It came with a roar. The sky was weirdly lit by lightning, and the thunder crashed and rolled. Sure that they would never be found in such a storm, they drew together for warmth and lay staring into the wild night. And lying so, they slept.
CHESNEY, KIMMEL, AND McAlpin came up to the camp at the foot of No Man’s Mesa in the bright sunlight of the morning after the rain. They had waited out the flash flood that filled the canyon with a rushing river, and when it had run its way on into the desert and the natural catch-basins below, they rode up on the hard-packed sand.
There was no pleasure in Oskar Neerland’s eyes when they appeared, and even less in those of Muley when he saw Gay Cooley was riding with them.
“They got away?” Chesney asked, almost hoping they had.
“Up there.” Neerland jerked a thumb toward the mesa’s rim.
“You mean there’s a way up?” It was Cooley who spoke. His eyes went to Muley’s, then he looked around him very carefully. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.
“They found a way,” Muley said. “Followed some broomtails, an’ they went right up.”
“You haven’t been up there?”
“They had a fire going right on the rim until the rain put it out. It has not been lighted again, so they must have gone.”
Kimmel interrupted. “I thought there was three of you.”
“Bob Mitchell’s dead. Matt Keelock shot him, then the horses ran over him. We dragged him over yonder.”
They looked in that direction, but did not ride over. Bob Mitchell had been known to them as a hard character and a dangerous one. The country, they felt, was better off without him.
“All right,” Chesney said, “let’s go get them.”
Neerland did not move. “You have given the job to me,” he said, “I will do it.”
“We’re all here,” Chesney said. “We might as well help.”
“I shall need no help.”
“There’s a woman up there,” Chesney said, “who had no part in the killing of Johnny Webb. We want to take her back to town.”
“I will take care of the woman.”
For the first time in many years Chesney was unsure of himself. Oskar Neerland was a dangerous man, but he did not fear him. The trouble was, he himself had been one of those who appointed this man the marshal. He himself had directed him to hunt down Matt Keelock.
“That woman must be protected,” he objected now. “We will see that she gets back to Freedom and the stage line.”
“I will take care of her, and I do not want your help. Go away.”
“To hell with her!” McAlpin exclaimed. “She killed Short. She tried to kill me.”
“We’re riding along, Neerland,” Chesney said. “We want to see that woman is safe.”
“I am the law.” Neerland spoke in a flat tone. “If you interfere, I shall arrest you.”
“I don’t think so,” Kimmel said.
“You’re fired, Neerland,” Chesney said. “You ride back to Freedom.”
Neerland did not even smile. He was contemptuous. “You cannot discharge me. You do not have the votes. I know your rule of voting.”
Muley had drawn off to one side, and Chesney was aware that he had a corner on them. But he was not going to back down now.
“Count me out,” McAlpin said. “I don’t care what happens to her.”
“Why argue?” Muley said. “There’s enough woman there for all of us.”
Chesney’s face showed his shock. “By—” he began, but Kimmel’s cool voice interrupted. “Forget it, Bill. She’s no affair of ours. Let’s get out of here.”
“Kim, why you—!”
“Bill, let’s get out of here!”
Kimmel’s tone brought a breath of sanity to Chesney’s anger. He turned to Kimmel and saw his eyes, saw the warning in them.
He took a quick grip on himself. “Oh, the hell with it!” he said, and they rode away.
When they had gone no more than fifty yards, he turned on Kimmel. “If you think I’m—”
“Shut up, Bill. They can still hear you.” Kimmel’s low tone was persuasive. “Why get yourself killed and do no good? That other fellow had him a shotgun.”
“If you think I’m afraid, you’ve got another think coming!”
“You ain’t scared,” Kimmel said, “you’re just a damn’ bull-headed fool. You get an idea crossways in your skull and nothin’ in God’s world can get past it. All we’ve got to do is let them go on up, then follow them. It’s simple as that.”
Chesney felt like a fool. Of course. Anybody should have realized that, and there he was, about to walk bull-headed into a shotgun.
“Where’s Cooley?” he asked, suddenly thinking of him.
“He stayed back there, with them.”
McAlpin had not stayed behind. He rode with them, but neither man looked at him or recognized his presence. Angered by being ignored, he broke in. “If you think I’m goin’ back up there, you’re crazy!”
Kimmel looked around at him. “Mac, we had no idea you’d go along, and if you’ll take my advice you’ll go back to Freedom, you’ll sell those scrubs of yours to whoever will buy ’em, and you’ll pull out. I don’t care where you go, but I’ve got an idea you aren’t goin’ to like it around Freedom any more.”
They walked their horses away and left him sitting there staring after them. Short was gone and nobody was talking about the Lost Wagons any more, and of a sudden he realized what Kimmel had said was true. He was not going to like it around Freedom after this.
“Kim,” Chesney said, “I’ve played the fool. All I could think of was Johnny dead and some rawhider had shot him in the back. I was crazy to hang that Key-Lock man.”
