“I told you I wanted you here,” he said flatly.
“And I told you I didn’t want to stay,” countered Yancey.
“Difference is, what I say goes, Bannerman!” Dekker snapped. He pointed at Yancey with the cigar. “You need to be taught a lesson, mister.”
Cato stirred slightly but Yancey didn’t look at him. He kept his bleak gaze on the rancher.
“Yeah,” Dekker went on slowly, standing up. “A lesson.” He gestured to the three men from the bunkhouse as they kept Yancey under their guns. “Lock him up for the night. We’ll take him out to the shaft in the morning.”
“Wait a minute!” Cato protested but Yancey shook his head swiftly and Cato caught the warning. He fought to keep the anger out of his voice as Dekker looked at him coldly. “What’s this ‘shaft’?” he asked a little lamely.
Dekker’s mouth twisted in a crooked smile. “You can come out with us in the morning and see for yourself,” he answered, then gestured impatiently for the men to take Yancey out.
Cato stood, frowning thoughtfully, as they dragged Yancey to his feet and shoved him roughly towards the door, cocked guns covering him all the way.
~*~
A cavalcade of riders moved out of the ranch yard before breakfast. The cook complained that whatever he was cooking would be ruined by the time they got back, but Dekker told him to shut up and make sure it wasn’t ruined or he would spoil the cook’s face with a skilletful of hot fat.
Yancey didn’t ride. His hands were bound together with rawhide and rope was run from these bonds to the saddle horn of one of the men. At a signal from Dekker they started out of the yard and Yancey was almost yanked off his feet. His forehead and one side of his face was swollen and discolored from his heavy fall and some skin had been grazed from his jaw and nose. He stumbled and staggered along, saying nothing, not looking towards Cato, who rode with a grim set to his mouth.
They travelled for maybe a half hour, out into the brush country, and then began climbing into the foothills of the Breaks. Timber was thinned-out here and cattle could be seen on the slopes. In another ten minutes they reached their goal, though, at first, Cato did not see it. Then Dekker put his mount alongside Cato’s and pointed up through the trees towards a clump of dry-looking brush beside a mountain of rubble. There were piles of mullock and old rotting planks.
“That’s the shaft ... An old abandoned mine. This area of the Breaks is full of ’em. Your friend is going to be lowered down into that shaft and he can stay there for a few days, until the end of the week at least. By that time, he ought to realize that what I say goes on Circle D.”
“Hold up, now!” Cato said curtly. “I ain’t standin’ by and seein’ Yance dropped into some hole in the ground and forgotten.”
“No?” queried Dekker bleakly. “I don’t know what you think you can do about it, but I’ll explain further, Cato ... Bannerman goes down on that rope on the winch, about seventy feet or so. The rope’s pulled up. Food and water will be lowered to him once a day and I’ll even throw in a tin of vestas for him and a stub of candle. He’ll survive, so you have nothing to worry about.”
“Mebbe not, but mebbe you have,” replied Cato grimly.
“How’s that?”
“S’pose I said I wouldn’t work on the gun as long as you keep Yancey in that shaft?”
Dekker smiled faintly. “All right, supposing you said that. He goes down into the shaft anyway. And, after the first hour, I drop a live rattlesnake down to keep him company ... He might manage to kill it before it bites him. Then, after the second hour has passed, I’ll drop two rattlesnakes in. After the third hour, three, and so on ... But I wouldn’t reckon he’d be alive by then, do you?”
Cato narrowed his eyes and held Dekker’s gaze for a long minute. He nodded very slowly. “You’ve made your point, I guess ... ”
Dekker lifted a hand and Yancey was jerked off his feet, the slack in the rope taken in so that he couldn’t stand; each time he tried to get up, the man moved his horse back a step and yanked him down again. Two others moved in and flipped the rope off his hands first, then cut the rawhide bonds. Yancey rubbed his wrists a spell before getting slowly to his feet, under the menace of the guns. He glanced up at Dekker.
“Any time you’re ready, Dekker.”
