Claude belly crawled as far as two little side-by-side bitterbrush bushes, stunted until they didn’t stand a full eighteen inches off the flinty ground. He kept his carbine back. There was ample sunlight to make a twinkling reflection.
That big Mexican reached, hauled Clayton to his feet with one hand, slapped him viciously across the face with his free hand, and let Clayton go. He fell and rolled, trying dazedly to sit up again. The Mexican called him something in a fiercely loud voice. Claude heard that, although he couldn’t distinguish the words.
Evidently the physical beating wasn’t over yet, which meant the Mexicans didn’t have to start gathering twigs for their torture fire. The three peons lounged indifferently while their jefe—chief—continued to work on Clayton. The big Mexican leaned, raised Clayton again, held him with one hand, and pulled a big-bladed, wickedly shining knife. He flourished the knife for emphasis, then bent his head close and said something. Clayton was stiffly straining against the little grass rope—called a mecate by Mexicans, McCarty by American cowboys—twisting and bunching his powerful shoulders. He could guess what was coming. First, the nostrils were slit, then the ears were punctured, then the eyelids were fleshed away. But these were only the preliminaries.
Claude sighed, wet a finger, held it aloft to catch the direction of the moving air, pushed his carbine gingerly through between the pair of little bushes, clamped his hat lower until it was fully down in front of his eyes, then he settled comfortably in the gritty dust and curled up around his carbine. The range was considerably farther than most men who used carbines with their short barrels rather than long-barreled rifles were accustomed to. At least the sun was just beginning to turn brightly brittle and fiercely hot, so there was as yet no shimmering blur to mar his sighting.
He waited, taking down big gulps of air and letting them out slowly again, his slitted eyes fixed with deadly intensity on the big Mexican’s thick chest. He couldn’t fire as long as Clayton was that close. He’d have to wait until the Mexican either knocked Clayton down again, or slashed him and Clayton recoiled from the pain.
Those three loafing peons down there were finally taking an interest. They sat down, carbines across their laps, silently watching. Claude shot them one glance, then after that completely ignored them. His palms got oily so he wiped them on his shirt front and resumed his firing position again, swearing under his breath because the Mexican was haranguing Clayton instead of striking him. Then he struck, using the heavy handle of his big knife. Clayton’s knees turned rubbery but he refused to go down. The Mexican stepped back, roared a violent curse, and struck again. That time Clayton went down.
Claude fired.
The sound was a thin, high, twig-snapping sound in the immensity of all that emptiness. It didn’t even make an echo. The big Mexican raised his black, oily face until Claude had a good sighting at the man’s fierce black mustache, and aimed again, confident he’d missed. The Mexican then turned very ponderously toward the three startled peons as though to speak to them, and fell. Claude hadn’t missed after all.
The peons whirled up off the ground, twisting left and right, trying to catch some sign of their leader’s assassin. Claude drew his carbine back so there’d be no flash of hot light off cold steel, and put his head too low for it to be made out from down below. The vaqueros were confused and excited. They gesticulated and ran around a little, unable to ascertain where that killing bullet had come from. One of them started over toward Clayton. Claude eased his carbine out again, cocked it, and was seeking that one through his sights when one of the others called loudly, gesturing toward the horses. The one farthest off looked from Clayton to his dead jefe, then, seeing he was going to be abandoned, turned and ran for his mount. The three of them broke away in a wild rush straight down the middle of the barren cañon, southward.
Claude sat up, fished out a replacement for the one bullet he’d expended, and plugged it into his carbine while watching those fleeing Mexican peons growing smaller and smaller. After that he arose, knocked dust and grit off his clothing, and returned to his horse.
He kept the entire cañon in view as he began angling down off the overhead desert toward the place where Clayton and the dead Mexican lay, within a hundred feet of that shriveled, mummified carcass of a dead horse. Clayton’s chestnut saw him and raised its head to nicker softly. The Mexican jefe’s animal, also ground tied nearby, made a soft call to Claude’s animal.
