But the light went out of them in a hurry when Nevada said, “Yeah. Tres Cruces in the Sierra del Luna, across the border.”
“An’ you think we’re goin’ traipsin’ into that country?” Utah squalled out the words like a cougar missing a kill. “Why hell on a shovel, I wouldn’t go into those del Luna mountains for all the gold in Arizony. Son, you’re younger than me, and you ain’t seen as much of the world as I have. Leastways you ain’t never been in the del Lunas. I have, and I ain’t hankerin’ to go there ag’in. That’s where the Penitentes hang out, in Tres Cruces. They got three crosses stuck up on a hill, and their idee of fun is to ketch a white man, strip him, cut him tuh doll rags with cactus whips, then hang him tuh one of these here crosses! Nope, Jim, we ain’t goin’ to Tres Cruces. We don’t need gold that bad!”
Utah McClatchey was just talking. He was as perverse as a Missouri mule. Nevada knew that nothing short of boothill could keep his old partner from jaunting to the Sierra del Luna. The gold was just a part of it now. There were thirteen white men who had died ignominiously, and somebody was going to pay for that.
Nevada had gone on into the bedroom. There were three dead men on the floor. He eyed them with a pleased expression on his hook-nosed, hatchet-thin face. “I tally four, all told,” he called out to Utah. “That pays double for ol’ Dan’l, and one of them fellers the coyotes chawed up.”
Then he fell silent. Two of the dead men on the floor were Mexicans. They were dressed in dark business suits, smooth-skinned, slick looking fellows. Nevada didn’t like the type when they were alive. He liked them no better when they were dead. His hooked nose wrinkled with disgust. Long, blue-barreled automatic pistols were lying near each of the men. They had, funny looking gadgets attached to the muzzles. Nevada guessed they were silencers, but they were the first he had ever seen. It made him like the Mexicans no better, for he personally liked nothing more than the business-like boom of a Colt Peacemaker.
The third man on the floor also wore a dark business suit. The two Mexicans were not big, but this man was smaller yet. He lay there on his back, and lead from one of their guns had smashed into his skull just above the bridge of his nose.
* * * *
McClatchey was staring at a red corner of something that had evidently fallen from an inside pocket of the foreigner’s coat, and now was half-hidden by his body. On impulse, he pushed out one leg and rolled the foreigner’s inert body over.
A small red book bound in red leather lay exposed. He stooped down and picked it up, and handed it to Nevada Jim. “Yo’re the readin’ member of this team,” Utah grunted sententiously. “I been too busy dodgin’ bullets durin’ most-a my life to git any book larnin’.”
Nevada opened the little book, and an odd pulse of excitement beat through his rawboned frame. It was not what he read in the book that made his pulses leap. It was what he couldn’t read.
The writing on some of the pages looked like hen-tracks. On other pages were written names in good, clear English, with numbers that might be addresses beside each name. Nevada read off a few to Utah, and showed him the hen-track writing.
“It don’t make sense,” McClatchey grunted. “Jim, them danged hen-tracks cain’t be writin’ in no civilized tongue.”
Nevada grinned wryly. “That there talk we heard when we wuz shootin’ it out with these gents don’t make sense neither,” he grunted. He stuck the thin, leather-bound book in his hip pocket and forgot it.
At least he forgot it temporarily, for as they moved through the bunkroom door into the main room, a dry voice said. “Get your hands up!”
The voice was dry, cold, and authoritative, and Nevada Jim James knew even as he got his first glimpse of the man who had uttered the words that he was looking at a lawman. There wasn’t a sign of a badge about him. He didn’t need any. His hard, piercing blue eyes and the flat automatic in his hand was authority enough.
The stranger was not a big man, but he was well put together. He reminded Nevada of a sleek greyhound. He had the same cool, competent look about him, from the natty black boots he wore to the open-necked white shirt turned outside the collar of his coat. The clothes made him look like a dude, but the hard, straight line of his mouth and square chin was enough to change anybody’s mind. He was standing just inside the front door, and for the first time in his life Nevada got the impression of a single gun covering two men at the same time.
“Get those hands up,” the man repeated. “I’d hate to have to kill you like you killed Conover!” His voice scorched them like a whip.
Utah McClatchey said explosively, “Take ’er easy, young feller! Don’t you start accusin’ us of murder. We’ve done our share of killin’, but killin’ and murder are bosses of a different color.”
A chill smile that Nevada Jim James didn’t like touched the stranger’s face. “You can tell that to Judge Evans in Tombstone,” he clipped. His direct gaze studied the pards a little more closely. “Seems like I recognize you boys,” he added coolly.
“Aren’t you those famous Hellers from Helldorado who’ve got all the sheriffs chasin’ their tails?” Nevada Jim had his hands shoulder high, palm outward. He had obeyed orders to the letter, because the stranger acted just cool enough to kill him if he didn’t. But he had kept walking forward. Now only some eight feet separated him from the lawman.
“Stop right there,” the cold-eyed man said. Nevada Jim stopped obligingly. “Utah did the same, though Nevada could see that his old pard was just about ready to spring sidewise behind the table and make his desperate gamble for freedom. He shook his head ever so slightly at McClatchey. If his guess was right they were up against no ordinary lawman.
He had started to grin when the stranger ordered them to halt. It was a crooked, ironic grin that would have irritated anybody. The lawman was no exception.
“What’s funny?” he snapped.
“Nothin’,” Nevada drawled. “Nothin’ at all. I was just wonderin’ if mebbe you’d like to have one of our tombstones fer a souvenir? Where you’re takin’ us, we won’t be havin’ much use for ’em.”
The stranger looked interested. It was apparent to Nevada that the fellow was a little surprised at the ease with which he had made his capture. He could imagine the hell-fire and brimstone stories the Tucson sheriff had told him regarding their toughness. Being presented with one of their famous calling cards would be quite a feather in his cap. Watching the man, Nevada could visualize those thoughts passing through his mind.
“I always carry a couple in my pocket,” he went on. “If you’ll let me drap one hand and undo my gun belt, I’ll haul one out for you.”
The stranger nodded. “Make it slow and easy, amigo,” he said crisply. “If you don’t I’ll let you have it right where it’ll hurt worst.”
Nevada Jim looked at the lawman, and that saintly, almost righteous expression crossed his deeply tanned visage. “You know I think you would at that,” he said thoughtfully.
Slowly he dropped his right hand to the hammered silver buckle of his wide double gun belt from which both his heavy guns were suspended, butt forward in their molded holsters. Nevada unlatched his belts and let them fall at his feet. Still moving carefully, he started his fingers into the pocket of his Levis.
“I hope for your sake that you haven’t got a sneak-gun in there,” the man said.
“I haven’t,” Nevada answered. His hatchet face was completely innocent as he brought his hand from his pocket. He opened his fingers. A harmless looking replica of a tombstone a scant two and one half inches high, by an inch and a quarter wide and thick, lay in his palm. The wood was polished until it shone like satin.
Involuntarily the stranger started to step forward, and as his foot lifted, Nevada Jim’s loose wrist nipped like the