Dead Man’s Cañon

by Paine, Lauran; Burns, Traber;

  He found the place. It was within five yards of where that earlier killer had knelt and fired to kill the mysterious stranger Claude had buried. The ejected brass cartridge caught his eye while he was still three hundred feet distant. Sunlight glittered off that tubular object with all the evil intensity of death itself. He got down, carefully circled the area before picking up the spent casing, and had his answer. The bushwhacker hadn’t run for Mexico at all; he’d headed straight back toward Springville. Claude swore long and loud, got fiercely back astride, and started toward Springville, too, picking up the other man’s tracks now and then as he rode.

  It was well into the afternoon before he arrived back in town. He went immediately to the livery barn to look over all the horses. A person didn’t ride that long and hard under a midsummer desert sun and not sweat the hell out of his horse. Even if he curried the animal, he couldn’t hide the shrunken gut dehydration caused.

  But there wasn’t a tucked-up horse either in the stalls or out back in the corrals. When the liveryman sauntered out mopping his face with a red bandanna to inquire what Rainey might be looking for, Claude only growled at him and went out into the roadway to begin a slow and meticulous stroll up one side of the road and down the other, looking at the tethered horses.

  He found nothing there, either, so he strolled into the Oasis for a beer, and found no strangers there at all. It was more than just frustrating; it could also be dangerous. If all that bushwhacker’d had in mind was scaring Claude off, then he probably felt he’d made his point. But if there was something personal to this, then, since a man only had one life, Claude had to locate his particular enemy before he was himself located.

  Jack Mather mentioned that Claude looked as though he’d been out in the heat of the day. Rainey acknowledged that he had, and asked if there were any strangers in town. Jack rolled his dark eyes. “Ain’t two enough?” he asked. “By the way, have you heard from that second deputy marshal? I’d give odds they nail him down there, too, if you was of a mind, Claude.”

  “What kind of betting is that,” growled Rainey. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Mather went after a glass of beer for himself and returned with another one for Claude. He said, “It’s not that I’m hoping anything happens to the second one, Claude. It’s just that sometimes a feller has to break the monotony, and this way maybe he can pick up a dollar or two at the same time.”

  “Oh, sure,” grumbled Claude, draining the last of his first glass and reaching for the second one. “Anyone come in here in the last hour or two who looked like he’d been riding hard or lying in some dust?”

  Mather’s dark eyes grew very still. Then he shook his head. “What’s on your mind, Claude, what’re you up to? Does it have to do with the ten thousand dollars?”

  “Does asking tomfool questions break the monotony, too?” countered the lawman, belching aside and afterward dragging the back of a scarred, hairy hand across wet lips. “Jack, I’ve had a bad feeling about that damned money ever since I put it in Barney’s safe.”

  “Nothing’s happened, except a couple of federal deputies come along, and they didn’t stay around.”

  “I know. But that feeling I’ve had is getting worse.”

  “How about some bicarbonate of soda. You been eating in those greaser cafés again, Claude?”

  Rainey finished the second beer, slapped down a coin, glared, and walked out of the saloon. Mather scooped up the coin, shrugged, and reached for his bar rag. It was evening finally, trade would shortly pick up, and best of all the heat would start to lessen.

  Sheriff Rainey went down to his office and wrote a letter to the authorities up at Raton, New Mexico, asking a number of questions concerning a man named Arch Clayton. He also gave a general description—which was all he could give—of the mummified dead man riding the Clayton horse, described the animal also, and asked for information about him, too. Finally, he directed a letter to the US marshal over at Phoenix asking two questions: (1) Was there a field office at Raton? (2) If there was such an office, did a deputy named Arch Clayton work out of it?

  He then took these letters up to the stage office and afterward went to the pool hall, which lay south of Hank Smith’s shoeing shop, and ate at the free lunch counter, played two rounds of snooker with a couple of Hightower cowboys he met up there, and then headed for his room at the hotel—euphemistically called a hotel while in reality it was a rooming house.

