Skeleton Lode (30 page)

The lantern hung behind Arlo as he began his descent. Suddenly the wall seemed to vanish and his feet dangled in the air, throwing all his weight on his arms and shoulders. Desperately he hand-walked down the rope until the light revealed his predicament. He had gone over a hump, like a huge stone chin, and the wall beneath it was recessed far beyond his groping feet. Dimly he could see sanctuary—a shelf beneath the overhang—but he couldn’t reach it. There was no feeling in his hands as they clung frantically to the rope, and his body broke out in a cold sweat. He began kicking, forcing himself to become a pendulum. Desperately he swung to and fro, toward the stone wall, which seemed farther and farther away. Sweat blinded his eyes until he couldn’t see. On his final forward swing, which might have taken him to safety, he was unable to clear the stone abutment that had been his undoing. His head smashed into the stone, his numb hands lost their grip, and the rope went slack.

“Arlo!” Dallas cried. “Arlo, are you all right?”

But there was no answer. Dallas heard only the pounding of his heart and the rushing of the underground river he himself had called the Death’s Head.

Sunset was less than two hours away when Cass Bowdre and his angry companions reached the west bank of Saguaro Lake on their return journey. Their feet were blistered almost beyond endurance, and they hadn’t eaten since breakfast of the day before.

“We got to have grub,” Bowdre said. “Must be a ranch or some miner’s shack where we can get a feed.”

Nobody said anything. They stumbled on, following the southern perimeter of the lake until they came within sight of Hoss Logan’s cabin.

“Place looks deserted,” said Three-Fingered Joe.

“All the better,” Zondo Carp said. “Still might be grub there. We can break in and help ourselves.”

Quietly they made their way to the cabin and Bowdre tried the door.

“Damn,” he growled, “it’s barred from the inside. Zondo, see if there’s a back door, and if there is, try it.”

“The back door’s barred too,” reported Zondo when he returned. “That means somebody’s in there.”

“We’ll find out,” Bowdre said. “If nobody answers, we’ll bust in.” He pounded on the door with the butt of his Colt.

Kelly Logan, looking out a slit in one of the shuttered windows did not like the looks of the six men at the door.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “And what do you want?”

“Who we are don’t concern you,” said Bowdre. “Injuns took our hosses. We’re afoot and hungry.”

“Sorry,” Kelly said. “We don’t know you. My sister’s
sick, and we don’t have more than enough food for ourselves.”

Angrily Zondo Carp kicked the door as hard as he could. There was a roar from within the cabin and two slugs ripped through the door. One of them snatched off Bowdre’s hat and the other nicked Carp’s left ear. The men scattered to either side of the door, out of the line of fire.

“Break that door in,” Kelly shouted angrily, “and I’ll kill the first man through it. Leave us alone!”

Bowdre backed away and the others followed.

“Damn them,” growled Zondo, nursing his bleeding ear. “I’ll gather some dead leaves and brush, and bum the place down on top of ’em.”

“Just what we need,” Sandoval said sarcastically. “A big smoke to draw attention to us, when we ain’t got a horse to our name. Damn good thinkin’, Zondo.”

“Come on,” said Bowdre. “Botherin’ a woman could get us all strung up quicker than hoss stealin’. We’ll find us one of them little minin’ settlements and get us some grub at their general store.”

Kelsey Logan watched them leave, still gripping the Colt with both hands.

“Who could they have been?” Kelsey asked.

“I believe it’s that bunch from the Superstitions,” said Kelly. “They’re on foot, so that means they didn’t recover the horses Yavapai and Sanchez took. But there’s something I don’t understand. There were only six men, but Yavapai and Sanchez had eight extra horses. What’s become of Gary Davis?”

“Perhaps he got on the bad side of this bunch and they killed him,” Kelsey suggested. “Davis was mean and cruel, but he was no gunman.”

Bowdre and his weary companions finally reached what remained of a little town after its silver strike had played out. Nothing was left but a few die-hard residents and a not-too-well-provisioned general store.

