Sidewinders:#3: Cutthroat Canyon

by Johnstone, William W.

  Scratch noticed it, too. “Where is everybody?” he asked quietly.

  “It’s late,” Davidson answered before Bo could say anything. “These people work hard. They’re all in their houses resting after a day in the fields.”

  “I suppose,” Bo said.

  They saw their first sign of life as they neared the church. A brown-robed priest came out of the sanctuary, saw the men on horseback, and stopped short. As they passed by, the padre crossed himself and backed through the open door of the church.

  “What was that about?” Bo asked with a frown.

  “You mean Father Luis?” Davidson said. “He’s a very devout man. I imagine he was about to ask us inside to pray with him, but I guess he changed his mind when he realized that we’ve been riding a long way and probably want to get back to the mine as soon as possible.”

  That explanation made sense, too, Bo thought—but for some reason, uneasiness still lurked inside him. Back in El Paso, Davidson had struck him as being honest, open, and friendly, and so far the man hadn’t done anything to make that opinion change.

  And yet, Bo wasn’t feeling so sure now about taking this job. Maybe it was because Davidson had hired Jim Skinner. Was that just a lapse in judgment on Davidson’s part, or did he really not care that he had a vicious, low-down snake like Skinner working for him?

  He and Scratch hadn’t made any promises other than telling Davidson they would ride down here with him and have a look at the situation, Bo reminded himself. They could ride away any time they chose, and if Davidson tried to pay them for helping out against the bandits the night before, well, they could always refuse the money. They wouldn’t want to be beholden to the man if they weren’t going to work for him.

  They left the strange little village behind and rode on toward the mine. The sun had vanished behind the mountains by the time they reached the mouth of the canyon. The shadows that gathered inside it made it look like a black maw gaping in the rock wall. Bo heard some muttering behind him, and glanced around to see a worried frown on Hansen’s face. The Swede’s mouth was moving. Saying some more of those Lutheran prayers, Bo thought. Douglas looked a little uneasy, too.

  But not Skinner, Jackman, Tragg, and Lancaster. They appeared eager to get where they were going. Jackman said, “I hope you got plenty of good whiskey in this place, Boss. After eatin’ trail dust for a couple of days, I’m plumb thirsty.”

  “There’s whiskey,” Davidson said. An edge crept into his voice as he went on. “But I don’t want you or anybody else getting sloppy drunk, Jackman. That makes a man careless. Just because those bandits haven’t attacked the mine doesn’t mean they never will.”

  “Sure, Boss, I understand,” Jackman said. “Anyway, whiskey don’t muddle me none.”

  “See that it doesn’t,” Davidson said.

  Their eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the canyon. It ran fairly straight, and after a few minutes Bo spotted the yellow glow of lamplight up ahead. He was able to make out several buildings, and when he asked Davidson about them, the mine owner explained, “There’s a bunkhouse for the workers, quarters for the foremen, a mess hall, and a cookshack. Plus storage sheds for the equipment, of course, and a barn for the mules we use to pull the ore wagons. There’s another barn and a corral for our saddle horses. The shed where we store blasting powder is about two hundred yards farther up the canyon.”

  “That’s a good idea, not keepin’ that stuff too close,” Scratch said. “I never have cared for anything that’s liable to blow up.”

  “Well, you won’t have to work with it,” Davidson pointed out. “I have men who do that.”

  “How big is your crew?” Bo asked.

  “I have between fifty and sixty men working here, plus a dozen more supervising the operation.”

  “You need that many foremen?”

  “Mining can be pretty complex,” Davidson said.

  That didn’t really answer the question, Bo thought, but he didn’t press it. He had done some mining himself, and while it was grueling, backbreaking work most of the time, it wasn’t really that complicated if you knew how to dig a tunnel and shore it up. That’s what had been done here, he knew, because he could see the tunnel mouth in the canyon wall beyond the cluster of buildings.

  Most of the buildings were made of adobe, but the biggest structure was of logs. Davidson nodded toward it and said, “That’s the mine headquarters. My office is in there, as well as my living quarters. And there are extra rooms for you gentlemen as well, although I’m afraid you’ll have to double up.”

