And right into a bellyful of trouble.
Chapter 7
Steve Hooker, Tex Parker, and Charlie Hurst were sitting their horses just across the ford, blocking the trail. They all had rifles, and they were just sitting there, and Hooker was grinning. The thing was, they expected me to stop.
"You boys want something?" I called out.
"You turn around and git out'n here!" Hurst yelled. By that time I was at the water's edge. That water was no more than eight inches deep and there was good hard bottom, so I let the dun have the spurs and went through the water and up the bank and into them before they realized I wasn't going to stop and parley.
They sure enough expected me to pull up and talk about it, but when trouble faces me I never was much on the talk. So I rode right into them and then I dropped the reins and slammed right and left with the rifle.
Hurst tried to duck, but the rifle barrel caught him behind the ear and knocked him from the saddle. Parker was reaching for me when I swung the rifle across and drove the barrel into the side of his head.
It struck with a thunk like the butt of an axe against a log, and he went out.
Grabbing the reins as my horse turned, I put the muzzle of the gun on Steve Hooker. His own rifle was coming up and I shot him, holding high a-purpose so he'd take it through the shoulder. He jerked, but stayed in the saddle, losing his grip on his rifle.
He started to swear, and I said, "You still got a left hand. You want to try for none?"
"You played hell!" he shouted at me. "Do you know who those boys are?"
"Sure. They ride with Bill Coe. I know all that outfit, and you can tell Coe he knows where I am if he ever wants to come hunting."
"You think he won't?"
"That's right. I know Coe, and he knows me. You'd have to weigh a lot of gold in the other side of the scales before he'd make a move toward me."
The buckboard came down to the water and drew up sharply. "What's going on here?" Loomis called.
"No trouble," I said, and swinging down I caught Parker by the scruff of the neck and dragged him clear of the trail. Both of their horses had been frightened into running off a ways. "Drive right on through. These boys figured to stop us, but they had a change of mind."
Penelope's face was white and shocked. "Are ... are those men dead?"
"No, ma'am. They'll both have headaches tomorrow, that's all."
"Was this necessary?" Loomis demanded.
"If you want to cross the ford it was necessary. You wanted me to take you where you're going and I'm doing it."
Wheeling the dun, I rode off up the trail, and the buckboard rattled on after me. It didn't make a mite of difference what Loomis thought, but the expression on Penelope's face bothered me. A lot of people hear about violence but never come face to face with it, and they've no experience with men of violence. One thing I'd learned a long time back: you just can't waste time talking. If there's talking to do, do it afterwards.
All the time we'd been traveling I'd been looking for wagon tracks. I didn't see how the Karnes outfit--Sylvie, Ralph, and Andrew--could make it faster than we had, but it never pays to weigh an opponent too light.
It was a far-stretching open land through which we rode. It was a country with lava outcroppings here and there, with the yellow-brown grass and the green showing through. It was the bright green of mesquite, and the oddly jointed clumps of prickly pear. A man could hear the cicadas singing endlessly in the brush, and from time to time he'd see a rattler curled in the shade of a bush.
It was bunch-grass country where the buffalo ran, and it was mustang country, wild and free. Maybe I would never have very much in the way of money, but I'd have the memories of this land when it was fresh and open, the memories of one of the grandest pieces of country a man could ever see.
The dun liked it, too. Whenever we topped out on a rise his nostrils would widen to test the wind, and he'd toss his head a little, ears pricked, looking straight away into the far distance.
Well, we were a part of this country, that dun mustang and me. Our natures bred us for it, and our way of living was the way the country demanded.
Back there I'd mentioned William Coe. Now, I would never hold him as a small-calibered man. Coe had a gang of men and a stone fortress not far north of here on the Cimarron, a regular Robbers Roost. His men were tough and wild and uncurried. He was a steady man, if an outlaw, not one to be stampeded into doing anything foolish. I wasn't hunting trouble with Coe, and he wouldn't be hunting any with me ... unless the price was right.
