The Sixth Western Novel

by Jackson Gregory

  “You say you know where Tondro holes up, Jace?”

  Blackwine exhumed a briar pipe from his brush-popper jumper and jabbed the stem between his teeth. “You’re closer to it than you realize right now, Redding.”

  After a long run of silence, Doug asked bluntly, “What’s your play, Blackwine? Did Chessman put a bounty on my scalp and you aim to collect it?”

  Blackwine grinned. “Do Chessman a favor? Hell, no. Lissen. I drifted over to Crowfoot huntin’ you, all right, but not for the reason you think. What’s it worth to you if I p’int out where Blaze Tondro is squattin’ right this minute, bidin’ his time to jump this herd you’re workin’?”

  Redding countered, “How’d you know where to look for me?”

  Blackwine’s eyes held a secretive triumph. “Played a hunch. Knew damn well the Rickaree Kid wasn’t an SPA snooper. Knew Crowfoot’s boss got bushwhacked this spring; plumb logical an Association dick might shift to that case. Visited Crowfoot’s home ranch yestiddy; you weren’t there. Knew you were either workin’ this side of the range, or you’d be with Teague Darkin workin’ the Axblade lease.”

  Redding glanced over at the chuck wagon, aware that Slim-Jim was watching them curiously.

  “I’ll grab a bite of chow,” Redding said in a low voice, “and head back up this canyon I’m working. Meet me there inside of an hour. I’ll make it worth your while on this Tondro deal.”

  Blackwine nodded, picking up his reins. “Thought you would, star man. You get your badge back when we close the deal. I’ll give you the low-down on Tondro’s den after we’ve come to terms.”

  Blackwine waved to the cook and spurred his grulla over the ridge in the opposite direction from the canyon Redding had indicated as their rendezvous point. But Redding knew the mustanger would be waiting for him. The man who led to the smashing of Tondro’s border ring would be rich when the accumulated rewards were paid by the two governments seeking to break Tondro’s grip on Lavarim Basin. If Blackwine had information that would enable Redding to crack Tondro’s hideout secret, the rewards would go to him.

  Redding’s appetite was gone, as he realized that he was nearer to cracking this case than he had hoped to be, this soon. But he forced himself to eat, fueling his body against a ride which probably would prevent his return to the chuck-wagon camp tonight.

  Shorty Hadley and the other Crowfoot riders drifted in, singly or by pairs and threes, by the time Redding had finished eating. He cut his personal mount out of the remuda and saddled up, heading back to the short box canyon he was working.

  An hour had elapsed since he had made his arrangement with Jace Blackwine, ample time for the mustanger to double back to this draw and wait for him.

  An ory-eyed ladino steer popped out of the chaparral as Redding put his horse into the draw. The dust of the animal’s passage obscured his vision as the sorrel plunged through a spiny hedge into a further clearing.

  Somewhere out of the roundabout mesquite and buckbrush he heard Blackwine’s voice. “Over here, Doug.”

  As he hipped around in saddle, Redding had his quick glimpse of the mustanger’s hairy face at the edge of the clearing. Redding’s arm was coming up with a rope, making his California underthrow at the steer. He was tensed like that in saddle when he saw Blackwine hurling a chunk of lava at him.

  There was no time to dig his gut hooks into the sorrel, no time to dodge the oncoming missile. Instinct made Redding kick boots from stirrups as the rock struck his skull a glancing blow.

  He was vaguely aware of the steer hitting the end of his reata, dallied to his saddle horn; the sorrel swung back, taking up the slack as he had been trained to do by a former owner; and Redding found himself toppling from saddle.

  In mid-air he pawed at a gun butt, hoping his senses would clear enough for him to lay a shot at Blackwine’s grinning face over there in the brush.

  In landing, Redding’s head struck a protruding boulder, and with that concussion all sensation faded in the man. It seemed he was plunging into a bottomless black funnel. Oblivion had smothered his senses before Jace Blackwine ran out to slash Redding’s catch rope with a bowie blade and free the bawling ladino.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tondro’s Hideout

  For Redding, the return to sensibility was a slow ordeal, like a swimmer breasting a swift current through a black cavern, with daylight showing only dimly, an unattainable distance away.

