He stared at the outlaw and realized he was talking himself into a grave. If he thought he’d lose any contest, he was half beaten.
Jensen’s hand twitched. England Dan lifted his pistol and fired. Poke Jensen cleared leather and fired. England Dan staggered and fell, but not from lead ripping through his heart. His involuntary retreat had caused him to catch his heel and lose his balance. Whether that saved his life was a fact to be debated around many campfires.
His bullet hit Jensen squarely in the chest. The gunman never got the chance to fire a second round. He sank to the ground, his life draining from him fast. A few gasping sounds came from his lips before he died. England Dan wasn’t sure if Jensen tried to speak or whether those inarticulate noises were what remained of his soul rushing from his body.
“You got him, Dan. You cut down one of the meanest gunmen in all Arizona.” Cooley stood over him, his six-gun aimed at the ground. As he turned, he covered his partner.
England Dan reached up and pushed the gun away. Grunting, he got to his feet and rushed to Jensen’s side. He yanked the gun from the killer’s hand, then pulled off the gun belt half filled with cartridges. He was once more in the fight with ample ammunition.
“You killed him. You’re going to be famous, Dan. The man who killed Poke Jensen in a face-to-face gunfight.”
“It wasn’t like that.” England Dan ejected the single spent round and replaced it with a fresh round. “Keep a lookout for the other one.” He quickly searched the body. Jensen had thirty dollars in folded, sweat-stained greenbacks and a silver cartwheel. But he wasn’t carrying the map.
“I saw it. Well, I heard it. And when I got here, you were alive and he was dead, his gun in his hand. He threw down on you and you beat him.”
England Dan ignored his partner’s ravings. The odds had improved for surviving with Poke Jensen dead. But his brother was as much a killer as Poke had been.
“Take a few cartridges so you can back me up. We’re going after his brother.”
“He has the map?” It finally penetrated Cooley’s brain why his partner had searched Poke Jensen and what he hadn’t found.
“Let’s hope they didn’t hide it somewhere. Searching around here would take days or even weeks. There’re too many ways to conceal a map.” He failed to add what was an even worse possibility. The outlaws might have memorized the map, then destroyed it.
Poke Jensen’s six-shooter in hand, England Dan backtracked along the outlaw’s route to this point. Cooley crowded too close, but England Dan wasn’t able to shoo him away. At least his partner didn’t babble endlessly as they stalked Lars Jensen.
“Blood,” England Dan said, poking at a muddy clod on the ground. Just beyond he saw a smear across a clump of grass. “We must have hit him.”
“Horse,” Cooley said. “There’s where they left their horses. Both of them are gone.” He wandered around, kicking at rocks and trying to look as if he read the signs.
England Dan took it all in with a single glance. The gunfight had been more one-sided than he thought, but then he’d had to control his own fear as bullets whined around his head.
“They spread the map out on the ground here,” he said. “They held the corners down with those rocks.” He pointed to a perfect square. Each of the rocks had been moved into the position. Trying as hard as he could to hear hoofbeats, he gave up when only the wind filled his ears with soft whispers.
“What do we do now, Dan?” Cooley sounded apprehensive.
“I just mowed down half of the opposition. Lars Jensen has our map. I say we go take it from him.”
“Even if it means we have to shoot him?” Cooley looked uneasy.
England Dan didn’t answer because he would have said, “Especially if we have to shoot him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
DOWN! WE’RE BEING ambushed!” Poke Jensen shoved his brother hard. Lars staggered and fell. He wasn’t as steady on his feet as he should have been. He wondered why his brother had gone loco.
Then bullets tore past his head and whined off into the woods behind him. At the same time, Poke had his six-shooter out and fired steadily. Lars dragged out his iron and got to a sitting position. It took only a fraction of a second for him to find a target. A man wearing a bowler sprayed lead in his direction; Lars Jensen returned the deadly hail in kind. He growled deep in his throat when he missed. Nobody tried to bushwhack him and got away with it.
