by COLE JACKSON
Again he studied the overhang and at the same time visualized the crumbling ledge. He chuckled as the plan unfolded; then explained it to Pancho.
The little Yaqui’s eyes snapped.
“It will be simple, señor,” he declared. “You, señor, and I will do the work in the dark hours, both here and within the cave. Fear not of chance discovery, Capitan. None may approach without Pancho knowing.”
This doubtless explained the trip Jim Hatfield and the Yaqui made to the gloomy hollow the following night. They carried mysterious packages with them, which they handled gingerly, and during the space between a sun and a sun they worked at the cavern mouth and on the crumbling ledge.
“It’s all ready,” the Ranger said at length, straightening his weary back and setting aside drill and sledge. “You’ll handle this end when the time comes and I’ll take care of the ledge. You’re sure you can find out when they’ll ride this way again?”
“Pancho will know,” the Yaqui replied tersely. “Even now he hurries beyond the river, there to listen and watch. He will warn El Capitan in time.”
“And after that things will be a lot better in this district,” the Ranger commented.
“Si, Capitan, and my friend the young Señor Webb, will sleep more soundly, doubtless.”
Jim Hatfield nodded, his eyes grayly cold. He was thinking of a lonely grave beneath the whispering pines close by the bloody Huachuca Trail.
CHAPTER 17
THREE nights later Jim Hatfield sat in the Una Golondrina and talked with Amado Capistrano. The hunchback was recounting his discovery of the silver lode which became the Cibola mine.
“It was the merest chance,” he said. “Had the rabbit darted the other way, I would have cut straight across the canyon toward the Huachuca Trail and never have approached the ledge. I owe much to that rabbit, and I feel, somehow, that I also owe much to a strange and likeable character I met with that same day.
“He was a tall man, nearly as tall as yourself, with a great brown beard shot with gray and fine eyes. He gave me coffee and appeared not to notice my misshapen body. I have often wondered what became of him.
“Strange, on the ledge which was the outcropping of the Cibola lode, I found the marks of a pick, very fresh marks, and I have often wondered did not that kindly stranger stumble upon the rich find before I? If so, why did he not return to claim what was rightly his? There were no notices posted, and no location filed. I searched the records and could find none. Nor could I learn anything of whom the man might be.”
“You’ll never see him again, Don Amado,” Hatfield replied softly, “and I guess you were right in thinking he hit on your ledge, too. I happen to know,” he added, “that fellow, whose name was Shafter, left an old mother without much to live on.”
Amado Capistrano glanced up at the tall Ranger, a warm light in his clear eyes. He smiled his charming, melancholy smile.
“You make me very happy, my friend,” he said. “That old mother will never know want, nor lack with the material things to make happy the declining years. Now tell me — ”
The talk was suddenly interrupted by a man who came striding across the dance floor. It was John Chadwick, wearing a jovial smile. He stopped at the table occupied by Hatfield and the hunchback.
“Amado,” he said, “I’ve been doing some thinking. There isn’t one bit of sense in you and I being on the prod against each other the way we have been. Supposing we call it quits and try and get along together?”
Capistrano smiled his reply.
“Nothing would appeal to me more,” he declared heartily.
“Fine!” exclaimed Chadwick. “Tell you what — supposing you come over to my place tomorrow, about noon. It isn’t but about three hours’ ride, you know. We’ll have a little talk and thrash things out proper. You come along, too, Hatfield. I’ve got a bottle or two of the right stuff and my Mex cook puts up a mighty fine meal. What do you say? Is it a go?”
He rested his broad hands on the table top and leaned forward as he spoke. His coat swung open and Hatfield could see the guns in his carefully adjusted shoulder holsters. His gaze rested for a long moment on Chadwick’s heavy double cartridge belt, and on the brass rims of the shells snugged in the loop. He raised his eyes to the cattle king’s and the look in them was inscrutable.
“Yes, I’ll come,” he said quietly. “I think we ought to have an interesting session.”
Amado Capistrano had already accepted the rancher’s invitation.
Glancing toward the door, Hatfield saw a lithe, dark little man enter the saloon. A moment later he left the table with a word of excuse and sauntered through the swinging doors. Outside he waited until Pancho, the Yaqui tracker, joined him.