  His first conscious sensation was that of red-hot spikes being pounded into his skull; it seemed an eternity before he was able to rationalize the peculiar pitching motion of his body enough to know that he was on horseback.

  Hearing came next. The whisper of wind in tree crowns, the spongy rasping of hoofs in wet gravel. A bandanna had been knotted over his eyes. When he tried to claw it off, it was to find that his wrists were tied to a dish shaped saddle horn which he recognized as that of his own Brazos hull.

  His nostrils became aware of the spicy odors of dank moss and conifers. There was a chill moist wind beating his cheek one moment; and then at a turn in the trail he felt the radiated warmth of nearby rocks, holding the sun’s stored-up heat.

  Through the fabric of his blindfold he saw a blurred nimbus which he finally concluded was the moon. It was night, then. That fact gave him a concrete problem to conjecture about and brought back his last lucid memory—Blackwine knocking him out of saddle with a well-flung rock.

  His tongue was blotter-dry in his mouth. He felt the stickiness of his own crusted blood on his left cheek, drawing the skin and lying still wet on the back of his neck.

  All this must have happened six-seven hours back, maybe longer. A combination of coma and sleep, then, must have blotted out the intervening time. From the stiffness in his thighs and arms he reckoned that Blackwine must have had him on the trail most of that time.

  When he tried to move his feet out of stirrups he found his ankles trussed together by a rope leading under his horse. This being made a prisoner was a question Redding could not immediately fathom. Was Blackwine a Tondro scout? If so, this kidnapping was out of character. Spotting him for a range detective, Blackwine would have thrust a knife into his back and buried him in a shallow grave or else left him for the coyotes.

  Or was Blackwine taking him back to face the law in Paloverde? Perhaps Dorf Chessman had issued a warrant for his arrest as the Rickaree Kid’s killer.

  His horse was scrambling up a considerable grade. Off to the left, Redding could hear the brawl of shallow water cascading down a rocky bed, and from time to time his right shoulder brushed rock and foliage, proof that Blackwine was leading him along a narrow ledge trail.

  This would not be Cloudcap Pass, then. And the direction of the moon, whenever he glimpsed it through his blindfold, was wrong if they were heading over the mountains toward Paloverde.

  He knew from his mount’s jerky gait that it was being led by a trail rope tied to the bridle. There was another horse immediately ahead. That would be Blackwine on his close-coupled grulla.

  “What’s the deal, Jace?” Redding’s voice made a croaking, unsteady sound in his throat. It held the tremor of a man but lately out of the throes of the sickness of a mild brain concussion.

  He heard saddle leather creak as his captor twisted to face him, up ahead. Then Blackwine’s voice floated back. “Rallied out of it, hey? You had me worried. Thought I might have slung that rock a mite too hard for your noggin. And you’re worth more to me on the hoof than if you were cold meat.”

  Redding was silent a moment, pondering this implication that he was being hauled in for the bounty on his pelt.

  “Where are we? Mexico?”

  Blackwine laughed enigmatically. “The question you went into the Basin to find out was where Tondro forted up, wasn’t it? Well, I’m takin’ you there, like I promised.”

  The horses made a sharp bend in the trail, and the n
oise of spilling rapids somewhere far below was lost in a deeper organ roar of sound that indicated a sizable waterfall near at hand.

  The night wind flung a stinging icy spray against Redding, shocking his senses back to nearer normal. “Why the blindfold, Jace?” he called above the cascade’s roar.

  “Tondro’s finicky about keeping his hideout under cover. Even for hombres makin’ a one-way pasear to his place.”

  From somewhere out of this black void, Redding’s keening ears caught the unmistakable metallic click of a Winchester lever cranking a shell into a gun breech. It was not from the direction of Blackwine’s horse. Higher up and to the left.

  Blackwine caught that sound, too, for he reined up so abruptly that Redding’s following sorrel collided with the grulla’s rump.

  “Que es?” demanded a voice.

  “Jace Blackwine,” the mustanger answered the sentry’s challenge. “That you, Panchito? I’m hauling in a gringo jerife.”

  “Tondro will pay you well, señor.”

  They pushed on past the sentry’s post. The thunder of the waterfall deepened as the horses came abreast, entering a belt of shadow which cut the thin diffusion of moon rays from Redding’s vision through the bandanna.

