Robber's Roost (1989)

by Grey, Zane

  "What kind of a roost is it, Hank? Anythin' like thet Dragon Canyon?"

  "No indeed. I seen thet place once. It's a cave high up--forty feet mebbe, from the canyon bed. You have to go up on a pole with steps cut in. But I was never up. Only one outlet to that burrow, an' thet's by the same way you come. This roost has four. We could never be ketched in a hundred years."

  "Ahuh. How about the hosses?"

  "Wal, you-all know that hosses will travel from barren country.

  They'll stick here. We'll never even have to go up on top to find them. Best of pure water--no alkali--an' grass till you can't believe your eyes. I haven't been here fer ten years, but I know it'd never change."

  "Any game?"

  "Antelope an' rabbits in flocks."

  "Jest where air we?"

  "I'll show you in the mornin' when we can see."

  "Hank, how'd the lady stand the ride?"

  "She's all in."

  "Gosh! no wonder! Thet was a job fer men."

  "Reckon I'll put up the little tent fer my lady guest."

  "Say, Hank, do you aim to sleep in thet tent with her?" queried Smoky, who had not spoken before. His tone was peculiar.

  "No, if it's any of your mix," returned Hays, after a considerable pause.

  "Ahuh. Much obliged. I was jest curious."

  "Hank, how'n hell air you goin' to collect thet ransom now?" inquired Lincoln.

  "Damn if I know. Heeseman shore spoiled my plan. But I'll make another, an' after we lay low awhile I can work it."

  "Keepin' thet gurl hyar all the time?" queried Smoky.

  "What else can I do, man? I meant to hang out over on the other side till I got the money for her. But now thet's no good."

  "It never was no good, boss. An' if it hadn't been fer Heeseman hot on our trail, I'd never stood fer this."

  "Wal, you'll have to stand fer it now, whether you like it or not."

  "Ump-umm!" muttered Smoky, as if to himself.

  That concluded the conversation for the moment. Happy Jack gave each one a cup of coffee, a slice of cold meat, and a biscuit.

  "Wal, thet's better," said Hays, presently. "Now, Sparrow, I'm a- goin' to look after your gunshot."

  "Wait till daylight, boss. I'm restin' tolerable comfortable," replied Latimer.

  "You know thet's bad. When blood-poisonin' sets in it does it quick. I'll go get my salve an' some clean linen. Stir up the fire, Jack, an' have me two pans of hot water, one of them boilin' hot."

  Jim watched the robber chief minister to his wounded comrade.

  Latimer cursed, and stuck out his boots to dig his spurs in the ground.

  "Thet bullet will have to come out, or your name is cold cabbage.

  Tomorrow, mebbe, I can find it. A lot depends on thet, Sparrow.

  Bullets in fleshy parts ain't so bad. I've got one in me somewheres. But if this forty-four chunk of lead in you ranged down instead of up, I'm thinkin' you'll cash."

  He was cold-blooded and methodical, but his earnestness and solicitude were not to be questioned. While he was bandaging the wound Jim stole away in the darkness toward where the chief had left his prisoner. He did not run great risk of detection because he could see all within the camp fire circle of light, while it would be impossible for any of them there to discern him out in the blackness.

  Chapter 10

  It was dark as pitch toward the grove of cottonwoods, which were shadowed by the bluff, here very close. The rustling of the leaves and the tinkle of water guided Jim. There was also a first tiny peeping of spring frogs.

  At length Jim located gray objects against the black grass. He stole closer.

  "Where are you, Miss Herrick?" he called in a tense whisper. "It's Jim Wall."

  He heard a sound made by boots scraping on canvas. Peering sharply, he finally located her sitting up on a half unrolled bed, and he dropped on one knee. Her eyes appeared unnaturally large and black in her white face.

  "Oh, you must be careful! He said he'd shoot any man who came near me," she whispered.

  "He would--if he could. But he'll never kill me!" Jim whispered back. "I want to tell you I'll get you out of this some way or other. Keep up your courage. Fight him--if--"

  "I felt you'd--save me," she interrupted, her soft voice breaking.

