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Copyright © 1959 by Bradford Scott.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
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Chapter One
LIKE A TORPID SNAKE, the Mojo Trail slithers through the Puerta Hills. It slips stealthily past the juncture of the Old Spanish Trail and the famous Chihuahua Trail, slides furtively into Boraco, the railroad town, and flows onward toward the distant Guadalupes. On the eastern edge of the Guadalupes it becomes the main street of Sotol. Then it winds past ill-omened Jericho Valley, enters the remote fastnesses of the Guadalupes and steals across the state line into New Mexico.
The Pueblos used to pad over it, long before the Spaniards brought the horse to the New World and thereby greatly extended the Indian’s scope of activity and increased his capacity for devilishness.
But the Mojo was old long before the Pueblos first used it in their treks from south of the Rio Grande to their cliff dwellings in what is now New Mexico; and even then it had a sinister history, being the natural route from one wasteland to another—the wastelands always provide sanctuary for men who make sinister history.
Fifty miles northwest of Boraco, the Mojo begins its weary climb over the towering backbone of the Puertas. With a bristling cliff on one side and a sheer drop into a shadowy canyon on the other, it winds steeply upward, with many an almost right-angle turn where the cliff wall thrusts out at the traveler and the dark gulf to the south reaches hungrily for horse and rider. The trail is narrow here, with barely passing room for two teams taking it slow and easy and exercising the utmost care.
Up this steep and winding gradient, rode a man mounted on a magnificent black horse, full eighteen hands high, whose glorious mane was like to a ripple of dark flame. The rider was worthy of the splendid animal he bestrode. He was over six feet in height, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, narrow of waist and hip. His pushed-back “J.B.” revealed crisp black hair and a broad forehead singularly white in contrast to his deeply-bronzed cheeks. His nose was prominent and his rather wide, good-humored mouth, grin-quirked at the corners, somewhat offset the tinge of fierceness evinced in that hawk nose, the jutting chin and the lean, muscle-rippling jaw. From the bronzed countenance, under heavy black brows, gay, reckless gray eyes looked out upon the world and found it good.
Thus, with a song on his lips and laughter in his eyes, Ranger Walt Slade, named by the Mexican peons of the Rio Grande river villages El Halcon—The Hawk—rode the Mojo Trail, headed for Sotol, thirty miles distant.
Slade looked forward to his mission Sotol and predicted he would find it an interesting town. There had been six killings and as many robberies in and around Sotol in the past two months, with some cattle stealing thrown in for good measure. This was why an angry Captain Jim McNelty had dispatched his lieutenant and ace-man to the section in answer to a plaintive bleat for help from the local authorities.
“Some sidewinder, or maybe two or three, raising the devil and shoving a chunk under a corner over there,” said Captain Jim. “See what you can make of it, Walt. Got a letter from the sheriff yowling about conditions. Name’s Clem Baxter and he sounds to be all right. Get in touch with him and the chances are he can give you the lowdown. Just the usual deviltry that takes place in all gold strike sections, I reckon. Figure you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting things under control. Those old cowtown sheriffs get panicky when something comes along to bust up their routine. Most of ’em are cowhands that got elected to office and following a cow’s tail most of their lives don’t do much to develop intelligence. Honest and dumb, that’s what you usually find ’em. Quick on the trigger and slow in the think tank. Be seeing you.”
Walt Slade wore the efficient, unconventional garb of the rangeland with careless grace. About his lean waist were double cartridge belts and from the carefully worked and oiled cut-out holsters protruded the plain wooden handles of heavy black guns. His Ranger badge, the famous silver star set on a silver circle, was not in evidence at the moment but tucked away in a cunningly concealed secret pocket in his broad leather belt. He preferred not to reveal his Ranger connections for the time being, having found that it was sometimes to his advantage not to do so until necessary.
His habit of working under cover had built up a peculiarly mixed and not altogether enviable reputation. Plenty of people knew him to be a Ranger and admired and respected him—“the ablest and most fearless Ranger of them all.” Which was saying considerable. Some who did not know him as the ace-man of the most illustrious commander the famed Border Battalion ever had, were wont to say that if El Halcon wasn’t an owlhoot he missed being one by the skin of his teeth. Slade did nothing to discourage this erroneous conclusion, although he well knew it made him fair game for any ambitious gunman out to get a reputation, having found out by experience that a man of dubious standing could ofttimes gather valuable information, the sources of which would be closed to a recognized peace officer.
As Shadow climbed the long and winding slant of the Mojo Trail, Slade talked to him jovially in the fashion of men who ride much alone. The big black seemed to understand, for he wheezed and snorted, nodded his head wisely at times and at others shook it vigorously in emphatic disagreement. Slade chuckled and began humming a song as he lounged gracefully at ease in his comfortable Mexican saddle.
Suddenly, however, he straightened, his bearing became alert. Some of the sunniness left his gray eyes and there was a tightening of his lean jaw. He leaned forward in an attitude of listening.
From somewhere ahead, thin with distance, had sounded the hard, metallic crack of a rifle shot, another, and another, evenly spaced, purposeful.
Slade listened intently for a further repetition of the sounds, which did not come. Quite likely some trapper or hunter shooting at a varmint, he decided, and was about to resume his comfortable, loose-jointed slouch when he heard a faint rumbling, an almost inaudible mutter that steadily increased in volume.
The concentration furrow between El Halcon’s black brows deepened, and he tightened his grip on Shadow’s bridle. There was something ominous to that steadily loudening rumble that hinted at wheels spinning altogether too swiftly for safety on the hazardous track. He pulled the black to a halt and sat rigid in the hull, his head again bent forward in an attitude of listening, his gaze fixed on the trail a hundred yards ahead, where it vanished in a bristle of growth which took advantage of a sudden widening of the crumbling ledge on which the track ran.
“Shadow,” he muttered, “that sounds like a—Blazes! It is a runaway!”
From out the dark tangle of pinon and chaparral crashed a wagon drawn by four frantic horses. Despite the mad speed with which they raced down the trail, the heavy wagon kept jamming the trees against the hind quarters of the wheelers, driving them insane with fright. They in turn lunged against the leaders, squealing and biting and infecting them with their panic. The driver of the wagon sagged against the high back of his seat, lurching and lolling, his head rolling on his shoulders, the reins limp in his nerveless hands.
In a single swift glance Walt Slade took in the situation, and with the same swiftness he acted. He wheeled the black on bunched hoofs, leaned low in the saddle; his voice rang out, “Trail, Shadow, trail!”
Like the released coil of a spring, the great horse shot down the trail, his irons drumming a low thunder on the flinty surface. And after him raged and roared the hurtling death and destruction.
Under ordinary circumstances, the wagon horses would have been no match for Shadow, but now, driven insane by terror, they raced down the steep track with the speed of madness. They were on the black’s very heels before he got into his full stride and for hundreds of yards he did not gain a foot. Indeed, the crashing rumble of the runaway seemed louder in Slade’s ears as he glimpsed, not far ahead, an almost right-angle turn which to take Shadow must slacken his breakneck speed or court destruction. It was well nigh impossible for him to take that