by Peter Dawson
He reached down to take her hand and lift his arm away, and as he moved to the seat’s edge, she realized she had once again said the wrong thing. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Dan! It’s just that you’re running such risks in staying here.” She clung tightly to his hand. “This woman isn’t worth it! Aren’t things bad enough for you as they are?”
“A man does what he sees he has to.”
“But she’s only taking advantage of you!”
“We’ll see,” he drawled, stepping aground. He glanced at her briefly to say — “McCune will take you back home.” — before he turned up the steps. He didn’t pause or look back on his way in across the platform to Mike Clears’s office door.
He found Tim McCune alone in there, and his voice was gruff as he said: “She’s ready to go back now. And not a word to her about tonight.”
McCune’s look was uncomfortable. “Guess I told her too much, Captain.”
“No, it’s not that. We’re just being careful.”
The sergeant went to the alley door. “You said eight, Captain?”
Gentry nodded. “Eight.” But then, as McCune was reaching for the door, he said: “Wait a minute, Tim.” After a slight pause, he asked: “Did you hear about last night?”
“About Shotwell?”
“No, about my tangling with Ash up there at the gate.”
“No.”
Gentry gave a slow tilt of the head. “We had a scrap. Johnny Ewing wound it up by clubbing me with his rifle.” McCune’s look was instantly outraged; and at that Gentry asked: “Why would Ewing side with Caleb? He tried to kill me.”
The sergeant burst out: “I’ve been itching to whittle that lad down to size. Now I’ll....”
“But what I’m after is why he’d jump me when Ash called for him to do it,” Gentry interrupted. “Why would he?”
McCune lifted hands outward in an unknowing gesture. “Search me.” Abruptly he frowned. “Unless....”
When he didn’t go on, Gentry asked: “Unless what?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the sergeant said: “You know about the game Ash runs in his barn every pay day, how slick he is with the cards? Well, a couple weeks ago I heard he was into some of the boys for some real money. Ewing owed him close to two hundred. Which is probably why Johnny’s turned up sober the last few times he was paid. But then last week he got paid and hit the booze again. It got me to wondering. How could he if he owes Ash?”
Gentry’s look was a deeply thoughtful one. And shortly he mused aloud: “It could be. Ewing could have passed the word to him.”
McCune stiffened, instantly catching his meaning. “So he could,” he breathed. “He knew about our going to Fort Starke, knew about bringing the remounts back. He told Ash, and Ash got the word to the Apaches.”
“Maybe, Tim. Just maybe.” Gentry sighed, saying then: “Keep an eye on Ewing. You may run across something.”
“I’ve had my eye on him, sir.”
Gentry nodded. “Good. Now you’d better get out there to Missus Fitzhugh.”
McCune started to salute, but Gentry’s shake of the head cut him short, and he went out. And afterward Gentry took the chair at the desk, contemplating something that etched a deep gravity across his face.
* * * * *
The sun broke through just before it set, reflecting from the cloud mass lifting off Sentinel a last burst of brilliant orange light that sharpened the colors along the cañon — the light emerald of the aspen, the darker shade of pine, the yellow-brown undulations of the placers. The air was sharp, chill, laden with a heady freshness that bore strongly the pleasing taint of newly washed earth.
Caleb Ash worked through the dusk and then on into the evening by lantern light, nailing down tar paper he had this morning hastily spread over the unshingled sheathing on the roof of his hardware store to protect it from the rain. Ned Stroble was the last stable hand to leave, and as he was closing the big gates, he called up: “Any word on when we start unloading those wagons, boss?”
“None.” Ash swore soundly. “But we do it tomorrow regardless.”
Stroble said: “Good. To hell with those Army stuffed shirts.” And he turned and walked off down the muddy street.
At about this time Tim McCune, bellied up to the bar in the Lucky Find, saw the man he had been waiting for come in through the swing doors. He was in luck, for Trooper Andrews spotted him standing there and pushed this way through the crowd. As he came in alongside, Andrews said pleasantly: “Man needs something to thaw out his gizzard on a night like this, eh, Sergeant? Thought this was summer.”
