“Two?” Sylvie spoke up. She hadn’t known that.
“Sure, there was a Mexican got away—he was a packer for Hume. But the governor of New Mexico was after anybody who worked for him. Somebody tipped off the governor that Hume was smuggling gold out and paying no percentage to the government, or whatever they had to do in those days.
“That Mexican lit out for Mexico, but he got his back broke down there and never could come back. But that doesn’t say some of his folks mightn’t have come back.”
“Are you trying to tell us the gold isn’t there?” Ralph demanded incredulously.
“I’d say it isn’t,” I replied. “Bishop, I don’t know about you, but Fryer worked the mining camps in Nevada and Colorado. He’ll tell you hidden gold is usually gone, or nobody ever finds it. There’s men who have spent their lives hunting for treasure like this, and never found anything.”
“That’s nonsense,” Ralph said. “The gold is here … we know it is.”
“Lots of luck. I only hired on to guide these folks into this country. You find it, you can have it. And you’ll know the place by the bones.”
“Bones?” It was the first time Ferrara had spoken.
“Sure. A lot of men died there when Hume was killed, and a lot have died since. The Comanches and the Utes say that box canyon is cursed. No Indian will spend a night in the canyon, and none will ride through if they can help it.”
“See?” Hooker said. “That was what I was tellin’ you.”
“Take their weapons,” Sylvie said. “We will make them talk.”
“Noble,” I said, “nobody ain’t about to take my guns. Do you think I’d shuck my iron, with what I know’s ahead? I’ve got nothing to tell you, so there’d be no end to it. You boys want what I’m holdin’, you’re going to have to buy it the hard way.”
“Don’t talk like a fool!” Ralph said. “Why, we could blow you out of your saddle!”
“Likely. Only Noble here knows me, and he knows I wouldn’t be goin’ alone. I seen a man one time who was still shooting with sixteen bullets in him. At this range I know I’m going to get two of you anyway—maybe three or four.”
And they were going to help me do it, for if trouble started I was going to jump my horse right in the middle of them, where every shot they fired would endanger everybody else in their party.
Now, Noble Bishop was no damn fool. He’d used a gun enough to know that you don’t just shoot somebody and they fall down. If a man is mad and coming at you, you have to get him right through the heart, right through the brain, or on a big bone to stop him.
On the other hand, a shot that’s unexpected can drop a man in his tracks; although any expert on gunshot wounds can tell some strange stories about what can happen in a shooting.
Bishop knew I’d been wild and desperate. He knew I was reckoned to be a fast man with a gun, and a dead shot; and he knew if it came to shooting, somebody was going to get killed. In such a melee it could be anybody. And like I’d hinted, the gold might not even be there.
Bishop, Fryer, Ferrara, and maybe Parker were canny enough to guess what I’d do, and they weren’t having any of it. After all, why start a gunfight when they could pick us off one at a time with small risk? Or let us find the gold and then take it from us? I knew how they were thinking, because I knew what I’d think in their place.
Bishop spoke calmly. “He’s right as rain.” He wasn’t going to turn this into a wild shooting where anybody could get hurt, and maybe nothing accomplished in the end.
Time and numbers were on their side. All the help I had was a girl and a crippled-up old man, but both of them could scatter a lot of promiscuous lead at such close-up range as this.
“There’s nothing to be gained by shooting it out here,” Bishop went on. “You ride on your business and we’ll ride on ours.”
Sylvie was about to protest, then said. “Let him go. Just kill the girl. She has claim to that gold.” You never did see anybody who looked so beautiful and was so poison mean as she did when when she said it.
“Nobody gets shot,” Bishop said. “You all turn and ride out of here.”
We turned and started away, but as I went past Bishop, I said to him in a low voice, “Noble, if you find that gold, don’t drink any coffee she makes.”
Then we went on by, but when I glanced back he was still watching us. After a minute, he lifted a hand and waved. That was all.
“I thought surely there would be shooting,” Penelope said.
“Nobody’d been drinking,” Mims said dryly, “and nobody was crazy. We’d have wound up with some of them shot up, and nothing settled.”
All the same, nothing was settled anyway. Noble Bishop and me would have it to do, come the right day.
And I had an idea the day was not far off.
11
Sylvie Karnes must have made contact with Bishop in Romero, I was thinking. But murderous as Bishop was, he did his work with a gun, which in my book was something altogether different from using poison. Yet he was none the less deadly, for all of that.
“How’d you get shut of Loomis?” I asked as we rode along.
Penelope shrugged. “Who said I was? We got separated, that’s all.”
Now, I didn’t really believe that, nor did I believe that I’d seen the last of that stiff-necked, hard-mouthed old man.
“Whatever we’re going to do,” I added, “had best be done soon.” Even as I said it, I had no stomach for it. I’d a sight rather face Bishop with a gun than ride back into that box canyon.
And Mims was in bad shape. He had lost blood, leaving him weak as a cat, and he could only fumble with his bad hands. It was no wonder he had passed out up there in the canyon, but the idea stayed with me that it had been something worse than mere weakness.
The shadows were growing long as we rode along the stream and then crossed to a low island covered with willows. It was no more than sixty or seventy feet long and half as wide, but there was concealment of a sort there, and some grass.
Swinging down, I helped Mims from the saddle, and felt him trembling with weakness. I spread his blankets, and got him over to them, and he let himself down with a deep sigh.
“We’d better make some coffee,” Penelope said. “We all need it.”
The stars were out while I gathered driftwood along the island’s low shore, and the water rustled pleasantly. Behind the trunk of a huge old cottonwood deadfall, I put together a small fire. The wind was picking up a little, and it worried me, for the sound of the wind would cover anybody trying to approach us.
Nobody talked. All of us were tired, and on edge. We all needed rest, Mims most of all. When I looked at the old man it gave me a twist of pain inside. And it gave me a sudden turn to think that though I was young and strong and tough now, this was the way a man could be when he grew old. It was old age I could see in the face of Harry Mims now.
He drank some coffee, but refused anything to eat, and soon he fell into a restless sleep. Off to one side I said to Penelope, “All the gold in this country ain’t worth that man’s life. He’s a good old man.”
“I know.” Then she was silent. I sipped black coffee and tried to reach out with my thoughts and picture what tomorrow would bring.
“I need that money, Nolan,” she went on. “I need it badly. Say I am selfish if you will, but if I don’t get the gold, I’ll have nothing, nothing at all.”
There didn’t seem much of anything to say to that, and I kept still. But I kept thinking about the gold. We were not far from the canyon. As I thought about it, I wondered if I could find my way around in there in the dark. The trouble was they would probably have somebody watching. Tired as I was, I wanted to get it over with and get out of there.
That canyon worried me. A man who lives on the rough side of things learns to trust to his instincts. The life he leads calls for a kind of alertness no man living a safe and regular life would need; his senses become sharper and they make him alive to things he can’t always put into words. I was not a superstitious man, but there was something about that canyon that was all wrong.