by Joe Millard
CHAPTER 18
TUCO scowled at the stacked cases of explosives. He lifted a box of dynamite a few inches, grunted and set it down hastily.
“Ah, Whitey, these are heavier than they look. Why didn’t my fine idea include an easy way to move all this down to the bridge, eh? If I had enjoyed hard work I would never have taken the trouble to become a bandit.”
“The weight of this stuff is only half the problem,” the hunter said. “If we try lugging these cases down openly we’re likely to run into some junior officer with a military-regulations mind who wouldn’t go along with the idea of having his pretty little death-trap bridge blown to hell and gone.” He glanced out through the observation slit and stiffened. “Hold on, Tuco. I think the solution to our problems is coming now.”
Two soldiers, members of the burial detail, were toiling up the slope with another body. They were carrying it between them on a makeshift stretcher fashioned of rough planks nailed together. They set their burden down on the parapet outside, squatted beside it and rummaged through the dead soldier’s pockets for identification papers and personal trinkets.
They stood up, carrying their pitifully small findings, and trotted off to make the fatal entry of another hero of the Langston Bridge in the military record. As they disappeared the bounty-hunter darted out, rolled the corpse on to the parapet and came back, dragging the plank stretcher.
He and Tuco piled cases of explosive on the planks. The hunter found an army blanket in an adjoining storeroom and spread it over the low pile. At a casual glance their burden coulbe readily mistaken for another victim of the daily slaughter.
No one paid any attention as the hunter and Tuco worked their way down the slope of the ridge to the river. In the deep shadows under the bridge they cautiously set the plank stretcher in’the water and found that it floated with sufficient buoyancy to serve as a raft. From the bridge planking above their heath came the steady tramp-tramp of boots as men carried their dead and wounded off the blood-drenched span.
“You know something, Whitey?” Tuco said. “It has just struck me that doing what we are doing could get us both killed.”
“That it could,” the other agreed, “but it could also lead to something a whole lot worse.”
“Worse, Whitey? What could be worse, eh?”
“Only one of an getting killed. Then the other could spend the rest of his life going crazy—thinking about all that money he might have had mouldering away to dust in a grave somewhere.”
Turn’s eyes grew round as the full realisation struck him. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle.
“Whitey, I have a great idea. We are close to where we are going, now. Very close. Why don’t we trust each other now and share our secrets? I will tell you the name of the cemetery and you tell me the name on the grave. Then if, say, you should be killed, I would be able to find the two hundred thousand dollars and use your share to honour your memory.”
The hunter said hastily, “Let’s not go through that whole mass-and-candles business again. Let’s just say I think your idea has merit and I’m game for it if you are.”
“Whitey, you are a true friend and partner, as I have always said. See, I will hold up my right hand—so—and give you my word of honour. Tell me the name an that grave. Quickly.”
“Uh-uh. The idea was yours, Tuco. You deserve the honour of revealing your secret first, I’d never think of depriving a good friend of such a privilege.”
Tuco struggled briefly with the impasse, then surrendered.
“All right, Whitey. The place to which we are going is Sad Hill, the military graveyard. Now—quickly—tell me the name on the grave. And no tricks, Whitey.”
“No tricks, Tuco, on my word of honour. The name Carson, or Jackson, muttered to me just before he died was Stanton—Arch Stanton. He said it was painted on the headboard over the grave.”
A low, gurgling moan came from somewhere nearby. The two men whirled in unison, hands streaking to their guns. In the deep shadow where the bridge met the bank of the river lay a wounded Union soldier, his uniform sodden with blood. His eyes were closed and he breathed in liquid, rasping gasps.
Tuco’s eyes were wild. He snatched out his pistol.
“He could have heard what we said. We spoke of the sum of money and said exactly where it is buried. We can’t take any chances. Step aside, Whitey, and let me finish him off.”
