Harrington nodded without saying anything or looking at Dan Younge. He was watching Rylan. Finally the sergeant waved his hand, and Harrington said, “All right. Move out, gambler.”
Dan Younge swung his fifteen feet up the canyon and started moving, swinging his head from side to side, watching, his shotgun crossed in front of him, hand on the trigger guard. His thoughts were idle. He thought that Harrington had been hurt bad at a gaming table more than once to talk that way to a man he hardly knew. He thought his black clothes were an asset in this black lava flow, and thinking that, pulled his black hat a little farther down on his forehead.
He thought that those handsome white clouds forming someplace behind the other edge of the malapie might bring thunderstorms on, though there’d been no rain for weeks. He thought that the little patch of grass he passed as he swung around a bend in the lava-fissure was so green it must mean a spring there. Might be a worthwhile project to dig it out, let it flow down to that patch of soil there, instead of going back into the rock.
He thought he might have made a farmer if things had been different. But being a farmer meant swapping with your neighbors—tools, labor, horses, bulls and studs—and a gambler’d never be welcome among farmers.
Now, ranching was something different. Ranching was being on your own. It was gambling, and the odds were way against you. A man who had been a houseman for all these years could never deal himself into a game against the house.
He thought idly of the ladies he’d known. There’d never been an Ellen Lea amongst them. That’d be marking the cards. His ladies had always planned on getting their fun out of him without giving up the luxuries of their husbands, and that made it a fair game. What had gone wrong with Phyllis Sydnor?
He didn’t like these thoughts, and cast around for some more. This malapie sure looked like tar, but it was one of the hardest rocks going. Must have been awful hot when…
Then he stopped thinking. A man had moved up there in the rocks. Just a flash of plaid shirt and a gray hat, but movement, and no animal. Dan Younge waved back to Harrington, and dropped on his belly, moving forward, keeping his rifle snugged under his chest, his belt pulled around so his Colt wouldn’t be under him.
He moved forward on his elbow and hips, his boots raised a little from the rocky ground. He didn’t know it, but he didn’t want the rough lava scuffing leather off his forty-five dollar black footwear; in fact he would have been shocked if he’d known that part of him was capable of thinking of a thing like that at a time like this.
Around a round black rock, like a huge toadstool. Down into a smooth crease into the lava, then up again, through a sloping alley covered with rubble that dug into his elbows.
Now. Now he ought to be able to see his man. There, where green moss had obscured the black of the malapie, there, and…
He saw the man, clearly, for a moment, a man in a faded shirt that had once been fiesta gay, in soiled fawn pants with patches on the knees, in a sweat-stained gray hat. He saw him clearly enough to see all these things, and was puzzled by what the man was doing; for the miner wore no gun and carried neither shotgun nor rifle. He was just bending down, picking up something, taking a bite at it…
Reluctant to shoot an unarmed man, Dan Younge held his fire, and lived to regret it forever. The stick of dynamite that the man had just crimped with his teeth flew over Dan Younge’s head and landed square among the men of Harrington’s little command.
Dan Younge, against his will, twisted back to look. Harrington, indeed, had had the fault Rylan had named. He had been too eager, he had not waited for Dan Younge to report. If he’d laid back where he’d been told to, he would have been out of range.
But he’d never take the lash of Rylan’s tongue for his fault. He was gone, and his men were gone, blown into unrecognizable fragments of horror, and the rest of the blast spilt a small piece of malapie and sent it down over them for a tombstone.
This Dan Younge saw, and twisted back, and the miner in the plaid shirt was standing there, crimping down another cap to another stick. For a miracle he had not seen Dan Younge, and the oversight cost him his life.
Dan Younge shot him, and watching the dingy shirt turn bright and catch the sun as the buckshot hit home. Then the miner fell, and the cap must have been tight and ready, for the stick of dynamite blew up under him.
But he had been dead already.
