themselves, for some of the weird tales that came out of those hills were sometimes more truth than fiction. At least there were few who had the courage to prove any of them false.
Most of the stories concerned the Penitente brotherhood, and the cruel religious rites they practiced on themselves as well as on any unbelievers unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. Utah McClatchey had not been exaggerating when he had said all the gold in Arizona was not worth a visit to Tres Cruces.
A grimmer errand was bringing them here now, one compounded of pride, and the realization that a hangnoose was all that waited them back in the States.
They were angling along a slanting trail now that clung like a thread on a wall to the side of a barren peak that towered to a needle-point crest a good five thousand feet above them. Directly ahead, though, was the thing that interested Nevada Jim James.
He could see that for once in his life Utah hadn’t been exaggerating things. The plateau with Tres Cruces atop it sprang out from the flank of another high peak, like a vast, flying buttress. It towered a good two thousand feet above the trail they were on now, a vertical, somber cliff that was enough to take a man’s breath away with sheer awe. He could even see the trail they would have to climb. It looked hardly fit for a mountain goat to use, let alone horses and a pack mule.
The pack-mule was Nevada Jim’s idea. They had stolen it and miner’s gear from an old prospector on the border. It had been necessary to knock him over the head to get the outfit, but Nevada, with a curse for his own soft-heartedness, had left a handful of greenbacks to pillow the old gent until he woke up. Of course they had stolen the greenbacks, but that didn’t matter. Nevada still figured he was going soft.
They had needed the mule, however. “If we mosey into that country lookin’ and actin’ like a couple of crazy ol’ desert rats,” he had pointed out to Utah, “we may get further than if we sashay down thar with blood in our eye.”
So now the pack mule plodded along between them, as they rode single-file up the slanting, mountain trail. Utah was leading the way because he had been here before. Nevada brought up the rear, a loose, slouching figure who had let roan whiskers grow for a week on his usually clean-shaven cheeks. He looked mean and ugly enough without whiskers. Now he looked worse. Heat, and a stinging dust storm they’d ridden through out on the desert had reddened the whites of his eyes until he had all the appearance of a man recovering from a week-long drunk.
Utah McClatchey, hipped around in his kak, had been studying his younger pard.
Now he chuckled. “You look so bad,” he said, “that even the Penitentes wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with you!”
“You’re not so handsome yoreself,” Nevada grinned back, and then he caught an expression in Utah’s eyes that made him twist around in his own saddle to scan their back-trail. McClatchey had seen something. Nevada saw what it was as he got turned.
* * * *
The man behind them was a good two miles away, but in the clear atmosphere he was easily visible from flop-brimmed sombrero to sandals. A donkey trudged along behind the ragged peon, his pack-saddle piled so high with a load of crooked chaparral limbs that he looked like an animated wood-pile.
McClatchey grunted, his words floating back to Nevada. “Guess that hombre’s nothin’ to git our wind up about. Looks like a’ old charcoal burner to me.”
From their position on the trail, the flop-hatted Mexican could not see them. Nevada Jim studied the man behind them speculatively, then he looked at his partner.
“If it wasn’t for me, you’d a been in boothill years ago,” he pointed out. “You’re always willin’ to take chances when it ain’t necessary. Now that gent back there looks a leetle too harmless. He cain’t see us, so what you say we duck off the trail into that nest of boulders and chaparral up thar ahead and wait for him to come past. It won’t do any harm to let him climb that mesa trail ahead of us. We got plenty of time.”
“’Ceptin’ I was plannin’ on cookin’ up a mess of bacon and beans a little farther on,” Utah grumbled. “My belly’s gallin’ me right now.”
Nevada reached into one of the saddlebags behind his saddle and pulled out a strip of jerky. He gnawed a chunk off it with his strong white teeth, and tossed the rest forward to McClatchey. “I’d shore hate to have you die hungry!” he remarked.
* * * *
They were still gnawing on the leathery jerky a half hour later when the rattle of hoofs on stone brought them from their reclining positions against a big boulder, some fifty feet below the edge of the trail.
Nevada led the way to peepholes they’d already prepared in a copse of chaparral. He had barely settled himself when a chill that felt like icy water running down his back, prickled the length of his spine. He felt Utah stiffen beside him.
“Leapin’ blue blazes,” he whispered, “weren’t you the hombre who claimed you could scatter these modern lawdogs with a boo?”
Nevada Jim James was the one who had claimed that all right, and now to himself, he admitted his mistake. Some lawmen had little stomach for facing the half ounce slugs good old-fashioned Peacemakers packed, but the young, hard-faced, blue-eyed man who had faced them at the Bronco was evidently not one of that kind. For that was who trod the trail above them. Nevada felt certain that he was not mistaken.
A man couldn’t help but recognize those eyes which were as direct and straight as the barrel of a forty-five. The stranger was right above them now. Except for those eyes, he would pass for a Mexican anywhere. His disguise was perfect, and whoever had dyed his skin a chocolate brown, had known how to do it.
“Phew!” Utah McClatchey wiped his brow when the stranger passed on out of sight. “I swear that hombre was lookin’ straight at us. Jim, that young cuss is sure enough one tough jiggero. You suppose he’s come down here trailin’ us?”
For once in his life Nevada Jim didn’t know what to think. “That cuss ain’t no ordinary lawman, Utah,” he pointed out, “on account of they stay on their own side of the Line. Course he could of slipped across. That could account for his disguise.”
“He must figger he’s one skookum hombre if he thinks he can take us single-handed,” Utah grunted.
Nevada made no answer. He was just easing from the chaparral to go and get their mounts and mule tethered behind the nest of boulders where they had hidden, when a sound alien to these peaks sent his long body diving back to cover.
It was the roar of an airplane motor, an ear-shattering sound the echoed back from the iron peaks like the thunder of a mammoth blast. He had barely time to settle himself, when both of them saw the low-winged, silver monoplane sail out from the edge of the plateau, and start climbing into the clear blue sky.
Utah watched it with an expression of disgust twisting his seamed face. “Looks like a danged overgrown trout, ’ceptin’ it’s got wings, and a trout ain’t. Why in hell we hidin’ here in the brush?” he demanded acidly. “If any of ’em in that airyplane are lookin’ this way they’ll see our cayuses. Dang it, yuh got to crawl in a hole and pull it in after yuh to keep one of them critters from spottin’ you!”
Nevada crawled from the chaparral, and brushed twigs from his shirt and pants after watching the airplane all but disappear into the blue above them. Shading his eyes, he saw it level off finally, and streak away, a silver flash in the afternoon
