by John Long
Contents
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
He was alone. He lowered his gaze from the distant mountains to the nearby pine-clad foothills, then from there to the crimson streaks in the water of the creek wherein he knelt. This was the end. There would be no more saddle-partners for Jeff Rand, and therefore no more griefs. Rand would always ride alone. Cradled in Rand’s arms was the bleeding lifeless body of his last friend, old Jim Miller.
‘Jim – dead!’ he bitterly murmured. ‘Seems crazy. Sure he could cuss like pitch, soak up whiskey like he was fire – but a kinder, gentler old-timer never panned gold.’
Blood ran down the corpse; blood dribbled down Rand’s chin from where, silencing his grief, he had fiercely bit his lips. How long he knelt there, shocked, and almost sun-drunk by the noonday, he could never tell. A cloud of flies buzzed up from the reeds when, turning stiffly and groggily, he waded to the bankside. He toiled up the slope to a cabin of peeled spruce logs, and, setting his burden on a bunk, once more stood peering lengthily into the dead face, as if hoping for life to reappear.
The air in the cabin was stifling; in fact that cabin was as silent as a desert tomb; and a fat blue-tailed fly, whining round the dead man’s head, seemed to enhance the frightening silence. Sinking down upon a goods-box, casting aside a bag of broad-tailed trout which he had been carrying over his arm, Rand hid his face in his hands.
Loneliness as deep as the sky engulfed him. The same thing had happened years ago, miles away, when he was just a kid. At that time his kinfolk had drifted from Texas to Arizona, where desert mining was opening up south of Tucson. There life had been booming real good, same as recently. Then one day his pa sent him hunting a lost burro, which he tracked down right smart for a youngster. How proud he was as he came whooping back into the mining-camp! But all that made the blow more cruel. Singing out triumphantly for Pa and little sister Jenny, he had charged into the shack, and found them brutally murdered.
Then had come this identical profound loneliness, this same resolution to remain lonesome, and this same fierce burning for revenge. After that first tragedy he had become a gloomy and dangerous person, a feared and hated creature of the wilds. But old Jim Miller had changed him, mined a way into his life by simple kindness, and – and here he was robbed and murdered.
‘Mebbe if I’d not been so derned mean,’ mourned Rand; ‘mebbe if I’d quit thinking of spoiling my hands by hard digging, this would never have happened. I shoulda been here helping Jim to wash yesterday’s heavy load of dirt, instead of playing hooky, pretending to examine rock upstream. Funny thing, but every sluicing of dirt was leaving bright rich particles at the bottom of Jim’s pan, just like it was when Pa died.’
Grief seemed to have turned Rand crazy; for he sat there talking aloud to himself, making appealing gestures to the body, and pausing to examine reproachfully his long and immaculate hands.
‘Yeah; Miller’s Mine was beginning to pan out big. The realisation of a life-long dream. A big yield for Jim. At last a lucky strike for Jim. Why, only yesterday he talked of moving back to Texas in the Fall. “I’m a-going home, Jeff,” he had said. “Home Sweet Home”. And then the old fool had started to cry.’ Rand chuckled brokenly. ‘Poor old fella. Sure enough Jim is home now. By the great Lord Harry! If Jim Miller isn’t camped down somewheres in heaven, then – then who the hell is?’
A fiery passion surged through Rand, and his eyes flashed strangely. The blue-tailed fly sped by him and he took a dab at it.
‘Death and murder are a coupla different things!’ he snarled.
Then the old prospector’s last words began to occupy his thoughts.
‘Played out, that’s me,’ Jim had said. ‘You ain’t to ride after them hoodlums, Jeff. Don’t start that life again. The whole hell-raising bunch of them tried to make me talk. They wanted to know about this mine. Guess I’m a mule-headed cuss like your pa used to say. But my luck’s come too late, Jeff. I always knowed it would. But you listen here, son. Keep a-digging this claim. I’m a-watching you. Just keep – keep digging – hands clean.’
