The Sixth Western Novel

by Jackson Gregory

  “Doc,” Redding whispered into the curdled blackness. “That girl—Zedra Stiles—what is she doing in this hellhole?”

  Doc was tugging at his trussed arms, leading him across a pit-black void between the shaft house and the base of the canyon wall, a distance of less than a score of paces.

  “My daughter warned you what would happen if you sought to track down your brother,” old Doc’s voice came from the darkness. “This will be trail’s end for you, Douglas Redding, just as it was for Matt. Just as it is for me.”

  There was an undertone of lost hope, of utter despair in this old man’s voice. Redding said, “Your daughter? Zedra is your daughter?”

  He got no answer. Doc halted to wipe a match alight on his pants leg, revealing the narrow maw of a prospect hole chiseled out of the face of the granite wall directly ahead of them.

  While the match light held, Doc Stiles pushed Redding into the cave-like opening, past a rusty iron-latticework door built into the rocky fissure. Then darkness closed in, like a curtain.

  As the match went out, the old man withdrew; Redding wheeled about as he heard the iron door closing, its hinges wailing their rusty protest. The roar of the waterfall made less of a thunder in this confined space.

  A massive padlock clicked metallically. Then another match flared in the old man’s scraggy paw, its lambent glow undisturbed by air currents, its light making Stiles’s eyes glow in their deep sockets like marbles in a skull.

  “Stick your hands out here, son,” the old man ordered, drawing a clasp knife from his pocket with his free hand and snapping it open. “You understand this business is not to my liking.”

  The match guttered out as Redding thrust his trussed arms through the interstices of the iron-webbed door, felt Stiles’s blade sever the bonds Jace Blackwine had knotted there.

  “You knew my brother,” Redding said, desperation in his voice. “You’ve got to tell me what happened, Doc!”

  Like a voice from an opened tomb, the old man spoke from beyond the iron grating. “Your brother did not die because Tondro found out he was a lawman, Doug, for that was a secret he shared only with Zedra and myself. Matt died because he won my daughter’s love. You see, Tondro intends to make Zedra his wife.”

  Redding’s knuckles squeezed tight against the heavy iron straps of the door, his ears aching to the strain of picking up the old man’s quavering words.

  “I am as much a prisoner here as you are, my son,” Stiles went on in his panting, asthmatic whisper. “Alone of all Tondro’s crew, I am not permitted to carry firearms or to leave this canyon of lost hope. Only for my daughter’s sake have I not destroyed myself long before now.”

  Redding shook himself out of the dazed stupor which had enveloped him from the moment he had laid eyes on Zedra. There was too much of human tragedy back of Doc Stiles’s words for a man to grasp. The fact that his brother had died because of his love for Zedra Stiles, rather than because Blaze Tondro had discovered his true identity as a lawman bent on stamping out Tondro and all he stood for, made Matt’s sacrifice all the more outrageous.

  “This is the old Thunder Rock mine, Doug,” the old man went on. “It was a peaceful enough place eleven years ago when Zedra and I found it. I was panning the old tailings for color, letting this high mountain country restore my wrecked health. Then one winter morning Blaze Tondro rode up the canyon with his Mexican crew, dodging a sheriff’s posse out of the Basin.”

  Redding found himself caught in the spell of the old man’s narrative. The drama of it made him forget, for the moment, that avenging his brother’s murder was now an impossible dream.

  “Tondro recognized the benefits of this place for an outlaw hideout. An earthquake had blocked the outlet of this canyon, making it well-nigh unapproachable from the Basin. There is a mine tunnel which makes an exit for his gang if they should ever find themselves trapped here, which would put them onto Mexican soil in twenty minutes’ riding. In eleven years no outsider has seen this place, Redding.”

  The range detective nodded, still wondering if this nightmare were a figment of his imagination, a result of the clip on the head he had suffered at Blackwine’s hands. “How come you were spared?” he asked.

  “Zedra and I would have died had it not been for the fact that I was a medical man of considerable skill. Zedra was only a child of seven. You see, Redding, an outlaw band is subject to frequent gunshot-wound cases. A competent doctor is an asset worth sparing.”

