But Fong had again retreated to a dark place and was still.
“Who appointed you guardian,” Flintlock said, his anger flaring again. “Or did you just take it on yourself?”
The old man took the earthenware jug from the shelf and the two cups. He poured wine into both, as red as blood.
“Drink, it will do you good,” he said, extending the cup.
Flintlock took it and sniffed the wine suspiciously.
The old man smiled. “It is not poisoned. See”—he took a sip—“it did me no harm.”
The wine was rough, but Flintlock drank, for politeness’s sake. Or so he told himself. In fact he wished to calm his clamoring nerves.
The old man had an unearthliness about him that set Flintlock on edge.
“Before me there were fifty guardians,” he said. “I am the fifty-first and I will be the last.”
“Why all the guardians?” Flintlock said.
“To warn greedy men away from the cave and the gas that kills.”
“You’re a monk, huh?”
“No, not a monk.”
“Then what?”
“A guardian.”
“Well, that’s a lot of help,” Flintlock said.
Then, out of the blue, the old man said, “Do you smoke tobacco?”
Surprised, Flintlock said, “Yeah, I do. I was taught to roll cigarettes by Texans who are much addicted to them.”
“Ah,” the old man said. “I don’t know these cigarettes, but perhaps you will roll one for me?”
“Sure,” Flintlock said. He got out his tobacco sack and papers and said, “When did you last have a smoke, pops?”
The old man counted on his fingers. “Sixty years. Before I was made guardian. I had a pipe once, a beautiful pipe. It was a Spanish clay pipe and I enjoyed it immensely.”
Flintlock stuck the cigarette between the old man’s pale lips and lit it.
“Well, enjoy it,” he said.
The old man drew deep, smiled and behind a cloud of blue smoke, said, “Ahh . . . it’s even better than I remembered.”
Then he surprised Flintlock again.
The old man again struggled onto his creaking knees beside Charlie Fong. He drew deep on the cigarette, and then gently blew the smoke into the unconscious man’s nose.
He did it a second time.
And then a third.
Long moments passed. Rain slanted across the mouth of the cave and lightning flashed, searing the hillside. Thunder roared and Flintlock felt the cave floor tremble under his feet. Dust drifted from cracks in the roof and he thought he heard the growl of grinding rock from . . .
Outside!
It had to be!
Flintlock’s hair stood on end. My God, the hanging rock shelf above the cave entrance was shifting....
But then the ground under his feet stilled and the only threatening sounds were made by the storm.
Flintlock blinked. Had he imagined the whole thing?
Maybe. Or maybe not.
Charlie Fong made a small noise in his throat and his eyes fluttered open.
“He has come back,” the old man said. “He will live.”
Flintlock kneeled beside Fong and said, “Charlie, are you all right?”
“Where am I?” Fong said.
“In the cave of the golden bell,” Flintlock said. “The poison gas got to you.”
“It didn’t kill me?”
“No. You’re alive, Charlie, I promise.”
Charlie Fong looked into Flintlock’s face and grinned. “Sam, old Barnabas says you’re an idiot.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Asa Pagg was fifteen miles north of Buffalo Pass in the rugged red butte country when he experienced the familiar, uneasy feeling that he was being watched.
Horse Mesa was two miles ahead of him when he drew rein.
The instincts of a dangerous, hunted animal warned Pagg that there was someone on his back trail, close enough to have sight of him.
He swung his horse around, and as he expected, two riders were heading toward him through rain and wind.
Pagg grinned. There was no mistaking Logan Dean’s flashy paint and beside him, hunched in the saddle reading a poetry book the way he always rode, Joe Harte on his big American stud. He’d made a tent of the front of his slicker to protect the book and had no eyes for the trail.
But Logan Dean was aware. And when he spotted Pagg he punched Harte on the shoulder to get his attention.
Harte looked up, blinked, and said, “It’s Asa, as ever was.”
“Yeah, and we got some explaining to do,” Dean said.