But if we got that gold out of the ground--three hundred pounds of it--the price would be right and all bets off. But Coe wasn't going to come hunting my kind of trouble because I'd rough-handled some of his men. He'd figure they were big boys now, big enough to saddle their own broncs.
Coe knew me maybe as well as I knew myself, for we'd been acquainted back yonder. He knew that trouble had become blood-kin to me, and that something in me wouldn't let me back up or back down, no matter what happened. When trouble showed, when I was faced with it, I just naturally stiffened my neck and went ahead. There was a streak of wildness in me, a streak of recklessness that I disliked. The cool way was the best way, that I knew, but at times I just naturally went hog-wild and started throwing lead or punches at whatever was in the way. It was going to get me killed some day.
The Rabbit Ears were standing up there plain now. I could see them clear, and so could Loomis and the others, so I dropped back alongside the buckboard.
"There they are, Loomis," I said, "and whatever happens will happen soon now. If we can get in there first and get that gold out, and hightail it out of here, we may get away without a fight. But we won't have much time."
"How much time do we have?"
"Maybe a day ... maybe a day and a night. No longer."
"Do you think Hooker rounded up those men himself? Or were they acting for somebody else?"
"I think it was his show, but from here on it may not be. Those other men were outlaws of the Coe gang ... their Roost isn't far from here. If Coe gets wind of that gold, and we get it out of the ground, we'll have us a running fight."
"Does he have many men?"
"Anywhere from three to thirty, depending on who is hanging out up there. He will have enough."
Now I dropped behind them and stayed off to one side. As we rode I studied the country, cutting for sign. There had been some movement around, and it worried me. Rabbit Ears Mountain wasn't far off the Santa Fe Trail, but as a usual thing there wasn't too much movement off the trail. But now there had been.
I was a fool to go riding over there for a treasure of which I'd been offered no part, guiding them there, and then having to choose whether or not to leave Penelope to her friends and her enemies, or to stay on and fight and perhaps get no thanks in the end.
But she was a fair lady, a girl's bright eyes have won the day more than once, and I was the fool ever to look into them. For I am an unhandsome man, and the romance in my heart does not show past the bend in my nose, or at least the girls don't seem to look beyond that.
Back in our Tennessee hills we had few books to read, and I'd never learned beyond the spelling out of words; but we had copies of Sir Walter Scott there in the mountains, and a teacher or a preacher to read them to us in passing. It was always as Ivanhoe that I saw myself, and always as the Norman knight that I was being seen by others.
Yet being the fool I was, I was forever riding into trouble because of a pair of pretty lips or a soft expression in the eyes of a girl. Nor was this time to be different. Even as I thought of riding off into the night, I knew it was not in me to go, and I'd risk a bullet in the back from that cold chill of a man up yonder in the buckboard. Or maybe from that quiet one who sat saying nothing, but seeing and hearing everything, that Flinch, who was one to fear and be careful of.
The Rabbit Ears were close now, so I closed in on the buckboard. My foolishness for the eyes of Penelope did not lead me to foolishne
ss with Loomis. There was no nonsense in me where men were concerned, and if he wanted my kind of trouble I'd serve it up hot and well done for him, and he'd get indigestion from it, too, or I'd know the reason why.
"There are the Rabbit Ears," I said. "No doubt you know where to find the gold of Nathan Hume."
Loomis drew up, for he was driving then, and he reached in his pocket and paid me fifty dollars.
"Your money," he said. "You've been paid, and we have no more use for you."
Penelope was keeping her eyes straight front, so I said to her, "And you, ma'am?
If you want me to stay and see you clear with your gold, I'll do it, and no pay asked or wanted."
"No," she said, not looking at me at all. "No, I want nothing more from you. Mr.
Loomis is here. He will take care of things."
