The Cure of Silver Cañon

by Max Brand

  “That’s sand,” said the older man, with a grudging admiration. “But it don’t get us very far.”

  Mary Hamilton appeared at the door. “No fear of them for a long time,” she said. “They’re busy.”

  “Whiskey?” asked Hamilton.

  She nodded. Then to Lew Carney, “Oh, why, why, didn’t you bring a dozen men?”

  “Because I couldn’t take ’em on a wild-goose chase, and because you hadn’t told me what I could say. I could have taken fifty men with me but not without a reason to give them.”

  She admitted the truth of what he said with a miserable gesture. “I couldn’t talk,” she said. “I’d promised.”

  “Like a fool girl,” groaned her father.

  There was a flash of anger in her eyes but she said nothing. And turning to Lew Carney, she said, “You’ve done a fine thing and a clean thing to try to help us but it’s no use.”

  “I can go back and bring help.”

  “It’s too late. They intend to move on in the morning.”

  His head bent.

  “Get clear before they know you’re here,” she added

  Lew Carney smiled, and she looked at him in wonder.

  “Don’t you see?” she explained. “I’m grateful for what you want to do. And when I first saw you, you brought my heart into my throat with hope.” She was so simple as she admitted it, so grave in her quiet despair, that Lew Carney felt like death. “But now there’s nothing for you to do,” she concluded, “except to leave us and see that you’re not drawn into this yourself. Will you go?”

  “Do you want me to go?” Lew Carney asked.

  “What’s all this?” broke in her father. “Carney, get out and ride like the devil. They may make things warm for you yet.”

  But he repeated, looking steadily into the girl’s eyes, “Do you want me to go?”

  “I like you,” the girl said quietly. “I admire you and I know that you’re clean and honest. But you can’t help us. There’s nothing for you to do. Please go.”

  “Then,” Lew Carney said, “that settles it. I stay.” He took off his hat to give point to his words, and hung it on a nail on the wall. Feeling their puzzled glances, he stiffened a bit and made his eyes, with trouble, meet the eyes of the girl. “I’ll tell you why. I’ve been a drifter and a waster, Mary Hamilton. I’m not clean particularly, and if you ask a good many people, they’ll laugh if you say I’m honest. No, I’m not a gambler, I’m a gold-digger. When you come right down to it, I don’t take many chances. Cards are my business. Other fellows got their hands all hardened up with work and their brains all slowed up with making money. And after they’ve got their stake, they meet up with me. They play poker for fun … I play it for a living. What chance have they got? None. Well, that’s what my business is. And all at once I’m most terrible, awful sick of it all. You understand? I’m tired of it. I want something new, and the first job that comes up sort of handy seems to be to do what I can for you and your dad. You want me to go. Well, if I’m good enough to be worth having my neck saved, I’m good enough to pull a gun in a pinch for you two.” He paused. “Seems like I’ve made a sort of a speech, and now I feel mostly like a fool. But, there, I see that you’re about to say something about gratitude. Don’t say it. This is only another kind of a game and I enjoy taking chances. Here’s our first chance and our big chance. If your father can stand it, I’ll get him through that window and carry him up the hill to my horse, and …”

  “Break off,” cut in Hamilton. “Son, you mean well but I can’t move a hand. I’m nailed here for a month.”

  And a second glance at his pain-worn face told Lew Carney that it was the truth. Once more the two pressed him generously to leave them, but, when he had refused, they sat beside the bunk of the father and talked of possibilities. But always in the midst of a scheme, the laughter from the men beside the pool where the riot was running high broke in upon them and mocked them. The helplessness of Hamilton was the thing that foiled every hope. No scheme could meet the great necessity.

