by Short, Luke;
The weight of the rock above them had over the years cracked and in some places crushed the timbers that supported the walls and ceiling. With the light of a match they gathered enough dry wood to build a fire ten yards in from the entrance to the tunnel, and another twenty yards farther in, where the cross-cut intersected the main tunnel. Afterwards they came back and got the other horses, who, seeing the fire, came without trouble. Once a third fire was built back in the cross-cut, they were tied to the timbering and were unsaddled.
Traf sent Dickey back to the tunnel mouth to serve as lookout. The horses unsaddled, Traf placed their gear, including the newly filled canteens, near the second fire, around the corner from the cross-cut. The smoke from the fires traveled back down the tunnel, and Traf judged that the miners who had cut the tunnel had also cut a ventilating shaft.
After he had spread out Sophie’s blankets, she sat down on them and leaned back against the wall. Traf looked around them and said, “Not quite a hotel, Sophie, but it will do.”
“What do we do now, Traf?”
“Why, we eat and sleep.”
Sophie smiled faintly. “I mean, what do you do?”
“Why, I’ll be gone for a while tonight, Sophie.”
“Gone where?”
Traf tilted his head. “Out there.”
“But what for?”
“To find out who these jokers are that are following us.”
A look of alarm came over Sophie’s face, and she said, “You can’t be serious, Traf.”
Traf looked at Caskie, who was warming his hands over the fire and who had heard the conversation; then he returned his attention to Sophie.
“Serious enough, Sophie. Why do you think we’d hole up if it wasn’t to stop them? If we had cut out for home, they’d have made a try for Caskie at the first camp we made. If they got him, we’d never know who they were. Now they’ve got to stop somewhere and I want a look at them.”
“Won’t they be expecting you?”
“There’s one way to find out.”
Traf moved over to his saddle, took the rifle from its scabbard, and headed out of the cross-cut. As he passed Caskie he said, “Don’t show yourself, old-timer, no matter what happens.”
“You want help?”
“Maybe later,” Traf said. “But for now, stay here in the cross-cut, will you?”
He moved down the tunnel toward Dickey, who was leaning against the wall at the tunnel mouth, rifle slacked in his arm. Dusk was settling over the valley, but Traf could see the rings on the still lake made by the fish feeding.
“Nobody showed?” he asked.
“One man,” Dickey said. “They’re playing it coony. He took a look and I reckon he spotted our smoke. Then he went back.”
“Good. Let’s help him, Russ. After I’m gone, you’d better have a fire here at the tunnel mouth.”
“You crazy?” Dickey asked. “You want them to know where we are?”
“That’s the idea,” Traf said. “I’m going out there, Russ. I’ll be back after dark. When you hear an owl hoot, that’ll be me, so don’t shoot. Once they’ve had a chance to spot your fire, put it out. Then shoot at anything that moves.”
“What do you aim to do out there?” Dickey asked.
“Never mind,” Traf said. “You go back and get your bottle. I’ll watch.”
“I’ll just do that. I’ll bring Caskie back with me too.”
“No, you won’t,” Traf said. “He might get hit.”
“Hell, so can I!”
“People don’t shoot at a deputy sheriff, Russ. The deputy sheriff shoots at them,” Traf said mockingly. Dickey moved away then, cursing under his breath.
While he was gone, Traf pulled off splinters from the timber and built a fire just outside the tunnel in the fading light. He figured that he had probably hazed Dickey enough. By inviting him to get his bottle and by building the fire for him, he just might coax him out of the surliness that he had shown all day long.
When Dickey returned with his almost empty bottle, it was deep dusk. Traf, saying nothing more to him, moved down the talus slope toward the buildings. Once he had reached the closest one, he settled down to watch the fire he had built. Several minutes passed, and then Dickey came out to the fire and kicked it out and scattered it. That meant that Dickey had seen someone enter the valley down below.
