by Jonas Ward
"You and I are leaving," he said to her.
"I'm staying with Angus . . ."
His fingers clamped on her upper arm, painfully, and he swung her around and half-dragged her out the rear door.
"You're going to learn one thing," Gibbons promised. "You're going to learn to jump when I tell you to."
He forced her to ride ahead of him along the river, to a line camp Mulchay and his neighbor Bryan shared for their common roundup. Rosemarie was ushered into the small, clapboard shack.
"See you tonight," Gibbons said. "By the light of the silvery moon." He closed the door and bolted it, and rode for Scotstown, there to instruct Lou Kersh about invoking the martial law, then on to Overlord to set the scene for the "invasion" of Mulchay's ranch.
FOURTEEN
LAUREN MACKAY was a round, bustling, blue-eyed man who always had a great many important affairs to attend to—tomorrow—and what kept him busy today was avoiding doing those things he had spoken of to Rosemarie yesterday. Each morning he arose with the sun, ordered his favorite breakfast of flapjacks and boiled beef, and after the third cup of coffee studiously wrote out a list of chores that was invariably the same as the list he threw away the night before. Then he left the house, looking purposeful, and perhaps his eye would notice that a board was coming loose in the steps. The loose board immediately went on the list—first thing tomorrow—and he would continue his inspection of the ranch.
And that was the man's real occupation, riding endlessly over the six hundred acres he owned. It stunned his imagination, all this grass, filled him with so much awe of the size of it that he couldn't begin to think where he should start working it. But he was going to start—tomorrow—start perhaps with a loan. That way he could increase his herd to, say, five hundred head. And with that much beef he'd have to hire half a dozen punchers, a wrangler and a full-time Mex cook to help his niece with her work. In a year, maybe less, he'd be drawing level with Malcolm Lord—and wouldn't that be something, pestering Lord to buy him out instead of vice versa? Rosemarie, of course, would have to stop working in the saloon and learn to live like a girl with the richest , uncle in the Big Bend.
He'd get on it tomorrow, first thing, but by now it was nearly noon, time to head for his favorite spot by the river, where he had the jug cooling and the cottonwoods made a siesta the next best thing to heaven. That's where he was when Jack Gibbons was violating the privacy of his home, and the gunfire that followed startled him awake.
MacKay's first thought, to give the man his due, was far his niece's safety. But his second was for his own, perhaps only natural for a bachelor of fifty-five, and damn providential, and instead of dashing pell-mell toward the house he went that way circuitously, keeping to the dense grove of cypress. All he saw, when he finally had the house in view, was Gibbons' departing group, Rosemarie amongst them and two figures draped over their saddles. It never occurred to him to go to the house now, thereby upsetting Gibbons' plan to take him in tow. Instead he took up pursuit of the men with his niece.
This, too, he did with caution, just keeping their dust just in view along the primitive road toward Mulchay's spread. And when they arrived at Mulchay's, MacKay took cover in the trees again, biding his time to do he knew not what.
Then, obligingly, Rosemarie and Gibbons emerged from the house, and even at this distance MacKay was dismayed to recognize the rough treatment the girl was receiving. MacKay followed along again, watched her imprisonment—and with maddening precaution waited the better part of twenty minutes before venturing forth to unbolt the door.
And as he slid the bar back—in all fairness to MacKay: the harmless old do-nothing considered it a simple enough business he was engaged in, rather foolish, in fact—but should he live among the angels through eternity the man would never again be on the receiving end of such a look as Rosemarie gave him when he opened that cabin to daylight.
For she had spent every second of those twenty minutes futilely searching a way out of the gloomy little place. Twenty minutes is a large slice of life under those conditions, when even something as drastic as suicide is denied a person, and had the door opened four hours after Gibbons had thrown her in there she could not have felt so heart-burstingly happy to see whose face it was peering in and asking, "What you doin' in there, lass? Come on out."
She couldn't answer, only fly to him, hold onto him as if she needed the feel of his bewhiskered face against hers, the touch of his rough shirt beneath her ringers to make sure this was no dream.
MacKay had no idea what it was all about.
"You better quit that job in Terhune's," he said parentally. "I don't approve the company you meet there."
"I will, Uncle Lauren, I will. But Mr. Mulchay's in trouble. He's bad hurt. We have to help him."
"I've known Angus Mulchay for twenty years. He's forever in trouble."
