Lupo was a second away from dropping his bottle and cup and reaching under his poncho for the big Walker, knowing he would have to step back to do so, as close as the Russian stood to him. But before he set himself to making his move, the Russian stopped a few feet away and stared at the half-breed.
“What is now the trouble?” he asked Cold Foot, sounding put out. “I told you it is not trouble I want to have here.” He turned his glassy eyes to Lupo. “Who are you and what do you want here?”
Lupo put away the idea of going for the big Walker. He held up the bottle and cup.
“Only this,” he said meekly, “and a chair on which to sit while I quench my thirst?”
“All right,” said Cherzi, gesturing to the table where Lupo had been headed anyway. “Have your drink. This man will no longer bother you.”
“I know him,” Cold Foot insisted, both of them in a dope-induced stupor.
“Be a nice person,” said Cherzi, raising a finger. “We are all three foreigners here.”
Foreigners here?
Lupo looked at Cold Foot, a shoulder-length single braid of hair hanging beneath his hat, a Cheyenne beaded necklace around his neck. He glanced down at his own striped peasant poncho. Thank the saints for good Mexican dope, he told himself.
“But he’s been called a bounty hunter,” said Cold Foot.
“So what, are you wanted?” Cherzi asked. “I have been called a Bulgarian, but what does it matter?”
Cold Foot had to think about it.
“You asked what I am doing here,” Lupo offered, lowering his tone, adjusting his meek countenance a little now that he saw what he was dealing with. “I’m here to meet Billy Boyle and ride with him and his amigos.” He gestured his eyes in the direction of Lookout Hill. “We talked about robbing the mine payroll?” he whispered.
“I do not know what it is you speak of,” the Russian said. But his glassy eyes couldn’t hide the truth.
Lupo saw it. The time was here, just as he thought. Lookout Hill was ready to move against its neighbor, the Pettigo-American Mining Company.
“You must wait for the sheriff and his deputy to return,” said Cherzi. “They are with Billy Boyle. I am not to tell anybody anything.”
Bellibar and Siebert, the new sheriff and his deputy…
Lupo thought about it without letting the surprise show on his face. He held the empty wooden cup out to the half-breed just to see if he would take it. He did.
“Gracias,” he said. “Maybe I should come back when the sheriff is here,” he said to the Russian.
“What about your mescal?” asked Cherzi.
“I’ll take it along with me,” said Lupo, wanting out of there while both men still saw him through a fuzzy veil. He saw that Cold Foot was not as doped as the Russian—he might yet be a problem.
Walking out of the tent with both men shadowing him, Lupo stepped up into his saddle, touched his sombrero brim and rode away. But he only rode for a mile before veering his horse into a stand of scrub mesquite and fire bush, and stepped down from his saddle and hitched his horse out of sight. Climbing atop a large rock beside the trail, he slipped a Spanish-style dagger from his boot well, looked at it in his hand.
“Mi puñal…you must not fail me on this day,” he whispered to the glittering blade. He touched his lips to the cold steel as if in a lover’s kiss. He took off his poncho and his belly rig, but shoved his big Colt down behind his back just in case and pulled his shirttail out to cover it. He crouched atop the rock and waited.
Chapter 17
In his inebriated state, the half-breed rode along the narrow trail at a medium gallop, trying hard to clear his mind. He watched the rocky terrain for an ambush, but when Lupo made his move and leaped down from his position atop the rock, it caught Cold Foot by surprise. Even if he’d been expecting the attack, it would have done him little good, the weight of the Mexican coming down atop him unchecked.
Seeing the flash of steel in the Mexican’s hand as they both flew from the saddle, Cold Foot instinctively grasped his wrist before Lupo’s blade made its way into his chest. As the half-breed managed to offer a defense for himself, the two rolled along the rocky trail, tumbling in a rising swirl of dust.
When they stopped rolling, the half-breed rose first to his knees, then to his feet, grabbing a knife he carried stuck down in his own boot well.
