“The Injun Agent, eh?” Lennon commented, igniting a lampwick from his candle. “Had a hunch that hyena would overplay his hand one of these days. What’s the setup, Doug? You look like you’ve done a good day’s work since you left town ten-twelve hours ago.”
Redding gave the Trailfork sheriff the high lights of this wild night’s crowded events.
“Curtwright needs medical attention, Sheriff, and then I want you to lock him in your calaboose. I want him held incommunicado. His testimony should help wrap up the loose ends at the payoff. I have a hunch the Basin’s rustling scare is about over.”
Lennon bent over Curtwright, who was either unconscious or playing possum, and decided to play it safe while he was going for a doctor by shackling the Indian Agent’s good ankle to the cot with a pair of handcuffs.
Redding stepped to the door, drawing Lennon’s sharp, “Where you think you’re going, son?”
“To leave Darkin’s note where O’Connor will spot it. And I’ll need a fresh horse; that pinto you loaned me is dead, Sheriff. And you might also rustle me up a pack of grub; say, enough to last me two-three days.”
The sheriff thumbed his overall straps over his shoulders and tugged on his warped boots. There was a grin lurking under his waterfall mustache as he asked, “What joy ride are you cookin’ up this time? Don’t you ever sleep, man?”
Redding grinned as he opened the door. “I aim to follow O’Connor to Tondro’s hideout, Sheriff—without bein’ blindfolded or inside a black box for a change.”
Dawn was a scant two hours off, Redding estimated, as he stepped out of Lennon’s door. He was glad he had fortified himself with a long sleep the day before, against the unknown rigors of the trek he had ahead of him.
Leaving the jail vicinity, he avoided the main street of Trailfork, although this cow town’s deadfalls and honkies were locked up at this hour, most of its cowboy patronage busy with roundup work at this season of the year.
With the moon below the Axblade peaks, Redding had only the starlight to guide him to O’Connor’s barn and blacksmith shop on the southwest edge of town.
He had no way of knowing whether Tondro’s liaison man slept on the premises and regretted not having obtained that information from Lennon. Entering the stable yard, he saw Blaze Tondro’s yellow democrat wagon still standing where the rustler boss and Zedra Stiles had left it an aeon ago—was it less than twenty-four hours?
There was a lean-to connected with the blacksmith shed which had the look of a dwelling about it. Pausing alongside the front window, he heard a man’s measured snoring inside. Peering through the open window, he saw a man sleeping on a cot, his face faintly illuminated by the cherry-red glow of a heating stove on which a pot of coffee simmered.
The sleeper was Clark O’Connor.
Taking Teague Darkin’s note from his pocket, Redding creased it carefully and wedged it under the door, knowing the bright red figures on the calendar page would catch O’Connor’s eye immediately upon awakening.
That done, Redding made his leisurely way back to the sheriff’s office. Lennon was waiting for him in the alley with a saddled steeldust gelding, his own personal mount.
Lashed behind the cantle was a grub sack, and a plump canvas water bag was hooked over the horn. Lennon was thorough. He had transferred his Winchester from Blackwine’s saddle to this one, and had supplied a pair of Army field glasses in a scuffed leather case securely tied to the swell-fork pommel.
“Doc Ullman’s in there working on Curtwright,” the sheriff reported. “Ullman can be trusted not to let the word leak out that I got a federal politician locked up. What next, son?”
Redding checked the stirrups and let them out another notch to accommodate the length of his saddle-warped legs.
“I’m going to head east along the foothill road. Going to post myself on a ridge where I can spot whichever crick O’Connor heads up on his way to Tondro’s. The crick Tondro and Zedra traveled in the buckboard.”
The sheriff chewed at the ends of his mustache. “What’s your idea of what Darkin is up to?”
Redding shook tobacco into a brown-paper trough between his fingers. The stillness of the alley was broken by a stifled groan from Curtwright, inside the lean-to, as the doctor worked on the Agent’s broken leg.
