Desert Death-Song

by Louis L'Amour

  They knew how a backshooter lived and worked. He had his brand on everything he did. The mark of this man was the mark of a man who did things, who stood upon his own two feet, and who if he died, died facing his enemy. To the unknowing, such conclusions might seem doubtful, but the men of the desert knew their kind.

  The mill was dark and silent, a great looming bulk beside the stream and the still pool of the mill pond. They dismounted and eased close. Then according to a prearranged plan, they scattered and surrounded it. From behind a lodgepole pine, Hardin called out.

  “We’re comin’ in, Lock! We want you!”

  The challenge was harsh and ringing. Now that the moment had come something of the old suspense returned. They listened to the water babbling as it trickled over the old dam, and then they moved. At their first step, they heard Lock’s voice.

  “Don’t come in here, boys! I don’t want to kill none of you, but you come an’ I will! That was a fair shootin’! You’ve got no call to come after me!”

  Hardin hesitated, chewing his mustache. “You shot him in the back!” he yelled.

  “No such thing! He was a-facin’ the bar when I come in. He seen I was heeled, an’ he drawed as he turned. I beat him to it. My first shot took him in the side an’ he was knocked back against the bar. My second hit him in the back an’ the third missed as he was a fallin’. You hombres didn’t see that right.”

  The sound of his voice trailed off and the water chuckled over the stones, then sighed to a murmur among the trees. The logic of Locke’s statement struck them all. It could have been that way. A long moment passed, and then Hardin spoke up again. “You come in an’ we’ll give you a trial. Fair an’ square!”

  “How?” Lock’s voice was a challenge. “You ain’t got no witness. Neither have I. Ain’t nobody to say what happened there but me, as Johnny ain’t alive.”

  “Johnny was a mighty good man, an’ he was our friend!” Short shouted. “No murderin’ squatter is goin’ to move into this country an’ start shootin’ folks up!”

  There was no reply to that, and they waited, hesitating a little. Neill leaned disconsolately against the tree where he stood. After all, Lock might be telling the truth. How did they know? There was no use hanging a man unless you were sure.

  “Gab!” Short’s comment was explosive. “Let’s move in, Hardin! Let’s get him! He’s lyin’! Nobody could beat Johnny, we know that!” “Webb was a good man in his own country!” Lock shouted in reply. The momentary silence that followed held them, and then, almost as a man they began moving in. Neill did not know exactly when or why he started. Inside he felt sick and empty. He was fed up on the whole business and every instinct he had told him this man was no backshooter.

  Carefully, they moved, for they knew this man was handy with a gun. Suddenly, Hardin’s voice rang out.

  “Hold it, men! Stay where you are until daybreak! Keep your eyes open an’ your ears. If he gets out of here he’ll be lucky, an’ in the daylight we can get him, or fire the mill!”

  Neill sank to a sitting position behind a log. Relief was a great warmth that swept over him. There wouldn’t be any killing tonight. Not tonight, at least.

  Yet as the hours passed, his ears grew more and more attuned to the darkness. A rabbit rustled, a pine cone dropped from a tree, the wind stirred high in the pine tops and the few stars winked through, lonesomely peering down upon the silent men.

  With daylight they moved in and they went through the doors and up to the windows of the old mill, and it was empty and still. They stared at each other, and Short swore viciously, the sound booming in the echoing, empty room.

  “Let’s go down to the Sorenson place,” Kimmel said. “He’ll be there.”

  And somehow they were all very sure he would be. They knew he would be because they knew him for their kind of man. He would retreat no further than his own ranch, his own hearth. There, if they were to have him and hang him, they would have to burn him out, and men would die in the process. Yet with these men there was no fear. They felt the drive of duty, the need for maintaining some law in this lonely desert and mountain land. There was only doubt which had grown until each man was shaken with it. Even Short, whom the markers by the trail had angered, and Kesney, who was the best tracker among them, even better than Hardin, and had been irritated by it, too.

