The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four

by Louis L'Amour

  TURK CUT THE MOTOR, and tossed the man a line, then dropped his anchor. He was thinking rapidly. But when he stepped up on the wharf, his manner was casual.

  “Hello,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve met you before. Where’s Yorke?”

  “Yorke?” The big man’s eyes were challenging. He lit a cigarette before he answered, then snapped the match into the water with studied insolence. “He sold out. He sold this place to me. He left two weeks ago.”

  “Sold out?” Madden was incredulous. “Where’d he go? Sydney?”

  “No,” the man said slowly. “He bought passage on a trading schooner. He was going to loaf around the islands awhile, then wind up in Suva or Pago Pago.”

  “That’s funny,” Madden said, rubbing his jaw. “He ordered some stuff from me. Told me to fly it in for him. Some books, medicine, food supplies, and clothes.”

  “Yeah,” the big man nodded. “My name is Karchel. He told me he had some stuff coming in. My price included that.”

  “You made a nice buy,” Turk said. “Well, maybe I can do some business with you once in a while.”

  “Yeah,” Karchel said. “Maybe you can.” His eyes turned to the plane. “Nice ship you got there. Those Grumman amphibs do about two hundred, don’t they?”

  “Most of them,” Madden said shortly. “This was an experimental job. Too expensive, so they didn’t make any more. But she’s a honey. She’ll do two forty at top speed.”

  “Well,” Karchel said, “you might as well come up and have a drink. No use unloading that boat right now. An hour will do. I expect you want to get away before sundown.”

  He turned and strolled carelessly up the path toward the bungalow, and Turk Madden followed. His face was expressionless, but his mind was teeming. If there was one thing that wouldn’t happen, it would be Tony Yorke selling out.

  Tony and Angela, he was sure, loved their little home on Polenia Bay. If they had told him that once, they had told him fifty times.

  Now this man, Karchel, something about his face was vaguely familiar, but Turk couldn’t recall where he had seen it before.

  “You don’t sound Dutch,” Karchel said suddenly. “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” Turk said. “My name is Madden. Turk Madden.”

  Instantly, he realized he had made a mistake. The man’s eyes came up slowly, and involuntarily they glanced quickly at the brush behind Turk. Another guy, behind me, Turk thought. But Karchel smiled.

  “I heard that name,” he said. “Weren’t you the guy who made all that trouble for Johnny Puccini back in Philly?”

  Sure, Turk thought. That would be it. How the devil could he ever have forgotten the name of Steve Karchel? Shot his way out of the pen once, stuck up the Tudor Trust Company for $70,000, the right-hand man of Harry Wissler.

  “If you want to call it that,” Turk said. He stepped up beside Karchel. “Johnny was a tough cookie, but he wanted to organize all the mail pilots. I was working for Uncle Sam, and nobody tells me where to get off.”

  Karchel dropped his cigarette in the gravel path.

  “No?” he said. “Nobody tells you, huh?”

  Two men had come out of the brush with Thompson submachine guns. They looked tough. Covered all the time, Turk thought. Those guys had it on me. I must be slipping. Aloud, he said:

  “You boys got a nice place here.” He looked around. “A right nice place.”

  “Yeah,” Karchel chuckled coldly. “Lucky Yorke was ready to sell.” He motioned up the steps. “But come on in. Big Harry will be wanting to see the guy who thumbed his nose at the Puccini mob.”

  Turk walked up the steps and then the mosquito netting flopped from the door, and a man stepped out. He was a slim, wiry man with a narrow face. His eyes were almost white, his hair lank and blond. He was neatly dressed in a suit of white silk, and there was a gun stuck in his waistband.

  “Who’s this punk?” he snapped. “Didn’t I tell you if you found any more to cool ’em off?”

  “This guy’s different, Chief,” Karchel said. “He’s a flyer. Just flew in here with some stuff for Yorke. I told him how we bought the place, and the stuff would come to us.”

  “Oh?” Big Harry Wissler sneered. “You did, did you?” He stepped up to Madden, his white eyes narrowed. “Well, he lied. We wanted this spot, so we just moved in. Some of these damned niggers got in the way, so we wiped ’em out.”

