The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  He searched his mind for an answer to this. Speculating thus, he picked up Clanton’s rifle and, with the ejector lever, yanked the shell out of the barrel of the gun, catching it in his hand.

  The shell was empty, and the percussion cap showed the dent of the firing pin. Clanton had at least got to fire one shot at the robbers.

  Why hadn’t he hit somebody? Any Ranger was a good enough shot to hit a man at short range with a rifle.

  Webster ejected the rest of the shells from the gun and counted them. Clanton had fired only once.

  He hefted the unfired shells in his hand while he speculated on this. There was something wrong here, and he could not make out what it was. But there was a thought somewhere deep in his mind, trying to force itself to the surface. It was some hardly remembered passing thought that had been unnoticed but was now trying to return to consciousness because of its importance. Webster jiggled the shells in his hand, sitting on the edge of the wagon bed, and tried to find out what it was that was attempting to get his attention.

  Then something else came to him and brought a puzzled frown to his face. He looked down at the shells in his hand, and jiggled them again. Then he took one of them and held it between his thumb and forefinger, examining it, feeling it, lifting it.

  Then he knew what was wrong with the shell; it didn’t weigh as much as a Winchester shell ought to weigh. It was too light.

  He got his pocket knife out and dug the bullet out of the shell, and turned the shell upside down over the palm of his hand.

  There was no powder in the shell!

  He looked at another of the shells and, to the eye, it seemed like a normal, live shell. But it was light, and when he opened it, it also had no powder.

  He quickly dropped the rest of the shells into his pocket and picked up the other gun—Nix’s rifle, and discovered the same trouble with it. He found the half-emptied box of shells which they had brought along and had left handy in the big box, also that the powder had been removed from every shell in the box.

  Clanton and Nix had bought their rifles in Woodbine, and they had been given dummy shells with which to fight off the outlaws!

  Now Webster knew what the thought was that had been trying to make its way to the surface of his consciousness.

  During that brief interchange of rifle fire, he had heard a couple of slight pops that would have been made only by the sound of an exploding percussion cap, feeble sounds lost in the heavier explosions of the live shells.

  Clanton and Nix hadn’t had a chance; the cards had been stacked against them, and they had died trying to defend themselves with dummy shells.

  In Webster’s books, that was cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

  The two officers had not been killed because they resisted the ambushers; they had been marked for death before they left Woodbine! They were law enforcers, and somebody knew it and wanted to get rid of them before they went prying around in these hills. Unknowns had turned their own trap against them and had caught them in it.

  Webster came to a sudden decision; whether it was officially his business or not, he was going to get those murderers. Clanton and Nix had taken him into their confidence, and had prepared him against any mishap. Now that it had occurred, he felt it his duty to take up where they left off, adding their job to his own, seeing that their deaths were avenged.

  He rummaged through the boxes of groceries until he found a roll of longhorn cheese, and cut off a big chunk of it to take with him. He looked long and speculatively at the wagon and wondered what would happen to the merchandise, reaching the conclusion that somebody would come along and pick it up sooner or later.

  And he wanted to know who that somebody would be.

  Jim found a can of paint in the hardware goods and pried the lid off. He found a dozen new plow points tied together with strong wire. Taking a twig, he dipped it into the paint, he inverted the plow points, and on the inner, concave sides of them, he painted the number which was on the marshal’s badge that he had taken off Nix before burying him. He painted the badge number on all the plow points, expecting that if they were noticed at all, they would be taken for stock numbers. Thus protected, they were not likely to be seen, and even use of the plow would not erase them, since they were on the underside of the mold-board points.

  Those points could be traced if every plow in Indian Territory had to be turned upside down and examined.

  Webster now secreted the rifles and the box of dummy shells in the brush where he had been hiding. Then he unharnessed the horses and turned two of them loose, leaving the bridle on the one he intended to use. He had to ride on a quarter of a mile to get out of the cut, but then he returned on the high ground to the point where the bandits had been, and here he picked up their tracks in the earth that was still damp after the rains.

  He walked and led his horse until he had followed the men’s footprints to the point where they had hidden their own horses, after which he mounted and had no trouble in the morning light in following their trail. Tracking them a half mile or so through the woods, he followed them out to a narrow deer trail, where they turned to the right and continued along the trail for several miles.

  Here, he saw that they had separated and gone different ways. There were four of them, and he was faced with the task of deciding which set of tracks he could most profitably follow.

  There was no answer to that, for he knew that they had separated to throw off any possible pursuit, and that they would come together again at some predesignated place. And he was much concerned with its location.

  Deciding then that it did not matter which track he followed, he chose the ones that continued along the deer trail, since this seemed to be easier riding. This trail ran along at an even keel across the side of the mountain, neither climbing upward nor dropping down toward the flats below, and he followed it slowly and alertly for two hours.

