Clay Nash 15

by Brett Waring

  “Hands up, feller!” Hayward snapped, going forward, gun thrust out in front, half-crouching.

  The moaning man seemed to stiffen and then he turned his head slowly and Hayward figured this must be Idaho, the wounded outlaw the posse had told him about.

  The man stared with feverish eyes, his face gaunt and lined with pain. There didn’t seem to be any fight left in him.

  “I—I’m mighty bad, mister,” moaned Idaho. “Ju—just get me a sawbones ... I won’t give you no trouble. G—gospel!”

  Hayward could see the man spoke the truth now he was closer. There was a big hole in the man’s back and it was ringed with flies and badly infected. It was a wonder that Idaho was even rational. The drifter knelt beside him, still holding his Colt, though he eased down the hammer when he saw that the outlaw didn’t even have a gun.

  “Where’s Sundance?”

  Idaho stared at him with fever-bright eyes. “He—he wouldn’t come here. Kid knows about this place—might tell Nash after—what he d-done at the bridge ... Little double-crossin’ sonuver...”

  Hayward frowned. “Just what was going on at the bridge, friend?”

  “Sawbones!” gasped Idaho, stiffening with a wave of pain. He grabbed at Hayward’s arm but the man knocked his hand aside.

  “I asked you a question!” he said coldly. “You’ve got no chance of seeing any doctor until you answer me.”

  Idaho frowned, trying to hold onto his senses as he stared up into the drifter’s hard face.

  “The—the gold train,” he gasped. “We—we tried to blow it up but that damn’ kid turned on us an’...”

  “The train was carrying gold?” interrupted Hayward, showing sharp interest now.

  “Hell, yeah! Fortune. In—in a special car. It—it got carried away downstream ... Dunno where ...”

  “A whole car-load of gold!” Hayward breathed.

  He looked down at Idaho whose eyes were slowly closing. He gripped the man’s shoulder and shook him violently. Idaho screamed.

  “Don’t you die on me yet, friend!” Nelson Hayward gritted. “You’ve got a lot more to tell me yet. A whole lot more!”

  Nine – Gold and Guns

  Larry Holbrook reined down and pointed to the red scar on the side of the gulch.

  “Up there,” he said. “The floor of the cave’s clay and water seeped through the walls, flooded the floor in most parts. It spilled over and carried some of the red clay with it.”

  Hume and Nash had their rifles out already and Nash motioned to the kid.

  “You lay low, Larry. I can see the rump of a horse near those trees. And it looks like someone climbed that wall pretty recent, wouldn’t you say, Jim?”

  “I’d say so. Kid—get behind the rocks and stay there. Clay and me’ll handle this.”

  Larry didn’t argue. He was nervous, wondering if it was Sundance or Idaho who had returned to the cave. Or both. He couldn’t see enough of the horse to identify it but he sure wished he had a gun ...

  Nash and Hume were dismounted now, handing their mounts’ reins to Larry. They levered shells into the chambers of their rifles and started up the slope, Hume approaching from the right, Nash from the left. They slithered a little in the mud but managed to dig in with their boots and were almost to the level of the cave mouth when there came a single, thundering gunshot.

  Both Wells Fargo men went to ground, in the mud, and Larry stiffened with tension, huddling behind his rock, but peering out enough to see what was going on. The Wells Fargo men had their rifles ready, aiming at the cave mouth and then Larry saw something move up there and his fingers dug into the rock face.

  A man appeared in the mouth of the cave, stooped under the weight of another he carried across his left shoulder. There was a six-gun in his right hand as he paused at the entrance and looked down into the gulch.

  “Drop the gun, Hayward!” snapped Nash rising suddenly to one knee, his rifle covering the drifter.

  Nelson Hayward started and swung towards Nash instinctively bringing up his Colt, but he froze when he saw Hume covering him, too, and he raised his right hand, still holding the gun. His left arm held Idaho in place on his shoulder. Hayward grinned briefly at Nash.

  “Hell, you scared the pants off me, Nash!”