  The sun was up and warming them when they rode over the brow of the hill and had looked down into the parched basin where the Sorenson place lay.

  But it was no parched basin. Hardin drew up so suddenly his startled horse almost reared. It was no longer the Sorenson place.

  The house had been patched and rebuilt. The roof had spots of new lumber upon it, and the old pole barn had been made water tight and strong. A new corral had been built, and to the right of the house was a fenced in garden of vegetables, green and pretty after the desert of the day before.

  Thoughtfully, and in a tight cavalcade, they rode down the hill. The stock they saw was fat and healthy, and the corral was filled with horses.

  “Been a lot of work done here,” Kimmel said. And he knew how much work it took to make such a place attractive.

  “Don’t look like no killer’s place!” Neill burst out. Then he flushed and drew back, embarrassed by his statement. He was the youngest of these men, and the newest in the country.

  No response was forthcoming. He had but stated what they all believed. There was something stable, lasting, something real and genuine in this place.

  “I been waitin’ for you.”

  The remark from behind them stiffened every spine. Chat Lock was here, behind them. And he would have a gun on them, and if one of them moved, he could die.

  “My wife’s down there fixin’ breakfast. I told her I had some friends comin’ in. A posse huntin’ a killer. I’ve told her nothin’ about this trouble. You ride down there now, you keep your guns. You eat your breakfast and then if you feel bound and determined to get somebody for a fair shootin’, I’ll come out with anyone of you or all of you, but I ain’t goin’ to hang.

  “I ain’t namin’ no one man because I don’t want to force no fight on anybody. You ride down there now.”

  They rode, and in the dooryard, they dismounted. Neill turned them, and for the first time he saw Chat Lock.

  He was a big man, compact and strong. His rusty brown hair topped a brown, sun-hardened face but with the warmth in his eyes it was friendly sort of face. Not at all what he expected.

  Hardin looked at him. “You made some changes here.”

  “I reckon.” Lock gestured toward the well. “Dug by hand. My wife worked the windlass.” He looked around at them, taking them in with one sweep of his eyes. “I’ve got the grandest woman in the world.”

  Neill felt hot tears in his eyes suddenly, and busied himself loosening his saddle girth to keep the others from seeing. That was the way he felt about Mary.

  The door opened suddenly, and they turned. The sight of a woman in this desert country was enough to make any man turn. What they saw was not what they expected. She was young, perhaps in her middle twenties, and she was pretty, with brown wavy hair and gray eyes and a few freckles on her nose. “Won’t you come in? Chat told me he had some friends coming for breakfast, and it isn’t often we have anybody in.”

  Heavy footed and shamefaced they walked up on the porch. Kesney saw the care and neatness with which the hard hewn planks had been fitted. Here, too, was the same evidence of lasting, of permanence, of strength. This was the sort of man a country needed. He thought the thought before he fixed his attention to it, and then he flushed.

  Inside, the room was as neat as the girl herself. How did she get the floors so clean? Before he thought, he phrased the question. She smiled.

  “Oh, that was Chat’s idea! He made a frame and fastened a piece of pumice stone to a stick. It cuts into all the cracks and keeps them very clean.”

  The food smelled good, and when Hardin looked at his hands, Chat motioned to the door. />
  “There’s water an’ towels if you want to wash up.”

  Neill rolled up his sleeves and dipped his hands in the basin. The water was soft, and that was rare in this country, and the soap felt good on his hands. When he had dried his hands, he walked in. Hardin and Kesney had already seated themselves and Lock’s wife was pouring coffee.

  “Men,” Lock said, “this is Mary. You’ll have to tell her your names. I reckon I missed them.”

  Mary. Neill looked up. She was Mary, too. He looked down at his plate again and ate a few bites. When he looked up, she was smiling at him.

  “My wife’s name is Mary,” he said, “she’s a fine girl!”

  “She would be! But why don’t you bring her over? I haven’t talked with a woman in so long I wouldn’t know how it seemed! Chat, why haven’t you invited them over?”

