by Matt Rand
“Uh-huh, and it looks like I lost the best saddle bronk I ever owned!”
Rance slept the clock around and awoke stiff and sore but otherwise feeling fine. He got on the outside of a stack of flap-jacks and a flock of cackle-berries and hustled to headquarters.
“Now ain’t that fine!” he exclaimed as he sighted the building. “Anyhow she ain’t no hoss thief!”
Seated on the board sidewalk was the Mexican bartender, holding the reins of El Rey!
The Mexican’s teeth flashed white in his dark face. “Ai Capitan, it is good to see you! The caballo? Capitan, last night a vaquero rode to the door of the casa where I sleep, knocked and rode off most quickly. Going to the door I behold the black caballo.”
Rance was staring at El Rey’s saddle and bridle.
“Good gosh! What a hull!” he exclaimed. “Hand tooled and mounted—and look at that silver mounted bit. Sa-a-ay—”
The Mexican grinned and bobbed. “Si, La Señorita forgets not, nor is she ungrateful! Only the caballos of great Caballeros are so equipped, Capitan. But El Capitan is himself a great gentleman. Should not his caballo bear only the best?”
Still slightly dazed, Rance hunted up Captain Morton.
“Sit down,” said the captain, “got any plans?”
“Uh-huh,” Rance nodded. “I think I’ve figured somethin’,” he added before Morton could interrupt. “I callate Cavorca give Fuentes the slip so’s he could get his own men t’gether fust and meet Tomaso on more’ve an equal footin’. But they’ll get t’gether, all right, and ’tween ’em they’ll cook up a fine kittle of hell. Cavorca’ll be needin’ money bad and he’ll hit some place this side the Border.”
“The question is wheah?” worried Morton.
“Don’t think theah’s so much question ’bout it,” said Rance. “He’ll go wheah he figgers he can make the biggest killin’ and get away with it.”
“And that’s—”
“Silver City, suh.”
Captain Morton pounded on his desk. “Damn’d if I don’t believe yo’re right!”
The tall young Ranger stood up, flexing his long arms. “Guess a little ride is what I need to limber me up,” he said, “so if it’s O.K. with you, suh, I’m headin’ for Silver City.” Like a hell-kettle set out to cool—and not cooling—Silver City crouched on the shoulder of a grim mountain. High over the huddle of tents and shacks and false-fronted brick buildings loomed the great peak, dwarfing them, making them appear grotesque and sordid and ugly, casting its mighty shadow across the blistering desert that stretched away to the eastern skyline. Dust storms boiled up from the desert, flung against the mountain wall and sifted back onto the roaring town. The blazing Arizona sun turned it to showers of gold. The cold, dead desert moon caused it to gleam with the frosty gleam of the silver bricks that men trundled down the loading platforms of Silver City’s giant stamp mills.
Dust from the desert and silver from the mountain! That was Rance Hatfield’s thought as he and the Mexican bartender, Pedro Hernandez, rode into Silver City late one afternoon.
Rance had seen Coffin and Concha and the other Arizona hellroarers, but Silver City could give them cards and spades and best them hands down. Silver City was the wildest, maddest, most turbulent town the Ranger had ever entered. Life was cheap in the mines, and men who were used to brushing fingertips with death by day cared little for his frozen grin at night.
Blood and whiskey and gunsmoke and gold! Mix ’em up, and add a dash of lust and cruelty and greed! It made a grand devil’s-brew. Silver City rank deep!
From end to end of the town ran the great Alhambra silver lode. Dozens of mines gutted the mountain of its treasure. Under Silver City was another city—a city of timbered galleries extending hundreds of feet into the ground. From that underground city came the veined ore that was Silver City’s life-blood. Men slaved and mucked and sweated and died in that underground city. They rioted and fought and drank and played and died, in the city seething above the gloomy galleries.
Then, too, the great C.&P. railroad was stretching steel fingers across the desert. Rawhidin’ Dave Barrington and Jaggers Dunn were building a double-track line to the rich cattle and fanning land beyond the scorching sands and the mountains. Silver City was now headquarters for the construction forces.
Cowboys riding north with their trail herds also stopped at Silver City, coming and going.