“You’ll probably dig that out of Curtwright before I get back from the Navajadas,” Redding said. “Offhand, I’d guess that Darkin has been stealing Crowfoot stock from the west lease, venting the Melrose iron into Wagonwheel. He wants Tondro’s crew to lend him a hand in getting that stock over to Duke Harrington’s range, where it won’t attract as much attention as it would on Joyce’s Axblade graze.”
The sheriff shivered, not entirely from the night’s chill. “Wish to hell I was twenty year younger and spryer, son. I’d give my eyeteeth, if I had any, to be ridin’ with you.”
Redding stepped into saddle, the unlighted cigarette sloping from his underlip.
“You’ll get your chance to flash that star at the payoff,” he assured the Trailfork lawman. “I’m no one-man Army. I don’t intend to corral Tondro’s border hoppers by myself. My job is to locate his hideout well enough to lead a posse to it when the time is ripe. And maybe get a line on this Wagonwheel deal of Darkin’s while I’m at it.”
He heard Curtwright bellow an oath inside Lennon’s shanty, heard the cow-town medico’s professionally brusque, “That does it, I guess. You’ll wear this cast a few weeks, Mr. Curtwright.”
Redding reached down to grip Lennon’s hand in the darkness. “So long, amigo. I got to be linin’ out, in case O’Connor gets up early. One thing sure, he’ll light a fast shuck out of town soon as he spots Darkin’s note.”
Lennon said, “Luck, fella,” and watched Redding spur past the jail and rein east when he hit the main street.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The lost trail
Dawn’s ruddy promise was staining the saw-toothed sky line when Doug Redding reached the first of the series of creeks which the stage road spanned as it flanked the Navajada foot slopes.
This, if memory of Val Lennon’s county map served him right, was the Sangre de Santos, emptying into the Whetstone River out in mid-Basin. He failed to locate any growth of wild mint which would indicate that this was the stream Tondro’s wagon had followed out of the hills.
Redding followed the creek into the embracing foothills and put the steeldust gelding up a rocky splintered ridge which gave him a view of the entire sweep of road leading to Trailfork, ten miles west—the road Clark O’Connor would soon be riding.
He had a smoke and plundered his grub sack for a breakfast of jerked venison and a can of tomatoes, knowing events might crowd too hard to permit another meal during the day.
By the time he had finished eating, the sun had risen in fiery splendor, filling the vast length of Lavarim Basin with its unearthly beautiful glow, tipping the remote Axblade peaks with pure gold.
Assuming that Clark O’Connor awoke at daylight, Redding figured the Irishman might be starting on his errand about now. An hour and a half should see him at the Sangre de Santos. From then on it would be a matter of trailing O’Connor without being seen. With luck, Tondro’s lost trail would be revealed to Redding before a nooning sun made a bake oven of these uplands.
After slightly more than an hour’s wait Redding saw a rider flogging his horse down the Trailfork road, east-bound. The hard drum-roll of iron-shod hoofs wafted to his ears as the horse forded the Sangre de Santos below him.
Using Lennon’s binoculars, Redding saw without surprise that the rider was Clark O’Connor. A mile farther along the road, Redding saw the Irish blacksmith leave the road where it forded the next creek—marked Twelve Mile Creek on the map—and put his horse into its fetlock-deep wash until he disappeared behind a ridge.
Redding cased the glasses, went back to his horse, and put the steeldu
st down the ridge into the cactus-mottled valley which formed a saddle between the bracketing hills.
He picked up a game trail linking the ridges and followed it at a gallop, knowing the wind would keep the sound of hoofbeats from crossing the ridge into the canyon where O’Connor was riding. He could not risk losing sight of O’Connor. It was almost too much to hope that the canyon O’Connor had entered would form an unbroken route to Tondro’s hideout at Thunder Rock.
At the crest of the ridge overlooking Twelve Mile Creek, Redding pulled up, searching the vista below with the sheriffs Army glasses. The sun’s full light had not yet penetrated this pocket in the Navajadas, but a silver flashing caught Redding’s eye, and he picked out O’Connor’s horse still following the stream.
The creek bed was wide and level, with no visible rapids. A mule-drawn wagon could negotiate it to reach the Basin road without leaving any sign of its passage on the pebbly bottom. It was that lack of a visible trail which was the main lock on the door of Tondro’s lair.
