Presently a saddle creaked. “I’m getting down,” Penelope said. “I’m going to look around.”
“Wait!” I spoke sharply. “This may be a damned trap. Get back in your saddle and wait.”
Well, I expected a quick answer, but none came. She got back into the saddle and sat quietly. By now the sky was growing gray, and it would not be very long until it was light enough to see.
Nobody said anything for several minutes, and then it was Mims who spoke. “Say I’m scared if you like, but I can’t get shut of this place fast enough.”
Rocks and brush began to take shape, and we could see the walls of the canyon. Nobody was going to ride out of here unless he went out the front way. Or so I thought then.
“I could do with a cup of coffee,” I said.
“Not there. Let’s get the gold and get out.”
“It won’t be that easy,” I said. “It never is.”
Nevertheless, I was as eager to be away as he was, for the canyon was a depressing place. Bones lay about, and not all of them seemed old enough to be the remains of Nathan Hume’s pack train.
We all saw the pool, which lay close to Penelope’s horse. A still, dead place covered with a scum of green. Penelope leaned over and stirred the surface with a branch she broke from a dead tree. The water under the scum was oily and dark.
“You notice something?” Harry Mims said suddenly. “There ain’t no birds in here. I’ve seen no insects, either. Maybe them Indians are right.”
The place was beginning to give me the creeps. “All right,” I said. “From what I’ve heard the gold should be somewhere yonder.”
We worked our way around the fallen rocks and over to the spot. There were bones enough, all right. A mule’s jaw, white and ancient, lay near a shattered rib cage. But the skeletons weren’t pulled apart, the way they often are after wolves or coyotes have worried at them.
I could see that the canyon walls were too steep for any horse to climb, in some places too steep for a man. Yet the first sign of life I saw in the canyon were the tracks of wild horses. Several horses had come through here not long since, but there were older tracks, too, which were headed toward the back of the canyon. On a hunch, I swung my horse around. “You hunt the gold,” I said. “There’s something back there I’ve got to see.”
Without waiting for a reply, I started off on the trail of those mustangs, and believe me, the dun was ready to move. He just didn’t take to that box canyon, not at all.
Those wild horses headed right back up the canyon and into a mess of boulders tumbled from the rock wall above. They wound around among the rocks and brush, and of a sudden I found myself on a narrow trail going up a steep crack in the rocks, scarcely wide enough for a man on horseback. It went straight up, then took a turn, but I had no doubt but that it topped out on the mesa above.
So there was another way out.
Suddenly I heard a faint call, and turned in the saddle to look back. I hadn’t realized I had come so far, or so much higher. I could see Penelope back there, a tiny figure waving her arm at me.
When I reached them Mims was down on the ground. He was lying on his face, which I saw had a faint bluish tinge when I turned him over. “Let’s get him out of here,” I said quickly. “If they come on us with him out—”
I’d no idea what was wrong with him, but it looked as if he’d fainted from some cause or other, and his heart seemed a mite rapid, but was beating all right. I got him up in the saddle and lashed him there, then led the way down the canyon and out. We rode at once toward the shelter of the trees but saw no one, and soon were back among the cottonwoods and willows along the creek.
By that time the better air outside the canyon, and maybe the movement on the back of his horse, seemed to have done him some good. I took him down from the saddle, feeling uncommonly helpless, not knowing what to do for him; but after a moment or two he began to come around.
“You given to passing out?” I asked. “What happened back there?”
“I don’t know. All of a sudden I felt myself going. I tell you one thing—I want no more of that box canyon. There’s something wrong about that place. Call it whatever you like, I think that place is ha’nted.”
After a while he sat up, but his face was uncommonly pale. When he tried to drink he couldn’t keep it down.
“Whatever we do had best be done quickly,” I said. There are too many others around. They’ll find the place if we waste time.
“Maybe I’d best go after the gold. I can take along one of the horses and pack some of it out, and I can get the rest on my horse.”
Penelope stood there looking at me, and then she said, “Mr. Sackett, you must think I am a very foolish girl, to let you go after that gold alone.”
“No, ma’am. You feel up to it, you just go along by yourself—maybe you’d feel safer that way. But I figure one of us ought to stay by Mr. Mims here.”
“I can get along,” said Mims. “You can both go.”
To tell the truth, I’d no great urge to go back there at all, and even less so if I went along with Penelope. She had helped me out of a fix, but she needed my help. I didn’t figure it would be easy to get that gold out, and I wanted nothing else to worry about—especially not a girl I had to look after. I said as much.
“You look after yourself,” she told me, speaking sharp but not what you’d call angry. And with that she got into the saddle and I followed.
To see us, you wouldn’t figure we were going after a treasure like three hundred pounds of gold. We didn’t act very willing, and the closer we came to the mouth of that canyon the slower we rode. I didn’t like it, and neither did she.
Harry Mims was a tough old man, but something had put him down, and it was nothing we could see. Maybe there was a peculiar smell, time to time. I never mentioned it, not really knowing whether it was imagination, or something more.
It was almost at the mouth of the canyon that we rode right into a trap.
Penelope might have had an excuse, but there wasn’t anything like that for me—I should have known better. All of a sudden, there was Sylvie, standing right out in front of us, and when we both drew up, men started stepping out from the rocks and brush.
They had us, all right. They had us cold. And a prettier lot of thieves you never did see. Bishop was there, and Ralph Karnes. Hooker was there, too, his arm in a sling. And there was Charlie Hurst and Tex Parker and Bishop’s men.
“Well, Mr. Sackett,” Sylvie said, “it looks as if we can pick up the chips.”
“Don’t figure on it.”
She just smiled at me, but when she looked at Penelope she was not smiling. “And now I’ve got you,” she said, and there was an ugly ring to her voice. “Right where I’ve wanted you.”
“Where’s that canyon?” Bishop asked.
It sounded like an odd question, for from where he sat he could almost have thrown a rock into the mouth of it, but the way it looked we were about to ride right past it. The reason was that you had to ride to the far side before you could get past the big boulders at the mouth.
“Canyons all around, Noble. You take your pick.” I gestured right toward the canyon. “Like that one, for instance.”
He grinned at me. “You already checked that one,” he said. “We found your tracks coming out. If you left that canyon the gold can’t be there. So you show us.”
“I wish we knew. How’s a man going to pick one canyon out of all these around here?”
“You’d better find a way,” Bishop said.
“Don’t be a damn fool, Noble. Look, we’ve been up here a few days now. How long does it take to pick up that much gold and run? If we knew where it was, we’d have been off and running. Nathan Hume was supposed to have hidden some gold up here. We know that two men got away from the massacre. Maybe some others did, too.”