Mojave Crossing (1964) (17 page)

Only Dorinda was easy to talk to. She knew how to lead a man on to talk of himself, and somehow she soon had me talking of the hills back home, of Ma, of Tyrel and Orrin, of the Higginses, and even of the Trelawney girls.

Those Trelawney girls lived over the mountain from us, and they had the name of being a wild, harum-scarum lot, but they kept the dust rising on those mountain trails. There were eight Trelawney girls, all of them pretty, and whilst everybody else was feuding they had no feuds with anybody.

Busy as I was now a-talking, I found time to check my back trail. A man who travels wild country gets to studying where he's coming from, because some day he might have to go back, and a trail looks a lot different when you ride over it in the opposite direction.

Every tree, every mountain, has its own particular look, and each one has several appearances, so you look back over your shoulder if you want to know country. It also helps you to live a whole lot longer. Like now.

Somebody was rising a dust back there. Not a big dust ... but a dust. It seemed to me there were four or five horses, and they were walking just to keep the dust down so as not to attract attention.

Dorinda didn't look back none at all.

She was thinking, though, as I might have expected.

"It will serve him right," she said. "He tried to have you killed."

"Who?"

"Ben Mandrin. He knows you are the only one who could ride to where his gold came from. There must be a lot more of it there, or he wouldn't have wanted you dead."

"Could be."

"He had men waiting out in the cactus patch near the brea trail yesterday. They were out there all day, only you dodged them somehow."

"You got to give him credit for tryin'."

"I'd like to see his face when he finds the gold gone. It will be just what he deserves."

Now I took a careful look at her. It seemed to me she was doing a lot of thinking, and I hoped my Bible was still in my saddlebags. When I turned in tonight I wanted it under my pillow.

"There must be a lot of it," she said. "He told me about a ship he sank off the coast of Panama. It was loaded with gold from Peru. He told me how they had brought it ashore and up a canyon to the hiding place. It took them a week to get it all out of the ship and up to where they took it ... only working at night, of course."

"Now that there," I said, "would be a lot of gold."

"When we get it," she said, "we can go to New York, Paris, London ... everywhere. And you can buy the biggest, finest ranch you can find, and stock it with the finest horses and cattle."

"I sure could ... if I had that much gold."

"You know where it is ... and you have the mules to carry it away."

"That old man is crippled up. No telling what will happen in the future, and he may need that gold. If he don't, Roderigo might."

She turned in her saddle and stared at me like she figured me for crazy, and I expect she was right.

"You mean you're not going after it?"

"No, ma'am, I'm not. Maybe a few years from now when that old man is dead and gone, I'll come back and look around, and if he hasn't taken the last of it, I shall."

"Why, he tried to kill you! And after all you did for him!"

"That's his way. There's a mighty hard old man, Dorinda, a mighty hard old man. Right from the start I sort of half expected it. I don't think folks have ever been very friendly to him ... not unless they figured to get something for it."

Her eyes got narrowed down and mean. "Do you intend that for me?"

"Not necessarily. It's just the way it's been for him. But he owes me nothing. Look at the mules he gave me."

"Mules! When you could have all that gold?"

She took off her hat then, and the next thing I knew two Winchesters were looking over a rock at me, and I heard horses coming up from behind.

Dorinda's hand dropped over mine as I reach for my six-shooter.

"There you are, boys. Make him talk."

She drew away from me, taking my gun with her. I took a careful look around, but they had me. They had me dead to rights, and there just wasn't anything I could do about it.

There were six of them, and my Winchester was in the boot, and it might as well have been back in Prescott for all the good it would do me.

"Take him, boys. He's all yours."

Dorinda's black eyes showed all the witch in her now. I think she was ready to shoot me herself, only they still didn't know where all that gold was.

One thing I did know. There was no way out of this one.

Chapter
Ten.

The way I'd taken in leaving the ranch was north into the hills. It had been in my mind, for I'd still no stock of goods to sell at the Arizona mines, to cross over the mountains to San Francisco Ranch where Newhall was building a town. Folks said he already had the finest hotel south of San Francisco there, and the railroad and stage line passed through the town.

Goods were reported to be as cheap there as in Los Angeles ... even cheaper, some said, because Fields, who ran the store, was trying to keep folks from riding all the way into Los Angeles to trade.

We'd ridden westward a ways and were just about to cut back into the hills and head north when these men moved down on me. No question but what that black-eyed girl had planned it that way. If I'd gone to where the old man had hidden his gold, these men would have followed and taken it from me. Now that I hadn't gone that way, they were going to force me to tell them where it was.

If I reached for my rifle I'd be dead before my hand fairly grasped the action, let alone got it clear of the scabbard. Yes, they had me dead to rights.

The place they'd picked to stop me was near a big rock at one end of a small valley ... and I had a strong hunch this was the very potrero that lay below the ridge where all that gold was hidden.

It was a pretty little valley, with some fine old oaks around, and we'd stopped almost in the shade of one of them. It was a still, warm afternoon, and I could hear the birds talking it up back in the trees and brush just off the trail.

They moved in around me in a narrowing circle.

I let my hands rest on the pommel and tried to see my way out, but my mind was a blank.

"He took the old man out that night, boys,"

Dorinda said, "so he's got to know where the gold is."

"He wouldn't take me to it. Do you think he's crazy?"