The rancher jumped his horse forward and Yancey was too slow in getting out of the way. The horse’s shoulder hit him and knocked him sprawling. Dekker looked down at him.
“Mr. Dekker, Bannerman!”
Yancey threw him a mocking salute as he climbed slowly to his feet, but his eyes did not look too amiable now. One of the men stepped in with a rifle and nudged Yancey towards the shaft up the slope. Cato rode along slowly with Dekker at his side. They made Yancey stand at the edge of the shaft that went straight down into the ground, and then fitted a handle to the winch roller and told him to wind up the rope. As he bent to the task, Cato spoke to Dekker:
“Why were the shafts abandoned? No more gold?”
“Partly. Also because of the nature of the ground here. Crumbling shale, tends to cave in frequently.” He laughed shortly, but neither Cato nor Yancey saw anything funny in the words. Then the rope appeared and Cato saw that there was already a loop at the end.
Yancey was told to fit a boot into the loop, sit down on the edge, then, gripping the rope, swing out into space. The winch roller was held in check by the brake-pawl but Yancey didn’t much like the idea of hanging suspended over that dark dank maw in the ground. It smelled musty and wet and unused. He wondered if the air at the bottom would be breathable, and mentioned this to Dekker, who merely grinned tightly.
“Give him a tin of vestas and that candle, Jack,” he instructed one of the men. “If you can light your candle when you reach the bottom, Bannerman, there’ll be enough oxygen for you. When the candle flame flickers out and you can’t get it to burn again ...” He shrugged, still smiling.
Yancey took the vestas and candle and put them in his shirt pocket. He nodded to Cato, fitted the loop over his boot and grabbed the rope, swinging out over the black shaft. One of the men knocked out the pawl-brake and, using the handle, lowered Yancey swiftly down into the darkness.
“He better come out of there alive, mister!” Cato said grimly to Dekker.
The rancher looked hard at him, then wheeled his mount and rode back down the slope. Cato waited until he saw the rope go slack and when the man on the winch started to wind up, he suddenly stopped, cursing.
“Damn it! He’s still on it!”
Cato leaned over the shaft. “All right, Yance?”
“Guess so,” came the echoing, resonant reply. “Air’s thick as a blanket but—breathable, I guess ... ”
“Get off that goddamn rope!” yelled the man at the winch.
“Not till I see if this candle lights!” Yancey yelled back. Cato started to inch his hand towards his gunbutt, but saw that the other two guards had him covered. He sighed and waited, seeing far below the flare of a vesta, just a point of light. Then there was a steadier, though smaller pinpoint of light down there.
“It burns steady enough,” Yancey called up.
“You get off that goddamn rope in two seconds or I start droppin’ rocks down!” yelled the man on the winch, straining at the handle. Abruptly the winch spun and the rope went slack. The man swore and wound it swiftly.
“I’ll be seein’ you, pard,” Cato called down the shaft before being gestured away by one of the guards.
A few minutes later, they all rode down out of the Breaks. Yancey didn’t hear them go. He was holding his candle, examining his prison. He was in a rough square about six feet to each side and there was a short, boarded-up drive running off to one side. He was about to crawl in and see if he could see anything behind the boards when he kicked against something soft. He jumped back, sucking in a sharp breath, looking down. He started. There was a man’s body lying against one wall and even in the murky yellow candle light he could make out the bullet hole in t
he back of the head.
Heart pounding from the initial shock, Yancey forced himself to steady down, knelt beside the man and held the candle closer. From what was left of the face, he knew he would have had a hard time recognizing the man even if it had been his own brother. He hunkered back on his hams, wondering how long the man had been here. A couple of days, he guessed. Then he reached out and felt in the pockets, surprised to feel the outlines of a billfold in the jacket pocket.
Yancey pulled out a plain wallet, dark with damp and some blood, and opened it. Inside were papers and a little folding money. Yancey unfolded some of the papers. They were letters, and when he saw who they were addressed to, he figured this shaft was going to be his tomb: Dekker wouldn’t, couldn’t, let him live now. Nor Cato either.
