A dark silhouette in the pale moonlight, Nevada Jim stuck his injured member into a capacious mouth and licked the pinpoint wound which stung like fire. Then he grinned at his sour-faced old companion. “Don’t get impatient, Utah,” he said. “Good times await us at yonder mine. After we lift ol’ Dan Conover’s gold, we won’t have to do this kind of work no more—unless we feel like havin’ some fun.”
Utah matched his younger partner’s grin. “You know,” he gave back quietly, “we’re really doin’ Conover a big favor by relievin’ him o’ his dust. Why, from what I heard in Tombstone, the poor jasper’s been worryin’ himself near to death for fear somebody was goin’ to rob him. We’ll take a big load off his mind.”
Nevada Jim’s thin, hawk-like face assumed a benign expression. “I believe you’re right, pard,” he said. “I bet he’ll be tickled pink to see us!”
“I reckon,” McClatchey chuckled. “Lots of other folks would, too.”
He was right. Lawmen from Laramie to Paso del Norte would have given time from their lives to nab this pair. Many had seen the two slippery owlhooters, but none of them had been capable of laying hands on them. One reason was because there wasn’t a sheriff west of Omaha who didn’t have a healthy respect for the old Colt Peacemakers they wore, tied hard at their thighs. Another reason was that times had changed and the law was more accustomed nowadays to riding along fine highways in high-powered cars, than fording mean cayuses over the rough western badlands in quest of the two old-time outlaws.
Some newspapers in the Southwest frequently referred to the pair as the Hellers from Helldorado and poked fun at the law for being unable to put them where they rightfully belonged. Others called them ribald raiders because they seemed to enjoy themselves so thoroughly when they walked into some unsuspecting cow-country bank and lifted its cash. There were still other papers, and individuals too, who mentioned slyly when the pair made front page news, that Nevada Jim James and Utah McClatchey sometimes did the country a service by preying upon their own kind. For deputy sheriffs, town marshals, and border patrolmen frequently found dead gangsters in unexpected places, with miniature tombstones carved from chaparral or manzanita placed neatly upon their chests. That was a symbol the Hellers from Helldorado always left behind them.
“We don’t want nobody to git credit for our doin’s but us,” Utah always said. “An’ we shore as heck don’t want to git credit for orneriness that ain’t our’n!”
They enjoyed many a chuckle over those miniature tombstones. And they were valued by the lawmen fortunate enough to get hold of one. They carried a message that was plain as the beak-like nose on Nevada Jim’s predatory face. The miniatures were more than calling cards. They told all and sundry that the Hellers’ hangout was in the old ghost town of Tombstone, Arizona, hard by the fastnesses of the Chiricahua Mountains, the Turkey Creek badlands and the Mexican border. It was an open challenge to the law to come and get them—if it could.
But now the two pards had been forced to abandon their snug retreat in the old Oriental Saloon where Wyatt Earp had once held forth in all of his frock-coated, gun-hung splendor, for Tombstone was coming to life again. Mines were reopening and ore trucks were churning up the thick dust of Allen and Tough-Nut Streets.
“It’s this here dee-fense program that’s runnin’ us into the hills again,” Nevada Jim complained. “It might be a good thing for the country, but it’s goin’ to make it awful tough for us to keep dodgin’ the law.”
Utah McClatchey had squared his flaring old shoulders and snorted: “What this country needs is a few ol’ timers like you an’ me that are plumb handy with hog-laigs.”
“We’re handy enough,” Nevada had agreed. “But we’re also pizen mean an’ ornery. Our law-dodgers say so.”
“They ain’t lyin’,” Utah admitted. “There ain’t no Social See-curety for us, an’ we gotta make a livin’ somehow, don’t we?”
* * * *
Now, the Hellers were high on the flank of a barren Chiricahua peak, making their way with cat-like stealth up the tailings of an old mine dump. New streakings of ore marked it in places, for Dan Conover had recently reopened the Bronco Mine.
“Funny Conover ain’t got his stamp mill runnin’ tonight,” Utah complained. “If it was goin’, we could’ve rode our hosses right up to his shack without bein’ heard instead of us havin’ to crawl on our hands an’ knees.”
Nevada Jim grinned. The old renegade was always complaining about something. “You got to do a little work for yore dinero,” he pointed out, “or you wouldn’t appreciate it none.”
He ceased talking as they reached the edge of the dump, and clamped a hand over his pard’s wrist. His bleak, wintry eyes scanned the shelf for sign of life. There was none. A waning moon shed a faint radiance over the long, narrow plateau, and the gaunt shaft house at the mouth of the mine. The stamp mill, cook shack and long bunkhouse were on the other side of the shaft house. A clammy silence held sway over the place.
The only sign of human habitation was a pale, yellow light in one old shanty off to the right of the two renegades. Save for that, every building seemed deserted when the mine should be going full-blast. There was something subtle in the quiet that Nevada Jim didn’t like. It made the hair crawl on his thin neck.
They stole forward again toward the lighted shack. There was a front and rear door to it and it boasted three rooms, a kitchen, bunkroom and a front room. Nevada was aware of that because he and Utah had once holed up there when a posse became too annoying.
They saw now that the yellow lamp-light was coming from the front room. They picked their way quietly to the rear porch. Testing each step, Nevada mounted slowly. The door was hung on leather hinges, but by lifting it a little, he managed to ease it open without a sound. He stepped inside.
The little kitchen was dark as the inside of his pockets. He paused, with Utah at his shoulder, to accustom his eyes to the darkness. After a moment he could make out the door leading into the front room. Silently he crossed to it. Left hand reaching out, he jerked it open as his right whipped his long-barreled Colt from its pouch. Like a cat he slipped through the door and took one long stride to the right. Utah, gun in hand, moved to the left. It was their system when entering a bank.
Their guns flipped up to cover the room, then sagged. Both stared open-mouthed at old Dan Conover seated beside a stained table in the center of the room. They blinked to make sure their eyes were not playing them false.
A dirty rag had been drawn tight between Dan’s teeth and knotted securely behind his white head. His arms were bound to the back of the chair in which he sat, and his ankles were lashed to the legs of it. Only his blue eyes were active and they were filled with hellfire and brimstone. But when he looked up at the two renegades, Nevada saw his angry expression change. The old mine operator’s shoulders shook and his chest started heaving. A sound came from behind the gag that was very much like choked laughter.
He looked at the renegades standing either side of the door. Utah McClatchey resembled a gaunt lobo. Tall, thin as a rail, bowlegged in his ragged Levis, his blue shirt and moth-eaten cowhide vest hanging about his spare torso in loose folds, he looked like a wolf emerging from a hard winter. His scraggy, drooping, iron-gray mustache fell below his narrow chin. The battered range hat atop his bullet head had seen better days, but now the brim was warped and floppy and the crown boasted two bullet holes. He looked older than he was, for he had hit the owlhoot at twelve, and forty years of night riding since weighed heavily upon him.
Nevada Jim flushed a little when he felt Conover’s laughing eyes go over him. He was garbed much as his old partner, but there the resemblance ended. His eyes and thin face carried an expression of ironic, devilish humor most of the time. He was perhaps ten years younger than Utah, but heavier. A sparse stubble of roan whiskers, well on the gray side, hid the weather-wrinkles etched about his mouth and flat cheeks. He always enjoyed a good laugh at the other fellow’s