“Hold it,” the hunter said sharply. The ragged breathing sounds had ceased and the shattered chest no longer rose and fell. He squatted down to touch the figure. “Save your bullet, Tuco. He’s on his way to Sad Hill, all right, but not to dig up our money. But we’ll never make it there if we don’t get this damn bridge mined before the truce period is up.”
He led the way, wading out between the supporting timbers. The plank stretcher made a makeshift raft that helped to support its deadly burden. While Tuco lashed bundles of dynamite sticks to the bridge supports the hunter attached the fulminate caps and connected them to a single continuous fuse.
They were well past midstream and close to the Confederate-held bank when their supply of explosives was exhausted. The hunter crimped the last cap to the end of the fuse. The tramp of feet overhead had long since ceased. The burial details on both sides had fanned out along the ridge slopes, searching out the last victims of the savage bombardment, A squad of men on the Union side was rigging a scissors and tackle to hoist the dismounted mortar back on to its platform.
The bounty-hunter squatted under the Union end of the bridge. He struck a lucifer to flame on his thumbnail, held it close to the tip of the fuse and glanced up.
“Run like hell and dive under an overhang of the riverbank when this starts to sputter. There’ll be chunks of bridge timber flying all over New Mexico Territory.”
“I will fly ahead of the blast, amigo.”
The fuse sputtered to life, spitting crimson sparks. The two men ran. Some distance upstream, where the river straightened from its sharp bend, the current had deeply undercut the bank. They dived under the protecting overhang of earth and and an instant before all hell broke loose.
There was not a single explosion but a succession of ear-shattering blasts as the fire raced along the fuse from one bundle of dynamite sticks to the next. With each thunderous boom a new section of the bridge flew up, hung suspended for a moment, then broke into chunks of jagged timber and metal that filled the air. Underneath, the force of the blast pushed great holes in the water Itself, exposing the muddy river bottom for brief moments.
When the echoes of the last explosion died away the hunter climbed to the riverbank and wrung water from his sodden clothes.
“I hope the captain was still alive to hear his big bang. I’d like to know, but I don’t see any point to going back to find out. We can stay here out of sight until they start to pull out. Maybe, with luck, we can grab us a couple of horses from one side or the other. They owe us mounts.”
“They owe us more.” Tuco screwed up his face and pounded his temples with clenched fists. “What fools we have been—What stupid idiots. What unbelievable muttonheads—”
“What in blazes is biting you?”
“That wine,” Tuco growled. “All that lovely, lovely wine. We could have put the whole case on the planks with the dynamite and brought it along to celebrate our great triumph. The captain has no more use for it. Now we will sit here and spit cotton while those pigs up there drink it all.”
CHAPTER 19
SENTENZA crouched at the edge of a dense thicket on the hillside overlooking Sad Hill Cemetery. The sorrel eyes were bloodshot from strain and veins throbbed in his temples above the high cheekbones. The fingers of his right hand opened and closed convulsively on the butt of his loner barrelled pistol.
“Why don’t they come?” he muttered. “Damn—why don’t they hurry up and get here?”
His head swivelled as his baffled gaze shuttled over the endless rows of identical graves. He had tramped over every foot of the imme
nse cemetery, scrutinising each individual grave, digging his fingers into the mounded earth to feel its freshness, testing the firmness of each weather-beaten headboard.
More than half the markers bore only the single cryptic word, UNKNOWN. Even these drew his full attention as he searched frantically for a clue—a dab of extra paint or a notch cut into a board, perhaps, for later identification. He had gone over every mound on hands and knees, looking for a rock of an unusual shape or colouration or for a seemingly casual arrangement of smaller stones that would be meaningless to anyone but the man who had placed them—or to someone looking fora sign.
In the end he knew only continuing frustration for his pains. It was all too obvious that the dead Carson—or Jackson—had depended solely upon the name of the grave’s supposed occupant as painted on its head• board. And only one man in the world—the tall blonde bounty-hunter—knew that name and could identify the grave in which two hundred thousand gold dollars lay waiting.
He stared out over the empty landscape.
Come on, damn you. Come on...
