Treasure Mountain s-17

by Louis L'Amour

  When I was dressed and out there beside him, he showed me the tracks. There were only parts of two foot tracks, the rest were on grass and left no mark that remained to show size.

  It was the same track I'd seen on the trail.

  "He was out to get you, Tell. There's a place where he waited in the aspens over there. He must've waited an hour or more."

  In the earth back of the outhouse we found another track, smudged and shapeless because he had been running. We found where his horse had stood, tied and waiting.

  I studied the tracks, knowing I had seen them before, but without remembering where. To a tracker a track is like a signature, and as easy to identify, but this was not one I had remembered, hence it was no one I had ever followed. It was simply a track I had noted casually without paying it any mind, but one thing I knew. If I saw that track again, I would remember it.

  Orrin came in from the ranch. "Good place," he said, "and I've found a spot for us."

  When I told him what had happened, he looked grim. "I should have come back. I knew I should have come back."

  "Nothing gets by that girl," Tinker commented. "She had that man dead to rights."

  We drank coffee, ate breakfast, and watched the cloud shadows change on Baldy.

  "I'm going up there again," I said. "I've got to settle it in my mind. I've got find what remains of him."

  "He's lost," Berglund said. "Coyotes or bears carried off the bones ... or the buzzards dropped them. Nothing lasts long up there that isn't stone."

  "There's evidence of that," the Tinker said quietly, "coming down the trail."

  Four horses, four riders--a rain-wet, beat-up looking crew--and one of them was Fanny Baston. Paul was there, one hand all tied up with a bandage, and those two riders they'd picked up from somewhere.

  They came down the trail, and we stepped outside to see them pass, but they looked neither to the right nor the left, they just rode on through. They carried nothing, nor did they stop for grub.

  "She's a beautiful woman," Orrin said. "You should have seen her the night we met."

  "Mountains are hard upon evil," I said. "They don't hold with it."

  Back inside we drank coffee whilst Judas saddled up for us. He came across the road, a neat black man in a neat black coat. "I would like to ride along with you, suh," he suggested.

  "Why not? You're a man to ride with, Priest. But ride ready for war. It may come upon us."

  We packed the buckskin again, for we'd be gone one night, anyway.

  We rode out into the street and started for the trail, and two more riders came up from the other end of town. It was Nell Trelawney and old Jack Ben.

  "See here," I said, pulling rein, "this is a rough ride, and you've been ailin'."

  "I ain't ailin' now," old Jack Ben said irritably, "and as for rough rides, I was ridin' rough country before your head was as high as a stirrup! You just ride along now, and pay us no mind."

  "No use to argue," Orrin said. "He was always a hard-headed, unreasonable old coot."

  Jack Ben snorted, but when we started off they were right behind us, and there they stayed, all the way up the mountain, and we rode with our rifles ready to hand. Yet no trouble came to us, and we rode easy in our saddles, the wind cool and pleasant in our faces, winding around and doubling back, the wild waters of the La Plata tumbling over the rocks or slowing down where the canyon widened out.

  Midday was long gone when we rode into the basin. The grass was a glorious green, wild flowers were everywhere. When we went down on the shelf Andre's body was gone. I showed them where the daybook had been. We had brought it along to read on the spot.

  It was getting on for sundown, so we unsaddled and staked out our horses. When the fire was lit and the coffee on, I took out the daybook.

  Chapter XXVII

  Judas was fixing supper. The Tinker sat a little away from us in the dark where he could listen better to the night sounds.

  With firelight flickering on the faces around, I tilted the book to catch the glow and settled down to read. There was a smudge on the first page.

  ... wind blowing, hard to write. Played out. A man trailin' me got a bullet into me when I went to move the picket pin. Low down on my left side. Hurts like hell. Lost blood. Worst is, he's in a place where I can't get a shot at him.

  Dasn't have no fire.