"But this time it's awful. They mean to kill him off."
"Who does?"
"Those gunmen Gibbons left behind."
"Gibbons? The fella that's massacreein' the poor Mexicans?"
"The same. Come on, Uncle, we've got to help."
MacKay spread his arms. "How?" he asked.
How? Rosemarie heard the question echo in her mind and she came back to hard reality, saw her mild-faced uncle for the lovable but still woefully ineffective man he was.
"What can we do?" MacKay asked, reading her dismay.
"Ride with me back to our place," the girl said.
"Why?"
"So you'll be safe, and I can borrow your horse."
"And do what?" he asked, suspicious of her tone. "Nothing foolish, now!"
She shook her head. "Nothing foolish."
"What are you going to do?"
"Climb up there," she told him, looking toward the mountain.
"Climb the Negras? And whatever for?"
Tor a man," she said. "Now let's be off, both of us."
FIFTEEN
WHAT day did you say this was?" Fargo asked. "Tuesday."
“Still June?"
"July the second. The year is eighteen fifty-seven."
"Don't have to bite a man's head off. Hell, I know what year it is."
"Tm not so damn sure."
“Is that so?"
"Yeah, that's so. And I'm not so damn sure about anything else."
"And what might that be, Mr. Grouchbag Buchanan?"
"All right, Fargo. I'm a grouchbag and I'm gripin'— but, dammit, tell me one thing: Have you ever in your life mined gold before?"
"You can bet your wasted life I have! Man, I was cashin' nuggets big as California plums ten years before the big strike!"
"Out of a goddam mountain?"
"Well, no. My specialty heretofore was placer minin'. But when I won this here map in a poker game over to El Centra . . ." Fargo's voice trailed away guiltily and he pretended trouble with his full-glowing pipe. The silence dragged on and Buchanan let him fry in his own fat. Finally he turned to look at him.
"You mean the map the old Spanish don gave your granddaddy in seventeen-eighty?" he asked softly. "The one that'd been in the family vault for so long, but because Grandpa saved the don's daughter from drowning herself in the Conchos he handed over the most fabulous treasure in all history? That map?"
"That map," Fargo admitted, and when Buchanan broke into wonderful laughter it was one of the most relieving sounds the old man had heard in a lifetime of narrow squeaks.
"Won it in a poker game!" Buchanan was shouting to the moon overhead. "Won—it—in—a—poker—game!"
"Well, it's gold-bearing, ain't it?"
"Sure it is. Sure!" He couldn't or wouldn't bottle the laughter bubbling from his chest. "Gold all the way down, so far as I know. But Fargo, a man can't beat a mountain to death!" A fresh wave of laughter took him and he let himself fall flat on his back. "Won it in a poker game!" he roared happily. '
"What's so blinkin' funny about that?"
"The two of us," Buchanan answered him, recove
ring himself. "You for risking your good money to win it, then turning right around and roping me into the deal.”
"Figure you've been chummed, do you?"
"I'm full-grown and long-weaned, old buddy. You took me with my eyes wide open."
"Maybe you'd like to match me for your half of this bonanza—winner take all?"
"Not on your life. The way my luck's running I'd win this damn desolation."
"Desolation, hell! This mountain's worth twenty million to somebody. Fifty."
"Even more, Fargo. But not in our time, not for twenty years. That somebody's going to have to spend half a million to get it out."
"Then let's sell it to him."
Buchanan grinned. "You're the bottle with the cork pulled," he assured him. "Sell what to him? What is it you figure we own?"
"We're here, ain't we? The federal government itself says a man that squats on something long enough has rights, don't it?"
"Rights to live on it, to work it. He can't sell it—and in the second place whole mountains are excluded. That I’m sure—" His voice broke off sharply and he swung to his feet in a lithe, one-piece motion.
"What's the matter?" Fargo asked.
"We got a visitor," Buchanan said, striding to his war bag.
The cat?"
"Too noisy for her." He slid a rifle free from the bag, laid it in his arm and crossed the clearing at a right angle to where the sound had come from.
"I don't hear nothin'," Fargo said, but by then Buchanan had slipped from sight over the ridge. Fargo went in his own belongings, produced a formidable Greener, sue was soon out of sight in the opposite direction.
