More than once she had suspected Harvey Thorpe’s activities during those absent years, and now she was sure. But had she a choice? And after all, might it not work? It was true there was money in the mining camps of Colorado and Nevada, and it was true this was a relatively foolproof hideaway. Anybody approaching could be seen for some distance before arriving at the ranch. Yes, it might work.
And mining the stages and the gold shipments was quicker, easier, and scarcely more risky than ranching.
Radigan was dead. She had hated and feared him but he was dead, and now she felt a curious emptiness, a sense of loss.
It was an unfamiliar feeling, and it disturbed her, for never before had she given much thought to anyone, and in the case of Radigan, she herself had been first to order his death. Yet now that he was dead she felt uncertain and lost, as if something she valued had gone out of her life.
Standing by the window, listening to the talk behind her, she sensed Wall’s reluctance, and remembered what she had often said to Harvey, that they must be careful with Ross, for there was a point beyond which he would not go. Now she was aware of that more keenly than ever, yet he said nothing, and if left to handle only the honest work of handling cattle, he might stand aside and remain quiet.
What about her? Somehow in the last few days control had slipped from her fingers, leaving Harvey in command. He had taken the reins so quietly and skillfully that she was confused, for until now she had despised him and been sure he would run her errands for her, and listen to her. Now she knew she was mistaken, and she knew she did not like the thought. Something had to be done!
Yet, why do anything?
Why not sit back and let him engineer the robberies, and when there was enough to warrant it, find one man who would use a gun for her. And then San Francisco, New York, Paris, Vienna—and lots of money.
This way she was free. If they were caught, it was all his action. She had no idea…why, she was just ranching…Wall was her foreman, and see what they had done. Naturally, she could not control Harvey Thorpe. Yes, it would work, and just that way.
“Ross,” she would begin now, “as soon as the storm is over, take two men and try to find an estimate of what we have left. Then we’ll start building back.”
When Ross Wall had gone she walked to the table and sat down. Harvey rolled his cigar in his teeth and smiled at her. He was feeling good, for now, after a long wait and a lot of submission to her will, he had won. From here on he was in the driver’s seat, and he liked the feeling. Moreover, he could see that Angelina was aware of the shift of leadership. “On the fifth of next month,” he said, “there is a shipment of gold leaving Leadville for Denver. It will never arrive.”
The bullet smashed into the table between them and she heard the tinkle of glass. She stared at the deep furrow plowed into the wood of the table, shocked by its suddenness.
The second bullet shattered the lamp and spilled flame over the room, but Thorpe, acting swiftly, beat out the flames with a blanket before they had time to take hold.
They crouched near the floor in the darkness, frightened and breathing heavily, smelling the smoke, the spilled oil, and the singed wool of the blanket.
“You’re so clever,” Angelina said wickedly, “so very clever! He’s still alive, Harvey, and you’ve failed again. Radigan is alive!”
Harvey Thorpe made no reply. Crouching in the darkness he was suddenly swept by a wave of blind, unreasoning fury. He wanted to leap out into the open, to kill, to cripple, to beat down. But the enemy was beyond him, somewhere out there, elusive in the dark.
“It can’t be!” he protested. “It’s somebody else! It simply can’t be!”
“Your plans, they’re so complete, Harvey. So thorough. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Shut up!” His tone was low and vicious, never before had she heard him sound so murderous. “He’s dead, I tell you. It’s that breed, or somebody.”
Crouched in the darkness, waiting for further shots, she tried to examine her own position clearly. For the first time she realized that she felt active dislike for Harvey Thorpe. That she had not realized this before was due in part to their respective positions, for the ranch had been left to her, the cattle were in her name, everything was hers and she felt in no way obligated to him, while hers was definitely the superior position. Yet this move had been advised and instigated by him. It had seemed a good move, and she had been prepared for it, yet now she could see where she had played into his hands, and with the herd gone, or at least badly hurt by the storm, their positions were reversed. All this she had thought of earlier, but now she was wondering what her next move would be. That Ross Wall was loyal to her and to her alone, she knew. Also that their economic position was very bad: perhaps it would be better, if they eliminated the present danger, to go along with Harvey until he had acquired the gold, then take it for herself. She was sure she would never be suspected of conspiring with him to rob stages, and even if they suspected her, she naturally would have had no demonstrable hand in the robberies.
They waited in the darkness. Harvey sat with his back against the strong wall of the house in the direction from which the fire had come, and now he rolled a smoke in the dark, and lighted up.
“There’s nothing he can do,” Harvey said, finally. “He can’t live out there in the cold forever—look what shape Ross was in—and we can bottle him up and keep him in this country until we can hunt him down.”
“What if he knows of those Indian trails you talk of?”
“Mostly, they’re snowed in now.”
“Won’t that affect your plans to get away after the holdups?”
He was silent for several minutes and then he said irritably, “No—we’ll make provision for that.”
Harvey Thorpe, she recalled, was a man who planned carefully, but did not like objections to his plans. He did not like to admit that he might be in error, and he was also an optimistic planner: he expected the breaks to go his way. This, she remembered having heard, was true of the criminal mind; few of them were ever willing to assess the full weight of the forces against them.
