BOLSA GAP
Sheriff Jordan had a high-powered car purchased, not so much from the
fees of his office as with his perquisites, a word covering a wide range
of possibilities, all of which the sheriff made the most of. He was
proud of his car and proud of his ability to run it anywhere at
record-breaking speed. It carried an extra water container that could be
mounted on the running board for desert work, an extra gasoline and oil
supply, there were always extra tires strapped on, extra spark plugs
handy and his batteries were always well charged.
"I aim to make her efficient," said Jordan, "bein' she represents my
office. That's me. If I needed me an airyplane, I'd get me one to hunt
the outlaws out of cover, an' I'd run it myself, an' run it right.
That's me, Bill Jordan!"
Boaster though he was, there was little doubt as to Jordan's efficiency
or his courage. He brought in the criminals he went out to get, some
alive, some dead; prosecuted the first with zeal and collected the
rewards with alacrity. The trouble was that he did _not_ always go out
after certain individuals, who were outside the law, as interpreted by
the people, but inside it, as protected by the political ring to which
Jordan, with other prominent officials, belonged.
Jordan had taken up his brother-in-law's grievance with the greater zest
since he had a half-interest in Plimsoll's Good Luck Pool Parlors, a
share that had cost him good money. On top of that had come Sandy's
flouting of him on the bridge in front of the sheriff's own followers.
He had to save his face, politically as well as personally.
To secure papers bringing Molly Casey within the jurisdiction of the
court was not a difficult matter, but it was not so easy to get them at
an early hour, since court was not in session and the judge none too
eager to arise of a morning. But Jordan knew nothing of the visit of
Miranda Bailey to the Three Star and he pressed matters with no special
expedition, though he characteristically wasted no time.
Armed with the necessary warrant, backed by an assurance that, unless
some extraordinary howl went up, the girl would be given into the
custody of Jim Plimsoll as guardian, by virtue of his claim to
partnership with her father, the sheriff, Plimsoll and two others, all
three deputized for the occasion, started the car from Hereford at a
quarter of twelve, after an early lunch. They passed the butte where Jim
lay prone atop without noticing the flashes he shot into the sky. At a
few minutes after twelve they reached Three Star where Buck, seated on
the porch, his saddle astride a sawhorse, stitched away at a cinch.
Buck played his part well, allowing Jordan to ferret out information to
his own satisfaction. It appeared plain that all three partners had
taken flight with the girl in the buckboard. Sandy's pinto and Sam's
roan were in the corral. Jordan overlooked one thing, the counting of
saddles, though that would not have been an easy determination.
"Some one tipped this thing off," he said sternly to Buck. "Who was it?"
"Meanin' this visit's offishul?" asked Buck. "What's it fo', Sheriff?
Moonshine or hawss stealin'?" He spoke in a jesting note, his weathered
face impassive as the shell of a walnut, but Plimsoll scowled, noting
the turn of Buck's bland countenance in his direction for the first
time. It was whispered that the brands on Plimsoll's horse ranch were
not those usually known in the county, nor even in the counties
adjoining. There were rumors, smothered by Plimsoll's stand with the
authorities, of bands of horses, driven by strangers, arriving
wearied--and always by night--at his corrals.
"It don't matter--to you--what it's for," answered Jordan. "I'll
overhaul 'em an' bring 'em back. Crossin' the county line won't do 'em
any good with this warrant. Ef they try hide-out tactics or put up a
scrap, it'll be kidnappin' an' that's a penal offense."
Buck whistled.
"Thought you wasn't goin' to let me know," he said. "It's the gel."
"Who's been here to tip it off?" asked Jordan.
Buck looked at him serenely, took a plug of chewing from his hip pocket,
took his knife, opened it deliberately and slowly cut off a corner of
the tobacco.
"Search me," he drawled. "Me, I don't stay up to the house."
Jordan, temporarily discomfited but still confident of bringing back his
quarry, marked the trail of the buckboard in the alkali soil, noted the
hoof-prints of the diverging riders and nodded with the semi-smile and
half closed-eyes of conscious superiority. He had already elicited
apparently reluctant information from Pedro as to the four passengers in
the buckboard. Buck had been more reticent. To the sheriff Buck's
reticence betokened desire to cover the fugitives. He fancied that
Pedro's testimony was the result of Jordan's own cleverness in
cross-questioning. Joe resorted to "no sabes."