  Thinking over the whole business which lay behind him, he began to feel growing in him a strong hatred of this whole setup. The thing that he was facing now was no longer a simple job of breaking up a systematic plan of cattle thievery, but it had spread into a picture of some giant octopus which under the cover of a cloud of its own making was spreading its tentacles and sucking out the lifeblood of a whole people.

  The tentacles, he knew now, were even close to enwrapping such an innocent victim as Sonia Swanson. This thought brought his mind to the girl, and he felt an ache in him as he saw how she was going to be unavoidably dragged into the dirty picture. As he rode, he tried to think of some way of shielding her from the hurt that threatened her, but he saw little chance of protecting her.

  He came at last to a point where the woods were broken by open spaces, some of it rock-filled, some of it bare patches of grass, patches of scrub pines growing out of fields of stone, then other grass and rock patches.

  It was near the top of a low rise, and it was dismal and deserted country. But nonetheless, this was where the tracks brought him, and he stopped within the protection of the heavier trees and looked out on that broken mass of rock, grass and scrub. The deer trail cut straight through it toward a towering cliff face, before which was a boulder as big as a two-story house.

  It was a suspicious and dangerous looking setup to Webster, and his hand instinctively went to the handle of Clanton’s pistol, with which he had replaced his own gun taken by the bandits.

  There was no way to get across the open space but to start moving and go across it. Having calculated the danger, and having seen no other way of moving along on the trail, he rode out of the woods with his hand on his gun butt.

  A rifle bullet knocked his hat off. The roar of the weapon bounced against the mountain walls, and he tumbled off his horse and led it back into the trees.

  CHAPTER VII

  Hidden Valley

  The second shot came just as Webster got to the protection of the woods
and turned around in time to see the rising puff of smoke drifting upward from behind one of the big stones in the open field.

  “So that’s it,” he said to himself. “Whatever is ahead is important enough to keep a guard posted. I have found myself something, whether it is too big to handle or not.”

  He was talking to himself with words, but his mind was focused on that rock behind which the sniper lay. The sun was high above the house-like boulder, lighting the whole field ahead of him. The near space before him offered him no means of concealment so that he could work his way toward the hidden gunman.

  But he had a hankering to interview that gentleman. The way he figured it, anybody who was left out here on such monotonous guard duty must be a man pretty low in the ranks of the thieves, and consequently no mental heavyweight. Webster had an idea that if he could get his hands on the gent, he could find ways of persuading him to talk. Particularly, if he kept the officers’ murder in mind, he would likely be quite impatient with any reluctance on the sniper’s part to do some pretty fast and furious talking.

  He backed his horse up a bit deeper into the woods and tied the reins to a tree without ever once taking his eyes off the boulder from which had come the firing.

  What was the sniper going to do? One thing was certain, he was going to be wondering the same thing about him. And a man who is wondering what is going to happen next is generally nervous and inquisitive. His curiosity will sooner or later demand satisfaction.

  Webster, then, crawled to the edge of the woods and sat down behind a tree with his gun in his hand and his eyes on the rock, and prepared himself mentally to outwait the guard. He had a strong streak of patience, and he knew men well enough to realize that a man who has shot at another man and has not found out the results is likely to have a strong curiosity to know what happened.

  Webster settled down to outwait him, not even allowing himself to wonder what the sniper would eventually do. His task was to be sure that he waited him out, and so he kept his mind on that one objective.

  He spent his time not with his mind on the man, but on the possibilities of what lay in this vicinity. It was apparent that the man had business here; he hadn’t just ridden here to throw any pursuers off the track. Particularly since the likelihood of pursuit may not have occurred to the bandits.

  The bandit stuck it out half an hour. Then he must have decided that he had scared Webster off, for Jim saw him suddenly dart from behind his boulder to another larger one.

  Webster raised his pistol then and kept it trained on the edge of the man’s new hiding place.

  Then he came out from behind the big rock, riding the horse that had been hidden there. He turned his back in the direction of Webster and headed his horse toward the giant rock which sat before the upright wall of the next peak.

  Webster leaned his hat against the bole of the pine tree before him, then placed his pistol against the hat. A pistol is not an accurate weapon at long distance, and its kick upon being fired can throw a man’s aim off far enough to miss a target at the distance the sniper was from him. The hat between the gun and the tree would absorb much of the recoil.

  He brought the gun barrel down until he had his sights aligned on the middle of the man’s back in a slow and careful aim. He held the gun true on the rider and, with a bitter recollection of Clanton and Nix flashing across his mind, he squeezed off the trigger slowly and carefully.

  His gun barked, and at that instant he saw the man jerk erect in the saddle as though he had been hit in the back with a hammer. His arms spread out as though he were stretching himself, and then his body bent forward, his head dropping down toward the saddle horn as though he were going to sleep.

  Then the man swayed sideways and he slipped out of the saddle. One leg went over the seat and made an arc toward the ground. The foot in the near-side stirrup got hung up, and failed to come out of its resting place. Thus he fell to the ground head first, one foot still in his stirrup.