CHAPTER XXI
Lava country is tricky country. Voices bounce off the smooth walls of the black rock; and one fissure looks precisely like the next. Stories are told of travelers who went into the malapie to explore, and died, lost, while a hundred yards away a companion or a wife called them back to safety.
Around Dan Younge now there was a confusion of voices, of noises of all kinds. Some more dynamite had gone off someplace, and someplace else Sergeant Rylan was shouting and other voices could be heard, too. But where they were or whose voices they were, he couldn’t decide; and he couldn’t make out what the sergeant was saying.
He decided to go ahead. Not knowing anything about the geography of the malapie, he had as good a chance of circling back by going forward as not; and the truth was, he didn’t want to go through the little canyon where Harrington and his men had been blown up.
He was drenched with sweat, his eyes smarted from it. The black rocks caught and trapped the heat, saved it to punish intruders to their depths.
That is mighty fancy thinking, Dan Younge told himself, and wriggled on.
It was not purpose, just accident, that brought him around a bend in the lava, and square upon the miner he had shot.
The man was not as badly mangled as he’d expected. Some trick of dynamite had sent most of the powder stick’s force sideways and down so that the body was lying in a hole, but from the back it had not been disintegrated the way Harrington and his men had been.
There was a box of dynamite and a box of caps near the dead man’s hand. Dan Younge sat up on his heels and considered this. He had a mighty weapon in his hands; but he didn’t know how to use it. He’d never shot off a stick in his life, never even been near anyone who was blasting. He was a gambler, not a miner.
It might well cost him his life. Explosions were going off from time to time in other parts of the malapie; men were screaming, men were shouting, and once he was pretty sure that he heard Rylan shouting for the horses.
There were gunshots, too, and some of these must be the possemen. But what could gunslingers do against dynamiters, especially when the dynamiters had better knowledge of the rocks? A good powderman on the side of the law could turn the battle, if he had the dynamite.
Dan Younge had the dynamite, but he didn’t know how to use it.
For the first time, he felt absolute fear. Not just worry, but the almost certain knowledge that he was trapped in the malapie, that it would only be a matter of time before the miners hunted him down and blew him up.
His one chance was to get to other possemen, turn his powder over to them, and hope that one of them knew how to use it. He heaved the two boxes up, aware that the one thing he knew about dynamite was that caps and sticks should be kept apart.
There were labels tacked to the little boxes; one of the tacks stuck out and tore at his hand. He took out his pocketknife to pull the tack, and read the label.
The dynamite had been sent from a Chicago wholesaler to Charles Sydnor, Rock Spring.
A whole lot of things became clear at once. Sydnor getting the wounded miner into what Dan had thought was a cave, but which must have been a rock tunnel out of town; the activities around the store at night; Sydnor’s furious attempts to keep the posse home. Charley Sydnor was a traitor in the simplest sense of the word, a renegade, a man who’d see his neighbors killed for his profit.
The fear that had filled Dan Younge was gone. An anger he didn’t know he had owned took its place. He’d been a fool, an idiot who r
isked his life simply because his life didn’t mean much to him. It did now. Life meant a chance to get back at Charley Sydnor.
The sardonic humor with which Dan Younge armored himself against the world was gone, and he didn’t know how he’d shed it. He didn’t stop to wonder why he wanted to kill Charley Sydnor; it didn’t occur to him to think that it was none of his business. He just wanted to kill.
It was probably the first time in his life that a single passion had moved Dan Younge.
He clutched the two boxes to his belly and, bent over, started hurrying back along the way he had come. But the tricky canyons fooled him. In a few minutes he was back at the place where he’d found the dead man and the dynamite.
He straightened up, gasping, and a bullet clipped air near his head.
He bellied down again. The sound of the shot was echoing all around him, louder than the booms of the dynamite sticks still going off in the near distance. It was impossible for him to tell where the shot had come from, and now that he was down on the ground, it was apparently impossible for the gunman to see him.
He left his powder and his caps on the floor of the canyon, raised his shotgun breast high, and slowly stood.
