He glanced from Lonnie to Casey, who stood frozen in horror, and laughed.
“What is it? What is it?” Kinch said, grabbing his own rifle and cocking it.
He looked around wildly.
“Oh, nothin’,” Engstrom said, holding his rifle on Lonnie, who stood with his hands raised to his shoulders. “Just these two younkers keepin’ us two old curly wolves on our toes—that’s all.”
He gave Lonnie a mocking wink.
Lonnie glanced at Casey, who returned the glance, crestfallen.
Disappointment was a heavy stone inside him. He cursed to himself.
Kinch and his friend Dutch Engstrom not only retied Lonnie and Casey, they tied their hands behind their backs and their ankles behind their backs, as well. Their wrist ropes were connected to their ankle ropes by a foot-long length of hemp. They lay on their sides, facing each other on the ground, like two hogs bound for tomorrow’s slaughter.
Not long after the two outlaws had rolled back up in their bedrolls, their snoring resumed.
Lonnie looked over at Casey lying three feet away from him. He couldn’t see her clearly, as the moon was waning, but he thought she lay with her eyes open, staring hopelessly at the ground.
Lonnie doubted that either of them would get much sleep for the remainder of the night. Their positions were far too uncomfortable for slumber.
“Casey?” Lonnie whispered.
She rolled her sad eyes up to him.
“You all right?”
“Do I look all right?”
Lonnie sighed and winced at the tension that the deep breath added to his strained arms and shoulders. “No, I reckon not. Sorry about all this. I reckon we should have lit out of the canyon back when you said we should.”
Casey didn’t respond to that. She just went back to staring at the ground.
Keeping his voice low, Lonnie said, “I reckon you were right to throw in with the counter jumper.”
“He’s a bookkeeper, Lonnie.”
“I meant you were right to throw in with that bookkeeper.” Lonnie paused. “I reckon Niles or Giles or whatever his name is wouldn’t have gotten you in half as much trouble as this.”
Casey stared at the ground.
After a few seconds, she made a snorting sound.
Lonnie frowned curiously, staring at her. Then he saw her shoulders jerking, and he realized that she was laughing.
Her shoulders lurched more violently and she made a strangling sound as she laughed louder, blowing dirt and pine needles into her face. Then Lonnie found himself snorting, as well. His snorts grew into uncontrollable laughter as he, too, saw the dark humor in their situation.
Kinch and Engstrom stopped snoring.
Kinch lifted his head from his saddle. “Good night, children!” he ordered.
Lonnie and Casey pressed their faces to the ground to squelch their laughter but it took their shoulders a long time to stop jerking.
Even though Lonnie knew tomorrow would likely be his last day on earth, morning couldn’t come fast enough. The chill mountain air of the long night aggravated the aches and pains in his strained joints. The two old outlaws didn’t start rolling and snorting out of their bedrolls until well after dawn, however. They continued snorting and coughing and spitting phlegm for close to a half hour before they came over and cut Casey and Lonnie free so they could limp off into the woods and relieve themselves.
Kinch said, “Either one of you gets the urge to make a run for it, just remember I was a sharpshooter back during the War of Northern Greed and Criminal Aggression, and I can shoot the eye out of a junebug at two hundred yards.”
Kinch and Engstrom laughed at the exaggeration.
Even if Lonnie had had the urge to run, he doubted he could have run—not after being trussed up like the proverbial fatted calf for half the night. Besides, he wouldn’t have left Casey. He doubted she was in any better condition to run than he was.
When he finished his business, he glanced back toward the camp. Kinch was down on one knee, coaxing last night’s fire back to life. He had Lonnie’s rifle near. Engstrom was off in the trees on the far side of the camp, tending their horses. Kinch glanced up occasionally at Lonnie, making sure the boy didn’t run off.
Casey walked up out of the trees behind Lonnie. Her hair was badly mussed. She looked pale and tired out and frightened. Lonnie’s heart ached at seeing her so beaten down. He grabbed her arm, glanced toward Kinch who was blowing on the mounded ashes, and leaned in close to the girl.
“As soon as your horse is saddled,” Lonnie said, “you climb up on Miss Abigail and hightail it back to town. You understand?”