He stiffened and leaped to his feet. A great distance off a small, pale dot of dust moved against the dark backdrop of the mountains. He stared at the spot until his eyes watered and blurred. He rubbed them and stared again. It was a good half-hour before he could make out the two dark pinpoints, moving side by side, that were stirring up a steady dust.
His hand whipped to the long pistol. He slid it in and out of its holster to try the slickness of the waxed leather. He thumbed back the hammer and eased it down several times, testing the hair-trigger action. He flipped open the cylinder gate and checked the loads, replacing the cartridge whose brass case showed the faintest trace of a dent. He snapped the gate shut with a grunt of satisfaction and slid the weapon back into its holster.
His tension and impatience vanished. His quarry was coming to lead him to the buried gold. He could afford to be patient—no, he had to be patient. He sat down with his back against a tree, folded competent hands in his lap and closed his eyes.
He had time for a refreshing nap while he waited for his destiny to arrive at Sad Hill Cemetery.
“Whitey,” Tuco said anxiously. “That Bill Carson, he was dying—pretty near dead—when he told you the name on the grave, wasn’t he?”
“As good as dead,” the hunter agreed. “He barely got the name out before his heart stopped for good.”
“His voice—it was pretty weak, eh? And with his tongue swollen for want of water—he couldn’t talk clearly, eh?”
“I had to put my ear right to his lips to make out what he was trying to say.”
Naked worry clouded Tuco’s eyes. “Whitey, how can you be sure you heard Arch Stanton? Maybe he said Art Landon or Bart Blanton or some other name that only sounded like Arch Stanton. What then, eh?”
“Then,” the hunter said, “you’re going to end up with blistered hands and empty pockets.” He grinned faintly. “Stop worrying, Tuco. I got the name straight enough. What I didn’t get was the location of the grave. We may have a mighty long search ahead of us, finding that one particular grave among thousands just like it.”
“The search will soon begin, Whitey,” Tuco said, pointing. “There is Sad Hill Cemetery on that slope ahead.”
“It’s big, all right” The hunter squinted through the heat haze. “But it’s going to get a whole lot bigger when the toll from Langston Bridge starts coming in.”
They dismounted at the edge of the immense burial ground. Tuco almost fell over his own feet in his wild haste to get to the nearest grave markers. He peered around.
“Unknown. Unknown. Pete Anson. Unknown—”
“Hold it, Tuco. We’ll find it a lot faster if we organise our search. You take the first two rows and I’ll take the second two. That way we won’t miss a single head-board as we work our way through.”
Heads turning right and left steadily, they tramped up the slope to the edge of the woods, then moved inward and worked their way back down. Tuco stopped at the end of his third row to mop his streaming face.
“Yon know, Whitey, I am so mad at those Yankees I could almost become a real Confederate myself.”
“What are you riled up about now? We traded them our spent mounts for fresh and better ones.”
“But the stinking tightwads could have at least thrown in a couple of shovels for us to dig with.”
It seemed they had been tramping for hours and there was still more than half the vast cemetery still to be covered. A few rows ahead of them the centre of the graveyard was marked by a large open space—an amphitheatre reserved for the holding of formal funeral services.
“When we get to that open space,” the bounty-hunter said, “we might as well call it a day. It’ll be too dark to see the names—and my head feels about ready to break right off my neck. We can get a good night’s rest and start on the other half at sunrise.”
“How can you think of sleeping when all those beautiful gold dollars are lying right around here somewhere—maybe so close one of us could reach out a hand and touch the spot, eh? I will keep on looking until my eyes balls pop out and my legs drop off.”
“All right. We’ve still got a couple of hours of daylight left.”
They reached the trees, shifted over to the next rows and started back down the slope. Tuco suddenly loosed a wild, incoherent howl and flung himself on to one of the grave mounds.
He clawed frenziedly at the dirt with his bare hands, yelling, “Here it is, Whitey. This is the one. I have found it at last. I have found my fortune.”
