Twisting his head about so that one cheek ground against the hot rubble under his head, Hap Kingman saw the black zopilote bouncing wildly amid a flutter of bloody feathers, a few feet away. Like a chicken beheaded on a chopping block.
Only then did the half-dazed puncher realize that it had been a bullet, smashing through the scrawny body of the bird of prey, that had knocked the buzzard to one side.
Uttering harsh squawks, the buzzard finally flopped over on its back, blood guttering from a wound that had torn through its entrails. The huge wings beat feebly, and then the buzzard relaxed, its long-clawed talons slowly opening and closing like human fingers as death relaxed tendons.
The sound of the shot filled the air with a dozen or more of the shrieking buzzards, who had been clawing at the hide of the dead horse which pinioned Hap Kingman to the ground.
Grating boots on gravel made the cowboy turn his head the opposite direction.
Physical and nervous exhaustion were bogging at the cowboy's senses, but his dimming vision made out the form of a gaunt, bony man stalking toward him, a smoking six-gun in one bony fist, a flop-eared burro following him at the end of a rope.
The hombre's shadow fell across Kingman's face, as the stranger thrust his Colt into a worn half-breed holster buckled low on a bowed thigh.
"You're in a hell of a fix, ain't you, cowboy?" greeted the newcomer, in a high-pitched voice like a clarinet with a squeaky reed. "I figgered you for daid, when I seen that turkey buzzard fixin to tear into you. I was figgerin' to bury you."
Hap Kingman tried to find his voice, but it was impossible. He had difficulty in focusing his eyes on the stoop-shouldered old codger standing beside him.
His last conscious memory was a picture of the old-timer—a kindly face, brown as leather and adorned with a stringy waterfall mustache, under a flop-brimmed Stetson; a caved-in chest, arms with whipcord muscles, and warped legs clad in patched and faded blue Levis.
Then all went black, as the man tried to reassure him:
"Don't worry, son. You're safe as in God's pocket, now that I've found you—"
The hombre was a prospector, as evidenced by the pickax and shovel and pair of canteens which hung on the outside of a canvas-wrapped, diamond-hitched pack on his burro.
The prospector was one-eyed, his left eye socket being a screwed-up, empty slit under a craggy brow. But the hardrock miner's left eye was blue as chipped turquoise, and it was busy.
The prospector, bred to reading sign, had no difficulty in sizing up what had happened here. And, in the habit of men who live alone in the desert with no one to talk to but themselves or their animal companions, the wizened old hombre vouchsafed his opinion to the inattentive burro:
"Gertrude, offhand I'd say this here hoss sot foot in a prairie-dawg hole an' stumbled. This here cowpoke was prob'ly dozin' in the saddle, an' got pinned down by one laig so he couldn't move."
The prospector squatted down, squinting at the horse's withers. Flies were swarming around the bullet wound which had killed the horse.
"Reckon this cowboy figgered his hoss' leg was broke, so he shot the hoss," deduced the prospector, stepping over Kingman's inert body. "That left him out o' luck, not bein' able to pull out from under the—Oh-oh!"
The oldster broke off with an oath as he saw that Hap Kingman's arms were tied behind his back.
"Gertrude, I'm thinkin' that somebody else must've shot this feller's hoss," he told the burro. "Now, you suppose this jasper was an outlaw? Else why'd he be tied up thisaway? Mebbe some sheriff lost him—"
With a pocketknife, the prospector cut loose Kingman's bonds. Then, salvaging the longest end of the lariat, he tied it to the horn of Kingman's saddle.
The other end of the lariat he tied to the pack saddle of the burro.
"Now, Gertrude, it's up to you to shift that hoss' carcass so I can pull that cowboy out from under," instructed the old man. "Wouldn't be surprised if'n his laig's broke, or badly bruised. An' he's been lyin' thar two, three days mebbe."
It took the combined strength of the sturdy little jenny and the prospector's wiry muscles to shift the dead weight of the pony so that Hap Kingman's trapped leg could be freed.
The prospector made a clucking sound with his tongue as he unbuckled Kingman's chaps, slit his overall leg and inspected the discolored skin.
"Broke a bone, sure as hell," muttered the prospector soberly. "An' he's about tuckered out from thirst. Reckon he needs water, much as anything."
