The Vengeance Seeker 4 Page 5

  Compton stirred himself and looked blearily at his two guests. “Hi, there, Sam ... Slim. When the hell you get back?”

  Slim stopped beside the bed. “We want to know, Frank. Where’s Rose?”

  “With them ... the sonofabitch ... she went with them, left me for dead.”

  “Them?”

  “Johnny Reno’s gang.”

  The two miners looked at each other, then smiled. “She left you, huh?” said Sam, shaking his round head in mock pity. “Now ain’t that too bad.” He slowly drew his six-gun.

  “What’re you two after?” Frank asked, suddenly alarmed at their behavior. He struggled to a sitting position on the bed. “I’m a wounded man. I been shot once already by that gang!”

  “Wrong,” said Slim, drawing his own Colt. “Twice already—less’n you tell us where you cached that gold you been taking from our mine.”

  “You must be crazy! How the hell could you think such a thing, Slim? You and me been friends since—”

  What stopped Compton was the sight of Slim cocking his six-gun.

  “This place is dropping dead on you, Compton,” Slim said. “Last winter near wiped you out. So you ride into Silver City and pay for your provisions with gold dust. Don’t you think we got any friends in town?”

  Compton knew when he was licked. He took a deep breath. “All right. Under the floorboards ... near the fireplace. I didn’t take much boys, honest. Just a little to tide me over.”

  Sam holstered his weapon and hurried over to the fireplace and began trying to pry up the rough planks set into the dirt. But he experienced considerable difficulty with one board and began swearing.

  Glancing over at him, Slim told Sam to hurry it up. At that moment Frank made a clumsy lunge for the gun in Slim’s hand. Slim caught the movement and stepped back easily, keeping the Colt still trained on Compton.

  “Got it!” cried Sam, as he lifted out the loose board and reached into the hole underneath it.

  Slim smiled at Compton. The man’s pale, unshaven face was drawn, his eyes filled with the pain that had begun again in his left shoulder when he grabbed for Slim’s gun.

  “Help me, Slim,” Compton pleaded. “It’s my left shoulder. I’m wounded pretty bad.”

  “Shit, you ain’t wounded,” said Slim. “You’re dead.”

  Slim aimed quickly and pulled the trigger. But at Slim’s words Compton had screamed and ducked back under the covers. The bullet slammed into the wall behind Compton’s bed. Aiming lower this time, Slim fired again. But this bullet got nowhere in its effort to plow through the thick blankets wrapped around Compton, who now began to shake and thrash in an agony of terror as he burrowed, still screaming, under the covers.

  The shuddering figure on the bed unnerved Sam. He jumped to his feet, staring. “Jesus!” he cried, dropping the bags of gold dust he had just retrieved from under the floor.

  Slim moved closer to the bed and with the barrel of his six-gun he began to club furiously at the weaving, bobbing thing under the covers. He tried to catch Compton about his head and shoulders, until at last the obscene thrashing and screaming subsided to a whimper. He stepped back then, measured carefully and brought his six-gun down solidly. The whimpering stopped instantly.

  Slim waited a moment to make sure, then holstered his weapon and turned to look down at the bags Sam had dropped onto the floor. There were about eight of them. “That all he took?”

  “Hell, no. There’s more under there. The sonofabitch must have been bleeding us for months. No wonder the mine played out so fast. I’ll bet there’s twenty bags there at least.”

  “Okay. Let’s get the dust into the saddlebags. We can drop them off at the mine before we take Caulder.”

  Slim looked through the window in the direction of the river, out at the dark ramparts of the mountain range beyond. The lawman was well out of sight by now. But they knew which way he was going. There was no way they could lose him. Tomorrow morning, maybe, they’d surprise the ugly one-eyed sonofabitch. Slim smiled when he thought how good it would be to hand Wolf Caulder over to Johnny Reno.

  Reno would have to cut them in then.

  Far above the valley, astride a broad-chested stallion, Juanita watched the two miners ride out of the ranch yard. Her horse—a deep chestnut in color—pawed uneasily as she urged the animal still closer to the lip of the ledge so she could look over.