“You weren’t alone.”
“I was the worst. I was drivin’ after it. That was why Hardin pulled out. And Neill.”
“They’re good men, Bill.”
Chesney gathered his reins. “All right, Kim, let’s ride back and get that woman out of there, anyway.”
He was silent for several minutes. “I don’t like it, Kim—that Neerland going after that man.”
“You leave ’em alone,” Kim replied calmly. “That Key-Lock man is an old lobo. He’s from away back at the forks of the crick. Anybody who gets that man in a corner has bit off a chunk, believe me, and he’d better have the jaws to chew it!”
The camp was empty when they reached it, but the tracks showed them the trail up the mountain. It was tucked away behind a thick clump of cedars, and there was no indication of a trail until you got right to it. Hidden below by the thick growth and by broken rock, it led up steeply.
At the top they found themselves standing with all the world spread out around them.
“We’ve got to find that woman, Kim,” Chesney said urgently. “Else something will happen here that will bring us shame to our last days.”
Kimmel’s horse switched his tail restlessly. The rain had destroyed the tracks. If they chose the wrong way, they might easily arrive too late.
And then they heard a shot.
Chapter 15
MATT KEELOCK WOKE with the first light. He clasped his hands behind his head. For the first time in days he was thinking really clearly. Tentatively, he moved his leg. The wound on his hip had never been much more than an annoyance, but the fall had made his leg one great bruise from hip to knee. This morning it felt better.
He eased from under the blankets and pulled on his boots. Then he put on his gun belt, took out his Colt, and spun the cylinder.
From the overhang, he looked out over what was in essence a hanging valley, approximately a mile long and, at the head where their camp was, not over a quarter of a mile wide. It was green and beautiful under the warm morning sun, fresh after the fall of rain.
He went to the horses, checked their hoofs, and looked them over generally. The mules seemed cheerful enough, and he released them to wander down on the rich grass not far away.
Then he went back to their shelter, where he looked down at Kr
is. Her face looked tranquil and unbelievably lovely in repose. He hesitated to wake her, knowing what was to come. He knew too much about the sort of men who pursued him not to realize that it would all be over, one way or another, before this day was past.
They would be coming soon. It would take them a while to locate him, and much as he wanted a cup of coffee, he was not going to make it easy for them by lighting a fire and lifting a smoke.
He went to one of the packs and got out a thick wad of rawhide strips that he had planned to use in plaiting a riata. He tied several of them end to end, then walked to a boulder some fifty feet away, found a chunk of rock of the right size, and made a four-way wrap-around tie. Then he trailed the rawhide along the ground under the grass and dust, to the overhang.
After that he dug around in his gear and found a can of peaches, which he opened. With his Winchester close by, he sat down on a rock and began eating them. He speared each half, cut it in half, and lifted it to his mouth with the point of his knife. When he had eaten the peaches he drank the juice.
He heard Kris stirring in the blankets, and was about to turn when he saw one of the mules look up suddenly. He got to his feet.
“What is it, Matt?” Kris said.
Without turning his head, he replied, “What we’ve been expecting, Kris. I think we’ll make an end to it here.”
“What can I do?”
“When I say, ‘Jim, don’t shoot,’ you pull on that string. Pull good and hard.”
“Is that all?” she asked, and he nodded.
Three riders had stopped on the rim above them. He knew there were three, because they had the sunrise at their backs and their shadows fell on the wall opposite.
Three?
He had seen Bob Mitchell go down before his gun, had seen some of the stampede sweep over him. Who, then, was the third?
“Stay out of this,” he said softly to Kris. “I do not want to think of you now.”
“All right,” she said. And then she added, “Here they come.”
He could see them working their way down the slope at almost the place where he and Kris had descended. They were a good three hundred yards off he and he might have taken one of them out, but he was not sure who they were, nor did he want to turn this into a sniping operation. He wanted to see them face to face, and win or lose that way.
When they were almost abreast of the overhang, he stepped into view. On his left was a thick cedar, gnarled and ancient. On his right a broken slab from one of the ledges above.
“You came a long way for it.”
They brought up short, and he said casually, “You’ve played the fool, Gay. You’ve wasted your life hunting that gold.”
“Like hell! It’s here. We’ve found it.”
“You mean you’ve swapped it for a belly full of lead.”
Muley had the shotgun, and that shotgun worried him. At the distance it was a dangerous weapon. But he had given it thought. And Muley had an instinct for survival.
Oskar Neerland was kooking for Kris, and she was not in sight. His eyes returned to Matt. The sneer his face always wore was deeper now.
“You have to die,” he said. “I promised it. I promised myself to kill you, and then to take the woman.”
He was going to draw. Matt saw it clearly, and he shouted, “Jim, don’t shoot!”
Something crashed in the brush and Muley pivoted, his shotgun lifted toward the brush.
