by Brand, Max
“Silver is down here, somewhere in the desert. My men have seen his wolf. That means that I shall see Silver, before long.”
“Well, then we’ll smash him, when he comes! How many are with him?”
“He seems to be alone. But he’s enough, by himself. Pull yourself together, and try to start your brain working. I say that Jim Silver is somewhere near this town!”
“I follow that,” said Yates. “It’s a hard punch, but I can take it.”
“It means we have to hurry up. You’ve wasted time on that fellow, and now he has to talk. You’ve worked with your thumbs, and not with your wits,” answered Christian coldly. “There’s another way to tackle the thing.”
“How?” asked Yates.
“Through his sympathy,” said Christian. “Any one of these noble fools can be unnerved, if you know the right nerve to press on.”
“What nerve?” asked Yates.
“Use your imagination,” said Christian. “There’s the girl, isn’t there?”
The breath left Yates in a long, soft gasp.
“Yeah! I never thought of that!” he said.
“It’s time to think of it now,” said Christian. “We’ve got to get out there now. Are you ready?”
“Of course, I’m ready.”
He started toward the door, and Christian followed with a swift but leisurely step. There was such a grace about the motions of the man that Trainor found himself faintly wondering, faintly admiring. Then he saw the door close behind them, and he stepped out from his hiding place into the open room.
He had learned a vast lot; that mention of the black ore, beaded with gold, attached what he had heard to the mystery of his brother. He had a desperate suspicion that the man who must be made to talk was Clive Trainor. But he was still as far as ever from knowing where to turn himself in his quest. There was only a single dim clue, and that was “Blondy,” who was to be put to sleep by Dolly in the dance hall downstairs.
CHAPTER VIII
The Clue
TRAINOR remained for a moment with his fingers fidgeting on the butt of the gun he had taken from Cormack, uncertain whether he should climb out through the window or else try to steal down through the hall and stairs, as he had come. Those nervous fingers of his made the metal rim on the center of the gun butt slide a little. He looked down immediately, half-expecting the time-worn old weapon to come apart in his hands, but now he saw that one part of the outer metal, right at the heel of the Colt, was no more than a sort of sliding clasp that played easily back and forth as soon as it was directly pressed by the finger. It revealed a hollow half the size of a walnut, and in that hollow was a closely wadded bit of paper. This he drew out, pulled it straight, and found a child’s picture of a man with a round head, a stick for a body, and other sticks for arms and legs. The features were very much awry, and the tongue seemed to be sticking out. There was one word scrawled across the forehead: “Baldy!”
Trainor felt a queer touch of interest that was almost remorse. It might be that Cormack was a married man with children. All of the scoundrels are not bachelors, after all! This might have been a farewell gift from Cormack’s son or daughter, and the rascal had stuffed it away in the hollow handle of his revolver. It might even be that he attached an extra importance to the scrawl, and that that was why he had been so anxious to get back his gun.
Trainor dropped the paper into his pocket and tried the window. It was well fastened, but he got it open and climbed out on the slanting roof of a shed that presently let him down to the ground just beside the dance hall. The music poured out of the shuttered windows like light; the continued whispering of the feet spoke messages to him, and every word was a warning to him to be gone. Instead, he got to a window in the rear which was open to let in a necessary draft at the expense of some privacy, and through that window he saw the picture.
There were seven or eight score of men and twenty girls. Some of the men lounged at the bar; some of them danced together, whirling rapidly; others were obviously waiting, each man, for a turn with the girls. But here and there, some girl sat out with a favored suitor, and Dolly was one, with a vast mountain of a blond man opposite her. With one hand he held her wrist. With the other hand he gripped the neck of a capacious flask. His face was bleared with a sleepy smile. He looked like a vast engine, burdened down by his own excess of weight; the sleepiness of that smile made Trainor feel that he had perhaps delayed too long already.
And suddenly he had stepped through the window. That was easy enough because it was close to the floor. The music was blaring, the dancers were a moving screen that helped to hide him from dangerous observation as he crossed to the table of Dolly. As he leaned above it, he saw her shoving a glass of whisky toward Blondy; she jerked up her head and glared at Trainor.
