Guadalupe and Felipe hurried the two women into the kitchen and barred
the door leading to the outside, while the others, except the priest,
flung themselves on the floor, away from the rays of the lamp, and
covered the doorway with their guns.
The priest moved toward the door, but was stopped by Baldy.
“Get back by the table!” snapped Baldy. “I ain’t never killed no
priests, but there’s always a first time.”
Father Francisco moved back to the table, where he stood full in the
rays of the lamp, looking toward the doorway. The place was as silent as
the tomb, except for the breathing of the men.
It seemed ages before there was any sound from outside. Came the soft
crunch of gravel and the door was flung violently open. Still there was
no one in sight. The door creaked back a trifle. Then Big Medicine
Hawkworth’s huge body filled the doorway, a heavy revolver in his right
hand. He squinted at the light and at the black-gowned priest, blinking
slightly.
“Only a priest,” he said softly. “That’s queer.”
He stepped inside, followed by Ike Marsh, Musical Matthews, and Cleve
Davis.
“A priest, eh?” said Ike nervously.
“Don’t move.” Baldy’s voice was triumphant. “There’s a dozen guns on yuh
right now. Put up yore hands and drop them guns.”
The capture was a complete success. They realized that it was useless to
resist. The men were scattered along the wall, and now the men from the
Tumbling H could distinguish them and their guns.
Kohler came and collected the guns from the floor, handing them to
Guadalupe for safe keeping, while the rest of the men got up and came
forward. Big Medicine leaned back against the wall and looked at the
well-known faces.
“Thought you’d catch us asleep, eh?” sneered Baldy. “We’ve been
expectin’ yuh.”
Baldy looked them over curiously.
“Where’s that damn Stevens?” he asked suddenly.
Ike Marsh laughed with relief. He was afraid that they had already
captured Sleepy, who had not come back to them. Baldy scowled and
repeated his question.
“Yuh might do a little guessin’,” said Ike. “We always have an ace in
the hole, Kern.”
“Thasso? Well, yore aces won’t help yuh none this time, Marsh. We’ve got
the whole deck ag’in yore one.”
Doctor Meline had come into the lamplight, and Big Medicine was staring
at him, an amazed expression on his face. He moved toward Meline,
unheeding the menace of several guns.
“Hey!” snapped Baldy. “Get back there, Hawkworth!”
But Hawkworth did not seem to hear Baldy’s warning. Meline stepped back
and put the table between himself and Big Medicine.
“You!” said Big Medicine hoarsely. “What are you doing here?”
Doctor Meline laughed nervously.
“Man, can’t you talk?” demanded Big Medicine.
“Oh, I can talk all right,” said Meline.
“Then go ahead. I don’t understand it.”
Big Medicine swung his head and looked at the crowd, but his gaze came
back to Meline.
“You are Doctor Meline?”
It was both a question and a statement.
“The notorious Doctor Meline,” corrected Torres. “The biggest
drug-seller in the West, the crook who sent you a bundle of paper
instead of money.”
Big Medicine stared at Torres. Meline whirled angrily on the Mexican,
but decided that it was better to face one man at a time.
“Is this true, Jim Meline?” asked Big Medicine hoarsely.
“True?” Meline laughed. “Well, if it is--what then?”
Big Medicine’s right hand went to his face and he drew the back of his
hand across his mouth. The lines of his face seemed to deepen.
“I trusted you, Jim,” he said simply.
“You always was a fool,” declared Meline. I might as well spill it all
now, Hawkworth. The money you sent me for the past twenty-odd years has
been well spent. It has bought me many things.
“You fool, you buried yourself down here in the hills, and gave me your
money to invest. Oh, I’ve invested it well”--Meline laughed recklessly.
“I’ll admit that I got quite a shock when you sent for twenty thousand
dollars.
“But I sent it to you, a whole package of bogus money, and some damn
fool held up the stage and stole it. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I intended for the
stage to be robbed, but by a different outfit. The package was to come
back to me intact, so that none would ever know what it contained.”
“You did this, Jim?” Big Medicine spoke softly, sorrowfully. “We were
friends once, Jim. I would have backed you with my life. In all the wide
world there was no man I trusted as I did you, and you do this thing to
me.”
