Tall Rider Read online

  This, too, he waved away, saying the braves had been acting on their own, not on his orders. They had courage to spare, but acted before they thought. He said he hoped they’d learned something.

  ‘The guns we have, no good,’ said. ‘Too old. One shot only each. That day the braves were young and foolish. Is of no account. Is finished now.’

  Then he guffawed as he told me how far they had ridden before they managed to get away from the burning buffalo grass that chased them and how they’d come back to camp smelling of smoke and looking foolish.

  He said his tribe had always lived on peaceable terms with the Isantanka. That is until white men from Berry’s Crossing had started acting hostile, driving them off their land, manhandling any braves who went into town and even on occasion riding through their camp, setting fire to their lodges and shooting their animals.

  ‘Why they do this thing? Land is for all. Also game. Better trade than fight. But millahanska bad. So we fight him. Braves of tribe attack you. Braves think you go with horses to sell to see millahanska. For this they attacked. All hate millahanska.’

  The Indians I knew back home were peaceful too. But I knew what they were capable of when they felt threatened.

  I saw Kla Klitso many times during the time it took for me to get my strength back. Out of the talks we had I built up a picture of a reign of terror kept up by the men from Berry’s Crossing, and especially the one he called millahanska. At first I could make nothing of this. I guessed the words meant something like ‘White-man-with-silver-shining’. Did he mean a man with white hair? But when I got him to describe who he meant, he came up with a suit of black and a vest of red. Of course! Calthrop, the white man with a silver star!

  From other things he told me, it became clear that Calthrop had taken over Berry’s Crossing and was using it as a cover for criminal operations of all kinds. His ranch, the Bar-T, was his headquarters. He had maybe twenty or thirty men working for him. Some were cowhands and bronco breakers, for the Bar-T had acquired a lot of stock which was regularly got up into herds and driven east to be sold to the army, who always needed beef and mounts, or to the population mushrooming along the Santa Fe trail. But some of his men did no ranching work and wore guns. Calthrop paid them well, so they had no complaints. From the Bar-T, he’d take off from time to time and ride mostly east where new settlements were springing up and stage-coach runs, even railroads were reaching. Then a week or so later, he’d be back with a loaded wagon or a string of horses he hadn’t had before. Putting the pieces together, it wasn’t hard to work out that Calthrop and his boys were on to a good thing, robbing banks, stopping the stage, raiding trains and attacking trading posts. He also made those emigrants who were unlucky enough to stop in Berry’s Crossing pay a ‘passing-through’ toll, a tax levied for driving along local trails, drinking the local water, setting up camp on local ground and, for all I knew, for breathing the local air.

  There was no one in Berry’s Crossing strong enough to stand up to him. And since he’d appointed himself sheriff, he was beyond the reach of the law.

  It was a pretty good set up.

  At the start of the time when I was still building myself up and getting fit again with the Kepwejo, there was an incident which gives some idea of the tensions surrounding the place and explains the source of the fear I had smelled the first time I’d come up against King Calthrop.

  Now, the Kepwejo stayed well away from town when Calthrop was around. But they always knew when he’d gone foraging for booty and chose those times to transact their business at the Indian agency at Berry’s Crossing. But on this occasion, Calthrop had returned sooner than expected and caught out a couple of braves who’d gone into town to trade a load of pelts for a sack of flour and a few pounds of salt. As they left the Agency, they were stopped by half a dozen of Calthrop’s men who took them to the saloon, got them drunk and poured their flour and salt into the road for entertainment. Then they let them go. Didn’t even rough them up. I took this as a sign they were in a good mood. The raid they’d been on must have paid off pretty good for them to be so jovial.

  The young braves were all for riding into town there and then and settling the score. Kla Klitso talked them out of it. It wasn’t that he was any less keen than they were. But the Kepwejo just didn’t have the fire power and if it came to a showdown it was a sure bet that only the slow old men would be left alive: a tribe consisting of old timers, women and children had no future. But he knew he wouldn’t always be able to keep them on a leash. One day they’d be pushed too far, they’d break out and there’d be nothing he could do to stop the carnage.

  As the weeks went by I slowly felt my strength returning. After a spell, the old crone weaned me off the murky brews she cooked up in her cauldron and gave me buffalo steaks instead. This brought me on a lot faster. A man needs meat.

  Meanwhile, I wondered where Pete and John had gone with Billy. Where was this safe place they’d talked about?

  I told Kla Klitso I was worried about my friends. He sent a couple of braves to take a look-see. They said the white men had stayed a spell in a broken-down old barn on a farm belonging to ‘He-who-has-horses’ (I guessed they meant old man Jebb) which he only used for grazing his stock. But they weren’t there any more.

  I couldn’t find out how Billy had got on. But I guessed that whether there were two or three of them they’d either gone back home or moved on. No way could they come looking for me. How could they? I was the only white man in the whole wide world who knew where I was.

  One day, Squawking Crow took me out riding. I was getting stronger now, though my arm was still sore sometimes and I didn’t have the full use of it yet. I reckoned I could hurry my recovery along if I stopped sitting around and pushed my body hard as I could.

