The Cowpuncher

by Bradford Scott

  For a long moment Huck Brannon stood staring at the unexpected portal here at the mouth of the ancient mine, his wondering companions thronging behind him. And as he stared, a possible solution of this mystery caused his blood to run wildly. Turning, he seized a sledge that had been brought along against possible emergency. In another instant the heavy hammer, wielded with all the strength of his sinewy arms, fell upon the lock. Again he struck, and again. The door creaked and groaned, flakes of damp rust showered down.

  Suddenly the lock shattered, the bolt fell free from its rusted fastening. With a final crashing blow, Huck sent the door swinging open on rusty hinges that screeched shrill complaint.

  Stepping forward he held his lamp high and peered into the dripping chamber which, walled and ceiled with cut stone, was of no great extent.

  Old Lank, crowding close behind the cowboy, gave vent to a low whistle.

  Stacked from floor to ceiling in orderly rows, were ponderous ingots, black and discolored. Huck hauled one free from its resting place of years and scratched industriously at the dull surface with the point of his knife. A clear, frosty gleam rewarded him. He held the bar for the others to see.

  Old Lank whistled again, staring at the stacked ingots.

  “The five thousand bars of silver!” he muttered. He craned his neck, swept his lamp forward. “Only there’s a helluva sight more than five thousand or I miss my guess,” he added. “Old Don Fernando de Castro shore weren’t no piker!”

  “Yes,” Huck said, “this is the real Lost Padre Mine, not the one we have been working for coal.”

  “But how the hell,” wondered Lank, “the water—the—”

  “Don’t you see?” Huck broke in. “That hole up there ends in the old channel they cut to let the crick run over the end wall of the canyon. The crick water filled the mine and hid it when they turned it into the channel, just as the falls hid the mouth of the other mine. Old de Castro was plumb smart. He figured if anybody did happen to spot the channel and what it meant, they’d turn the water back into the original bed and uncover the mouth of the mine down in the canyon.

  “They’d think right off that they’d found La Mina del Padre, and when they discovered the diggings down there were worked out, they’d give up in disgust and go away. If they happened to come up this way nosing around after the water’d run out, all they’d see here would be another pool of water left when the channel emptied. Nobody’d ever suspect it as the mouth of another mine. He slipped a little in not knowing that the end wall of the gallery down below was coal and the water would, in time, seep through, and if allowed to run long enough would drain this mine. Then, of course, anyhow, he intended on coming back this way for his silver after he’d got reinforcements from Spain or Mexico.

  “And,” he added with a grin, “when those hellions come up here and flooded the channel again last Spring, they walked around over top of the Lost Padre silver and never knew it. And if they hadn’t turned the water into the channel and filled up the mine again after it’d been draining for months, the chances are there wouldn’t have been enough water in it to flood our mine and put out the fire. Gents, that’s what you call justice!”

  Turning, he held up the ponderous ingot in both hands.

  “Take a look at this sample,” he chuckled. “We all had a helluva time findin’ it, and everybody’s due for a cut. There’ll be plenty here to pay for putting our mine back in shape, and enough left over to give every man a nice poke of dinero. Pedro, you can go back to Mejico and marry every senorita you’re engaged to!”

  “Me, I stay here in Colorado and get betrothed to some more,” said Pedro, after the cheering had subsided.

  “I reckon Sue honey,” the gray-eyed puncher chuckled, “that that isn’t such a bad idea. How about it?”

  “Sounds like a grand idea to me, dear,” replied Sue, her amber eyes luminous, her red lips parted.

  “Then it’s settled,” Huck decided.

  They scrambled through the opening, which, with grass and other growth fringing the edges, looked at a casual glance just like another shallow hole in the old channel bed, and headed for the canyon. It was a hard trek for starving, exhausted men, and harder for a girl, but they made it, and as the setting sun was pouring a flood of reddish light into the gorge, they burst from the growth below the site of their camp.

  Men lounging about the mine mouth, which showed evidence of the mighty flood of water which had poured from it, set up a tumultuous yelling at sight of them. Prodigious back slapping and congratulations, interspersed with a yammer of incredulous questions, followed; and the exhausted survivors were hurried into cabins for food and medical attention and rest.

  As Mrs. Donovan took Sue in tow, Huck cried after her.

  “Take good care of her, Mrs. Donovan, and see that she gets plenty of food and rest.”

  “Don’t you be tellin’ me what to do, me buckaroo,” retorted Mrs. Donovan. “I been doin’ this long before you was born.”