  Lying in bed with the roadside window open, the late night sounds drifting up, he wrestled with the interlude of the strange gunshot. Why in tarnation had that damned idiot shot at him down there by the dead horse, and how did he come—whoever he was—to dust it for town instead of back down into Mexico where he had undoubtedly come from? Finally, and most annoying of all, how had that assassin managed to fade out in Springville like he had?

  Chapter Four

  It’s never the answers that bother a man very much, it’s the questions. Claude went about for the next two days with his eyes narrowed and wary. At the end of two days, however, he began to feel that his bushwhacker out there hadn’t come into Springville to shoot him after all, or else he’d have tried it long before now.

  That, of course, was the answer, and it relieved him in a sense. But the questions were piling up, and they continued to bother him right up until, after supper over at the jailhouse, Archer Clayton walked in out of the bland, hot night, as though he’d only been away an hour or two. He nodded and tossed his hat upon a bench, sank into a chair, and said it was almighty damned hot, riding the desert this time of year. He didn’t even say hello or how are you or, has anything happened in Springville since I left.

  Claude sat stonily studying the younger, heavier man. Eventually, playing his cards close, he said, “Nothing ever happens in the Springville country,” with enough sarcasm behind the words to make Clayton lift tired eyes. “Only, someone took a shot at me the other day out where that other fellow got killed.”

  Clayton’s expression changed. “Oh, that,” he said carelessly. “That was me did that, Sheriff.”

  Claude’s tough gaze narrowed a little more. “You? You’re the one took that shot at me?”

  Clayton nodded.

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “Because if I hadn’t, they’d have killed you. I aimed close enough at your horse to make him jump. I didn’t really aim at you at all.”

  “They’d have killed me?”

  “You saw where a brand had been cut off that carcass out there?” asked Clayton, looking directly at Claude. “Well, they took care of that right after someone down in the Mex town of Rosario recognized me, tried a bushwhack that didn’t come off, then came up here to hack off that brand. You see, Sheriff, the brand on that horse was my mark.”

  Claude pulled back into himself until he had a double chin. He was suspicious, wary, and perplexed. Also, he was beginning to think Archer Clayton was too glib with his answers. “Go on,” he said noncommittally. “Keep talking.”

  “I reckon I’d better go back and start at the beginning.”

  “That might help,” said Claude, mildly sarcastic.

  “The fellow you found dead out there with his horse … and buried out in your Boot Hill cemetery … was my partner. He owned some land that adjoined my ranch up near Raton, over in New Mexico.”

  “Yes,” murmured old Claude, still sternly drawing away.

  “He and I found an old cache of Spanish gold. We sold some of it to a trader from over around Socorro, and he resold the old gold coins to a big hacendado down Mexico way.”

  “Name of Bríon?” asked Claude softly.

  Clayton, in the midst of speaking, looked sharply at Sheriff Rainey with his mouth still open. Gradually he closed it. “You fool a man, Sheriff,” he murmured. “You surely do. So you figured it out, did you?”

  “Nope. Bríon’s the Mexican I told
you about who brought Jonas Gantt’s stuff back here and gave it to me.”

  Clayton digested that for a while. Eventually he said, “I reckon it was just an oversight, Sheriff, you referring to that Mexican simply as such, instead of naming him.” Clayton was gazing straight at Rainey when he said this, as though Claude’s answer would have weight with his judgment of Rainey, one way or another.

  “There are thousands of Mexicans in this border country, Mister Clayton. Even fancy ones like this Bríon are still only Mexes. If you’d hung around a day or two when you came by before, it would’ve come out. I sure never attached much importance to his name. Just a taller than average, nice-looking Mex hacendado … rancher.”

  “All right,” Clayton murmured, revealing nothing of his inner judgment the way he said it. Then he turned back to what they’d been discussing. “Bríon bought those old Spanish coins. Then he sent word, if my partner or I’d bring down some more to his place in Mexico, he’d buy them direct and no one’d have to pay the Socorro trader.”

  “So your partner went.”