Lupo came to his feet ten feet farther along the trail as the half-breed’s horse galloped on, spooked and whinnying loudly. He saw the flash of the half-breed’s blade streak across the air between them just in time to keep him from rushing in. Crouched, the Mexican agent held himself back. The two men circled crablike. Lupo thought about the Colt behind his back beneath his poncho. He would use it as a last resort, but he wanted no noise. He needed to remain unseen and unheard, as he had been these past weeks while studying the comings and goings of the Pettigos and the Lookout Hill boys.
“I knew you were him,” the half-breed growled, still winded from the hard fall. “You never fooled me for a minute.”
“Yes, I am Juan Lupo,” the Mexican said as the two continued their slow circling stance. “I saw in your eyes that you wanted to kill me as soon as we looked at each other, but I did not understand why. That is why I waited here for you. I knew you would come, and I wanted to know.”
“It doesn’t matter why I want to kill you, Easy John,” said the half-breed. “I wanted to kill you when I first laid eyes on you in Matamoros. When I saw you ride into Copper Gully, I just wanted to kill you even worse than before.” He tossed the knife back and forth from hand to hand as they circled.
“In that case, what better way to kill each other than with the bite of cold steel, eh?” Lupo said.
“I couldn’t have said it better, Mex,” the half-breed said.
“All right, then,” said Lupo, crouching with even more deliberation, but he stopped short and straightened a little. “But as you see, I have only my dagger.” He gestured toward the Colt in the half-breed’s holster, wanting to keep it silent too. “You have the advantage.”
“Oh, the gun,” said Cold Foot. “I almost forgot.” His bloodshot eyes had cleared considerably. He raised his Colt from its holster, examined it and cocked it toward Lupo.
It took courage for Lupo to not draw the big Walker from behind his back and end things quickly. But he held on, even as the half-breed pointed the gun at him, taking aim.
“One shot and it’s all over, Mex,” the half-breed said. “I could quit hating myself for not killing you sooner.”
Lupo felt his hand want to grab for the Walker; still, he kept held himself in control, fighting the urge.
“But I won’t do that,” said the half-breed, uncocking the gun and pitching it aside in the dirt. “I want to watch your face up close while you’re wriggling and dying on the end of my—”
His words stopped as Lupo charged at him, but he retaliated fast, launching forward in a charge of his own. Stabbing and slashing wildly at each other, the two fought chest to chest for only a second. Yet at the end of that tense second, as they backed away from each other, both stood crouched and bleeding from stabs and slashes on their blocking hands, their defending forearms, their exposed sides, their faces, their abdomens.
Ignoring his own bleeding, the half-breed gazed upon Lupo’s cuts and punctures with a gleam in his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said in a dark tone, “this is what I wanted to see.”
The two charged again. This time they didn’t back away. Instead they fell to the ground, rolling, kicking, stabbing and cutting each other relentlessly until Lupo’s dagger slipped free of his blood-slick hand. Before he could grab his dagger back from the ground, he felt the half-breed’s blade go deep into his lower side and stop against solid bone.
The half-breed’s knife stayed stuck in Juan Lupo as Lupo rolled away to once again reach for his own lost dagger. This time he closed his hand around his dagger’s handle and felt a layer of dirt and grit that allowed him the trac
tion he needed. He swung the knife hard as he rolled back to the half-breed and saw the blade open a deep, long gash on his shoulder.
But the half-breed wasn’t finished. Even as blood spewed from his shoulder, he grabbed his knife and gave it a hard merciless rounding before jerking it from Lupo’s bleeding side.
Lupo bellowed in pain and he flung himself atop the half-breed, pinning the man’s knife hand to the dirt with his knee. He jabbed a bloody thumb deep into the half-breed’s eye until he felt the eyeball pull loose and jump to one side. Still he pressed his thumb even deeper, to its hilt into warm, soft substance and membrane. Gripping his bloody head like a punctured melon, he held Cold Foot in place as he stabbed his blade deep into the exposed side of the half-breed’s neck—once, twice, three times.