Slowly Rand raised his head. Jim’s voice rang so clearly in his mind that it still seemed a reality. As his moist eyes cleared he abstractedly scanned the raided cabin. The floor was strewn with dried apples, burst flour bags, and shattered boxes of supplies: a whole season’s grub-stake lay ruined. In one corner the boards had been ripped up: there was no need for Rand to check Jim Miller’s hoard of gold. It was gone. There had been fifty thousand dollars worth of pay-dirt stacked away since they first located this place and filed their claim. Days and nights of hard work lost in a moment; a fortune lost; a partner lost – and now Jeff Rand would always ride alone. This was definitely the end.
While he sat there brooding, with Jim Miller’s blood drying on his whipcord breeches and mining boots, the sun had moved round the cabin with surprising quickness. Now it streamed through the small window, brazenly picking out a certain goods-box nailed for a cupboard on the opposite wall. Rand’s attention became curiously attached to this cupboard. It seemed to possess some hypnotic power over him, so intensely did he stare at it, while beads of sweat trickled down his nut-brown face. Gradually a more dangerous gleam blazed in his eyes; suddenly he leapt up. He lurched across the room, his tall and skinny body trembling visibly. Having slammed back a table, kicked aside some picks and shovels, he reached that cupboard, jerked open its doors, and dived his hands inside. He clutched at an oil-smeared parcel. But thereat he was stricken motionless by private thought. The moments passed in gnawing uncertainty. His passion died. He bowed his head, giving vent to a soblike groan. Wearily he returned the parcel to its shelf, closed the cupboard doors, and turned away. Choosing a spade he dejectedly strode outside. Rand would bury his partner in the cool and calm of the sunset.
The mountains had become flat silhouettes rimmed by a rosy glow, leaving the foothills half-submerged in mist. A lone bird was piping intermittently somewhere up there. Beside the creek the rhythmic ringing of a spade could be heard. It was a deep down doleful sound, arising from beyond a clump of juniper and mesquite. Presently all went quiet. A tall figure strode into view. He climbed ponderously towards the cabin, only once glancing back at a fresh and ominous mound of earth.
Loneliness, vengeful inspiring loneliness met Rand as he peered at Miller’s empty bunk. Thereon lay the old-timer’s simple belongings: a six-shooter, a knife, chaws of tobacco and a watch. But wait! Rand looked again, searched with mounting surprise: the watch was missing. He had presented it to Old Jim on his birthday, and Jim’s name was scraped on it. Whoever stole that cheap time-piece had murdered the finest old man on earth.
‘The scum! The dirty blazing scum!’
New rage welled in Rand’s breast. He strode up and down; he slashed at a whiskey bottle on the window-ledge; the bottle crashed into pieces; he then recognized it as Jim’s favourite ‘coffin-varnish’. Rand choked between a sob and a curse.
Passion drove him back to that cupboard on the wall. His violent impatience ripped loose the door’s hinges. Then, as had previously occurred, something cautioned and restrained the man as his hands closed upon the same stained parcel.
Thereafter Jeff Rand sat on
his own bunk before the doorway. He wasn’t sleepy; he wasn’t hungry; he wasn’t even thirsty; he just wasn’t nothing. He only wanted to sit, to hide and nurse his injury like a sick animal, same as it had been after burying Pa and little Jenny, years, years, and years ago. Rand began to doze, finding a quaint sympathy in the crickets and bullfrogs chorusing ever louder through the window and open doorway. Peace gradually embraced him, and he felt close to some vague yet grand Presence.
An evasive pearly light was seeping across the sky. An uncommon silence was in command. The dawn was as chill as springwater. Outside the cabin two pack-mules gaped in a kind of astonishment at a saddled and raw-boned horse, which in turn gaped with humorous curiosity through the doorway.
Jeff Rand always rose early. This morning he was haggard and tight-jawed. His mining boots and clothing lay discarded on the floor: he stood dressed in a dark raw-hide riding outfit. The cupboard on the wall was open and empty; and now, on the table, beside a steaming can of coffee and a fry-pan loaded with beans and flapjacks, rested the familiar oil-stained parcel.