  Then he saw a smudge of illumination, which he took to be a lighted window, drawing nearer. A faint clamor of men’s voices reached Redding as Blackwine halted the horses alongside the light and called out, “Señor Tondro aqui!” Spurs chimed as several men approached, gathering around Redding’s horse. There was a confusion of voices speaking in Spanish gutturals and pelado jargon. Then Redding felt a knife sever his leg and wrist bonds, and he was hauled roughly out of stirrups.

  It was difficult for him to stand. He sensed Blackwine’s vast body close to his right elbow. Then a hush fell over the assembled men, and an odor of tequila struck his nostrils.

  “Howdy, Blackwine,” a voice spoke near at hand. “Who is this hombre you’ve brung in?”

  Blackwine’s shoulder brushed his prisoner’s. “Douglas Redding. Your stock detective, Tondro.”

  Redding felt a sensation of pure shock go through him, knowing that within reach of his hand stood Blaze Tondro, goal of his manhunt in Lavarim Basin, the man known through the Territory as the kingpin of border rustlers for more than a decade. Perhaps the killer of his brother Matt.

  He heard Tondro suck in a breath. Then the outlaw spoke incredulously. “What are you feeding me, Jace? I shot Redding in Paloverde. You showed me his star yourself, that night in your room at the Foothill House.” Something sharp stabbed through Redding’s shirt—the pin of his law badge, which Blackwine was now returning to its owner.

  “This hunk of tin?” Blackwine laughed cryptically. “It’s the genuwine article, Tondro. But the man you killed that night in Paloverde wasn’t Redding. It was a drifter on my crew who called himself the Rickaree Kid. He was using Redding’s room that night.”

  Redding could feel the impact of Tondro’s gaze upon him, hear the quickened tempo of his breathing.

  “You told me it was Redding—you told the marshal it was Redding—”

  Blackwine laughed. “A business proposition, Tondro. I knew if the marshal had found Redding’s law badge on the Kid that it was a plant to throw the marshal off the scent. I knew Redding had made a getaway. I knew sooner or later I’d track him down and turn him over to you. For a price.”

  A hand reached up to jerk the blindfold off Redding’s eyes. He found himself staring at the man with the skunk stripe running down the middle of his shock of black hair.

  This was the killer of the Rickaree Kid. For mercenary reasons of his own, Jace Blackwine had kept Tondro in ignorance of his mistake in targets. But how had Blaze Tondro learned of a range detective’s presence in Paloverde that night? It all led back to Joyce Melrose’s visit there to meet him, and the mystery back of Teague Darkin’s trailing the girl over the Pass.

  Redding glanced around, seeing too much to absorb in one glance. Behind him, on all sides, stood a group of serape-clad Mexican pelados. Cartridge bandoliers formed crosses on their chests; the lighted window was set in a rough building of whipsawed lumber which the high-wheeling moon revealed to be the shaft house of some abandoned mine.

  On all sides lifted the sheer granite wall of a canyon. A hundred-foot waterfall was spilling through a notch in the box-end cliff brink a hundred yards beyond the shaft house, its flow a phosphorescent horsetail in the moonlight.

  Tondro regarded Blackwine’s prisoner for a long moment, the evil of the man showing in his close-slitted eyes. “You admit to being Doug Redding?” he asked.

  Redding shifted his glance to Blackwine, who stood at his side, holding the reins of their two horses. “I don’t,” he shot back. “My moniker is George Blagg. Blackwine snatched me off the Crowfoot roundup. He’s trying to wangle a ransom of some kind out of you, on the strength of a tin badge he picked up somewhere or other.”

  Tondro swung toward Blackwine. It was obvious that Redding’s denial had planted the seeds of doubt in the outlaw. An angry chagrin was in the mustanger’s eyes as he sensed how his prisoner had outmaneuvered him here.

  “If you lied to me about Redding that night in Paloverde,” Tondro said with a grim logic, “how do you expect me to pay a bounty on this stranger now?”

  Blackwine grunted. “This man worked for me all summer, Tondro. His pay check was made out to the name o’ Doug Redding.”

  The object of this argument was the target of all eyes now. He fought to keep his expression inscrutable, knowing he had gained a hollow victory here. Tondro would never permit an outsider to leave his bastion alive.

