Robber's Roost (1989) (26 page)

"We might steal away--now."

"Yes. I've thought of that. But only to get lost and starve--or die of thirst in these brakes."

"That almost--would be better--for me."

"If you can't stick it out we'll plan and go--say tomorrow night.

We must have food, horses. . . . It's only honest, though, to tell you the chances are a hundred to one against us. . . . We've got an even break if we wait."

"How can you--think that?"

"This gang is about ready to go up in smoke. There'll be a terrible fight. Hays surely will be killed. And just as surely, more than he. That will leave a proposition I can handle without risk to you."

"Even then--we still have to find a way out of this awful place."

"Yes, but I'd have time, and I could pack water and food. . . .

Helen, trust me, it's the best plan."

"If you take me back to my brother, I'll give you the ransom."

"Don't insult me," he replied, bitterly.

At that she drew up suddenly, and threw her hair back from her face. "Forgive me. . . . You see I have lost my mind. That never occurred to me before. But I'll reward you in some way."

"To have saved you will be all the reward I ask--and more than I deserve. . . . You've forgotten that I love you."

"Yes--I had," she whispered. Her great eyes studied him in the starlight, as if the fact had a vastly different significance here than it had had at Star Ranch.

"The proof of it is that I'm one of this robber gang--yet ready to betray them--kill their chief and any or all of them. Except Smoky. I've worked on him so that he's our friend. He is a real man, as you'll see when the break comes. . . . If you were an American, you'd be human enough to grasp the situation and help me through with it."

"I am human and I--I've as much courage as any American girl," she flashed, stung by his caustic words. "You--you talk of love as freely as you Westerners talk of horses--guns--death. . . . But surely you don't mean that it's because you love me you'll save me?"

"I'm afraid it is."

"I cannot believe you. . . . I never accepted you as a desperado."

"Miss Herrick, all that doesn't matter," he rejoined, almost coldly. "We are wasting time--risking--much--"

"I don't care. That is WHY I had to come to you. I knelt here for moments before awakening you. It helped me somehow--and it is easing my nerves to talk."

"Well, talk then. But make it low. . . . You must have crept very softly to my side. I sleep with one eye open."

"Indeed you don't. Both yours were tight shut. And your lips were stern. A strange thought came to me. I wondered if you had not had a good mother, and sister perhaps."

"I had," whispered Jim, feelingly.

"That accounts."

"It did not keep me from--"

Suddenly she stiffened, no doubt at the slight sound that had checked Jim's speech. She put a hand over his lips and stared at him with wide, vague eyes.

Over her shoulder, Jim's eye was arrested by a glint of starlight upon a bright object on the ground. Above and behind it a shape, darker than the dark background, gradually took the outline of a man on hands and knees. Cold terror assailed Jim Wall, despite his iron nerve. That was Hays crawling upon them with a gun in his hand. A bursting tide of blood through Jim's veins paralleled the lightning flash of his thoughts. Death for both of them was terribly close. His gun was under his pillow. Helen knelt between him and the robber. A move of even the slightest kind would be fatal. Cunning must take precedence of action. He swerved his rigid gaze from the humped black form to Helen's face. It was white as marble in moonlight. Her eyes showed the tremendous strain under which she labored. In that instant she could almost read his very thoughts. Her fingers still crossed his lips and they had begun to tremble.

"IT'S HAYS," he whispered, scarcely audibly. "FOLLOW ME--NOW."

Then, exerting all his will to speak naturally, he said aloud:

"No, Miss Herrick, I'm sorry, but I can't oblige you. I don't approve of Hays' kidnapping you, but it's done. And I'm a member of his band. I would not think of going against him, let alone trying to run off with you."

There was a tense silence, fraught with much apprehension for Jim.

Would she be able to play up to him? There was just a chance that Hays had not heard any of their whispers, in which case it was possible to deceive him. Helen comprehended. It was Jim Wall's privilege then to see the reaction of a woman at a perilous moment.