  Redding said, “But Zedra is not kept a prisoner here—I saw her myself, in Trailfork. Surely she has told Sheriff Lennon of your predicament, Doc.”

  Stiles grunted bitterly in the darkness. “She would not dare. Tondro allows her to visit Trailfork whenever it pleases her. He has her vow of secrecy. How could she talk, knowing my life would be forfeit the moment a sheriff’s posse came anywhere near this accursed place? No. Tondro holds us powerless.”

  For the first time, Doug Redding grasped the reason why Zedra had not dared talk to him that night in Trailfork. Her father’s life was the grip Blaze Tondro held over her, a factor which made her as much a prisoner of Thunder Rock Canyon as if Tondro kept her in chains.

  “Tondro is holding me here until Teague Darkin can identify me as an Association man,” Redding said. “Darkin doesn’t know me. Blackwine tricked Darkin into thinking I was dead, the same as he did Tondro.”

  Stiles said, “There is another alternative. Harrington.”

  “So far as I know, I’ve never seen Harrington, either. Except that he is connected with Wagonwheel Ranch, this Duke hombre is a total stranger to me. What’s the deal?”

  Stiles did not answer Redding immediately. When he spoke again, his voice came from farther away, as if the old man was edging toward the mouth of the prospect hole, afraid of lingering here with his prisoner.

  “Harrington? He is one of Tondro’s confederates on the outside. I have never seen him. He has not visited Thunder Rock in my time. Rumor has it that he is an English remittance man who runs Wagonwheel Ranch.”

  “Where does Blackwine fit into the picture?”

  “Blackwine was once a companero of Tondro’s. He became too ambitious for his own good. There was not room enough for both him and Tondro in this organization. A vote was held as to which should be captain. Tondro won. Jace Blackwine chose to withdraw—knowing well that if he ever betrayed this place to the law, he would not live to enjoy his reward.”

  Redding fingered the bloody welts on his skull. It galled him to think that for four months he had rubbed shoulders with Jace Blackwine, not knowing the mustang hunter was a former associate of Tondro’s.

  “Whether or not Darkin can identify you,” Stiles said bleakly, “Tondro will kill you tomorrow. I—”

  “Send Zedra here to talk to me, Doc,” Redding pleaded. “I’ve got to know how my brother died. I found his bones—”

  “Zedra does not know the details,” Stiles answered. “One day Tondro caught Zedra kissing Matt. A week later, Blackie Fletcher—as we called him here—was sent out to bring back some mustangs for our vaqueros to break to saddle. He never came back. Tondro told Zedra that he had trailed him and ambushed him, over on Mustang Mesa. It broke my little girl’s heart.”

  Redding ground his teeth impotently. This was the answer to the main riddle he had come to Lavarim Basin to solve. Matt had died at Tondro’s hands, as he had guessed, not haying proof. He heard Stiles’s voice continuing from outside the cavern.

  “Tondro does not know Matt gave Zedra the golden lizard ring she wears. He, of course, has not guessed your relationship to Matt. Let us hope he does not. Tondro is half Yaqui. I have seen him burn a man at the stake, Indian-fashion—” The old medico’s voice broke off; Redding heard him hurry away. A moment later he knew the reason for Stiles’s retreat. A door in the shaft house opened, and Blaze Tondro came out carrying a lantern.

  The ha
lf-breed entered the cavern, ignoring the prisoner beyond the iron grating, and checked the padlock to make sure Doc Stiles had snapped it. Then he heeled around and disappeared inside the shaft house.

  When the lights in the shaft house went out, indicating that Tondro’s men had turned in for the night, Redding rummaged in his pockets for a match. He lighted it, sizing up his prison.

  A generation ago, when this mine had operated, this cavity in the cliff wall had been utilized as an assay office. A dust-covered table built against the back wall of rock was still littered with cupels and fragments of ore samples, flux bins and empty acid bottles now gray with dust. The brick furnace had fallen into ruin, its smokestack long since removed.