He knew what was in the whisky. He brushed it back from the grasp of Blondy.
“Hey!” said Blondy. “What’s the main idea! Who’s stealing my drinks? Who the hell is this, Dolly?”
“You big, flat-faced ham,” said Dolly through her teeth to Trainor. “Back up, or I’ll call a bouncer. I’ll have to call a bouncer, you fool!”
Trainor gripped the shoulder of Blondy. His fingers dug through the loose outer flesh and down to a solid core of powerful muscles.
“You’re being doped. Get out of here, Blondy!” he commanded.
“Hey, whatcha mean by that?” demanded Blondy.
“You’re seeing double already,” said Trainor. “Spread your hand and look at the fingers, and see for yourself! They’re doping you.”
“I’m going to squeal on you, you thick-wit!” gasped the girl. “I gotta squeal on you, if you don’t get out. Look! Blackjack Harry is coming this way now. Will you run and save your hide?”
“Dope?” said Blondy stupidly, staring down at his spread fingers. “You’re crazy, stranger!”
“You’ve seen too much — remember what you’ve seen!” said Trainor. “And this is the place where they’re going to put you to sleep so you can’t talk. Blondy, you’re going to sleep on your feet!”
The screech of the girl stabbed twice through the brain of Trainor.
“You have to have it! You asked for it — take it then!” she snarled at him. “Harry! Harry! Throw this bum out!”
But Blondy had heaved himself to his feet and stood with his great legs spread.
“What I seen? Doping me? I thought that whisky had a funny taste all at once. You black-eyed vixen,” said Blondy to the girl, “what you been doing?”
He reached for her, but Trainor knocked down the red fist, pulled the heavy arm over his shoulders.
Half of the dancers kept spinning on the floor. The other half had fallen into a confusion through which “Blackjack Harry” came on the run. He was that same bartender with the twisted face. He had picked up his apron as a girl might pick up her skirt to get through deep waters, and he was clawing back at his hip as he ran.
Trainor, with his free hand, scooped a chair from beside the table and flung it, underhand. Blackjack tried to duck, but he merely thrust his head into the path of the flying missile and went down, sprawling.
Then everyone started shouting. There was such a confusion of noises that Trainor felt a swirling dizziness before his eyes as he half led and half lugged the weight of Blondy toward the nearest door.
The girl grappled with Trainor. She was gasping:
“Hit me, kid! Slam me! I gotta be knocked out. I can’t be suspected!”
He struck wide, with the flat of his hand, and she crumpled on the floor right in the path of the charging bouncer. The man leaped her body. Trainor backhanded him, lodging the muzzle of his gun between the eyes. He saw, from the tail of his eye, how the fellow walked backward on his heels, falling for ten feet before he struck the floor.
Then he and Blondy turned out into the side alley that ran down past the dance hall.
The fresher air seemed to give Blondy more strength. He was able to break into a run, supporting most of
his own weight. They turned the corner of the building with a hue and cry behind them. They could not escape, possibly, by means of fast running, and the best Trainor could think of was to jerk Blondy back against the wall of the house.
There he stood with his wabbling burden, while five men sprinted right past them into the dark.
It was a childish device, but it had worked. He took Blondy back down the alley, turned into the rear street, and got his man out there in the tree clump, where he had left his mustang. In the central clearing, Blondy went to pieces and spilled out of the arching grip of Trainor onto the ground.
Trainor got a canteen from his saddle and threw water into the big, hot, panting face of Blondy. Still there was no response. He heaved the bulk up by the loose of the shoulders and planted him against a tree trunk. With the flat of his hand he spatted the cheeks of Blondy until his palm was burning.
Dull, confused oaths were spluttering out of the man’s lips. He was going to have the heart’s blood of a hound, he said. Trainor took him by the hair of the head and shook the head back and forth, knocking it heavily against the tree.