“Think again,” McCune said. Then, as Andrews was nodding to an apron, asking for a bottle, McCune asked: “Did you find him?”
Andrews looked around.
“Find who?”
“Ash. Caleb Ash. I hear you were looking for him.”
“Not me.”
McCune scowled. “You mean to say you weren’t just in here asking where you could locate Ash?” When Andrews had shaken his head, McCune muttered: “Guess this gent that told me about it mistook some other bird for you.” He eyed the trooper obliquely a moment, then abruptly said: “Look, Andrews. Do me a favor. Whoever was looking for Ash said it was important. The major wants to see him right away. If you’ll go up there to the yard and make sure he got the word, your drink’s on me when you get back. And don’t mention me, or Ash won’t pay any attention. We don’t get on too well.”
“He and me, either,” Andrews said, turning from the counter. “Be back in five minutes.” And he headed for the street.
McCune turned slowly then and glanced back toward Mike Clears’s office. Gentry was leaning there in the shadows by the door, and now McCune tilted his head in a slow, unmistakable nod. He waited until he saw Gentry disappear into the office. Then, picking up his drink, he sighed gustily. His hand was shaking.
Ash was still on the roof of his new building when Andrews walked up out of the darkness and called to him. The scout listened to the trooper’s story. Someone, Andrews didn’t know who, was looking for him to take him up to see Fitzhugh. It was urgent. No, Andrews didn’t know what it was all about; he’d heard of it second- or maybe third-hand.
Caleb Ash, astride his bay gelding, left the yard even before Andrews had had time to get back to the Lucky Find and collect his drink. And Ash hadn’t been gone quite one minute when Dan Gentry crossed the street from the shadows of a wide, vacant stretch on the far side, opened the gate, and disappeared into the yard.
Over quite an interval then subdued sounds issued from the stable lot, noises that several passers-by scarcely noticed because they were the usual to be heard from a stable — the stomp of horses, the rattle of doubletree chains, the creak of axles.
Finally Gentry appeared at the gate once more. He looked both ways along the street before he pushed the gate’s two halves wide open. He went back out of sight, then toward a high gray shape that showed against the yard’s blackness and shortly his voice sounded in an urgently spoken word, followed by the report of a whiplash.
Seconds later three teams lunging powerfully against harness pulled a canvas-shrouded Conestoga out into the street and straight across it. Close behind the first lumbering wagon came another, its tongue chained to the back axle of the first, then finally, blocking the whole width of the street, a third followed the second.
Gentry stood erect and with legs braced against the seat of the first Conestoga as he reined the teams off into the blackness across the street toward the creek. Down there some twenty minutes ago he had marked a fairly good crossing by the irregular shape of a boulder. And now as that shape came up out of the dark brushy void stretching ahead of his lead team, he swung the animals sharply left, using the whip again even though this was a downgrade and the wagons were rolling faster.
The high-bodied Conestoga lurched violent
ly as its wheels dropped into the creek, jolted over the rocky bottom, then lifted over the far bank. Seconds later Gentry used the whip mercilessly as he felt the wagon abruptly slow again, nearly stop. Almost immediately and for several seconds the horses moved the load faster as the second wagon lurched across the stream. Then there was another interval when it seemed the animals were pulling at the side of a mountain. The wagons slowed, came to a standstill.
Gradually the load started inching forward again, and now Gentry booted the brake-arm as far forward as it would go and held his weight against it. For this was a steep downgrade and the ground was rough, strewn with small boulders. Once, the wagon’s tongue slewed dangerously around to bring the off-wheel horse to his knees. It was mainly Gentry’s brute, rawhide strength on the reins that hauled the animal to its feet again.
Presently, off across the creek, the lights of the store windows let him make out the silhouettes of buildings and he took his boot from the brake, letting the horses go on at a faster trot. Somewhere close ahead were the pair of wheel ruts that crossed the stream and began climbing toward the cave mouth. He began using the whip again.