  Her long dark hair had been wound into a neat bun at the back of her head and the hat she wore was a high-peaked sombrero. Under her dark vest she wore a white silk blouse and a black silk bandanna was knotted about her neck. A dark woolen split skirt and riding boots, beautifully tooled, completed a riding costume that quite effectively transformed the waitress Wolf Caulder had known in Silver City: Juanita’s face was also transformed. It was puffy and her cheeks and eye ridges were still discolored from the vicious beating administered the day before by the two miners she was now watching. Her nose had bled so profusely that her upper lip was still faintly discolored from the blood.

  But it was only when the two men had begun beating Delores that Juanita told them what they wanted to know about Wolf Caulder. Now—the Winchester she had borrowed from Carl in its sleeve and her own Colt in its holster—she was determined to make up for that weakness.

  With a gentle nudge of her knee and a barely perceptible movement of her reins, Juanita Lopez de Santa Rosa guided the chestnut off the ledge and started down the trail that led to the valley floor—and the two miners.

  Five

  Once inside the canyon, Wolf found that Frank Compton’s estimate of the stream’s depth at this time of the year had been somewhat optimistic. In places the swift, clear water reached a depth of at least four feet—and soon his thighs were soaked, his boots heavy with moisture. On both sides sheer black walls of rock reared into the sky, cutting off the sunlight almost completely. It was going to be a cold, wet ride, he realized, as he urged on the black.

  The horse stumbled in the creek bed’s smooth gravel. Wolf patted his neck and soothed him with soft words—and kept on. Compton had been right about the impossibility of anyone traveling along the stream’s shore. There was no shore, actually. The stream had sliced its passage out of sheer rock. A mountain goat would have had difficulty following the channel along the shoreline.

  The water’s rush increased as the slope of the stream bed lifted. Each time he glanced up at the bright sliver of sky overhead, it seemed to have receded still farther from him. After a while he came to an abrupt turn and found himself moving over a small, frantic stretch of white water.

  The black snorted nervously and shook his head as he picked his way along. Wolf patted his neck, urging him on with gentle sounds. About a mile further on, the rapids fell away and the water rushed over clean gravel and seemed not more than a foot deep. So clear was it that he might have been looking through a pane of glass at the stream’s bed.

  The pines clinging to the canyon walls were smaller now and the walls of rock appeared to be leaning closer. When he looked up, the comforting strip of bright blue was no longer there. The canyon’s walls had folded over, cutting off the sky entirely. It was as if he had moved imperceptibly underground. He became aware at the same time of a gentle roaring sound—like a distant wind, growing steadily closer. And then he saw at last what appeared to be a cloud of steam rising out of the stream bed well ahead of him. A damp fog fell over him and he realized he was approaching a waterfall.

  He kept on. About twenty yards before the deep pool gouged out by the plunging water, he saw the trail leading out of the stream bed up over the rocky spine of the divide.

  He had been going most of the day without rest and what sky he could occasionally glimpse was no longer a bright blue. It would soon be dark, he realized. But he was drenched through to the bone by this time and the trail before him seemed a welcome change.

  The horse clattered gratefully up onto the rocky trail. Soon, Wolf found the trail looping steeply up the side of the canyon wall. T
he short switchback courses took him higher and higher until the stream he had left was no longer visible below him and the sound of the falls only a faint sighing whisper hanging in the air about him.

  A chill night wind began to flow off the snow-clad summits. Abruptly the trail dipped. Pleased at having reached the ridge, he urged his horse on. And then to his right he saw what was unquestionably a mine entrance. He was surprised to find it this high, but it was obvious from the amount of tools and the condition of the cradle standing by the entrance that the mine was still being worked.

  He wanted to stop and pull the horse into the mine’s entrance to rest, but it was still light, so he kept on. He would prefer to make camp on level ground on the other side of this ridge—and away from this bone-deep chill. But the light did not last long, and soon it was almost pitch-dark. Wolf could feel the trail as it dropped even more steeply ahead of him. And from the feel of it, he judged it had not been recently used and possibly was nothing more than a foothold cut out by deer.