“It’s life or death!” said Trainor. “It’s your life, too. Try to think, Blondy. They’ve doped you. Try to say three words. You saw something. You saw something, and they know it. They’ll murder you for it unless you tell me in time. I’m your friend, Blondy. I’m fighting for you. You saw something.”
“That’s why I gotta get drunk,” groaned Blondy. “I seen his face. It still keeps runnin’ at me, with the blood on it.”
“It’s not running at you. I’ve turned it away,” pleaded Trainor. “Tell me where you saw it! Where, Blondy, where did you see it?”
“Over Baldy!” groaned the other. “Over Mount Baldy.”
He groaned, and his body fell to the side.
Trainor lighted a match and looked into the swollen face. He lifted an eyelid. The eye was dull and dead-looking. He pushed Blondy on his back, opened his shirt, and listened to his heart. It beat along steadily enough, though very slowly. Probably the best thing in the world for Blondy was to be allowed to sleep out his jag, and the influence of the drug right here in the open air.
There had been only one useful word in what had been spoken — Baldy!
For that word matched the scrawl on the childish sketch which had been found in the handle of Cormack’s revolver. Baldy could be a mountain, no doubt.
Trainor scratched another match and by its light reexamined the paper in his pocket. The whole thing looked different, now that he regarded it with a clue. The long lines of legs and body and arms might be trails. The queerly marked features might be natural landmarks near Baldy or on it, and the chinless, pointed dome of the head was the mountain itself. That scrawled and wriggling line was a trail, perhaps, that worked through the breast of the mountain. That right arm was the trail’s continuation — for, after all, even the arm a child draws does not come out of the head of its subject. No, it might rather be a trail that went on to a forking where three trails branched out. The uppermost finger was the more extended. Yes, and at the end of it there was an arrow point, indicating that this was the right direction.
When Trainor had seen the arrow mark, he folded the paper with tender care and put it away.
He thought back over the clues as he had gathered them.
Because he had recognized his brother’s knife in the hand of a stranger, he had been thrown out of the Golden Hope. He had drawn down on his head the mighty danger that flowed from Doc Yates. He had been turned out of his hotel and broadly invited to leave town through the same agency. Moreover, he had heard that something Blondy had seen had to do with a mine whose ore was like the sample he had left at the assayer’s office. And Blondy had seen a frightful apparition, a man with blood on his face. Blondy was not a nervous type. He seemed to have no more sensitiveness than a great boar. And yet he had rushed for town and tried to drink himself into a stupor in order to crush the vision out of his memory.
That bleeding face began to wear, to the excited imagination of Trainor, the features of his vanished brother. He felt that his cause was lost before he embarked on the journey, because he knew that he could not hold up against such a pair as Yates and Christian, to say nothing of all their assistants.
But now he gave a farewell pat to the shoulder of the sleeper, mounted his mustang, and rode straight out of Alkali toward the hills.
CHAPTER IX
Mount Baldy
THERE were a few shacks on the edge of the town where miners lived when they were out of work or when they were tired of sledge-hammers and drills. Trainor went to the first of these in which he saw a light, and he found a pair of grizzled old veterans in their red flannel shirt sleeves, playing seven-up on top of a cracker box, bending their stiff backs painfully to take up the cards.
He dipped down from the saddle without dismounting, and looked in through the doorway.
“Partners,” he said, “will you tell me the way to Mount Baldy?”
“Damn Mount Baldy,” said the bald-headed one of the pair.
“Here, here, Jake,” said the man with the broad beard. “That ain’t no way to talk. Tell him where Baldy is, will you?”
“Shut yer mouth, Pike,” said Jake. “Play the cards and shut yer mouth.”
“Damning Baldy ain’t no answer to him,” said Pike. “It ain’t a nacheral answer and it ain’t a right answer.”
“Why ain’t it a right answer?” demanded Jake. “Ain’t Baldy a hell of a place? Ain’t it right to damn it?”
“Not to a stranger that’s askin’ his way,” declared Pike.
