With the speed of a tophand bulldogging a steer, Utah jerked piggin’ strings from his pocket, and leaped astride the unconscious man’s back. In ten seconds the lawman was trussed hand and foot.
Nevada was just finishing buckling on his gun belt when the stranger opened his blue eyes. There was a lump the size of an egg right between them. Clearly his head ached fiendishly, but there was still something almost like admiration in his gaze as he stared up at the two, tall outlaws.
Nevada scratched his neck with a corner of the little tombstone, and grinned ironically at the lawman, wrinkles closing his pale eyes to the merest slits. He looked as ornery as everybody claimed him to be.
“You’re pretty smart,” the lawman said. “I suppose that tombstone’s loaded with lead.”
Nevada grinned. “Quicksilver,” he said, “it’s heavier.”
“You took a chance,” the lawman said conversationally. “If you’d missed, friend, I’d have killed you on the spot for trying to resist arrest.”
“If you’d practiced flippin’ that thing as much as I have,” Nevada drawled, “you wouldn’t worry about missin’. Mister, I can knock flies off a wall at twenty feet!”
Utah McClatchey thrust his ugly, leathery face forward. “Quit yore braggin’, Jim,” he snapped. “Listen to me, fella,” he addressed the man on the floor at their feet, “we wanta know who you are, and after we find that out, I’m aimin’ to put you straight on a few things you ought to know about this murder bizness. We—”
That was as far as he got, for Nevada Jim, moving like a cat, had stepped to the open front door. Moonlight lit the plateau with a clear radiance. And out there some four hundred yards away were a half dozen horsemen, black dots in the moonlight. Through narrowed eyes Nevada studied them. His ears, tuned to hear the scamper of a pack-rat across a floor, had caught the drum-beat of those horses’ hoofs a moment before.
Now he swung back to Utah’s side, answering the old outlaw’s enquiring stare. “Jess Cloud, an’ a posse,” he said calmly. “Comin’ hell-bent for election.”
Utah grunted his disdain of all sheriffs. He addressed the hog-tied lawman. “You tell that old pot-bellied Siwash to drop in on us down Tres Cruces way if he wants tuh see us soon. Sorry we ain’t got more time tuh make yore acquaintance, young feller,” he ended. “Right sorry. If you weren’t on the wrong side of the fence I bet we could make a fair tuh middlin’ owlhooter outta you!”
Nevada reached in his pocket. His hand came out with another of those small tombstones. “Hyar’s that souvenir I promised yuh,” he drawled. He stooped and laid it directly in the center of the helpless lawman’s chest.
Then his catlike walk carried him back to the front door again. He raked one gun from leather, leveled it and fired six times as fast as he could cock and trigger. As rapidly as it had appeared, the gun slipped back into its holster, and his other Colt came free. Again six shots sped out into the night, rolling like the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum.
Grinning evilly, Nevada watched the effect of his shots on Sheriff Cloud’s posse. They were still well beyond effective short-gun range, but it didn’t matter. The shots sent them scattering for cover like a covey of quail taking wing.
He swung back into the room. “Folks is gittin’ soft, Utah,” he complained. “Danged if I don’t think you could scatter ’em nowadays if you said ‘boo’!”
* * * *
Some could be scattered that easily, and some couldn’t. The Hellers found that out almost a week later. They were deep in the Sierra del Lunas now, that high, virtually unexplored range of mountains cutting deep into Chihuahua. Tumbled peaks rose all about them, gashing the pale blue of the Mexican sky. Cauldron-like heat filled the deep blue canyons, and icy winds played about the sparse pines on the rimrock crests. It was a country shunned even by the Mexicans themselves, for some of the weird tales that came out of those hills were sometimes more truth than fiction. At least there were few who had the courage to prove any of them false.
Most of the stories concerned the Penitente brotherhood, and the cruel religious rites they practiced on themselves as well as on any unbelievers unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. Utah McClatchey had not been exaggerating when he had said all the gold in Arizona was not worth a visit to Tres Cruces.
A grimmer errand was bringing them here now, one compounded of pride, and the realization that a hangnoose was all that waited them back in the States.
They were angling along a slanting trail now that clung like a thread on a wall to the side of a barren peak that towered to a needle-point crest a good five thousand feet above them. Directly ahead, though, was the thing that interested Nevada Jim James.
He could see that for once in his life Utah hadn’t been exaggerating things. The plateau with Tres Cruces atop it sprang out from the flank of another high peak, like a vast, flying buttress. It towered a good two thousand feet above the trail they were on now, a vertical, somber cliff that was enough to take a man’s breath away with sheer awe. He could even see the trail they would have to climb. It looked hardly fit for a mountain goat to use, let alone horses and a pack mule.
The pack-mule was Nevada Jim’s idea. They had stolen it and miner’s gear from an old prospector on the border. It had been necessary to knock him over the head to get the outfit, but Nevada, with a curse for his own soft-heartedness, had left a handful of greenbacks to pillow the old gent until he woke up. Of course they had stolen the greenbacks, but that didn’t matter. Nevada still figured he was going soft.
They had needed the mule, however. “If we mosey into that country lookin’ and actin’ like a couple of crazy ol’ desert rats,” he had pointed out to Utah, “we may get further than if we sashay down thar with blood in our eye.”
So now the pack mule plodded along between them, as they rode single-file up the slanting, mountain trail. Utah was leading the way because he had been here before. Nevada brought up the rear, a loose, slouching figure who had let roan whiskers grow for a week on his usually clean-shaven cheeks. He looked mean and ugly enough without whiskers. Now he looked worse. Heat, and a stinging dust storm they’d ridden through out on the desert had reddened the whites of his eyes until he had all the appearance of a man recovering from a week-long drunk.
Utah McClatchey, hipped around in his kak, had been studying his younger pard.
Now he chuckled. “You look so bad,” he said, “that even the Penitentes wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with you!”
“You’re not so handsome yoreself,” Nevada grinned back, and then he caught an expression in Utah’s eyes that made him twist around in his own saddle to scan their back-trail. McClatchey had seen something. Nevada saw what it was as he got turned.
* * * *
The man behind them was a good two miles away, but in the clear atmosphere he was easily visible from flop-brimmed sombrero to sandals. A donkey trudged along behind the ragged peon, his pack-saddle piled so high with a load of crooked chaparral limbs that he looked like an animated wood-pile.
McClatchey grunted, his words floating back to Nevada. “Guess that hombre’s nothin’ to git our wind up about. Looks like a’ old charcoal burner to me.”
From their position on the trail, the flop-hatted Mexican could not see them. Nevada Jim studied the man behind them speculatively, then he looked at his partner.
“If it wasn’t for me, you’d a been in boothill years ago,” he pointed out. “You’re always willin’ to take chances when it ain’t necessary. Now that gent back there looks a leetle too harmless. He cain’t see us, so what you say we duck off the trail into that nest of boulders and chaparral up thar ahead and wait for him to come past. It won’t do any harm to let him climb