  "Oh, if I had only listened to you! But I wasn't afraid. I left both my door and windows open. That's how they got in. I ordered them out. But he made that Sparrow man point a gun at me. He jerked me out of bed--tearing my nightgown all but off--throwing me on the floor. I was half stunned. Then he ordered me to dress to ride. I ran in my closet. But he kept the door open. . . . He-- he watched me--the unspeakable beast!"

  "I saw him pawing you," said Jim, under his breath.

  "Yes--yes. He never loses an opportunity. I--I'm sick. I begin to fear this talk of ransom is only a blind. If he robbed me-- which he did--certainly he would rob Bernie. And it takes weeks for money to come by stage. Meanwhile--"

  "I tell you to keep your nerve," interposed Jim, with a backward glance toward the camp fire. "But I'll not deceive you. Hank Hays is capable of anything. His men are loyal. Except me. I'm with them, though I don't belong to the outfit. I could kill him any time, but I'd have to fight the rest. The odds are too great. I'd never save you that way. You must help me play for time--till opportunity offers."

  "I trust you--I'll do as you say. . . . Oh, thank you."

  "You said he robbed you?" went on Jim, with another look back at camp. Hays was standing erect.

  "Yes. I had four thousand pounds in American currency. It was hidden on the top of my trunk, which they broke open and searched.

  The Sparrowhawk man found it--also my jewelry. . . . Another thing which worries me now--he made me pack a bundle of clothes, my toilet articles--"

  "Ahuh. But where was Herrick all this while?"

  "They said they had tied him up in the living-room," she went on hurriedly. "I remember now that I heard considerable noise and loud voices. But it didn't alarm me. What a complacent imbecile I was! Oh, I should never, never have come to Utah!"

  "How much money did Herrick have on hand?"

  "I don't know, but considerable."

  "Where did he keep it?"

  "I have no idea. We Herricks are careless with money."

  "It is a good bet he robbed your brother, too. That'd make this ransom deal look fishy, even if there were nothing else. Hank Hays is the kind of robber who burns bridges behind him."

  "Oh, what am I to do?" she moaned. "I'm utterly at his mercy."

  "It's hell, Miss Herrick. But you were warned. Now you must take your medicine, as we say out here. If life means so much to you, I can save that, sooner or later. Even that depends on my playing along with Hays and his men until something turns up. Heeseman's outfit is after us, as you certainly know. They may find us. I hope they do. . . . But for the rest--your--your womanhood. . . ."

  "My God! . . . But you could kill me!"

  "I couldn't--I simply couldn't. . . . I love you myself. . . ."

  "There! He is coming. Go--go! You are my only hope."

  Without a look Jim rose to glide away along the grove. He made no sound. The darkness cloaked him. Once it nearly proved his undoing, for only in the nick of time did he sense that he was on the verge of a gully. This proved to be behind the grove and between it and the wall. He heard water down there. Hays' deep voice floated to him from the other direction. Circling to the left, he got on higher ground from which he saw the camp fire again. The horses were grazing near.

  Jim paced to and fro. This was not the thing for him to do.

  Suppose Hays or Smoky should discover him! If they concluded that he was thinking too much they would be right. Jim sought his bed and crawled into it.

  He had committed himself. He had sworn to save this girl from Hank Hays. He loved the fair-skinned, golden-haired girl, but in any case he would have saved her. Once or twice at Star Ranch he had answered to old memories and instincts; he had b
eaten down in their very inception the promptings of his longing to make love to her.

  But Miss Herrick at home, with her brother, and in the light of her position and class, was a tremendously different person from a girl captive, in the hands of a robber, out in the wilderness.

  Jim Wall realized, as he lay under the pitiless white watching stars, that if Miss Herrick were kept there by force for a week or a month, subject to the jest and scrutiny of these robbers, she would surely suffer mentally and physically from such an ordeal.

  Every day to see her shining hair, her white face and wonderful eyes--that could never lose their beauty! Every night, perhaps, in the dead silence of this weirdly insulated place, to fear to hear her cry. It would be too much.

  Moreover, Jim realized, through his association with lonely men of the open, that when Hank Hays stole this girl from her home he had broken the law of his band, he had betrayed them, he had doomed himself. No matter what loyalty, what comradeship they felt for Hays, the woman would change it. Her presence alone meant disintegration, disruption, and death.

