Callaghen knew the chips were down. He knew that he was not going on from here, nor was anybody else until the issue had been faced… and decided.
The men against him were not just playing games. They had a stake to win, and gold was involved. If there were no witnesses there could be no investigation that would matter. Whatever Champion and Spencer had done would not be known, and what Bolin and his friends found would be their own business, and they would be free to operate as they wished.
Bolin was sure that, whatever there was in the mine, Callaghen knew about it. Hadn’t Callaghen had access to the map, and hadn’t he been over the country represented on it?
There were two men and two women up there in the rocks. They had very little water and they were not going to move much higher. According to Champion, both men had been doing some shooting; therefore there was not much ammunition left.
Nobody could possibly know where they were, and there was no army nearer than Camp Cady, a good eighty miles to the west. But Bolin had run stolen horses through this country a dozen times and he knew where water was, and one place was not two hundred yards from where he was sitting. He held all the cards, and he could wait. They could not.
Moreover, although he preferred not to mention it to the others, he was within half a mile of one of the entrances to what he liked to think of as the Cave of the Golden Sands. The trouble was that that damned Irish soldier up on the side of the mountain was even closer.
Bolin made a trumpet of his hands and called out: “You want to come down, Callaghen? it’s no use to shoot each other. Wylie’s dead… it’s just you an’ me now.”
Callaghen heard him, but made no reply. Bolin wanted to talk, and that meant that Bolin was losing a little patience. It also meant that Callaghen had something Bolin wanted. Was it the women? It was possible. After all, it was more than a hundred and fifty miles in any direction to where one could find a woman.
Callaghen looked around him. Already shadows were thickening under the mountains to the west. Night was going to be a bad time. Still, under cover of darkness they could perhaps move on up the mesa. He knew, though, that travel at night might be noisy. Loose gravel or rock that one can see in the daytime cannot be seen in the dark. He turned his back on the enemy below and, lying against the rock that was his parapet, he studied the face of the mesa, carefully picking out a possible route.
It could be done, he believed. There was a sort of notch up there… it mightoffer access to the top, but then what? Would it be better to fight it out here? No, higher up was better, he decided. Not all the way to the top, but close.
He motioned the others to him and pointed out the way. “Beamis, you’ll have to lead. Malinda can follow, as she’s a good climber. What we’re looking for is water, but what we want most is some kind of a defensive position with a good field of fire. There’s too many ways they can flank us here.”
“It is too light,” Beamis said.
“We’ll wait. When it is full dark, you lead off, quietly.”
It was already dark down below where the rays of the sun, which had now set behind the mountains, could not reach. Here there was still a half-light. Somewhere he heard the call of a quail, that most beautiful sound of the desert evening. He waited, scanning the boulders below. He could see the horses occasionally, and for a while there was a thin trail of smoke visible that gradually merged with the night.
“Now, Sergeant?” Beamis asked.
“Now… and be very quiet.”
Beamis moved out, followed by Malinda. Aunt Madge lingered. “I am worried about McDonald. When I do not come he might start looking.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be seeing him soon.”
She left, and Callaghen listened but he heard no sound. They were moving well, and now he was alone.
He had never minded being alone in the desert. He was not one of those who always had to be talking or sharing thoughts. He liked people, but he felt there was nothing like being alone in the desert or among the mountains, for it is then you begin to know them. The wilderness does not share its secrets with the noisy or the talkative; its secrets come to you with silence.
Animals move, birds stir, and the whisperings of the night become audible. The desert itself speaks, for the earth lives, and in the night’s stillness one can hear the earth growing, hear the dying and the borning and the rebirth of many things. A bit of sand trickles, a rock falls, a tree whispers or moans these are the breathings of the earth.
If there were some way to speed up the sounds of the night, to bring them more precisely to the ear, one would hear the music of the changing earth the ripples, the falls, the tricklings, all grown into one vast but infinitely delicate symphony that would charm the ear of men. Callaghen waited only a little longer, and then he drew back from his rock, rifle in his right hand.
“Well, now, you moved just in time!”
A flame stabbed the night just as he threw himself aside and swung with the rifle. It was not a considered blow, merely an instinctive thing with the rifle poorly balanced for it, but his grip was hard as the barrel drove forward.
He felt the burn of flame, and then wild with sudden fear he caught the rifle with both hands and swung, forward and back, with butt and barrel. He heard a grunt, a blast roared from the gun, a choking blast that illumined for an instant a staring face. Then the pistol clattered among the rocks and he swung the rifle butt upward in an uppercut that smashed the man’s head back against the rocks.
And then, like a cat, Callaghen was scrambling upward, leaping from rock to rock, ducking the spines of prickly pear by instinct more than by judgment. Behind him a gun roared, and he heard the bullet strike off to his right, but he went between two junipers and on up the slope.
His eyes were accustomed now to the darkness, and he could see to place each foot carefully, wary that he might have a broken leg or twisted ankle should he slip between the rocks. He had no idea who it was he had battled so fiercely among the rocks.
He paused and listened. There was a stirring down there, a muffled curse and a murmur of voices. Somebody struck a light, and Callaghen’s bullet spat where the light had been, the sound of the shot racketing down the slope. He moved instantly, putting himself away from the firing position, and went farther up the slope. He had a feeling they would try nothing more during the night. He had been lucky.
He paused again to catch his breath and heard his heart throbbing, as much from reaction to fear as from the struggling climb. It had been a narrow escape. Somebody had crept close to him, and in another moment he would have been dead had he not moved and had the stranger not felt a compulsion to speak.
Well, he reflected grimly, from the feel of that upper-cut butt stroke there was one man who wouldn’t be opening his mouth for a while. If the man wasn’t dead he would at least have a broken jaw.
His hand was smarting as sweat got into the powder burn. He moved up higher, and had climbed for several minutes when he heard a soft call, barely audible. “Mort?”
He moved in that direction, and saw that it was Malinda. “We’ve found a place,” she said.
It was a wind-hollowed half-cave in the mountainside, perhaps thirty feet wide, and less than half that deep, a poor shelter if a storm came, but a difficult place to get at. It was a sandy place, partly sheltered by a slight overhang, and scattered boulders were in front of it, rocks that had tumbled down the mountain and fallen off the edge of the overhang, hitting the ground in front of it to form a not very effective parapet.
“Are you all right?” Malinda asked.
“Yes,” he said reassuringly, and Beamis moved over to him.
“We heard a scuffle down there, and some shots.”
“I think one of them is out of it,” Callaghen said. “I don’t know which one, but he was a good Injun… he came right up to me without a whisper.”