  “I don’t share a room with anybody,” Skinner snapped.

  “Reckon that’s because nobody’d want to share one with you,” Scratch drawled.

  Skinner turned toward him angrily, but before things could turn into an argument, the door of the big log building banged open and a man hurried out onto the porch.

  “Thank God you’re back, Boss!” he exclaimed as the riders reined to halt. “We’ve got trouble!”

  CHAPTER 7

  The man was a tall, craggy-faced hombre in work clothes and lace-up boots. He had a revolver in a cross-draw military holster with a flap on it strapped to his belt on the left side. He went on. “Those blasted Mexes are causing problems again—”

  “Hold on, Wallace,” Davidson said sharply. “I just rode up after two days on the trail from El Paso. Can’t you at least let me dismount and stretch my legs?”

  The man called Wallace looked a little chastened, but still mostly angry and upset. “Sorry, Mr. Davidson,” he said. “I just thought you’d want to know. I’m on my way into the mine now.”

  “I’ll come with you and see what this is all about,” Davidson said as he swung down from the saddle. “Is Alfred inside?”

  “Sure. Where else would he be?”

  Davidson ignored that question and turned to Bo, Scratch, and the other men. “You can put your horses in the corral,” he said, pointing to the enclosure made of peeled pine poles. “There’s water for them, and I’ll have someone rub them down and put out some grain for them right away. You can go inside after that. My man Alfred will take care of you, see that you have something to eat and a place to sleep.”

  “Long as he don’t try to give us a rubdown,” Scratch said.

  Davidson looked puzzled by that comment, but didn’t hang around to question it. He started off toward the tunnel mouth instead, with Wallace striding along beside him and talking with a lot of animated gestures.

  “I don’t think Mr. Davidson understands your sense of humor,” Bo said to Scratch as they led their horses toward the corral along with the others.

  “Hell, sometimes I don’t understand it, and it’s my mouth the words are comin’ out of. Say,” Scratch went on, “did you ever see a Mexican village as plumb quiet as that one? There should’ve been kids and chickens runnin’ around, and dogs a-yappin’, and guitar music comin’ from the cantina. Instead, the whole place was like a funeral.”

  “I noticed,” Bo said. “I didn’t like it very much either. Rubbed me the wrong way.”

  “You and me both, pard. Ain’t the first thing about this job that’s rubbed me the wrong way neither.” Scratch cast a meaningful glance toward Jim Skinner. Bo just nodded in agreement.

  When they reached the corral, Tragg opened the gate and the men turned their horses inside. The others all turned around to go back to the headquarters building, as Davidson had told them to do, but Bo and Scratch remained behind.

  “You two fellows aren’t coming?” Lancaster asked from outside the corral fence as he paused to look back at Bo and Scratch.

  “We’re used to taking care of our own mounts,” Bo said.

  “That’s right,” Scratch added. “You never know when some other fella ain’t gonna do it to suit you.”

  Lancaster shrugged and went on. Bo and Scratch led the dun and the bay through an open door into a flat-roofed adobe barn. The roof was made of thatch, and vigas—support beams made from logs—stuck ou
t around the upper edges of the walls.

  The barn was big, with about two dozen stalls in it, half of them occupied. Bo and Scratch led their mounts into a couple of the empty ones, unsaddled the horses, and began rubbing them down with handfuls of straw from the hard-packed dirt floor.

  “Davidson’s been working this mine for about six months,” Bo said as he worked on the dun. “At least according to August Strittmayer. These buildings look older than that, though.”

  “Yeah, I’d say most of ’em have been here for at least a couple of years,” Scratch agreed. “Davidson never said that he started the mine. Could be he bought it from somebody else.”

  “Yeah, I reckon.” Bo saw a bucket in a corner of the stall, picked it up, and carried it outside to fill it in the corral’s big water trough. He was going to take it inside so that the dun would have water in its stall.