“Who are they?” Poke Jensen reloaded, then loosed a new curtain of death across the open space beyond the trees. “They can’t be road agents. Nobody’d try to rob us.”
“Not everybody knows you. Your reputation, sure, but not you by sight.” Lars Jensen pinned down the one in the bowler and kept him cowering behind a boulder. “That must be the pair of miners that had the map.” His six-gun came up empty, but he got a good view of the second man flinging lead in their direction. “That one. The one taking refuge behind the tree. That’s Cooley. The other one with the bowler must be his partner, Rutledge.”
“They aren’t getting the map back.”
“I agree. Over my dead body,” Lars Jensen said. Then he laughed. “Over their dead bodies!”
“We’re exposed. I’ll circle and come at them from the side. You keep them busy.”
Lars Jensen said nothing. He thought his brother was suicidal doing that, but then much of what Poke did struck him that way. Keeping the man with the bowler pinned down proved harder than he expected. Cooley opened fire as Lars reloaded, giving Rutledge the chance to retreat into the woods. Shouting to his brother that he had company out on the left flank was out of the question. That would warn Poke. It would also warn Rutledge. Poke knew how to take care of himself.
With that thought, Lars bent over and scooped up the map. He stuffed it into his pocket, then tried to kill the two miners out there. As he triggered the third round in his gun, he winced. A bullet left a deep groove in his left thigh. Lars Jensen half spun and grabbed the wound. Blood squirted between his fingers. He hadn’t recovered fully from getting back-shot the last time he’d confronted Cooley. Unless he stanched this wound, he was going to lose enough blood to pass out.
Hobbling off, he got to the horses. His mind raced.
“He can fend for himself.” Lars Jensen painfully mounted, bent and snared the reins to his brother’s horse, then rode away. Two horses meant he would make better time getting to Mule Springs. If Poke killed the miners and got away, he’d know where to rendezvous. If he didn’t, good riddance. His elder brother wouldn’t be around to treat him like dirt. And when he found the stolen payroll, he wouldn’t be given crumbs. It’d all be his and not a dime of it’d go to Beeman’s ma or anyone else.
He pressed down hard on the gunshot wound on his leg. That money would serve him well down in Mexico while he recuperated. A thousand dollars bought a keg of tequila and a passel of lovely señoritas to wait on him hand and foot.
Galloping along jolted him and sent knife slashes of pain into his leg. Worse, he felt sick to his stomach. He hung onto consciousness with grim determination.
In less than ten minutes, his horse began to falter. He slowed, then stopped to transfer to his brother’s horse. From here he walked both horses a half mile, then picked up the pace again. More than once in his criminal career, he had outpaced a posse using this very pattern. Gallop, swap horses, then build up speed again. The combination of riding one horse first and then the other put lots of miles under their hooves. Once Jensen had traveled over fifty miles in a single day, but the Superstition Mountains wore down both animals because of steep slopes and rocky terrain. Worse, he found himself wavering.
As sundown claimed the land again, he found a cave to put both horses in, built a fire just inside the mouth and fell into a heavy sleep that came close to being a coma. The sun was well up by the time he awoke. He tended his leg wound the best he could, washing it off us
ing water from a nearby stream. Trail rations went down good, but jerky did nothing to restore his strength. When his horses had eaten their fill of grass and drunk enough water to get them on the trail, he repeated the prior day’s travel, reaching Mule Springs after sundown.
Jensen longed to sleep in a bed. He had some money for the solitary hotel in the small town, but more than this, he wanted a good meal.
He put on a knee-length canvas duster to hide his gunshot leg and tried not to hobble as he went into the café next to the hotel.
The meal was decent, and he felt strength flowing back into his body after he finished. He leaned back and studied the waiter. The man was graying and had a world-weary expression of someone trapped in a dead end.
“You live here in Mule Springs very long?” Jensen asked.
“Most all my life. My ma and pa moved here when I was six.”