Nobody said anything, and then after a bit one of them spoke up. "How about that, ma'am?"

"How far can an old man crawl? It took them time to ride out and back, so if Old Ben left him up there, he can't have gone far. There's been no rain, so we should get a few indications of direction."

The black-eyed gunman tilted his Winchester.

"You going to tell us, mister? You going to take us there?"

Well, why not? It wasn't my gold, and once they had it they'd have no further use for me.

They might just let me go ... although they might figure it best to shoot me so's I couldn't come back at them.

"Far's I know, he got it all. Else do you think I'd not be up there looking?"

"If that was all there was," Dorinda said, "he'd not have cared in the least about you seeing the place. No, it took them several nights of work to take that treasure up there from the beach, so he couldn't possibly bring all of it away in one night."

"We'd have to pack grub," I said. "It's far from here, and I'm carrying nothing. I was figuring to stock up at Newhall's place."

"He's lying," Dorinda said. "I tracked them part of the way."

Now I taken another look at her. This witch woman certainly knew a sight of things no city girl should know. She had tracked us, she said, and I had a hunch she wasn't lying about that.

If she had tracked us, she must be pretty good.

"It's not far from here," she said. "I tracked them for several miles in this direction, and they couldn't have ridden much further than this."

They were all around me. There was no chance to make a move without getting killed, or at least badly hurt. My mules were over there feeding on the grass along with my spare horses.

"My guess is that we aren't more than a mile or two from it right now," Dorinda said, "and if I'd not been along he'd have gone right to it."

She turned toward a tall, tough-looking blond man. "Clymer, you and the Yaqui make him talk."

The Yaqui was flat-featured, a half-breed by the look of him, and a man who would know how to make a man die slowly. The Yaquis were said to be as good at that as the Apaches.

If I tried a run for it, there was no shelter close by. The trees were too scattered, and that big rock was almost sheer.

Time and again I'd been in tight spots, and somehow I'd come out of them, and it seemed as if this here one ought to be so easy. It was such a pleasant day, the sun made leaf shadows on the ground around, and a few high, lazy clouds drifted in the sky. There was no violence around ... except in that ring of silent guns, aimed at me.

It shouldn't happen like this, I told myself. This is all wrong. There should be shouts and guns exploding, and fighting; there should be blood and the smell of gunpowder.

There were none of those things, and here I was, flat against a wall, with no way out.

"Get down off that horse," Clymer said.

He was grinning at me, and I saw he was missing two teeth. "We're going to see what kind of stuff you got in you."

He gestured toward the Yaqui. "I seen him skin a man alive one time ... well, almost.

That feller got smart and done what we told him. Not soon enough, though, because when we let him be it was already too late."

There was a moment there when I thought about jabbing a spur into the stallion and taking my chances, but the trouble was, there wasn't any chance. Those guns just couldn't miss. Not all of them.

So I swung down, and they walked me toward a big old oak. Believe me, I was sweating.

I was scared, but I was determined not to show it, and I was watching every second for the break I hoped would come. Only it didn't come.

They walked me up to that tree, and suddenly I made up my mind. If they were going to kill me they might as well get it done. One thing I knew. Nobody was going to tie me up to a tree. Not unless I was dead or unconscious.

So I made ready. If I turned fast I might lay a hand on one of those rifles, and if I had one of those I'd take somebody with me when I passed in my checks.

"Hey," somebody said. "Who's that?"

A rider was coming along the road, coming slow and easy. He was a tall man who rode well up in the saddle, and he came riding straight on.

"Hell," one of the men said, "it's Nolan Sackett!"

"Get on with it," Dorinda said irritably.

"This is no affair of his."

He rode right on up to us, and despite what Dorinda had said, nobody did anything but watch him come, including me.

"Howdy, boys!" His eyes had plenty of time to take in the situation. "If you're after that gold I figure I should be in for a share."

"You're in for nothing!" Dorinda said angrily. "Get on with it, Clymer!"

Nolan, he looked over at me and grinned, and then he taken a pistol from under his coat and tossed it to me.

It was as simple as that.

He just flicked that pistol over and I reached up and snared it, and then we stood there with two guns on them, his and mine.

It caught them flat-footed and off guard.

They just didn't expect anything like that, for Nolan was one of them. The trouble was, he was also a Sackett, and blood runs thicker than branch water.

Dorinda didn't cut up and scream like some women might, although she was mad enough to fight a cougar. She just looked at him and then at me.

"You boys mount up and ride," Nolan told them. "This here's a cousin of mine, or some sort of kin, and whilst I might have let you shoot him, I don't cotton to seeing that Yaqui skin no Sackett out of his hide. You boys just ride out of here and count it time well spent."

"What if we don't?" Clymer asked belligerently.

"Well," I said, "you outnumber us, but by the time we get through shootin' a whole lot of you are going to be dead, and us, too, so what will you be fighting for?"

"The hell with it," one man said, and turned his horse; and after that they just drifted away, leaving us there with Dorinda Robiseau.

"Nolan," I said, "I've got it in mind to buy goods over at Newhall's place and pack them across the Mojave to the Arizona mines.

That's a lot of mules for one man."

"You got you a partner," he said.

He looked over at Dorinda. "You want to come with us, Abigail?"

"I'll see you in hell first," she said, and turning her horse, she rode off.

That was no way for a lady to talk.

A few miles down the trail I said to Nolan, "You called her Abigail."