Casey scowled at him, as though he’d said something ludicrous. “I won’t leave you alone with those men, Lonnie.”
“There’s no point in us both dyin’, Casey.”
Casey gazed into his eyes for a moment, her eyes soft. “If you’re going to die, Lonnie, I’m dying with you.”
“Hey, you two lovebirds,” Kinch called, “get over here now!”
Lonnie stared back at Casey, shocked by what she’d said. She was a puzzle, this girl.
His throat felt thick and tight. He cleared it and said, “If I don’t have to worry about you, I’ll find a way out from under them. You know I can do it. That’s how I am. So, first chance you get—and you probably won’t get one, but in case you do—you ride like Miss Abigail’s tail’s on fire!”
Kinch straightened now and shouted, “What’d I just tell you two? If you ain’t back here in three seconds, your end is gonna come sooner rather than later!” He picked up Lonnie’s rifle and cocked it loudly.
“We’re comin’!” Lonnie called.
He jerked his desperate, beseeching gaze back to Casey. “Got it?”
Dully, turning her mouth corners down, Casey nodded. She strode past him, brushing her hand against his, and headed back to the fire.
“What were you two talkin’ about over there?” Kinch wanted to know.
“None of your business,” Casey snapped at him.
“If you two try anything, you’re wolf bait—understand?”
Lonnie said, “Wolf bait ain’t gonna dig up that gold for you.”
Kinch glowered at him, his eyes dark beneath the brim of his battered hat. “Stop your sassin’ and gather wood for the fire, but don’t you leave my sight, boy. The girl’s gonna be here, makin’ coffee and corn cakes. If you run, she’ll pay. Now, get to work—both of ya. You got you a job of work ahead!”
CHAPTER 32
When they’d all padded out their bellies and had their fill of coffee, Kinch and Engstrom led Lonnie and Casey by gunpoint out to where the horses were picketed.
“Saddle up and be quick about it, children,” Kinch ordered. “As soon as you’re in the saddle, your wrists will be tied to the horn. We’re gonna tie her horse to your buckskin’s tail, and Dutch will be leadin’ your buckskin by the reins. So don’t even think you’re gonna get a chance to run off—understand?”
He stared pointedly, suspiciously at Lonnie.
Lonnie shook his head as though in grim defeat. “You two got it all figured out, don’t you?”
“Let’s just say this ain’t our first rodeo,” Engstrom said. “Is it, Kinch?” he called over the mule’s back.
“No, it sure ain’t,” Kinch said.
Lonnie glanced at Casey, nodding at her to be prepared for a chance to run, then picked up his saddle blanket and tossed it over the General’s back. He took his time rigging the General. He wanted Casey to have her mare saddled ahead of him. When the two outlaws had their own mounts saddled and ready to go, Lonnie was taking his time inspecting the General’s right rear hoof.
“He’s a slow mover, that one,” Engstrom said, indicating Lonnie. “You watch him like a hawk, Kinch. He looks like he couldn’t toe up a horse apple from a frozen barnyard, but he’s sly as a three-legged coyote.”
He gave Lonnie a sharp look.
“I’ll walk out a ways and make sure we
’re alone out here. If anyone camped nearby, I’ll likely smell their smoke.”
“Don’t worry,” Kinch said. “The kid knows if he tries anything, the girl’s gonna pay.”
Kinch narrowed an eye at Casey. Lonnie turned to Casey, and his heart immediately started tattooing a frenzied rhythm against his breastbone.
Casey had her mare saddled and ready to go. She’d seen her chance. With one quick, anxious look at Lonnie, she stepped fleetly up onto Miss Abigail’s back, and shot a haughty glance at Kinch, who merely stared up at her dully, slow to comprehend what she was fixing to do.
The outlaw had thought that Lonnie was the one he had to keep the closest watch on. He’d been wrong.
Casey said, “Yeah, but what if the girl hornswoggles you, you cork-headed fool, and tries something herself?”
Cheeks flushed with desperation, the girl neck-reined the mare around on a dime and batted her heels against the chestnut’s flanks. With a single lunge off her hindquarters, Miss Abigail was off and running through the trees.