“You boys got some explaining to do,” Pagg said. “I’m trying to decide if I should listen, or shoot you off’n them ponies.”
“Over there, Asa,” Dean said. He nodded toward a natural sandstone arch that promised shelter. “Let’s get the hell out of the rain.”
“You two ride ahead of me,” Pagg said. “I got a bounty on my head and maybe you got a mind to collect it.”
“You can trust us, Asa,” Dean said. “Me an’ Joe are true-blue.”
“Maybe. But all the same, ride in front of me,” Pagg said.
The span of the arch was only about twenty feet and about ten wide, but it was enough to keep off the worst of the rain and the cutting wind.
When the lightning played on Pagg’s face it looked like glistening stone. “All right, why did you run out on me?” he said.
Harte looked at Dean and his eyes pleaded with him to do the talking.
“It was like this, Asa,” Dean said. “After you done the colonel’s wife—”
“She wanted it,” Pagg said.
“—and was tossed in the brig, some hard talk was thrown in our direction, on account of you an’ us bein’ almost like kin, Asa,” Dean said.
“So you skedaddled and left me to face the music, huh?” Pagg said.
“When I heard what had happened to you, Asa,” Harte said, “I thought my heart was going to break. Poor ‘trampled man with smarting wounds.’” The gunman smiled. “The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote them words.”
Pagg ignored that and stared at Dean. “You didn’t try to spring me, Logan.”
“Asa, there were too many soldiers and you were padlocked in tight,” Dean said. “We’d no chance to help you make a break.”
“You heard about the Apache attack?” Pagg said.
He looked as though he was weighing something in his mind, and that set Dean on edge.
“Heard about that and we was right sorry, ain’t that the truth, Joe,” he said.
“True as ever was, Logan,” Harte said. “But by the time we heard, it was all over and you were a hounded fugitive, Asa.”
Dean, fearing Pagg’s volcanic temper, tried to steer the conversation into safer waters.
“Heard something else, Asa. There’s a heap of talk goin’ on around these parts.”
“About what?” Pagg said.
“Do you recollect Abe Roper talking about a golden bell somewhere up in the Red Valley? Well, it turns out it could be true.”
“How come that?” Pagg said.
“It seems a prospector started jawing about the bell and showed a map to the place where he said it’s hid,” Dean said. “We heard a bunch of tinpans already headed up that way to take a look, but were wiped out by Apaches before they even got close to the valley.”
“Who told you all this?” Pagg said. He felt a little twinge of worry.
“We got it from miners at a trading post over to the Tohatchi Flats country,” Joe Harte said. “There’s talk of a gold rush. It’s like all of a sudden folks are saying that the bell is real and it’s there for the taking by anyone lucky enough to find it.”
“Two thousand pounds of gold is hidden in a cave, Asa,” Dean said. “That’s what they’re sayin’.”
“So why are you telling me this, Logan?” Pagg said. “Because it makes a good story, maybe?”
“You know what it took for me and Joe t
o find you, Asa?”
“Tell me.”
“Three dead cavalry troopers. The one that got away said they’d been bushwhacked up near White Cone Mountain by bandits led by a man that matched your description. We figured it was you, Asa, then a man-woman at the trading post north of Buffalo Pass said he’d seen you, that you’d killed a man and then headed north toward the valley.”
“And here we are,” Harte said.
“The man I killed gave me this,” Pagg said as he touched his battered face. “It was his mistake. Now you’ve told me how you found me, now tell me why.”
“The why is easy, Asa. So we can go get the golden bell afore an army of tinpans is crawlin’ all over them mountains up there,” Dean said.
Pagg decided to be affable. He’d kill Harte and Dean after they helped him get the bell, not before.
“You’ve bested me, boys,” he said, smiling. “That’s the very thing I was plannin’ on doing my ownself.”
Harte echoed Pagg’s smile. “Then we’re well met,” he said.
“If the bell exists, and that’s a big if, there’s always the chance that Abe Roper and Sam Flintlock already have it,” Pagg said.