  Later: shot twice. Missed. I shot at sound, figured to make him carefuller. Gold hid. Got to hide this book--the other one's been stolen. If the boys come a-huntin', soon or late they'll find it. I trust if somebody else does he'll call the boys and share up. I don't expect no man to find gold and give it all up. Figured that was Andre, yonder. It ain't. Andre ain't that good in the brush. This'ns like Injun.

  Later: ain't et for two days. Canteen empty. Licked dew off the grass. Caught a swallow of rain in my coffeepot. Wounds in bad shape.

  Writing time to time. Boys will find that gold. They'll remember when it comes right down to it. That Orrin, he should recall, him always wantin' the cream of things. No further than from the house to the old well. Ma could find it. How many times she scolded that boy!

  Been backed up here five days now. Grub's gone. Coffee's gone. No water but dew and rain. Whoever it is out there won't take a chance. Got a funny walk. Hear him. Got another bullet into me. Boys, I ain't goin' to make it. Be good boys.

  Be good. Take care--got to put this away.

  He was cornered like an old bear driven to the wall, wounded and dying, but his last thoughts were of us. He'd have handled everything all right if he could have moved around, but he was bad hurt. That bullet in the side, now. That must have been worse than he said ... and no water. He must have caught some rain in his coffeepot, but that wouldn't have been much. He would have been slower in his movements with that bruised hipbone.

  When I finished reading, we just sat there thinking of pa, remembering the way he walked, the lessons he taught us, his humor, his handiness with tools.

  "That gold's somewheres about," Jack Ben said, "an' he left you clues. 'No further than from the house to the old well.' That there should mean somethin'.

  I recall that old well. She always had good water. Cold water, too. On'y it was too far from the house on a winter's mornin' so your grandpa dug one closer."

  "It ain't the gold, Jack Ben. It's pa. We want to find what remains of him."

  "You know what I think?" The Tinker turned his head toward us, firelight glinting on the gold rings in his ears. "I think that's the same man after you.

  The one who killed your pa. I think he's out there right now."

  We set quiet, contemplating on that. It could be ... but who?

  "A Higgins," Jack Ben said, remembering the old feud in Tennessee. "It must be a Higgins you've paid no mind to. He got your pa, now he's after the rest of the Sacketts."

  That might be, but something worried me. Couldn't put a finger on it, but something about this whole setup bothered me to fits. Nell set over there kind of watching me and that upset my considering. Hard to keep a mind on business with her setting over there breathing. Every time she took a deep breath my forehead broke out with sweat.

  "Go back over it," Judas suggested. "Cover every step. Possibly there is a thing that does not fit, something that will explain it all."

  "It might be the McCaire outfit," Orrin said. "Charley McCaire didn't take kindly to losing those horses even if he had no hand in stealing them."

  "You don't think he did?" I asked.

  "I doubt it. I think it was somebody in his outfit. But once he had them he didn't want to give them up or to have it believed that anyone in his outfit was a thief. If Tyrel hadn't ridden up when he did we'd have had to shoot our way out."

  "I don't think it's any of them," I said. "There's something odd about this man."

  "What became of Swan?" Judas asked.

  I shrugged. I'd been wondering that myself. We'd seen nothing of him, yet surely he was around. He was not with Paul and Fanny when they left ... if
they had.

  Finishing my coffee, I threw the grounds into the fire and rinsed out my cup. We would find the gold. I was sure of that, but I had never been a money-hungry man. We'd started out to find pa, or what remained of him, and we'd come a long way. We had to find out what happened in those last hours or minutes.

  I put my cup away and went into the darkness near the trees, stood there a moment, and worked my way over to where the Tinker was.

  He spoke as I neared him. "Tell? There's somebody or something out there."

  His whisper was very soft, only for my ears. I squatted near him. "Nothing definite ... just something moving ... scarcely no sound."

  I noticed that he held his knife in his hand. The Tinker was always a careful man.

  "I'm going out there."

  "No." The Tinker put his hand on my arm. "I will go."

  "This here's my job. Just tell them I am out there. And be careful, there's no telling what he will do."