“They ride tonight, Capitan,” Pancho whispered, his eyes snapping with excitement. “All will be there tonight, or nearly all. Cartina himself will be there, and perhaps the other of whom you spoke. We strike, Capitan?”
Jim Hatfield glanced toward the distant hilltops, and Pancho, eagerly reading his expression, gazed upon the face of the Lone Wolf, a bleak, terrible face in which were set eyes that glittered coldly as frosted dagger points under a winter sun.
Again the Ranger and the tracker rode into the hills. On the crest of a long ridge they separated, Pancho making his way to the cavern mouth in the hollow. Hatfield rode to where the conveyor buckets clicked past the gloomy cleft in the cliff. He concealed Goldy in a thicket on the banks of a little stream, where he could have grass and water, and entered the cleft. On the lip of the ghastly pit he crouched, listening to the murmur of the far-off water, which came up from the vast depths.
Hatfield was listening for another sound — a sound that would tell him Pancho had successfully completed his dangerous task. He could visualize the little tracker, creeping silently as a lizard toward the mighty mass of rock which overhung the cave mouth. He could see him, in his mind’s eye, counting the evil-faced riders who passed beneath the gloomy arch to enter the cave. He could see the Yaqui tense as the last one vanished in the dark depths — see him strike a light and fire the end of the long fuse that led to the hidden dynamite. His palms grew clammily moist as he thought of the mighty mass of stone thundering down to block the entrance to the cavern and make of it a living tomb.
“They’ve got it coming,” he muttered as he fingered the length of fuse which was attached to the dynamite planted along the surface of the crumbling ledge. “It’ll be good for them to think for a spell that they really are buried alive without any water or food.”
Suddenly he tensed and his muscles swelled like iron bands. Down the gloomy aisle of the corridor drifted a sullen boom followed by a rumbling thunder. Hatfield could almost hear the cries of terror and see the sudden rush toward the narrow corridor which led past the pit and to the cleft in the cliff by the conveyor line. Grimly he stooped and set fire to the end of the fuse. It sputtered, smoked, and then burned steadily.
Hatfield stood up, and instantly hurled himself sideways and down. He had sensed rather than seen or heard the menace creeping toward him through the clammy dark. He was flat on the ground when the gun flashed fire and a bullet whistled through the space his body had occupied the instant before. He shot forward in a streaking dive and crashed into the man who had fired the shot.
He heard the gun clatter to the stone floor. Then arms like bands of steel wrapped about his body and he was lifted off his feet.
With all his strength he lashed out viciously. His fist crunched against flesh and bone with a shock that jarred his arm to the shoulder. The other’s hold loosened slightly and the Ranger regained his feet.
Mightily, the two powerful men wrestled, reeling, swaying, their breath coming in panting gasps. Never in his life had the Lone Wolf encountered such superhuman strength. The abnormally long, gnarled arms crushed his chest until it was as if a red hot clasp of iron encircled it. He bowed his back and resisted to the last atom.
Backward the other forced him. Suddenly, with a terrible ch
ill of horror, he felt a foot slip over the edge of the pit. Another instant and he would be hurled into the awful depths. With a final mighty effort he sent his opponent reeling away from the lip of the gulf. Then, utterly unexpectedly, he hurled himself down upon his back, gripping the other’s forearms at the same instant and kicking upward with all the strength of his sinewy legs.
Caught by the mighty thrust of those pistoning legs, the other man shot into the air. Hatfield jerked down on the forearms at the same instant and then let go.
The squat, powerful body of Hatfield’s assailant shot through the air, cleared the edge of the pit and hurtled downward with an awful scream of terror and despair. Up from the depths came the cry, growing thin with distance — then the faint whisper of a splash. Then silence.
Gasping and panting, Hatfield scrambled to his feet. Numbly he remembered the dynamite and the burning fuse. He staggered away from the edge of the pit, shambling toward the outer air and safety.
With a clap of thunder and a lurid reddish glare, the dynamite let go. Down into the pit crashed yard after yard of the ledge, making the way past the gulf unpassable, imprisoning the men who came yelling down the long corridor from the great central cavern.