  “That’s right. And Bríon bought the coins.” Clayton fished out his makings and began manufacturing a cigarette. “This much I know for fact. From here on I’m guessing. But Bríon showed me the coins he’d bought, day before yesterday at his ranch.”

  “Wait a minute,” broke in Claude skeptically. “How could you tell one old Spanish coin from another, Mister Clayton?”

  “I’m coming to that, Sheriff. Don’t get impatient. Anyway, Bríon showed me the coins. They were the same ones my partner took down to sell him. Bríon said he’d paid my partner ten thousand US dollars in paper bills, and my partner left with the money in a small wooden box.”

  “Here goes my schoolhouse,” murmured Claude, and Clayton looked inquiringly at him as he struck the match for his smoke. “Nothing,” said Claude, in a louder voice. “Nothing at all, Mister Clayton. Let’s have the rest of it.”

  “You know the rest of it, Sheriff, except for one small thing. My partner was waylaid by some Mexican ambushers who tried to kill him for the ten thousand dollars. They almost succeeded, but he shot two of them and the other three fled. One of the men he shot got the little box and was trying to run with it when my partner killed him.”

  “Is that how you figure the blood got on the money?”

  Clayton nodded, trickling smoke from his nostrils and narrowly eyeing Rainey. “It’s the only way it could’ve happened, since my partner wasn’t wounded in the fight.”

  “Well, now, Mister Clayton, since you never talked to your partner after he left Raton, heading for Mexico, how do you know any of this happened?”

  Clayton smoked a moment, still narrowly eyeing Sheriff Rainey, then he stood up. “If you’ve got a minute to spare, I’d be glad to show you my proof.”

  Claude also stood up. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said, and followed Clayton out of the office, down the roadway toward the southern end of town where some abandoned adobe jacales stood, and stopped only when Clayton killed his smoke underfoot, stepped through a doorless opening into the rank, dark interior of one of the little hovels, and beckoned Rainey inside, too.

  Claude stepped carefully to the doorway and looked in. He was being prudent about all this; he had no reason to act otherwise, which Clayton seemed to appreciate, so he crossed the room, struck a match, and held it above a bundle of rags with a man inside them, lying apparently lifeless upon the earthen floor. Claude’s breath caught in his throat. He craned ahead as Clayton’s match flared then went out.

  “Who is that?” he demanded softly.

  “A Mexican brigand,” replied Clayton, digging for another match. “Come on in, Sheriff. He isn’t here for long.”

  Finally, Claude stepped through the doorway, looked quickly left and right, then stepped up beside the younger man and looked down. The Mexican had been shot. He very clearly was dying. Claude asked a question, “You do this to him?”

  Clayton nodded and knelt down. In smooth Spanish he asked the dying Mexican if he rode for Fernando Bríon. Claude had to lean over to catch the soft-sighed reply.

  “Sí.”

  “And you were one of the buscaderos Señor Bríon sent to kill the gringo with the wooden box?”

  “Sí, señor …”

  Clayton looked around. “You understand Spanish?” he asked. Claude nodded and asked the dying man a question of his own.

  “How did you get shot, amigo?”

  In faint, wavering words, the dying brigand said he’d also been sent to ambush this other yanqui, but this one, too, was of the devil’s own breed of men. He’d routed the four bushwhackers and had shot the dying man. Then, when Clayton started to speak, Claude motioned for silence while he asked his last question of the dying man.

  “Paisano, who killed the other gringo … the one with the lawman’s badge in his pocket?”

  The Mexican tried to focus his eyes upon his interrogator, but they only rolled aimlessly from side to side as he answered. “It was done by order of Don Fernando, when the vaqueros found that one on the trail of the men who finally killed the gringo carrying the wooden box up over the line, señor …”

  Claude straightened up. He glanced at Clayton, who was watching him, then made a little useless gesture. “Maybe if we got this man to the doctor he’d …?”

  Claude didn’t finish it and Arch Clayton made no attempt to answer it as he uncoiled and stood up straight. No one, very obviously, was going to save this dying man. The most merciful thing that could be done for him would be to leave him in peace and quiet, and dark coolness.

