The whole thing here was more than he could understand. It was bad enough to battle soundless guns, let alone men who spoke a language that only a heathen could comprehend. “But before we get done here, I’ll git me all the answers or git salivated tryin’,” he avowed to himself. “An’ I’ll pay back them scuts for gutshootin’ a helpless man thataway, too. Hell, all we wanted was his gold an’ there ain’t been that much dinero runnin’ around loose since hell froze over!”
But for a time it didn’t appear that they were going to get anything in this dark room but a dose of lead. There seemed to be at least half a dozen men loose in the darkness.
Nevada Jim remained on the floor. He shot and rolled over, then shot again at each gun-flash. Lead slapped all about him, but he was used to that. Utah was yelling like a Comanche each time he triggered, and Nevada used his own voice as he emptied one gun and flung it into the face of a shadow looming near him. “Shut up, Utah!” he rapped. “Want every sidewinder here tuh spot you?”
Somebody stepped on his hand just then. He clutched an ankle and yanked. In the same movement he brought forth his second gun and swung the long barrel down on a skull. Bone crunched sickeningly, followed by a deep sigh.
“Like breakin’ aiggs into a fryin’ pan!” he chuckled to himself.
Again he whipped his gun sidewise and took a snap shot at a figure trying to steal through the doorway. That was the end of it, or at least Nevada thought so. But just then both of them heard a sound that brought them swiftly to their feet. It was the coughing roar of an airplane motor coming to life.
“Two of the skunks got out through the door,” Utah yelped, “whilst I had my hands full with a couple more. But they ain’t got away yet. Come on!”
“I’m way ahead of you!” Nevada shouted as he hurdled the body of the last man he had triggered. His long legs pumped him swiftly into the living room. He took a glance at Dan Conover and went to him. The mine owner was dying. Blood welling from the wound in his chest now stained his entire shirt and pooled on the floor. He was slipping fast, but on sight of the outlaw, he urged him close.
Utah came panting up. “Looks like they punched Dan’s ticket sure,” he commented, taking a look at Conover’s bloodless face. “The dirty lowdown scuts—triggerin’ a man that couldn’t nowise defend hisself!”
“Get goin’ outside!” Nevada bit out. “Wing that sky-buggy afore she gits offen the ground, or we’ll have a hell of a time follerin’ its trail on hoss-back. Watch yore step, Utah. Them jiggers is plumb bad!”
McClatchey jumped for the door, gray hair flying out like a mane behind his shoulders. Nevada leaped to the side of the old mine owner, and for a rough and ready hellion with no more scruples than a mangy coyote, he was strangely gentle about untying the gag still in Dan Conover’s mouth, and bringing him a big slug of whiskey from a bottle of old Squareface in a corner cupboard. He had sloshed a tin-cup half full, and Dan Conover gulped it down like water.
Nevada looked at the empty cup. “You might of saved me a swig,” he said morosely. “That’s all there was in the bottle!”
A ghost of a smile crossed Conover’s face. He looked pleased at seeing the old-time outlaws. At least the three of them spoke the same language.
Outside, the plane motor was rising into a crescendo of sound that almost drowned the savage barking of Utah McClatchey’s Colt. Then a shadow passed across a lighted window. Nevada didn’t need to hear Utah’s sulphurous curses to know he had failed to halt the plane’s flight. McClatchey did not immediately reappear, and for a few minutes Nevada Jim had his hands too full to wonder where the old lobo had gone.
For as soon as the plane roar got out of his ears, he became aware that Conover was speaking his name in a halting, gasping voice. “James. Jim, bend closer. I ain’t got long to be here, but while I am, I want to tell you what I can. You’re a pesky outlaw, and yuh come here to rob me, but I’d a sight rather have seen you get my gold than them pesky greasers, and furriners that have got it now. I—I didn’t know they’d come back to the bunkroom or I’d a-warned yuh.”
Nevada Jim sat down on the arm of Conover’s chair, and propped his head so the blood coming into his throat wouldn’t choke him. But he saw, even as he did so, that Dan Conover had spoken just about his last words. Only a supreme effort brought another mumbling phrase from his lips.
“El Sierra del Luna, Jim. Tres Cruces, The Mountains of the Moon. Three Crosses.”