"You 'tendin' ranch?" Jordan asked Buck, at last.
"Yep. Till I git fresh orders."
"I'll bring you back those orders, also yore bosses, before sun-down."
Buck permitted himself his first grin.
"You'll have to go some," he said. "Goin' to bring 'em back in irons?
Figgerin' on abduction?"
Jordan gave no hint of how Buck's shaft might have targeted his
intentions, but climbed into the car and started it. The powerful
machine went lunging through the soft dirt, following the blurry trail
of the buckboard's iron tires, throwing up dust as a fast launch churns
spray.
After leaving the Three Star all semblance of road vanished. The
alkaline soil was almost as fine as flour, and deep. This and the fear
of losing the trail kept the machine down to a limit that would have
been ridiculous on a real road but represented fast work on the desert.
The water boiled in the radiator from the heat of the toiling engine and
Jordan stopped, replenished, reoiled. Reaching the lava strip where the
buckboard had halted for water and the noon meal, they found the trail
skirting the flow toward the south. The main mass of the mesa, broken up
into gorges, gaps, stairway cliffs, marked by purple shadows, scanty in
the early afternoon but gradually widening, was about fifteen miles
away. Jordan braked his car. He ignored the water in the spring. His
spare supply was still ample and was distilled, not alkaline.
He turned to one of his deputies.
"Which way do you figger they're headin', Phil?" he asked. "Is there a
cut or a pass through the mesa?"
"Dam'fino. Mesa's all cut up, but it's sure a Godforsaken country.
Nothin' but rock an' clay an' cactus. No one ever goes there. I reckon I
know as much of this country as most an' I sure never explored the dump.
One thing's sure an' certain. Them fellers from the Three Star usually
know where they are headin'. Trail's plain."
"Sure is." But Jordan scratched his head a trifle doubtfully. If Sandy
Bourke and his chums had been tipped off, this trail was a little too
plain to be true. Presently, as the machine plowed on south, they
struck a patch of desert where the rock surfaced out and showed no trace
of hoof or tire. Jordan stopped the car and the four got out, casting
around, expecting that this outcropping had been used as a device to
throw off the pursuit. Fairly fresh horse droppings showed that the
buckboard had held to its course and, the rock passed, the trail showed
plain again, curving in toward the broken wall of the mesa, leading
toward a cleft that was plainly distinguishable.
"That's Bolsa Boquete," announced the deputy named Phil. "I never went
through it."
"What's it mean--the name?"
"Boquete's gap. Bolsa's money--not jest the same as dinero. It's the
word they have on the bank winders down in Mexico. Exchange."
"Money Gap? That don't tell us a thing," said Jordan. "But I'll bet my
star they've gone through it all right. We ought to be not much more'n
an hour behind them."
"They're on about us getting the papers," said Plimsoll. He had not said
much on the trip so far. "Too much talk nowadays. You can't whisper in a
dugout but what the news is all over the county inside of twenty
minutes. Bourke sabes that getting the girl out of the county won't do
any good; he aims to get her out of the state and any Arizona court or
sheriff jurisdiction. He's the brains of the outfit. We've got to get
her, Jordan."
"You ain't tellin' me a thing I don't know, Jim. But there's one thing
you _can_ tell me. Is that tip you got about Dynamite a sure one?"
Plimsoll, sitting beside Jordan, flashed him a look of contempt.
"Do you think I'm chasing this girl because I'm stuck on her? One of the
party with this eastern crowd dropped into my place and talked. Showed
some samples and I had a good look at them. He happened to leave a bit
or two behind and I had them assayed. Here is where I get back the money
I put up to grubstake Casey."
Jordan gave him a grin of derision.
"You an' yore grubstake," he jeered.
Plimsoll said nothing more.
As they neared the gap, translated by Phil in the unconsciousness that
Bolsa had two meanings in Spanish, Jordan slowed up.
"No shootin' in this deal," he warned. "Come to a show-down, Bourke
won't buck the law soon's we show papers. So long's he ain't been
notified the court is makin' a ward of the girl they ain't done nothin'
wrong. But--if he resists, that's different."
"I ain't goin' to be awful anxious to start shootin'," said Phil. "They
done some pretty shootin' at the bridge that time. Sandy Bourke's a
two-handed lead flinger an' Soda-Water Sam's no slouch. Neither's
Mormon. Me, I'll be peaceable 'less it's forced on me otherwise."