  The horse had not stopped his trot, and now that he was dragging a human body, he became panicked. He pranced up and down once or twice, kicked out to dislodge the dragging burden, then broke into a frightened run.

  Webster watched the horse, and saw something that made him wonder. The horse dashed around the giant boulder and disappeared from view. Webster waited for it to reappear on the other side, for there could have hardly been more than a narrow passageway between the boulder and the solid face of the cliff. But the horse did not come out the other side.

  Webster waited ten minutes, and the horse still did not come out. He had either stopped dead still, or something had swallowed him up. What had happened to the horse when he went behind the boulder? He couldn’t have climbed the sheer face of that cliff, and he hadn’t come out the other side.

  That was puzzling, and Webster intended to get the answer to it. He went back and got his horse and, riding gun in hand, he rode out across that open ground and around the big boulder.

  Then he knew!

  The cliff face was not solid. It was a thick stratum of rock which some prehistoric upheaval had stood on edge, and which later erosion had worn down until it had crumbled at a point behind the big boulder, leaving a gap in it some twenty feet wide.

  Now Webster understood about the horse. The giant boulder acted somewhat like a screen hiding a door, for he saw as he rode into the place that the gap in the cliff-like sheet of upended rock actually was a doorway to a vast, green, saucer-shaped valley with a bright lake in the middle of it.

  He was gazing at this revelation with awe when he saw a group of horsemen emerge from a small grove inside the big saucer-shaped valley, and come riding toward the entrance.

  He understood the significance of this without having to wrack his brain for an answer. The horse had dragged the dead guard back to where these men were, where he had been discovered. And now the horsemen were coming out to find out what had happened.

  Webster did not wait to explain to them what had taken place. He turned his horse’s head out of the passageway and lashed him toward the nearest point of protection in the trees.

  He had found something; he intended to live long enough to learn what that something was, and he knew well enough that the approaching group was thoroughly opposed to his idea.

  Jim had not yet made his way completely across the open field and stone when the troop of horsemen came thundering out of the passageway behind the big rock. As he looked over his shoulder he saw five of them, and they had seen him.

  He heard them set up a shout, and the next moment a bullet whined by his head and he heard the blast of a rifle. Several other shots followed in a quick volley, but the shooting of the bandits on racing horses was not accurate, and he reached the trees with bullets whining around his head like hornets.

  Webster had little time to think about it, but he realized instantly that he stood no chance to outrun them. He was riding on a work horse, and these men on fast saddle horses could run him down quickly, for the brush and trees were so thick on either side of the deer trail that he would be unable to leave the trail and take to the deeper timber.

  On the spur of the moment he made his decision, and slowed his horse down under the limb of one of the giant oaks which were interspersed with the pine and which made a canopy over the trail.

  It took only one quick movement for him to lift his legs and get his feet set on the horse’s back. He was standing as the animal passed under the oak.

  Jim made one jump with arms raised. His lingers caught onto the overhanging limb, slipped a moment, then caught again and held. The horse kept moving down the trail and, now freed of its rider, set off at a brisk run, fear of the gunfire behind him urging him on.

  Hanging from the limb, Webster lifted his legs and swung up into the tree. Moving as fast as he could manage among the stiff limbs, he climbed into higher and higher branches until at last the foliage conceal
ed him from the ground.

  The sound of pounding hooves had been growing louder in his ears, and he was hardly settled in his high perch when the four horsemen thudded by single file along the deer trail, and kept going.

  Webster breathed a sigh of relief, but he knew that he was far from safe here. Having abandoned his horse so that the men would follow it while he found concealment, he knew that now being afoot in these strange mountains, and right in the mouth of the thieves’ hangout, put him in a tougher spot than he had been up to this moment.

  The men would soon run his horse down and find that he had deserted it, and this would tell them that he was still around. He had no idea how many more men there were in that big valley, but of one thing he was completely certain; they would comb the woods for him.

  He toyed with the idea that they might decide not to search, but he quickly abandoned it. They must suspect now that he was the driver of the wagon which had been robbed, and they knew that they could not afford to let him live with the knowledge that he had found their hangout. They had a job of capturing and killing to do in order to save their own hides. And the odds were all with them, for they knew this territory, and he was afoot and a stranger here.

  He decided that the tree was about as safe as any place he could find, for if he began walking in search of a better hiding place, he would leave his tracks in the mud, to be read as easily as a man could read a signboard. He could only hope that they did not figure out his play and find him before darkness came and gave him a chance to escape. He had spent a strenuous twenty-four hours without sleep, but he was facing a long wait in an uncomfortable position before he had any hope at all of eluding capture.

  He had to smile to himself at his position, perched high in the branches of a gnarled old oak tree, and he spent the moments speculating on how an owl managed to get in a little sleep in the daytime in such a place. He decided that the owls probably had a trick of their own for roosting in trees, but that under the circumstances he had better stay awake.