  “Where’s Tom Gaylord, I’d thought he’d be here?” Huck asked of Ah Sing as the old cook plied him with steaming coffee and food, wiping his bruised and blackened face between bites and chattering away in a weird mixture of English, Spanish and Chinese.

  Ah Sing’s face grew long.

  “Mist’ Gaylold think you all dead,” he replied. “He feel mighty bad—want go ‘way. Man called Mist’ Coleman send fo’ him—say want to buy mine. Mist’ Gaylold go on bullgine mebbe come hour ago fo’ town. Sell mine come t’mollow.”

  XXVI

  Hoss Flesh and Saddle Leather

  Dazed as he was from fatigue, it took several minutes for that statement to penetrate Huck’s brain. He stared stupidly at Ah Sing, wondering if he had really heard right. Then he realized the full significance of the Chinaman’s words.

  Still staring at the cook, he recalled the carefully worded agreement deposited in the Esmeralda bank—an agreement based on mutual confidence and a knowledge of the hazards of their occupation.

  By the terms of that agreement, Old Tom, believing his two partners to be dead, could sell the mine and the sale would be binding. The agreement had been drawn to prevent extended and expensive litigation in just such a case as the present. Huck gravely doubted if the subsequent “resurrection” of him and Lank would void the sale, especially when Cale Coleman’s wealth and influence were taken into consideration.

  Face bleak, he stood up, half-reeling for a moment.

  “A hot bath, and then let me sleep four hours,” he told the cook. “Have Smoke saddled and bridled when you wake me up. You were right when you brought him up here from Texas, feller. I’m going to need him mighty bad!”

  It seemed to Huck that his head had scarcely touched the pillow before old Ah Sing was shaking him; but after downing more food and steaming coffee, he began feeling something like his old self. His body, with the elasticity of youth, was swiftly throwing off the effects of his exhausting experience in the mine. He was still stiff and sore, but that would quickly wear off once he was in the saddle.

  The big blue horse snorted gayly as Huck gave him his head. Down the canyon he thundered, onto the mesa and veered sharply into the wide Apishapa Valley. Slugging his big head above the bit, he seemed to literally pour his long body over the uneven ground. Huck Brannon, swaying lithely in the saddle, sensitive to his mount’s every mood and movement, guided and encouraged, watching the stars pale in the brightening sky and counting the hours he had in which to reach Esmeralda, fifty miles away.

  They drummed the dawn up out of the east, fronted the rising sun and crashed onward until Esmeralda sprawled before them on its mountain bench, uncouth and ugly in the flood of mellow light. Huck glanced anxiously at the sun, now high in the sky, and urged the straining horse to a last mighty effort.

  Old Tom Gaylord’s little office in Esmeralda was well filled. Two of the Lost Padre foremen were there, glowering and sullen. There were also representatives of the Coleman mines. Seated at the table across fro
m Old Tom was Jeff Eades, vicious of mouth, uncertain of eye. Beside him was Cale Coleman, his hard face alight with satisfaction and vindictive triumph.

  Gaylord was slowly scrawling his signature to the agreement of sale.

  “You’re drivin’ a mighty hard bargain, Coleman,” he complained, pausing to dip his pen in the ink as a clatter of hoofs sounded in the street outside.

  “Take it or leave it,” Coleman replied sarcastically.

  “Oh, I’m takin’ it,” grunted Old Tom, bending over the sheet again. “With both my partners daid and the damn mine all busted up and flooded from floor to ceilin’, there ain’t nothin’ I can do but take it.”

  “Wrong!” said a voice in the doorway.

  Old Tom whirled with glad, unbelieving eyes. “Huck!” he yelled, starting to his feet. “You ain’t daid then!”

  Huck Brannon shook his head, his smoky eyes never leaving Cale Coleman’s livid face. The mine owner’s jaw was hanging slackly, his eyes had a dazed, incredulous look. Jeff Eades was white as paper, his hands were beneath the table.

  Huck took a long step forward, ripped the paper from under Old Tom’s pen and tore it across. He cast the fragments to the floor.

  Eades and Coleman were both on their feet. “Hey, you blankety-blank-blank—” the latter howled.

  Huck Brannon’s cold voice cut through his yammer.

  “Coleman,” he said, clipping the words between his teeth. “Coleman, fifteen men died this week because of you. Suppose you try and make it sixteen! Fill your hands, you skunks!”

  For a numb instant there was silence. Then the little room rocked and roared to the thunder of six-shooters.

  Shot through the chest, Jeff Eades went down, coughing and retching. Cale Coleman, a wondering expression on his face, stared straight at Huck Brannon. His gun fell from his nerveless hand and the expression changed to one of horror. With a choking groan that ended in an ominous rattle in his throat he pitched forward on his face, writhed and was still.