“Perhaps you’ll tell me,” said Trainor to Pike, dismounting and impatiently slapping his leg with his quirt. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I’d tell you free and willing,” said Pike, “but there’s a bigger point in this here than you think. Here, have a drink, kid.”
“No, thanks,” said Trainor, his very brain burning with desire to be gone. For now danger might be gathering on his trail behind him, and forming to cut him off in the distance. “I only want to know the way to Mount Baldy,” he insisted.
“It’s about the first time,” said Pike gravely, to Jake, “that I ever seen a man refuse a drink of good corn whisky. Did you know that this was corn, young feller?”
“I’ll bet it’s great whisky, but I can’t stop for it. I’ve got to get on, please!” groaned Trainor.
“I’d tell you the way in a minute,” said Pike, “but there’s a big idea wrapped up in this here. The idea is this: Is Jake goin’ to act like a Westerner oughta act, or ain’t he goin’ to act that way? Is he goin’ to have real hospitality, or ain’t he goin’ to have it? I’ve knowed him for a long time, and now I’d like to know this here about him.”
“Shut yer old fool mouth or tell me what you bid?” demanded Jake.
“Are you or ain’t you goin’ to tell this here man, in a rush the way he is, the right trail to Mount Baldy?”
“Why don’t the fool go and look at the mountain and ride to it?” asked Jake. “What’s your bid?”
“Jake,” declared Pike, putting down his cards, “this here game has gotta stop till I find out what you’re goin’ to do by way of showin’ yourself a gentleman, or ain’t you one?”
“Well, what do you wanta know?” Jake asked Trainor.
“The way to Mount Baldy,” said Trainor.
“Aw, follow your nose,” said Jake. “You go right on down the street and take the straight trail and don’t do no branchin’. You can see Mount Baldy shinin’ in the moon right now, if you got an eye in your head. Pike, what you bid?”
Trainor pitched into the saddle, and heard Pike bid two.
“I shoot the moon!” shouted Jake.
The rush of his frightened mustang carried Trainor out of earshot of the rest of the game of seven-up, and he slipped rapidly out of Alkali into the desert. There before him was a squat mountain, to be sure, with glints on it from the rising moon, as though it were
formed of ice. He could imagine that there must be great, transparent cliffs of quartz. The shape of the mountain was almost a dome, though just at the top it sharpened into a pyramid.
Toward that goal he kept at a steady jog, sometimes freshening the mustang into a lope, sometimes letting it drop to a dragging dog-trot, but it was never allowed to fall to a walk until it was on the steep ascent of Mount Baldy.
The lower slopes were hills of shifting sand. He got off and trudged on foot to lighten the horse through that difficult going. Nothing lived here. Out on the desert the lifelike forms of the Spanish bayonet had been jogging past him, and great cacti like vast spiders with legs gathered, ready to spring. But even these shapes had been better than the nakedness of Mount Baldy, white under the ascending moon.
Trainor was well up on the breast of the slope before the sand ended, and he climbed into the saddle to ride on over a rocky trail. It held on, fairly straight, and then began to twist to the right.
But that was not the direction required. It was just the opposite of the trail which was marked on Cormack’s sketch. Therefore, he turned back, and urged the mustang onto a higher shoulder. From the edge of a hundred-foot precipice, he glanced down, then to the sides. Finally, he spotted what he wanted, a trail that corkscrewed up the side of the mountain at just the angle which the map indicated. The moment he saw that, his heart leaped, because he became assured that the childish scratching on the paper was a map in actual fact.
He got to the beginning of that twisting trail. He followed it over the shoulder of Baldy onto a high plateau, and beside him rose a quartz cliff for hundreds of feet, brilliant, dazzling, with the quicksilver of the moonlight.
The trail went out like a light. He rode on for a quarter of a mile and still could not find it. In this blighted land there was no grass, no brush. There was nothing but the scalded face of a dead world, and the moonlight could not heal or cover its wounds.
He cut for sign, opening up in wider and wider circles. And suddenly he found the beginning of the trail again, a thin shadow that wound among the rocks.