"I'll give you the ransom money," she said, quite clearly, and certainly most persuasively. "My brother will reward you otherwise."

"You can't bribe me," he rejoined. "And I wouldn't advise you to try it on Smoky or any of the others."

"Hays may have had only money in his mind at first, but now--"

"DON'T MOVE, JIM!" came a low hard voice from the shadow.

Helen gave a little gasp and sagged on her knees. Jim waited a moment.

"I won't, Hank," he replied.

Then Hays' tall form loomed black above the rise of ground. He strode forward. If he had sheathed his gun, Jim would have made short work of that interview. But he held it half leveled, glancing darkly in the starlight.

The robber chief gazed down upon Jim and Helen. His features were indistinguishable, but the poise of his head was expressive enough.

Still, Jim sensed that he had been misled.

"You cat!" he declared, roughly. "If I ketch you again--tryin' to bribe any of my outfit--I'll treat you so you won't want to go back to your baby-faced brother. . . . Now you git to your tent!"

Helen rose unsteadily and vanished in the gloom.

"Jim Wall, you ain't been with me long, an' I don't know you, but I'm takin' this deal to heart," Hays said, slowly. "I'm much obliged. I reckon you're the only man in the outfit who could of withstood thet woman."

"No, you're wrong, Hank. Smoky wouldn't have listened to her. And I'm sure the others would have stood pat."

"My faith was damn near gone."

"That's in you, Hank. You've no call to lose it. You've about split your gang over this woman."

"Wal, I'm not askin' judgments from you or any of the outfit," growled the chief, gloomily. "You'll all be good an' glad to git your share of the ransom."

"The thing is--boss--will we get it?" queried Jim, significantly.

Hays made a violent move, like a striking snake. "What you mean by thet?"

"I'm askin' you."

"Air you insinuatin' you mightn't git yours?" demanded Hays. And Jim, used for years to sense peril, divined he was not far from death then. He had not moved a hand since Hays' arrival. If he had had his gun within reach he would have ended that argument.

But the chances were too greatly in Hays' favor. Wit and cunning must see him through. He could feel how intensely the chief wanted to know what Jim knew.

"No. You might say I was askin' for all of us," replied Jim, curtly.

"Wal, I'll git the outfit together an' do some askin', myself."

"It's a good idea. It MIGHT prevent the split--provided you divide the money you stole from Herrick."

"I'll wring thet white cat's neck," hissed the robber.

"You're wrong, boss. She didn't tell me. She doesn't know you robbed her brother. Sparrow confessed before he died."

Hays swore a mighty oath. ". . . An' he squealed?"

"Yes. To Smoky an' me. We kept it secret until we had to tell.

They KNEW somethin' was wrong."

"All the time you knowed!" There was something pathetic in the fallen chieftain's shame and amaze. By this he seemed to realize his crime.

"You see, Hank, how your outfit has stood by you, even in your guilt."

"Ahuh! . . . If it ain't too late--I'll make amends," he rejoined, hoarsely, and stalked away in the darkness.

Jim lay back on his blankets with a weight of oppression removed.

He had saved himself for the hour, but what would the outcome be?

After deliberation it seemed he had put Hays in a corner from which there could be no retreat.

Chapter
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Next morning Jim, who slept ill the rest of that night, was building a fire when Happy Jack, who had his bed under the shack, heard him and rolled out with his merry whistle.

"Thet's downright good of you, Jim," he drawled. "I like cookin', but I shore hate to rustle firewood an' chop. When I was a kid I

'most cut off my big toe."

"Happy, you're a card," replied Jim. "How in the hell can you whistle and smile when you know this outfit is primed to blow up?"

"Wal, Jim, show me the sense of bein' sore an' unhappy, no matter what's comin' off," rejoined Jack, philosophically. "As a feller grows older his mind sets one way or another. Look at Brad.

Gamblin' got to be breath of life to him an' he lost thet breath.