Redding moved along the ridge, keeping O’Connor abreast of him before he finally moved west of the crest to keep O’Connor from hearing or seeing him. If Tondro’s messenger thought he was being followed, the whole plan would be ruined.
The ridge climbed steadily as it roughly paralleled Twelve Mile Creek. From time to time Redding dismounted to walk to the crest, but O’Connor was now out of sight, below vertical rock walls which the brawling stream had furrowed out of the country rock through millenniums of time.
Redding knew he was sky-lined now, but that fact did not worry him. So long as O’Connor was hemmed in by cliffs without visible ravines entering from the sides, he could not discover that he was being flanked.
A thousand feet of elevation were behind Redding when, unexpectedly, his horse broke out of the scrub brush above timber line onto a clearly defined trace of an old wagon road.
Tondro’s spring wagon had not traveled these sand-filled weed-grown ruts, however, nor had any other vehicle passed this way in a decade. This was probably an old logging-camp road.
Because the road dipped down toward the canyon O’Connor was traveling, Redding decided to follow it, giving the steeldust its head and keeping his full attention on watching for O’Connor to show up in the canyon below.
The road bent around a shoulder of naked rock which lifted hundreds of feet to form a lava sugar loaf which Redding recalled having seen from the sheriff’s office in town. Glancing behind him, Redding had an unobstructed view of the Basin, with the roofs of Trailfork forming their indistinct blot in the middle distance.
The steeldust blew its lips and came to a halt. Looking ahead, Redding saw where this old-time road he was following had been obliterated by a rock slide which had stripped the mountain to the naked bedrock to form a scar hundreds of acres in extent.
An earthquake or some other cataclysmic upheaval had blocked Twelve Mile Creek’s course with incalculable tons of granite debris. Beyond the avalanche pile, Redding could see the ancient cuts and fills of this road leading on up the canyon; below it, the natural dam had backed up the waters of Twelve Mile Creek to form a small lake which meandered out of sight around a far bend of the hills.
The creek’s waters, or part of them, drained through the rock-slide boulders. O’Connor could never hope to pass that barrier on horseback. Therefore, this must be the first turnoff in his route to Tondro’s lair.
Even as that thought touched Redding, he saw Clark O’Connor, reduced to speck-like proportions at this altitude, putting his horse up a ledge which crossed over the opposite canyon wall.
Focusing the field glasses on the ledge O’Connor was following, Redding made out the unmistakable tracks of a wagon recently driven down that tilt of rock and brush.
“This is where Tondro drove the other night to reach the creek bed,” Redding muttered, a vast satisfaction filling him. It was like seeing invisible hands put together the pieces of a mammoth jigsaw puzzle.
That creek had swallowed up the last five miles of Tondro’s secret exit into the Basin. It was easy to see why no sheriff’s posse had ever penetrated this deep into the Navajadas; there was no trail to lead them here, no reason for exploring.
Redding waited until O’Connor had scaled the farther slope and vanished over the ridge. Then he put his gelding down to the avalanche-blocked creek, picked his way across, and began trailing the fresh hoofprints of O’Connor’s horse.
He was not prepared for the sight awaiting him at the high point of land above the avalanche scar. This was a lookout point commanding an unbroken view of the entire northwest extent of the Navajada range. Hundreds of feet below and perhaps two miles farther inside the mountain barrier, the nooning sun was refracted by the crest of a dazzling white mare’s tail of water spilling over the crest of a cliff.
O’Connor was not in sight, but the wagon track led down into the farther canyon formed by that waterfall’s runoff. Even before he put his military glasses on the curvature of the distant cataract, Redding knew he had broken the secret of Blaze Tondro’s hideout.
Just visible over the intervening rimrock he saw the weather-beaten roof of the old mine shaft house marking Tondro’s headquarters. Up there at the dead end of this canyon was Doc Stiles’s bastille of lost hopes.
Swinging his gaze over the formidable vastness of this unsurveyed domain of rock pinnacles and unscalable cliffs and ridges and caverns, many too deep for the sun’s light ever to penetrate them, Redding realized how cunningly Tondro had selected his den.