Yet he might win, for a time, at least. Getting to her feet she went into the other room and brought back a blanket which she hung over the window, and after that she lighted a candle taken from a box in the kitchen. With a broom she swept up the broken glass and threw it out, along with the ruined lamp.
When she returned to the living room Harvey had gone. Her thoughts returned to Tom Radigan.
Was he actually dead? The more she thought of that, the less she believed it. He was a shrewd fighter, one who missed few chances, and no matter how strongly Wall might believe him dead, she was unconvinced. Coker was not the man to kill Tom Radigan.
For several days nothing happened. The sun came out and melted the snow in exposed places, and Ross Wall, working tirelessly, checked their losses, and the reports he brought to her were not as bad as she had first expected. True, they had lost several hundred head, but it was mostly the weakest stock that would scarcely last out such a winter in any event. If the bad weather had remained they could have lost the entire herd, but now they had a respite.
The activities of the few riders Harvey had left her were limited by the snow-filled passes and trails blocked with snow. As most of her life had been spent in Western country she knew how difficult it was to search every corner of any range. And in this broken, tumbled and forested country it was virtually impossible. She had known of cowhands who had worked a range for years, and then discovered canyons they had never known to exist. Yet somewhere near Radigan had his own cattle and where they were there was feed.
Harvey was busy with his plans. He had divided the remaining force into three groups of six men each, and each had been given a project. Each group was to strike at the same time and then each was to get out of the country, fast. The country they were to cover was far to the north, but there were at least two ranches where they could get fresh horses, ranches owned by m
en who were themselves outlaws. Scouting north, they found the trails open as far as they rode, and there was a good chance they could make their strikes and escape before another snow fell.
Wall had been working with only four cowhands, and he came to Gelina as she was saddling for a ride. “I declare, Miss Gelina,” he said, “we’ve covered a sight of country, but not one brand of his stock have we found, nor a single stack of hay.”
“Maybe you’ve worked too close to the place,” she suggested. “It must be a valley, or a plateau.”
“We’ve been working west and south,” he said, “but we’ll try east and north, across the river.”
She drew the girth tighter. “Ross, are there any tracks? Of people, I mean.”
He hesitated. “I know what you mean,” he said, after a moment, “but I’ve hesitated to say. Bitner found the tracks of the man who shot into the cabin.”
She turned to face him, waiting. Yet even before he told her, she knew what was coming.
“It was Radigan, all right. He was on that pinnacle south of the place, although how he got there without being seen beats me. We found his tracks, and I know his tracks, and we backtrailed him to a camp in the hills a couple of miles over west. Mighty nice place, and they had a-plenty to eat.”
“They?”
“Yes, ma’am. There was three of them. Radigan, John Child and the girl.”
So Coker had failed after all? And what of Gorman?
Suddenly, she realized she was glad. She wanted Radigan alive. Yet was it that? Or was she pleased that Harvey had failed?
“Ross,” she said, “you told me you’d found some grazing on a mesa over that way. I want you to cull what is left of the herd, and pick out about five hundred head of the best stock, and I want you to scout around and find the best grass you can, and get them on it.”
He looked up at her, and she knew he understood exactly what she was thinking. “We may not be able to save them all,” she said, “but I want to save enough to start again—elsewhere.”
“All right.” He shifted his feet and got out the makings, beginning to build a smoke. “I take it we’re to make no talk about this?”
“No, no talk. Just do it.”
“That Flynn,” Wall said. “Harvey shouldn’t think too little of him. He’s no fool.”
“Harvey’s the fool.” It was the first time she had let her feelings be known. “Radigan will beat him. Harvey’s too reckless.”
“I’ll start working those cattle,” Wall said. “You can depend on me.”
That she could. She watched his broad back as he rode away and wondered who, if anyone else, she could depend on. Yet as he disappeared she was wondering if she would not do best to depend only on herself, and to keep her thoughts to herself. There might be a way to win out of this yet. If Radigan and Harvey destroyed each other, then she would remain in command of the situation.
And then Gorman showed up. He rode in on a gaunted horse, his face drawn and pale, his eyes fever-bright. She was alone on the ranch when he came in and she got the story first. It was brief and to the point, the story of Coker’s death, and he added, “I found a deer in the deep snow and killed it. I’ve been eating meat without salt for the past three or four days, and not much of that.”
After he had eaten and drunk coffee he rolled a smoke. “Ma’am, one thing I got to tell you. That Radigan! He wasn’t worried. I mean not even a little. I never saw a man take things so easy-like, and I think there is reason for it. I think they knew exactly where they were going, and I think they went to Loma Coyote for help.”
Gorman told her then what she had already heard from Ross, about the men at Loma Coyote, about Loren Pike, Charlie Cade and Adam Stark.
*
TOM RADIGAN ROLLED out of his blankets and stirred the few coals that remained from the night’s fire. To these he added some fragments of bark and pitch pine he had split the previous evening. Shivering with cold, he moved swiftly to get the fire going, then dived back under his blankets. Glancing across, he saw Gretchen laughing at him from her bed.