  It was very dark. There were a few stars among scattered clouds. I made no attempt to keep to the brush. I moved through the knee-high grass and wild flowers.

  When I was thirty yards out from camp, I stopped to listen. What was he doing?

  Trying for a shot? Or merely listening?

  I moved on among the scattered spruce, keeping low to the ground. I stopped, and a voice spoke, very low. "Have you found the gold?"

  There was a chill along my back. "No," I said after a moment.

  "It is mine. It is all mine. You will not find it."

  That voice! There was something ... some thread of sound ...

  "We can find it," I said calmly, "and no one else can. The message my father left is one only we could understand."

  There was a long silence. "I do not believe it. How could that be?"

  "It has to do with our home in Tennessee."

  What manner of man was this who would so coolly talk to me in the darkness? And where was he? The direction was obvious, but if I leaped, and missed, I'd be dead in the next moment.

  "It is my gold." He spoke softly. "Go away and I'll not kill you."

  "You're through killing. If anybody does it now, it will be us."

  He did not speak, and I wondered if he were gone. I listened ... the man was a ghost in the woods. I was good, but this man, I believed, was better.

  "You killed my father," I said.

  "He was a good man. I did not wish to do it, but he had my gold."

  "The Frenchmen mined the gold. They buried it. They sold their claim to it with Louisiana. It was anybody's gold."

  "You will not have it. I will kill you all."

  After a moment of listening, I said, "Where is my father's body?"

  If I could keep him talking, just a little longer. I shifted my position slightly, making no sound.

  "It is beyond there, beyond your camp. I buried him in a crack. It is at the edge, near the roots of a tree."

  The faintest sound. I moved swiftly, felt the sudden rush of a body in the darkness, saw the gleam of a knife in a short, wicked sidewise swing at my ribs.

  He swung with his right arm, and I pulled back and dropped to my right. His knife went past me, and I rolled up on the small of my back and kicked out viciously with both feet, kicking where his body had to be.

  The double kick caught him on the side and knocked him rolling. Coming up like a cat, knife in hand, I went for him. I saw the black bulk of him roll up and come at me, felt the edge of the knife and the point take my sleeve, and then I came up on his right side and brought my knife up from below.

  His elbow caught my wrist and I almost lost my grip on the knife. He twisted away, turned, and threw his weight into me. He was heavy and bull-strong. The charge threw me back, but I caught my left forearm under his chin and brought him over with me. He landed on his back just above me and then we both came up, panting fiercely, gasping for breath at that altitude.

  He circled ... I could barely see him. I could hear his breath and see the cold light gleam along his blade. Suddenly I stopped, poised, yet still. Instantly he threw himself into me and I sidestepped off to my left, leaving my extended right leg for him to trip over. As his toe hooked over my leg, I swung back and down with my blade.

  It caught him too high--it ripped his coat and must have nicked his neck, for I heard a gasp of pain and then he wheeled into me again. This time his head was up and I jabbed him in the face with my fist. He did not expect it; my fist smashed him back on his heels, and I stepped in, stabbing low and hard.

  At the last instant he tried to evade my thrust, throwing himself backward down a small declivity. For an instant he vanished, and then I was down and after him.

  He was gone.

  Stopping, poised for battle, I listened. Not a sound except a soft wind in the trees. A cloud drifted over the stars and it was darker. Every sense alert, I listened.

  Nothing ... nothing at all.

  A brief, utterly futile battle. A moment of desperate struggle, and then nothing.

  Yet I should have known. He was a sure-thing killer, who could stab the wounded and helpless Pierre, who could shoot my father from ambush and then lurk, waiting for days for a final shot.

  He had thought to kill me there in the darkness, coming at me suddenly, yet I had been ready. And I had nicked him. Of that I was sure.

  After a moment I walked back. "I believe I scratched him," I said and explained.

  At the edge of the cliff where he had said my father's body was hidden, I hesitated. It was the very edge, and there looked to have been some crumbling.

  Probably the result of the tree roots.

