The Second Western Megapack

by Various Writers

  Most of the stories concerned the Penitente brotherhood, and the cruel religious rites they practiced on themselves as well as on any unbelievers unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. Utah McClatchey had not been exaggerating when he had said all the gold in Arizona was not worth a visit to Tres Cruces.

  A grimmer errand was bringing them here now, one compounded of pride, and the realization that a hangnoose was all that waited them back in the States.

  They were angling along a slanting trail now that clung like a thread on a wall to the side of a barren peak that towered to a needle-point crest a good five thousand feet above them. Directly ahead, though, was the thing that interested Nevada Jim James.

  He could see that for once in his life Utah hadn’t been exaggerating things. The plateau with Tres Cruces atop it sprang out from the flank of another high peak, like a vast, flying buttress. It towered a good two thousand feet above the trail they were on now, a vertical, somber cliff that was enough to take a man’s breath away with sheer awe. He could even see the trail they would have to climb. It looked hardly fit for a mountain goat to use, let alone horses and a pack mule.

  The pack-mule was Nevada Jim’s idea. They had stolen it and miner’s gear from an old prospector on the border. It had been necessary to knock him over the head to get the outfit, but Nevada, with a curse for his own soft-heartedness, had left a handful of greenbacks to pillow the old gent until he woke up. Of course they had stolen the greenbacks, but that didn’t matter. Nevada still figured he was going soft.

  They had needed the mule, however. “If we mosey into that country lookin’ and actin’ like a couple of crazy ol’ desert rats,” he had pointed out to Utah, “we may get further than if we sashay down thar with blood in our eye.”

  So now the pack mule plodded along between them, as they rode single-file up the slanting, mountain trail. Utah was leading the way because he had been here before. Nevada brought up the rear, a loose, slouching figure who had let roan whiskers grow for a week on his usually clean-shaven cheeks. He looked mean and ugly enough without whiskers. Now he looked worse. Heat, and a stinging dust storm they’d ridden through out on the desert had reddened the whites of his eyes until he had all the appearance of a man recovering from a week-long drunk.

  Utah McClatchey, hipped around in his kak, had been studying his younger pard.

  Now he chuckled. “You look so bad,” he said, “that even the Penitentes wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with you!”

  “You’re not so handsome yoreself,” Nevada grinned back, and then he caught an expression in Utah’s eyes that made him twist around in his own saddle to scan their back-trail. McClatchey had seen something. Nevada saw what it was as he got turned.

  * * * *

  The man behind them was a good two miles away, but in the clear atmosphere he was easily visible from flop-brimmed sombrero to sandals. A donkey trudged along behind the ragged peon, his pack-saddle piled so high with a load of crooked chaparral limbs that he looked like an animated wood-pile.

  McClatchey grunted, his words floating back to Nevada. “Guess that hombre’s nothin’ to git our wind up about. Looks like a’ old charcoal burner to me.”

  From their position on the trail, the flop-hatted Mexican could not see them. Nevada Jim studied the man behind them speculatively, then he looked at his partner.

  “If it wasn’t for me, you’d a been in boothill years ago,” he pointed out. “You’re always willin’ to take chances when it ain’t necessary. Now that gent back there looks a leetle too harmless. He cain’t see us, so what you say we duck off the trail into that nest of boulders and chaparral up thar ahead and wait for him to come past. It won’t do any harm to let him climb that mesa trail ahead of us. We got plenty of time.”

  “’Ceptin’ I was plannin’ on cookin’ up a mess of bacon and beans a little farther on,” Utah grumbled. “My belly’s gallin’ me right now.”

  Nevada reached into one of the saddlebags behind his saddle and pulled out a strip of jerky. He gnawed a chunk off it with his strong white teeth, and tossed the rest forward to McClatchey. “I’d shore hate to have you die hungry!” he remarked.

  * * * *

  They were still gnawing on the leathery jerky a half hour later when the rattle of hoofs on stone brought them from their reclining positions against a big boulder, some fifty feet below the edge of the trail.

  Nevada led the way to peepholes they’d already prepared in a copse of chaparral. He had barely settled himself when a chill that felt like icy water running down his back, prickled the length of his spine. He felt Utah stiffen beside him.