They entered the split in the mesa. The cliffs shimmered in the heat,
their outlines fuzzy. Branched and pillared cactus showed in gray-green
reptilian growths. The soft earth, through which here and there the
volcanic cores of the range were thrust, seemed as if it could supply
the paint shops of a nation with almost any hue desired, ready for
mixing with oil or water. Waves of heat beat between the walls of the
cleft. The floor was fairly smooth, swept clean by occasional
cloud-bursts, save for the skeleton of a tree and another of a too-far
wandering steer, both blanched white as the alkali-crusted boulders. It
was nearly level going and the car pounded along, all the occupants
looking for trail sign. The mesa corridor, nowhere more than thirty feet
wide, twisted and snaked, three hundred feet of sheer wall on either
side topped by sloping cliffs mounting far higher toward the actual top
of the mesa.
"Keep an eye peeled for rain, Phil," said Jordan, "I'd sure hate to get
caught in here with a cloud-burst."
"Right," answered Phil. "I c'ud see better if I had a drink. Plimsoll,
you got somethin' on the hip, ain't you?"
Plimsoll produced a bottle and the four of them drank the fiery
unrectified, unstamped liquor. Ahead was an abrupt turn. Jordan slowed.
Making the curve, a fence stretched across the gorge, reaching from wall
to wall, a four-strand barrier of barbed-wire, strung on patent steel
posts. Jordan braked with emergency. The sight of such a fence in such a
place was as unexpected as the sun-dried carcass of a steer would be on
Broadway. Plimsoll and Jordan cursed, the former in pure anger, the
latter with some appreciation of the stratagem for delay.
"We can tear it down quicker'n they fixed it," he said. "I've got a pair
of nippers in the tool kit. They can't have driven in those posts deep.
Come on."
A voice floated down to them.
"You leave that fence alone, gents. _If_ you please. I went to a heap of
trouble puttin' up that fence. It's _my_ fence."
They looked up, to see Mormon seated on the top of a great boulder that
had land-slipped from the cliff into the gorge. From thirty feet above
them he looked down, amiably enough, though there was a glint of blued
metal in his right hand.
"Hello, Jim Plimsoll," he went on. "I ain't seen you-all fo' quite a
while. You fellers out fo' a picnic?"
Jordan advanced to the foot of the rock, producing his papers.
"I have a bench warrant here to bring into court for the appointment of
a proper guardian, the child Molly Casey, she being a minor and without
natural or legal protectors. I've got yore name on these papers, Mormon
Peters, as one of the three parties with whom the girl is now domiciled.
I warn you that you are obstructing the process of the law by yore
actions. You put up that gun an' come down here an' help to pull down
this fence, illegally erected on property not yore own. Otherwise you're
subject to arrest."
"That is sure an awful long speech fo' a hot day," said Mormon equably.
"But I don't sabe that talk at all. Molly Casey ain't here, to begin
with. Nor she ain't been here. An' I don't sabe no obstruction of the
law by settin' up a fence in a mesa canyon to round up broom-tails."
One of the deputies snickered.
"Broom-tails?" cried Jordan. "That's too thin. There's no mustangs
hangin' round a mesa like this, 'thout feed or water." He flushed
angrily. He was short-tempered and he was certain the fence was a ruse
to gain time, with Mormon left behind to parley. It all seemed to point
to Sandy Bourke making for the railroad.
"You never kin tell about wild hawsses, or even branded ones," said
Mormon pleasantly. "Ask Plimsoll. He picks 'em up in all sorts of
places."
Plimsoll cursed. Mormon still held his gun conspicuously, and he
restrained his own impulse to draw. Jordan wheeled on the gambler.
"You keep out o' this, Jim Plimsoll," he said. "I'm runnin' this end of
it. He's talkin' against time. You come down an' help remove this
fence," he shouted up at the smiling Mormon, "or I'll start something.
It ain't on yore property and it's hindering the carrying out of my
warrant."
"It ain't on a public highway neither," retorted Mormon. "But I'll come
down. Don't you go to clippin' those wires an' destroyin' what _is_ my
property." He slid down the rock and commenced to unbend the metal
straps that held the wire in place. Jordan and one of his men followed
suit with pliers from the motor kit. The job took several minutes.
"You'll come along with us," said Jordan. "You lied about the girl
comin' this way. I've a notion to take you in for that. But I reckon you
can go back in the buckboard with yore partners."
