What manner of man was this who would so coolly talk to me in the darkness? And
where was he? The direction was obvious, but if I leaped, and missed, I’d be
dead in the next moment.
“It is my gold.” He spoke softly. “Go away and I’ll not kill you.”
“You’re through killing. If anybody does it now, it will be us.”
He did not speak, and I wondered if he were gone. I listened … the man was a
ghost in the woods. I was good, but this man, I believed, was better.
“You killed my father,” I said.
“He was a good man. I did not wish to do it, but he had my gold.”
“The Frenchmen mined the gold. They buried it. They sold their claim to it with
Louisiana. It was anybody’s gold.”
“You will not have it. I will kill you all.”
After a moment of listening, I said, “Where is my father’s body?”
If I could keep him talking, just a little longer. I shifted my position
slightly, making no sound.
“It is beyond there, beyond your camp. I buried him in a crack. It is at the
edge, near the roots of a tree.”
The faintest sound. I moved swiftly, felt the sudden rush of a body in the
darkness, saw the gleam of a knife in a short, wicked sidewise swing at my ribs.
He swung with his right arm, and I pulled back and dropped to my right. His
knife went past me, and I rolled up on the small of my back and kicked out
viciously with both feet, kicking where his body had to be.
The double kick caught him on the side and knocked him rolling. Coming up like a
cat, knife in hand, I went for him. I saw the black bulk of him roll up and come
at me, felt the edge of the knife and the point take my sleeve, and then I came
up on his right side and brought my knife up from below.
His elbow caught my wrist and I almost lost my grip on the knife. He twisted
away, turned, and threw his weight into me. He was heavy and bull-strong. The
charge threw me back, but I caught my left forearm under his chin and brought
him over with me. He landed on his back just above me and then we both came up,
panting fiercely, gasping for breath at that altitude.
He circled … I could barely see him. I could hear his breath and see the cold
light gleam along his blade. Suddenly I stopped, poised, yet still. Instantly he
threw himself into me and I sidestepped off to my left, leaving my extended
right leg for him to trip over. As his toe hooked over my leg, I swung back and
down with my blade.
It caught him too high—it ripped his coat and must have nicked his neck, for I
heard a gasp of pain and then he wheeled into me again. This time his head was
up and I jabbed him in the face with my fist. He did not expect it; my fist
smashed him back on his heels, and I stepped in, stabbing low and hard.
At the last instant he tried to evade my thrust, throwing himself backward down
a small declivity. For an instant he vanished, and then I was down and after
him.
He was gone.
Stopping, poised for battle, I listened. Not a sound except a soft wind in the
trees. A cloud drifted over the stars and it was darker. Every sense alert, I
listened.
Nothing … nothing at all.
A brief, utterly futile battle. A moment of desperate struggle, and then
nothing.
Yet I should have known. He was a sure-thing killer, who could stab the wounded
and helpless Pierre, who could shoot my father from ambush and then lurk,
waiting for days for a final shot.
He had thought to kill me there in the darkness, coming at me suddenly, yet I
had been ready. And I had nicked him. Of that I was sure.
After a moment I walked back. “I believe I scratched him,” I said and explained.
At the edge of the cliff where he had said my father’s body was hidden, I
hesitated. It was the very edge, and there looked to have been some crumbling.
Probably the result of the tree roots.
There was a crack, all right, and some dirt had been filled in. Orrin came
closer, holding a burning branch in his left hand. I leaned over to look closer,
put my foot on the outer edge of the crack and leaned still further, astride the
crack.
Suddenly there was a grating sound, the outer edge fell away under my foot and I
felt myself falling. Half-turning I made a futile grab at anything, the rock
crumbling from under my feet.
A hand caught mine, the branch dropped, another hand grabbed my sleeve, and I
was hauled up on the ledge.
There was a moment when I said nothing. I looked over into the terrible void of
blackness behind me, listening to the last particles of rock fall, strike, and
rattle away on the last slope.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It was a trap,” Orrin said dryly. “There’s more than one way to kill a man.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
We still had no idea who the killer was. He was somebody who fancied he’d a
claim on all that gold, and he was bound and determined to keep everybody else
away and to have it all for himself.
At daylight we took a look at the place where I’d almost gone over. There was no
evidence to show that a body had ever been there. I reckon the killer had seen
the place, figured it was ready to collapse, and just used it on chance.
A woodsman is forever noticing small things like that. He’ll have in his mind
many possible camps that he’ll never have time to use, and he’ll notice tangles
to avoid, things a man might trip over, and bad footing generally. After a time
a man takes all these things in without really thinking about it. But if
something is out of place he will see it instantly.
Judas fixed us bacon and eggs from the outfit he’d brought up the trail. It
wasn’t often we had eggs unless setting down at table, but Judas was a planning
man, and he’d packed for good cooking. When we finished I took my Winchester,
shifted into moccasins, and walked out to where we’d had our scuffle the night
before.
There were tracks aplenty, but might few of them a body could read, for we’d
fought mostly on crushed-down grass and flowers, and some of them were already
springing back into place.
After a while I found a couple of fair prints. It was the same boot I’d seen on
the trail, and I worked around, trying to pick up sign that would take me where
he was going. Trailing a man like that would be like trailing an old silvertip
grizzly. He’d be watching his back trail and would be apt to see me before I saw
him, and that wasn’t pleasant to contemplate.
Not that I had anybody to mourn much for me but brothers. Ange was dead, the
other girls I’d known were scattered and gone, but I could do some mourning for
myself. It seemed to me I had a lot of living to do and no particular desire to
cash in my chips up here in Cumberland Basin.
Nevertheless, I poked around. He’d taken off in an almighty hurry, not scared,
mind you, but lacking that extra percentage he always had to have. When he took
those first steps he’d be getting away, not thinking of hiding a trail. By his
third or fourth step he’d be thinking of that, if I knew my man.
Sure enough, I found a toe print, gouged deep. I followed a few bruised blades
of grass, the edge of a heel print, a crushed pine cone, and a slip in a muddy
place, and I came through a patch of scattered spruce and into the open beyond.
I had to pull up short. Chances were nine out of ten he’d changed direction
right there. So I scouted around and after a few minutes worked out a trail down
into the hollow that lay on the east side of the basin. He had gone down into
it, then switched on a fallen log, walked its length, and started back up to the
ridge.
By night he couldn’t see what he’d done, but crushed grass or leaves had left a
greenish smudge atop that log in two places. He had stepped on the log and grass
from his boots had stuck it, just as a body will track dirt and the like into a
house.
Four or five places in the next hundred yards or so took me along a diagonal