  It was obvious that Jace Blackwine had been affiliated with this owlhoot band at some time in the past, otherwise the sentry would not have let him pass. The fact that the mustanger knew the location of this hideout pointed up some past association.

  “Jace,” Tondro said, “I will not pay off on such slim proof.”

  Blackwine curbed his mounting anger with an effort. “If you won’t pay off on this man, Tondro, I know a couple of hombres who will.”

  “Not without better proof than you’ve given me, amigo.”

  Blackwine reached for Redding’s arm. “Teague Darkin won’t ask questions. Neither would the Englishman you work with over on Wagonwheel. Duke Harrington.”

  Blackwine pulled Redding’s horse forward and gestured for his prisoner to remount.

  “Wait!” Tondro’s snarl was like a whipcrack. “No stranger leaves this place alive, Blackwine. But I’ll do this—if Teague says this man is an SPA trouble shooter, I’ll match his bounty.”

  Blackwine grinned his relief. “Fair enough,” he said.

  Tondro wheeled to single out one of his henchmen. “Rafael, I want you to ride down to the Basin and bring Señor Teague Darkin here. Tell him we are holding a man who may or may not be Douglas Redding of the SPA. You will find Señor Darkin working the Crowfoot lease in the Axblades. You sabe?”

  One of the vaqueros nodded, flung his greasy serape over a shoulder, and stalked off into the darkness.

  Addressing another of the group standing around, Tondro snapped, “Lock this man in the assay room, Doc. Jace, you are free to ride out or stick around until Darkin gets here.”

  A salt-bearded oldster, who seemed to be the only americano in the group, shuffled forward at Tondro’s command and gripped Redding by the elbow. This man wore no guns. His fingers on Redding’s arm were skeletal and trembling as if from the ague.

  “Come with me,” he said in a tired voice.

  Redding heard Blackwine say, “I’ll stick around, Tondro. That man is worth a couple thousand pesos to me.”

  Redding stumbled forward as Doc escorted him through the ranks of garlic-smelling Mexicans, up a flight of steps to a doorway entering the shaft house.

  Blinking his eyes against the battery of gas-mantled l
anterns rimming the walls of this building, Redding saw that this shaft house had been converted into a living-quarters for Tondro’s outlaws. A mine shaft had been planked over; a rusty donkey engine was still in place in one corner of this barnlike room, rusty cables leading to an overhead windlass drum that had once lifted ore from the bowels of the earth.

  At a far wall, a long table sided by benches was set up. Two persons were seated at supper there; one of them, incredible in these surroundings, was a girl whose back was to Redding as Doc led him toward the black maw of a door in the back wall.

  The girl’s companion was a paunchy gringo with a porcine, jowled face which was instantly familiar to Redding. Sight of a black Mormon hat hanging from a peg behind the table gave Redding the reminder he needed, the fat man was the one he had seen posting the Indian Agency’s beef bid notice on the bulletin board of the Fandango Saloon in Trailfork five days ago.

  In the act of following Doc through the rear doorway, Redding glanced around to see the girl’s profile as she shifted position to reach for a salt shaker.

  Recognition put a sudden paralysis on Redding. He cried out involuntarily, “Zedra! Zedra Stiles!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Last Cartridge

  Redding felt himself being jerked bodily through the doorway before Zedra Stiles had time to look his direction. He was not even sure that his voice had carried to her. But, brief as his glimpse of her had been, Redding knew he could not be mistaken.

  The girl he had met in a Trailfork saloon, the girl who at first glimpse of him had mistaken him for his martyred brother, was for some unaccountable reason a resident of Tondro’s hideout, a lone woman surrounded by the offscourings of border riffraff. Or was it possible that she, like him, was a prisoner here? When she had fled Trailfork rather than talk with him, had this robbers’ roost in the Navajadas been her destination?

  It added up. Matt, working incognito, had become a member of Tondro’s band; this box canyon had known his voice, his shadow. In the note which Matt had sent to the outside world he had added incidentally the glad news that he had given his love to some unnamed woman, that she was wearing his golden lizard ring as a betrothal pledge. Zedra Stiles was wearing that ring. And she was here. It all made sense.