He rode slowly and carefully, approaching as he came on in a wide circle the way wary Apaches did when coming on to an enemy they thought was dead but wished to take no chances with. By the time he got up close enough to see where his slug had hit, he marveled that the big Mexican had turned at all. The bullet had pierced him from front to back, right through the center of his chest.
He untied Clayton and hung the dazed man’s hat over his face to shield his eyes from the sun, then squatted beside Clayton, patiently awaiting the return to consciousness, and smoked.
The Mexicans were nothing more than a very faint dust banner far southward. The dead one yielded nothing from his pockets but the usual personal effects—a little silver, some tobacco, a bandanna handkerchief. He was a villainous-looking man, pockmarked, scarred, his coarse mouth beneath the big mustache twisted downward even in death. Claude picked up the big knife. It was razor-sharp and nearly a foot long. It had evidently been hammered into shape out of a shoeing rasp because there could still be discerned the very faint crisscrossing lines.
Clayton groaned and moved, rolled his eyes, and knocked aside the shielding hat to find himself gazing at leathery, tough, old Claude Rainey, who sat smoking and toying with the big knife. Clayton raised up, winced from the effort, and saw, for the first time, his dead assailant. He spat, raised a hand to feel the side of his face where a purple, sullen lump lay, and said, “What took you so long?”
“Had to shave and have breakfast first,” replied Claude laconically. “Besides, how come someone like you needs help, when there were only four of ’em?”
Clayton straightened up into a sitting posture, flexed his arms, and gazed around. “At least they didn’t get my horse,” he croaked.
Claude flipped the knife. It stuck into the ground point first between Clayton’s legs. “He wouldn’t have done you a particle of good in another hour, mister. Tell me, where were they?”
“They found my horse down in the jacal, when I went in to lead him out to water, and jumped on me like a herd of wildcats. All I remember after that was someone holding me in the saddle until I came around on my way over here.”
Claude nodded. “One question, Mister Clayton … why in the devil does everyone have to come back to this spot? Your partner’s dead and buried in town. All that’s left out here is that mummified skeleton of his horse.”
Clayton looked around again, felt his cheek where the big Mexican had struck him, and afterward massaged his wrists as he said, “Sheriff, this is a guessing game we’re all playing. Bríon’s assassins must have told him my partner tried to bury the ten thousand dollars here, and from that I’m guessing he thinks the cache of gold bars is around here, too. When I came around after they had me, and saw where we were heading, I figured Bríon himself would be waiting out here. But he wasn’t. That big Mexican had evidently been ordered to fetch me here because Bríon figures the cache is somewhere around, and start torturing me to find out exactly where the cache is.”
Claude turned this over and over in his mind, then put a shrewd gaze upon the younger, burlier man as he said in a very soft way, “Mister Clayton, just how near to being right were they?”
Clayton stood up gingerly and flexed his legs without answering. He had two bruises, one on the side of his face, one higher up on the opposite side near the hairline. He’d also evidently put up quite a scrap the night before when he’d been jumped in the dark jacal, because his shirt was torn and his knuckles were skinned.
Sherif
f Rainey stood up, toed the dead Mexican with his foot, and privately debated whether to hoist the hefty devil up behind his saddle and haul him back to town like that, or to come back with a wagon from the livery barn and take him to Boot Hill this other way. He decided to take him back now. He went after his horse, forgetting entirely that the dead man’s animal was still around until he looked up and saw the beast. Then he said gruffly, “Give me a hand with Pancho here. He gets his last ride belly down across his own saddle.”
The Mexican was a larger man than he seemed; it took all the strength they both had to get him flung across his saddle. As they were lashing him securely, Arch Clayton looked over at Claude several times without Rainey being aware of it, and as the lawman stepped back to examine critically their tying job Clayton said, “It’s close by.” He turned to go after his chestnut horse.