His head fell forward on muscles gone suddenly slack. Gently, Nevada Jim let the old man drop forward across the table. He was not a praying man, was Nevada Jim James, but he prayed right then that the Good Lord would let him line his sights on Dan Conover’s killer.
Utah McClatchey came stumbling in from outside.
Nevada looked up. “Where you been?”
For a moment, Utah McClatchey didn’t answer him. He stared somberly at Dan Conover. When he raised his eyes they were black and hard as obsidian.
“They’s twelve fresh graves out alongside the bunkhouse,” he said slowly. “Dan’l will fill the thirteenth. Jim, them twelve graves are kinda shaller. Looks like the hombres who dug ’em got tired in a hurry. Mebbe they didn’t give a damn if the coyotes come down from the hills and dug out the corpses, and made a meal off of ’em. Which they done. Every last one of the dozen, Jim, was shot in the back of the head like you’d shoot a steer. From the look of things, they had just about as much chance as a hog of defendin’ themselves. Now there ain’t nobody accused me of bein’ an angel, but I’ll be damned right straight tuh Purgatory if I ever shot a man when he warn’t lookin’ at me!”
He was silent a moment while he punched spent shells from his two Colts, and thumbed in fresh loads, taken from the well-filled belt about his thin waist. Then he spoke again, while Nevada Jim was still digesting the information already given him.
“That flyin’ chariot got clean away,” Utah went on gloomily, “and the gold with it, I’ll bet you that. Away as clean as a whistle, and me already havin’ figured out ways and means of spendin’ it. I guess we’ll jest have to hunt ourselves up a bank to bust, afore we skip to Chihuahua.”
“We will like hell!” Suppressed violence filled Nevada’s voice. “Dan’l got out enough to tell me where them hombres took the dinero.”
“He did!” Utah McClatchey came around the table, his eyes lighting.
But the light went out of them in a hurry when Nevada said, “Yeah. Tres Cruces in the Sierra del Luna, across the border.”
“An’ you think we’re goin’ traipsin’ into that country?” Utah squalled out the words like a cougar missing a kill. “Why hell on a shovel, I wouldn’t go into those del Luna mountains for all the gold in Arizony. Son, you’re younger than me, and you ain’t seen as much of the world as I have. Leastways you ain’t never been in the del Lunas. I have, and I ain’t hankerin’ to go there ag’in. That’s where the Penitentes hang out, in Tres Cruces. They got three crosses stuck up on a hill, and their idee of fun is to ketch a white man, strip him, cut him tuh doll rags with cactus whips, then hang him tuh one of these here crosses! Nope, Jim, we ain’t goin’ to Tres Cruces. We don’t need gold that bad!”
Utah McClatchey was just talking. He was as perverse as a Missouri mule. Nevada knew that nothing short of boothill could keep his old partner from jaunting to the Sierra del Luna. The gold was just a part of it now. There were thirteen white men who had died ignominiously, and somebody was going to pay for that.
Nevada had gone on into the bedroom. There were three dead men on the floor. He eyed them with a pleased expression on his hook-nosed, hatchet-thin face. “I tally four, all told,” he called out to Utah. “That pays double for ol’ Dan’l, and one of them fellers the coyotes chawed up.”
Then he fell silent. Two of the dead men on the floor were Mexicans. They were dressed in dark business suits, smooth-skinned, slick looking fellows. Nevada didn’t like the type when they were alive. He liked them no better when they were dead. His hooked nose
wrinkled with disgust. Long, blue-barreled automatic pistols were lying near each of the men. They had, funny looking gadgets attached to the muzzles. Nevada guessed they were silencers, but they were the first he had ever seen. It made him like the Mexicans no better, for he personally liked nothing more than the business-like boom of a Colt Peacemaker.
The third man on the floor also wore a dark business suit. The two Mexicans were not big, but this man was smaller yet. He lay there on his back, and lead from one of their guns had smashed into his skull just above the bridge of his nose.
* * * *
McClatchey was staring at a red corner of something that had evidently fallen from an inside pocket of the foreigner’s coat, and now was half-hidden by his body. On impulse, he pushed out one leg and rolled the foreigner’s inert body over.
A small red book bound in red leather lay exposed. He stooped down and picked it up, and handed it to Nevada Jim. “Yo’re the readin’ member of this team,” Utah grunted sententiously. “I been too busy dodgin’ bullets durin’ most-a my life to git any book larnin’.”