"I've no doubt," I said, and turned my horse away, but not my eyes, for I knew Loomis was one to shoot a man in the back if chance offered. At the moment, I almost wished he would take the chance, so that I might lay him dead across the buckboard seat.
I skirted a low hill and drew up in the shade of a clump of mesquite to contemplate. This was another time when the maiden fair saw me only as the Norman knight.
Chapter 8
So I'd been given my walking papers, and now there was nothing to keep me here.
Penelope Hume had said not a word to keep me, and I was no longer responsible.
Moreover, this was not the kind of country I cottoned to, wishing more for the sight of trees and real mountains right now, although I'll say no word against the far-reaching plains, wherever they lie.
The Rabbit Ears were basaltic rock--or lava, if that comes easier. There were ancient volcanoes to the north, and much of this country has been torn and ruptured by volcanic fires long ago. Where the wind had swept the flat country clear it was sandstone.
The Rabbit Ears could scarcely be called a mountain, as I've said. They were more like big mounds, falling away on all sides. At their highest they stood about a thousand feet above the surrounding country.
Circling wide, I drifted on across country to the north and watered at Rabbit Ears Creek, then followed the creek toward the west. On the northwest side of the mountain I found myself a notch in the rocks screened by brush and low trees, where there was a patch of grass subirrigated by flow from the mountain.
I staked the dun out on the grass and, swapping boots for moccasins, I climbed up the mountain. It was sundown, with the last rays of the sun slanting across the land and showing all the hollows.
There was a thin line of smoke rising from the brush along Rabbit Ears Creek; more than likely this was the camp of Loomis, Penelope, and Flinch.
Over east, maybe seven or eight miles from there, I caught a suggestion of smoke, and near it a white spot. It was so far off that had the sun not picked up that white I might never have noticed it. Even the smoke might be something my expectation had put there after I glimpsed that spot of white. For that white could be nothing but a wagon top ... the Karnes outfit, or somebody else.
What about Hooker? He had a bad shoulder. Tex and Charlie Hurst would have aching heads. Would they quit now? I decided it was unlikely.
William Coe would be at his Roost over on the Cimarron, not nearly as far away as I wished, for his was a tough, salty outfit, and Coe was game. He'd fight anything at the drop of a hat; he'd even drop it himself.
His outfit had raided Trinidad, had even raided as far east as Dodge, and had stolen stock from Fort Union, government stock. They had nerve. If one of those boys rode for Coe, I'd be in trouble.
On the north side of Rabbit Ears all the ravines ran down toward Cienequilla Creek. The location of the box canyon was unknown to me, and it might be anywhere between the mountain and the creek, or even over on the other side.
After I'd walked and slid back down the mountain I shifted the dun's picket-pin to fresh gazing and made myself a pot of coffee from dry, relatively smokeless wood. In the corner where I was the fire couldn't be seen fifteen feet away.
A man on the dodge, or in Indian country, soon learns to watch for such a place as this. His life depends on it. And if he travels very much his memory is soon filled with such places. As mine was.
Sitting beside the fire, I cleaned my pistol, my Winchester lying at hand, just in case. Then I checked both of my knives. The one I wore down the back of my neck inside my shirt collar slid easy and nice from its scabbard. A time or two in passing through brush or under low trees I'd gotten leaves or bits of them into the scabbard, and I knew that in the next few days I might need that knife almighty bad.
Later, lying on my blankets, I looked up at the stars through the leaves. My fire was down to red coals and my pot was still full of coffee. Tired as I was, I was in no mind to sleep.
My ears began making a check on all the little sounds around me. They were sounds of birds, of insects, or of night-prowling animals, and were familiar to me. But in every place some of the sounds are different. Dead branches make a rattle of their own; grass or leaves rustle in a certain way, yet in no two places are the sounds exactly the same. Always before I slept I checked the sounds in my mind. It was a trick I'd learned from an old Mexican sheepherder and mountain man.