  “You’re still holdin’ that six-gun!” Nash snapped.

  Hayward shrugged and tossed it at his feet. “Listen, it’s all right, friend. There’s no one else in the cave. I found Idaho there alone, dying. He went for a gun and I had to shoot him.” His face sobered. “Well, I thought he was going for a gun … He reached under his blanket and I reacted instinctively. I—I’m afraid I couldn’t find any weapon when I searched. Still, I believe I did him a favor, put him out of his misery. You’d blown quite a hole in his back, Nash.”

  “How do you know I did it?”

  Hayward smiled thinly. “Posse man told me all about the train wreck, although he didn’t mention the gold in the special express car, only that someone had tried to blow up the trestle bridge and there had been a gunfight.”

  Hayward looked sharply from Nash to Hume and back again as he mentioned the gold and he saw the slight reaction on their faces.

  “And who told you this fairy story about gold, mister?” Hume demanded.

  Hayward laughed. “Why, Idaho, of course. Tried to buy his life with it. I tried tell him he was dying and there was nothing anybody could do about it but he thought by telling me about the gold in the special car that was washed away that it might induce me to get him back to medical help. It was when I refused that he reached beneath his blanket.”

  “You weren’t tempted to go lookin’ for the express car, huh?” Nash asked shrewdly.

  Hayward smiled slowly, crookedly. “Well, I must say I was. But, after I—shot Idaho, I thought well, there’s bound to be a bounty on his hide. It’ll be much safer to collect that, so I was going to bring his body back to Signal.”

  Nash looked at him grimly. “Quite a bounty hunter, ain’t you? Get me to do one killin’ for you, an’ shoot a dyin’ man who’s unarmed.”

  Hayward flushed. “I told you I thought he had a gun! Anyway, no matter how he died, does it? The fact is he’s dead and if there’s a reward, I believe I’m entitled.”

  He looked quizzically at Hume who nodded slowly. “I guess so.”

  “Afraid I won’t be able to collect on Waco, Nash. Lost that authority you gave me. I suspect from your disapproving tone you won’t write another for me ...?”

  “Why should I? I don’t want anythin’ from you now.”

  Hayward laughed briefly. “Are you sure? You know I had a very good education, I told you that a few days ago. You see, our family were involved with a shipping line and riverboats. I studied hydrographics; currents and so on, silting of estuaries and related topics. I believe I could do some calculations that would enable me to reasonably estimate the most likely area where that express car came to rest. Of course, I would need to have some idea of the weight involved and the car’s general buoyancy, but it is not impossible to work out.” He looked at Hume’s interested face and laughed again. “Yes, I believe, gentlemen, I still do have something to offer you. For a price, of course.”

  “Of course,” Nash said bitterly, lowering his rifle.

  He glanced towards Hume and saw by the Detective Chief’s face that he was willing to take a chance on Hayward; he would do anything to recover that car.

  What was more, Hayward seemed to sense the same thing and Nash wondered just what the man’s price was going to be.

  Sundance Harmer figured he had run far enough.

  His horse was jaded, ready to fold under him, and he himself was so hungry his backbone seemed to be rubbing against the front of his belly. He was gaunt and beard-shagged and red-eyed.

  But he was alive. And a lot of people were going to be sorry for that!

  Harmer dismounted and leaned against his staggering mount, trying to hold it still. He cursed weakly but realized that the horse
was falling, trying desperately to keep its balance but falling just the same. He stepped back, swaying drunkenly himself, and the animal collapsed with a gusting grunt, rolled over onto its side. It tried to lift its head, gave a weak-sounding whinny and then flopped back. Its breathing was uneven and heavy. The body quivered, the legs kicking and jerking occasionally.

  Sundance watched, his mind dazed, as he leaned against a tree, rubbing gently at his eyes. The animal was finished. It would be a kindness to put a bullet through its brain and end its suffering but he couldn’t risk a gunshot, not even this far from Skillet Canyon.