Nevada opened the little book, and an odd pulse of excitement beat through his rawboned frame. It was not what he read in the book that made his pulses leap. It was what he couldn’t read.
The writing on some of the pages looked like hen-tracks. On other pages were written names in good, clear English, with numbers that might be addresses beside each name. Nevada read off a few to Utah, and showed him the hen-track writing.
“It don’t make sense,” McClatchey grunted. “Jim, them danged hen-tracks cain’t be writin’ in no civilized tongue.”
Nevada grinned wryly. “That there talk we heard when we wuz shootin’ it out with these gents don’t make sense neither,” he grunted. He stuck the thin, leather-bound book in his hip pocket and forgot it.
At least he forgot it temporarily, for as they moved through the bunkroom door into the main room, a dry voice said. “Get your hands up!”
The voice was dry, cold, and authoritative, and Nevada Jim James knew even as he got his first glimpse of the man who had uttered the words that he was looking at a lawman. There wasn’t a sign of a badge about him. He didn’t need any. His hard, piercing blue eyes and the flat automatic in his hand was authority enough.
The stranger was not a big man, but he was well put together. He reminded Nevada of a sleek greyhound. He had the same cool, competent look about him, from the natty black boots he wore to the open-necked white shirt turned outside the collar of his coat. The clothes made him look like a dude, but the hard, straight line of his mouth and square chin was enough to change anybody’s mind. He was standing just inside the front door, and for the first time in his life Nevada got the impression of a single gun covering two men at the same time.
“Get those hands up,” the man repeated. “I’d hate to have to kill you like you killed Conover!” His voice scorched them like a whip.
Utah McClatchey said explosively, “Take ’er easy, young feller! Don’t you start accusin’ us of murder. We’ve done our share of killin’, but killin’ and murder are bosses of a different color.”
A chill smile that Nevada Jim James didn’t like touched the stranger’s face. “You can tell that to Judge Evans in Tombstone,” he clipped. His direct gaze studied the pards a little more closely. “Seems like I recognize you boys,” he added coolly.
“Aren’t you those famous Hellers from Helldorado who’ve got all the sheriffs chasin’ their tails?” Nevada Jim had his hands shoulder high, palm outward. He had obeyed orders to the letter, because the stranger acted just cool enough to kill him if he didn’t. But he had kept walking forward. Now only some eight feet separated him from the lawman.
“Stop right there,” the cold-eyed man said. Nevada Jim stopped obligingly. “Utah did the same, though Nevada could see that his old pard was just about ready to spring sidewise behind the table and make his desperate gamble for freedom. He shook his head ever so slightly at McClatchey. If his guess was right they were up against no ordinary lawman.
He had started to grin when the stranger ordered them to halt. It was a crooked, ironic grin that would have irritated anybody. The lawman was no exception.
“What’s funny?” he snapped.
“Nothin’,” Nevada drawled. “Nothin’ at all. I was just wonderin’ if mebbe you’d like to have one of our tombstones fer a souvenir? Where you’re takin’ us, we won’t be havin’ much use for ’em.”
The stranger looked interested. It was apparent to Nevada that the fellow was a little surprised at the ease with which he had made his capture. He could imagine the hell-fire and brimstone stories the Tucson sheriff had told him regarding their toughness. Being presented with one of their famous calling cards would be quite a feather in his cap. Watching the man, Nevada could visualize those thoughts passing through his mind.
“I always carry a couple in my pocket,” he went on. “If you’ll let me drap one hand and undo my gun belt, I’ll haul one out for you.”
The stranger nodded. “Make it slow and easy, amigo,” he said crisply. “If you don’t I’ll let you have it right where it’ll hurt worst.”
Nevada Jim looked at the lawman, and that saintly, almost righteous expression crossed his deeply tanned visage. “You know I think you would at that,” he said thoughtfully.
Slowly he dropped his right hand to the hammered silver buckle of his wide double gun belt from which both his heavy guns were suspended, butt forward in their molded holsters. Nevada unlatched his belts and let them fall at his feet. Still moving carefully, he started his fingers into the pocket of his Levis.
“I hope for your sake that you haven’t got a sneak-gun in there,” the man said.
“I haven’t,” Nevada answered. His hatchet face was completely innocent as he brought his hand from his pocket. He opened his fingers. A harmless looking replica of a tombstone a scant two and one half inches high, by an inch and a quarter wide and thick, lay in his palm. The wood was polished until it shone like satin.