Look at Hays. Love of robbin' lost him wife, family, ranch, respect. An' look at you, Jim. Lone wolf, your hand always itchin' wuss to throw your gun."

"So you figure me that way!" exclaimed Jim, in genuine surprise.

"Reckon I see through a lot I don't git credit for."

"You see through me wrong, Jack. I don't ride around looking for trouble. But I can't help being worked on by other men and conditions."

"Wal, I'm admittin' Hays eased us into a rotten deal."

Jim had breakfast before the other men were up. It still wanted half an hour till sunrise. This was the beautiful time of day.

All was balmy, sweet, fresh, fragrant. Mockingbirds were bursting their throats. To Jim their melody was indeed a mockery, not of other birds, but of men and life and nature. The dawn, the air, the sky, the birds, the cliffs--nothing that was there in Jim's sight held any intimation of the hell about to break in Robbers'

Roost, nor of that captive imperiled woman! Jim hurried away on scout duty before Hays and his accusers had assembled at the camp fire.

With rifle in hand Jim headed toward the western exit. Not until he was out in the valley did he realize that he carried his rifle.

The fact surprised him. There was plenty of fresh meat in camp.

He had no idea of hunting. That act had been instinctive and it puzzled him. But there was a release of a clamped tension within.

This day would see events, and he felt almost elated.

Perhaps that had something to do with a singular sense of the mounting beauty of the morning, of the magnified solitude, of the rarefied atmosphere that gave the buttes and mountains a most deceiving nearness. The outside world of Utah seemed to be encroaching upon this wilderness of canyon brakes.

The sun was still beneath the rim of the escarpments in the east, but its approach was heralded by a magnificent glory of red and gold, of flushed peaks and rose-shrouded mesas, of burning faces of the zigzag walls along distant ramparts.

Jim had never before been up high here at such an early hour. Any man would have been struck by the spectacle. He felt that if he were to die that day he would be leaving earth without having fully realized its sublimity, its mystery, its solemn warning, its inscrutable promise. And there ran through his mind a thought of how Miss Herrick would have reveled in this glorious scene.

"Well, I AM loco," he soliloquized, blankly, suddenly brought up sharply by the absurd reflection. Excitement and emotion had reacted so powerfully upon him that he was not himself. Right then he made the stern decision that when he started back to camp, to face Hays again, he would be a thousand times his old self.

The sun-shelter he had erected had once before toppled over, and this morning he found it again flat, except one of the poles. Jim gathered up the dry brush and made a seat and back-rest of it. He did not examine into his premonition that the shelter had served its turn. Then he sat down to watch.

It was as if he had never seen a sunrise. There was no comparing it with any other he could recall. And one magnifying look through the field-glass was more than enough. Nature's exaggeration of color and loveliness and transparency and vastness, was too great even for the normal gaze of man.

But that superlative grandeur passed, leaving something Jim could accept and gloat over as actual.

From this lofty perch he gazed with narrowed eyes across the shaded hole below, into which no ray of sun had yet penetrated. The black mouth of the gorge yawned hungrily. Above it on all sides spread the gray and red rock ridges, dotted with dwarf cedars, with white washes between, and on to spotted red ragged hummocks that fringed a green level, yellow with sunflowers, which led to an abrupt break into a canyon. The walls showed brown, rust-colored, hard as iron, with dark lines and shadows, beyond which stood up the pyramids and bluffs of the brakes. Here gloomed suggested depths and corrugated slopes, then the infinitely wild, obscure, stratified space terminating in the Henry Mountains, looming colossal in the lilac light of morning, ghostly, black, unscalable, piercing the pale- blue sky.

To their left the lifting sun, losing its gold for red, spread a transparent curtain over the line of level escarpments and mesas, finally to dazzle the canyon country under it to blinding rays. To the right shone many leagues of rock ridges and mounds, broken at intervals by pale gleams of washes and alkali flats and banks of gray clay, ending in the dim, wandering White Bluffs.