  He found a stub of tallow candle on the assayer’s bench and lighted it. A short examination of his prison convinced him there would be no digging under the iron doorway; its frame had been cemented into the living rock.

  A dry nettle-sting of suspense touched his pores as he groped inside his shirt to check whether Blackwine had stolen his golden lizard ring, as he had done his guns. But the bauble still hung by its rawhide thong around his neck, and the feel of that talisman between his fingers buoyed Redding with a strange, irrational belief that perhaps his luck had not yet played out.

  The thunder of the waterfall plunging into the canyon prevented Redding from hearing any sounds outside the shaft house. Recalling his brief passage through that building, he found himself puzzling about the presence of the fat man with the Mormon hat who had some connection with the Indian Agency’s bid for beef.

  There was some common denominator linking all these puzzles together, if he could live to put them in order. The Indian Agency invariably let its beef contracts to the English-owned Wagonwheel spread. That ranch was managed by the mysterious Duke Harrington, who Jace Blackwine said would be glad to pay blood money for his, Redding’s, capture. It could only mean that Duke Harrington was an outlaw Redding had known by another name sometime in his checkered past.

  The candle flame guttered and died in its own drippings. Redding knew that by now Tondro and his men would be asleep. He thought of Matt, who had once occupied one of those bunks as an accepted member of Tondro’s legion, the man who had brought Zedra the only happiness she had ever known in this living hell. He found himself wondering if Matt had been on his way to keep his promised rendezvous in Fort Paloverde when Tondro had bushwhacked him and left his corpse for the buzzards, out on Mustang Mesa where the Rickaree Kid, hunting a strayed mule, had found him.

  By an association of ideas, Redding groped fingers in his watch pocket, feeling for the 1846 half dollar the Kid had removed from his brother’s skull.

  The touch of that tarnished silver disk gave Redding a strange rapport with his dead kin, the same tug of emotion that sight of Matt’s ring on Zedra Stiles’s finger had given him that night at the Fandango Saloon.

  He took out his watch, struck a match, and saw that it was nearly midnight. Obviously Tondro meant to delay any interview with his prisoner until tomorrow. All the time Redding could count on would be tomorrow; by the following night Tondro’s messenger would probably be back with Teague Darkin.

  The instincts of a trapped animal set him to exploring his prison anew. The floor of the assay room was paved with adobe, dirt carried into the tunnel by the winds of yesteryear. The walls and ceiling of the short dead-end tunnel dripped with seepage, enabling a slimy moss to grow there.

  Reaching through the door bars, Redding examined the huge padlock Doc Stiles had placed in the hasp, on the off-chance that it might be unlocked despite Tondro’s check. But the padlock was snapped shut. Tondro probably carried the only key.

  Searching his pockets for another match, Redding’s fingers closed over an oblong metal object which he identified as a stray .45-70 cartridge. Fingering that shell, the hazy form of an idea took shape in Redding’s mind. That cartridge might be the instrument of his escape from this place.

  There was enough energy in the seventy grains of powder contained in that cartridge case to drive a copper-jacketed .45 bullet a mile or more. If that latent power could be harnessed to his own needs—Groping his way back to the door of the assay room, Redding fumbled for the brass padlock, reamed a finger tip into the big keyhole. A surge of hope went through him, like opium firing the blood of an addict’s veins.

  Removing the .45-70 cartridge from his pocket, he reached through the strap-iron ribbons of the door and inserted the shell into the big keyhole of the padlock. The cartridge went clean through the giant lock until the flange of the casing fitted against the keyhole’s aperture.

  “It’s a chance,” Redding whispered into the darkness. “If I can explode that shell it might spring that padlock.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Blind Journey

  A doomed man, the saying goes, snatches at straws.

  That feeling of futility nagged Redding now as he set about his preparations for a getaway attempt.

  Thanks to the singularly large size of the padlock, the Winchester cartridge was accommodated inside the keyhole. The problem now was to devise a makeshift firing-pin to detonate the shell’s center-fire cap.