  “Leapin’ blue blazes,” he whispered, “weren’t you the hombre who claimed you could scatter these modern lawdogs with a boo?”

  Nevada Jim James was the one who had claimed that all right, and now to himself, he admitted his mistake. Some lawmen had little stomach for facing the half ounce slugs good old-fashioned Peacemakers packed, but the young, hard-faced, blue-eyed man who had faced them at the Bronco was evidently not one of that kind. For that was who trod the trail above them. Nevada felt certain that he was not mistaken.

  A man couldn’t help but recognize those eyes which were as direct and straight as the barrel of a forty-five. The stranger was right above them now. Except for those eyes, he would pass for a Mexican anywhere. His disguise was perfect, and whoever had dyed his skin a chocolate brown, had known how to do it.

  “Phew!” Utah McClatchey wiped his brow when the stranger passed on out of sight. “I swear that hombre was lookin’ straight at us. Jim, that young cuss is sure enough one tough jiggero. You suppose he’s come down here trailin’ us?”

  For once in his life Nevada Jim didn’t know what to think. “That cuss ain’t no ordinary lawman, Utah,” he pointed out, “on account of they stay on their own side of the Line. Course he could of slipped across. That could account for his disguise.”

  “He must figger he’s one skookum hombre if he thinks he can take us single-handed,” Utah grunted.

  Nevada made no answer. He was just easing from the chaparral to go and get their mounts and mule tethered behind the nest of boulders where they had hidden, when a sound alien to these peaks sent his long body diving back to cover.

  It was the roar of an airplane motor, an ear-shattering sound the echoed back from the iron peaks like the thunder of a mammoth blast. He had barely time to settle himself, when both of them saw the low-winged, silver monoplane sail out from the edge of the plateau, and start climbing into the clear blue sky.

  Utah watched it with an expression of disgust twisting his seamed face. “Looks like a danged overgrown trout, ’ceptin’ it’s got wings, and a trout ain’t. Why in hell we hidin’ here in the brush?” he demanded acidly. “If any of ’em in that airyplane are lookin’ this way they’ll see our cayuses. Dang it, yuh got to crawl in a hole and pull it in after yuh to keep one of them critters from spottin’ you!”

  Nevada crawled from the chaparral, and brushed twigs from his shirt and pants after watching the airplane all but disappear into the blue above them. Shading his eyes, he saw it level off finally, and streak away, a silver flash in the afternoon sunlight, toward the Arizona border. He reached for his bandanna, and his hand touched the thin, leather book he had been carrying since finding it beneath the body of the dead foreigner in Dan Conover’s bunkroom. Thoughtfully he pulled the book from his pocket and stared at it.

  “What you lookin’ at that danged thing for?” Utah queried irascibly. “Figger to find the answers to why that that plane’s headin’ back to Arizony?”

  Nevada put the little red book back in his pocket sheepishly. “I was just thinkin’,” he explained as they went for their horses, “that mebbe that sky-buggy is headin’ back to Dan’l’s to look for this thing. They shore as heck ain’t pyrootin’ off in that direction for nothing.”

  “You got more imagination than good sense, Jim,” Utah grumbled. “But dang it all, I suppose yore guess is good as mine.
There’s only one thing I’ll lay you odds on,” his creaky voice turned grimly serious for a moment, “and that is that us two hellers from Helldorado have got to do all the plain and fancy hellin’ we’re going to afore that flyin’ chariot gits back here. They saw our hosses, that’s a lead-pipe cinch, and they didn’t see us, which is goin’ to make ’em mighty suspicious. We’re goin’ to have a fine time now convincin’ anybody that we’re just a couple of harmless ol’ prospectors!”

  * * * *

  The charcoal burner was a good half mile ahead of them by the time they gained the trail again, but the shadows were thickening so rapidly now along this flank of the mountain that they did not think the disguised lawman would notice them.

  But in that surmise they were wrong. They had barely lined out single file again when a harsh curse from McClatchey in the lead made Nevada lift in his stirrups and crane his neck to see what had brought on the exclamation.