“Know of anybody with some hosses to sell?” Bowdre inquired. “We lost ours to the Injuns.”

“Nope,” said the store owner, “but if you’d been here a mite sooner, you might have dickered for some big mules. Not more’n two hours ago, six gents was through here with twenty-one mules. Big brutes, ever’ one of ’em, brung in from Missouri through Santa Fe. On their way south fer work in the mines, I reckon.”

When Bowdre and his men left the store it was almost dark, but they could still see to pick up the trail of the drovers and their mules.

“Be a sight easier to wait for these hombres to bed down, and us just kill the lot of ’em,” Os Ellerton said. “Then we don’t have to worry about ’em follerin’ us with fire in their eyes an’ guns in their hands.”

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Bowdre growled. “Kill ’em and we’d have the law on our tail. You think that old gent back there at the store ain’t gonna remember the six of us on foot and askin’ for hosses? No, we find these mules, and slick as we can, stampede ’em to hell and gone. With nobody seein’ us, we grab six of the brutes and ride ’em into the Superstitions. For a while we can leave ’em at that hidden camp where Wells and Holt was hidin’ out.”

Following Bowdre’s orders, they found and staked out the drovers’ camp until moonset. Soon after, the mules stampeded.

Deep in the shadow of the overhang, his back against the wall, Paiute watched as Arlo tried desperately to swing himself in close enough to gain the safety of the ledge. On the last forward swing, just as Arlo smashed his head against the stone, Paiute seized the young cowboy’s belt. Though Arlo was a dead weight and almost dragged the old Indian over the edge, Paiute held fast. Stretching Arlo out belly down on the stone ledge, he felt for a pulse and found it strong. He then disappeared into the shadows.

“Arlo!” Dallas shouted.

There was no response. Dallas attached the other
lantern to his belt, looped the extra rope over his shoulder, and began hand-walking down the same rope that was still tied under Arlo’s arms. Finally, just as Arlo had been, Dallas was suspended in space, unable to reach the ledge on which Arlo now lay. Arlo stirred, finally able to sit up, and was shocked into action by the predicament in which he found Dallas. He pulled on the rope, bringing Dallas close enough that he was able to get his feet on the ledge. Dallas fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

“That was a damn fool move,” Arlo said, “comin’ down after me without knowin’ what the trouble was. It was very nearly the death of me. I wasn’t far enough down for my head to clear that stone, and I swung right into it. I was knocked plumb blind and crazy for a minute or two.”

“I don’t see how you made it,” said Dallas. “You was all sprawled out, the lantern still burnin’, when I first saw you.”

“When it hit my head,” Arlo said, “just a second before I blacked out, I’d swear somethin’ grabbed me. I still don’t know how I made that ledge. I just don’t remember it. I thought I was a goner.”

“This ledge narrows down some,” said Dallas, “but it runs along the face of the rock for a ways. Since you come near to gettin’ your brains bashed out, you just lay back and rest. I’m gonna take a lantern and look around some. I want to see how far I can go before the ledge plays out.”

The ledge soon became so narrow that Dallas had to walk sideways, his back flat against the wall. This was not a passage, but a mere crack in the sheer stone, and kneeling was impossible. He held the lantern in his right hand, raising it, then lowering it as far down as he could. He had progressed only a few feet when he came upon a thin, head-high crevice, into which were driven three oak pins.

“Arlo!” Dallas shouted. “I’ve found a way down to the river!”

Arlo brought the other lantern, and they crept slowly
through the split in the stone. The split slanted downward toward the rushing river, which now grew louder. When they finally stepped out of the confining rock, water sloshed around their boots and spray wet their faces, dampening their clothes and hissing against the hot lantern globes. Even shouting, they were barely able to hear one another above the river’s mighty roar as it dashed over the huge upthrusts. Slowly, carefully, they worked their way past the rapids and the river quieted.

“It’s time for the crucial test,” proclaimed Arlo. “Let’s see if we can get out of here without going back the way we came in.”