Jensen estimated that was more than thirty years back. He knew better than to make himself stand out too much, but he needed information.
“I was told to meet a friend in the hills west of here. You recognize a pattern of mountain peaks like this?” He drew a fair copy of the map on the tablecloth, using what remained of the gravy on his potatoes.
“You ain’t a miner,” the waiter said. “We’ve seen an army of them through here over the years. The last bunch came two, three years ago. Why do you want to find this place?” He tapped the sketch.
Jensen almost lost his temper. He asked questions, he didn’t answer them. Pistol-whipping the old man would get him nowhere. For all he knew, Mule Springs had a marshal. The town wasn’t all that far from Fort Bayard. Tangling with the army when he was hunting for their stolen payroll was a fool thing to do.
“A friend’s up there. He gave me a map that’s not too good.”
“That might be Prickly Pear Pass. If this hill’s moved farther off, I’d say it definitely is.”
“I’m not much of a mapmaker. Let’s say this is Prickly Pear Pass. How do I find it?”
The old man laughed. “It’s hard not to find it. Get up ’fore sunrise and wait. The sun lights up the two peaks on either side of the pass like they was made of gold. Somebody told me they have quartz faces on them. I don’t know about that. But after the sun’s up more than a half hour, they look like plain old brown rock.”
“Much obliged.” Jensen got to his feet, trying not to wince. His left leg had stiffened on him. “Time to get these bones into bed.”
“I’ll get you a room. The hotel’s mine, too. If you want, I’ll see that you get a second-story room that looks out toward the mountains. All you’ll have to do is pull back the curtains to see where to ride.”
Jensen grunted as he followed the waiter to the hotel desk to register. If he had read Beeman’s map a’right, he’d find the payroll before sundown the next day.
All night long he tossed and turned in the uncomfortable bed. Waking before dawn proved no problem. He realized he was het up over finding the money. It took all his willpower not to let out a whoop of joy when he propped himself on the windowsill and saw how the rising sun set two of the peaks on fire. He spread the map out, located the line of inverted Vs showing the peaks and carefully counted. The two on the map matching what he saw were the last two Rivera had sketched in. That made remembering which they were easier.
Breakfast, the trail, the two peaks and Prickly Pear Pass. His leg ached dully, but the promise of finding the payroll let him ignore it as he rode on. The trail through the pass proved steep and treacherous, but he pressed on. He used both horses to the best advantage, always switching to the other when the one he rode began to flag. Eventually, his efforts paid off. On the far side of the pass, he found a spider web of roads. There had been considerable mining activity in the region once. Now silent testimony of the weed-overgrown, double-rutted road and the empty hills showed that the miners had moved on to better claims. Straight west through the Superstition Mountains, Bisbee had become the new boomtown. That suited him just fine, not having nosy miners or prospectors watching his every move.
Using the map got him turned around, but he pressed on. The lure of the cavalry payroll set his heart to pounding a little faster every time he thought of it. The stolen money promised him more than he’d ever had on his own, and all he had done to earn it was get shot a couple times. Poke was like a bad penny and always turned up. Since he hadn’t, he was probably dead. Nothing else explained why he hadn’t caught up since he wasn’t likely to surrender to anyone. Losing his brother along the way was unfortunate, but not overly so. Poke had gotten what he had deserved for most of his life. It struck Lars as ironic that Poke had been cut down by a miner wearing a bowler and a battered British Army uniform coat.
Someone who was as big a maverick as Poke had done him in. All this time Lars had thought the law or a bounty hunter would cause his brother’s demise.
A final study of the map gave him a tiny trail meandering up the side of a tall peak. He forced himself to take the slope slowly for the sake of the horses. His occasional dizziness moderated his excitement even as he swayed to and fro. The map’s dotted line showed where Barton Beeman had gone. Lars Jensen blinked at realizing there was only one possible trail, then rode on because that meant he had found the mine where the outlaw had hidden the loot.