For the dead man was Jason Burrell, the gunsmith, and it was patently obvious that he had been murdered and his body dumped down this shaft.
~*~
Cayuse Dekker put a guard on the gunshop while Cato worked. His attitude had changed completely. He no longer coaxed Cato along with his work on the gun; he told him to get it done or Yancey would be in even more trouble than he was already in.
Dekker was no fool. There had been marks on Bendix, or Fargo as he knew him, that supported Yancey’s story of a fist fight, but he knew Yancey could likely have finished it without actually killing the man. As it had happened, Yancey hadn’t had any real choice, but Dekker thought he could have merely shot to wound. Because Yancey had killed Fargo outright, and Fargo had hinted strongly previously that he knew Yancey and that he was not just the bounty hunter he professed to be, Dekker figured Yancey’s bullet had been expressly designed to shut Fargo’s mouth for good. Following this reasoning, he assumed then that there must have been something in Fargo’s suspicions and that Yancey could well be some sort of lawman.
It made no difference to the way Cato worked, not even when the guard looked in at regular intervals as instructed by Dekker. He worked methodically and mostly automatically, his mind on other things. He was a good enough gunsmith to be able to get away with this and still turn out a first class job, but he had to figure out some way to get Yancey out of that shaft and away from here so he could warn Governor Dukes. It looked like the only way was to slip out there with a rope and drop it down to him. While Yancey was still alive. For Cato figured the air down there would turn bad after a spell and Yancey could suffocate. That could well be Dekker’s idea, but he would go on with the fiction that Yancey was still alive, using him as a lever to make Cato work on the gun.
The gun ... If he couldn’t get Yancey out to warn the governor, the only answer was to sabotage the gun itself. And that was sure a problem, because Dekker was aiming to check every step of the way against Burrell’s specifications. And the man would be beside him when it was tested for accuracy on the target range. What was more, Dekker intended to try out the gun himself for accuracy, to make sure there was nothing deliberately out of plumb that Cato was compensating for. It was going to be one hell of a job to pull off ...
And, if he was going to do anything to the gun, it would have to be by tomorrow, for then the parts would be ready for assembly. Which meant he had to try to get to Yancey tonight.
~*~
Yancey was cold and it was a damp coldness that seemed to seep clear through to his bone marrow, insidious, creeping, demoralizing.
He found himself worrying more about how to keep warm than on ways to escape. Yancey tried running on the spot for a time but found that the exertion quickened his breathing and he felt as if he was suffocating. The air down here was breathable but the oxygen content was way below the fresh air above. Any heavy or prolonged exertion was obviously out. After his heart had settled down and his breathing was more or less normal, Yancey sat for a spell, warmer, but beginning to gradually grow cold again. He stood up and began flinging his arms about: throwing them wide and barking his knuckles against the walls, knocking loose some earth and rocks, then bringing them back sharply and crossing them over his chest. It worked fine for a short time, and then he began to get dizzy and he found he was really straining to get enough air down into his lungs. He began to cough and to shake and he knew he was starving for oxygen. The candle flame still burned steadily enough but it was a yellow-orange color; there was no tinge of blue that told of good oxygen content. He sat down again, elbows on his knees, head hanging, chest heaving as his lungs worked ponderously in their craving for air. His breathing rhythm settled again though he still felt he wasn’t getting as much air as he really needed. By then he had decided that he would just have to put up with the cold and damp and exert himself as little as possible.
And while he was sitting dead still, breathing slowly, savoring each lungful, he noticed the candle flame quiver. He tensed, immediately thinking that the air was turning foul. Then he saw that the flame was actually leaning over to one side, not diminishing in size at all. Hope rising in him, he glanced up the shaft at the patch of bright blue sky, looked over towards the huddled form of the dead man, then slowly turned his head towards the short, boarded-up drive shaft behind him. He moved aside slowly, getting his body out of the way.
The candle flame fluttered, leaned way over to one side, elongating and showing tinges of blue.
