Sharpshooter

by Dusty Richards

  His crew, even without Cole and Salty, set in with saws and axes to build a small pole corral to hold the two colts. By suppertime the pen was built and Lisa’s wards were nickering for their momma in this new world. Taking hold of her shoulders from behind, he kneaded them as she observed her “herd.”

  “I am more than a little amazed at your ability to rope.”

  She nodded. “I never needed to rope anything before when you were around. It was learn how to rope or be the cook’s slave, and I mean slave. I learned how to beat those neighbor boys at roping pretty damn quick.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Twelve or so. I beat those big boys—sixteen and older—at it.”

  “I can recall riding out at dawn with the rest of the roundup crew and that big Gary Sampson was waving a big knife at me, peeling potatoes and shouting, “You bitch, you won’t beat me again at roping.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you going to do with your herd?”

  “I never owned two horses before. Guess I’ll have to think on it. How did those boys build that trap that quick?”

  “I figure between Cole and Salty gone they knew when those two got back they’d have them hopping to do things. So they didn’t need any prodding to build it.”

  “We do have a good crew, and they wouldn’t want to be camp dishwashers left in camp, either, on this trip.” She turned around and stood on her toes to kiss Chet.

  “You worried about those two men of yours?” she asked him.

  He looked off over her head across the vast abyss of the canyon and shook his head. “Not yet. They want a good picture of the enemy. Those two are smart and will want all the information they can get before they come back.”

  “What if they took them prisoners?”

  “A big part of his gang will be dead.”

  She hugged him and shook her head. “You know them well enough.”

  “That may be the toughest pair I could have found to do this job.”

  His detectives rode in after dark. They looked hollow-eyed in the campfire light but Chet could tell they’d learned a lot.

  Lisa and some of the help fed them when they settled down at the fireside circle.

  “You all been catching wild horses?” Cole tossed his head toward the corral.

  “Lisa owns them.”

  Cole took a sip of the hot coffee they’d served him and nodded. “Salty, tell them about the Logan gang.”

  “They have about a dozen men. Some have wives. Mates, huh, anyway. They’re Mexican women or squaws. They have some dome hide lodges and a few raw cabins. Kind of a sorry camp, and a part of those men we think were gone somewhere. Nothing like we expected to find. I thought they were more military-like when we met them coming out of that canyon. They don’t look it to me.”

  “Salty and I figured they are like most outcasts. They just exist out here so they aren’t imprisoned or hung. I say we go on having your vacation that you and Lisa are taking. Be a little more cautious and handle them when we need to.”

  “Sounds good to me. Get a bath and some sleep.”

  “Lisa, are you going to need a ranch up here for your horses?” Cole teased.

  “You want the job running it?” she asked him.

  He held up his hands to protect himself. “No. No.”

  “Well, let’s look at more country tomorrow,” Chet said, and they agreed.

  * * *

  West of there the following day, they were out on a point and Cole directed their attention to a cave opening under the face of the sheer cliff, maybe thirty feet below the rim. Nothing would do but tying some lariats together and lowering someone small like Salty down there and have him explore it.

  They tied the end of the rope to a good-size juniper tree and two men let hatless Salty off the edge using Chet and Hampt as the main force on the rope to allow him to drop down. Salty managed to get off the rope and into the cave. In minutes he shouted, “Send Cole down. I found something. Make another rope to pull things up.”

  “What did he find?” Chet couldn’t imagine finding anything but bat shit in that cave.

  He shook his head, and Cole shed his hat to give to Lisa. Cole smiled and got on the rope with his gloves. “Hell only knows.”

  He soon disappeared into the cave entrance, waving his thanks. In a short while Cole and Salty shouted they had something to pull up.

  Chet frowned. The fish on the line they hauled up were breastplates of Spanish armor. He looked at them in disbelief.

  “What is it?” Eddie asked.

  “Something a Spanish soldier left in that cave,” Chet said.

  “Is there any more treasure?” Hampt shouted.

  Cole stuck his head out. “There is a damn museum of those things. Even some skeletons of the men who died down here.”

  Chet turned to two of the boys. “We may need to get one of the wagons over here to haul it out. Can we do that?”

  “We can get one close. That last wash might be as close as we can get one on top.”

  Chet agreed. “We better get what we can hauled up.”

  “Is this stuff worth much?” Billy Bob, the freckled-face cowboy, asked.

  Chet nodded. “No telling. But all these years in this dry atmosphere it is in really good shape and probably worth something.”

  So, the job began with them piling the bounty coming from the cave well back from the edge. Some old flint-sparked muskets, hand pistols, swords, and metal hats, and then Cole shouted up to them, “Be careful. This is the good one.”

  Chet was standing on the edge and could not make out the contents of the bucket they hauled up the cliff’s face. Hampt even strained to pull it up, and it was obvious that it was heavy enough that he had to move back from the edge and use both his hands.

  After the pail was set down, Chet knelt and took a handful of the shiny red stones out. “Rubies.”

  Raw, red, uncut diamondlike stones—why, there must have been thousands of dollars’ worth of them.