Claude gazed after him, wondering, but he didn’t ask the obvious question. When they were mounted, Claude leading the dead Mexican’s horse, he said, “Mister Clayton, unless I’ve sized up Fernando Bríon all wrong, the minute those cowboys of his get back down to the rancho and tell him what happened up here this morning, he’s going to come the next time in person, and if you thought you had trouble before, he’s going to make you figure everything previous was a pleasant little game of musical chairs.”
Arch Clayton borrowed Claude’s makings, twisted up a cigarette, and looked across the dead world to where the sun was high and brassy. “Mighty good sight,” he murmured, passing back the tobacco sack. “I didn’t figure I’d see it come up this morning. That sun I mean.”
They said very little after that, all the way back to town. Claude didn’t want to cause a furor so he left the dead Mexican in one of the abandoned jacales where Clayton had also been hiding out, took the dead man’s horse and outfit to the livery barn along with his own animal, and scowled when the liveryman asked a couple of leading questions. Afterward, Claude and Arch Clayton went up to Barney’s store where Arch bought a new shirt, put it on in the back room, then again, avoiding questions by scowling, Claude led off toward the café. It was late for breakfast and early for dinner, but that never kept a man’s stomach from growling.
Chapter Seven
Claude Rainey was correct, not that he wanted to be right in this instance, and not that he was certain that he was right. It wasn’t until the same stage company clerk, who brought him several letters the following day after he’d saved Clayton over in Dead Man’s Cañon, insisted that what the driver had reported wasn’t just a bunch of cowboys out looking for cattle.
“Mexicans, Sheriff. I tell you it was at least ten of ’em led by a tall one riding a fancy saddle. Let me tell you … when Johnny Egger says he seen a big band of armed Mexicans coming up across the border down below that broad cañon where you found that dead feller, that’s exactly what it was. Johnny’s one of our best men. He don’t make up no tales.”
After the clerk had departed, Claude opened his letters. The first one was in response to his earlier letter to the US marshal’s office at Phoenix. It confirmed there definitely was a substation up at Raton, New Mexico. It also confirmed there was a part-time—formerly a full-time—deputy marshal up there named Archer Clayton. This letter then went on to recite some of Clayton’s triumphs as a lawman.
The second letter was from the Raton, New Mexico, civil authorities. It also confirmed the existence of a field office for the US marshal down at Phoenix. It said about the same thing concerning Arch Clayton, too, except that Raton’s civil authorities obviously didn’t know nearly as much about Clayton as the US marshal’s office over at Phoenix knew, which didn’t surprise Claude any.
He put those two letters carefully in a drawer and put the earlier doubts he’d had of Archer Clayton out of his mind. Something a lot more critical had just jumped up to confront him.
He went up to Mather’s saloon looking for Clayton, and failed to find him. He then drifted down to the exact opposite end of town and went prowling through the jacales. At one time there’d been a strong move on foot to demolish those ancient mud hovels. They had at one time been functional enough, but even when people had been living in them they’d had the ugly appearance of upright mud blocks, and now, many years after the last Mexican had moved out, they clustered down there as immutable, as square and forlorn and ominous-seeming as any set of abandoned mud buildings. No one could even come close to guessing their age. Perhaps a hundred years old, perhaps two hundred, there were no Mexicans around Springville anymore. They’d moved on, finding homes in other, all-Mexican communities. In a land where often enough two and three years passed without a drop of rain to wash the mud walls, and in an atmosphere both hot and very dry, wooden buildings were the only structures that time worked upon with dry rot. Mud jacales stood forever. In fact, as Claude Rainey walked among them, he began to have an uncanny feeling that maybe the Indians and half-castes used by the conquering Spaniards as their beasts of burden might have lived here.
Then a thick shadow moved and Claude whirled, going for his gun.
“Easy,” complained Arch Clayton. “Sheriff, you got to do something about those nerves of yours.”
Claude straightened up stiffly. “Very funny,” he growled. “I’ll tell you something else to split your sides over. Bríon and his vaqueros are coming. A stage driver saw them cross up out of Mexico about dawn this morning.”