  “What about Yorke?” Turk said. “And Angela?”

  Wissler’s eyes gleamed. “What? What did you say? Who’s this Angela?”

  Madden could have kicked himself for a fool. Somehow then, Angela Yorke had managed to get away.

  “What d’you mean?” Wissler snapped. “Speak up, you damn fool! Was there a woman here? We heard she’d left!”

  “She had,” Madden said quickly. “I didn’t think.”

  “Oh? You didn’t think!” Wissler sneered. Then he wheeled, his eyes blazing. “You idiots get out an’ find that woman! Find her if you tear the place apart. The one who finds her gets a grand. If you don’t have her by night, somebody gets killed, see?”

  The man was raging, his white face flushed crimson, and his small eyes glowed like white-hot bits of steel.

  “Take this punk away. Put him somewhere. I’ll take care of him later.”

  Karchel’s hand was shaking when he took Turk’s gun. The two men with tommy guns covered him so he was powerless. Then, they hurried him from the verandah and down to a big copra shed.

  “The chief ’s got the willies,” Karchel said. “We better watch our step.”

  “Why stick with him?” Turk said. “You’ll get it in the neck yourselves, if you aren’t careful.”

  “You shut your trap,” Karchel snapped abruptly. “I would’ve burned if he hadn’t helped me out of the pen. You couldn’t leave him, anyway. He’s got eight or ten million hid away. He’d follow you till the last dime was gone. He’d get you. Nobody ever hated like that guy.”

  BEHIND THE COPRA shed a steep cliff reared up from the jungle growth, lifting a broken, ugly escarpment of rock at least two hundred feet. Here and there vines covered the side of the precipice, and from the rear of the shed to the foot of the cliff was a dense tangle. Once, three months ago, Turk had helped Yorke find an injured dog back in that tangle.

  A sudden thought came to him with that memory.

  “Damn! My plane’s sinking!” he shouted.

  Karchel stopped abruptly, staring. Madden swung, and his big fist caught the gunman on the angle of the jaw, then he leaped around the corner of the copra shed and ran!

  Behind him rose a shout of anger, then one of the men who had been with Karchel sprang past the corner and jerked up his submachine gun. Turk hit the ground rolling, heard bullets buzzing around him like angry bees, one kicking mud into his face. Then he was around the corner and into the brush. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled between the spidery roots of a huge mangrove, wormed his way around the bole of the tree, and then on through another.

  He halted, breathing hard, and began to work his way along more carefully. This was the way the dog had come, trying to find a place to die in peace. Almost before he realized it, he found himself at the foot of the cliff.

  Again he halted, pulled aside a drapery of vines. He stepped quickly into a crack in the rock and found himself in a chimney of granite, its walls jagged and broken. It led straight up for over two hundred feet. Carefully, taking his time, he began to climb.

  It was nearly a half hour later that he came out on top, and without waiting to look back, walked quickly into the jungle and started for the top of Traitor’s Head.

  He had been climbing for some time when he heard the movement. Instantly, he dropped flat on his face and rolled over into the grass beside the trail. The movement came to him again, and he edged along in the brush, peered out.

  A GIRL WAS COMING down the trail, moving carefully. In one hand she gripped a sharpened stick, a crude weapon, but it coul
d be a dangerous one.

  “Angela!” he gasped.

  “Turk!” Her eyes brightened and she ran toward him. “I saw you flying in, tried to warn you, but you didn’t see me. I was on the summit of the Head.”

  “Where’d they come from?” he asked. “How long have they been here?”

  “They came in about three days ago. They’ve got a steam yacht hidden, with a lot of gunmen aboard. They’ve two planes, too. They killed Salo, our foreman. Tony came running down the beach and knocked one of the men down. They grabbed him then, and started beating him. I knew I couldn’t help him by going down there, so I hid.”

  “A good thing you did,” he said. “That blond-headed man? He’s Harry Wissler, a gangster from the States, and as crazy and dangerous as they come. The big man is Steve Karchel, he’s almost as bad.”

  “I heard them say they were going to hijack some ships,” she told him. “They have a fast motorboat and two planes. They want to use this for a base, and loot ships going to and from Australia.”