He popped over the rim of a low mesa. At the far side rose another mesa. Jensen let out a whoop. The distant rock face had a mine shaft blasted into it. All around the stretch of mesa leading to the mine shaft, deep pits made riding dangerous.
“Where’d you hide the goods, Beeman? Where?” Lars stared at the mine. It would have made sense to stash the payroll there, out of the weather. But Beeman had been severely wounded. That would have made tossing the gold into one of the pits a better choice. “Dump it in the nearest hole, then beat a retreat.”
He looked around and saw how several narrow trails onto the mesa presented ways for Beeman to leave after hiding the payroll. Jensen considered which of the westward trails would best have connected Beeman with Poke. If he’d known of those other pathways, he’d have used them and saved himself a couple days’ travel.
“So he went west from here after drawing the map, then passed the map to Rivera as he was dying, and the cowboy found him on the far side of the Superstitions.” Jensen nodded. It all fit. Now for the real question. “Where’d he hide the money?”
He dismounted and went to the first of the pits. Carefully peering over the side, he saw sunlight reflecting off ripples in the pooled dirty water. It wasn’t quite a cistern, but Beeman hadn’t been dumb enough to throw the money into a well. Even if it had filled up from the rains after Beeman had prowled around here, the outlaw was smart enough to know how hard it’d be to recover the loot in such a deep pit.
Working across the mesa, saving the mine for the final search, he peered into each of the pits. Some were little more than shallow bowls blasted in the rock. Jensen painfully jumped down into a couple of those to examine the bottoms. The loose rock littering these pits betrayed him. No hidden payroll. After clambering out, he looked around. Two more pits.
Jensen took another look at the map and positioned the paper to mirror the layout of the mesa. The mine had been bored into the solid rock of a towering cliff. Above the mine stretched a second mesa.
“Stairsteps,” he muttered. He had no desire to scale that cliff and hunt on a second mesa. Beeman had been wounded. That argued against him going to such lengths. Jensen checked the next-to-last pit.
Nothing.
Going into the mine looked more and more like the only way to find the payroll. He limped to the final pit, expecting to give it a cursory search before going into the mine. Jensen stopped, toes at the pit rim. His eyes raced over the shallow bowl. He half turned to enter the mine and then stopped. Wheeling back, he stared hard into the pit again.
He dropped to his knees and examined a tiny pile of rocks
. There wasn’t any way the stacked rocks had set themselves one on top of the other through natural means. Wind or rain? Never.
“Ah, Beeman, you marked it so it was easier to find.” Jensen tossed the rocks away. At the bottom of a depression lay a canvas bag marked with US ARMY and an insignia telling the world it belonged to the Fort Bayard paymaster.
He let out a whoop of glee and bent over to drag the payroll up so he could see how rich he was. Stones rattled back into the pit. Wind whistled past the cliff face and sucked the musty breath out of the mine shaft behind him. With a strong tug that sent new agony into his body, both in chest and leg, he dumped the bag onto the ground.
Eager hands reached to open the bag.
“You’re a dead man if you go for your gun.”
Lars Jensen looked into the pit. He had been so eager to get rich, he hadn’t seen the long shadow of a man coming up behind him. The shadow figure held a six-shooter in a steady hand. Lars had been caught dead to rights.
CHAPTER THIRTY
NOT THAT WAY,” England Dan Rutledge said. “We’re going this way.” He pointed to a steep mountain trail.
“But, Dan, the sign says the road to Mule Springs is that way.” Cooley pointed to another road leading from the crossroads. “We got lost before. This time, we should follow the signs.”
“Unless I miss my guess, Jensen went that way. We can’t travel fast enough to catch up with him, even if he is wounded.”
“You found plenty of his blood along the trail. He must be riding with one foot in the grave.”
“He’s got two strong horses.” England Dan patted the black stallion’s neck. “We’ve got decent horses, but they’re all tuckered out. We have to rest, or they’ll die under us. Jensen jumps over to his spare and keeps riding.”
Lost Banshee Mine Page 24