It was directly in a current of fresh air, and it had to be coming from that short drive. Of course! he told himself angrily. There had to be some sort of air currents down here or he would never have had time to free himself from the rope after being lowered: the air would have been so foul it would have killed him in minutes. Something had to be keeping just enough oxygen there for the air this deep to be breathable. And for a candle to burn.
Yancey took the candle and, shielding the flame carefully with a cupped hand, got to hands and knees and crawled warily into the short drive. It was low and dripping in parts and he lay down on his back, ignoring the wetness soaking through his clothes, and let the water drip into his mouth. It tasted like he had been sucking pennies but it eased the fire in his throat. Thirst slaked, he continued to crawl forward another seven or eight feet and then he had reached the crisscrossed boards that had been nailed across the tunnel. It had been shored up with heavy timber at the sides but it looked old and rotted with the damp: he wouldn’t like to have to depend on those posts, he figured.
Then he realized that was exactly what he was doing: he was laying his life on the line down here. But there was no reason why those shoring uprights should suddenly collapse at this moment in time after supporting the drive’s roof weight for so many years. Just the same, his back muscles crawled and he felt his neck tense as he held out the candle in front of him. He saw then that something had been written on the planks of the barrier in chalk. He blew a film of dust off and read:
DANGER! KEEP OUT! CAVE-IN BEHIND HERE!
MY PARD’S UNDER IT. AIN’T NO GOLD HERE!
JOE KELSEY, 1858
Yancey sighed. Great news. Just what he wanted to know. He held the candle up to a space between the boards but the dim light made no impression on the darkness beyond. He couldn’t tell what was there. He was about to back out when he felt the touch of a cold air current on his cheek: moving, cold, dry air ...
Yancey went back to the boards, rammed his face against the rough wood. By Harry, there was some sort of breeze blowing through, but only intermittently, as though the tunnel was connected to the surface in some way, but only caught the breeze when it blew from a certain direction.
He turned the candle on its side, let tallow drip onto a stone and, while it was still fluid, stood the butt of the candle in it and held it there until the tallow set. With both hands free now, he grabbed the topmost plank, glanced at the rotted uprights, then, figuring he had nothing to lose, he heaved back, shoulder muscles straining, throwing his weight against the plank.
Rusty nails screeched and protested and the whole wooden barrier began to bulge as Yancey braced his legs and strained even more. Abruptly, the plank splintered in the middle and
he was thrown backwards just as he heard a rumbling sound and dirt and rocks began to rain down on him, choking him.
The candle was buried under a fall of earth and the drive was plunged into blackness as the thunder of the new cave-in filled his ears and something heavy crashed across his lower legs, pinning him.
Chapter Seven – Cave-In
Cato’s Manstopper had been taken from him. There was open distrust now and he was regarded by the others in the bunkhouse as a straight risk. They didn’t know if he was some kind of lawman or what, all they knew was that Dekker seemed to regard him as some kind of enemy and their orders were to watch him closely at all times.
Cato knew he wasn’t going to be able to get out to the shaft where they had Yancey prisoner without a deal of trouble. He still aimed to try, but he figured he was going to have to take it very carefully, the way the others were watching him.
He was right: he had plenty of trouble.
Coming back from the gunshop just after sundown, for his supper, Cato stopped at the wash bench to clean his face and hands. While drying himself, he glanced down towards the corrals and saw the row of saddles hanging on the top rail. On almost every one of the saddles was a coiled lariat, made of plaited grass. A couple of those joined together would easily reach to the bottom of that shaft. If he could only get his hands on them.
He lay in his bunk until well after midnight when the gate guards changed. He gave the relieved guard a chance to settle down and, when he heard the man snoring gently, he slipped out of his bunk silently, picked up his boots and made his way to the rear door. The latch wouldn’t move and he cursed. Since Yancey had slipped out the door closest to their bunk area, it seemed that Dekker had ordered the door to be locked. It meant now that he had to creep the full length of the bunkhouse down to the front door, past all the twin rows of bunks full of sleeping men. The windows were few and placed too close to other bunks for him to risk trying to open one in its warped frame and then slipping out. The front door was the only way out.
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