Neerland drew, and Matt stepped forward and down. He had planned it nicely, believing Neerland to be a dead shot, and hoping for it. A wild shot might have wasted his strategy, for the forward step took him two feet down. He had studied that spot, planned for it; and when his foot landed, he fired.
And missed!
Neerland’s bullet had whipped by over his head, but now the gun muzzle lowered, and Matt went forward and down another step, and then he fired once more. A bullet whipped by near him. He was thinking that would be Cooley, and then he fired and fired again.
A shot spattered bark into his face, half blinding him, and he let himself fall forward onto one knee. His left forearm came up, his gun barrel lay across it, and he fired again. Fired into the widening crimson blot on the front of Neerland’s shirt. He saw the big man start to fall, and he swung his gun to Cooley, who traded shots with him. Both men missed, and then Matt lunged to his feet and fired again.
The bullet knocked Cooley sidewise in the saddle and he yelled, “I quit!”
“The hell you do!” Matt fired again, and Cooley fell off his horse.
A rifle roared, then another. Muley brought his shotgun to bear at last, but he dropped it and slapped the spurs to his horse. Another shot, and he was racing like a madman down the valley with bullets dusting him at every step.
On the rim were half a dozen riders, all with rifles, but there was no scoring a hit at the distance. The horse, stung perhaps, and frantic with fear, was now a runaway.
He was still running when he reached the rim. They all saw it clearly enough. The maddened animal took one enormous leap out into space, seemed to hang suspended for an instant, then dropped from sight. At that point there was a drop of five hundred feet.
The riders from the rim above were coming down.
Matt Keelock walked forward and stood over Neerland. The man was alive, his eyes fastening on Matt in a fixed and awful stare. But he was dying, dying hard and slow.
“You came of your own will,” Matt said, “I had no strings on you.”
Deliberately, he turned away, and went over to Cooley. He held his gun ready, but there was no fight in the man.
“It was the Lost Wagons,” Cooley said. “That gold ruined me. Right from the day we left California.”
“You did all that killing?”
“Me? No, that was Muley. We thought he was just a youngster we were helpin’ out. Instead, he figured from the first day that he’d kill us all.”
“When did you find out?”
Gay Cooley threw him a guilty look. “That was the worst of it. When the second man died, I was pretty sure.”
Matt looked down at him, reflecting at the curious turn things could take. There were two bullets in him, but he was going to make it. Right now this man was in better shape than he was himself. He backed up a step and sat down, careful to keep his gun up.
Kris was talking to the men who came off the rim. They were all approaching now; he could hear their voices.
“It was those Lost Wagons,” Cooley said. “I was a pretty good man until then. Muley, he wanted all that gold for himself, and I was just as bad.”
“Cooley wasn’t your name?”
“It was Hollenbeck…Ben Hollenbeck. I dropped out of sight and let everybody think we were all dead. The trouble was, all this country looks alike after a few years, and I’d have taken oath that gold was seven or eight miles south of here. That much, at least.
“I figured I could come right back to it, but the way things worked out, it was a couple of years. The worst of it was, when I went out of this piece of country I never took time to look back, and it all looks different coming at it from the south.
“Four or five times I knew I was within a short distance of it, but every time I turned south. I couldn’t believe we had come north any further.
“Then I saw that place at the foot of the mesa. That was where Muley was left, all tied up, and I recognized it on sight. I knew it was the place, but it still didn’t look right.”
“Did you ever think that Valadon deliberately wrote his directions wrong?” Matt said. “You could have been influenced by that.”
The men had all ridden up now, and he knew four of the faces as those of men who had hunted him. The others were strangers.
Neill swung down. “Keelock, I’m Neill, and I’m sorry. We had the wrong idea about you.”
“It was me,” Chesney said. “I ramrodded the whole thing. I figured you for a yellow back-shooter and I wouldn’t listen to anything else. I was wrong.”
“It was
a fair shooting,” Matt said quietly.
“I know, and I played hell.”
Matt turned away, resting a hand on Kris’s shoulder. “I’ve got to lie down, Kris.” He looked back at the men and gestured toward Cooley. “You do whatever you’ve a mind to with him. He won’t be looking for the Lost Wagons any more.”
Cooley twisted toward him. “Why is that?”
“Because I found ’em.” Matt took a wagon-bolt from his belt. “Ever see that before, Cooley? It was your marker, stuck into a crack in the rock wall.”
His hand on Kris’s shoulder, he limped to their shelter. When he reached it, he almost fell onto the bed.
“In a couple of days we’ll ride out of here, Kris.”
“What about the stallion?”
“We’ll come back for him.”
He stretched out, easing his bruised leg to its full length. “Kris,” he said, “make some coffee, will you? I’m tired.”
About Louis L’Amour
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—
as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man
in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way
I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.
A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Novel 1965 - The Key-Lock Man (v5.0) Page 13