  The answer was simple. The woodcutter had halted his burro. He was leaning negligently against the animal’s rump looking back at them. Then he waved.

  Utah cursed again, heartily. “I’ll lay you my last centavo,” he growled back to Nevada, “that that hombre knew we were hidin’ in the brush here all the time. An’ if he ain’t standin’ there laughin’ at us, I’ll eat that straw sombrero he’s wearin’. Jim, we been out-smarted by that hombre! If he knew we were down here in the brush, why in Hades didn’t he cut loose at us with that fancy smoke-pole he’s packin’?”

  Nevada Jim shook his head, and his thin, hatchet-face turned sour. “There ain’t but one answer tuh that,” he grunted as disgustedly as Utah.

  McClatchey’s black eyes widened. “You mean he ain’t here lookin’ for us?”

  Nevada nodded. “You guessed it the fust time,” he answered dryly.

  “Then what in blue blazes is he here fer?” Utah demanded.

  “If we knew that,” Nevada drawled, “and a few other things, mebbe we wouldn’t have to foller the gent to Tres Cruces!”

  * * * *

  Dusk was touching the plateau on which the Penitente town, Three Crosses, had been built, by the time the Hellers reached the top of the precipice trail. The charcoal burner had crossed the rim a good ten minutes before them.

  “Let’s you and me be smarter’n that gent,” Utah remarked with one of his ugly grins, that showed his broken, tobacco-stained teeth, “and take a look for ourselves afore we stick our necks in a noose.”

  Nevada nodded. Keen excitement stirred through him as he dismounted. Adventure such as this was meat and drink to the pards, and beneath that feeling coursing through him was another, deeper feeling that he could not analyze. He felt like a man on the threshold of some great discovery, for certainly there were forces at work here that neither of them could understand.

  He was right behind Utah as the old outlaw dropped to his stomach and inched the remaining way to the rim, but he was as unprepared as his partner for the sight that met them.

  Shimmering like lace in the last rays of sunlight striking the plateau, was a high steel-wire fence surrounding Tres Cruces. A single gate at the end of the trail in front of them was the only means that Nevada Jim could see of entering the town. And that was guarded by two Mexican sentries standing by their rifles on either side of it. The Mexicans appeared to be wearing some kind of military uniform.

  Utah McClatchey, always the more vocal of the outlaw duo, was already voicing his surprise in a low, excited monotone. “Hang me for a hoss thief,” he exclaimed vociferously, “I never counted on seein’ a sight like this. Why that town’s done up tighter’n a dogie in a loadin’ chute!”

  Nevada had been thinking fast. Now he voiced his thoughts as he watched the pseudo woodcutter approach the wire barrier, hat brim flopping down to partially hide his face. “You can knock boards off a loadin’ chute, Utah,” he answered, “an’ I got a pair of wire-cutters in my war-bag that’ll slice a hunk outta that fence like you’d open a can of sardines. Tonight—”

  The words stuck in Nevada’s throat. For a moment both of them were too stupefied to speak. They lay there with their mouths open. One of the sentries had moved a little nearer the gate he guarded, and as he stepped forward, his movement startled a mother hen and brood of chickens busily scratching in the dust near his feet. Eyes bugging, they saw the startled hen rush against the steel fence, saw its feathers appear to puff out all over its body, and then it fell, a limp, shapeless think against the dust.

  “So yuh want tuh ram a pair of wire-cutters ag’in that fence, eh?” Utah’s eyes were still bulging with surprise. “Jim, I dunno much about electricity, but I heard somewhere that metal sorta takes it from here tuh there. If you stick pinchers again that wire yo’re goin’ to look wuss than that thar chicken. Leastways they can throw it in the stew pot!”

  Nevada had no answer for that. His faded, blood-shot eyes were watching the charcoal burner never waver in his march on the guarded gate, and his busy brain was full of calculations.

  He spoke swiftly out of the corner of his mouth to McClatchey. “That wood-hoppin’ hombre is a heap sight smarter than we are, Utah. He must figger he knows a way to get them entries to open up that gate for him, or he’d be layin’ back here like us, lookin’ things over. Watch him close. If we’re ever going to get inside Tres Cruces, it’ll have to be the same way!”