  As he was dipping the bucket in the trough, he noticed a man hurrying toward the corral. The fella was moving so fast he was almost running. He wore a straw sombrero, rope sandals, and the white shirt and trousers of a Mexican farmer. Somebody from the village who worked here at the mine, Bo supposed.

  “Señor! Señor!” the man called as he came closer. “You do not have to care for your horses, Señor. I will do that. A thousand apologies for not getting here sooner!”

  “That’s all right, old-timer,” Bo said as the man unlatched the gate and came inside the corral.

  Enough red light left over from the sunset remained in the sky above the canyon so that Bo could make out the man’s lined, leathery face and drooping white mustaches. He might not actually be much older than Bo and Scratch, but calling him an old-timer just seemed to fit. Repeating the explanation he had given Lancaster, Bo went on. “My partner and I are used to taking care of our own mounts.”

  “You will not tell Señor Davidson that you were forced to do so?” the man asked, worry evident both on his face and in his voice.

  Maybe more than worry, Bo thought.

  The old Mexican almost seemed afraid.

  “Nobody forced us to do anything,” Bo told the old man. “And anyway, what we do isn’t really any of Señor Davidson’s business.”

  The old-timer frowned, causing even more wrinkles to form in his forehead. “You do not work for the señor, like the other men?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We haven’t decided yet.”

  “But…but he brought all of you here to…to kill the men who try to take his gold, did he not?”

  “Yes, he wants us to help protect his ore shipments from the bandits who have been holding them up.”

  “Sí,” the old man said. “Bandits.”

  Something about his tone of voice made Bo’s frown deepen. “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  Suddenly the old man looked even more nervous. “Nothing, Señor, nothing at all. I must tend to the horses.”

  With that, he grabbed the water bucket out of Bo’s hand and scurried off into the barn, passing Scratch as the silver-haired Texan came outside.

  “Where’s that little varmint hurryin’ off to?”

  “Davidson sent him to take care of the horses,” Bo said. “He was worried because you and I were already tending to our mounts. Didn’t want us telling Davidson that we had to do it ourselves.”

  “We didn’t have to,” Scratch pointed out. “It was our own choice.”

  “Yes, but that old-timer didn’t know that when he came up.”

  As they left the corral and started walking toward the headquarters building, Scratch said, “You make it sound like the little ol’ fella was scared.”

  “I think he was.”

  “But scared o’ what?”

  “That’s a mighty good question,” Bo said.

  They went up the steps to the porch and on inside the building. A stocky young man in a brown suit but with no tie appeared to be waiting for them in a small front room dominated by a pair of desks and some cabinets. With a smile on his round face, he said, “Mr. Creel? Mr. Morton?”

  “That’s us, sonny,” Scratch confirmed. “He’s Bo, I’m Scratch. Who’re you?”

  “My name is Alfred, sir. I’m Mr. Davidson’s bookkeeper and major domo, I suppose you’d say. The other men are in the dining room if you’d care to join them.” Alfred held out a hand to usher them through a doorway into another room.

  This chamber was considerably larger, with a long, brilliantly polished hardwood dining table in its center. A fireplace sat on one wall with a massive stone mantel above it. Mounted on that same wall were numerous wild-animal heads, including antelope, bighorn sheep, bear, and even a jaguar, the beast the Mexicans called El Jaguar, with its mouth open and fangs bared in a fierce snarl.

  “Looks like Mr. Davidson is quite a hunter,” Bo commented as he looked at the mounted heads.

  “Yes, sir,” Alfred agreed. “He’s an excellent shot, and very daring. That jaguar would have been on him in another couple of bounds when he pulled the trigger on his rifle and killed it.”

  Bo wasn’t sure whether a man endangering his own life like that just for a trophy was daring or foolhardy. He leaned toward foolhardy.

  The other men had gathered around a sideboard on the wall opposite the fireplace. They held drinks in their hands, poured from a bottle that sat open on the sideboard. Hansen picked the bottle up by the neck and held it out toward Bo and Scratch, raising his bushy blond eyebrows in a questioning look.