At no other point in the Navajada range, probably, was Thunder Rock’s waterfall crest visible to earthbound creatures.
Redding had passed this spot, wearing Blackwine’s blindfold; he had returned over this ridge, locked in the grub box of Tondro’s wagon. Now the landmarks were his to study and memorize against the time when he would make his last trek into Tondro’s forbidden domain backed by the strength of a posse that would rid Lavarim Basin forever of Tondro’s reign of lawlessness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Underground to Mexico
Redding withdrew into a jumble of time-furbished glacial boulders to ponder his next move. Any attempt to trail Clark O’Connor farther would mean inviting a bushwhack bullet from the sentries Tondro kept on duty around the clock. For all he knew, this spot might be within gun range of a guard post.
His horse concealed, Redding sized up the rugged country between him and the rimrock which overlooked Tondro’s hideout. He saw no cross chasms breaking that brushy slope, no indication of a ledge or avalanche scar which would block a man on horseback.
To be spotted out on that sun-baked expanse of steep, naked slope would be risky business, but was a chance he had to take. Darkin’s message called for Tondro to send a crew from Thunder Rock large enough to move a sizable cattle herd onto Wagonwheel range. He was tempted to remain where he was, on the supposition that within a short while O’Connor would be returning, perhaps with Tondro’s rustler crew.
Then he remembered what Doc Stiles had told him of a mine tunnel which served as an escape outlet from the gorge in case of emergency. It was possible that Tondro might dispatch the men Darkin had asked for through that exit.
Checking the magazine of his Winchester and the cylinders of his Colts, Redding put his horse out of the rocks and along the mountain slope, heading in the general direction of the canyon-end waterfall.
He could make good time along here, for the slope carried a webwork of hard-beaten game trails. With luck, Redding believed he could reach the rim directly above Tondro’s hideout before O’Connor reached his destination.
Redding had estimated the waterfall to be two miles from the ridge where he had had his first glimpse of it. But, reversing the usual error in underjudging distances in this high arid country, he found himself nearly abreast of the plunging waters within an hour’s riding.
Redding off-saddled
in a brushy rincon, staked out the steeldust gelding, and provided himself with a hunk of rye bread and a can of peaches from the sack Lennon had supplied him. Then, unencumbered by his Winchester, he picked his way down an eroded barranca, eating as he traveled, until he found himself at the edge of the cliff, facing the dizzy abyss of Thunder Rock gorge.
He bellied down on the hot granite shelf and worked his way with infinite caution to the rimrock’s verge.
He was directly above Tondro’s shaft house; he could have thumbed a pebble into space and landed it in the outlaws’ horse corral. A dozen Mexicans were lolling in siesta in the shade of a loblolly pine, down by the boiling whirlpool at the foot of the falls, the showering white spray giving them welcome surcease from the sweltering heat of the day.
A maul made its metallic music on an anvil in one of the aguista-thatched outbuildings down there. The place had an almost pastoral atmosphere of undisturbed peace, which Redding took as evidence that Clark O’Connor had not yet arrived with his message.
At that very moment a horse’s hoofs beat up echoes above the muted organ roar of the falls. Redding swung his gaze down-canyon and saw O’Connor rounding the last bend of the gorge wall, his shout to the camp lost for Redding in the constant thunder of plunging water.
But O’Connor’s shout had reached the shaft house. Redding saw the loafing Mexicans jump to their feet like startled quail and head across the flat area of old mine tailings at a run.
Peering almost straight down, Redding caught sight of Blaze Tondro as the contrabandista chief emerged from the shaft house, walking out to greet O’Connor as the Trailfork blacksmith climbed wearily from his lathered stirrup and handed Tondro the slip of paper from Darkin.
Before Tondro had finished reading the note, he was surrounded by sombreroed henchmen, coming from all sides. Redding felt his pulses race as he caught a flash of vivid color down by the river and recognized Zedra Stiles, wearing a scarlet fandango dress, come into view with a basket of clothes she had been laundering in primitive fashion.
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