  He didn’t know where the posse might be. He had seen lots of riders searching the riverbank these past four or five days, looking for bodies or survivors from the crash. He figured just as many would be out searching for him. And Idaho, if the man had made it. He had seen Idaho’s back blown open by Nash’s bullet and then had deliberately veered away from the man. He knew a wounded man would only slow him down and it was every man for himself now.

  Damn that lousy kid! he cursed to himself. If Larry Holbrook hadn’t been so spineless they would have had their hands on a fortune in gold now—and Wells Fargo would be suffering. But even that didn’t matter right now.

  The thing was to survive. Get out of this mess alive. That was the priority.

  And, once he did, he would be back. If he could get his hands on the gold, fine, but even if he couldn’t, Sundance aimed to square things with that kid. No one pulled any kind of a double-cross on him and got away with it, sure not some snotty-nosed button. He should have let the old man kill him way back there in Montana ...

  Sundance thrust off the rock and knelt beside the dying horse. He struggled to get his saddle loose, but couldn’t manage it. There was no use taking the saddlebags for they contained nothing: they had been emptied of soggy food days ago. The damn horse was lying on his rifle in its saddle scabbard and he couldn’t move it so he abandoned that, too, and staggered away into the trees.

  The land was drying out under the wind that blew up here in the hills and he shivered as it probed through his ragged shirt. He didn’t know what part of the country he was in here, except he was a long way from the river.

  Or, he thought he was.

  But when he came out of the stand of timber he discovered that he was on a mountain top not three miles from a bend of the Colorado. The sun struck weakly from the foaming, racing muddy waters and he saw that much of the flats below had been flooded. Where the waters had receded, mud was evident, thousands of square yards of it.

  He blinked, rubbed at his eyes, thinking he was seeing things. Looked like someone had built a cabin out there before the river had flooded and been caught. The house had been knocked over at an angle, jammed down in mud, one end partly lifted clear of the ground. Sundance revised his initial thought. It was more likely that the cabin had been built someplace else and carried downstream by the floodwaters and deposited here. Now that the waters were receding, it had been left high and dry in the mud.

  It was only small but maybe there was still some edible food in it, he thought, as he started down the slope. Might be a body or two, as well, but that didn’t bother him. As long as there was grub of some sort...

  He was only half-way down the mountainside when the sun went behind some scudding clouds and the glare from the river and wet mudflats disappeared so that he could see more clearly.

  It was then that he realized it wasn’t a cabin at all...

  Sundance, recovering from the shock, allowed a wide smile to crease his gaunt face and he began to laugh with a strange, high sound, as he increased his pace, staggering drunkenly down the mountain slope, arms held wide for balance. The express car ...

  Nelson Hayward looked up from the notebook where he had been doing his calculations. They had been riding the ridges for almost two days so they might better see just how the course of the river had changed because of the flood. It was the nearest they could get to a birds-eye view of things but Hayward assured them it was adequate for his purposes.

  He had struck a bargain with Hume. He would calculate the position of the express car as well as he could and, if the gold was recovered near that position, now or in the future, he would be entitled to one fifth of its value as a reward.

  Hume and Nash had not protested that the amount was too much. Hayward had merely smiled.

  “Very well, gentlemen, then I shall be on my way.”

  “We can call in another expert,” Hume pointed out.

  “Certainly you can,” Hayward had agreed. “But by the time he gets here, who knows what might have happened to the gold. I mean, I could work it out for myself and be long gone with it before you get your man up here …”

  “Not till you know some weights and so on,” Nash said, but Hayward’s smile didn’t fade.

  “Oh, I can do some rough estimates. It might take me a little longer to reach an accurate conclusion, but it can be done, Nash, believe me.” He had flicked his gaze from Nash to Hume and then to Larry, before adding, quietly, “And, of course, Sundance Harmer is still somewhere out there. If he came across it...?”

  “Not likely,” Nash snapped.

  “Possibility.”

  “All right,” Hume had agreed finally. “You’ve got a deal.”