  “That’s absurd!” he said. “They couldn’t get away—” He hesitated. “They might, at that. They wouldn’t leave any survivors, and they’d sink the ships. There’s a war on now, that might make the difference.”

  “What are we going to do, Turk?” Angela said. Her gray eyes were wide, serious. “We’ve got to do something! Tony’s down there—they may kill him any time. And then some ship will come along…it would be awful!”

  “Yeah,” he replied, nodding slowly. “Where’s their yacht?”

  “In Cook Bay. But they won’t leave it there long. It is too exposed.”

  “So’s Polenia, as far as that goes. But the cove is okay. That is sheltered enough. Did you hear them mention any particular ship?”

  “The Erradaka. I remember her very well because I once went from Noumea to Sydney on her. But they expect to get her before she reaches Noumea.”

  THE ERRADAKA was a passenger liner of some fifteen thousand tons, running from San Francisco to Sydney. She passed within a comparatively short distance of the island.

  “Our problem now is to hide,” he told her. “They’ve got orders to find us—or else.”

  “We’ll go where I’ve been.” She walked faster, and he was glad to step out and keep moving. “It’s in a place they’d never discover in years!”

  They reached the round top of Traitor’s Head, and she walked straight forward to the very edge of the precipice. Then she stepped carefully over the edge!

  He gasped and jumped to catch her arm, but she laughed at him.

  “Come on over!” she said. “See! There’s a ledge, a few steps, and a cave!”

  An instant his eyes strayed out over the edge. It was a long drop to the sea, and yet a more secure hiding place couldn’t be found. The cave was invisible from above, and one had to dare that narrow, foot-wide ledge before they could see the black opening. Inside it was dry and cool, and somewhere he heard water running.

  “How in the world did you ever find this?” he demanded, incredulous.

  “I climbed the Head one day, just to be doing it, and saw a rat go over here. I hurried up to see why a rat should commit suicide and saw him disappear in the rock. I decided to investigate, and found this. Even Tony doesn’t know it’s here!”

  Turk Madden looked around the bare, rock-floored cave. A perfect hideout if ever there was one. Their greatest danger was to be seen from the sea when coming or going. A boat or plane might see them, as it was coming through the entrance to Polenia. Otherwise, with food and water, they could remain indefinitely.

  He stepped toward the opening, then stopped dead still. A low murmur of voices came to him, and Turk tiptoed to the cave entrance, motioning to Angela for silence. Above on the cliff edge, two men were talking.

  “They aren’t up here, wherever they are,” one man growled. “The chief ’s in a sweat about the dame; it’s a waste of time, if you ask me.”

  “There’s worse ways of wasting time, Chino,” a second man said. “I’d like to find her. A grand is a lot of dough.”

  “What d’you think about goin’ after these ships?” Chino asked. “I don’t know a damn thing about ships.”

  “It’s a steal. A war goin’ on, lots of ships missin’ anyway, an’ if we don’t leave anybody to sing, what can go wrong? Durin’ the last war, a German tramp freighter did it for a couple of years. If they did it, why can’t we? It’s like Harry says. When everybody is fightin’ there’s always a chance for a wise guy to pick up a few grand.”

  “Well,” Chino said. “I’m going back down in that jungle. I want to see if I can’t find something. Coming?”

  “I’ll stick around,” the man said, slowly. “I’m fed up crawlin’ through the brush.”

  Turk Madden tiptoed back to Angela.

  “One of them’s leaving,” he whispered. “There may be a chance!”

  HE PICKED UP the stick Angela had carried. Then he turned and slipped back to the cave entrance. Stopping, he felt on the rocky floor to find a loose fragment of stone. Suddenly, there was a gasp behind him and he looked up.

  A burly, flat-faced man was standing in the cave entrance, his eyes gleaming with triumph.

  “Hold it, buddy,” he said softly. “I don’t want to take no dead meat back to the chief. All you got to do is come quiet.”

  “How’d you find this place?” Turk demanded.

  The man chuckled wisely. “I seen your tracks back a ways. I said nothing to Chino, because I want that grand for myself. Me, I done some huntin’ as a kid, so I figured the lay. I seen half a heel print from a woman’s shoe right on the rim where there was a little dust.”