Traf settled himself to wait, wondering what the next couple of hours would bring. Most certainly the men would attack the tunnel, but only under cover of darkness, before the moon rose. Dickey had everything in his favor if only he used his head, Traf thought. There was a chance, of course, that if shooting broke out, Dickey might pull down on Traf by mistake. But that was a chance he was willing to take.
His eyes were adjusting gradually to the night, and he could make out the tunnel mouth with little difficulty. He tried to put himself in the place of the attackers. It seemed unlikely they would lay siege to the place and try to starve Caskie out. They would, however, search these buildings to make sure this wasn’t an ambush. Also, they would want to find the horses and stampede them.
Now it was full dark, and Traf moved away from the building and slowly made his way to a big boulder at the foot of the slope, which he had noted earlier. Settling himself there, he waited, listening.
Presently he picked up the faint sound of horses walking along the stony shore of the lake. As they came near, Traf heard a man speaking as if giving orders. He could not make out what was said, nor did he recognize the speaker’s voice.
In another few minutes Traf picked up a different sound of moving horses, the sound coming now from several different directions. He concluded that the precautionary search of the buildings was on. No match was struck until a searcher was inside a building and could not be seen.
When the search was finished, he heard a man call out, “All horses here.” Traf judged that, like sensible men, they were securing their horses in the protection of one of the cabins. Would they leave a horse holder, he wondered; he doubted it, the horses could be well secured to the logs of the walls, and every man would be needed to storm the tunnel.
Now, from the sound of their voices, they were assembling in front of the building where Traf had waited. He stood up and quietly moved to his left in the dark. The men moving on the stony ground made enough noise to cover his quiet progress. When he reached the cabin where he thought they had tied their horses, he started to circle it. That was when the first shot came, and it was Dickey’s.
There was answering fire, and Traf move swiftly around to the rear. The horses, made uneasy by the gunfire, were snorting and stomping. Talking softly to them, Traf freed them one by one, giving each a cut across the rump to get him moving. The shooting was steady now, and Traf retraced his course back to the rock.
Only one man was firing from the cabin where Traf had waited earlier. To the right and closer to the talus slope, a second man was forted up behind a rock. And then Traf heard rock cascading down the slope. It could have been a rock dislodged by a bullet, or by a man climbing the slope in the hopes of surprising Dickey from the side.
Traf faced the slope, trying to make out any movement there in the darkness, and failing. Yet rocks kept coming down the slope, which argued that someone was moving there. He hoped that Dickey would have sense enough to anticipate an attack from both sides, instead of making a suicidal rush.
Traf raised his gun now and, using Dickey’s gun flash as a reference, he tried in the darkness to sight on the tunnel. It was hopeless, for all he could do was guess.
And then, abruptly, on the other side of the tunnel a gun flash came, and then another and another. By the second shot Traf could decide where to aim, and at the third shot he fired blindly at the gun flash.
On the heels of his shot the man on this side of the tunnel opened up, and Traf, switching targets, fired at the new gun flashes. At his second shot he heard a strangled cry and heard a body hit the ground, starting a small rock slide.
Dickey’s gun was silent. Have they got him, Traf wondered. The gun of the man on the far side of the tunnel was silent now, too. That could mean the man had silenced Dickey and had entered the tunnel for a shoot-out with Caskie.
Traf stepped out from behind his boulder when Dickey opened up again and was answered by the gun in the cabin. Backtracking to the rock, Traf reloaded the magazine of his carbine from his shell belt, which was half filled with carbine bullets and half with loads for his pistol.
He steadied himself, his gun on the rock, and waited for the man in the cabin to shoot again. When he did, Traf put three swift shots in the direction of the gun flash. His last one was followed by a howl of pain, and then came a shot from the man forted up across the way. Traf heard it hit in front of him and ricochet off into the night. Then Dickey opened up on his rifleman, and was answered by a shot that came from the top of the wall of the cabin. Both Dickey and Traf answered that shot.
Suddenly it was still, but only for a moment. From the cabin came a wild yell of “Pull out! Pull out!”