  We galloped the horses and took turns jumping boulders and tilting at steep slopes. My arm was holding up pretty well and I felt good about it. We were about to thread our way through a narrow passage between fallen boulders into a canyon Squawking Crow knew about where a rider could be put through some tough trials. Suddenly he stopped dead and pointed at the ground.

  There were tracks of mules, maybe four or five of them, and two newly shod horses. They were recent, and they went one way. Unless there was a back way out, the party which had left the tracks must still be in the canyon.

  He slid off his pony and led it into a patch of tall mesquite. He gestured for me to do the same.

  When both horses were tethered, he snapped a branch he’d cut off a bush and used it to sweep our tracks clear behind us. We retreated like this until we were among loose scree at the foot of the bluff. This we climbed until we were maybe fifty feet above the narrow passage that led between the boulders into the gorge.

  Keeping to about the same height, we followed a narrow ledge that led around the shoulder of the bluff until we reached a point where we had an uninterrupted view of the canyon. We moved forward slowly, choosing where we put our feet: a stone dislodged would turn into a minor avalanche and give our location away to anyone who might be watching. Squawking Crow went first. He kept his head down and stopped to listen from time to time for any warning sound.

  There was no back way out. What we found was a natural bowl surrounded on four sides by a high rim of bare rock that was almost sheer at the top but sloped down in easy steps until it reached the arroyo, the Mexicans’ name for the bed of a dried-up watercourse. When the place was hit by a sudden storm, the water would rush down the steep sides of this natural basin, collect at the bottom and force a way out through the boulders in the narrow pass below us which was the only way in and the only way out. A couple of armed men could have held it indefinitely. But no one was posted among the boulders and in the valley below us there was not a soul to be seen.

  Squawking Crow stared hard, his brow furrowed. He couldn’t make sense of it.

  The tracks had shown that horses had come in and not gone out. Yet the canyon was deserted.

  Then he touche
d me on the arm and pointed.

  From the height we were at, there was no way even he could follow the tracks for more than a few yards from the entrance to the pass. They were lost among the loose stones of the dry water-course. But by following the course of the stream he had noticed other traces – a bush with a branch hanging oddly as if something had brushed against it, a rock in the bank that had been disturbed and left unnaturally balanced – which led towards a projection or rocky spur.

  I nodded to indicate I’d spotted the signs too.

  The spur blocked our view of where the trail might have led. To get a better look, Squawking Crow moved a few yards to his right, still in a crouch, making for the shelter of a medium-sized boulder. He never made it.

  There was the crack of a rifle and he went down like a rag doll.

  I didn’t even think about going to help him.

  Dead men don’t need help.

  6

  BURIED ALIVE!

  Squawking Crow fell in a heap. Then his body began to slide down the steep face of the hill, gathering speed as it went. The crack of the shot that killed him was still reverberating around the canyon when his body slowly came to a stop on the bank of the dried-up river bed about forty of fifty feet below me.

  I didn’t move. I hadn’t seen where the shot had come from. Nothing moved for a long spell after which there was more nothing.

  I didn’t move, either. For all I knew, the same gun that killed Squawking Crow, or a different gun, it made no difference, might be pointing at me.

  All this time I had my own gun out of its holster, but there was nothing to shoot at.

  Then, an hour at least after the sun had passed overhead, I saw something move.

  Above the rocky spur where Squawking Crow had lost sight of the trail was a stretch of ground that sloped up gently among a litter of boulders. In the middle was a patch of mesquite growing round a boulder. What had caught my eye was the glinting barrel of a rifle that had suddenly poked out of the bushes.

  I still had nothing to shoot at.

  Then the branches shook and a head appeared. It was Nat, Calthrop’s main man.

  I held my fire. Where Nat was, Calthrop would not be far behind. I was right.

  Looking round him all the time and keeping his rifle up, Nat came out of the bushes. He took a look at Squawking Crow and seemed satisfied there was no one else about. He gave a signal and Calthrop followed him out.

  ‘All clear,’ said Nat, putting up his gun.

  I had the two of them in my sights. I took a bead on Calthrop and pulled the trigger. At this range I couldn’t miss. My Colt gave a dull click as the hammer hit the firing-pin. The sound was too low to be heard above the sighing of the afternoon wind which had got up. The two men below me gave no sign of alarm and went on with their business which just then consisted of leading a string of mules out of the mesquite.

  I cursed silently and flipped open the chamber. It was empty!

  I had every reason to be grateful to the Indians who had saved my life, but just then I would have gladly throttled every last light-fingered man jack of them. For a joke they’d hide my hat or fill my boots with sand. They also ‘borrowed’ on a permanent basis anything that took their fancy. They didn’t have the same notions of property.

  No excuses. It was my fault. I should have checked. I had missed the best opportunity a man could have wished for to rid the world of a prime skunk.

  Nat was below me now, walking the mules towards the pass that led out of the canyon. Calthrop brought up the rear with their horses.

  I reached for the ammo in my belt. But I had stayed still for so long that my muscles were cramped and my movements were slow and clumsy.

  As I was wasting time loading my gun, my best chance of a clear shot disappeared.