The cold-faced gamblers, the oily saloon keepers and the hawk-eyed women of the dance halls welcomed miner, railroader and puncher alike. A sprinkling of Mexicans and Apache half breeds added spice to the mixture. Silver City whooped ’er up and threw the keys away!
“She’s Dodge, Tombstone, Poker Flat and Deadwood rolled inter one and set a-fire,” Rance said as he and Pedro stabled their horses. “Now, feller, yore job is to circ’late ’round through the Mexican section and see what you can find out. Most of Cavorca’s men is Mexicans and the odds are better’n even he’ll have Mexican scouts gettin’ the lay of things heah. Shavin’ off yore whiskers and moustache oughta stop anybody from knowin’ you, but keep yore eyes open, and remember, you and me is jest a coupla waddies on a cel-bration. Don’t you get too darn drunk and go to talkin’, though; and watch out for the señoritas.”
“Assuredly, Capitan, will I watch out for them,” grinned Pedro as he sauntered through the stable door, sombrero tilted rakishly over one eye, ever-present cigarette drooping from his lower lip.
“Now jest what did he mean by that?” chuckled Rance. “Well, I got a notion it’ll take a smooth little muchacha to get the best of Pete.”
By the time Rance had washed up and stowed away some chuck, the lovely blue dusk of the desert land had snared mountain and sands in a net of beauty whose fringes reached trustingly toward the garish town, only to be beaten back by the hard blaze of lights flaring from saloon and dance hall and gambling hell and brothel. Overhead, the bonfire stars of Arizona shuddered away from the bedlam of song and yell and curse and groan that spouted up through the darkness.
Spilled whiskey stained the sawdust and spilled blood reddened the whiskey. Men fought over drink or gold or women—or fought just for the fun of fighting. Women laughed with painted lips, and calculated shrewdly with eyes that laughed not at all. White-faced gamblers spoke briefly from the corners of their mouths, and raked in the gold that miner and railroader and cowboy had salted with the sweat of heartrending toil and now tossed away with a curse and a jest and a careless shrug. Silver City boomed defiance to the laws of man and the laws of nature—and got away with it!
“Is she allus as wild as this?” Rance asked a friendly puncher who stood, glass in hand, at the bar beside him.
“Feller,” drawled the waddie, “you ain’t seen nothin’! T’morrer is payday for the mines and the railroad. They’re jest tunin’ up the fiddles t’night. T’morrer night the orchestra cuts loose!”
Rance drifted from saloon to saloon, listening, watching. He heard and saw plenty, and some of the sounds and sights very nearly put a curl in his black hair; but as the roaring hours of early evening slipped away to make place for the “roaringer” hours of midnight and after, he had learned nothing relative to his quest.
“Hope Pete’s havin’ better luck,” he growled as he trudged up the hillside.
CHAPTER 15
Rance found Pedro Hernandez in his tiny room near the livery stable.
“You find out anythin’?” he asked the ex-bartender.
Pedro nodded. “Si, not much, but something. There are strange men, lately arrived, in the Mexican quarter I am told by one who lives there. Among them,” said he, “are Norte Americanos, in appearance most evil.”
Rance pondered this information gravely, his black brows drawing together over his cold grey eyes.
“It ties up,” he mused. “You know, Pete, after Cavorca robbed the Curry bullion train and murdered the guards, I trailed him for months ’fore I finally dropped my loop on him. I slipped inter Mexico once, to his hangout down
theah, and tried to snake him out and get him acrost the Line. I saw Americans in his outfit then—plumb salty hombres they was, too. Yeah, what you found out ties up all right.”
For some time, he sat silent, while Pedro smoked. Abruptly he straightened up, his thin-lipped, good-humored mouth tightening. In his ears rang the words of the friendly cowpoke in the saloon. “T’morrer is payday for the mines and the railroads!”
“Pete!” he exclaimed, “how you figger they bring in the money they use to pay the miners and railroaders with?”
Pedro reflected. “The Tucson stage I would say, Capitan” he hazarded at length.
Rance nodded. “Figger you got the right of it. Nobody’s s’posed to know, but of co’hse ev’body does, ’specially them what ain’t got no bus’ness knowin’. The stage lays up over night at Burley and makes the trip through Bleached Bones Canyon by daylight. Gets in heah right after noon. Uh-huh, that’s it, Peter. Well, I’m gonna pound my ear a hour or two—got a ride ahead of me this mawnin’.”