  Claude returned to the sunshine and waited. Clayton came out moments later. He had an empty bottle of whiskey in one hand. As Claude looked, Clayton said, “I’ll get another bottle. That’s how I kept him going the last couple of days. It won’t cure him … nothing can do that … but it’ll make going out a lot easier for him.”

  “You brought him back with you … in that shape?” Claude was incredulous.

  Clayton shrugged. “He’s tough. They’re all tough, Sheriff. I wanted him to be able to talk when you saw him. The hardest part was riding double. My horse is a stout one, but still and all it’s a bad time of year under the best circumstances. On top of that we had to make a sashay over toward that cañon. The Mexican told me he’d been sent up to cut out the brand on my partner’s dead horse. I wanted to test that, to see whether he’d lied or not. That’s when I saw them stalking you around the southerly end of the cañon out there. They were going to drop you just like they dropped my partner, and in the same damned place. So, I shot at you myself, to warn you, then I had to ride like hell to get up here to Springville before you … or they … got around to where I was, and got me first.”

  Claude moved over against the front of the jacal and leaned there. He was getting his answers now, all right, but they seemed only to pose more troublesome questions. “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Bríon’s guerillas. His vaquero pistoleros. He’s got a small army of them down on his ranch. You know how those Mex hacendados operate, Sheriff. When there are no revolutions going on, they work their herds of cattle. The vaqueros in both cases are their soldiers or their cowboys, but they obey. Believe me, Sheriff, they obey.” Clayton jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the interior of the adobe hovel, his meaning amply clear. “One more question,” said Claude, narrowing his eyes against the sun smash. “Why? Why all this killing?”

  “The Spanish coins, Sheriff. Now I’ll tell you about them, too. These aren’t just any old Spanish doubloons. They are made like every other Spanish gold sovereign, but each one of them has a mark scratched upon it so small you have to look to find it with a magnifying glass.”

  “Mint symbol?” asked Claude, not quite comprehending.

  “Nope. Each of those coins has a different mark. My partner and I recorded each one in a little
book before we sold the coins. My partner never knew what those marks signified. Neither did the trader down at Socorro, but Fernando Bríon knew. Whoever gets all those coins has to put all the little scratches together, Sheriff, like he’s making a map, then he’ll have the map, for that’s exactly what it is, a map to a very old hidden cache of Spanish gold bars and more coins.”

  Claude gazed for a long moment at the younger man. He asked an irrelevant question. “Mister, where did you get that deputy US marshal’s badge you left with me before you went down into Mexico?”

  For a second or two Clayton seemed off balance, then he said, giving his head a wag, “Sheriff, that ten thousand dollars over in the safe at the general store is only a small part of what that old cache will bring. And you’re interested in a two-bit badge.”

  “Son,” Claude said crisply, “when a man gets to be my age, all the damned gold the old Spaniards sweated out of the Indians in this whole blessed hemisphere doesn’t mean as much to him as one good human life. Where did you get that badge?”

  “From the resident deputy US marshal at Raton. He swore me in when I told him I was going down to look for my partner, who was long overdue getting back home.”

  Claude didn’t exactly care whether that was the truth or not. He only wanted to force Clayton into telling him something, just anything, so that when his reply came back from the marshal’s office over at Phoenix, he’d have an answer to the main thing, and that was, simply, whether Archer Clayton was a liar or not.

  According to Claude Rainey’s view of men, if they lied at all, he wanted nothing to do with them. All he wanted to know now was whether he dared put any credence in anything Archer Clayton had told him.

  A little noise came from inside the jacal. Clayton turned and disappeared inside for a moment. Claude heard his voice low and soft, speaking swift Spanish. Then there was silence. Claude dug out his makings and started to work on a smoke he felt no desire for at all. What a lousy way for a man to die, even a murderer and bushwhacker like that Mexican brigand obviously was, on a dirt floor in an abandoned mud hovel, in the dark.