He was lucky. He was facing the man, a man in a black shirt, standing on a chunk of malapie, holding a pistol. They both fired at the same time, and again the bullet went high, and apparently the shotgun could not carry that far, because the miner still stood, though Dan was sure his aim had been good.
He dropped the spattergun and snatched at his belt, and the miner fired and knicked cloth from Dan Younge’s shoulder.
He couldn’t be killed. He felt armored in his hatred for Charley Sydnor. He pulled trigger on the miner, once and then twice, and the second bullet hit the outlaw as he was already going down.
Dan Younge snatched up his boxes and charged forward, the shotgun under his arm. He scrambled over the slick rocks and got to the blackshirted body.
The miner had picked a good place for his stand. Dan Younge could see into a dozen of the crooked passages through the black rocks. He spotted Rylan, making a stand, spreading his men around to pin down the miners. A couple of the miners were visible too. Dan Younge fished shells from his pocket, reloaded the barrels of the shotgun, blasted at the nearest patches of miners’ clothing.
Then he snatched up the boxes and plunged from rock to rock toward Rylan, exposing himself because he didn’t dare get down in the cover and get lost.
Rylan was shouting: “Now! Bring up them horses, now!” His cavalry boom carried clear and commanding in the hot air. Dan Younge jumped another little canyon and Rylan stood up. Dan got both the small boxes under his left arm, tossed the shotgun to the sergeant, who caught it and hung on to it.
Then Dan Younge was there, and the horseholders were running up, the horses plunging and trying to tangle their lines. Rylan was bold, running to tap men, shouting, “You, and you and you—mount up an’ ride.” The sergeant got to Dan Younge’s horse, swapped the shotgun for the rifle, and came trotting back, leading the horse. “You an’ me’ll fight rearguard.” He raised his voice. “Everybody mount up! Put ’em at the gallop, an’ keep it up.”
A horseholder shoved reins in Rylan’s hands. He looped the leather around his arm, and made him stand with his carbine, squeezing off a shot almost at once. Dan Younge stood by his side, half turned away. He saw a movement in the malapie and fired and knew he’d hit nothing, but the man he’d shot at did not appear to fire or heave dynamite after the possemen.
Horses drummed behind Dan Younge and Rylan, loud at first, and then fainter, and Rylan said quietly, “We’ll ride for it, now,” and at once jumped into the saddle.
Dan Younge picked up his boxes again. Rylan was already on his way, but he wheeled his horse back and shoved one box between his belly and the phantom cantle of his McClellan saddle.
Dan Younge managed to scramble aboard his horse holding the other box and the rifle and his reins all anyway in his hands. He swung his heels and Ranger took off, fast. Dan bent low and when the bullets started following them, he and the sergeant were out of range.
“All right,” Rylan called. “They’re not followin’. No use killing two horses.”
They pulled down to walk. “We led ’em in,” Rylan said. “You and me. Reckon it was up to us to guard ’em out.”
“We got away with it,” Dan Younge said.
“We got away with nothin’,” the sergeant said. His voice was bitter; there were lines along his thin-lipped mouth that had not been there before. “I lost two-thirds of my men! I ought to have my stripes ripped off! I ought to be stable police the rest of my enlistment!”
“I shot two of the miners,” Dan Younge said. “Killed ’em.”
“And I the same, and the other boys a half dozen more. But there’s ten, twelve of the snakes left in those black rocks, an’ the price we paid was too high.”
“It wasn’t necessary,” Dan Younge said. “The whole thing wasn’t needed.”
Rylan turned in the saddle to stare. “And what are you trying to say? This some of your fancy gamblin’ talk?”
“Nothing fancy about it. We could have stayed home, lynched one man, and made starve-outs of the miners.” He gestured. “Read the label on that box.”
Rylan looked down at his cantle. “Blasting caps! Man, an’ me galloping with my old belly rubbing that!” He made to throw the box away.
“No, the other label. The address.”
Rylan looked. His hand came up and pulled his horse to a dead halt. “Rock Spring! So the powder that blew those boys away was from their own storekeeper.” He shook his head. “I’ve heard of that kind, but I never figured to get to spoil a bullet on one.”