Kinch grabbed his rifle and raised it, cocking it and yelling, “Why that—!”
As the man aimed at Casey, Lonnie threw himself against Kinch, shoving the rifle up as the outlaw triggered it. The rifle thundered as Kinch fell on his back, Lonnie landing on top of him and struggling to wrench the rifle out of the outlaw’s hand.
“Lonnie!” Casey yelled in the distance.
Lonnie turned his head and shouted, “I’m all right! Keep goin’, Casey! Ride!”
He’d just gotten that last shout out before Kinch slammed the butt of his rifle against Lonnie’s head. It was a glancing blow, but it threw Lonnie onto his back, where he lay staring up at the sky while little, golden butterflies danced in front of his eyes. Beneath the ringing in his ears, he heard Casey’s hoof thuds dwindle quickly into the distance.
“I’ll go after her!” Engstrom said, running up to his saddled horse.
“Let her go,” Kinch said, pushing up off a knee and heaving himself to his feet, breathing hard, cheeks flushed.
He glared down at Lonnie. “We still got this one here. He’ll dig up the gold for us. Then we’ll kill the hydrophobic mongrel and be shed of this canyon once and for all. By the time she can bring the law, we’ll be halfway to Denver and points south.”
Lonnie’s head ached, and the rough ride around the lake and up a low ridge wasn’t doing it any good. He rode with his wrists tied to his saddle horn. Engstrom was leading the General by his bridle reins. Kinch led the way up the steep slope around outcroppings of jagged rock resembling the backbones of dinosaurs.
Tall pines and firs loomed over and around them.
Lonnie had lost his bearings, but he thought they were somewhere near the canyon’s far northern end, though he couldn’t see the craggy peaks around the skull from this low angle. He could hear the hoarse, raspy breathing of the wind around the giant skull, however.
The two outlaws stopped frequently to study their back trail, to make sure no one was following. Then Kinch would collapse his spyglass, mount his sorrel, and continue riding.
“You sure you remember where you buried the strongbox?” Engstrom called to Kinch around midday, the blazing sun burning down from straight overhead.
“Well, it’s been eighteen years,” Kinch said, looking around carefully and also a little anxiously, Lonnie thought. “Excuse me if I don’t ride right up to it, Dutch!”
“I’m just askin’,” Engstrom said, throwing his hands up in supplication. “Just askin’, that’s all . . .”
Kinch started to look around more and more anxiously. By the set of his shoulders, Lonnie thought the old outlaw was beginning to panic, thinking he might not have remembered the route to the gold as well as he’d thought he had. He’d probably gone over the map in his head hundreds if not thousands of times, all those years he’d spent behind bars.
Only to discover, in the end, that the years had fogged the trail . . .
That was all right with Lonnie. The sooner they got to the gold, the sooner he’d be dead. He was still waiting for a chance to skin out away from these two old bandits. After losing Casey, however, they were being more careful. They’d tied Lonnie’s wrists tight to his saddle horn, and Engstrom looked back often to make sure Lonnie hadn’t worked himself loose.
Kinch hauled back suddenly on his sorrel’s reins. He sat studying a black granite ridge wall down which a small spring trickled over a glistening path of blue-green moss. At the bottom of the ridge the water had formed a slight pool ringed with deep grass. The water flowed over the lip of the pool and down across the trail in a rivulet that murmured like delicate wind chimes.
“What is it?” Engstrom asked Kinch.
Kinch worked his nose like a dog. “That smell. I know that smell. I remember that smell!”
“I reckon my sniffer’s done been fouled by too many full privies and slop pails not to mention that rotten prison food they was always feedin’ us. Rotten potatoes and man sweat is about all I can smell anymore.”
Lonnie could smell what Kinch was smelling. The smell of green growth and wet rock and mushrooms and the slightly cloying smell of moss and mold. He could tell from the way Kinch was now looking around, sniffing, that those smells were reaching up from the past to tickle his memory.
“There!” Kinch said, pointing on up the slope a ways, toward the base of the granite ridge wall. “That’s it right there, or I’ll be hanged!”
Kinch galloped the sorrel on up the ridge and stopped near a depression at the base of the stone wall. Wildflowers grew in the high grass over and around the depression. So did honeysuckle shrubs and even a few gnarled cedars and pine saplings.