Traf waited, listening. He could hear somebody from the cabin going over the stony ground in the direction of the horses. A few minutes later he heard the circling of the man who had been forted up behind the rock, and he too was headed for the horses. Traf still waited. Then he caught the sound of wild cursing, undoubtedly triggered by the discovery that the horses were missing. This was followed by silence.
The men in the attacking party were afoot now. Would they wait until the moon rose to hunt for their horses, or would they leg it back to their camp, hoping their horses had returned? Traf didn’t know, and didn’t care. He waited some minutes longer, and then, judging it was safe to do so, he gave the call of an owl. He got one in return, and came out from behind the rock and started for the tunnel.
But curiosity was prodding him. Moving closer to the slope, he walked slowly until the slope began to lift off the flats. Traveling the line where the slope and flats met, he had gone less than twenty yards when his boot touched a yielding object. He halted, knelt, reached out, and felt the body of a man.
His hand came away wet. He wiped it on the man’s clothing and reached in his own pocket for a match and struck it. He was looking at a dead man, and recognized him. This was Henry Kitchell, a Bar B horse wrangler.
Picking up his rifle, Traf started up the slope trying to puzzle this out. Why would a Bar B hand be hunting Caskie? Were all of them Bar B hands, he wondered. And if they were, what sense did it make?
He labored up toward the tunnel mouth, and halfway there, to insure against a trigger-happy Dickey, he called out, “It’s Traf, Russ.”
“I know that,” a voice called down—it was Caskie’s.
When Traf reached the tunnel mouth he saw Caskie’s stringy frame outlined against the light of the fire beyond the cross-cut. “You were supposed to stay in the cross-cut, old-timer.”
“I did till Dickey was hit. Somebody had to keep shootin’.”
“Hit badly?”
“Right shoulder. He couldn’t handle his rifle.”
“There’s a dead man down there,” Traf said.
“There’s one here too, outside. At least, I reckon he’s dead. I ain’t heard him move. He’s the one that got Dickey.”
“Keep watch, Caskie, while I look at Dickey.”
When he came to the cross-cut, he saw Dickey propped up against the wall. His shirt and undershirt were off, and Sophie, kneeling beside him, was tearing off another strip of cloth from her Mexican blouse. There was a strip already on Dickey’s shoulder. Beside Dickey on his bloody shirt was an almost full bottle of whiskey, his second one.
At Traf’s approach Sophie looked up, and he saw the relief flood into her face.
“How do you feel, Russ?” Traf asked as he halted by him.
“Like I got shot.”
“What have you done for him, Sophie?”
“I poured water on it, then whiskey, then put flour on it to stop the bleeding. Is that what I should have done?”
“Just right.”
“What went on out there?” Dickey asked.
Traf told him of freeing the attackers’ horses and of hitting and killing Kitchell. He finished up by asking, “What’s a Bar B hand doing hunting Caskie?”
“Maybe they think Caskie knifed Braden,” Dickey said after a moment’s thought. “After all, he had the chance.”
“Do you believe he did?” Sophie asked Dickey.
“I never said I did, Sophie. I said they might think he did.”
Sophie resumed her bandaging and Traf went back to Caskie. Halting in the tunnel mouth beside the old man, he asked, “Hear anything? See anything?”
“Nothin’.”
“I want to look at those dead men with you, Caskie. Where’s the other one?”
“Just outside the tunnel and to the right,” Caskie said.
Traf moved slowly out of the tunnel mouth and started across the slope, Caskie following. In the darkness he could make out nothing. He drew a match from his pocket and wiped it alight on the seat of his trousers. By its flare he saw a figure down the slope, and before the match went out he was moving. Reaching the figure, which was lying face down, Traf turned the body over. Then he struck a second match and was looking at the young face of Loosh Wegner, another Bar B hand.
“That the man you talked to on the platform?” Traf asked.
“Nope,” Caskie said.
Traf rose slowly, baffled. He stood over the body a moment, speculating, then climbed down to Kitchell. He struck a match and looked inquiringly at Caskie.
“Nope,” Caskie said again.