  Silence came over them, that grim silence when people wait together for a calamity. In the morning the band was moving on. They could not take the wounded man with them. They could not leave him behind to die slowly or else to be saved and to deliver an accusation that would imperil all their lives. The term of his life, then, was the dawn, and before the dawn came, John Hamilton told Lew the story of the ghost wagon. He told it swiftly in a monotonous voice. Now and again there was a moment of interruption—when Lew or Mary went to the front of the shack to make sure that the gang was thinking of nothing more than its whiskey—but on the whole the story of the phantom wagon went smoothly and swiftly to its dark conclusion.

  X

  Three short weeks ago John Hamilton had left his ranch for a prospecting tour. Though he had made far more out of cows than he had ever made out of gold and silver, the old lure of the rocks still held for him. From time to time he was in the habit of making a brief circuit through the hills, chipping rocks with an unfailing enthusiasm. Ten days of this each year kept him happy. He filled his house with samples and mining, as far as John Hamilton was concerned, stopped at that point.

  On this season he had gone out with his burro to see the world, sighting between those two flapping, cumbersome ears. But it had been long since he had really taken his prospecting seriously, and now he chipped rock with more careless abandon than ever. What sincere and hopeful labor had never brought to him, he found by happy chance, or unhappy chance, as it was to prove. For drilling into a lead he had uncovered a pocket of pure gold!

  He had run short of powder by this time and that pocket was a most difficult one to open. It was a deposit strongly guarded in quartzite, the hardest of rocks. Yet with the point of his pick, he had dug out five pounds of pure gold!

  It was enough to set a more callous heart than that of John Hamilton on fire. When he saw that he could not work the deposit without more powder, he debated whether he should go to Cayuse for supplies and to file his claim or whether he should take the longer trip and return home to bring the supplies from there.

  The temptation to convince the mockers in his own family, where his annual prospecting trips were an established joke, was too great.

  “Mother was away, so I dumped the gold on the table before Mary and watched her eyes shine. Same light always comes in the eyes when you see gold. Can’t help it. I’ve shown it to a baby, and they grab for it every time. It’s in the blood.”

  Finally he had determined to return to the site of his mine with a heavy wagon and a span of strong horses, taking supplies in abundance, one tested ranch hand, Hugh Delaney, and his daughter Mary to run the domestic part of the camp. At the same time he sent to the nearest telegraph office a message to his son Bill. Bill, it appeared, was the scapegrace of the family. Three years ago, after a quarrel with his father, he had left home, but the finding of the gold unlocked all of John Hamilton’s tenderness, for Bill had gone many a time on those annual trips. He had sent an unlucky telegram informing Bill of the find and inviting him to come to Cayuse and ride down Silver Cañon to the claim.

  Without waiting for a reply, he started out in his wagon with Mary and Hugh Delaney, and they went straight to the pocket.

  It had not been disturbed in the interim, and for five days of tremendous labor Hamilton and Delaney broke away the quartzite bit by bit and finally laid the pocket bare. It was a gloomy disappointment. Instead of proving a vein that opened out into the incredibly rich pocket that John Hamilton expected, it pinched away to nothing at the end of a few feet. In fact he had picked out a full two-thirds of the metal in his first attempt. Nevertheless, up to this point, the venture had been profitable enough in its small way, but when they were on the verge of abandoning the work, and only waiting for the arrival of Bill Hamilton from Cayuse, they were surprised late one afternoon by eight men who had left their horses
at a distance, and crept upon the camp.

  John Hamilton had thrown up his hands at the first summons and at the first sight of the odds. But Hugh Delaney, ignorant, stubborn, tenacious fighter that he was, had gone for his gun. Before he could reach it, he was shot down from behind, and then a volley followed that dropped John Hamilton himself, shot through the thigh.

  The explanation was simple enough. A friend of Jack Doyle, long rider and bandit of parts, had seen the telegram that Hamilton sent to his son, and the outlaw was immediately informed. The surprise attack followed.