Kinch swung heavily down from his horse and stood staring at the depression, fists on his hips.
He turned toward Engstrom after a time and grinned. He pointed at the depression. “That’s it. We laid up here, making sure we were shed of the posse. The old digging we found is that low spot right there. We slid the strongbox off our mule and into the hole, and caved it in. That brush has done grown up in the eighteen years since. No one’s messed with that hole. I can tell they haven’t. The gold is still down there, Engstrom!”
He looked around, and then pointed upslope toward several humps of black granite about the size of large ranch wagons. “Beyond them rocks up there—that’s where I buried Bentley, so’s no one would ever find him.”
He looked again at Engstrom, who’d remained on his horse.
“Come on, come on!” Kinch said, beckoning. “Bring the mongrel.” He grinned at Lonnie. “And a shovel!”
CHAPTER 33
Lonnie rammed the folding shovel into the dense, tangled roots at the base of a shrub, and glanced at the two men sitting in the grass about ten feet away from him. Both held their rifles across their thighs, watching him eagerly.
Sweat ran down Lonnie’s cheeks. It burned in his eyes.
He’d dug two feet down into the hole and was still coming up against large rocks and shrub roots, which required prying and twisting and heaving away, so that he could continue digging deeper into the hole.
“Come on, come on,” Kinch said. “You’re young and strong, boy. Keep diggin’!”
“I’m thirsty,” Lonnie said, dabbing sweat from his eyes with his neckerchief. “Toss me my canteen, will ya?”
His canteen lay in the grass near where the two old bandits lounged like church deacons at a Sunday afternoon picnic. They were passing a small, flat bottle of whiskey back and forth between them.
“No more water till you’re done,” Kinch growled.
“The faster you dig down to the strongbox,” Engstrom said, “the faster you can have a drink of water—ain’t that right, Kinch.”
“There you have it, kid. Dig!”
Lonnie started digging again with an angry snort. His head hurt from the braining that Kinch had given him. His shirt and longhandle top were sweat-basted to his chest and back.
After another ten minutes of
digging, he stopped, breathless, and turned to the two old reprobates still passing the bottle, their eyes growing more and more glassy. “This would go a heckuva lot faster if one of you would take a turn and give me a breather,” Lonnie said. “It’s hot, and, like I said, I’m thirsty. And who knows how far down that box is.”
Kinch wrinkled his nostrils and narrowed his eyes. “Who raised you to talk down to your elders?”
“I’m just sayin’—”
“What you’re doin’ is sassin’ your elders and your betters,” Engstrom said, pointing an angry finger at Lonnie. “Now, you get to work or I’m gonna come over there and box your ears.”
“Keep it up, kid,” Kinch put in, “and I’m gonna drill a bullet into each of your knees. How would you like that?”
“How would that help?” Lonnie said, exasperated.
Kinch merely jutted his jaw at him, glaring.
Lonnie sighed and continued digging.
He pried up another rock and dug a few more shovelfuls of gravel. The shovel met something that had no give to it. Lonnie rammed the shovel down against whatever it was, probing, then turned to the outlaws. “Hey, I think I got it!”
He was relieved that his work might soon be over, even though it meant his life would likely soon be over, as well. He was so hot, tired, and hungry that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
The outlaws scrambled drunkenly to their feet, keeping their rifles on Lonnie, and hurried over to the hole.
“Well, keep diggin’!” Kinch ordered. “Keep diggin’!”
Lonnie kept digging until he’d uncovered the top of the stout wooden, two-feet-by-one-foot strongbox. There was a rusted metal hasp but no lock. The lock had likely been shot away by the outlaws some eighteen years ago.
“Sure as tootin’,” Kinch said, running an eager hand across his mouth. “There she is, Dutch!”
Engstrom whistled.
“Come on, kid—put your back into it,” he ordered. “Haul it on out of there!”
Lonnie went back to work, digging along all sides of the box. When he’d gotten a gap dug all around it, he got down on his hands and knees, grabbed one exposed handle, and tried pulling the box out of the ground.
Curse of Skull Canyon Page 14