  Nat glanced down at the body of Squawking Crow and said, ‘What’s the chances he wasn’t alone? You reckon he had friends with him?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Calthrop. ‘We didn’t see any and no one came looking for him. He was by himself and a lone Indian don’t signify.’

  I dropped a couple of slugs in the chamber and snapped it shut.

  But they were gone.

  Or at least they were out of sight. But maybe one of them, just to be sure, was hidden behind a rock ready to take a pop at anything that moved. I was too exposed. It wasn’t worth the risk. I’d catch up with Calthrop soon enough. He’d not stray far from his set up at Berry’s Crossing. He’d invested too much time and energy in it. For the time being I was more interested in finding out how they’d managed to hide themselves and seven horses in a patch of mesquite.

  I let more time trickle by.

  When I figured it was safe, I stood up, stretched to get the circulation going again, then made my way back along the steep shoulder we had come in by until I had a clear view of Calthrop and Nat who were already a mile away. I clambered down the loose scree not caring now how much noise I made and checked that the horses hadn’t been spotted They were still there. I unhooked my water bottle and took a swig, then slung it over my shoulder. In case. Exploring the place they’d been hiding in might take some time and I’d sweated a lot in the sun.

  Then I re-entered the canyon through the pass. I moved Squawking Crow out of the sun into a hollow, and covered him with brushwood to hide him from the buzzards until I could get him back to his people who would look after him and give him a proper burial according to their rites and beliefs.

  I crossed the dried-up water-course, traversed the rocky spur and climbed up to the mesquite grove.

  I saw now that it covered the entrance to what looked like a natural cave, though I later found some traces suggesting it had been enlarged by mining operations at some point, though not recently.

  I had already figured this out, but now I wanted to test another thought: this must be a hidey-hole that Calthrop used to stash the proceeds of his plundering forays. Since he couldn’t manage to transport the stuff without help, I also guessed Nat was in on it because he was useful. Probably he was the only one of Calthrop’s men who knew the exact location of his cache. I didn’t give much for Nat’s chances of reaching three score years and ten.

  Only two men knew about the treasure cave. Correction: three.

  Inside, it was cool and shady after the bright heat of the sun. The walls were solid rock, and so was the roof except for a section which had been shored up by timber props. The cave seemed to go back far into the side of the mountain. The rocky roof dropped as I went but I was still able to walk without bending.

  The further I got from the entrance the darker it became. In a niche in the wall a half-burned candle had been left. I lit it, walked on and then tripped and fell. A rope had been strung knee-high between the cave walls and I had not seen it in the gloom.

  I was wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of setting a snare that had no point to it when I felt then heard a dull thud behind me. I got to my feet. It had grown very dark and I had to grope on the ground for the candle which had gone out when I dropped it. I made my way back to the mouth of the cave.

  At first, I could not figure out why it wasn’t getting lighter as I went. Nor could I explain the dust that had suddenly filled the tunnel. And then I knew what had happened.

  The rope had sprung a trap made of ropes and geared pulleys which had pulled out whatever props had been supporting the timbers holding up the roof. That section was between me and the cave entrance.

  I was trapped.

  The dust made breathing difficult and I retreated. I decided to explore the rest of the cave until it had all settled. Then I’d be able to see and could start digging myself out.

  I went back to the point where I had tripped and pressed on. After no more than about fifty paces, the cave became wider and higher, forming a vaulted chamber whose roof was too high for me to see. In the centre was Calthrop’s booty. There were chests of different sizes. They contained coins, necklaces, silver snuff-boxes, ladies’ brooches, gentlemen’s ti
e-pins and such like, small items of large value and easily transported. Neatly stacked in makeshift racks against the wall were supplies and goods of all kinds, from nails and tools to city-made articles, sacks of flour, and bottles containing most things from patent medicines to branded liquor. These had been less easy to bring here but I guess Calthrop reckoned it was worth the effort. I couldn’t have put a figure on what it was all worth, but it must have been a fortune.

  No wonder Calthrop was prepared to bring the roof down rather than leave his ill-gotten plunder exposed to being spirited away. I reckoned the chances were small that anyone would ever notice the cave, let alone venture that far into it. But maybe Calthrop thought an Indian might, or a prospector, and he wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

  Around the walls were other niches in which candles had been placed. The one I had been using was burning low. So I gathered up three or four that still had a good life in them and made my way back towards the mouth of the cave.

  The dust had cleared and I could see that the tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling, completely filled by rubble like a cork in a bottle. I wondered how far the blockage extended. I thought hard and tried to get a picture in my mind’s eye of the section with the props. I saw myself entering the cave, forced myself to recollect how far I’d gone, how many paces I had taken to pass by the props. I couldn’t tell exactly, but it must have been around fifteen, maybe twenty. Just assuming that only the supported section of the roof had come down, it would take a dozen men with shovels a week to dig a way out. I was alone and I didn’t have a shovel.

  My prospects didn’t look rosy.

  I sat down on a rock and started to think.

  Fact: Calthrop was ready to bury any over-inquisitive passer-by alive. That was no surprise. But burying intruders also meant burying his treasure, and that made less sense.

  I took a small swig from my water bottle. Had to go easy on the stuff. Might be here for some time.