When they were back in the tunnel again, Caskie asked, “You know them two?”
“Yes. Two Bar B hands.”
“What’s the Bar B brand got agin’ me? I never even heard of it.”
“They must think it was you killed Braden, Caskie. Braden owned the Bar B.”
“How’d they know how to find me?”
“I reckon the station agent told them what Schell telegraphed us. Stay here, Caskie, until I can spell you. I want to talk with Dickey.”
Back in the cross-cut, he found Dickey still seated with his back against the wall. Sophie had got his bloody undershirt back on him and had rinsed out his shirt, which she had propped up before the fire to dry out. Traf halted and looked down at Dickey.
“The other dead man is Loosh Wegner, Russ. Now tell me why Bar B wants Caskie dead. Why will they fight and die to kill him?”
Dickey’s face was flushed now, but Traf didn’t think it was from fever. The level of the whiskey in the bottle beside him had gone down a couple of inches.
“Like I said, they think Caskie knifed Braden.”
“And they found him because Len Stapp told them about Schell’s message?” Traf asked.
“What else?” Dickey said. “There’s not a message comes into that office that ain’t on the street within an hour.”
“You think Tom Gore is behind this, Russ? Those are two of his men.”
“Well, he thought a lot of Braden. But it just don’t sound like him.”
Sophie, standing by the fire, had followed this exchange, and now she spoke. “Traf, Tom Gore doesn’t know what we know—that Caskie only saw the killer—he wasn’t the killer.”
Oh, yes he does! Dickey thought miserably. He himself had told Tom Gore everything in the saloon the evening before they left, but he was ashamed to admit it here and now. If Tom Gore was out to get Caskie because he thought he’d seen the killer, then Gore must know who the killer was. Was Gore himself the killer? Dickey wondered, but immediately he knew he was not. Gore had remained at the roundup. Dickey had even visited the Bar B chuck wagon that night and had talked with Gore to see if Gore couldn’t dissuade Braden from bringing in the sheriff. Gore knew the killer and was trying to cover for him. But why? Why?
“You think the way Sophie does, Russ?” Traf asked.
“Why, sure,” Dickey lied. “My message to Schell
made it look like I was looking for the old coot. It didn’t say why I wanted him.”
Traf sighed. “All true. I better go spell Caskie,” he added wearily.
“And I better fix us something to eat,” Sophie said.
Dickey took another drink from his bottle and stared morosely into the fire. You damn coward, he thought. Why didn’t you tell him you gave away their move to Gore? But if he did tell them, would it change anything? He didn’t think so. Traf was already suspicious of Gore after finding two of his crew dead. It was only that he was suspicious for the wrong reasons. Why not let it ride that way?
Leaving Traf at the tunnel mouth, with the understanding he would relieve him in three hours, Caskie came back to the fire and helped Sophie prepare their simple supper of bacon, bread, and coffee. This was a spunky girl, he thought as he helped her. What had begun as a simple search for identification had placed her squarely in the middle of a running gun fight she hadn’t bargained for, but was too loyal to leave.
When the food was prepared, Caskie gave Dickey his plate, and Sophie, taking her plate and Traf’s, went to the tunnel mouth before Caskie could stop her. Oh, well, the fighting here was over, Caskie judged, at least for a while.
Conversation between the two men was sparse. Dickey told him of Traf’s scattering the attackers’ horses, and it seemed they were now afoot, at least for the time being. That didn’t matter if they intended a siege of the tunnel, Dickey thought aloud. Caskie knew that Dickey was wondering about their ever getting out of there. There were three of the five attackers remaining, and they could starve them out of the tunnel. Caskie himself was worrying about this too.
After he had finished eating and had smoked a pipe, he took his blanket roll and went back in the cross-cut, closer to the horses. Once in his blankets, he found it impossible to sleep. Lying in the near darkness, he tried to rationalize their situation. Obviously, he himself was the cause of it, though through no fault of his own. Without him, there would be nothing left of the fight. Traf, Sophie, and Dickey could head for home without being harmed.