  Chat mumbled something, and Neill stared at his coffee. The men ate in uncomfortable silence. Hardin’s eyes kept shifting around the room. That pumice stone. He’d have to fix up a deal like that for Jane. She was always fussing about the work of keeping a board floor clean. That wash stand inside, too, with pipes made of hollow logs to carry the water out so she wouldn’t have to be running back and forth. That was an idea, too.

  They finished their meal reluctantly. One by one they trooped outside, avoiding each other’s eyes. Chat Lock did not keep them waiting. He walked down among them.

  “If there’s to be shootin’,” he said quietly, “let’s get away from the house.”

  Hardin looked up. “Lock, was that right, what you said in the mill, was it a fair shootin’?”

  Lock nodded. “It was. Johnny Webb prodded me. I didn’t want trouble, nor did I want to hide behind the fact I wasn’t packin’ an iron. I walked over to the saloon not aimin’ for trouble. I aimed to give him a chance if he wanted it. He drawed an’ I beat him. It was a fair shootin’.”

  “All right.” Hardin nodded. “That’s good enough for me. I reckon you’re a different sort of man than any of us figured.” “Let’s mount up,” Short said, “I got fence to build.”

  Chat Lock put his hand on Hardin’s saddle. “You folks come over some time. She gets right lonesome. I don’t mind it so much, but you know how women folks are.”

  “Sure,” Hardin said, “sure thing.”

  “An’ you bring your Mary over,” he told Neill.

  Neill nodded, his throat full. As they mounted the hill, he glanced back. Mary Lock was standing in the door way, waving to them, and the sunlight was very bright in the clean swept door yard.

  TRAP OF GOLD

  Wetherton had been three months out of Horsehead before he found his first color. At first it was a few scattered grains taken from the base of an alluvial fan where millions of tons of sand and silt had washed down from a chain of rugged peaks; yet the gold was ragged under the magnifying glass.

  Gold that has carried any distance becomes worn and polished by the abrasive action of the accompanying rocks and sand, so this could not have been carried far. With caution born of harsh experience he seated himself and lighted his pipe, yet excitement was strong within him.

  A contemplative man by nature, experience had taught him how a man may be deluded by hope, yet all his instincts told him the source of the gold was somewhere on the mountain above. It could have come down the wash that skirted the base of the mountain, but the ragged condition of the gold made that improbable.

  The base of the fan was a half-mile across and hundreds of feet thick, built of silt and sand washed down by centuries of erosion among the higher peaks. The point of the wide V of the fan lay between two towering upthrusts of granite, but from where Wetherton sat he could see that the actual source of the fan lay much higher.

  Wetherton made camp near a tiny spring west of the fan, then picketed his burros and began his climb. When he was well over two thousand feet higher he stopped, resting again, and while resting he dry-panned some of the silt. Surprisingly, there were more than a few grains of gold even in that first pan, so he continued his climb, and passed at last between the towering portals of the granite columns.

  Above this natural gate were three smaller alluvial fans that joined at the gate to pour into the greater fan below. Dry-panning two of these brought no results, but the third, even by the relatively poor method of dry-panning, showed a dozen colors, all of good size.

  The head of this fan lay in a gigantic crack in a granite upthrust that resembled a fantastic ruin. Pausing to catch his breath, his gaze wandered along the base of this upthrust, and right before him the crumbling granite was slashed with a vein of quartz that was liberally laced with gold!

  Struggling nearer through the loose sand, his heart pounding more from excitement than from altitude and exertion, he came to an abrupt stop. The band of quartz was six feet wide and that six feet was cobwebbed with gold.

  It was unbelievable, but here it was.

  Yet even in this moment of success, something about the beetling cliff stopped him from going forward. His innate caution took hold and he drew back to examine it at greater length. Wary of what he saw, he circled the batholith and then climbed to the ridge behind it from which he could look down upon the roof. What he saw from there left him dry-mouth and jittery.

