald’s belly, the same strategy Chance had used when he clashed with MacDonald back in Packsaddle.
Despite his weight and strength, Costello had the same lack of success Chance had had. MacDonald bellowed and wrapped both hands around Costello’s head. He held Costello off and started to squeeze, as if he were trying to pop Costello’s skull like a melon.
Costello grabbed MacDonald’s arms and tried to loosen his grip. MacDonald turned, pulling Costello along with him, and threw the former lieutenant against the wall. Costello bounced off, and when he did, MacDonald was waiting to land a roundhouse right that crashed into Costello’s jaw with such force that it sent him flying through the air. He slammed into the wall again and dropped loose-limbed to the ground, evidently out cold.
“Now,” MacDonald growled as he swung around to glare at Ace and Chance. He took a step toward them.
Costello wasn’t unconscious after all. He raised a somewhat shaky hand and clamped it around MacDonald’s ankle. He yanked, but he wasn’t strong enough to pull MacDonald’s leg out from under him.
In fact, MacDonald just stopped, looked down at Costello, and laughed. “Stubborn, ain’t you?” he said. “Well, I guess I’ll just go ahead and stomp you good and proper.”
“Wait a minute,” Ace said as he scrambled to his feet. “If you kill him, that’ll make Olsen mad. He needs every available man to work on the road to the mine, doesn’t he?”
“One man won’t make a difference,” MacDonald said, baring his teeth at Ace. “He’ll just throw somebody else in here on trumped-up charges and put him to work with the rest of us. You think I haven’t seen how Olsen operates over the past year? Everybody in this fort is doomed! He’ll sacrifice all of us if he has to, to get his share of that gold. The men who have thrown in with him just don’t realize that yet.” He started to turn back toward Costello. “So it won’t matter if I stomp this good-for-nothing little polecat to pieces!”
Over and above his code of common decency, Ace sensed that he couldn’t stand by and allow MacDonald to murder Costello. The former lieutenant might be the only true ally he and Chance would have here at Fort Gila. So Ace did the only thing he could.
He tackled the brawny three-striper from behind.
If MacDonald had been expecting the attack and braced his legs and feet, Ace might not have done any good. But he took MacDonald by surprise, and the sergeant stumbled forward a couple of steps. Chance had started moving the same time Ace did. He threw himself at MacDonald’s legs and knocked them out from under the man. Ace, Chance, and MacDonald all fell to the hard-packed dirt floor.
MacDonald roared in anger and twisted around. His long arms and big hands reached for Ace, who was the closest to him. Ace tried to fend him off, but MacDonald got a hand around his throat and started to squeeze with those thick, sausage-like fingers.
Chance levered himself up, lunged at MacDonald, and rammed his knee into the sergeant’s groin. MacDonald groaned in pain and let go of Ace.
“We gotta help the sarge!” one of the deserters yelled. Several of them started to dive into the melee.
“Help . . . the Jensens!” Costello gasped to the men who had been locked up with him.
Some of them held back, unwilling to get mixed up in this brawl, but half a dozen charged into battle, meeting MacDonald’s friends with a flurry of fists. Punches rained back and forth, accompanied by grunts of effort and pain and the thudding of fists against flesh.
Ace scrambled to his feet and came upright at the same instant as MacDonald. The sergeant threw wild, roundhouse blows that Ace ducked and weaved away from. He knew it wouldn’t do any good to go after MacDonald’s body, so he watched for his opportunity and then seized it, shooting a hard, straight right that landed squarely on MacDonald’s nose. That was a weak spot on many a big man.
Evidently not Sergeant Vince MacDonald, though. The force of the blow rocked MacDonald’s head back for a second and caused blood to flow from his nostrils, but he recovered almost instantly and caught hold of Ace’s arm with a flashing sweep of his big left paw.
MacDonald reached down with his right hand and grabbed Ace’s thigh. Before Ace could do anything to stop him, MacDonald hoisted him into the air above his head. Ace knew that the burly noncom was about to smash him into the adobe wall of the guardhouse. Such an impact would break bones and pulzerize flesh.
Before MacDonald could do that, Costello heaved himself up from the ground and rammed his shoulder into MacDonald’s knees from behind. The sergeant’s knees buckled, and he couldn’t hold Ace over his head anymore. He and Ace both fell, collapsing in a heap on top of Costello.
MacDonald shrieked in pain as they all writhed around on the hard-packed dirt. Costello must have bitten him, or else gotten hold in a tender place and twisted. In a tangle of arms and legs like this, there was no room for throwing punches. Dirty fighting was the only kind of fighting there was.
Ace spotted an opening and drove his elbow into MacDonald’s throat. Such a blow might crush a man’s windpipe and prove fatal, but Ace wasn’t worrying about that now. His survival, and that of his brother, was the only thing that really mattered to him.