Rosemarie was certain that not even in the wildest of her rugged Scotland was there such a fearsome as the Sierra Negras. At the start of her climb it been the trees, so thick they all but blotted out the midday sun, so close together a person had to detour to find a way between. And down there snakes and a whole world of slithering things made each new step forward an adventure in itself. For an hour you worked along in that company, then the trees grew sparser, the shade diminished and the torrid sun beat down. But the heat was a minor discomfort compared to the bramble bushes —thigh-high they grew, like rolls of barbed wire piled one atop the other, and their bristling defiance of free passage was nature at her thorniest best against the trespass of the animal—in Rosemarie's sorry case, human species.
But a determined person could get past the brambles, paying for it with legs scratched and bloodied from ankle to knee, cotton skirt shredded to ribbons, and could survive that and then find the going really hard. For now the mountain inclined sharply, became a bare wall of rock studded with sharp outcroppings, and climbing it was a test of sheer endurance combined with the sure-footedness of a cat.
Of which there were plenty, thriving unmolested as they did in this natural habitat. But night is the time when cats hunt, and though half a dozen terrified the girl with their grunts and snarls, none made the effort to molest the strange-scented game on such a warm, lazy day.
Up she went, slowly, precariously, and after another hour the mountain relented, grew gradually less inclined as if paying a grudging reward. Soon she could see the top, a hundred feet beyond, and she stopped and called his name.
There was no answer. She called it again. Oh, no, she thought dismally. He can't have gone away.
She continued on—thirty more feet, fifty, seventy-five —and that was when Buchanan caught the first sound of her approach and moved defensively to apprehend whoever it was.
And then she called a third time.
"Tom! Tom Buchanan! Oh, where are you?"
"Right behind you," he said and she nearly fell to the ground from the start it gave her. His hand steadied her, and the reassuring strength of that made the girl want to collapse again, but for a different reason. As it was she leaned her head against his chest and relief came in the form of quiet tears.
"Who's with you?" Buchanan asked.
"No one."
"You climbed up here all by yourself? What in the world for?"
"Angus Mulchay. Gibbons has him. They're going to kill him."
"Hey, whatcha got there, boy?" Fargo cried excitedly, breaking from his cover and coming up to them quickly. "By damn!" he said admiringly, drinking in his first sight of womankind in nearly six months.
"This is Fargo, Rosemarie. He's not really as foolish as he looks right now."
Fargo heard the reprimand and quit his wide-eyed inventory.
"This is the good-lookin' gal you danced with down there?"
"This is her. Camp's around this way," he said to Rosemarie. "You can get some rest there and something ID eat."
There's no time," she protested weakly. "We've got to get back to him."
He had started to lead her to the campsite, but the girl's strength left her all at once and he just did catch her up. Buchanan carried her the rest of the way, settled her on his blankets, and hardly was she there but her eyes closed in deep sleep.
Fargo peered down at her intently.
“You got yourself a beauty, Buchanan."
"She's not mine," Buchanan answered, kneeling at his war bag.
“No?"
"No."
"Tell her that when she wakes up," Fargo said.
"I won't be here." He was standing now, unrolling his holstered Colt from the wide cartridge belt.
"What's that for? Where you goin'?"
"Ran into an old guy when I was down below," Buchanan said, notching the silver buckle, settling the gun comfortably on his hip. "He's in some kind of trouble."
"You comin' back up again?" Fargo asked quietly, and the two of them looked at each other very steadily.
"Not much future in it, is there?" the tall man asked.
"As much as you are going to find anywhere, Buchanan." Fargo's glance fell to the sleeping girl. "More, I'd say."
"Wrong, Fargo." He crossed the space separating them, extended his hand. "It's been my pleasure, Mr. Johns," he said, lightening the mood with his grin. "Drop in when you're passing through Frisco next time."
"Where'll I find you?"
"Where the loudest music is."
"And the fanciest women?"
"Where else?"
"I'll be there, boy. Save a place at the bar for Fargo."
And so they parted, Buchanan walking off the mountain without a look back, Fargo refilling his Meerschaum, settling down against a post of their dugout to keep vigil over the girl.
The old man felt the tears on his cheeks, warm and moist, before he actually knew he'd shed them. He brushed angrily at both eyes and clamped his teeth down tight on the pipe stem.
"What in hell ails you, anyhow?" he asked aloud, furious with himself. "Told you he'd see you in Frisco! didn't he?"
The self-scorn was genuine enough, but it didn't work. Fargo was certain that he had seen Buchanan for the last time, and would hear his voice never again. Not in this life.