He spat into the hole, turned away, and, holstering the six-gun, stalked back the way he’d come. “One Chink’s good as another, and I will find another.” He yawned. “Don’t know about you fellas, but I’m goin’ back to sleep.”
Deep in the hole, chest-deep in frigid ground water, Cuno dug his fingers into a cleft in the cave wall with his left hand while holding Li Mei around her waist with the other arm.
The girl shivered, teeth clattering. They both kicked their legs in the water as Cuno held them snug against the wall with his left hand. Apparently, the girl couldn’t swim. Whenever he loosened his grip, she slipped straight down in the water, sucking air nervously and grabbing frantically at his shirt and belt, entangling her legs in his, threatening to drown them both.
He didn’t know how deep the pit was. When he’d hit the water, he’d shot maybe twenty feet down without touching bottom.
This was obviously an old digging, possibly ancient. No doubt more recent prospectors had stumbled upon it and, nailing planks over the original hole, added another tunnel straight into the hill.
The old planks now floated in the stygian water around Cuno and Li Mei. Their faces sported the nicks and cuts from when the planks had fallen on them during their descent from above.
They’d managed to avoid getting pinked by Cannady’s rifle shots by hugging a small alcove.
“Are they gone?” the girl asked in a pinched voice, which sounded sepulchral in the close quarters. The water chugged and gurgled around them, unseen.
“Sounds like.”
Renewing his grip around her waist, Cuno ground his left hand deeper into the cleft. The hold wouldn’t last much longer. His hand was getting so tired that the fingers felt as though nails had been driven through them.
“What do we do now?” the girl asked through a sob.
“Good question.”
He looked around. The cave was black as the inside of a buried coffin. Occasionally, there was a dull flash off the water, vagrant starlight seeping in from above. Otherwise, there was no difference between his eyes being open or closed.
“Whoever dug this pit had to have a way down here.”
Cuno felt around for a lower handhold—one that Li Mei could grasp. Finding one, he guided the girl’s small, shaking hand to it, then found another notch she could rest her foot on, taking some of the strain off the hand.
Leaving her clinging awkwardly to the wall, her teeth clicking together, Cuno swam around the pit, running his hands against the wall, feeling for handholds. There were many pits and clefts, slight fissures probably caused by humidity over the years, but nothing like the steps he’d been hoping for. Whoever had dug the pit must have used ropes and pulleys to climb in and out and to remove the ore.
Shit.
He stopped and, growing heavy with fatigue, the water seemingly sucking him down into its black, chill depths, he looked around, opening his eyes wide as if to see better. It did no good.
The wall eight inches from his face was black velvet, unrelieved and undefined. Cuno moved ahead, kicking off the wall with his waterlogged boots, guiding with his left hand, using the right to tread water.
As he did so, his right hand touched something that didn’t feel like wood planking. He gripped it, flipped it in his hand, running his thumb and index finger down its two-foot length—slender and smooth but knobbed at both ends.
Realizing it was a human bone, probably an arm or a leg, he dropped it, curling his lip. “Christ.”
“What is it?” the girl asked in a quaking voice.
A prospector must have fallen into the pit before the planks had been laid. No reason for the girl to know that.
“Just in a foul mood’s all.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “Me too.”
Cuno kicked himself forward. After another minute’s search, his left hand found a knob of sorts, and gripped it. Using it to pull himself up, digging his boots against the wall, he found another about three feet above and right. He threw his left hand up, rammed his fingers into a cleft, and, gritting his teeth so hard he thought his jaws would crack, pulled.
His wet clothes and boots hung heavy, pulling him down. Water sluiced off him, raining into the pit. He should have kicked the boots off. Too late now. Though his bulging arms felt like rubber, he was making progress.
He reached up again with his right hand.
Damn…nothing but smooth stone only slightly relieved and gouged by pick blades and drills. He waved the right hand directly above his head.
There—another knob.
Reaching for it, he ground his left boot into a crack.
The crack crumbled beneath his boot sole.
Cuno’s left hand jerked out of its cleft, and he fell straight down the wall like a grain sack dropped from a barn mow.