On the third vicious stab, he fell way on the ground and stared up, blinking at the sky, feeling the earth sway beneath him like the deck of a troubled ship. The dagger fell from his hand onto the ground beside him. He felt for it and closed his hand back over it. He patted the bloody knife as if for a job well done. Beside him he watched blood fountain up from the half-breed’s throat, three feet in the air, then fall away to nothing.
Turning onto his side, knife in hand, he crawled over and looked down at Cold Foot’s grim bloody face. The half-breed’s remaining eye stared straight up into the endless sky with a look of disbelief.
“It’s all right…,” Lupo gasped. He patted Cold Foot’s bloody chest. “It’s okay….” He tugged at the half-breed’s shirt, trying to close the wide slash in the material. “It’s all right…,” he whispered again. He patted Cold Foot’s dead chest one last time, then rested his head down on it and felt a warm darkness close in around him.
When the three hours it should have taken Lupo to ride to Copper Gully and back turned into five, the Ranger set out down the trail searching for him. At a turn in the trail, the Ranger saw a horse coming at him, no rider on its back. He fell in beside the trotting horse, caught it by its bridle and brought it to a halt.
He was glad to see that it wasn’t Lupo’s horse, yet he had a suspicion that the horse had something to do with Lupo’s trip into Copper Gully, and that made him wish he’d waited for Lupo closer down the trail. But this was how Lupo had wanted it, he reminded himself, nudging the stallion on along the trail, leading the horse beside him.
Before he’d gone a mile farther, he saw Lupo riding his horse toward him at a walk. Sam let out a breath, rode closer and stopped again, this time seeing how Lupo sat bowed in his saddle. Looking past Lupo, he eyed the trail behind him closely. Then he moved forward again, seeing the drawn look on Lupo’s face.
“What took you?” he asked, studying Lupo even closer, seeing something was wrong.
Lupo had washed the blood from his face and hands with canteen water and torn a shirt from his saddlebags into strips to dress the worst of his wounds as best he could.
“One of Pettigo’s men followed me,” he said, “a half-breed Cheyenne named Clayton Cain. That’s his horse you have there. I couldn’t risk him getting on our trail, so I killed him.”
Noting Lupo’s hand clutching his lower side beneath his poncho, Sam asked, “Are you shot? I didn’t hear any gunfire.”
“No, I’m not shot,” said Lupo. “It was a knife fight. I took some cutting before I finally pinned him down.”
Sam looked at him closer, seeing a stark paleness to his face and hands.
“We’ll make camp here. I’ll take a look at those wounds,” he said.
“No, not here,” said Lupo. He nodded farther toward a turn in the trail. “Up there in the turn. From there we can see most of Copper Gully. I need to show it to you.”
“Following you,” Sam said, backing the stallion a step and letting Lupo pass him. As he fell in behind Lupo, leading the half-breed’s horse behind him, he watched the wounded Mexican riding slightly hunched over but otherwise unimpaired by his wounds. When Lupo stopped at the turn thirty yards ahead, Sam watched him step down from the saddle stiffly.
Lupo gestured a hand out across a steep drop.
“We cannot be seen from this distance,” he said, directing the Ranger’s vision up along the jagged gully. It ran straight and deep, stretching up the side of a steep, rocky hill that dwarfed the hills surrounding it. From their position above the lower end of the gully, Lupo traced his gloved finger upward, following the gully into the far distance where it ended short beneath the crest of the hill.
“It looks as if some higher power sank a giant ax into the hillside, eh, Ranger?” he said. “Perhaps in a fit of rage against my people.”
Sam only looked at him. He could see Lupo fighting against the pain of his wounds, trying not to give in to them.
“Not the kind of higher power we both know, of course,” Lupo added, crossing himself idly as he spoke. The Ranger recognized a note of wry irony in his statement.
Sam looked up the deep-walled gully, and at the high walls of rock that terraced its sides at random intervals.
“I can see why this gully is the only access to the mines,” he said. Then he looked at the roofline of the town below the deep gash in the hillside and spoke its name in Spanish.