“So we put the crawl on them two and take it,” Dean said. He shrugged. “Or gun them if we have to.”
“Joe, that set all right with you?” Pagg said.
“Suits me just fine, Asa. We split the gold three ways, right?”
“Of course. We’re partners, ain’t we?” Pagg said.
“Then let’s go get that damned bell and make ourselves rich,” Logan Dean said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
A bullet spaaanged off the inside wall of the cave and then bounced around like an angry hornet in a box.
“What the hell!” Sam Flintlock said. “Charlie, you stay right where you’re at.”
“I’m not going anyplace, Sam,” Charlie Fong said to Flintlock’s retreating back.
Flintlock ran to the cave mouth, his Colt hammer-back and ready in his hand. He hit the ground, rolled to his right and then came up on one knee, his eyes on the slope.
“Halloo,” Abe Roper yelled. “Can you hear me, Sammy?”
“Damn you, Abe!” Flintlock called. “You could’ve killed us.”
“I had to get your attention, Sammy,” Roper said. “I can’t walk up the rise, me feeling as bad as I do.”
He was leaning on his rifle, using it like a cane, and his head was bent as though breathing came hard to him.
“I’m bringing Charlie down,” Flintlock said.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yeah, he is. Lucky for you, Abe. You must be saying your prayers at night.”
Flintlock stepped into the cave. There was no sign of the old man.
“I’m taking you out of here, Charlie,” he said.
“Hell, Sam, I can’t walk.”
“I know. I’ll carry you.”
“I’m too heavy for you,” Fong said. “You could fall real easy.”
“You’re a little Chinaman. How heavy can you be?” Flintlock said.
He lifted Fong effortlessly and carried him like a man would carry a child, toward the entrance of the cave.
“Grab my Hawken from the wall there, Charlie,” he said. “Can you hold it?”
Fong nodded, reached out and picked up the rifle. He laid it across his belly and said, “Got it, Sam. Let us proceed.”
“Abe!” Flintlock yelled when he walked out of the cave. “Shoot at us again and I swear I’ll gun you right where you stand.”
Roper said nothing, but he waved and stepped away, leaning heavily on the Winchester. He looked like a man carrying a burden on his shoulders.
“What do you mean they just lit out?” Flintlock said.
“Sammy, I don’t know rightly what happened,” Abe Roper said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, I do know. After you left to get Charlie I must’ve passed out. When I woke, they were gone and so were their horses.”
Flintlock said to Ayasha, “You didn’t try to stop them?”
“They’re afraid of the thing in the cave,” the girl said. “They wanted me to go with them, but I wouldn’t. No, I couldn’t stop them, Sam.”
Flintlock again turned his attention to Roper. “So we got two little Chinese girls wandering out there in the wilderness somewhere?”
Roper nodded, his face a mask of misery. “I reckon that’s how it stacks up, Sam’l.”
“Damn you, Abe,” Flintlock said. “I should’ve shot you years ago.”
Charlie Fong was lying beside the fire, fat raindrops filtering through the pines splashing on his blanket. Now he got up on an elbow and said, “Sam, I’ll help you find them.”
“Not a chance, Charlie,” Flintlock said. “You’re still too sick. I’ll go after them.”
“The ground’s soft, Sammy,” Roper said. “They’ll be easy to track.”
“I figured that out for my ownself, Abe,” Flintlock said. He was still angry at Roper and it showed.
The girls’ tracks headed due east into the high desert country.
The only settlement of any size was at least fifty miles away and the chances of two young girls getting there alive were slim.
It consoled Flintlock to recall that the army was scouting the area, rounding up bronco Apaches. Maybe the girls would bump into a cavalry patrol.
But this was a country of vast, lonely distances, of scarred, somber peaks, shadowed canyons and long winds. The land was harsh and unforgiving and could kill a grown man a hundred different ways.
The odds were not in the girls’ favor, and Flintlock knew it.