Of course the dun was there, and as I've said, there's nothing like a mustang to warn a man if he hears something strange. For that matter, I was of the same breed. I was a mustang man--a man riding the long prairie, the high mesa, the lonely ridges.
That Penelope now ...
This was no time to think of her. Forcing my thoughts away from her, I considered the situation. Sylvie Karnes and her brothers wanted that gold, and they would stop at nothing to get it. I'd never come across anybody quite like them, and they worried me. I'd known plenty of folks who would kill for money, for hatred, or for a lot of reasons, but I'd met nobody so willing to kill just to be killing as they were, or appeared to be.
Sure as shootin', that coffee she fixed for me had been poisoned. No telling how many dead lay behind them, or lay ahead, for that matter.
Loomis would be after that gold, but he wanted the girl too. He would need her until they got the gold and after that? That was when Penelope Hume would come face to face with a showdown, and all alone.
Had she really wanted to go on without me? Or had they forced her to get rid of me? She had not looked my way even once, there at the end. Maybe they had talked her into it, but it might be that Loomis had threatened her.
Law and order were made for women. They are hedged around by protection. But out in the wilderness they are only as safe as men will let them be. Penelope Hume was a long way from any law, and it was likely that nobody even knew where she was, or where she was going. Loomis would have seen to that. If she never appeared again, nobody would be asking questions; and if anyone did ask, no one would answer. Many a man and many a woman disappeared in the western lands, left in an unmarked grave, or in no grave at all.
Whatever, law there might be would be local law, administered only in the towns.
Few officers ever rode out into the unsettled country unless they were Federal officers, and most of those were active only in the Indian Territory.
These were my thoughts as I mounted up and worked my way on down the mountain, keeping to whatever cover I could find. That box canyon would not be easy to find, but should be simpler for me, who knew this kind of country, than for either Loomis or the Karnes outfit.
Suppose I could get there first and get that gold out? Finders was keepers, wasn't that so? That was how I felt, and yet the idea made me uneasy. There would be nothing for that girl, for Penelope. I wasn't worried about Sylvie ... her kind could always get along. Penelope was something else, and I couldn't leave her without a two-bit piece to her name.
She was pretty, and she was a city girl. Both qualities put her in a bad spot.
She was pretty enough to attract trouble, and had too much of the city in her to know how to cope with this kind of country.
It seemed to me she was safe until they either found or failed to find the gold; after that she would be fair game. Only I was uneasy, leaving her at all. She needed somebody at hand to care for her.
Ahead of me was some low brush; on the side of the mountain a few pifion. I started to swing around a big boulder when the corner of my eye caught a flash of light and I ducked. Something hit me a wicked blow on the skull, and the dun shied violently. A report went racketing off down the canyon, followed closely by another, and then I was laying on the ground among some rocks, looking at a pool of red on the sand.
Instinct told me I must move from where I lay, and yet I couldn't move a muscle.
My brain told me to get up and get going, but nothing happened; and then I heard a voice call out.
"Ralph! You stop right there! I always was a better shot than you, and if you take one step nearer I'll break your leg!"
"Pen! Now, don't be foolish! We just came to help you. If you knew what we know about Loomis--"
"I don't need any help. You just turn back and leave that man alone."
"But he's after the gold, too! We've got to be rid of him, Pen!"
"You back up, Ralph! You and Sylvie and Andrew might just as well go home. You don't know where the gold is, and you'll never find it unless you know."
Ralph laughed, and it was an unpleasant laugh. "We don't have to find it, Pen.
We'll just let you and Loomis do that for us!"
"You heard me, Ralph. Back up and let him alone."
"I'm going to kill him, Pen. If he isn't dead already, I'm going to kill him."
"Ralph"--Pen spoke matter-of-factly--"you make the slightest move this way and I'll not stop with breaking one leg--I'll break them both and just let you lie there. Nobody would ever find you except the buzzards."
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