“A rope’ll do,” Dan Younge said. “This is no Army funeral.”
“A rope it’ll be,” Rylan said. “And some satisfaction. But it’ll be cold. It’ll be cold comfort for those boys dead back there, and not enough of them to bury.”
CHAPTER XXII
They overtook the posse after a while, sitting on the prairie, munching on the hard chocolate Rylan had looted from Sydnor’s store. Seven men, the soldier Haley and six townsmen, and Haley and a townsman were wounded, their shirts torn to make rude bandages.
Rylan and Dan Younge swung down to join them. “Indians ahead,” the stocky Patson said. “They’ve been ahead all the way. Flickering ahead, like lights in a swamp.”
“Watching us,” Dan Younge said. “Could be that they’ve figured out we’re trying to deal truly with them, trying to get them the murderers of their people.”
Rylan said gloomily: “I know Indians. One white man’s much like another to them. Could be, all they know is the whites are fighting each other at last, and making it good weather for Indians.” He stood up, wiping a smear of chocolate off his mouth with the back of his hand. “Might as well go to town. I lost three troopers. How many of the others were married men?”
“We were figuring,” Patson said. “All but Big Red, the barkeep.”
“Let’s go to town,” Rylan said. “It’ll be no fun there.”
They mounted again and moved out, Dan Younge and Rylan and the wounded Trooper Haley riding together, three men not of the town, though they had fought Rock Spring’s battle. Twice Rylan pointed, and Dan Younge saw the broomtail of an Indian pony disappear down a draw.
Finally the sergeant spoke. “Show Haley the label, Younge.”
Dan Younge handed the box over for Haley to hold in his one usable hand. “I wondered why you didn’t show it back at the rest,” he said. “But I followed your lead.”
“I don’t know why anyone would follow me, after what I led us into today,” Rylan said. His gloom was heavy on him. “But I’m somewhat cooled now. No use hangin’ your Mr. Sydnor till we’ve tolled them renegades into his store. They used a lot of dynamite today. Could be the night’ll see them t
rying to buy more.”
“Yes, but…” Dan Younge swallowed. “Knowing what we’re knowing, are we going to look at Sydnor and not spit?”
“My observation has been, you’re no Sydnor kisser at the best of times,” Rylan said. “For all your Mr. Sydnor’s money.”
Haley suddenly chuckled. “Depends on which Sydnor you mean, Sarge.”
Dan Younge remembered Trooper Haley coming into the livery stable, interrupting the little scene of love or passion or intrigue or whatever it was in Ranger’s stall. It seemed a long time ago and a long ways away, and now, his body exhausted by the battle, his mind by the constant push of hunting out the miners without himself being hunted, he couldn’t remember why he’d pursued Phyllis Sydnor.
He said: “Last I saw, your lieutenant was thinking along those lines.”
“She’s too good for an officer,” Haley said. “You seen her, Sarge?”
Rylan grunted. “I’m thinkin’ of war and the ways of war,” he said. “Tonight we’ll spread out around Sydnor’s store, block the alley both ways, put one man on the street. I’d like to be one ways up the alley, for all I haven’t slept since General Grant was a corporal. Haley, you’re on sick call.”
“I’ll take the other end,” Dan Younge said. “Maybe Beer would do for the street.”
“Fair enough,” said Rylan, and they rode on.
Dark was coming now, and distant on the prairie, lights began to flicker. Rylan sighed, deep from his chest, and Dan Younge said: “What is it, Sarge?”
“Why, Indian fires,” Rylan said. “Like we mighta known. They’ve had their pow-wow, an’ some have said we’re acting with good hearts, trying to lay the murderers low. And others have said that the only good white man’s a dead white man, which is the way young Haley here thinks of officers, and maybe sergeants, too.”
Haley chuckled, and then stopped.
Dan Younge said: “Is that good? It means we have a divided enemy.”
The 7th Western Novel Page 69