Operating between these articles with the calm precision of a craftsman, Rand ate his breakfast and unwrapped a pair of Colt Forty-fives. These well-kept weapons rested snugly in a plain loaded belt. He began to jerk cartridges into the chambers of each gun, his pale and slender fingers working with interesting familiarity. Having then regarded the finished work with some uncertainty, he strapped the belt low round his waist, tied the holsters low upon his thighs, and slammed home each six-shooter.
Standing there in that dawn-filled doorway, leisurely finishing his coffee, Rand looked a changed man – a forbiddingly changed man. Here stood, as even an inexperienced person would have deduced, the figure of a gun-fighter.
CHAPTER TWO
Land of drifting sand, of brightly-painted mountains, of craggy canyons, cacti, scorpions – and heat, parching, cruel heat. A land of strange formations, strange occurrences, and death. This was the Southwest with all its tortures and suffering, and into it came every variety of fortune-seeker. Hardy folk out of the hills, weak folk from the cities; the healthy, the sick, the rich and the poor, the office clerk and the rancher, the good and the bad: all mingled together by the same crazy fever, leaving home and loved-ones far behind, leaving in a moment all they had built by the hard toil of many years, answering that one thrilling war-cry: GOLD!
Jeff Rand was inured to all kinds of hardships and he knew, with that same well-earned knowledge of a ship’s navigator, the character of those sea-like desert plains, where already Nature had taken her toll in return for yellow ore. Jeff plodded slowly and steadily through the drifts of hot sand, already regretting his impatience which had so driven him to travel in the sun-hours. Since he had closed down Miller’s Mine that morning, he had followed a set of horse tracks which, so he figured, had been left by those riders who had committed the robbery and murder. Before he had left the wooded hills, however, he had noticed that those tracks split up: one set continuing through the beautiful mountain country, and the other descending into the sweltering desert. Following a hunch he therefore found himself entering this broiling hell. Although every mile now weakened his hunch, specially when he viewed his dwindling water supply, he was too stubborn to turn back. Whatever mercy dwelt in his heart, it was being quickly dried up, and replaced by a more flaming vengeance towards the killers.
Through the breathless air and sand finer than snow, Rand plodded from water-mirage to water-mirage. By altered formations of the tracks in the sand he was able to calculate his distance from the riders ahead. The chance of the sand beginning to drift, however, as it did habitually, set him in fear of losing the trail. Yet to urge his mount was too dangerous a thing for him to consider for a moment: the surest way to conquer these plains was by a constant steady pace. His pale blue eyes never ceased to search the hazy distances. Out there, among those acres of mysteriously piled up boulders, lay many a silent warning, lay the whitened bones of men and beasts, the remains of emigrants who had been greedily impatient to reach new gold-fields.
By sundown Rand knew he was gradually overtaking his quarry, who sheltered by day and rode by starlight.
‘We’ll rest at the first spring,’ he murmured, soothing the panting animal beneath him. ‘Guess we’ve done pretty well for the first day.’ He licked his parched lips and somewhat anxiously studied his slender hands. ‘Yeah; we’ll meet ’em come breakfast time, and even scores for our Jim. The dirty bloodlusting scabs!’
The sun was setting in a spectacular glory of scarlet, transforming the sand into a bloody sea, ribbed by shimmering blue shadow-islands. Presently Rand steered away from the trail, craning his neck, looking alertly to the right. The horse grunted. It began to trot quicker. Finally it halted beside a section of stove-pipe stuck upright in a gravel patch. Here the rider dismounted, grinning, inwardly blessing the neighbour-loving prospector who had thus marked and preserved a spring of water from the piling sand. Both wild creatures drank thirstily, ate salted biscuits and rested. Rand wiped down his horse with a wet neckerchief, then softened the leather inside his holsters.