Splash!
The cold water closed around him, ringing his ears. He fought to the surface, spitting water, arms flailing blindly for purchase. His left fist smacked the wall—the bark of skinned, bruised knuckles. Ignoring the pain, he grabbed the only crack he could find, grinding the tips of his fingers into it.
“Oh…God…I can’t hold on….” It was the girl, crying.
Spitting water and blinking, Cuno turned. “Li Mei.”
Another splash as the girl hit the water, immediately gasping and flailing at the surface.
Cuno had no strength left. Still, he threw his right arm out. His hand found her head, then slipped down, and he wrapped his fingers around her arm. He pulled her to him. Doing so, he lost his grip on the wall, and he too bobbed in the water like a bottom-heavy cork, trying to keep the girl afloat with his numb right hand.
Finally, he found another handhold, and brusquely dragged the gagging girl toward him and grabbed her around the waist. He coughed up water and looked around, feeling as desperate as he’d ever felt. Even if he could find enough handholds to climb up the wall to freedom, he wouldn’t have the strength.
The pit had him, and it wasn’t letting go.
He held the girl close. She convulsed with anguished sobs, calling for her father as she shivered against Cuno. As hard as he gripped her, he felt his arm and hands weakening, the muscles failing from exhaustion. In his mind’s eye, she slipped down his side, out away from him, sinking down in the black water.
He dug his fingers so deep into her side that she cried out in agony.
“Hold on,” he told himself aloud. “Goddamnit, there’s gotta be—”
“Li Mei! Cuno!”
The accented voice rang from above, echoing tonelessly off the pit’s walls. At first, Cuno wasn’t sure it wasn’t his imagination or merely the water and wood gurgling around his legs.
“Papa!” Li Mei cried thinly. “We’re here!”
Cuno followed the girl’s gaze straight up the pit. There the darkness was less solid, more murky. He saw nothing. But the voice that cut through the murk was Kong’s.
“I am here. Is Cuno with you?”
Cuno tightened his grip on the knob, which had become slick from his scraped, bloody fingers. “I’m here! Throw a rope!”
Time slowed down, and Cuno’s muscles turned to lead as Kong, finding that his own rope wasn’t long enough, had to retrieve Cuno’s roan and splice Cuno’s rope to his own. When Cuno finally heard the end of the rope slap the water, he was nearly too weak to grab it and hold his head above the water as he slipknotted the rope around Li Mei’s waist.
Kong pulled the girl up easily, while Cuno clung to a knob with both bloody hands, wedging the edge of one boot sole into a crack. Gritting his teeth, he pressed his forehead against the wet wall and summoned all remaining strength to his arms and the foot braced against the crack.
Below, the pit was a huge viper mouth sucking him down.
After what seemed a miserably long time, Kong called, “I drop rope to you now, Cuno!”
The hemp whistled through the darkness to his right. He threw out his right hand, grabbed it, awkwardly knotted the end around his waist wi
th numb, bloody fingers, and yelled for Kong to pull.
Two seconds later, Cuno rose with a jerk. The air squeezed from his lungs as he was slammed against the wall, then pulled straight up against it before he could get his heavy boots out before him. He walked up the side as the horse pulled, water sluicing out his boot tops and running back up his legs to his knees.
He shivered uncontrollably from the cold water and exhaustion.
Though every bone and muscle in his body cried out in pain, he’d never felt such deep relief as when his head broke over the pit’s rim and the horse dragged him onto the mine’s stony outer ledge.
“Ho, horse!” Kong yelled.
Cuno turned onto his side and, breathing hard and snaking his fingers under the rope to slacken it, lifted his gaze. Kong knelt before him, one hand on Cuno’s shoulder.
“You okay?” the Chinaman asked.
“Am I alive?”
“I borrow horse from whores, follow you. Lucky for you I did. Lost your trail for a while, but found it again.”
Cuno was too tired and sore to do anything but nod.
“Li Mei!”
Cuno snapped his eyes open again to see Kong bound off behind him. He rolled over to his other side. Li Mei sat with her back to the cave’s outside wall, head resting against the wooden frame. She wasn’t moving. Kong dropped to a knee, pressed an ear to the girl’s chest.