Big Medicine shook his head slowly, his lips compressed.
“I can’t believe it yet, Jim. I feel that I will awake after a while and
find that it is only a dream. Jim Meline, the one man I thought I could
trust.”
He shifted his eyes and caught sight of Jack’s pale face with the smear
of blood across his lips.
“You are all here,” he said slowly. “Lee Yung, Torres, Jack Hill--well,
what is the program? What is this priest doing here?”
Baldy laughed mockingly.
“Put four chairs against the wall and set down our guests,” he ordered.
“Kohler, you and Baum set over here and keep yore guns on ’em, _sabe_?
Guadalupe, you bring in the bride. By God, we’ll have a marriage, if I
have to be the bridegroom myself.”
Baldy turned angrily to Doctor Meline.
“So yore money package was a dummy, eh? You didn’t trust us to send it
back, didja, Meline? And all yore yelpin’ about losin’ twenty thousand
dollars was only a lie! You sent that fool kid in to take it back to
you.”
“What is that to you?” demanded Meline hotly.
“Nothin’, only yore crooked work has put us in danged bad. You ain’t got
no more sense than to write letters that anybody might steal.”
“My crooked work?” Meline laughed. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to yelp
about crooked work.”
“I never played crooked with my own kind,” retorted Baldy.
The boys began arranging the four chairs against the wall, while
Guadalupe went to the kitchen, carrying the captured weapons, which he
placed on the kitchen table. Felipe and Lopez had been guarding the
women, but now Guadalupe signaled them to precede him into the other
room.
Felipe and Lopez grinned at each other, as they drank from a jug.
“There is not much left,” informed Lopez, shaking the jug.
“Then hide it,” said Felipe, who was a half-wit.
Lopez unbarred the kitchen door and placed the jug outside, after which
he shut the door and went into the other room.
* * * * *
Sleepy had no idea of where he was nor how long he had been there when
he awoke in the dark. His head was splitting and he felt that most of
his body had been hammered to a pulp. He had a painful scalp wound,
which he examined with his fingertips, and one of his eyes was almost
swelled shut.
Investigation showed that in spite of his fall, his sixshooter was still
in its holster. For several minutes he lay quiet, trying to remember
just what had happened to him.
“Fell into a damned old prospect hole, I suppose,” he told himself
disgustedly.
But it was a big prospect hole, he decided, after trying to reach the
walls. Twisting his gaze upward he got a glimpse of the sky, a starry
circle some distance above him.
“That’s where I came from,” he told himself. “I sure done a regular
Santa Claus down that damned chimney. I hope to gosh I ain’t broke
nothin’.”
He flexed his legs and arms, which pained him considerably, but he was
soon assured that no bones were broken. Moving in directly under the
opening he found a ladder, which extended upward. He laughed painfully
and rubbed his nose. From somewhere he could hear the soft drone of
voices.
He listened closely. They did not seem to come from above. He was unable
to distinguish what was being said, but was very sure that it was a
number of people talking.
Cautiously he moved along away from the ladder. It seemed to be a sort
of cave, rather than a prospect hole. He bumped into a projection and
almost fell. Around this projection and about thirty feet away he could
see the faint glow of a light. It was from the room above the trap door,
but Sleepy had no way of knowing this.
He moved slowly toward this faint illumination and tripped over some
object, sprawling on his hands and knees. He swore softly, as his sore
hands and knees came in contact with the ground.
“Sleepy!” a voice whispered.
Sleepy sat up, rubbing his knees.
“Is that you, Hashknife?” he asked softly.
He did not seem to be surprised.
“Yeah, it’s me. Got a knife?”
“I s’pose so. Got yuh tied up, pardner?”
Sleepy took out his pocketknife and in a few moments Hashknife was free.
His hands were swollen from the tight ropes, and his arms seemed little
better than clubs, but he knew they would soon be all right again.
“What’s that ahead of us?” whispered Sleepy.
“Trap door into the ranch-house,” replied Hashknife painfully rubbing
his wrists. “How in hell did you get in here?”
“Fell in,” chuckled Sleepy. “Can yuh walk?”