It was not long before loneliness and idleness set him brooding, which brooding inflamed his desire for the showdown. Barely an hour passed by before he was ambling back to the trail. But, to his grim dismay, that trail had completely vanished. Even his own tracks were vanishing as he made them. The sand was on the drift. He could feel no breeze, yet the awful sand was drifting speedily beneath him like water. Bitter frustration filled him. Rand was never a talkative man, yet he could have spoken heated volumes at this moment. His mission of death had failed. His gold was lost forever. Jim’s killer must go free. To continue would be surely useless guesswork. He sat motionless, controlling his rising passion, staring with fixed fury into the west. He had to give in. The running desert had won.
Slowly returning to the spring, he became conscious of his exhaustion; moreover the pain in his left foot, which resulted from an old bullet wound, was throbbing sickeningly, and strangely producing fresh pity for his tired mount. There was nothing else to do except camp down for the night. Having gathered together certain juicy weeds round the spring, he tended his horse then brewed coffee. He redressed his foot in an icy wet bandage, then sat with his back to the sleeping animal, whilst he sewed a broken seam in his saddle. Rand’s solitary resignation, his silent and independent nature, were characteristic of those hardened desert rats who thrive on sand and sun. He fell asleep, gun in hand.
Time had passed. Jim Miller had now been dead seven days, and Jeff Rand was still alone. Gone was the desert, gone were the enclosing mountains, and all the weary hours of futile searching high and low. Before him there now spread grassy ranges, only interrupted by miniature Grand Canyons and sand-fields which gleamed like ripening corn. Upon the distant horizon a smoky blur marked his destination.
It was late noon when Rand rode into Vulch City, which place was a freak, a one street town where shacks were built from brush and adobe, as well as from barrel sides and bed-blankets. Like similar desert border towns it had begun from a small location of gold. Its first arising was in the form of a row of barrels with planks across them. This had developed into the now largest building, known as Crazy Bill’s Saloon.
Rand plodded lazily towards the livery-stable, dismounted by a supreme effort, and led his animal inside, aware that he was watched by a few dreamy and long-faced miners who, obviously poverty-stricken, lounged on the saloon’s sun-warped veranda. When Rand returned into the blinding daylight, he gave the whole place a deliberate scrutiny, until his attention fell upon a notice nailed to the opposite shack.
Hash Beans & Roast
No Raw Deals with Sam’s Square Meals.
No, sir!
New Arrived: A Whole Bacon!
You Bet!
Rand did not grin. No one should joke about food in this heat-choked and desperate land, specially when a fellow felt like he felt. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, wonder
ing just how large was a whole bacon, and just how square were Sam’s meals, not to mention his prices. Apparently unaware of the rowdy disturbance which was breaking out in front of that particular eating-house, Rand counted his money as he walked across the street, each spur tinkling at each puff of hot dust. He stopped once to admire an outsize bull-frog squatting in a pool of dampness placed there by a skinny kid who kept poking it with a reed, then looking down the reed at it. Rand might have stayed to see just how the play ended, but he was mighty hungry just then. He climbed on to the raised foot-walk. The sound of a fist contacting flesh reached his ears.
‘Take that! You’re the dirtiest hash-clinger in the whole of creation, and the meanest too!’
Hearing this strange recommending of Sam’s square meals, Rand felt a distinct sensation of disappointment. He dropped his few coins back in his pocket and came on, chewing and rolling his tongue. Ahead of him, sprawled on the footwalk, dabbing his blood-smeared face with an apron, was the hash-house owner, Sam. He glared up venomously at his attacker: a short and thick-set young man who wore oddly protruding guns.
‘Square meals nothing!’ he shouted, disdainfully ripping down the notice, which was quite a masterpiece of lettering on Sam’s part. ‘Bring out that plateful of filth he served me!’ the young fellow commanded one of his companions, thrusting him into the open doorway. ‘A coupla jerks of hash should finish him, I reckon, it’s poison.’
‘You leave my property alone, mister!’ groaned Sam.
A loud laugh broke from the small band of hoodlums.
‘I’ll get even for this, Mister Crocker, I warn you.’
‘Sure you will,’ replied young Crocker. ‘But try this for size first.’
A plate-load of beans was brutally slashed into the injured man’s face.
‘I’ll – I’ll call the sheriff of Flintstone out to – to these parts. I warn yuh!’