CHAPTER 16
It is not a nice place, Bleached Bones Canyon. Not only because of its frowning black walls and its foaming white water that ever gnaws hungrily at the narrow strip trail wandering about between fangs of rock. Too many terrible things have happened in the stone-cramped gorge that, even at noonday, is always shadowy. There are too many shattered skeletons shimmering whitely, too many rusty stains that look like dried blood, though they are really only iron outcroppings. Enough blood has been shed in there to make the white water run red. Men ride through Bleached Bones Canyon with furtive glances and their chins slanted over their shoulders.
Old Frank Masters, driver of the Tuscon stage, was nervous. His glance shifted continually from the trail ahead to the ragged crest of the beetling wall “t’other side the crik” and back again. From time to time he gazed back along the way they had just travelled. He growled querulously to the heavily armed guards who sat on either side of him.
“I tell you theah’s a feller been follerin’ us ever since we hit this damn hole-in-the-wall. I don’t like it!”
“Never saw anythin’ you did like,” grunted lanky Jim Osborne.
Fat, jolly Tim Mooney chuckled. “Responsibility sets heavy on Frankie’s shoulders,” he piped. “He’s allus seein’ bandits when he’s haulin’ payday gold.”
“‘Sponsibility, hell!” yelped Masters. “I’m ’sponsible for nothin’. I’m hired to drive stage, and that’s all. What happens to that damn gold is up to you tailbone warmers. Jest the same I don’t hanker to get a slug through my gizzard.”
“Drivers never get shot,” chuckled Tim.
“Hell, no,” grunted Osborne. “None of ’em wuth shootin’. Heah’s the south end of the canyon, you ol’ grumble-growler, and nothin’ happened.’
“Jest the same I got a feelin’,” snorted old Frank, “I got a feelin’.”
Riding along less than a quarter-of-a-mile behind the stage, Rance Hatfield also “had a feelin’.” He was puzzled, too.
“I’d a swore they was gonna pull somethin’ t’day,” he told the black stallion, “and this canyon’s the place to pull it. Guess that hunch was a maverick. All open trail to town and the bank, now. Well, feller, we had a nice ride, anyhow.”
He glanced at the sun slanting down the western sky and quickened the stallion’s pace. “If them jiggers in front don’t hustle, payday is gonna be late t’night.”
The Silver City bank squatted near the north end of the town’s principal street. It was a bulky one-storied building with thick walls, barred windows and heavy doors. A sign on one of the windows read “Closed for the day,” but the front door opened as the stage pulled up.
Rance saw the two messengers lug a heavy, iron-bound box into the bank. Peering through a window as he rode slowly past, he saw them heave it onto the shelf of a grated opening. A clerk back of the grating was writing a receipt.
Rance was just about to ride on when the clerk moved slightly, into a shaft of afternoon sunshine pouring through a side window. Rance saw the light glint on hair more golden than the sunshine itself. The “clerk” looked up and the Ranger stared into a face as handsome and as evil as must have been that of Lucifer, “Star of the Morning,” when Heaven’s gates crashed shut behind him.
Rance hit the ground running and went through the bank door like a greased pig through a bowlegged men’s convention. Manuel Cavorca, crouching in the teller’s cage, saw him coming and greeted him with a roaring gun. Rance’s answering shot knocked the iron-bound box sideways. One of the guards clutched it and it crashed to the floor, outside the cage.
Instantly the building seemed to explode with the thunder of six-shooters. The two guards went down, dead hands clutching their half-drawn guns. Rance hurled himself sideways back of a pillar, his Colts beating a drum-roll of fire. Men boiled out of the open vault, from behind desks, from underneath tables. The Ranger’s fire blasted them back from the cages. Outside sounded the shouts and yells of the aroused town.
Manuel Cavorca, calm, collected, barked an order. The back door banged open. There was a clatter of running feet, a thumping in a nearby stable; then the quick thud of galloping hoofs.
Rance dashed out the front door in time to see El Rey careening up a side street, blood streaming from a bullet furrow on one glossy black haunch. The bandits were already a cloud of dust on the southwest trail. A crowd of townspeople were clamoring down the street.
