curses to know he had failed to halt the plane’s flight. McClatchey did not immediately reappear, and for a few minutes Nevada Jim had his hands too full to wonder where the old lobo had gone.
For as soon as the plane roar got out of his ears, he became aware that Conover was speaking his name in a halting, gasping voice. “James. Jim, bend closer. I ain’t got long to be here, but while I am, I want to tell you what I can. You’re a pesky outlaw, and yuh come here to rob me, but I’d a sight rather have seen you get my gold than them pesky greasers, and furriners that have got it now. I—I didn’t know they’d come back to the bunkroom or I’d a-warned yuh.”
Nevada Jim sat down on the arm of Conover’s chair, and propped his head so the blood coming into his throat wouldn’t choke him. But he saw, even as he did so, that Dan Conover had spoken just about his last words. Only a supreme effort brought another mumbling phrase from his lips.
“El Sierra del Luna, Jim. Tres Cruces, The Mountains of the Moon. Three Crosses.”
His head fell forward on muscles gone suddenly slack. Gently, Nevada Jim let the old man drop forward across the table. He was not a praying man, was Nevada Jim James, but he prayed right then that the Good Lord would let him line his sights on Dan Conover’s killer.
Utah McClatchey came stumbling in from outside.
Nevada looked up. “Where you been?”
For a moment, Utah McClatchey didn’t answer him. He stared somberly at Dan Conover. When he raised his eyes they were black and hard as obsidian.
“They’s twelve fresh graves out alongside the bunkhouse,” he said slowly. “Dan’l will fill the thirteenth. Jim, them twelve graves are kinda shaller. Looks like the hombres who dug ’em got tired in a hurry. Mebbe they didn’t give a damn if the coyotes come down from the hills and dug out the corpses, and made a meal off of ’em. Which they done. Every last one of the dozen, Jim, was shot in the back of the head like you’d shoot a steer. From the look of things, they had just about as much chance as a hog of defendin’ themselves. Now there ain’t nobody accused me of bein’ an angel, but I’ll be damned right straight tuh Purgatory if I ever shot a man when he warn’t lookin’ at me!”
He was silent a moment while he punched spent shells from his two Colts, and thumbed in fresh loads, taken from the well-filled belt about his thin waist. Then he spoke again, while Nevada Jim was still digesting the information already given him.
“That flyin’ chariot got clean away,” Utah went on gloomily, “and the gold with it, I’ll bet you that. Away as clean as a whistle, and me already havin’ figured out ways and means of spendin’ it. I guess we’ll jest have to hunt ourselves up a bank to bust, afore we skip to Chihuahua.”
“We will like hell!” Suppressed violence filled Nevada’s voice. “Dan’l got out enough to tell me where them hombres took the dinero.”
“He did!” Utah McClatchey came around the table, his eyes lighting.
But the light went out of them in a hurry when Nevada said, “Yeah. Tres Cruces in the Sierra del Luna, across the border.”
“An’ you think we’re goin’ traipsin’ into that country?” Utah squalled out the words like a cougar missing a kill. “Why hell on a shovel, I wouldn’t go into those del Luna mountains for all the gold in Arizony. Son, you’re younger than me, and you ain’t seen as much of the world as I have. Leastways you ain’t never been in the del Lunas. I have, and I ain’t hankerin’ to go there ag’in. That’s where the Penitentes hang out, in Tres Cruces. They got three crosses stuck up on a hill, and their idee of fun is to ketch a white man, strip him, cut him tuh doll rags with cactus whips, then hang him tuh one of these here crosses! Nope, Jim, we ain’t goin’ to Tres Cruces. We don’t need gold that bad!”
Utah McClatchey was just talking. He was as perverse as a Missouri mule. Nevada knew that nothing short of boothill could keep his old partner from jaunting to the Sierra del Luna. The gold was just a part of it now. There were thirteen white men who had died ignominiously, and somebody was going to pay for that.
Nevada had gone on into the bedroom. There were three dead men on the floor. He eyed them with a pleased expression on his hook-nosed, hatchet-thin face. “I tally four, all told,” he called out to Utah. “That pays double for ol’ Dan’l, and one of them fellers the coyotes chawed up.”
Then he fell silent. Two of the dead men on the floor were Mexicans. They were dressed in dark business suits, smooth-skinned, slick looking fellows. Nevada didn’t like the type when they were alive. He liked them no better when they were dead. His hooked nose wrinkled with disgust. Long, blue-barreled automatic pistols were lying near each of the men. They had, funny looking gadgets attached to the muzzles. Nevada guessed they were silencers, but they were the first he had ever seen. It made him like the Mexicans no better, for he personally liked nothing more than the business-like boom of a Colt Peacemaker.
The third man on the floor also wore a dark business suit. The two Mexicans were not big, but this man was smaller yet. He lay there on his back, and lead from one of their guns had smashed into his skull just above the bridge of his nose.
* * * *
McClatchey was staring at a red corner of something that had evidently fallen from an inside pocket of the foreigner’s coat, and now was half-hidden by his body. On impulse, he pushed out one leg and rolled the foreigner’s inert body over.
A small red book bound in red leather lay exposed. He stooped down and picked it up, and handed it to Nevada Jim. “Yo’re the readin’ member of this team,” Utah grunted sententiously. “I been too busy dodgin’ bullets durin’ most-a my life to git any book larnin’.”
Nevada opened the little book, and an odd pulse of excitement beat through his rawboned frame. It was not what he read in the book that made his pulses leap. It was what he couldn’t read.
The writing on some of the pages looked like hen-tracks. On other pages were written names in good, clear English, with numbers that might be addresses beside each name. Nevada read off a few to Utah, and showed him the hen-track writing.
“It don’t make sense,” McClatchey grunted. “Jim, them danged hen-tracks cain’t be writin’ in no civilized tongue.”
Nevada grinned wryly. “That there talk we heard when we wuz shootin’ it out with these gents don’t make sense neither,” he grunted. He stuck the thin, leather-bound book in his hip pocket and forgot it.
At least he forgot it temporarily, for as they moved through the bunkroom door into the main room, a dry voice said. “Get your hands up!”
The voice was dry, cold, and authoritative, and Nevada Jim James knew even as he got his first glimpse of the man who had uttered the words that he was looking at a lawman. There wasn’t a sign of a badge about him. He didn’t need any. His hard, piercing blue eyes and the flat automatic in his hand was authority enough.
The stranger was not a big man, but he was well put together. He reminded Nevada of a sleek greyhound. He had the same cool, competent look about him, from the natty black boots he wore to the open-necked white shirt turned outside the collar of his coat. The clothes made him look like a dude, but the hard, straight line of his mouth and square chin was enough to change anybody’s mind. He was standing just inside the front door, and for the first time in his life Nevada got the impression of a single gun covering two men at the same time.
“Get those hands
