Silvertip's Trap (12 page)

B
ILL
N
AYLOR
looked right and left toward the hooded figures. They were not simply equipped with face masks. Barry Christian always insisted that his men wear hoods that completely covered the head. Otherwise telltale features such as hair and ears could usually be glimpsed and serve as bases of identification in case of arrest. Naylor himself was wearing such a mask. He wished now that he had made the eye holes even smaller. It was better to endanger his own accuracy of vision a little rather than to expose too much of his face.

In the meantime, the train rumbled nearer. It came to a shuddering halt with the engine exactly in front of Naylor, and he sprang suddenly to his feet with a yell and fired a rifle bullet into the sky. That was the arranged signal. He felt, as he saw the train halt right in front of him, that the robbery could not fail to go through perfectly. The skill with which Barry Christian had estimated the distance the engine must cover before the brakes brought it to a halt offered an assurance that all the rest of the scheme would go through smoothly.

All down the line of the train, in answer to his signal shot, he heard an outbreak of shooting and yelling. Frightened faces looked out the windows of the coaches. But just before him he had his main concern. There was a gray-headed, red-faced hulk of an engineer in the cab of the locomotive. He had leaned from view and reappeared again with a big revolver in his hand. Bill Naylor, his bead already drawn, merely snipped the cap off the engineer's head.

“Drop that gun, you fool, or I'll brain you with the next shot!” he shouted.

The engineer, his hair tousled and on end, looked woefully down at the big Colt which was in his hand. At last he threw it out on the ground with a curse. Across the cab, Naylor could see the fireman with his arms stiffly extended above his head. That meant that Cassidy was doing his share of the work.

In the distance he heard a voice shouting: “Open the door or we'll blow the car off the track, and you with it!”

That would be the mail coach which the robbers were threatening. But his own task was merely to see that the engineer was made helpless, together with the fireman, and that the fire box of the engine was thoroughly flooded. He told Cassidy to take the fireman down on his side of the engine. Then, climbing into the cab, he put his rifle aside and laid the muzzle of a revolver against the chest of the old engineer. He sat in the cab with his head fallen, his greasy hands weak, idle, palms up in his lap.

At Naylor's command to flood the fire box, he returned with a vacant stare:

“I dropped my gun like a dirty yellow coward — but I'll not lift a finger to kill this engine.”

Naylor felt a sudden touch of pity.

“You're not disgraced,” he said. “You got no chance. That's all. Buck up and do what I tell you!”

But there was no use arguing. The engineer seemed actually to prefer shooting to obeying orders from robbers. Cassidy had to get the fireman to do the job, and as the flood of cold water hit the raging furnace of the firebox, it exploded into steam that rushed out in enormous clouds with whistlings and rumblings. The cloud enveloped the whole locomotive and the head of the train, while voices of alarm yelled to cut down the fog.

In the meantime, Cassidy and Naylor tied the engineer and fireman back to back and elbow to elbow, which is about the best way of quickly making two men harmless, because every struggle of the one is sure to hurt the other.

There was plenty of action for Naylor to see as he walked back down the length of the train.

The passengers were making enough noise to furnish out a whole battle scene, but what mattered was the attack on the mail coach. The guards had failed to open the doors, and as Naylor left the engine and started back, a petard which Christian had affixed to the door of the mail coach exploded and smashed the lock. The door itself was instantly opened, and from within two repeating rifles opened a rapid fire.

The very first shot caught Dick Penny, of the Christian gang, full in the chest. He spread out his arms and walked with short steps across the tracks as though he were a performer on a tight rope striving to get his balance. He sat down against the fence and pulled off his hood in order to get more air. His whole chest was covered with red that began to leap down into his lap.

Naylor, taking shelter close to the side of the train, saw that picture. Then he was aware of a figure climbing apelike up the end of the mail coach and running along the top of it.

That was Barry Christian. No hood could conceal the dimensions of his big shoulders. And what other man, unless it were Jim Silver, could combine such massive weight and strength with such catlike agility?