He grabbed her arm. “Li Mei!”
The girl lifted her head slightly and groaned as she jerked the arm away.
Kong moved the arm out before her to inspect it. Slowly, he turned his head to Cuno. His voice was low and thick with shock. “My daughter shot!”
19
CUNO STOOD HEAVILY. His steps faltering and wet boots squeaking, he walked over and knelt down beside Kong. The Chinaman was talking to his daughter, lightly shaking her, getting no response except groans.
“Let me see.” Cuno nudged Kong aside and took the girl’s arm gently in his hands, inspecting the bloody, wet hole in her shirt, about three inches above her elbow.
With his bowie knife, he made a long cut up the sleeve, then peeled the wet wool back from the small, round bullet hole. The slug had entered through the back of her arm, exiting the front. It didn’t appear to have hit the bone.
No doubt she’d been shot when she and Cuno were trying to elude Cannady’s jackals. Hadn’t said anything. Tough girl.
With two deft knife slashes, Cuno cut the sleeve entirely off her arm, then sheathed his knife and began wrapping the cloth around the arm, knotting it taut over the hole, ignoring the girl’s groaning protests.
“Gotta get her warm.”
Kong nodded. “You too.”
Cuno looked around. His roan and Kong’s steeldust, which Cuno remembered from the Heaven’s Bane stables, stood left of the rubble, head-to-head, reins dangling.
Cuno picked up the girl and pushed himself to his feet. He tripped over his boot toes as he staggered toward the horses. When Kong had climbed into the steeldust’s saddle, Cuno lifted the girl up to him. He couldn’t keep his teeth from clacking as he shivered.
“We’ll head for cover and build a fire.”
He grabbed the roan’s reins and climbed heavily into the saddle, booted the gelding down the hill toward the valley bottom. He wasn’t aware of much after that, but went through the motions of finding a hidden hollow in the darkness, unsaddling his horse, building a fire, and throwing out his bedroll as if sleepwalking. He stripped quickly, lay down beside the fire, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep.
There was a long, luxurious blackness. As if in the far distance, he heard someone moving around, heard twigs snapping and the dull thuds of an ax driven into wood.
When he opened his eyes, his lids were heavy and sticky. For a second, he thought he’d been buried alive. He looked down his chest. Several ratty blankets and a shaggy, musty deerskin had been piled atop his own army blankets. The heavy covers and the fire popping and cracking somewhere near his feet made him feel mummified.
The air was rife with the succulent smell of roasting meat, making Cuno’s mouth water.
Five feet above his head, an awning of spruce limbs had been erected, lean-to fashion, over willow poles bound with rawhide.
Spying movement to his left, Cuno turned his head. Kong squatted over Li Mei, who slept under a pile of covers much like Cuno’s. The Chinaman was running a wet cloth down the girl’s flushed, glistening forehead. He met Cuno’s gaze.
“Found blankets in abandon trapper cabin. Killed deer.” The Chinaman wrung out the cloth in the pan. “How you feel?”
Cuno swallowed, looked outside the lean-to. A few feet away lay the cook fire over which a venison haunch roasted on a braided willow spit. Cuno’s coffeepot chugged and sputtered on a flat rock in the coals.
Over the small hollow surrounded by a tangle of brush, evergreens, and boulders, the sky was soft gray. It was either early morning or early evening. The lack of dew in the brush indicated the latter. Chill air pushed against him from both sides while the fire bathed him with heat, filled his nostrils with the rich, succulent aroma of the meat.
“How long I been asleep?”
“Nearly whole day. Li Mei too. She sweats from fever, in and out of sleep.” Kong sponged the girl’s right cheek, lines of concern in his face. His voice was soft. “I worry.”
Cuno rose to a sitting position, lifted his hands to finger the bandage around his head, where the lookout’s rifle slug had creased his skull. Kong must have dressed the wound while Cuno slept.
His brain felt heavy and he realized, sitting up and looking around, the small encampment pitching gently from side to side, that the slug had addled him more than he’d thought during his and the girl’s run. His weak limbs told him he’d lost a good bit of blood too.