  At length sleep came to Jim. Morning disclosed as remarkable a place as Jim had ever seen. The air was fresh fragrant, and not at all cold. Mockingbirds, blackbirds, and meadow larks were mingling their melodies, more wildly sweet for this solitude. The new leaves of the cottonwoods were turning a thousand shining faces to the sun.

  Jim gazed around, and then got up to see if the place was real or only a dream. But it magnified reality. Below him the little gray tent Hays had raised for his captive had been pitched against the grove of cottonwoods, which occupied a terrace and was composed of perhaps fifty trees, none of them old or even matured. One-half of the trees stood considerably higher than the other, which fact indicated rather a steep bank running through the middle of the grove. The luxuriant jungle of vines, ferns, flowers, moss, and grass on that bank was eloquent of water.

  This grove was a point that was separated from the wall on each side by a deep gully. But these gullies ended abruptly where the point spread into the oval floor of the hole. Also both gullies opened into a canyon below, dark-walled, rugged, and deep, winding out of sight. Looking the other way, Jim saw some of the men at the camp fire, among them Hays. Beyond them rose a wall of white, gray, and reddish stone, worn by erosion into fantastic shapes.

  This cliff, on the other side, was red and gray, more precipitous, with shelves and benches covered with moss and cactus and flowers.

  Farther up a gorge split the cliff, and Jim was reminded of what Hays had said about outlets to their burrow. There was also, on the other side, the steep entrance down which Hays had come to get into this fascinating place.

  The inclosed oval contained perhaps twenty-five acres of level sward, as grassy as any pasture; and at the far end the walls slanted down to a wide gateway, through which a long brush-dotted valley led to gray, speckled slopes. The walls all around were veined with ledges.

  Evidently the horses had grazed on out of this hole, which fact spoke volumes for the grass farther on. Jim made the discovery that the middle of the oasis contained a knoll, considerably higher than its margins. Aside from the features that made this retreat ideal for robbers, and which they naturally would give prominence in calculations, it was amazing in its fertility, in its protected isolation, and in the brilliance of its many colors.

  Jim strode over to the camp fire to wash. "Good morning, men.

  Wonderful place this is of Hank's. I don't care how long we stay here."

  "Hell gettin' in, but shore good now," replied someone.

  "How's Sparrowhawk?" asked Jim.

  "Stopped bleedin'." It was Hays who answered this time. "If fever don't set in he'll pull through. But I gotta dig out thet bullet an' I'm plumb feared I can't."

  "Let it be awhile. How's our prisoner?"

  "Say, all you fellers askin' me thet! Fact is, I don't know. She was dead to the world last night."

  "Let her sleep, poor girl. That was an awful ride."

  "After grub we'll climb up an' look our roost over," announced Hays, presently. "You can't appreciate it down here. Thet gully below is one way out an' I reckon the best. There's a waterfall about fifty feet high an' it looks impassable. But it ain't, as I found out by accident. There's a slant thet you can slide a hoss down. It's slippery an' mossy under the water an' takes nerve to put a hoss to it. I reckon any one foller'n' us could do the same, if they saw our tracks. Thet gully heads into the one we took up from the Dirty Devil. Shore we could go back by the canyon we come up last night. A third way out is up the draw, an' thet peters out on the uplands. An' there's a fourth way out, by thet north gap.

  But if we took it I reckon we'd get lost in the canyons."

  "It certainly is a great robber's roost," agreed Jim, wiping his face. "If we get surprised we'll simply go out on the other side."

  "Wal, we jest can't be surprised," said Hays, complacently. "One lookout with a glass can watch all the approaches, an' long before anybody could get close we'd be on our hosses an' gone."

  "But, Hank, you fetched us hyar in the dark," said Smoky.

  "Shore, but it wasn't easy. I was lost a dozen times. An' I knowed the way."

  "Ahuh. Did any other men know this place?"

  "Yes, but they're dead."

  "Dead men don't track nobody, thet's shore," said Smoky. "But, Hank, I wouldn't swear nobody atall could never track us in hyar.

  What you think, Brad?"

  "It would take a lot of nerve to tackle thet Dirty Devil," replied Lincoln.

  "What d'you say, Jim?"

  "If I was Heeseman and had seen you, as he sure saw us, I'd find you in three days," returned Jim, deliberately. "Provided, of course, I had pack-horses and supplies."