  “Jim, I don’t trust this hombre,” Nash had said later that same day, watching Hayward poring over his diagrams and figures. “He’s greedy for money. Told you how he got that authority for the bounty on Waco out of me. You ask me, he just put a killin’ shot into Idaho, too, for the reward. Once he works out where that express car is, he doesn’t have to lead us to it. He can give us a false position and slip away to the right place himself.”

  “Not if we watch him,” Hume replied. “I don’t trust him, either, but he’s our best bet right now, Clay. And Sundance is likely to be still hanging around this neck of the woods.”

  Nash had to agree they had to take a chance on Nelson Hayward, and he and Hume watched the man like a hawk while he worked on his figures.

  Now, Hayward lifted his notebook and shook it, grinning widely across the campsite at Nash and the others.

  “I believe I have pinpointed the location of the freight car!”

  Hume, Nash and young Larry crossed swiftly and gathered around Hayward. He showed them a page where he had drawn a small-scale map and tapped an area he had shaded in with his pencil and encircled.

  “Somewhere in there, I’d say. I have had to estimate the weights of the guards and other goods in the van, but I believe I had a workable buoyancy figure and I have always been very good at estimating the speed of currents so I am fairly confident, gentlemen, that we will find the car lodged somewhere in that area.” He stood up and pointed across country. “I’d think the river bends beyond that line of hills and the bottoms would have been flooded, of course, but should now be exposed again with the drop in water level. That means mud, so I believe the car would settle and come to rest on those river bottoms. Even if it was carried farther downstream, I think it would have to jam up where the river drops into a narrow gorge. The only thing that would allow it to go further would be if it was splintered against the rocks and broke into several pieces. In which case, of course, the gold would sink straight to the riverbed and who can say where it would be tumbled to by the currents ... That, gentlemen, is the best I can do, I’m afraid.”

  “Sounds pretty good,” Hume allowed, staring at the hills. “We can likely get across by sundown if we break camp right away ...”

  Hayward smiled crookedly. “I am just as eager to see if my calculations are correct, Mr. Hume, but tell me one thing: how will you open the freight car if we find it intact?”

  Hume looked at him soberly. “I have a set of keys, of course.”

  Hayward nodded slowly. “How stupid of me not to realize you would bring them with you.”

  He swung away to saddle his mount and Hume and Nash exchanged glances. Larry said nothing before he, too, mounted up.


  The hills were low and it didn’t take a lot of effort for the horses to climb them. Before they reached the top, they could hear the roaring of the river beyond. It was hidden from their sight by the trees and distant hogback rise, but Nash figured they would see it once they topped the ridge and cleared the timber.

  Hayward was riding slightly ahead of the others, unable to control his eagerness to see how correct his calculations had been. He was followed by Larry, riding a little to one side in the saddle, with his wounded arm in the sling, and then came Hume, his horse’s head almost touching the rump of the kid’s mount.

  Nash brought up the rear. He had been keeping an eye out for tracks but there hadn’t been any sign of Sundance. The outlaw might well have gone to ground in the hills, or he could have ridden clear through and headed for someplace else where it was a mite healthier. Nash was inclined to think Harmer might do this, but there was always the possibility he would stick around because of his hatred for Wells Fargo ...

  “By all that’s holy! It’s there!”

  Nash snapped his head up at the cry from Hayward. The man was sitting on top of the ridge, standing in his stirrups, his hat in his hand as he waved and let out a wild yell. Larry and Hume put their horses up alongside the drifter’s and Nash settled for reining down behind the others. Beyond them, he could see the glistening mudflats and the freight car stuck in the mire at a crazy angle, partly clear of the ground and twisted almost onto one side. It seemed to be pretty much intact, although it looked as if the air vents on top had been ripped off.

  “Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, Hayward,” said Hume.

  Hayward looked smug and pleased with himself, as he had every right to be.

  “It’s like a—miracle,” Larry said admiringly.

  “I must say I’m somewhat surprised myself,” Hayward admitted. “I mean, there was an element of luck which we mustn’t totally discount, of course, and …”