"Reckon I'll travel in the buckboard, when you catch up with it," said
Mormon. "But I'll come erlong with you fo' a spell--of my own free will.
I don't see no harm in takin' the gel visitin' anyway," he concluded as
he took an extra seat in the tonneau.
Jordan made no answer but started the engine. The gorge began to narrow
perceptibly, its floor slanted upward and the machine labored with a
mixture that constantly needed more air. The way zigzagged for half a
mile and then they came to a second fence. No buckboard was in sight.
Beyond the wire the pitch of the ravine showed steeper yet, as it
mounted to a sharp turn. Leaning against a post stood Soda-Water Sam,
smoking a cigarette, his gun holster hitched forward, the butt of the
weapon close to one hand. Jordan and his men leaped out as the car
stopped, Mormon following more slowly.
"Afternoon, hombres all," said Sam. "Joy-ridin'?"
Jordan wasted no more explanations.
"You take down this fence," he fairly shouted.
"What fo'?"
"Ask yore partner."
"Sheriff claims we're cumberin' the landscape with our li'l' corral,
Sam," said Mormon. "He's got a paper that gives him right of way, he
says. Seen anything of Molly Casey?"
"Not for quite a spell. Go easy with them wires, Sheriff. Price of
wire's riz considerable."
The second barrier down and the car through, Jordan ordered Sam to get
in the car.
"Jump, or I'll put the cuffs on you," he said.
"Not this trip," replied Sam coolly. "No sense in my climbin' in there.
Me an' Mormon's through with our li'l' job. We'll go back in the
buckboard. It's round the bend. I was jest goin' to hitch up."
Jordan glared unbelievingly, yet Sam's words carried conviction.
"Yo're sure goin' to have trouble turnin' yore car right here," Sam went
on imperturbably. "Kind of mean to back down, too. It's worse higher up.
Matter of fac' the gap peters out jest round the turn. This is Bolsa
Boquete. Bolsa means purse, Sheriff, one of them knitted purse nets.
Good name for it. Look for yo'self, if you don't believe me."
Jordan and Plimsoll strode on up the pitch. Mormon followed, Sam stayed
with the two deputies. Around the bend stood the buckboard with the
buckskins in a patch of shadow under a scoop in the ending wall that
turned the so-called pass to a box canyon.
"I told you the gel warn't erlong," said Mormon. "She and Sandy was with
us fo' a spell. But they're goin' visitin' an' they shifted to saddle
way back, out there by the spring beside the lava strip."
Mormon's bland smile masked a sterner intent than showed in his eyes.
Jordan, furious at being outwitted, dared not provoke open combat. He
had nothing on which to make arrest of the two Three Star partners and
he was far from sure of his ability to do so under any circumstances.
Mormon hitched up the buckskins, but followed the sheriff and the
scowling, silent Plimsoll back to the car.
"See that notch, way over to the no'th?" said Mormon, bent on exploiting
the situation to the full. "I reckon Sandy and the gel's shackin'
through there about now. Hawss trail only. 'Fraid you won't catch him,
Sheriff. They aim to ketch the seven o'clock train at Caroca. It's the
on'y pass over the mesa. If Sandy had knowed you wanted him he might
have waited. Why didn't you phone? Ninety mile' around the mesa, nearest
way, an' it must be all of five o'clock now, by the sun."
He stopped, puzzled by the change in the sheriff's face. Chagrin had
given place to exultation.
"Catch the seven o'clock train at Caroca?" said Jordan. "Thanks for the
information, Mormon. That schedule was changed last week when they
pulled off two trains on the main line. The train leaves at nine-thirty
an', if I can't make ninety miles in four hours an' a half, I'll make
you a present of my car. Stand back, both of you. No monkey business
with my tires. Cover 'em, boys. The law's on my side, you two gabbing
word-shooters."
He handled the car wonderfully, backing and turning her, and, while
Mormon and Sam stood powerless, the former crestfallen, the latter
sardonically gazing at his partner, the machine went tilting, snorting
down the gorge.
"You sure spilled the beans, Mormon," said Sam finally. "I'd have
thought them three wives of yores 'ud have taught you the vally of
silence."
"I ain't got a damned word to say, Sam. But I'd be obliged if you'd kick
me--good. Use yore heels, I see you got yore spurs on."