  "Wal, I'll bet you two to one thet you can't even git out of here," declared Hays.

  "Why, man, you just told us all how to get out."

  "Down the gully, yes. But you've never seen it an' you'd shore be stuck. . . . Wal, we'll keep watch durin' daylight. What's your idee about keepin' watch? One man's enough. Two hours on an' ten off? Or four on, an' every other day."

  "I'd like the four-hour watch better," replied Jim.

  "Me too."

  "Reckon thet'd suit."

  "Wal, four hours on it'll be, then," asserted Hays. "An', Jim, seein' as you spoke up so keen, you can have first watch. There absolutely ain't no need of any watch before breakfast."

  "Hays, don't forget thet YOU got here after nightfall, an' some other man might," said the pessimistic Lincoln.

  At breakfast Hays departed from his habit of silence and he talked, betraying to the thoughtful Jim the presence of excitement. He repeated himself about the security of the place and sought to allay any doubts in the minds of his men.

  "It'll be hotter'n blazes down here in summer," he said. "An' it rains. Say, but it rains! Course you-all got a hunch of thet from the cut-up canyons we come through. An' never be ketched in any of them when it rains hard. . . . I'll build some kind of a shack, an' we'll need a shelter to eat an' gamble under, an' as fer sleepin' dry, there's some shelvin' cliffs thet air as good as cabins. So after eatin', I'll show you the lay of the land from up on top. We'll leave Jim on guard, and start to work."

  It chanced that during the part of this speech referring to shelter, Jim happened to see Smoky and Brad Lincoln look at each other in a peculiar way. They did not change glances. They merely had the same thought in mind, and Jim wagered he had caught it.

  "Fellers," Hays said at the end of the meal, and his impressiveness was marked, "I forgot to tell you thet we took a little money from Herrick. I'll make a divvy on thet today."

  This news was received with manifest satisfaction.

  "How much, about, Hank?" asked Bridges, eagerly.

  "Not much. I didn't count. Reckon a couple thousand each."

  "Whew! Thet added to what I've got will make me flush. An' I'm gonna keep it."

  "Hank, as there's no deal in sight all summer, an' mebbe
not then, we can gamble, huh?"

  "Gamble ourselves black in the face, provided there's no fightin'.

  It's good we haven't any likker."

  "Boss, I forgot to tell you thet I bought a couple of jugs at the junction," spoke up Smoky, contritely.

  "Wal, no matter, only it 'pears we're all forgettin' things," said the leader, somewhat testily.

  "It shore do," rejoined Lincoln. "Hank, when're you aimin' to collect ransom fer the girl?"

  "Not while thet hard-shootin' outfit is campin' on our trail, an' don't you fergit it."

  "Brad, so long's the boss had honest intentions we can't kick about how the deal's worked out," said Jim, thinking it wise not to be always silent.

  "No--so long's he had," admitted Smoky, casually. But Lincoln did not reply.

  Later Jim caught Smoky aside, digging into his pack, and approached him to whisper:

  "Smoky, I wish we had time to talk. But I'll say this right from the shoulder. It's up to you and me to see no harm comes to this girl."

  "Why you an' ME, Jim?" returned Smoky, his penetrating eyes on Wall's.

  "That's why I wish I had time to talk. But you've got to take me straight. If I wasn't here you'd do your best for her--that's my hunch. . . . Shoot now, quick! Hays is suspicious as hell."

  "Wal, yore a sharp cuss, Jim," returned Smoky, going back to his pack. "I'm with you. One of us has always got to be heah in camp, day an' night. Do you savvy?"

  "Yes. . . . Thanks, Smoky. Somehow I'd have sworn by you," replied Jim, hurriedly, and retraced his steps to the fire.

  After breakfast Hays led his men, except Latimer, up through the west outlet, from which they climbed to the highest point in the vicinity. It was to the top of a bluff fully five hundred feet above the draw. It afforded a magnificent view of this baffling country. Every point of the green hole was in plain sight. Every approach to it, even that down the dark gully, lay exposed; and a sharp-eyed scout with a field-glass could have detected pursuers miles away, and have caught their dust long before they came in sight.

  "No use talkin'," was Smoky's comment.

  Others were loud in their encomiums.

  Brad Lincoln said, sarcastically: "So you been savin' this roost for your old age?"