  But when the first volley struck down the two men, Doyle himself remained behind to help bandage the wounds with the aid of Mary Hamilton until a cry from his men called him to them. They had found the niche in the quartzite and the gleaming particles of gold shining in it. And at the sight the whole crew had gone mad with the gold fever. They seized drills, picks, hammers, and flew at the hard rock, shouting as they hewed at it. There were practical miners among them but science was forgotten in the first frenzy. Jack Doyle himself was drawn into the mob. They threw off their belts in the fury of the labor. They discarded their weapons.

  What were guns with one dying and one wounded man behind them, and the only sound enemy a young girl? But John Hamilton, lying on the sand, had conceived a plan for reprisal and whispered it to his daughter. She took it up with instant courage.

  His scheme was both simple and bold. The girl was to come near the workers, get as many of the guns as she could, and at least all of the weapons that were closest to the frenzied miners, and then fall back to one side. In the meantime, John Hamilton was to squirm over to his rifle, train it on the bandits, and at his shout Mary also was to level one of the outlaws’ own guns upon them.

  It was a sufficiently bold plan to be successful. Rapt in the gold lust she could have picked the pockets of the gang as well as taken their weapons without drawing a word from them, and when the shout of John Hamilton came, the eight bold men and bad whirled, and found themselves helpless, unarmed, and looking down the muzzles of three guns. For the dying Delaney had dragged out a revolver, and now twisted over on one side, trained on a target.

  Eight to three, when one of the three was a girl, seemed liberal odds but a repeating rifle in the hands of a good shot will go a long ways toward convincing the largest crowd. The gang might have attempted to rush even the leveled rifle of John Hamilton, to say nothing of the girl and Delaney, but a few terse words from their leader convinced them that they were helpless, and that the wise part was to attempt no resistance.

  They obeyed grudgingly. John Hamilton issued curt orders. Delaney lay where he had fallen, his gun clenched in both hands, his dying face grim with determination. And the outlaws obediently stepped forward, one by one, obediently turned their backs, kneeled, and folded their hands behind them, and each was bound securely by Mary Hamilton. They threatened wild vengeance during that time of humiliation. Only Jack Doyle himself had remained cool and unperturbed, and had whipped his followers into silence and obedience with his tongue.

  Accordingly he was the last to be bound, and, before the rope was fastened about his wrists, he was ordered to help Mary with the burden of Delaney. Together, under the gun of Hamilton, they lifted the wounded man into the wagon, Doyle making no attempt to escape to cover. And later, under the cover of Mary’s revolver, Doyle, unaided, carried Hamilton to the wagon and laid him tenderly on a bed of straw.

  “For his muscles ain’t muscles … they’re India rubber,” Hamilton said. “He handled me like I was no heavier than a girl. He did that for a fact.”

  But the problem was still a knotty one. They could not remain in this camp with Delaney dying, Hamilton wounded and liable to become feverish at any time, and therefore helpless, and one girl to guard and tend ten men. For every reason they had to get to the nearest habitation, and the nearest place was Cayuse.

  But here again it was easier to name the thing than to do it. If eight strong men were placed in the wagon, bound, who would guard them, and also drive the team of horses? And if they were placed in the wagon—an additional burden of fifteen hundred pounds and more—would not the two horses be taxed to the limit of their strength?

  There was only one young girl to handle eight men, bound indeed, but each of them desperate, and each willing to risk his life for freedom. For if they arrived in Cayuse, the mob would not wait for the law to take its course. It was the dying Delaney who suggested the only possible course that would start them toward Cayuse, and at the same time keep all the eight men under the eye of the girl. It was Delaney who proposed that they harness the eight men to the chain of the wagon and let the horses be led behind.

  They discussed the plan urgently and briefly, for whatever they did, they had to do with speed. At length they decided that though the progress toward Cayuse by manpower would be slow, yet the labor would serve to wear down the strength of the eight until they would shortly be past the point of offering any dangerous and concerted move. And above all it was necessary to keep them from an outbreak. Besides, though they might not pick up anyone during the night, it was more than probable that early the next morning some freighter up Silver Cañon would overtake them, and then their troubles would end.