  Chet’s wife knelt beside him. Her face was very pale. “Are they real?”

  All Chet could do was swallow and nod. “They’re the real things. Wait. Cole’s shouting again.”

  “What comes next?” Hampt’s voice echoed back.

  “Damned if I know what they are,” was the reply.

  The big man hauled up the next bucket more carefully than the last. It was only half-full and Chet, still on his knees, scooped up some in his palm. “Emeralds. Equally as good.”

  In all this time Jesus was carefully reading the parchments they’d sent up earlier. “I am not a good translator but three officers must have been trapped in the cave waiting to be rescued by the soldiers that were with them, and no one came back for them in time to save them. One committed suicide by jumping out, the other two died down there.”

  “When was that?” someone asked.

  “Seventeen hundred–something.” Jesus said.

  Next came crude gold bars, melted, poured, and branded. They were real and damn impressive, Chet decided.

  “How much more is down there? We about have a wagon load now,” Chet told them.

  Cole stuck his head out. “Another wagon load, I bet, if it is worth hauling off.”

  “What else?”

  “Gold nuggets they never got melted, and we need some sacks for them.”

  “Well, we need to make arrangements for more wagons, and that store isn’t close.” Chet was laughing. What a deal to have a problem with.

  Someone obviously would be able to read the signs that they’d been removing things from that cave. They would need to get all that was worth having out of there. He’d need to buy some more wagons and conceal all they’d gotten to get it back to Preskitt. Nothing ever came easy.

  “There is a fortune here, isn’t there?” Lisa asked him under her breath.

  “Yes, but we’d need more wagons to ever get it all back home.”

  “Where are they at
?”

  “Maybe Joseph Lake. Maybe Utah. We need to send for them.”

  She nodded.

  “When we get all the valuable things up on top we will move this to our camp.”

  She agreed.

  No time for lunch. It was midafternoon when they ate, and all hands were up on top. Two of the men went back to camp to get the empty wagons as close as possible to the site. Chet and Cole appraised the deep cut wash as a barrier and decided it had too much depth to fill in with no more than the hand tools they had to move the dirt. They decided to build a walkway made out of poles to go across it.

  That meant the crew must spend another day there, considering the effort needed to build that bridge. No one complained. They set in to find trees nearby to cut down to build their crossing with, and the men who’d gone for wagons had been instructed to bring back saws and axes.

  Hands rested, waiting until they got back. Then trees were cut, limbed, and skidded by dark. They rode their horses back to camp in the dark, accompanied by some howling wolves stalking the ridges who no doubt wondered what the hell they were up to riding around under the stars in their territory.

  CHAPTER 5

  The bridge over the newly christened Dry Fork took shape by noon. Chet told the ones there that if they fell off it packing stuff across this bridge about twelve feet above the base they’d have to stay there permanently. Earlier he’d sent Cole and Billy Bob on a mission to buy at least one more wagon. If there was not one at Joseph Lake, he’d told them to go on to find one or two at Kanab, up the road.

  When everything was piled into the two rigs, they drove them back to their original camp in the fading sundown. They ate what they found and fell exhausted in their bedrolls. The next day passed and Chet decided his men had gone to Kanab, Utah, to find another wagon.

  He was busy writing in his diary when Lisa came back from feeding her horses herd grass she and some hands cut for them.

  “Chet, the wagons are coming. I can hear them.”

  He finished his last paragraph about finding the Spanish treasure and closed the inkwell. “I hear them, my dear, and a finer sound never came to me like their arrival is.”

  After Cole tied off the reins in the brake lever, he nodded to Chet. “Yes, we had to go to Kanab to get these rigs. But these horses are sound and the rigs are, too. They just cost a lot of money, which I had no time to dicker over.” Everyone laughed and clapped.

  “Everyone rest. We load up tomorrow and leave for Preskitt when we get that done.”

  The boss’s decision was well accepted by the hands.

  In the late afternoon, the Meadows family rode up on horseback. Lisa ran to meet them.

  “So glad you came to see us, Jeanie. Get down and meet my crew,” Lisa said, taking Jeanie’s young daughter off the horse.

  Jeanie’s handsome husband, a man in his late twenties, handed Chet the boy to hold and smiled as he dismounted. “She talked about you and said you all might still be here, and we decided to ride over. Hope we aren’t interrupting anything.”

  “No, we are resting. We found some Spanish treasures and are heading home tomorrow.”

  “A lot of it?”

  “Yes, to be honest, a lot of it. We had to pack it out to where we could get it in our wagon and now have it loaded.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “It was in a cave about thirty foot off the top of where we were looking at the canyon. By the notes we found, and Jesus translated, the three men were left in the cave and were waiting for their soldiers to come back and rescue them. One committed suicide and the other two died in the cave.”

  “When were they here?”

  “Seventeen-forty.”

  “And it was still there?”

  Chet nodded and showed him the metal armor and hats they wore. Then the guns, swords, and books.

  “Any gold?”

  “Some.”

  Michael said, “They didn’t get it from close around here. I have been panning in all the dry creeks.”

  “Ever find any rubies?”

  “Were there some of them there, too?”