One thing he had going for him was that they were not far ahead of him, and, despite the downpour, their tracks were fresh.
Buttoned up into his slicker, rainwater running off the brim of his hat, Flintlock stuck doggedly to the trail east, even though the devil of impatience rode him.
And a slow-burning anger.
Roper and Charlie Fong had ignored his warning about the cave and both were now sick and would probably take at least a couple of days to recover. Right then they were in no shape to defend themselves . . . and the Apaches were still out. Ayasha clung to him, mentally fragile and vulnerable, and he needed to be with her, now more than ever.
What he didn’t need was to chase two hysterical young girls across a rain-lashed, broken land where humans, white or Indian, rarely ventured.
Sam Flintlock clenched his teeth. Damnit, it seemed problems had piled up on him.
But what he didn’t know then was that were more to come....
Flintlock was ten miles east of the Red Valley when it dawned on him that he wasn’t closing the distance between himself and the fleeing Chinese girls.
Their horses bore a lighter burden than his and they were putting a heap of distance between him and the sisters.
He was reluctant to tire out his mount and kept the sorrel reined to a distance-eating walk. But his progress was slow and he reckoned there were only about four hours of daylight left. It was little enough time.
When Flintlock reached Shiprock Wash he saw a cabin on the east bank, its pine log structure almost invisible behind the relentless march of the rain.
It was an obvious place for the girls to hole up for the night.
Habits of a lifetime die hard, and Flintlock unbuttoned his slicker to clear the way to his Colt. He kneed his horse forward.
No smoke came from the cabin’s chimney and the door was hanging aslant on one hinge. The glass in the only window was bullet pocked and a dead hog lay in the mud outside. A screeching windmill still turned at the back and nearby a dead cottonwood raised skeletal fingers to the sky.
Wary now, Flintlock swung out of the saddle and advanced the remaining fifty yards to the cabin on foot, taking advantage of the little cover available.
The smell hit him when he was still a dozen yards away.
Flintlock drew his gun. Was it the hog? Or dead men?
He stepped to the door, jer
ked it wide and looked inside.
The two dead men lay sprawled on the floor, one gray, the other a young towhead. Their faces were distorted in death, but the men looked remarkably alike. Father and son miners, Flintlock told himself, and they’d both been shot multiple times.
Flintlock’s immediate reaction was to pin the killings on the Apaches.
He’d thought Geronimo would be in the Sierra Madres by now, content to raid into Mexico, until the U.S. Army gave up the chase and returned to barracks.
But had he in fact swung north?
Apaches were the most notional people on God’s earth, and there was no guessing what a man like Geronimo would do.
Then Flintlock studied the cabin more closely.
The place had been ransacked; something young Apache bucks would do as they searched for guns, ammunition and trinkets.
But the floorboards had been pulled up and the sod roof had been probed with a broom handle. No Apache would’ve done that. But white men on the hunt for gold certainly would.
The dead men were tinpans and they’d been murdered because their killers suspected they’d a stash of dust hidden somewhere in the cabin.
The rank, sweet stench of decay sickened Flintlock and he backed out of the door . . . into the hard, impersonal muzzle of a rifle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“Sam Flintlock, my friend,” Carlos Hernandez said. “How good it is to see you again.” He held up his right hand, the fingers curled into a claw. “See, my wrist is getting better, but—this is very sad—my hand, he is withering.”
The Mexican had eight men with him—and two girls.
The Chinese sisters sat miserable and soaking wet on their horses, guarded by a huge bandit with a scarred face and a bad attitude. When the man turned his nail keg of a head and stared at Flintlock his black eyes glowed with murder.
Flintlock had no cards to play. He knew he was already a dead man.
“Carlos, let the girls go,” he said. “Your business is with me.”
Hernandez smiled, the diamonds in his teeth catching the thin light of the gloomy day. “You are so right, my friend, my business is with you . . . and it is a business that will take a long, long time.”
Flintlock Page 24