  In this discussion Delaney took the weightiest part, for his words had the force of one about to die, and the selfless, kindly Irishman had the pleasure of seeing his murderers harnessed to the wagon that was to draw him to Cayuse and draw them into the power of the law. Altogether, the plan was not without a neatly ironic side.

  The outlaws at least felt that side of it. At first, though they could not refuse the urge of the girl’s revolver prodding their ribs, they would not take a step forward. Even the voice of Doyle, trembling with passion but submitting to the inevitable, could not stir them. Until Mary Hamilton took out the long whip and sent the lash singing and cracking above their heads. She did not touch them with it, but the horror of the lash was sufficient. Under its flying shade they winced and then buckled to their work with a venomous lurch that shot the wagon forward.

  The load was light for the broad wheels ate very slightly into the sand, rather packing it like the hoofs of a camel than cutting it like the hoofs of a horse, and the eight men found their labor easy enough. For the first hour they expended their spare breath in wild threats and volleys of curses. They cursed the girl who tormented them in the driver’s seat of the wagon. They cursed themselves. They cursed their luck. They cursed gold. They cursed even the leader who had brought them to this pass.

  Eventually the work grew keener, and the burden, which they had hardly noticed at first, now began to tell on them. They took shorter and shorter steps and began to move with a rhythm, leaning forward and swaying like a team of horses. And the spare breath was now gone. The dragging of the wagon burned out their throats and kept them silent. Once, in a futile outburst of rage, they turned and rushed about the wagon, gibbering at the girl, but their hands were still tied behind them, and the compelling point of the revolver sent them back to their places. They went, groaning at their impotence.

  Night fell on the wagon moving forward by fits and starts in a dreadful silence far more terrible than the air of blasphemy through which it had moved at first. Sitting on her seat, Mary heard the death rattle of Delaney and ran back to him too late to hear his last words.

  And later still, she was horrified by the voice of her father speaking to the dead man beside him. She lit a lantern and spoke to him, but he turned on her glassy, blank eyes. The fever had reached his head, and he was mad with delirium. So she put out the lantern again and went back to her place. There she crouched, never daring to take her eyes off the swaying line of eight who struggled before her, the dead man behind her, the madman close at her side.

  Finally her father no longer spoke aloud, but his voice was an insidious whisper hissing into the darkness. And all over Silver Cañon was the ghostly moon.

&
nbsp; In this formation they had passed Lew Carney. The girl did not see him, for she was sitting far back in the wagon. No wonder that the eight harnessed men did not speak to him, for he would have been one more enemy to keep them in hand.

  But they plodded on interminably until a haze grew up the valley, and then the sandstorm struck them. Against it there was no possibility of pulling the wagon. Huddled together, the eight were a miserable group whipped by the flying dust.

  Here the great calamity happened, for her father, rolling a cigarette in his delirium, managed to light a match in spite of the wind, but only to have the sulphur head fall among the straw that littered and piled the floor of the wagon. The blaze darted up at once, and the wind tossed it the length of the wagon in a breathing space. Her father began laughing wildly at the blaze. Through the darkness it lit the dead face and the living eyes of Delaney, and outside in the storm the eight men yelled with joy for they knew that their time had come.

  There was no other way. She could not handle the weight of her father, and therefore she went to Doyle, cut his bonds, and forced him at the point of her revolver to drag out the body of Delaney and the living form of her father. He obeyed without a word, but when he had done his work, in the rush of sand, he took her unguarded and mastered her weapon hand. A moment later all eight were loosed, and the victors were again the vanquished.

  Meanwhile the wagon burned furiously. Some of the eight were for throwing Hamilton back into the blaze along with Delaney, to burn away all traces of their crimes. But when their leader assured them that there was not nearly enough of a conflagration to consume the bodies, they gave up that vengeance. They would have worked some harm to the girl, also. They would have driven her with whips as she had driven them, but here again the leader interfered. He had been singularly gentle with Mary from the first and now he stood staunchly by her.