MacDonald gagged and thrashed, then heaved up from the ground and threw Ace off like a bucking bronco. He was still lying on top of Costello, who wrapped both arms around MacDonald’s throat and hung on, squeezing harder and harder. Beside them, Chance reared up on his knees, clubbed his hands together, and brought them down on MacDonald’s face. More blood spurted from the sergeant’s nose. He bucked a couple more times, then went still as unconsciousness claimed him.
Ace had rolled against the wall and wound up on his stomach. He raised his head and shoulders and propped himself up on his elbows. Men were down all over the guardhouse floor, whaling away at each other in struggling knots of humanity. It was impossible to tell which side was winning, if indeed either was.
How things might have turned out would never be determined. The heavy door swung open with a creaking of hinges and spilled light into the room. Ace squinted against the sudden glare and saw troopers rushing into the guardhouse with Springfield rifles held ready. A pair of them sprang into action, raising their rifles and slamming the butts down against the heads of brawling men. It took only a few s
econds of that before the fight was over. The men who hadn’t been knocked cold scrambled away from the guards.
“Stop it!” Costello yelled at the troopers. “There’s no need to hurt anybody else.”
The guards pulled back and kept their rifles leveled now, in case they needed to open fire. Through a gap in their number strode Lieutenant Frank Olsen. For a long moment, he regarded the combatants with a cold, murderous glare, but then a vicious smile broke out across his face.
“I had thought I’d give all you men the rest of the day off and start fresh on our mission in the morning, but I suppose this is what I get for trying to be nice,” the lieutenant said. “Very well. If you have this much energy, you might as well be accomplishing something. Corporal!” he barked at one of the guards. “Get these men up and out of here and put them to work!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chance helped Ace up, and then both of them assisted Costello to his feet. Prodded by the rifle-toting guards, the men who hadn’t been knocked out picked up the ones who had and shook and slapped them back to consciousness. It took three of MacDonald’s deserter friends to get him back on his feet. As he shuffled out, he glared at Ace and Chance with a roaring fire of anger and hatred in his gaze.
“MacDonald sure doesn’t like you boys,” Costello muttered.
“The feeling’s mutual,” Chance said.
“You’d better keep an eye on him any time he’s around. If he sees a chance to kill you, he’ll take it. And they give us picks and shovels when we’re out there working on the road, so it’s not like he’ll be unarmed.”
Ace said, “If you have tools you can use as weapons, why haven’t you overthrown the guards and taken command back from Olsen?”
“Like I said, there are fresh graves out in that cemetery,” Costello said as the three of them filed out of the guardhouse after the others. “Olsen makes sure that the men guarding us are ones who won’t mind shooting to kill, and those are the orders he gives them. Anybody makes the slightest move that a guard might regard as a threat, he gets a bullet in the head.” Costello shrugged. “After you’ve seen a few of your friends gunned down like that, you get to where you’d rather take a chance on being worked to death. Although that’s happened, too, a few times . . .”
Once all the prisoners were outside, the guards herded them into a group and kept them there, under the threat of the rifles, until a pair of mule-drawn wagons could be brought up. Then, again at gunpoint, they climbed into the wagons, which lurched into motion and headed for the mountains to the west.
“I wish we were going past the major’s house again,” Chance said quietly as he sat between Ace and Costello in the back of the lead wagon.
“So maybe you could get another look at Miss Evelyn?” Costello asked. He shook his head. “Your brother’s right. You really do have an eye for a pretty girl, don’t you?”
Chance grinned. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“I didn’t say there was. It’s just that not many men would be thinking about such a thing if they were in a fix like you’re in.”
“As long as we’re alive, we don’t give up hope that we’ll get out of trouble, no matter how bad it is,” Chance said. “Something in the blood, I guess.”
“I guess . . . Anyway, we’ll see how interested you are in pretty girls once you’ve spent a few days hacking a road out of those mountains.”
* * *
The Prophets weren’t towering, snowcapped peaks but rather gray, razor-backed folds in the landscape, twisting back and forth in a mad pattern that made no sense to anyone except—maybe—the Apaches. It took the wagons the better part of an hour of following a rutted trail to reach the foothills. As they approached, Ace was able to make out the beginning of the road that had been cut through the rugged terrain.
Interested in spite of the trouble they were in, he asked Costello, “How deep in the mountains is the mine?”
“About five miles,” the former lieutenant replied. “We have almost a mile of road built.”
“In a year?” Chance said. “You mean it’ll take four more years to finish the job?”
“Actually, we’ve only been working on it for a little over six months. It took a while after the major’s wife passed for Olsen to establish a strong enough hold over Sughrue to get away with what he wanted.”
Ace said, “Even so, at that rate it’ll still take several more years to build the rest of the road.”