From his own canteen, the old desert rat sloshed a quantity of brackish water over the cowboy's head.
As soon as Kingman had revived sufficiently for the oldster to cradle his head on his lap, the prospector let him sip several swallows of water.
"That's all for now," said the desert-wise oldster. "Cain't risk you gettin' sick from overloadin' your stummick with aqua. First off, I got to rustle a splint an' set that laig o' yourn."
Hap Kingman was fully conscious by the time the oldster had returned from a brief hunt on the surrounding hillside, carrying with him some mesquite limbs which he had chopped off with an ax.
Dusk was falling, and the cool breeze of the desert was soothing to the cowboy's flushed temples and the raw, swollen wrists where Melrose's ropes had chafed the flesh.
"Reckon I owe my life to you, stranger," the cowboy said gratefully. "What you fixin' to do? Set my leg?"
The prospector nodded.
"Call me Allen, busky. One-eyed Allen. Lost one lamp in a minin' accident when I was a kid, an' I been called One-eye ever since."
Allen chuckled as he saw Kingman eyeing the mesquite splints he was flattening with his knife.
"Son, if you think I can't doctor you, you're mistaken. I sot my own busted laig, onct, by myself, with not even whiskey to sooth my nerves. That laig's gone too long without attention now, an' it's a two-day trip to Marfa with you the shape you're in. I got to fix that laig hyar an' now."
Merciful unconsciousness spared Hap Kingman untold agony as the fractured bone was pulled into place. When he recovered consciousness once more, it was to find that night had enveloped the badlands, and his leg was firmly bound with strips of rag and firmly splinted.
"I'm loadin' you on my burro, son," One-eye Allen told him, as he lifted the cowboy's hundred and eighty pounds with a lithe ease that belied his scrawny frame. "I got a shack over in the Sierra Secos, about ten mile from hyar. I got whiskey an' a good soft bed for yuh."
Hap Kingman had little recollection of the long night's journey back into the trackless wilderness.
Lashed with rope to Gertrude's back, the cowboy made the trip with as much comfort as he could have expected under the circumstances.
A fever had set in by the time One-eye Allen reached the tiny rock shack which he had built at the far end of a shadowy canyon, well off the faint Mexitex trail.
The cowboy was dimly aware of his benefactor lifting him off the burro, jackknifing him over one scrawny shoulder, and carrying him into the shack.
There, on a buffalo hide stretched over a straw-tick mattress, Hap Kingman lapsed into a stupor, his brow burning with fever.
After stabling his burro, One-eye Allen busied himself with necessary preparations for taking care of his patient.
He forced a few swallows of whiskey down the cowboy's throat, to fortify him against the grueling ordeal of the fever. Then, after heating water in a blackened kettle at his fireplace, Allen carefully stripped off the cowboy's clothing and bathed the puncher's chafed muscles.
It was while hanging up Kingman's shirt that One-eye Allen dropped the nickel-plated star contained in the pocket. The old prospector studied the star's inscription by lamplight, and nodded with satisfaction.
"A deputy sheriff, eh?" he grunted. "Somethin' went wrong, son, for you to have been tied up an' left to die out there on the Mexitex trail."
Covering the slumbering cowboy with a faded army blanket, One-eye Allen stretched himself out on a pile of gunny sacks on the floor, and fell a
sleep—
Through the following day the cowboy babbled in delirium, his fever raging.
But One-eye Allen, making a closer inspection of the puncher's injured leg, was relieved to find that no infection had set in. The fever was due to exhaustion and exposure, and one look at Kingman's splendidly muscled torso told Allen that the cowpuncher was in no immediate danger. Around midnight the fever was broken.
It was noon the second day after his removal to Allen's shack that Hap Kingman was able to partake of nourishment.
"You don't have to tell me what happened out there on the desert, Hap," said the old prospector, stoking his corncob pipe and seating himself beside the cowboy's bedside. "What happened was yore business. Only I'm glad I happened to be prospectin' in yore neighborhood. That buzzard was fixin' to spile yore face for keeps, when I drifted up to investigate."
The cowboy grinned. For the first time, his head was free of the dull, splitting ache which had accompanied the period of fever.
"I can't ever repay you for this, Allen," he said gratefully. "How long I been here?"