  Chet showed him some samples of the ones they’d found, taking a few from his pocket. He held them up to the sun.

  “I never found any of these, either.”

  “I don’t know where they came from but they’re gem quality.”

  “Where is this place you found them, if I may ask?”

  “None of us plan to go back, do we?” he asked his men.

  They all shook their heads. “It is about ten miles west over there, but we cleaned out the cave in the face of the bluff. You find the bridge we built to cross a deep dry wash then you can find the cave, but don’t try to go down to it alone. We found these gems and artifacts in that hole, but we have ranches to run and no time to look for more of them.”

  “I’d love to find the source. And thanks for telling me how to find the area.”

  “They also found some emeralds when they were here. We never found the source of any of them.”

  “What made you look in that cave?” Michael asked.

  “Ask Cole. We let him and Salty down there on ropes. They found it all.”

  “Whew, you were real lucky.”

  “We’ve been looking all over at things. Jesus came to find some original Spanish horses. They caught my wife four colts she likes.”

  “Michael,” Cole said, swinging the boy around and making him laugh. “We had to see what was down there after we discovered it was a cave.”

  “I’ll be more attentive to things after this—thanks for the tips. Mr. Byrnes is your boss. How did he get to Arizona?”

  Cole laughed. “He told us they ran him out of Texas.”

  Chet nodded. “My family got in a feud. They murdered my brother while we were taking a herd to Kansas.”

  “I understand feuds. They’re bad deals.”

  “Why are you up here starting a ranch?” Chet asked him.

  “I had some money to buy some cattle. I couldn’t afford a ranch down south. This is unsettled country and I could homestead the land. Jeanie said she was brave enough to try it. Our brothers helped me get the herd up here. They came back and we built the cabin. In four or five years we will have cattle to sell.”

  Chet nodded that he heard him. “If you see that it doesn’t work, come find me up at Preskitt Valley. We could find work for you. We have lots of couples working for us.”

  “Wish I’d met you two years ago. I’ll stick with this plan, but thanks, and I may need to find you, Mr. Byrnes—someday.”

  The couple left to get home by dark. Lisa was on a high. She’d played with their daughter, Sally. Chet knew she wanted a girl of her own to show her how to live her life better than she’d handled her own early on.

  * * *

  They set out for Joseph Lake in the morning and made it by evening. Chet and Rory Lincoln, the storekeeper, talked about his business and the Logan bunch and their threats. Lincoln said he was glad they had no more problems than the one threat. He apologized, too, for not finding Cole the extra wagons and teams they needed, but he did send them to a man in Kanab who had them.

  Lincoln never asked what they were totting out and Chet wasn’t going to broadcast any information about it. They camped for the night and started for the ferry in the morning.

  A day and a half later, Mrs. Lee talked to them about ferrying two more wagons besides the two original ones. Chet merely told her they needed them and let it go. The entire cave treasure was well concealed in each wagon. Lisa’s colts, by this time, were broke to lead in a line, and they were another topic of the questions streaming from Mrs. Lee’s English-accented mouth.

  “Those are her horses. She picked them out. Better ask her.” Chet put Mrs. Lee off with that and paid her the fees.

  “You coming back up here to settle?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. We have a lot of good range land down there for now. Thanks.”

  “I’ll be he
re if you need to cross back over. Thanks, sir.”

  When he joined Lisa at the head of the line, she said, “I think Mrs. Lee likes you.”

  “Sorry. I am taken.”

  They both laughed. It was a good two days ahead of them to the Little Colorado Crossing.

  Riding along he told her, “Make a list of each man here. I’ll pay them half whatever this stuff brings when we get it settled.”

  “Eight shares, then get fifty percent of the final settlement?”

  “Fine.”

  That evening at supper he announced he would split the treasure’s final sales in half and each of the eight party members would get their share of that half.

  They applauded and thanked him.

  Jesus shook his head. “I get that and I will have to whitewash all my buildings at home.”

  “At least it won’t come out of your pocket,” Hampt teased.

  “It isn’t the money for the paint I worry about. It is me having to paint it all.”

  They laughed some more.

  They had no trouble at the Little Colorado. But Chet noticed they had many suspicious eyes and back-of-hands comments on how they went up there with two wagons and now had four.

  He bet the onlookers really worried about what he’d found up there that was worth dragging home. They would never know until the word got out that they’d found Spanish gold and gemstones, and that they’d slipped a fortune past them in those farm wagons.

  “What is so funny?” Lisa asked, riding in close to Chet.

  “There were several greedy eyes back up there wondering what we found. Why four wagons to go home with?”

  “Yes. It is funny. Where will you store it?”

  “The gold bars and the nuggets in the bank. The same with the gems. I want them appraised. Tanner at the bank can keep them for us. I know a man in Tucson who collects Spanish antiques. I’ll invite him up to look at those.”

  * * *

  Five days later they met Tom and Millie at the Preskitt Valley ranch. Chet made Millie put out her hand when she frowned at the four rigs. He dropped four uncut rubies into her palm.

  Her blue eyes flew open. “Oh my goodness, are they real?”