  Holstering his smoking guns, Huck Brannon swabbed the blood from his gashed cheek. Old Tom Gaylord, yammering and incoherent, but nevertheless efficient, began expertly bandaging the cowboy’s streaming left wrist.

  “Jest a scratch,” he said, “be all right in a week.”

  Men were coming off the floor and from beneath the table. Other men, shouting questions, were crowding in at the door. The corpulent town marshal shouldered his way through. He glared at Huck.

  “There’s been too damn many killin’s hereabouts of late,” he declared, “and cashin’ in the town’s most prom’nent citizen is too damn much. Young feller, it’ll take a lot of haulin’ to get you outa this mess!”

  “Never mind about that, marshal,” said a cold voice from the doorway. “I’ll furnish all the power necessary to do the hauling. Brannon just did a job that’s been needing doing for quite a spell.”

  “Why shore, Mr. Dunn, if you say so,” replied the marshal apologetically, ducking his head to the rugged and frosty-eyed old figure that blocked the door. He whirled to the men in the room and jerked his thumb toward the moaning Eades.

  “Haul that hellion up to the hospital,” he ordered. “He ain’t hurt half as bad as he thinks he is. Reckon he’ll be able to tell us the straight of this when he starts talkin’.”

  But Jeff Eades was already talking, and telling plenty!

  The office cleared and Huck told Jaggers Dunn the story of what had happened. The empirebuilder listened with absorbed interest, nodding his big head from time to time.

  “Of course it was Coleman who got the mountain Indians on the prod, sending his halfbreeds headed by Estaban among them. He was just a little bit too smart, though, when he had Indian drums beat every time something was going to happen. Of course the idea was to throw suspicion on the Indians, but I never knew the Indians to do so much advertising before, and it set me to thinking. But I never could get enough proof to pin anything on Coleman until now.”

  “You did a good job,” congratulated Dunn. “Well, now everything’s straightened out, I suppose you’re anxious to get back to your mining?”

  Huck grinned. “To tell the truth, sir, I’m about fed up on mining,” he said. “With things shaped up the way they are, Lank and Tom can run the mine. Me, I been noticing that that Apishapa River Valley is mighty fine rangeland. I’m going to take my share of the money coming in and buy me a nice herd of dogies and have them run inter that valley. Going to get back into the cattle business, where I belong. Hoss flesh and saddle leather in my blood, I reckon, sir.”

  And Jaggers Dunn understood, and there was a wistful gleam in his frosty eyes as he watched the tall cowboy swinging lithely across the street to his big horse. For, long before he dreamed of an empire of finance and railroads, Jaggers Dunn had himself been a rider of the purple sage.

  XXVII

  Apishapa Spread

  The dawn-cracking sun was pulling itself up by its bootstraps in an effort to scale the chain of mountains that ringed the Apishapa River Valley, and chase the gray shadow that lay clustered beneath the mesquite clumps and the cottonwood groves, when two riders entered the slash that ran through the north gap.

  For a moment they stood their horses, then they smiled at each other, picked up the reins and started moving down the trail that led to the heart of the valley.

  Their sure-footed ponies, at times snorting and squealing when they would slide stiff-legged down a rocky pass in the trail, brought them safely down to the floor where the river ran. The horses picked their way leisurely along the banks of the silver stream, sometimes fording it for better footing. At times the trail that led through the valley joined them and they rode it together.

  The sun in the meantime had heaved itself above the mountain tops and had touched off a burst of gorgeous yellow color that seemed to leap like a living flame on all sides of the riders.

  Presently, they came to a large open and even rolling clearing that stretched away from them for miles. Tall grass and smooth river flowed through this immense clearing. The riders stopped beneath a shady, wide-spreading elm, from whose branches came the full-throated song of a thrush, bursting with gaiety and verve. They listened attentively for a moment. Finally one spoke.

  “Our ranch will stand there, Sue,” he said, flinging an arm up in the direction of the clearing. “Plumb in the center.” He grinned down at his companion.

  “Near the river, Huck,” she said. “And it will have a flower garden, with trellis—” She smiled up at Huck.

  And he found the smile so irresistible that he kissed her.

  Other Leisure books by Bradford Scott:

  LONGHORN EMPIRE

  PANHANDLE PIONEER

  TEXAS RANGER

  TERROR STALKS THE BORDER

  Copyright

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  August 2009

  Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

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  Copyright © 1942 by Bradford Scott.

  Copyright © renewed 1970 by Bradford Scott.

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