"Two days, Hap." The oldster lit his pipe with a coal from the fireplace, and returned to the bedside. "An' I hope you ain't in any hurry to be dustin' yonderward, son, because it'll take six weeks at least before you can walk on that laig—let alone fork a bronc."
Kingman shrugged. Waiting for a broken leg was nothing, when he realized that only by a lucky break of providence was he alive.
"So you know my name's Hap! I didn't realize I introduced myself. Was I ravin' loco durin' them two days?"
Squinting through blue tobacco smoke at the puncher, One-eye Allen shook his head.
"You didn't interdooce yoreself, Hap. I called you Hap because I figgered mebbe that was yore name."
The cowboy eyed his benefactor with sharp interest.
"But it's an unusual name," he said. "Funny you'd strike on that name to call me."
One-eye Allen chuckled.
"I've met you before, Hap. That is, if you're the man I got you ticketed for. As a matter o' fact, Hap, if I ain't mistaken, I'm related to you. I figger I'm yore uncle."
22
SECRET OF THE PAST
Kingmans's eyes widened in startled wonder.
"You…my uncle?"
The desert rat nodded, his single blue eye twinkling.
"Is yore name Allen—Hap Allen?"
The cowboy shook his head negatively. The thought struck him that this bald-headed oldster was slightly on the loco side. It was not unusual for prospectors to be lunatics. But the coincidence of Allen's having called him "Hap" was difficult to understand.
"Afraid you got me wrong, Allen. My name's Kingman. Or—as a matter of fact—my real name is Hap Hewett. My dad's name was Dev Hewett."
A look of disappointment crossed the desert rat's face.
"If yo're dead shore yore name's Hewett, then my hunch is wrong," admitted the prospector. "But you shore as hell have got Warren's hair an' eyes an' jaw."
"Warren?"
One-eye Allen puffed energetically at his pipe.
"Warren Allen. My brother. You're the spittin' image o' my brother, whom I ain't seen in nearly twenty years. Same build, same expression when you grin. As much like my brother Warren as if you was both poured into the same mold an' left to set."
Strange emotions tugged at the cowboy's heart.
"I go by the name of Hap Kingman," he said slowly, "because I was adopted by old Les Kingman, who was sheriff of Yaqui County for thirty-odd years. But I got evidence to prove that my real father was named Dev Hewett."
One-eye Allen stared out the open doorway of his shack at the heat-shimmering canyon walls opposite.
"How old are you, son?" he asked.
"Around twenty-one. I was about three years old when Mr. and Mrs. Kingman adopted me. My father and mother were killed—when I was three."
The prospector's single eye gleamed with a strange light.
"Meanin' you was orphaned about eighteen year ago?"
"That's right."
Allen turned, cocking his head as he scanned the cowboy's emaciated face in the half light of the cabin.
"Answer me one question, Hap," requested the oldster. "Are you dead certain yore father was named Hewett?"
Hap Kingman started to voice his positiveness of his ancestry, and then checked himself.
He realized, with a start, that the "proof" of his birth rested solely on the word of the Mexitex lawyer, Russ Melrose. And in the light of what he now knew about Melrose, he saw that he could not necessarily accept the lawyer's word as gospel.
"Why… no. I… I'm not sure at all. The … lawyer who read Mrs. Kingman's will to me —he told me about my father."
Allen tapped his corncob sharply on a bony knee.
"Then you ain't a Hewett, no more than you are a Kingman. You're Warren Allen's kid—the baby son that was born to him over in San Antone, twenty-one years ago come August 10th. Nobody but Warren Allen's whelp could look as much like my brother as you do."
A far-away look came into the prospector's single eye, as he leaned back in his chair and hooked thumbs in armpits.
"I'm going to tell you a little story, Hap," began the prospector. "Twenty-one years ago, my brother Warren an' me was prospectin' in the Sierra Secos. His wife was livin' in a covered wagon, movin' wherever Warren took her—Fort Stockton, Marfa, Presidio. Their little kid was so cheerful an' gay all the time that his uncle—that's me, One-eye Allen —nicknamed him Happy. We got to callin' the little tike Hap for short."
There was silence in the little shack for a moment, a silence broken only by Gertrude's raucous bray somewhere far down in the canyon.