“Get in theah and see to the bank folks,” Rance shouted, and set out after his horse.
The stage guards and two bandits were dead. The bank workers were found trussed up in the vault.
“They jumped us right at closin’ time,” explained the cashier. “We didn’t have a chance.”
On the floor outside the cages was the payroll money box, its contents intact.
“Wheah’s that tall black-haired jigger?” squalled old Frank Masters. “If it hadn’t been for him they’da got away with it. He blew ’em clean out from ’tween their ears. What a hombre! I nev’ seed sich nerve or sich shootin’!”
“Who was it?” asked the cashier.
The stage driver described Rance as he remembered him, and from that description Captain Morton himself would not have recognized his star Ranger.
For which Rance was duly thankful. His least desire was to become conspicuous in Silver City—just yet. To do so would be to make his work all the more difficult. He was bitterly disappointed at the outcome of the bank raid. True, he had blocked the robbery and saved the big payroll; but Cavorca had escaped. To advertise the part he, Rance, had played in the affair would be to give Thomas and Patton more ammunition to use in their fight against the Rangers.
“They’d beller like steers with the colic ’bout Cavorca slip-pin’ outa the loop.” Rance assured himself. “They’d make folks forget all ’bout the payroll and it’d end up by the Rangers bein’ blamed for them two pore devils of guards getting’ drilled. Nope, the only thing what’ll do any good is Cavorca hisself as Exhibit A, either stuffed or on the hoof.”
Pedro Hernandez, however, suffered from no illusions.
“Ai, Capitan,” he enthused, “it must have been a fight! Such a fight as El Capitan fought in the cantina at Paloa. Why did you not take me with you, Capitan?”
“Yore a darn sight more good to me circlatin’ ’round and findin’ out things,” Rance told him. “Learn anythin’ more?”
“Only this,” said Pedro. “The night before the attempt at robbery there was a señorita, a most lovely señorita, asking questions in the Mexican quarter. Finally one of the strange men met her and talked with her. Talked with great earnestness, shaking his head often. La Señorita wept, I am told, but the man continued to shake his head and she went away, where to no one knows.”
“You know who she was?” Rance asked casually.
“No, Capitan,” replied Pedro. “I did not see her. I only heard.”
After Pedro had left, Rance sighed deep relief. “Well, anyhow she
wasn’t in on that stickup,” he breathed thankfully. “Looks like she even didn’t know it was bein’ pulled off. Looks like she figgered Cavorca was up to some dev’lment, though. If it ain’t hell—a girl like her wasted on such a wuthless sidewinder!”
The thought left him depressed and gloomy. “I’m goin’ out and get me a drink, two drinks,” he decided. “Little whirl with one of the dance-hall niñas mightn’t go bad, either.”
Ten minutes after leaving his room Rance decided that the friendly puncher in the saloon the night of the Ranger’s arrival had known what he was talking about, even though he had missed the time by twenty-four hours. The “orchestra” was going full blast tonight.
Payday had been postponed because of the robbery attempt and the disappointed workers were making up for lost time.
“All the mines is closed down,” a bartender told Rance. “Theah ain’t enough men left in the railroad camps to bile a pot o’ beans, and a flock of punchers who took three big trail herds nawth last month jest got inter town. Looks like it’s gonna be the biggest night Silver City ever seed.”
It was. That night Silver City reached such heights of madness and plumbed such depths of evil as she never achieved before or since. The very Gila Monsters and rattlesnakes of the desert at her feet would have died of poison had they sucked in the venom of that night.
Silver City’s streets ran red with blood and lust and passion and greed. Gold glowed in steady streams across the bars. The tables of the gamblers groaned under its weight. The women of the dance halls clutched it greedily in the early hours of the night, and flung it away in wild abandon before the red dawn flamed upon the mountain tops. Men died with spilled whiskey staining their shirt fronts and the paint from hot lips staining their souls. The gold was crusted with sweat and black with dried blood. Tobacco smoke and gun smoke swirled in the air. The gleam of silver flashed answer to the gleam of steel. The death cry of a poor devil with a knife in his back and a clutching hand in his pocket was drowned by song roared from a throat that would be bubbling with blood before the first sun shaft kissed the desert.