  “I see now,” Utah responded, “why we ain’t met none of them Penitentes out huntin’ or snoopin’ around. Jim, I’ll give you odds them jiggeros are prisoners in their own town! We—”

  Nevada’s hard fingers bit into the old outlaw’s arm and stopped him. His eyes were watching the pseudo wood-chopper’s every move and gesture, for some signal that might make those gates swing open. The signal came as he studied the strange lawman. The man’s right arm shot skyward in some kind of stiff-arm salute.

  The sentries answered it smartly. Then one of them pressed a button on a panel board alongside the small, adobe sentry house a few feet inside the fence. At his move, the gates swung open.

  The charcoal burner, leading his donkey, passed through. Nevada watched the gates swing silently shut again, and then his eyes were shuttling to the sentry house. Six men in those same black uniforms came marching from the house. Nevada heard an order barked in some nasal-sounding, unintelligible tongue, by a small, mustached man who seemed to be the leader of the platoon of Mexican soldiers. Instantly they surrounded the wood-chopper and his burro.

  Nevada felt Utah’s arm jerk. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the lifting sheen of metal, and only his quick move saved trouble for them right then. His fingers clamped McClatchey’s wrist.

  “Let go, dammit,” Utah snapped. “That danged wood-cutter’s a white man, and I ain’t goin’ to see him handled rough by no furriner and a bunch o’ greasers. I may be an outlaw, but—”

  “You’ll be a dead outlaw if you unlimber that smoke wagon!” Nevada cut him short.

  The sound of a shot snapped his attention back to the tableau within the electrified gates of Tres Cruces. He hadn’t seen the gun appear, but now there was a long-barreled, ugly-looking automatic in the hand of the small leader of the sentry-house platoon. Laughter, that sounded more like the hiss of a desert sidewinder, was coming from the man’s throat. He stood there looking down at the inoffensive burro. The little animal was dead.

  “That dirty, low-down skunk!” Utah was muttering. “Jim, get yore hands off me. Jest give me one shot. Only one. That jack needs company!” It was more than the pseudo lawman could stand, too. Perhaps, Nevada realized with sudden insight, that had been the little foreigner’s reason for shooting the burro. The man probably knew that any red-blooded American couldn’t stand the sight of seeing animals mistreated needlessly. And he was right.

  * * * *

  The ragged charcoal burner, who had been standing humbly beside his burro, suddenly became a raging whirlwind of a man. Nevada nodded admiringly as he saw the lawman knock two Mex heads together, drop them like disc
arded sacks, and make his spring at the little foreigner with the gun. Before the man could so much as lift the weapon, a pistoning fist plowed straight into his face. Blood spurted from the man’s nose like geysering water as he stumbled backward. But the fight was too one-sided to last. Sheer weight of numbers carried the nameless lawman to the ground.

  “I’m goin’ in there!” Utah raged. “Jim, whar’s yore sportin’ blood? We cain’t let them kill that gent, even if he would like tuh see us behind bars.”

  “They won’t kill him,” Nevada said grimly. “They want somethin’ from him. Notice the way they’re going through his clothes?”

  For a few minutes they watched in silence as the strange lawman was thoroughly searched. Then four of the Mexicans picked up the unconscious American. “Good gosh a-mighty,” Utah groaned. “They’re takin’ the pore devil to the Castle of No Return!”

  “The Castle of No Return? I don’t savvy, amigo?”

  Utah relaxed like a spent runner and gestured at the town. Nevada followed his pointing arm. For the first time since they had reached the rim he was really getting a chance to look over Tres Cruces. “The town covered, perhaps, a square mile of the wide plateau. Crooked alleys wandered between the houses. There seemed to be only one straight street in the whole village, and that ran from the gate in front of them straight toward twin hillocks around which Tres Cruces was built like the spokes around the hub of a wheel. The hills were low, rising barely a hundred feet above the tile roofs of the town’s adobes. Three great, ironwood crosses stood on one of the hills, stark against the dusk. A grim reminder to the Penitentes that their creed demanded crucifixion.