But Jim Hatfield did not hear the thudding feet nor the howls of despair. Near the mouth of the cleft he lay, silent and motionless, with the acrid fumes of the burned powder wisping about his white face.
CHAPTER 18
JIM HATFIELD regained consciousness to feel the drip of cold water on his face. Opening his reluctant lids, he glanced up into the dark, anxious face of Pancho, the little tracker. The Yaqui’s black eyes, glowed warmly as Hatfield struggled to a sitting position.
“Capitan! you live!” he exclaimed.
“I’m not so sure of it,” the Ranger replied. “Feel as though I ought to be dead. What happened?”
“I know not,” replied the Yaqui. “After making sure that the entrance to the cavern was blocked securely, I hurried across the ridge as you directed. I found you here, pale and still. I thought you to be dead.”
The whinny of a horse brought Hatfield’s head up around. Tied to a tree was a sturdy roan, Sheriff Branch Horton’s horse. Sunlight was shimmering on his black coat.
The sight of that sunlight, pouring almost straight down from the brassy-blue sky, sent remembrance crashing through the Ranger’s mind. He struggled to his feet and headed, somewhat shakily, for the thicket in which he had left his tall golden sorrel.
“Unhitch that black horse and ride him,” he called to Pancho. “You and I have got some riding to do, Pancho! If we’re not a long way the other side of these hills by noon, a mighty fine man is going to die!”
Together they rode across the hills, the Yaqui clinging like a burr to the unaccustomed saddle. They drummed on as the blazing sun arched upward into the sky toward the misty blue west. It was well past noon when the white buildings of John Chadwick’s Circle C came into view.
Hatfield and Pancho circled the apparently deserted ranch buildings, approaching them from the rear by way of a thick grove of burr oaks. No sound greeted them as they crept stealthily through the close-set tree trunks.
At the edge of the grove, several feet from the ranchhouse, they paused. Then the Yaqui crept on, a drifting shadow that seemed to lack real substance. He flattened himself against the wall as footsteps sounded inside the house. A door opened and Edwards, Chadwick’s foreman, stepped into view, a rifle in his hands. His quick eye caught the loom of Hatfield’s tall form amid the trees and he flung a rifle to his shoulder.
For a tense instant, disaster hovered in the balance. The crash of the report, no matter who fired first, would warn any other inmates of the house. Hatfield’s hands had moved with blurring speed and the muzzles of his Colts yawned hungrily at Edwards, but he hesitated to pull trigger.
In that split instant, Pancho drifted along the side of the ranchhouse like a swirl of dusky smoke. His sinewy arm rose and fell. Something gleamed brightly in the sunlight, and was dimmed by a reddish stain.
Edwards’ body fell forward as Pancho wrenched his knife from between the foreman’s shoulder blades. The Yaqui caught the limp body in his wiry arms and eased it silently to the ground, preventing the rifle from clattering at the same instant. Hatfield reached him in three giant strides. He motioned to the door which Edwards had left ajar. They slipped through and moved silently along the shadowy hall toward the front of the house, from which came voices. Crouched just outside a second door, they peered through a crack.
Seated on one side of the room was Amado Capistrano. His arms were bound and he was tied to his chair. On his handsome face was an expression of faint amusement as he stared into the flashing eyes of John Chadwick, who stood facing him. His glance strayed across the room to Joseph Bowers, his mine superintendent, and his clear eyes mirrored contempt.
“Yes, you’re not going to live long, you wriggle-backed greaser sidewinder,” Chadwick was saying. “You crossed me once too often. I’m doing for you as soon as your Ranger friend gets here, and for him, too. Folks are going to think you killed each other. It won’t be hard to fix it that way.”
For the first time Capistrano’s face showed concern.
“Let the Ranger alone, Chadwick,” he said in his musical voice. “Murdering him won’t get you anything.”
Chadwick snarled an oath.
“He’s in my way,” he grated. “The time will come,” he boasted, “when his kind will come eating out of my hand, when I get things going right in this state. Right now when they get in my way, I squash them like I would a horned toad.”
He shouted over his shoulder:
“Hey, Ed, aren’t the boys riding in yet?”