They’d have to get the girl to Sundance tomorrow, find a doctor. Cuno would guide them. No telling how Kong and Li Mei might be received. Without the proper urging, a white doctor might not treat a Chinese.
Cuno said as much to Kong as he flipped all the blankets aside but one.
“What about Mr. Parker?” Kong asked.
“He’ll have to bring the team on alone.” Cuno wrapped the blanket around his naked waist and stood heavily, staggering, and padded across the pine cones and gravel to the right side of the hollow.
Pissing on a juniper shrub, he glanced over his left shoulder. “Once I get you two situated in town, I’ll see to the Cannady wolves. If they haven’t robbed the bank already, maybe I can throw a wrench into their wheel spokes.”
Finished with his business, he wrapped the blanket tight around his waist and stumbled back to the lean-to. The cool air felt good against his chest, sweaty from the fire-warmed robes.
Kong glanced at Cuno, who was using a leather swatch to remove the blackened coffeepot from the fire. “They are very bad men. Too bad for just one man.”
Cuno poured the smoking coffee into a battered tin cup, tore off a chunk of meat from the haunch roasting on the spit. He bit off some of the meat and chewed as he stared into the fire, hearing the revolver pop as Cannady blew lead through Wade’s forehead.
“You worry about your daughter.” He swallowed the meat, chased it with hot coffee. “I’ll worry about Cannady’s bunch.”
Cuno and Kong were up the next morning well ahead of the sun in this deep mountain hollow, cold and swathed in fog.
Bundled in their heavy coats, they washed more of the venison haunch down with hot coffee and corn cakes, which Kong had cooked the night before, then saddled up and broke camp. Kong eased the blanket-wrapped, half-conscious Li Mei onto his saddle, then crawled up behind her.
They were on the trail a good hour before the fog finally lifted and a cobalt sky shone above the pine-mantled, hawk-hunted ridges. An hour after that, the town of Sundance appeared on a craggy, bald, saffron ridge high above the tree line. From a mile out and two hundred yards below, the swaybacked village looked like a giant anthill, with the
heavy mountain ore wagons and horseback riders milling amongst the rocks and scarps below and on both sides being the ants.
Rough wooden buildings formed a rickety line atop the ridge, the makeshift structures rammed together like battered, multicolored dominoes ready to be swept into the rocky gorge below at the first blast of a November snow squall. The town was a mile away, but it looked improbably close and detailed under the clear, white light of the high-country sun. Three mongrel dogs fought over refuse on the slope below the town, two snarling angrily while the third—a pup—sat back and howled. The dogs’ sparring and the metronomic pounding of an unseen stamping mill carried as clearly as a throat clearing in a hushed cathedral.
Cuno, Kong, and Li Mei followed the switchbacks into the town, where the chill wind rattled the shingle chains and made the rickety buildings squawk and lean to the south. They made their way around wagons as well as pedestrians, dogs, and chickens into the heart of the raucous village. Sundance was typical of mining camps in that every other building was either a saloon or a brothel or both, and every other woman was painted and proudly displaying her wares from a balcony overlooking the main trace.
Cuno turned his roan toward a hitch rack before a hotel he’d patronized on previous trips. It was painted bright green, and the huge letters over the roofed stoop identified it as the EVERGREEN INN. There were better places in town, but during his last two visits he hadn’t awakened to more than one or two bedbug bites, and the rats ran mostly only on the first floor. The miners’ famous shovel fights usually occurred over at the Mother Lode on the other end of town, and whores tended to shun the place because the owner was a lay minister from Iowa.
Just the place for Li Mei to recuperate from her bullet wound.
Carrying the blanketed girl in his arms, Kong followed Cuno inside. The freighter paused at the front desk, where the pious, fat-faced owner, whose name he couldn’t recall, was scribbling a letter on a lined notepad, sticking his pudgy tongue out the right corner of his mouth with concentration. His round, gold spectacles hung low on his chubby nose, which was impossibly white for being so close to the sun here in Sundance.
.45-Caliber Deathtrap Page 15