When he was just over the open door, Christian got a toe hold on a ventilator in the roof and drooped his body over the edge of the car. In that way his head and shoulders swung down suddenly over the open door.

It was a maneuver so daring that it seemed suicidal, but in each of Christian's hands there was a revolver. He fired three or four times as fast as he could. Then he pulled himself back to the roof of the car.

The rifle fire inside the car had stopped.

“Go get ‘em boys! They're done for!” shouted Christian.

The last of his words were blurred by a horrible screaming that began inside the mail coach. It made Naylor want to close his eyes and stop his ears, like a child or a foolish woman. He had never heard in his life a sound that was quite so frightful.

Big Duff Gregor, now that the rifle fire was silenced, was the first into the mail coach, with two others behind him. They pulled out two badly wounded men. They were carried over to the fence beside the railroad where Dick Penny was already sitting, and a yell from Christian told Naylor to guard them. It struck Naylor like a bullet — to hear his own name shouted out like that in the hearing of so many witnesses. Why should he be identified out of the entire crowd?

However, he had his hands full of work.

One of the guards had been shot through the body. He looked greenish white, he was so sick from his wound. He never made a sound of pain, but he kept saying in a weak voice:

“Quit the yelling, Charlie! Quit the noise!”

Charlie was not fatally hurt, in spite of his screeching. He had a clean bullet wound in his left leg, but what tortured him was the smashing of his right hand. A slug of lead from Christian's gun had drilled right through the center of the hand, tearing to pieces all the delicate nerves of the palm. He kept holding the hand by the wrist. He would be silent for a few seconds, bending his body forward and back like a pendulum, and then the scream of agony would jerk his head back and distort his mouth.

Every time he yelled, Naylor felt the sound go through him like a sword — a red, flaming sword that filled his brain with smoke.

He fell to work as fast as he could to bandage up the-wounds. Cassidy was there, too, not being definitely assigned to any other task. He took charge of Dick Penny. Out of the corner of his eye, Naylor was aware that the passengers were filing out of the train and lining up in a long, straight row beside the coaches.

It was a long train, and it was crowded. Three women had fainted. They were carried out by other passengers and laid in the shadow beside the train. Up forward, the steam was still gushing with a fainter hissing from the flooded fire box, and now and then wisp of the thin mist were blown back across the passengers. Duff Gregor was starting down the line of them, searching them thoroughly, and dropping everything he got — jewelry, watches, wallets — into a canvas sack.

In the meantime, of course, Barry Christian and his chosen assistants were working on the blowing of the safe in the mail coach. They must be working with set teeth and hasty fingers, struggling against time, and in their minds, constantly, the image of Jim Silver rushing across the hills on Parade, with his followers streaming out behind him.

But all of these things were in the background of Naylor's mind. What immediately focused his attention was the screeching of the man named Charlie, and the doings of the other two wounded men. The guard who had been shot through the body was so sick and weak that he had slumped down on his back. He shook his head when Naylor offered him a drink of whisky from a flask.

“Just stop Charlie from screaming, will you?” he pleaded.

“I'm tryin' to stop, Mike,” gasped Charlie. “But I can't! I'm tryin' to — ”

And again the horrible outcry tore his throat.

Over on the left, Cassidy stopped trying to work for the comfort of Dick Penny. He wanted to make Penny lie down, but Dick refused. He was only nineteen, a stringy, blond-headed, cheerful youth with a string of killings chalked up to his credit.

“I'll take mine sitting up,” he said. “If you don't stop that blankety fool from yelling, I'll shoot the other hand off him. Gimme a drink, Bill.”

Naylor handed him the flask. Penny could not manage it with one shaking hand, but he succeeded by using two in getting the bottle to his lips. He took a long swig.

“I wish I could get the whisky into me as fast as the blood is running out,” said Dick Penny. “That'd be a fair exchange. Here's to you, Bill!”

He drank again. He began to laugh, but the pain which the laughter caused to him cut it short.

Then he said — and Naylor never forgot it — “How dark it is, and not a star!”

Cassidy had the soul of a rattlesnake, but this speech had moved him.

“You're goin' to be all right, kid,” he said.