“Yeah. When the Central Pacific had to put their railroad through the Sierra Nevadas, they had a whole horde of Chinamen to work on it. We’ve got part of a small garrison of troopers. So even though this job isn’t anywhere near as difficult as that one was, it’ll still take us longer . . . assuming we live to finish it.” Costello grunted. “That’s a pretty big assumption.”
“Then it may never be completed,” Ace mused, “and everything Olsen has done will all be for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” Costello said. “He’s already collecting from Howden-Smyth. The real jackpot’s still a good ways off, but Olsen’s making sure he gets something out of the deal all along.”
The two wagons full of prisoners, followed by a smaller cart carrying the tools and drawn by a single mule, started up the road into the foothills. Ace could tell that it had been constructed by breaking up any rocky outcroppings that were in the way and then leveling the path with shovels. No wonder progress had been slow, especially with the limited number of men available to work on the project.
“Have you had to use dynamite to blast any of the rocks out of the way?” he asked Costello.
“Yeah . . . but if you’re thinking about what you might be able to do if you got your hands on any of the stuff, you can forget about it. Olsen doesn’t let the prisoners get near any explosives. He handles it himself, or gets one of his more trusted men to do it.”
Ace shrugged. “It was just an idle thought.”
“Trust me, if it involves getting out of this mess or turning the tables on Olsen, I’ve considered it. I just haven’t come up with anything yet that wouldn’t get innocent men killed.”
Chance was looking around, studying the surrounding foothills and the slopes rising above them. As his eyes narrowed, he said, “Have you had any trouble with the Apaches around here?”
“Not really. When the fort was first established about five years ago, there were some skirmishes in the area. I wasn’t here then, I hadn’t been posted to Fort Gila yet, but I’ve heard about them. Our patrols have spotted some Indians from time to time in recent months, but they always shy away and don’t seem to be looking for trouble.”
“What about the mine?” Ace asked. “Have they attacked it?”
“Not that I know of. Like I said, Howden-Smyth has a pretty salty crew up there, including some men who do nothing but guard the place, and they’re all good with guns. Why do you ask?”
“We just like to know what’s going on,” Ace said.
“This time it’s more than that,” Chance said. He nodded toward one of the low, rounded peaks looming ahead of them. “Look up there.”
Ace turned his head to see what his brother was talking about. Instantly, he spotted the trio of riders perched up high, looking down at the new road snaking its way through the foothills. Although they were too far away for him to be able to make out any details about the watchers, he had no doubt who they were.
Apparently, neither did Costello, who said in a quiet voice, “Yeah, those are Apaches, all right.”
“What do you reckon they want?” Chance asked.
“Maybe they’re just curious. They probably don’t think it’s a good thing, white men building a road into a domain they consider to belong to them.”
Ace said, “Wouldn’t they feel the same way about the mine? It’s an intrusion into their land, too.”
“Mines come and go,” Costello said. “Maybe they’re hoping the vein will play out and the white men will go away. But a road . . . that’s different. Any t
ime there’s a road, whether it’s one like this or a railroad, it usually means that more and more white men will be coming, until there are so many of them that they never leave. If you think back on it, opening up some sort of new route has nearly always been what started Indian trouble.”
Ace nodded. The former officer was right. “Maybe they’re watching to see whether or not the road keeps getting built. Maybe they’re hoping it’ll be too hard and Olsen will give it up.”
“They don’t know Frank Olsen,” Costello said. “He’s never going to give up on something that he believes will put a lot of money in his pocket.”
Chance said, “Then sooner or later, the Apaches will get tired of watching and hoping and decide they need to put a stop to the road themselves.”
“I don’t doubt that you’re right. Question is, how long will it take them to get fed up and do something about it?”
“If we keep working on this road,” Ace said, “I expect we’ll find out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A short time later, the wagons reached their destination. The Apaches who had been watching from the heights had wheeled their ponies around and disappeared, and Ace and Chance hadn’t caught sight of them again.
The troopers handling the mule teams hauled back on their reins, and the guards on horseback halted their mounts. With Springfield rifles covering them, Ace, Chance, Costello, MacDonald, and the other prisoners clambered down from the wagons and lined up to receive picks and shovels from the soldier manning the equipment cart.
Once they had the tools, the soldier in charge of the work detail pointed to the cluster of small boulders that sat directly in the way at the point where the road stopped.
“Bust up those rocks and get ’em out of there,” he ordered. “We’ve only got a few hours of daylight left. I want those boulders gone by the time we start back to the fort.”
As they started toward the boulders, Costello said with a note of bleak humor in his voice, “Making little rocks out of bigger rocks. That’s the fate of prisoners since the beginning of time.” He looked over at Ace and Chance. “Have you boys ever done work like this before?”
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