  There was a crack, all right, and some dirt had been filled in. Orrin came closer, holding a burning branch in his left hand. I leaned over to look closer, put my foot on the outer edge of the crack and leaned still further, astride the crack.

  Suddenly there was a grating sound, the outer edge fell away under my foot and I felt myself falling. Half-turning I made a futile grab at anything, the rock crumbling from under my feet.

  A hand caught mine, the branch dropped, another hand grabbed my sleeve, and I was hauled up on the ledge.

  There was a moment when I said nothing. I looked over into the terrible void of blackness behind me, listening to the last particles of rock fall, strike, and rattle away on the last slope.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "It was a trap," Orrin said dryly. "There's more than one way to kill a man."

  Chapter XXVIII

  We still had no idea who the killer was. He was somebody who fancied he'd a claim on all that gold, and he was bound and determined to keep everybody else away and to have it all for himself.

  At daylight we took a look at the place where I'd almost gone over. There was no evidence to show that a body had ever been there. I reckon the killer had seen the place, figured it was ready to collapse, and just used it on chance.

  A woodsman is forever noticing small things like that. He'll have in his mind many possible camps that he'll never have time to use, and he'll notice tangles to avoid, things a man might trip over, and bad footing generally. After a time a man takes all these things in without really thinking about it. But if something is out of place he will see it instantly.

  Judas fixed us bacon and eggs from the outfit he'd brought up the trail. It wasn't often we had eggs unless setting down at table, but Judas was a planning man, and he'd packed for good cooking. When we finished I took my Winchester, shifted into moccasins, and walked out to where we'd had our scuffle the night before.

  There were tracks aplenty, but might few of them a body could read, for we'd fought mostly on crushed-down grass and flowers, and some of them were already springing back into place.

  After a while I found a couple of fair prints. It was the same boot I'd seen on the trail, and I worked around, trying to pick up sign that would take me where he was going. Trailing a man like that would be like trailing an old silvertip grizzly. He'd be watching his back trail and would be apt to see m
e before I saw him, and that wasn't pleasant to contemplate.

  Not that I had anybody to mourn much for me but brothers. Ange was dead, the other girls I'd known were scattered and gone, but I could do some mourning for myself. It seemed to me I had a lot of living to do and no particular desire to cash in my chips up here in Cumberland Basin.

  Nevertheless, I poked around. He'd taken off in an almighty hurry, not scared, mind you, but lacking that extra percentage he always had to have. When he took those first steps he'd be getting away, not thinking of hiding a trail. By his third or fourth step he'd be thinking of that, if I knew my man.

  Sure enough, I found a toe print, gouged deep. I followed a few bruised blades of grass, the edge of a heel print, a crushed pine cone, and a slip in a muddy place, and I came through a patch of scattered spruce and into the open beyond.

  I had to pull up short. Chances were nine out of ten he'd changed direction right there. So I scouted around and after a few minutes worked out a trail down into the hollow that lay on the east side of the basin. He had gone down into it, then switched on a fallen log, walked its length, and started back up to the ridge.

  By night he couldn't see what he'd done, but crushed grass or leaves had left a greenish smudge atop that log in two places. He had stepped on the log and grass from his boots had stuck it, just as a body will track dirt and the like into a house.

  Four or five places in the next hundred yards or so took me along a diagonal route to the high-line trail. That Ghost Trail, as some called it. A pebble kicked from its place on the muddy path and a couple of partial tracks showed me he was following along the trail.

  This here was rifle country, most of it wide open, for the trees give out in the high-up country. Trees were scattered hither and yon, singly or in bunches, among some brush. Higher up the only trees had been barbered by the wind until they looked like upturned brushes. Then there was grass and bare rock, the far-away mountains on every hand, and over all the sky, always scattered with white clouds.

  If that hidin' man was in a swivet to get himself killed he'd have to bring it to me. Generally speaking I'm not a techous man, taking most things calm. When a man is about to get shot at he'd better be calm. As much as he can be, at least.