“Shut up, you fool,” answered Dick Penny. “I know what kind of a darkness this is. I know what kind of a night it is that's shutting in on me. I ain't going to wake up from this sleep. Gimme another flask, somebody. There ain't anything in this bottle.”

There was no other flask at hand. Naylor said to Charlie:

“Can you shut up for a minute? My partner here is passing out.”

Charlie bit a scream in two and swallowed the inside half of it. The other wounded guard turned his head toward Dick Penny and watched with eyes that were suddenly bright.

Penny said, “Help me stand up, boys.”

“Sit still, Dick. You ain't fit to stand up.”

Penny cursed him with a burst of language, saying: “I ain't goin' to sit down. I'm goin' to stand up to it.”

Naylor understood what was in his mind, and, grabbing him under the armpits, lifted him to his feet. He supported him. Penny's head flopped over to the side, and his sombrero fell off.

“Put my hat back on my head,” said Penny.

Cassidy lifted the hat, actually dusted it, and then settled it carefully on the head of Penny. The blood was running rapidly down to the feet of Penny. He was a crimson figure.

“All right, Bill. Let go of me,” directed Penny.

“Are you sure, Dick?” asked Naylor.

“Shut up, and do what I tell you to do, will you?” commanded Penny.

Naylor gingerly released his grasp. He expected Dick Penny to fall flat, but instead, Penny supported himself on sagging knees. He turned, staggering, toward the others.

“Look!” he said.

“I'm watching,” said Naylor.

“You tell the others,” said Dick Penny in a voice suddenly clear and loud, “that I took it standing. I didn't lie down to it, and I didn't sit down to it. I took it — standing!”

His voice held out right to the end of his words. Then he crumpled up.

Naylor grabbed for him, but the loose weight slid through his hands to the ground. He looked down and saw the half-open eyes of Penny, and a small, sneering smile on his lips.

He knew very well before he fumbled at the heart of Dick that he was dead.

Then he heard Mike, the guard, saying: “That was pretty good. That's the best I ever seen. That's nerve, is what it is.”

Right on the heels of that came an explosion that made the mail coach rock, and a thin cloud of smoke puffed far out through the open doors.

C
HRISTIAN
was first through the doors of the mail coach again. His shout of triumph told Naylor everything that he needed to know. The safe had been cracked, and the rest of this business would soon be finished. But where was Jim Silver, and where were the men from Elsinore that the boy on the fast-galloping mustang must have roused long before this?

A horse was brought up to the side of the mail coach, and Christian and the other men inside the car began to hand out hastily filled small saddlebags which were rapidly tied onto the horse. The thing was ended in another minute. Christian jumped down and whistled three quick notes.

“Fall in! Fall in!” he called in his great voice.

If any of the passengers on the train had ever heard that voice before, how could they fail to recognize now the powerful, ringing notes of it?

There was a quick scampering. The passengers had been disarmed, of course, as they were searched, and there was little danger that they would open fire as the retreat began. All that happened as the outlaws rushed to their horses was that one of the women who had fainted sat up suddenly and broke into hysterical laughter. She was a big, fat woman, and she laughed so convulsively that her hat jerked off her head and her gray hair tumbled down over her shoulders. She kept on laughing, on a higher and a higher note. It was strange the distance at which that laughter still followed in the ears of Naylor as he rode away with the rest of the gang.

It seemed to him a mockery of all that had been accomplished on this day.

Cassidy rode up beside him as he took off his hood.

“They say there's more than the three hundred and fifty thousand. They say there's nearly half a million taken out of that safe!” said Cassidy. “It takes Barry Christian to plan a scoop and then make it.”

Naylor heard the words, but the meaning did not register deeply in his mind. Nothing mattered very much to him except the picture of how Dick Penny had stood up to die. As for the money — well, money cannot teach a man how to die. It can't do much of anything for you. You can't eat gold. And as for enough clothes to stand up in and enough food to eat — well, any fool can get those things by working honestly with the hands.

Who need be afraid of work?

He kept thinking along those lines while he jogged his horse in the middle of the crowd.