“I don’t think the boys will ever come riding in again, Chadwick,” drawled a quiet voice from the doorway.
Chadwick whirled in amazement to face the doorway. The Lone Wolf stood there, towering in his great height. His face was as cold as wind-beaten granite, his eyes like icy water torturing under frozen snow. The eyes shifted suddenly and his slim hands moved with blinding speed. From the muzzle of one black Colt wisped a spiral of blue smoke. The room echoed to the roar of the explosion.
Joseph Bowers reeled sideways, his half-drawn gun clattering to the floor. Retching and choking, he writhed on the woven rug, his face ghastly, blood pouring from the gaping wound in his chest. Hatfield holstered his smoking gun and turned his terrible eyes on Chadwick once more.
“I’m giving you a full chance, Chadwick, you murdering skunk,” he said, his voice deadly in its softness. “More than you gave Dick Webb or Ed Shafter. Get going, Chadwick! Reach for those mismated guns of yours — the forty-five and the thirty-two-twenty. Those guns gave you away, Chadwick. Dick and Ed had holes in their heads made by different caliber bullets. Reach for them, Chadwick — or come along peaceably and be hanged!”
For an instant John Chadwick seemed to hesitate. Then blind, ungovernable fury blackened his face and his guns came roaring from their shoulder holsters.
Through a haze of powder smoke he saw Jim Hatfield standing straight and tall, blood trickling down one bronzed cheek. Blood was welling in Chadwick’s mouth. His breast was crushed and shattered by the heavy slugs that had hammered the bone to bits. Forward he fell, toppling slowly, to lie silent and motionless at the Lone Wolf’s feet.
“Dyson can get a posse together and get into that cave to haul out that nest of snakes we’ve got penned up there,” Hatfield told Amado Capistrano after the other had been released.
“Dyson’s honest — dumb, but honest. He didn’t know Horton was in cahoots with Chadwick. He didn’t know Chadwick was the prize crook of the district. Yes, I know Chadwick planned to kill us both when he got us here. I was coming prepared for him, but things worked out to make me late.”
He smiled briefly.
“Well, it all ended okay so that’s that,” he said. “Now you can go on back to your business of sending sick kids to hospitals and planning schools for the
well ones, and helping folks who are in trouble. Things will be better in this district now, and here’s hoping you end up owning all of the old Capistrano home ranch before you get through!”
Several days later, Jim Hatfield reported in full to grim old Captain McDowell at Ranger headquarters.
“A lie Horton and Chadwick told gave me my first real line on them,” he told Captain Bill. “That day I met them at the Cibola mine, they said they’d been in the hills all night. They were mighty anxious to have me believe they had been in the hills. They hadn’t!”
“How’d you know they hadn’t?” Cap. Bill asked. Hatfield chuckled.
“They were all covered with dust, sir, and it wasn’t the red dust of the hills,” he explained. “It was the gray alkali dust of the desert. They’d been around the hills to meet the rest of their outfit from down Mexico way.
“Then when I sent telegrams and traced down Bowers’ activities since the time he got fired for being drunk and miscalculating that bridge job, I found out he’d been associating with Chadwick for a long time. Bowers had a penitentiary record for crooked work. Chadwick got him pardoned because he could use him. Bowers was a smart engineer, but he couldn’t keep straight.”
He paused a moment, rolling a cigarette with the slim, bronzed fingers of one hand.
“Chadwick’s scheme was a lulu!” he exclaimed. “He wasn’t going in for the plain ordinary brand of banditry. He was planning to clean out the whole Tamarra Valley.
“He drilled those men of his like they were an army. Pedro Cartina was his front man, who took all the blame and did the strutting. Chadwick was the brains. Horton was another blockhead he’d raised up from nothing.”
He lit the cigarette and exhaled a long ribbon of smoke.
“The ore stealing idea was Bowers’, and it was a smart one,” he continued. “Chadwick was sending the ore to his Humboldt mine and slipping it into his stamp mill. No wonder the Humboldt was doing well. Holding up the stage and stealing his own insured payroll wasn’t so bad, either, and they even took a whack at the bank, and nearly got away with a fat haul.