My head, which had only stopped aching the day before, started in again now, and my breathing was bad. After a bit I left the hollow and scrambled up beside my horse, to lean against him. It was a surprising thing to know how much a wallop on the head could take out of a man.
Mims looked worried. “You feel all right? You sure don’t look so good.”
“Headache,” I told him, “from that knock on the head from Andrew’s bullet.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Now, you never did tell me how come your head was like that. Andrew, hey? What become of him?”
“Come to think of it, it wasn’t Andrew who shot me, it was Ralph. It was Andrew who came in to finish the job.”
The air was better up there beside my horse—only a few feet difference, too. After a few minutes I slid back down and went to work again, but I had moved only a few boulders when my head began to buzz and I felt very peculiar. I was going to have to quit.
“If there was a swamp around here,” Mims said, “I’d figure you were getting a dose of marsh gas. It’ll sometimes do that to a man. Cuts his wind.”
Crawling up again, I staggered to my horse, took my canteen and rinsed my mouth with water, and then emptied some of the water over my head. After a moment or two I felt better and went down into the hollow once more. Almost at once I found the gold.
It had been dumped into a natural hollow in the rock underneath. Wasting no time, I began to get it out. Mims, despite his weakness, got down and started to help. Our excitement carried us on, with me passing the ingots up to Mims, who put them in the prepared packs on his two lead horses.
There was no question of silence any more. I was coughing and choking, and couldn’t seem to stop. But I knew that at any moment the others might come.
When the last of the gold was loaded, I climbed up to where the horses stood, not more than six or eight feet above where the gold had been hidden. I fell down, pulled myself up, and then untying my horse, I got a leg over the saddle.
The dun wasted no time, but started for the steep trail up the mountain. It was that which saved us. I was coughing so hard I could scarcely do more than stay in the saddle. Harry Mims was right behind me with the gold. We had started up the trail when far back behind us we heard a clatter of hoofs and saw several riders come into the canyon. The first thing they saw was Hooker, and then the marks of our horses’ hoofs where they had waited while we loaded the gold. They saw the hollow among the rocks, where I’d climbed down to get at the gold, and they saw the empty hole. While they were flocked around it our horses were still scrambling up the steep trail.
We were still within rifle range when they saw us. The gold had been there … and now they were seeing it slip away from them.
Which one of them fired the shot, I will never know, nor how many of them there were. I know Tex Parker was there, or somebody riding his horse, and a man wearing a Mexican sombrero, who might have been Charlie Hurst. There was no sign of Bishop, nor of Penelope. All that I saw at that one quick glance, for I never got another.
One man whipped his rifle to his shoulder and fired, I saw the leap of flame from the muzzle, and then the whole world seemed to blow up in our faces. There was a tremendous explosion and an enormous flame shot up out of the canyon.
I hit the ground with a jarring thud, and I never knew whether I was blown from my saddle or thrown by my startled horse. Only I lit on my hands and knees, looking down into the canyon but well back from the edge.
Flame was streaking out in rushing streams from the point of the explosion, seeming to seek out every hollow, every low place among the rocks, and then it hit a three-foot-wide hole in the rocks. We’d seen that hole, but we hadn’t gone near it. Now the mouth of the hole was a great jet of flame, and the air was filled with a terrible, continuing roar.
Pulling myself to my feet, I staggered away, filled with horror, and trying to get away from the sound of the roaring.
There was no sign of my horse, and none of Harry Mims or the pack horses, but for several minutes the only thing I could think of was that I wanted to get away.
I climbed up, and had gone almost half a mile before I saw Mims. He was still in the saddle, and he had the pack horses with him. He was trying to round up the lineback dun, but the mustang was frightened and would have none of him.
Slowly, I limped along the mountainside toward them. The dun shied several times, but finally he stood still and let me get into the saddle.
We rode straight away toward the west, with no thought in our minds but to get away from that dreadful sight and that terrible sound. I’d seen men die before, but never like that.
And where … where was Penelope?
12
Neither of us felt like talking. We rode straight ahead, but we had no destination in mind. It was simply that we wanted to get away from the box canyon, away from that awful scene.
It was Mims who finally spoke. “Must be some kind of gas … or oil. You hear about that feller back in Pennsylvania who drilled him an oil well? Supposing something like that caught fire?”
I didn’t know the answer, but it seemed as if it must have been something of the sort. Even the fact that we had the gold, three hundred pounds of it, was forgotten in the shock of what had happened in the canyon.
What brought me back to myself was the thought of Penelope. … Where was she? Loomis, I was sure, had not been among these in the canyon. There had been at least four or five men down there, and Fryer and Ferrara might have been among them, or perhaps some other friends of Parker and Hurst.
“We’ve got to get under cover,” I said, “and we’ve got to stash this gold somewhere.”
I was still coughing from whatever it was I’d gotten into my lungs dawn there—the same thing probably that had killed Steve Hooker. It might have been worse for him at nighttime, or maybe his heart was bad. We’d never know about that, and I wasn’t giving it much thought. It was the living I was concerned with.
Steve Hooker had charted his own course, followed his own trail. If it led him to the death he’d found, he had probably saved himself from a bullet or a noose, for he was headed for one or the other. When a man begins a life of violence, or when he decides to live by taking something away from others, he just naturally points himself toward one end. He can’t win—the odds are too much against him.
We kept heading west, riding at a steady gait for about four miles, and then I let Mims go on ahead with the pack horses while I did what I could to wipe out whatever trail we had left through the bunch grass.
When I came up to him again, walking my horse up Cienequilla Creek, he had stopped at a place barren of cover—a sandy bank rising a few feet above the shore of the creek. It was just what we wanted. We unloaded the gold and put it down close to the bank, then caved the bank over it. The sand was dry, and when we had finished there was no sign that this spot was any different from any other place along the banks where small slides or cave-ins were common. Wiping out our own tracks, we started back.
It was early—the sun wasn’t more than an hour above the horizon. The sky was darkened by the pall of smoke above Rabbit Ears, but the smoke seemed to be thinning out some, we thought.
We had to find Penelope, if she was alive, and I was surely thinking she was. She just had to be. Slipping off in the middle of the night like that … it made no kind of sense unless she figured to get to the gold before we did, or anybody else.
But what happened to her? She had not been in the canyon, of that I was sure, so something must have stopped her, or turned her aside.