The lead Conestoga lumbered suddenly into the wheel ruts, Gentry pulled the leaders sharply right along the road, and as the teams lunged into the upgrade they slowed from a trot to a slow walk. Two figures standing beside the narrow roadway slid past in the darkness, and then, when the wagons were barely moving, Gentry called — “That’ll do it!” — and stood on the brake again.
Mike Clears and Tim McCune, both breathing heavily at the weight they carried, stepped in on the second and third wagons at Gentry’s cry. Clears dropped a sixty-pound pine log squarely behind the rear wheels of the second wagon and sighed in relief as the wheel rims rocked back against it, solidly wedged. Tim McCune had more trouble blocking the last wagon; it was only when it had jolted to a stop against its chain and slewed around two feet out of the ruts that he managed to get his log under both wheels.
They worked fast then, speaking only a word or two. Once Clears called softly — “More slack!” — and Gentry eased up on the brake to let the first wagon roll back another foot. Shortly afterward the saloon man’s voice sounded out of the shadows back there again. “Let ’er roll!” Gentry slapped his teams with the reins, using the whip once more.
The first Conestoga rolled slowly up through the darkness and finally in on the narrow shelf before the cave mouth. Gentry turned his teams into the cave and heard the canvas scrape the top of the rocky arch, heard a hickory bow snap. He drove straight on toward the feeble light of a lantern far back in the cavern, and as the horses plodded into the light Mike Clears and Tim McCune ran up alongside the wagon’s front wheels, Clears shortly calling: “This’ll do!”
They unhitched the teams and quickly took them on out and down the slope again. The second wagon seemed heavier than the first and on its way up Clears and McCune took hold of the wheel spokes and threw their strength into moving it against the hard climb.
It was when they were unhitching the teams from the second wagon that Gentry said impatiently: “We’re taking too much time! Ash knows something’s wrong by now. You two bring up that last one. Mike, where’s the crowbar?”
“Lying right outside. Can you do it alone?”
Gentry nodded and started out from the light toward the cave mouth. He had gone only several strides when he halted abruptly, asking: “What about your horses?”
“The roan’s tied down there where you wanted him. I’m leaving the mare here.”
“Is there whiskey enough down there to last you?”
“No, damn it! If there was, it’d look like I had a hand in this. It’s supposed to be a plain act of God, remember?”
“So it is,” Gentry drawled. “Give me a whistle when everything’s clear down here.” And he walked on out. He found the crowbar lying along the wall just outside the cave mouth, and as he hefted it, he stood a moment working at the buckle of his shell belt, thinking that the Colt riding his thigh would be in the way for what was to come. But then he knew that if he left the weapon anywhere but in the cave he would lose it and, since everything depended on how fast he moved from now on, he finally hurried on still wearing it.
For the first fifty yards his climb up the slope above the cave was comparatively easy. But then he reached the steeper going where the face of the rim was almost sheer and he had to pick his way slowly, often using as much of the strength of his arms as his legs in pulling himself up across the ledges. The crowbar slipped from his grasp once, and he slid downward ten feet after letting go a handhold to catch it.
Shortly he caught Mike Clears’s low whistle from below, which would mean that the last wagon was in the cave and that Clears and Tim McCune were on their way down to the creek to turn Ash’s teams out.
Finally, an endless ten minutes after the saloon man’s signal, Gentry lay belly down on a broad ledge that hung directly over the opening to the cave, a good hundred feet above it. He was gasping for breath, his chest aching as he dragged in deep lungfuls of air. But even so he got to his knees and crawled on over to the far side of the ledge, worried by the knowledge that the moving of the wagons and getting up here had taken far too long. Caleb Ash was certainly back in town by now.