Involuntarily the stranger started to step forward, and as his foot lifted, Nevada Jim’s loose wrist nipped like the popper on the end of a bull-whip. The Heller’s calling card left his hand like a bullet.
Even as it struck the lawman between the eyes, Nevada was hurling himself sidewise and down. The automatic coughed twice, gouging splinters from the floor where he had been standing. Then the whole room shook as the stranger caved at the knees, and fell forward on top of his smoking gun.
With the speed of a tophand bulldogging a steer, Utah jerked piggin’ strings from his pocket, and leaped astride the unconscious man’s back. In ten seconds the lawman was trussed hand and foot.
Nevada was just finishing buckling on his gun belt when the stranger opened his blue eyes. There was a lump the size of an egg right between them. Clearly his head ached fiendishly, but there was still something almost like admiration in his gaze as he stared up at the two, tall outlaws.
Nevada scratched his neck with a corner of the little tombstone, and grinned ironically at the lawman, wrinkles closing his pale eyes to the merest slits. He looked as ornery as everybody claimed him to be.
“You’re pretty smart,” the lawman said. “I suppose that tombstone’s loaded with lead.”
Nevada grinned. “Quicksilver,” he said, “it’s heavier.”
“You took a chance,” the lawman said conversationally. “If you’d missed, friend, I’d have killed you on the spot for trying to resist arrest.”
“If you’d practiced flippin’ that thing as much as I have,” Nevada drawled, “you wouldn’t worry about missin’. Mister, I can knock flies off a wall at twenty feet!”
Utah McClatchey thrust his ugly, leathery face forward. “Quit yore braggin’, Jim,” he snapped. “Listen to me, fella,” he addressed the man on the floor at their feet, “we wanta know who you are, and after we find that out, I’m aimin’ to put you straight on a few things you ought to know about this murder bizness. We—”<
br />
That was as far as he got, for Nevada Jim, moving like a cat, had stepped to the open front door. Moonlight lit the plateau with a clear radiance. And out there some four hundred yards away were a half dozen horsemen, black dots in the moonlight. Through narrowed eyes Nevada studied them. His ears, tuned to hear the scamper of a pack-rat across a floor, had caught the drum-beat of those horses’ hoofs a moment before.
Now he swung back to Utah’s side, answering the old outlaw’s enquiring stare. “Jess Cloud, an’ a posse,” he said calmly. “Comin’ hell-bent for election.”
Utah grunted his disdain of all sheriffs. He addressed the hog-tied lawman. “You tell that old pot-bellied Siwash to drop in on us down Tres Cruces way if he wants tuh see us soon. Sorry we ain’t got more time tuh make yore acquaintance, young feller,” he ended. “Right sorry. If you weren’t on the wrong side of the fence I bet we could make a fair tuh middlin’ owlhooter outta you!”
Nevada reached in his pocket. His hand came out with another of those small tombstones. “Hyar’s that souvenir I promised yuh,” he drawled. He stooped and laid it directly in the center of the helpless lawman’s chest.
Then his catlike walk carried him back to the front door again. He raked one gun from leather, leveled it and fired six times as fast as he could cock and trigger. As rapidly as it had appeared, the gun slipped back into its holster, and his other Colt came free. Again six shots sped out into the night, rolling like the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum.
Grinning evilly, Nevada watched the effect of his shots on Sheriff Cloud’s posse. They were still well beyond effective short-gun range, but it didn’t matter. The shots sent them scattering for cover like a covey of quail taking wing.
He swung back into the room. “Folks is gittin’ soft, Utah,” he complained. “Danged if I don’t think you could scatter ’em nowadays if you said ‘boo’!”
* * * *
Some could be scattered that easily, and some couldn’t. The Hellers found that out almost a week later. They were deep in the Sierra del Lunas now, that high, virtually unexplored range of mountains cutting deep into Chihuahua. Tumbled peaks rose all about them, gashing the pale blue of the Mexican sky. Cauldron-like heat filled the deep blue canyons, and icy winds played about the sparse pines on the rimrock crests. It was a country shunned even by the Mexicans themselves, for some of the weird tales that came out of those hills were sometimes more truth than fiction. At least there were few who had the courage to prove any of them false.
The Second Western Megapack Page 2