“How many?”
Claude shrugged. “He wasn’t sure. Ten or twelve maybe. I’d guess, since the stage road lies a good mile and a half from where they crossed over, all he saw was a bunch of Mex vaqueros. There could be twenty of them for all he’d know.”
“Bríon, Sheriff? You’re sure it’s Bríon?”
“No. Of course I’m not sure. That’s why I’ve been looking for you. Let’s get mounted and go look for ourselves.”
They left Springville, heading northward. Where Claude veered off, southerly now, he said dryly that if they kept up high and Bríon came up into Arizona by way of Dead Man’s Cañon, he’d be below them and they’d be able to spot him first.
That’s exactly how it worked out, but beyond that Claude found himself incorrect in that earlier syllepsis he’d made; Johnny Egger’d proved his eyesight very well. There weren’t any twenty of them as Claude had dourly speculated. There were only ten.
Johnny Egger was right again, too. They had a fancily dressed, very tall, fair-complexioned man on a silver-mounted saddle leading them.
Claude dismounted, took his carbine, and crawled up to the edge of the overhead slope exactly as he’d done when he’d saved Arch Clayton’s bacon. There, he growled for Arch to keep low, and he pointed southward where the riders were coming upcountry at a leisurely walk.
“Ten,” murmured Clayton, “and sure as hell that’s Fernando Bríon out front.” He looked at Claude. “Those three peons sure didn’t let any grass grow under them. They had to ride hard all yesterday and part of last night to reach Bríon’s hacienda.”
Claude had an observation along those lines, too. He said, “Amigo, it’s not how hard those cowboys rode getting home that’s interesting me right now. It’s how hard Bríon rode back, to get into Dead Man’s Cañon.” Rainey cocked a jaundiced eye at Clayton. “You sure you didn’t tell them anything when that big one was knocking you down and threatening you with his knife?”
Clayton didn’t even bother answering that. He simply threw a withering look at Sheriff Rainey, then resumed his vigil.
The Mexicans were armed with carbines, six-guns, knives, and their crossed bandoleers. They looked less like cowboys and more like a little party of guerillas, which, as a matter of fact, they also were. In times of peace, guerillas worked as vaqueros on Mexico’s immense cattle ranches. In times of war or insurrection, without changing even their hats, they became irregular cavalry.
Fernando Bríon alone among those men coming up into the broad expanse of Dead Man’s Cañon wor
e the short, elaborately embroidered riding jacket of the Mexican charro—gentleman horseman. He also wore the gold-thread-encrusted, large, peaked sombrero. His saddle with its dinner-plate horn and white goat-rawhide covered tree had silver inlay upon the heavy steel stirrups, upon the horn cap, even upon the ornate cantle and swells. Also, the stock of the Winchester carbine jutting up under Bríon’s right leg was carved and silver inlaid. Yellow sunlight flashed from Bríon’s clothing and equipment, prompting Sheriff Rainey to wag his head and grumble under his breath that any man who got decked out like that deserved to be shot; watchers could see him for two miles before they even got close enough to ambush him.
Clayton’s reaction was different. He’d evidently taken only cursory inventory of Bríon’s dress and accoutrements. It was the tall, handsome, fair-skinned man himself Clayton was intently watching.
“Give me another fifteen minutes, until he gets into range, Sheriff, and I’ll make him look like a bundle of red-flecked rags with my Winchester.”
Claude pushed steadily backward until he was far enough from the slope to stand up without being seen from down below. “You’ll do no such a damned thing,” he said. “We’ve got to have something more than another damned corpse to tie him to three corpses … your partner, Jonas Gantt, and that Mexican raider you buried.” Claude jerked his head and started back where the horses waited. “I know how you feel. I’m not even saying that if Bríon and I were the only ones within a hundred miles on a good day for sighting that I wouldn’t be tempted to kill him. But we’re not going to do it. At least not just yet. Now let’s get back to town.”
Dead Man’s Cañon Page 5