"Well, me an' Warren discovered a gold strike," went on One-eye Allen, his voice vibrant with a long-forgotten excitement. "It was in these Sierra Secos, somewhere. We cleaned out a small fortune in nuggets an' float ore, but we didn't have the equipment to develop the vein we discovered. It was a bonanza, though."
One-eye scratched his leathery dome to summon up almost-forgotten memories.
"Me an' Warren decided to record our claim," the oldster continued. "I headed for Fort Stockton to buy supplies, while Warren went down to Presidio, on the Rio Grande, to get his wife an' little son, Hap."
With careful detail, One-eye Allen explained that his brother Warren had drawn a map of the terrain where they had discovered their gold strike, with a red-hot nail on a strip of soft sheepskin.
"Just in case we couldn't trace our way back into the badlands and find it again—gold mines are easy to lose, in a country as big as this," Allen said. "Well, to make a long story short, I was supposed to meet Warren an' his wife Eleanor an' his kid, Hap, when they got to Marfa. But they never came back, an' I ain't seen hide nor hair of 'em to this day."
"Why didn't you go down to Presidio, if that's where your brother went to get his family?" inquired Hap.
"I did," responded the prospector. "I found out that a smallpox epidemic had busted out among the Mexicans, an' Eleanor decided to move out so Hap wouldn't catch the damned plague. She left word for Warren where she'd be, with a hotelkeeper there."
"Did your brother know where they'd gone to?"
"I reckon so. The hotelkeeper gave Eleanor's letter to my brother, when he got to Presidio an' found his family gone. But where they went to, I never found out. Nor did I get another trace of Warren."
Kingman nodded thoughtfully, following Allen's narrative with tense interest.
"And he never showed up at the gold mine?"
One-eye Allen spread his leathery palms in a Mexican gesture expressing ignorance.
"Quien sabe? You see, I didn't have a map, figgerin' I could never lose that claim. One reason Warren drew it was to have a map to file with the recorder. If Warren went back to the gold mine, instead of meetin' me in Marfa like he agreed, I don't know. As I said, he vanished like the earth had swallered him. An' I been huntin' that lost gold strike ever since."
Hap Kingman whistled w
ith awe.
"You mean you never located—"
One-eye Allen chuckled at Kingman's incredulity.
"It's easy enough to lose a thing like a gold claim, out in the Sierra Secos, son." The prospector grinned ruefully. "All the ridges look alike. A man could wander a lifetime an' never cover half the arroyos an' dry creek beds. I been at it eighteen years now with nary a glimpse of the canyon we located. Mebbe I been within a stone's throw of it—quien sabe?"
Hap Kingman was conscious of a strange pounding in his chest, as old memories stirred there.
"This was eighteen years ago?"
"Si. An' now you turn up, Hap. The spittin' image o' Warren Allen. I'd stake my bottom dollar you're the son of Warren an' Eleanor. That'd make me yore uncle—not that I expect you to whoop with delight at findin' that out. I ain't worth a red cent."
Hap Kingman inhaled deeply.
"Allen," he whispered tensely, "what memories I have of my babyhood are plenty thin, by now. But my mother's name was Eleanor—that I do know. I can remember my dad callin' her that. The night they were murdered by a masked hombre. It was in Mexitex town, up the river from Presidio. That must have been where my mother went in her wagon, after that smallpox broke out."
Speaking swiftly, excitedly, Hap Kingman told One-eye Allen what little he knew of his own past— the past that lay before that unforgettable night of horror eighteen years ago, when he had been orphaned by a killer's gun.
"As soon as this busted leg is well, Allen, you an' I are headin' back to Mexitex town," vowed the cowboy. "I got a hunch we're goin to get to the bottom of what made your brother vanish off the face of the earth, why he never kept his date with you at Marfa. Things are too tangled up and complicated for me to figger out the savvy of it now, but I got a hunch we'll be able to prove that Warren Allen was my father—and I think I know the hombre who did the mixin' up of my destiny."
A little group of bareheaded men and women filed out of the cemetery on the outskirts of Mexitex town, situated on the crest of a bluff overlooking the sluggish Rio Grande.
Dan Kendelhardt, the deputy coroner of Yaqui County and now the only undertaker in the cow town, had just finished tamping the clods over an oblong mound of freshly dug earth.
Bushwack Bullets Page 13