  The granite batholith was obviously a part of a much older range, one that had weathered and worn, suffered from shock and twisting until finally this tower of granite had been violently upthrust, leaving it standing, a shaky ruin among younger and sturdier peaks. In the process the rock had been shattered and riven by mighty forces until it had become a miner’s horror. Wetherton stared, fascinated by the prospect. With enormous wealth here for the taking, every ounce must be taken at the risk of life.

  One stick of powder might bring the whole crumbling mass down in a heap, and it loomed all of three hundred feet above its base in the fan. The roof of the batholith was riven with gigantic cracks, literally seamed with breaks like the wall of an ancient building that has remained standing after heavy bombing. Walking back to the base of the tower. Wetherton found he could actually break loose chunks of the quartz with his fingers.

  The vein itself lay on the downhill side and at the very base. The outer wall of the upthrust was sharply tilted so that a man working at the vein would be cutting his way into the very foundations of the tower, and any single blow of the pick might bring the whole mass down upon him. Furthermore, if the rock did fall, the vein would be hopelessly buried under thousands of tons of rock and lost without the expenditure of much more capital than he could command. And at this moment Wetherton’s total of money in hand amounted to slightly less than forty dollars.

  Thirty yards from the face he seated himself upon the sand and filled his pipe once more. A man might take tons out of there without trouble, and yet it might collapse at the first blow. Yet he knew he had no choice. He needed money and it lay here before him. Even if he were at first successful there were two things he must avoid. The first was tolerance of danger that might bring carelessness; the second, that urge to go back for that ‘little bit more’ that could kill him.

  It was well into the afternoon and he had not eaten, yet he was not hungry. He circled the batholith, studying it from every angle only to reach the conclusion that his first estimate had been correct. The only way to get to the gold was to go into the very shadow of the leaning wall and attack it at its base, digging it out by main strength. From where he stood it seemed ridiculous that a mere man with a pick could topple that mass of rock, yet he knew how delicate such a balance could be.

  The batholith was situated on what might be described as the military crest of the ridge, and the alluvial fan sloped steeply away from its lower side, steeper than a steep stairway. The top of the leaning wall over-shadowed the top of the fan, and if it started to crumble and a man had warning, he might run to the north with a bare chance of escape. The soft sand in which he must run would be an impediment, but that could be alleviated by making a walk from flat rocks sunk
en into the sand.

  It was dark when he returned to his camp. Deliberately, he had not permitted himself to begin work, not by so much as a sample. He must be deliberate in all his actions, and never for a second should he forget the mass that towered above him. A split second of hesitation when the crash came—and he accepted it as inevitable—would mean burial under tons of crumbled rock.

  The following morning he picketed his burros on a small meadow near the spring, cleaned the spring itself and prepared a lunch. Then he removed his shirt, drew on a pair of gloves and walked to the face of the cliff. Yet even then he did not begin, knowing that upon this habit of care and deliberation might depend not only his success in the venture, but life itself. He gathered flat stones and began building his walk. “When you start moving,” he told himself, “you’ll have to be fast.”

  Finally, and with infinite care, he began tapping at the quartz, enlarging cracks with the pick, removing fragments, then prying loose whole chunks. He did not swing the pick, but used it as a lever. The quartz was rotten, and a man might obtain a considerable amount by this method of picking or even pulling with the hands. When he had a sack filled with the richest quartz he carried it over his path to a safe place beyond the shadow of the tower. Returning, he tamped a few more flat rocks into his path, and began on the second sack. He worked with greater care than was, perhaps, essential. He was not and had never been a gambling man.

  In the present operation he was taking a carefully calculated risk in which every eventuality had been weighed and judged. He needed the money and he intended to have it; he had a good idea of his chances of success, but knew that his gravest danger was to become too greedy, too much engrossed in his task.

  Dragging the two sacks down the hill, he found a flat block of stone and with a single jack proceeded to break up the quartz. It was a slow and a hard job but he had no better means of extracting the gold. After breaking or crushing the quartz much of the gold could be separated by a knife blade, for it was amazingly concentrated. With water from the spring Wetherton panned the remainder until it was too dark to see.