  Scratch glanced over at Bo and licked his lips. “Go ahead,” Bo told his trail partner. “You don’t have to ask my permission to take a drink.”

  Scratch sauntered over to Hansen and said, “Don’t mind if I do.” He got an empty glass from the sideboard, and Hansen spilled amber liquid into it from the bottle. Scratch took a sip and let out an appreciative “Ahhh.”

  Bo turned to Alfred, who had followed them into the dining room. “What sort of trouble is going on inside the mine?” he asked the young man.

  “I wouldn’t know, Mr. Creel,” Alfred replied with a shake of his head. “I don’t have anything to do with the actual mining operation other than keeping track of the books for Mr. Davidson. I also prepare meals for him and the supervisors…and now, I suppose, for you gentlemen as well.”

  Before Bo could say anything else, he heard a shot. From the deep, echoing sound of the report, it came from inside the tunnel. As it faded, it bounced back from the walls of the canyon as well.

  There was only the one shot, but that was enough to send Bo striding quickly out of the dining room, followed close behind by Scratch. The rest of the men trailed along, too, with the exception of Skinner, Bo saw as he glanced at him. The skull-faced killer remained at the sideboard, casually pouring himself another drink. Unless somebody paid him to care or his own life was threatened, he clearly didn’t give a damn what was going on.

  By the time Bo, Scratch, and the others reached the porch, Davidson had emerged from the tunnel mouth, accompanied by Wallace, and was coming back toward the mine headquarters. He didn’t seem upset.

  “What was that shot?” Bo asked as Davidson and Wallace came up to the steps.

  “Just now, you mean?” Davidson shrugged. “I saw a little rattlesnake and got rid of it. Can’t have them crawling in where they’re not wanted.”

  “No, I suppose not. What about that other trouble you went to check on?”

  “I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Bo, since I’m hiring you to help guard the ore shipments, not to run my mine for me.”

  “Scratch and I haven’t said for sure that we’re going to work for you,” Bo pointed out.

  “I hope you will. I saw how well the two of you handled yourselves when those bandits jumped us last night.” Davidson shrugged. “And I can understand your concern. But it’s nothing for you to worry about. Just a dispute between a worker and one of my foremen. It’s been resolved, and it won’t happen again.”

  “Well, I reckon that’s good to know. You were on your way back out of the tunnel wh
en you spotted that snake?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bo wasn’t sure he believed that. He couldn’t help but wonder if Davidson had settled the dispute between miner and foreman with a bullet. He didn’t want to think that. He had liked Davidson or he never would have agreed to come down here in the first place. And he had no proof that Davidson wasn’t exactly the amiable sort he appeared to be, at least most of the time.

  Bo believed in giving a man the benefit of the doubt. He would continue to do so—at least for now.

  He would have felt better about things, though, if he had actually seen that rattlesnake himself.

  The last of the light was fading from the sky. As Davidson ascended the steps, followed by Wallace, he called, “Alfred, I hope you’ve prepared a suitable supper. After a couple of days on the trail, I’m hungry as a bear!”

  “Of course, sir,” the young man replied. “The meal will be ready shortly.”

  “And have Rosalinda serve.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Alfred spoke, Bo saw a troubled frown pass over the young man’s face. The expression was there and gone so fast that if he hadn’t happened to be looking directly at Alfred he wouldn’t have seen it.

  Something about Davidson’s mention of a woman called Rosalinda bothered Alfred. Bo wondered who she was and why Alfred had reacted that way.

  Like everything else, though, Bo figured that if he were patient, sooner or later he would have answers to all his questions.

  CHAPTER 8

  Rosalinda turned out to be a young woman; little more than a girl, in fact. She carried in a platter piled high with thick slices of roast beef, and set it on the table after the men had taken chairs around it.

  From the way the gazes of several of the men followed her lithe form in her long skirt and low-cut blouse, they thought she looked as appetizing as the food. Her skin was a rich honey brown, and the long, thick hair that fell around her bare shoulders was as black as a raven’s wing. She kept her eyes downcast as she backed away from the table.