  “That’s clever, plenty clever.” Turk took a firm grip on the stick. Half concealed by the darkness of the cave, he had inched himself forward to striking distance. Suddenly, like a striking adder’s head, the sharp stick leaped forward, the point tearing a jagged gash through the gunman’s wrist!

  Involuntarily, the man’s hand jerked up and his fingers opened wide. He dropped the gun and stepped back with a cry of pain. And in that split second, Turk Madden stepped in.

  Slugging the man in the belly with a bludgeoning right, he knocked every bit of breath from his body. Then a short, vicious left hook slammed the man on the chin and drove his head against the jagged rock beside the cave entrance. The man staggered and then fell clear. Where the leering gunman had stood an instant before, now the cave entrance was empty and behind the falling man a cry trailed up through the still air.

  Quickly, Turk stepped outside and up the narrow ledge. It was the work of an instant to brush out the tracks, then he retreated as swiftly as he had come forth, picking up the heavy automatic as he returned to the cave.

  “That was close,” he whispered.

  For three hours, they waited in the cave, hearing the sounds of the searchers above. The gunman’s cry had obviously carried far enough for Chino to hear, yet when they came searching, there was nothing. The men came and went, then darkness began to gather, and finally Chino spoke up.

  “To hell with it!” he snarled. “I must’ve been dreamin’! Buck probably went off huntin’ in the brush.”

  “No tracks left here,” Karchel insisted. “Where could he have got to?”

  “If you ask me,” one of the men said abruptly, “I don’t like it. No guy as tough as Buck vanishes into thin air. If he ain’t here he went somewhere, didn’t he? Well, I don’t like it!”

  “Afraid of ghosts?” Karchel sneered.

  “Maybe I am,” the man said doggedly. “Funny things happen in these islands! I been hearin’ plenty!”

  “Oh, shut up!” Karchel snapped, disgusted.

  THEY LEFT. “You know, Angela,” Turk said softly, “we’ve got something there. Those guys may not think they are superstitious, but all of us are a little. And maybe—”

  “Maybe what?” Angela asked anxiously.

  “I’m going out,” he said. “I’m going out to get Tony. And I’m going to th
row a scare into those guys they’ll never forget!”

  It was two hours before he slipped through the brush near the house, and paused on the edge of the jungle, studying the layout thoughtfully. Yorke might be imprisoned in the copra shed, and he might be held in the bungalow itself.

  Several windows were lighted, and Turk could see men moving about, apparently getting ready to leave. One of the men came out and stood near the roots of a giant ficus tree. Madden glimpsed his face in the faint glow of a lighted match as the man touched it to a cigarette.

  With a quick slice of his pocketknife, Turk cut a strip of liana from a long vine hanging near him. Then, soundlessly, he made a careful way over the damp earth to the giant tree. Like a ghost he slipped into the blackness among the roots. Before him, he saw the man stir a little, saw the faint gleam of light on the metal of a gun. He stepped closer.

  He made a crude running noose in the end of the liana, and with a quick motion, dropped it over the man’s head, jerking it tight! With a strangled cry, scarcely loud enough to be heard a dozen feet, the man grabbed at his throat. Then, Turk stepped in quickly, and slugged him in the stomach. Without a sound the man tumbled over, facedown in the mud.

  Taking his gun and cartridges, Turk slipped off the crude noose and slipped back among the roots. Working swiftly, he had almost completed a semicircle around the house when he heard the man cry out.

  Someone ran past him swearing, and Turk saw lights go out suddenly in the house. In the darkness, he could distinguish a stream of shadowy figures, starlight gleaming on their guns, as they poured from the house.

  “What the hell’s wrong now?” Wissler was demanding.

  “It was Gyp Davis,” Karchel said, with disgust. “Something jumped on him in the dark, or that’s what he says. Some slimy thing got him by the throat, he says, then kicked him in the belly.”

  Wissler made an ugly sound, half a snarl.

  “These yellow-bellied tramps!” he sneered. “Gettin’ scared of the dark! You tell Gyp and Brownie to get those ships ready. We’re taking off before daybreak. See that there’s plenty of shells in those crates. And a half dozen of those bombs the Doc makes. We won’t have any time to waste on this job!”