The hunter strode to the spot, bent to examine the marker. Storms and the fiercely beating sun had faded the paint but the name, Arch Stanton, was still plainly legible on the weathered headboard.
He straightened and turned to find himself looking into the muzzle of Tuco’s pistol.
“I am sorry about this, friend,” the bandit said, thumbing back the hammer, “but you know how it is sometimes, eh? There are two kinds of people in this world. Those with a little money and those with two hundred thousand. It is better to be one of those with two hundred thousand, eh, Whitey? This time I errs the one who is dissolving the partnership”
He pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with an empty, metallic click.
The hunter leaned an elbow on the headboard and watched impassively as Tuco whirled the cylinder, staring at it from bulging eyes. He slapped frantically at his gunbelt.
“My bullets are all gone. You—you—”
The hunter said, “I took them out last night after you went to sleep. You’re a little too handy at switching sides to suit my fancy.”
“You could have got me killed,” Tuco yelled.
“That would have been a pity—before you’d finished doing the heavy digging for me.” The hunter wrenched the headboard from the ground and tossed it at the bandit’s feet. “Get on with it. And use this instead of your bare hands to dig with. You’ll get the job done a lot quicker.”
Behind him Sentenza said, “In fact, you’ll get it done twice as fast with both of you digging.”
He stood at the edge of the woods, smiling sardonically. The long-barrelled pistol pointed steadily. The hammer was drawn back. Sentenza’s finger lightly caressed the trigger.
“I wondered when you’d show up.”
The bounty-hunter seemed unperturbed.
“Now you know,” Sentenza said. “Drop your gun-belt and step back away from it.”
The hunter smiled faintly and shook his head.
Sentenza’s face darkened. His pale eyes glittered with rage.
“Damn you, do as I say or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what, Sentenza? Kill me? You would be foolish. The only wealth you’ll find in Arch Stanton’s grave are the remains of poor Arch Stanton. His mother might like them—but they wouldn’t bring a dime on the open market.”
“Don’t believe him, Sentenza,” Tuco howled. “He’s lying—it’s only a trick to save his miserable skin. The gold is here.
It’s got to be here—”
“I think so, too,” Sentenza said through his teeth. “How else would he have known there was an Arch Stanton’s grave? But there’s one simple way to find out. Start digging.”
The bounty-hunter shrugged.
“They’re your hands, Tuco. Go ahead and get them all blistered for nothing if you want to.”
He leaned against an adjacent headboard and watched with mild interest as the bandit attacked the grave with his makeshift shovel. Sentenza moved down to a point where he could keep the hunter covered and still watch the progress of the digging. Under the packed surface the earth was fairly soft and the excavation was soon knee-deep.
Tuco stopped suddenly, panting, and mopped his streaming face. “Why should I do all the hard work, Sentenza? Make him dig, too.”
The hunter smiled faintly and shook his head. “Sorry, but grave-digging just isn’t my trade.”
Tuco said, “Don’t let him bluff you.”
Sentenza stared at the hunter’s bland face and the first faint shadow of doubt clouded his eyes.
He gestured with his gun and said savagely, “Shut up and get on with the job. I’ll give the orders now.”
CHAPTER 20
TUCO’S board suddenly encountered firm resistance. A hollow thump was followed by the unmistakable grate. lag of wood agairat wood.
“Sentenza,” Tuco yelled. “It’s here. A box—a big one.”
Sentenza stepped to the edge of the grave.
“Get it uncovered and open,” He waggled his gun at the tall figure. “You—stay right where you are. Don’t make any sudden moves.”
The hunted stifled a yawn. “I wouldn’t think of moving. I lose all interest in corpses once the worms have been at them for a while. You two enjoy yourselves.”
The coffin-sized chest was quickly cleared of earth. Tuco hooked his fingers under the edge of the lid and wrenched hard. It gave way with a protesting squeal of nails. A human skull grinned up at the intruders. Then, as the lid was flung back, the entire skeleton came into view, fleshless hands folded across the cage of ribs. A fete mildewed shreds of blue uniform still clung to the remains.