  The cliffside was rock and earth, with some vegetation clinging to it, the trail no more than five feet wide, sometimes shrinking against the cliff, causing Wolf’s leg to brush occasionally against the rock face. The black was both tired and uncertain by this time and frequently pulled up, needing to be pressed on with a touch of Wolf’s spurs. At one place the path pitched downward so steeply that the animal’s front feet slid along the loose rubble.

  Wolf had descended at least a hundred feet when his black refused to move on. Leaning over the pommel, Wolf peered into the darkness. He thought he could see the dim tracery of the trail extending ahead of him along the cliffside. He applied his spurs gently to the horse’s flanks. But the horse would have none of it. Wolf leaned back in his saddle.

  “All right, horse,” he muttered. “Which way is it?”

  The horse shuddered, shook his head—then gathered its feet close together and began to wind about in small shifts, carefully and slowly, until it had reversed itself completely. Then, on its way downward still, it moved on.

  Glancing back, Wolf saw now the switchback he had missed in the Stygian gloom. Though he was anxious to come to the end of this trail, he vowed to stop urging the horse on and from then on let the reins remain slack. He had no other choice at this point but to trust the animal.

  Their progress became much slower from then on, but the horse moved along steadily and soon Wolf could hear as well as feel the canyon floor coming closer. The rocks underfoot, he noticed, seemed larger. A moment after that discovery, the trail played out through the gravel and chunks of rock.

  He pulled up, dismounted, reached down for a rock and hurled it ahead of him into the darkness. It struck solid ground all around him, the echo of its travels carrying higher and higher up both rock faces. He looked up and after a while he was able to make out the faint glimmer of stars. Then he took off his hat. He wiped his brow with the back of his forearm, slapped his hat back on and remounted. He was about to continue on when he thought he heard voices far above him in the gloom. He sat his horse quietly, listening. But he could hear nothing, only the sound of the wind sighing in the few scraggly pines clinging to the rock walls above him.

  He gave it up and rode on, aware that the walls about him were moving back and opening up to the night sky. He glanced up and was rewarded with the sight of a swarm of stars and a bright orange peel of a moon. Rounding a bend at that moment, he saw in the moon’s dim light what appeared to be some of the roughest footing he had yet attempted to ride across.

  Dismounting for the second time, he led his horse around the great masses of fallen rock and soil and helped him skirt logs lying breast-high across the trail. Presently he came to an area of bald, worn rock, the canyon walls fell back, and he could feel the open sky and country looming just beyond him. He had indeed cut through to White Horn Pass as Compton had told him he would.

  But now exhaustion, aggravated by his still protesting thigh, forced him to seek a campsite among the boulders strewn carelessly about the canyon floor. A thin stream of water coursed down the middle of the canyon and from that he filled his canteen. He did not bother with a campfire. He unsaddled the black and rubbed him down. The horse had already drunk his fill; he let him drift over to graze on a meager patch of dried grasses caught in a shallow pocket of drift soil against the base of the canyon wall.

  He took out one of the sourdough biscuits he had taken from Compton’s place and chewed patiently on it until the weariness and the tension melted from his frame. Then he pulled his slicker around him and rested his head against his blanket roll. He remembered telling himself not to sleep beyond the break of day before he closed his eyes. Sleep came instantly—like a gentle fist.

  Wolf awoke quickly, aware at once of the gray light. Sitting up, he noted the wet tops of the rocks and felt the cold dampness in the air. The outer surface of his slicker was dimpled with faint beads of moisture and he could see his breath in front of him. He got up and stretched in the soft, damp breeze that swept through the pass. Though this was only late September, there was a hint of frost in the high, clear air.

  He poked with his rifle barrel along the under edge of the boulders, alert for snakes, until he found bits of wood dry enough for his fire. When he had gathered a large enough pile, he took a sulphur match out of his small tin box and snapped it alight with his fingernail. The flame took hold. He added larger pieces until the fire was safely burning, then opened out the three collapsible legs of his spider pan and placed it over the embers. He poured in some bacon fat. When it was ready, he placed all three of his remaining sourdough biscuits in the sizzling fat, then carefully basted the hard biscuits.