“That fellow Mike,” he said to Cassidy. “Think that he'll pull through?”

“I saw where the bullet socked him and where it came out. He's got a good chance,” said Cassidy. “But what d'you care?”

“Well,” said Naylor, “it just makes the difference between robbery and murder.”

Cassidy stared at him.

“Are you weakening, Naylor?” he demanded harshly.

And suddenly he reined his horse away, as though he were too disgusted by the last remark to remain any longer in the company of the man who had made it.

They got out of the narrows of the valley and onto the rolling uplands beyond, with Barry Christian keeping the pace down to a steady trot. That pace would conserve the strength of the horses, and if a posse from Elsinore came at them, probably the men from the latter town would have ridden most of the wind out of their mounts before they came in sight. But what man, other than Barry Christian, would have had the nerve to keep to such a moderate gait instead of trying to speed away for shelter among the higher mountains?

Gravely and bitterly, Naylor admired the outlaw chief. And yet, even at this minute he hardly regretted that he was no longer one of Christian's tried and chosen few. He was back in the ruck, part of the rank and the file. He noticed, too, that Christian was not leading the horse that carried the treasure. Instead, the horse was being conducted by Duff Gregor, whose fine thoroughbred chestnut stallion, stained to resemble Parade, was dancing lightly over the ground.

They had gone so far from the scene of the robbery that it seemed to Naylor that the late affair was sifting down into his past, joining many old memories that were dim under the sea of time, when the voice of Cassidy yelled:

“They're coming! They're coming!”

He looked back, and through a cleft among the hills behind them Naylor saw a slowly rising cloud of dust. It streamed toward them. He could make out little figures that moved under the cloud of the dust.

There was an irregular checking and spurring of horses. Then the calm voice of Barry Christian called:

“All right, boys. This is what we expected. Every man steady, now. Get the horses into a lope and keep ‘em there. I've got a half-million-dollar flag here, and I know I can trust you fellows to rally around it!”

Of course, that was true, and a very neat effect it made to see that horse which was burdened with nothing but the stolen treasure. Not a man was apt to fall away from the party before receiving his split of the loot.

They went off steadily enough, riding at the lope, the pace for which was set by Barry Christian. And, looking over his little band, Naylor remembered the evening not so many weeks before when he had smoked at the side of the Kendal Falls and had seen the body of the drowning man swept headlong down the current. Then, by a gesture — rather, by the lack of a gesture-he could have prevented all of this. He could have let Barry Christian pass on to the doom he deserved. Instead, he had chosen to pull him back to safety, and so he had managed to undo how much of the good work of Jim Silver?

Conscience was not a keenly developed portion of the soul of Naylor, but something like it was being tormented now!

They kept on at the steady pace until they had risen well up on a higher tide of hills, and at that point Christian fell to the rear and ordered the others to continue steadily toward a point which he had marked out.

Then, taking up his post on the brow of the hill, Christian drew out a strong field glass and peered down at the lower ground over which the pursuit was sweeping. He remained for some time conducting his examination. In the meantime, as the fleeing riders climbed a still higher slope, Bill Naylor in turn twisted in the saddle, let his horse go a little distance at a walk, and peered with straining eyes at the lower plain.

The pursuers were far closer than they had been a little time before. They came on with a determined rush, and the size of the dust cloud seemed to indicate more than a hundred riders in the lot. That, however, was too large a guess, for as a gust of wind cleared the dust suddenly away, Naylor was able to estimate the situation at a glance.

There were fully fifty men riding to the front, more or less stretched out in a loose formation, according to the strength of their mustangs and their skill as riders. And, a little distance behind them, held in a close herd by several other riders, appeared a sweeping mass of perhaps threescore unsaddled horses.

Fear that had remained far back in the mind of Naylor until this moment, now suddenly leaped up right into his throat. With so many remounts, the men of Elsinore would surely have an excellent chance of riding down Christian's party. But, more than all else, to make the picture significant, there was sight of a man in the lead of all the rest, and the horse he rode on flashed like gold, even from the distance.

That was Jim Silver and Parade.