Beyond the ledge’s far corner was a two-foot-wide shelf that jutted from the face of the cliff. Gentry had studied it from below at the window of Mike Clears’s office late this afternoon when he had first seen the possibility of hiding Faith Tipton’s wagons. And now as he stood on this shelf and thrust the crowbar’s tapered end into a crevice below the ledge’s top strata of crumbling sandstone, he was thinking of Faith, wondering if this gamble would give her the time she so sorely needed to prove how wrong Ash’s claim was.
He threw his weight against the crowbar and felt the heavy slab of rock lifting. Just then he heard a sifting of loose pebbles go rattling down the slope below. He paused, straightening, listening to the sound. Finally he placed it as coming from well below and in the upcañon direction he had taken in making his climb. He decided it must be either the falling of rock he had loosened in his climb or it was Mike Clears coming up here to help him.
He hunched over and levered the limestone slab upward once more, smiling at the thought of how surprised Mike Clears would shortly be if he was on his way up here. Then suddenly the night’s stillness was shattered by a shotgun’s blasting roar coming at him from out of the blackness below.
Chapter Nine
Mike Clears, waiting at the open alley window of his darkened office, went rigid as the reverberating blasts of two gunshots ripped away the heavy mantle of the night’s stillness. For perhaps five seconds as the racketing echoes ran back and forth along the cañon’s corridor, he stood there gripped by strong alarm, a sudden fear for Dan Gentry.
Then came an earth-jarring pound from high along the rim face. It was so solid that he could faintly feel the floor quiver. And immediately afterward there was a low rumble gaining in volume until shortly the air vibrated with a sound not unlike that of a big ore wagon crossing a heavy-planked bridge.
Now the whole building shook with the gathering roar. The two office doors rattled, and the metal shade on the desk lamp clanged against its braces. He could plainly hear the sharp explosive racketing of heavy boulders striking the rim’s lower ledges. Then he caught the heavy undertone of a massive slide.
Though he had been waiting for this, expecting it at any moment, the unlooked for magnitude of what was happening awed Mike Clears to a degree that left him shaken, almost disbelieving. Only when a gray fog of rock dust billowed in through the window did he stir from his paralysis of utter amazement and reach out to pull down the sash. Then, as the night out there swallowed the last dying sounds and finally turned utterly still, he remembered the gunshots once more and was again afraid, really afraid.
He was trying to understand the shots, telling himself that some drun
k on a spree must have fired them, when the first shouts echoed in off the street. Then abruptly Faith Tipton’s light step crossed the room above and the door at the head of the narrow stairway opened to let a shaft of lamplight pattern the upper part of the office’s far wall.
Though he couldn’t see the stair head, he knew Faith must be standing there, holding the lamp, listening. She was probably afraid, wanting not to be alone. She was also doubtless wanting some explanation of the terrifying sounds she had heard. But Mike Clears stood as he was, not wishing to have to explain to her just yet. He and Gentry had purposely been vague in telling her of their plans tonight. And just now, filled with apprehension for Gentry’s safety, he decided that she should know nothing of what had happened until he was sure himself of exactly what it was.
After several seconds the door up there closed, and quite plainly Clears heard her step cross the room once more. That sound irritated him. For, having gone to some pains giving Faith absolute privacy, he was reminded now that she would have little of it until he put a board over the six-inch circular flue opening in the outside corner of the office’s ceiling. Two months ago he had taken the stove out of the office, taken down the stovepipe that climbed up through the corner of his bedroom to give the only heat he ever needed up there. He had meant to cover the hole this afternoon when he and Gentry were in the room talking with Faith, but it had slipped his mind. Now he could plainly hear any sound from the room above and realized that any from down here would undoubtedly disturb Faith.
His preoccupation over this irritating oversight was abruptly ended by an excited mutter of voices in the alley. Because he knew that Faith might hear him moving around, and because he didn’t want her to know that he had been standing here all this time, he walked soundlessly across to the saloon door, opened it, slammed it, and then came back across the office to his desk with a heavy tread. He lit the lamp there and immediately went on out into the alley.