  The black had been watching all this carefully, his lips working, his ears pointing forward. The horse had eaten the last supply of oats the day before, and that grass he had foraged on the night before was a poor substitute. Suddenly the black raised its head, took a step backward and slanted his ears to Wolf’s right.

  At almost the same time Wolf heard the click of spurs on rock. He turned to his right, drawing his Colt as he did so.

  From behind him, he heard a chuckle. “Drop it, lawman.”

  Wolf turned completely and saw the smaller of the two miners stepping out from behind a large boulder, his six-gun leveled at Wolf. Looking back to his right, he saw the taller one—Slim—coming toward him with a wicked grin on his bearded face. He too held a Colt in his hand.

  “Sam said drop it,” Slim said.

  Wolf dropped his Colt carefully to the ground.

  Slim moved into the camp and went down on one knee to look at the breakfast Wolf had been preparing. Then he grinned up at Wolf. “Soon’s we eat your breakfast, we’re goin’ to take you to Johnny Reno’s camp. He’ll be right glad to see you, I’m thinking.”

  Sam moved closer and with a vicious swipe of his Colt raked its barrel across the side of Wolf’s face and sent him reeling back against the canyon wall. “You got an ugly, lopsided face, mister,” Sam said. “Anybody ever tell you that? I’ll just see if I can’t even it up some.”

  “But right now,” said Slim, lifting the spider off the fire, “we got our breakfast to eat.”

  The side of Wolf’s face was pulsing angrily and the skin under his one good eye had already begun to swell. Wolf kept himself erect by leaning back against the rock wall, the fury he felt a mixture of the gnawing emptiness in his stomach and his aching disappointment at having come so far—only to be bushwhacked by these two pieces of offal.

  Six

  Johnny Reno had been squatting by the fire pouring himself his second cup of coffee when he heard the sound of horses’ hooves on the trail ahead. Looking up, he saw Sam Peckin and Slim Cavanaugh riding up with Wolf Caulder in tow. Caulder looked even worse than usual. The left side of his face was swollen so bad his remaining eye was almost closed, and he was riding his big black with both hands trussed behind him.

  Reno put down his cup of coffee and walked over to meet the horsemen. Slim pul
led up and grinned down at Reno.

  “We been tailing Caulder since he left Silver City,” he told Reno. “He was about ready to spring a surprise on you sometime this morning.”

  “So we sprung the surprise ourselves,” said Sam.

  By that time Gibson and Tomlin were standing beside Wolf’s horse, looking up at him. Rose kept out of it and remained sitting with her back to a boulder, her cup of coffee still in her hand. She was studying Wolf’s face curiously.

  Reno did not like it. He knew the miners from Silver City. They had been nosy—too damn nosy—about Reno’s business, and it was obvious they smelled the money Reno was carrying. And they had bushwhacked Wolf and brought him in for a piece of it.

  Johnny looked up into Wolf’s swollen face. “You said you would have to get me, Wolf. Sure wish you hadn’t tried it.”

  Then Reno stepped back from Wolf’s black. “Help him down, Tom,” he said to the kid.

  But before Tom could reach up, Sam—sitting astride his horse alongside Wolf—lifted his foot out of his stirrup, placed it against Wolf’s side, and pushed. Wolf fell awkwardly with his hands still bound behind him and was flung sideways from the saddle, striking the ground shoulder first, narrowly missing a large boulder.

  Slim roared with laughter at his partner’s action. Then he and Sam dismounted quickly. Reno was startled at the fury that welled up inside him as he looked into the foolish faces of these two no accounts. Their grins were yellow, their beards matted, their faces unclean—and they smelled worse than buffalo hunters.

  “What the Christ did you do that for?” Reno demanded. “His hands was tied behind him already!”

  “What’s the matter?” Slim asked, grinning. “You got a soft spot for the guy what’s coming after you?”

  “You’d be dancing on the end of a rope if this ugly sonofabitch had his way,” Sam said, his voice high and querulous as he caught the anger in Reno’s face.