“I reckon so.”
Sleepy led the way back to the ladder and showed Hashknife where he had
fallen in.
“And I never touched the sides,” laughed Sleepy.
“I’m the champion diver of the world.”
“Kinda looks like yuh was,” said Hashknife. “Let’s get out of here,
before they come lookin’ for me. Got a gun?”
“Yeah, I’ve got mine.”
“We’ve got to get more.”
Sleepy went up the ladder first. It was no difficult climb, and he
sprawled in the brush, while Hashknife came slowly up, holding with his
elbows to the narrow rungs. It was a painful proceeding for him, but he
managed to get over the top.
For a while they sat together in the brush, gathering their strength.
“I’ve got one pretty black eye,” declared Sleepy, “and my scalp kinda
goes flip-flap in one place, but I’ll live, I reckon. I wish I knowed
where Big Medicine and the boys are. I left ’em on a pinnacle, while I
investigated.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Just before dark. I don’t know how long I slept. Mebbe my clothes are
out of style by this time.”
He took out his gun and worked the action.
“It’s all right,” he decided. “Now what’ll we do?”
He did not ask Hashknife for the details of what happened since he had
been knocked down in the K-10 ranch-house. The past could wait to be
talked about.
“I didn’t get a look at the outside of the place,” said Hashknife. “They
kept me blindfolded. But they’re scared, cowboy. Don’t never let anybody
tell yuh that Baldy Kern and his crew ain’t plumb scared. Torres is
there, too, and he’s scared. They know damn well that they’re up against
a hard deal.
“When you got away at the K-10, that ruined it for them. I’ll bet yore
ears burned a lot of times, over what they said. Baldy thought he had
killed yuh. Lee Yung, the Chinaman, is one of their outfit. Faro Lannin’
is down there, too. I dunno where he fits in, but he’s not one of
Baldy’s outfit. There’s another big Mexican called Gonzales. I owe him
somethin’ for givin’ me a drink of hooch. Boy, I shore needed it just
then. Well, let’s go.”
“Is Jack Hill down there?” asked Sleepy.
“Yeah, only his name ain’t Hill; it’s Meline. His dad is one of the big
guns of this smugglin’ layout.”
Sleepy laughed softly, as they started down through the brush.
“It kinda looked like we had some job ahead of us,” he whispered. “But
it’s a job that has to be done, I reckon.”
The trip down the side of that bluff was no easy task, but they finally
struck the flat ground at the corner of the shed, and crawled through
the corral fence. It was light enough to distinguish the colors of the
horses, and Hashknife chuckled at sight of his tall gray.
“I heard ’em talkin’ about that gray, Sleepy,” he said. “It seems that
Baldy tried to ride it and got ditched good and proper.”
“I seen him rise and glide,” laughed Sleepy. “I was lookin’ back at the
time. One of ’em was throwin’ lead at me, but never came within six feet
of hittin’ me or the horse.”
* * * * *
Cautiously they circled the corner and surveyed the triangular yard.
From within came the dull rumble of voices. Hashknife pointed at the
opposite end of the L.
“That’s the kitchen end down there,” he whispered. “Might be a good idea
to take a look in there, eh?”
They crossed the yard and drew up close to the end window. The light
from the open fireplace illuminated the room fairly well, and a glow of
light showed through the doorway which led into the other room.
“Look at that table,” whispered Hashknife. “There’s a whole raft of guns
on it. C’mon.”
As they drew back from the window, Lopez came in from the other room and
started toward the kitchen door. Hashknife and Sleepy ducked low, darted
around the corner, and ran to the door, where they flattened against the
wall.
Lopez swung the door open, stepped out and reached for the jug, which he
had placed just outside, and went sprawling without a sound, when
Sleepy’s sixshooter barrel swished down across the top of his head.
“One gone to seed,” whispered Hashknife, as they crossed the threshold
and over to the table, where they helped themselves to the guns which
had been taken away from Big Medicine’s outfit.
Hashknife shoved one inside the waistband of his overalls and took one
in each hand, while Sleepy put one in his holster and one in each hand.
“Dressed to kill,” breathed Hashknife. “And we wish them all a happy
evenin’.”