“Barranca del Cobre,” he said. “I can also see how nobody gets past the town in any great numbers without being seen. There’s no other way up the gully except riding along the main street.”
“This was the intentions of the early Spaniards,” Lupo said. “They knew how to use the land itself to keep others out.” He gazed at the up-reaching gully. “But there is more to the Pettigos’ security than this alone,” he added.
“I figured there might be,” Sam said, staring into the distance where the eleven-mile gully ran out of sight.
“The Pettigos have so many gunmen they leave one posted as guard, stationed every few miles apart along the gully floor,” said Lupo. “There are four in all. The one closest to Copper Gully listens for any unusual gunfire coming from town. If he hears anything, he fires warning shots for the next gunman, who passes along warning shots in return. Finally the warning makes its way up the gully to the mines.”
Sam considered it.
“No wonder nobody ever makes it up to the mines and pulls a surprise attack on them,” he said.
“Sí,” said Lupo, “the Pettigos are not fools. They pay the peasants they employ to mine the copper so little that they can afford many guns to keep their world protected. The peasant miners are little more than slaves. Yet the Pettigos’ gunmen live a good and prosperous life.”
The Ranger thought it over as he surveyed the rugged, steep terrain.
“This is the perfect place to hide a wagonload of stolen golden ingots,” he said. As he spoke, the two turned to their horses and swung up into their saddles, Lupo taking only a second longer, owing to his pain. Sam observed him in silence as they turned their horses and rode twenty yards deeper into the brush and rock cover above their trail.
This time when they stepped down from their saddles, Lupo held on to his saddle horn for a moment. Sam continued to keep a close eye him.
“Until I get my sights on Bellibar and Siebert, this is your show,” he said, watching Lupo straighten up enough to walk over to a rock and sit down, clutching his lower side. “But I have to ask, are you going to be able to do this?”
“I will do this,” Lupo said with determination. “You must believe me.” He didn’t mention Bellibar and Siebert just yet.
“All right,” said Sam, “I do believe you.”
“Gracias, Ranger,” he said, keeping the pain out of his voice.
“But I will ask, how do you plan on us getting up the gully to the gold without the posted guards tipping off the mines?” He pulled down both of their bedrolls from behind their saddles and pitched them on the rocky ground.
Lupo gave a tight, forced smile as Sam gathered dried brush and kindling twigs into a circle for a fire.
“Sometimes to solve a problem in the present, one must look to the past,” he said.
“I could not imagine the Spaniards putting themselves on a hilltop which had only one trail in and out of their encampment. So I searched the other side of this hill for two weeks until I found an old, tunneled trail.”
The Ranger listened as he stepped over a few feet and brought back dried scrub pine branches.
“I followed the trail until I could see a guarded building where the wagon sits,” Lupo continued. “I could have taken it that very day, but I could never have gotten away without the mercenaries catching me. The wagon tracks would have led them to the hidden trail and all would be lost.”
“What makes you think they don’t already know about the tunnel and the hidden trail?” Sam asked, stooping, striking a wooden match and starting a low fire.
“The trail has not been used for a very long time,” said Lupo. “There were no hoofprints or boot prints to be seen.” He paused, then said, “Besides, it would no longer matter if they know or not. I have dynamite hidden halfway down the trail. As I go escape through the tunnel, I blow up the trail behind me.”
“What will my part be in this?” Sam asked, bringing the fire to a working level for boiling water.
Lupo looked at the Ranger until Sam realized he could answer the question himself.
“You need somebody to help you take out the guards,” Sam said. “Somebody with a rifle who can hold them back until you get started down the back of the hillside.”
“If I am lucky, I can slip in and get the wagon and get out unseen while the Cadys are attacking the Pettigos from up the gully.”
“But if you are seen,” Sam said, “you’re dead, and the gold is never recovered.”
“I could never get down the back trail with horsemen riding after me,” Lupo said.
“It’s not going to be easy for your rifleman either,” said Sam. “The mercenaries will be stirred up like hornets, with the outlaws from Lookout Hill coming up the gully at them and the backside of this hill blowing up at the same time.”
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