“There’s water,” said Old Nathan. He leaned his rifle carefully against the well curb and released the brake to lower the bucket.
The same two poles that held up the shelter roof supported a pivot log as thick as one of the cunning man’s shanks. The crank and take-up spool, also wooden, were clamped to the well curb. The pivot log squealed loudly as it turned, but it kept the rope from rubbing as badly as it would have done against a fixed bar.
“Ned, take our horses over,” Hardy ordered abruptly.
The well was square dug and faced with rock. When the bucket splashed against the water a dozen feet below ground level, the sky’s bright reflection through missing shingles shattered into a thousand jeweled fragments. The white-oak bucket bobbed for a moment before it tipped sideways and filled for Old Nathan to crank upward again.
He took a mouthful of water before tipping the rest of the bucket into the pine trough beside the well curb. It tasted clean, without a hint of death or brimstone . . . or of gold, which had as much of Satan in it as the other two together, thet was no more ‘n the truth.
“You wait yer turn,” the mule demanded as Hardy’s horse tried to force its head into the trough first. “Lessen you want a couple prints the size uv my hind shoes on yer purty hide.”
“Well!” the horse said. “There’s room for all I’d say—ifen all were gentlemen.” But he backed off, and the mule made a point of letting the bodyguard’s nondescript mare drink before shifting himself out of the walking horse’s way at about the time Old Nathan spilled the third bucketful into the trough.
Old Nathan looked up to the cabin, dug into the backslope sixty feet up from the well. It squatted there, solid and ugly and grim. The door in the front was low, and the side windows were no bigger than a man’s arm could reach through.
The cabin’s roof was built bear-proof. Axe-squared logs were set edge to edge from the walls to the heavy ridgepole, with shingles laid down the seams t’ keep out the rain. The whole thing was more like a hog barn thin a cabin; but it warn’t hogs nor people neither that the sturdy walls pertected, hit was gold. . . .
“Well, ye coming in with me?” Old Nathan said in challenge.
“I bin there,” Bascom Hardy said without meeting the cunning man’s eyes. “Don’t guess there’s much call I should do thet again, what with it gettin’ so late.”
Hardy’s hand twitched toward his watch pocket again, but he caught himself before he dipped out the gold hunter. “I reckon I’ll be going,” he said, tugging the reins of his horse away from the water trough. “I’ll be by come sun-up t’ see thet you’ve kept yer bargain, though.”
The rich man and his bodyguard mounted together. If Ned had been the man he was hired t’ be, he’d hev waited so they weren’t the both of ’em hanging with their hands gripping saddles and each a leg dangling in the air.
Bascom Hardy settled himself. “I warn ye not t’ try foolin’ me,” he called. “I kin see as far into a millstone as the next man.”
“Hmpf,” grunted Old Nathan. He took his rifle in one hand and the mule’s reins in the other. “Come along, thin, mule,” he said as he started walking toward the cabin. No point in climbin’ into the saddle t’ ride sixty feet.
“Ye’d think,” he muttered, “thet if they trust me not t’ hie off in the night with the gold, they oughtn’t worry I’d come where I said I’d come.”
The mule clucked in amusement. “Whur ye goin’ t’ run?” it asked. “Past them, settlin’ a few furlongs up the road, er straight inter the trees like a squirrel? The trail don’t go no further thin we come.”
The cunning man looked over his shoulder in surprise. The two horsemen had disappeared for now; but, as the mule said, they wouldn’t go far. Just far enough to be safe from whatever came visiting the cabin.