  A nail seemed the answer. Redding struck another of his scanty supply of matches and located a tenpenny nail in the litter of junk on the assay table. The point of this nail Redding placed vertically against the percussion cap of the .45-70 cartridge, where a rifle’s firing-pin would ordinarily strike.

  Holding the nail in position would be tricky. There was no anticipating what direction the released power of an exploding shell would take.

  He thought of the adobe dirt underfoot, and had his answer. Scraping up a handful of soil, he clawed wet moss from the ceiling of the prospect hole and squeezed it into the adobe until he had a gummy, pliable mass.

  He worked the adobe until it formed a sticky ball, enough to encase the big padlock completely and at the same time hold the tenpenny nail in striking position against the center of the cartridge he had inserted in the keyhole.

  He waited a half hour for the mud to set, using that time to explore the debris of the assay furnace and locate a chunk of iron suitable for use as a gun hammer.

  The sedative boom of the waterfall filled the outer canyon with its never-ending monotone. Redding was counting on that heavy undertone of sound, plus the muffling effect of the adobe shell he had built around the padlock, to deaden the explosion he hoped to bring about.

  With his left hand, Redding held the mud-daubed padlock flush against the iron framework of the door. Gripping the chunk of rusty grate in his right, Redding pushed his arm through the largest opening in the door’s latticework until his elbow joint was outside the door.

  In that position, he made a few practice swings with his forearm, bringing the iron chunk lightly against the nail head protruding from the ball of hardening adobe.

  The thing seemed as ready as it would ever be. A wet film of perspiration covered Redding’s cheeks. In a moment he would know if this gamble would pay off. He was not even sure he could exert a hard enough blow to match a rifle’s dropping gun hammer on firing-pin.

  Every muscle taut for the supreme effort, Redding brought his right arm around with all his strength, smashing the iron hammer against the nailhead to drive its point against the percussion cap of the cartridge.

  The explosion came with a numbing slap on Redding’s eardrums. Bits of flying adobe peppered the latticework door, stung his averted cheek, brought blood in a dozen leaking punctures from his exposed hands.

  A rancid boil of powder smoke clogged the air. He was vaguely aware of metal splinters striking the wet rock walls outside the cavern door.

  The explosion had not carried the volume he expected; then he recalled that the main noise of a gunshot was the slap of air, refilling the vacuum of a bullet’s passage from a rifle’s muzzle, rather than the powder blast in the breech. It was th
e same reason why a high-calibered shell exploding inside a hot stove make a firecracker’s pop instead of the ear-riving blast of the same shell leaving a rifle’s muzzle.

  Dropping the iron chunk, Redding groped feverishly for the padlock. His fingers encountered the U-shaped brass prong. Stripped of its mud casing, the padlock was now a chunk of broken metal shards, its inner mechanism ruptured by the confined explosion in the keyhole. The wreckage was scorching hot to the touch.

  Redding jerked the broken padlock out of the hasp which held it and flung the door open. He staggered through the doorway to reach the outer mouth of the tunnel, coughing with the fumes of powder gases that burned the passages of his nostrils and lungs.

  He was free. The impossible had come about. What mattered now was whether the muffled explosion had carried above the roar of the waterfall to rouse the sleeping outlaws inside the mine shaft house.

  The moon had westered beyond the canyon rim during the night, so that Redding had only the dimmest view from this point. The roar of plunging river water covered the grind of his cow boots over the mine debris as he rounded the shaft-house wall, his ears still numbed by the blast of sound so close to his head.

  No lights flickered inside the shaft house as yet. There was too much noise echoing and re-echoing from the box canyon’s surrounding scarps for Redding to tell whether men might be tumbling from their bunks inside the building.

  Working his way along the up-canyon wall of the shaft house, Redding came to the front end of the building.

  There he froze. A lantern was burning midway across the flat area of ground between the shaft house and the deeply eroded bed of the river below the waterfall.

  The lantern’s rays revealed a light, yellow democrat wagon, hitched to a pair of mules down there, and the dim line of the trail up which Jace Blackwine had led him blindfolded earlier tonight.