“It’s cold!” he said defensively.
“Naturally! But you should have seen yourself, jumping around like a cricket on a hot skillet.”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said grimly, “you build the fire!”
“All right! But I’ll put the materials close by my bed so all I have to do is reach out with one hand and get the fire going.”
“Anybody who’d make a fire like that,” he said, “would steal sheep.”
They waited, watching the hungry flames reach out with red tongues and caress the cold sticks. The fire grew and crackled, warming the cave on the mesa.
Actually, as to distance they were not more than a mile from the ranch itself, and the cave they occupied was one of a series atop the mesa that backed up the ranch, but they were on the northwest side of the mesa and the cave could only be entered from the top, so far as anyone knew. The room they occupied was a small one that was an offshot of a much larger room, and one that Radigan had prepared long ago.
His own preparations had only followed those of some other man who had preceded him by many years, for he had found an artificially hollowed basin there in the outer cave into which water flowed, and he had found a rusted halberd and part of a breastplate.
Here, sometime in the bygone years, some lost adventurer, perhaps from the army of Coronado, had taken a last refuge from the Indians. And from all the signs here he had lived for some time, years, perhaps. Cut off by the Indians, he must have fled ever farther into the wilds until finally at a last extremity he had found this place, and remained here. Gradually, over the years, he had fitted it out as a combination fortress and home.
Into the rock walls he had cut shelves, and in the outer wall he had cut two windows, or portholes, perhaps, that allowed him a means of covering the approach to the cave. And here he had lived.
Coming upon the place quite by accident, Radigan had immediately seen its value as a haven of refuge if the Utes caused trouble, and had supplied it with utensils, stored food and ammunition, and had, over the years, brought in a plentiful supply of firewood. The smokehole used by the previous occupant he had improved by a chimney from the crude fireplace, and the smoke issued from the top of the mesa through the roots and then the branches of a gnarled and ancient cedar. These served to dispel the smoke until it was scarcely visible a few yards away.
This was the first and best of the caches of supplies he had planted.
As the fire grew, the cave warmed up and Radigan rolled out of bed and dressed swiftly. Child followed.
“How about that trail north?” Radigan asked suddenly. “Figure a man could get through to Loma Coyote?”
“When do you want me to start?”
“Not you—me.” Radigan walked to the deep-seat window and peered out. The approach to the cave was up a winding slide that was just short of being too steep for a horse to make it, and from below gave no hint of a means of access to the mesa’s top. The window allowed a view down the slide for much of the distance. “You stay here, and I’ll go,” Radigan said.
“Those boys know me,” Child protested.
“Pike knows me. So does Cade. The others can get acquainted. Anyway, it wouldn’t do for me to stay here with Gretchen.”
“Afraid?”
“Me?” Radigan stared at her, then grinned. “No, I’m not afraid, but you ought to be. There’s no telling what might happen if we were left here alone.”
“Nothing would happen,” she replied, “unless I wanted it to.”
Radigan measured her with cool eyes. “Now maybe that’s so, and again maybe it isn’t. Don’t offer me any challenges.”
He went into the outer cave where the horses were and fed them. He glanced at the hay—not much left, but there was a good bait of corn left, and there was a chance they could ride it out on what they had. There was food enough, that was sure. And ammunition enough to wage the Battle of Gettysburg all over again.
He saddled up, and went back for his blanket roll and saddlebags. Gretchen was up and had coffee on, and they sat down around the fire.
“About time somebody had a look at those cattle for San Antonio way,” Child suggested. “I could do that.”
Radigan looked over at Gretchen. “That means you’d be here alone. Could you make out?”
“I could.” She added a slice of beef to his plate. “I would be all right, and if anybody found the place, I’d be able to stand them off.”
“The snow’s gone from the slide,” Child said, “and we can get out without leaving any trail, so you’ll be all right. I can’t figure any way they could find you up here.”
When he had led the horse to the opening of the cave, Radigan walked back to meet Gretchen. He took the last packet of food she gave him and thrust it down in his saddlebags. “You be careful,” she warned.
He turned and looked down at her. Somehow, despite the cold and discomfort of their days, she had continued to keep herself attractive, and now looking down into her eyes, he felt her concern. “You do the same,” he said, “and don’t you go out of the cave unless you go on top of the mesa, and if you do that, keep well back from the sides. And whatever you do, don’t cook at night.”
“You told me that. At night you can smell the food cooking.”
“That’s right. A wood fire don’t matter so much because it could come from their own fireplace, but the smell of food is going to make them mighty curious.”
“I won’t.”
He stepped into the saddle. Her fingers lingered on his sleeve. “You be careful,” she repeated.
He glanced at her again, and was startled to see tears in her eyes. He looked hastily away. Now why would she be crying? There was no accounting for women, and it wasn’t as if he was a relative or anything. He walked the horse the last few steps out of the cave and then started down the slide. It was steep, but a horse could make it. At the end he drew up and listened, but there was no sound.
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