“It’s hard to get any sense of direction,” Dallas said, looking around, “but we’ll have to turn back to the southwest if this flows into the Salt.”

As they progressed, the voice of the river again became a roar, and it seemed they were approaching another rapids. But it was more than that. They soon saw that the river churned over a precipice and dropped fifty feet in a spectacular waterfall. They climbed down one side of it, over volcanic rock slippery with spray, as the cavern through which the river flowed began to narrow drastically.

“This is gettin’ a little scary,” shouted Dallas. “By the time this thing gets to the Salt, it may be pinched down so thin that we can’t get out.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to follow it all the way to the Salt,” Arlo replied. “I’m looking for a break somewhere in this wall while we’re still under the Superstitions.”

The split, when they found it, wasn’t in the cavern wall but in the river itself. At some point in time the earth had shifted, and the underground stream had taken a new, lower channel, while the original veered away to their left. Its stone bed was dry, as it might have been for many years. A draft sucked at the flames of their lanterns, and the way out—when they finally found it—was even more deceptive than they had expected. Before them was what had once been the mouth of a tunnel. Now it was
closed off by a mass of debris that had slid down the side of the mountain. But just as Arlo and Dallas reached what had seemed a dead end, they found that though the fallen stone blocked the original mouth, it had left an invisible gap at one side through which they could pass. It was a tight squeeze, and they again had to struggle sideways, but once through it they stepped out into a forest of chaparral and greasewood.

“Thank God!” Dallas sighed. “I never thought I’d welcome being up to my ears in a thorny thicket.”

“Less than two hours of daylight,” noted Arlo. “We have to figure out where we are and get back to the girls before dark.”

They found that they were on the western flank of the Superstitions, two miles south of the perilous trail that had led up to their old camp. They began working their way out of the thicket, and a dozen feet from where they had come out, they looked back. The fallen mass of stone and debris solid against the mountain’s base looked truly impenetrable.

“Nobody will ever find that,” Dallas said, “unless they come at it from the other side, like we did, or follow us back to it.”

“We’d better be damn sure we can find it ourselves,” said Arlo. “One chaparral patch looks just like another.”

When Arlo and Dallas reached the plateau where they had left the horses, they found the animals grazing undisturbed.

“We ought to go back through the passage and remove that rope,” Arlo said. “When those other hombres reach the drop-off, they won’t have any trouble figurin’ what we’ve been up to.”

“The hell with it.” said Dallas. “Let’s leave it there. I don’t figure they’ll find their way down that bluff any quicker or easier than we did. Besides, if we take the time to go back in there after the rope, we’ll be after dark gettin’ back to the cabin. We promised we wouldn’t leave Kelly and Kelsey alone after dark, and if we’re
not back they’ll be scared to death somethin’ happened to us.”

“You’re right,” Arlo said. “Let’s ride.”

Sheriff Wheaton had decided Yavapai and Sanchez were actually telling the truth for a change. He was skeptical only about how the pair had managed to escape with their lives. Wheaton was well aware that the Apaches weren’t known for their compassion or their carelessness. He had appealed to the Mexican quarter of town, and clothes had readily been donated to the hapless Yavapai and Sanchez. The pair left the jail barefooted and clad in ill-fitting garb that would have shamed a peon. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Men who had witnessed their disgrace the night before now grinned at them, while the women giggled and gossiped among themselves.

“This be hell,” said Yavapai. “Per’ap we go back to Tucson and again we rob the mule trains of the silver ore.”

“Por Dios,”
Sanchez said bitterly. “I am not finish here, and I am not leave.
El Diablo
himself cannot drive me away. Those who laugh, I do not forget forever.”

“We have no food, no boots, no horse,” said Yavapai. “We have not among us even one
peso
for which to buy
barato
mescal.”

“Si,”
said Sanchez, “but we have one ace in the hole. Señor Domingo Vasquez make us offer once, and per’ap now be the time to say we be ready for whatever he have in mind. Per’ap he pay us well for this gold the Señors Wells and Holt have find.”