“You are veree smart, senores,” he said in English, “but you make one leetle mistake. Thees is not the first time you have visited Tres Cruces. For if you have not been here before, how would two desert rats like you hombres know the Commandante’s own salute?”
Utah McClatchey started to bluster out something, and then both of them saw it was too late to talk.
The Mex sentries were jerking up their rifles, but they didn’t know they were facing the Hellers from Helldorado, men who could spot a man to the draw and beat him to the shoot.
Nevada’s gun seemed to leap into his hand of its own accord, but fast as he was, old Utah’s Peacemaker was the first to roar. His shot caught the sentry who had never learned to shoot first and talk afterward right in the teeth. Nevada dropped the other with a bullet through the forehead, before his rifle could speak.
“That’ll teach them hombres not to shoot jackasses and gringos,” Utah chuckled as he pouched his smoking gun.
“And us to quit being so smart about salutin’,” Nevada said grimly. “Take a look,” he gestured with his Colt, at the closed gate behind them, then at twisting alleys out in front of them. The very thing was happening that they had hoped to avoid. Alleys were filling with people—Mexicans in those black uniforms, Penitentes in ragged cotton drawers and dirty blouses. The shots had brought them out.
Utah cursed. “We got about as much chance now of hidin’ out till we see what’s goin’ on here as we have of climbin’ golden stairs tuh Heaven.”
Nevada Jim’s eyes were sparkling suddenly. He laughed harshly, and gestured at the Castle of No Return. “One of them towers,” he called, “would make a mucho fine fort. Andale, amigo.”
He struck spurs to his mount, and dropped the reins along the big animal’s neck. Hunched low in the saddle, with a flaming gun in each hand, he pounded away up the straight street toward the castle. Utah came racing along right behind him, whooping each time he let go a shot at a head poking from a hut.
“Like old times,” he yelled. “I recollect oncet when we shot up Tombstone when we were pups!”
Darkness aided them in their flight once they were past the spread of floodlights marking out the landing field. Above the roar of their guns, Nevada heard the plane coming in. He grinned. Somebody was going to be a mighty sore jasper when he reached town and saw what had happened to a pair of his tin soldiers.
Lead was beginning to shower about them now, and from somewhere behind them came the sudden ominous rat-a-tatt-tatt-ing of a machine gun. But that single burst of fire was all that came from the gun. Nevada jerked around in his saddle to see why. It was dark, and he was riding fast, but he caught an impression of white shapes, and black, too, writhing in the dust of the street. The machine gun had taken a toll of Penitentes and their own men!
* * * *
The castle loomed ahead of their racing mounts. One of the great stone towers, that were a good forty feet high from base to top, faced them. Nevada saw a domed, iron-banded oak door swing open. Another of the black-clad men leaped into view. Light from behind outlined him. He had a stubby-barreled machine gun in his hands.
Utah’s lead knocked him back into the tower. “Peacemaker’s is still best when you use ’em fust,” he chuckled.
Side by side they left their mounts. Nevada risked a glance back down the hill as he passed through the tower door. A confused mass of yelling, raving mankind was filling the street from side to side. He slammed the door, noting the solidness of it with satisfaction, as he dropped a heavy bar in the iron slots that locked it.
He was conscious suddenly of a strange hum filtering down from above. Utah was already heading for a flight of stairs leading up to a hole in the heavily beamed ceiling.
“Come runnin’, Jim,” he yelled across his shoulder. “We might just as well raise as much hell as possible. We ain’t ever goin’ to get outta this danged town alive now!”
Nevada, for once in his life, was prone to agree with one of Utah’s gloomy prophesies. Three steps at a time, he followed McClatchey, but before he reached the second floor he heard a crash and the humming noise stopped. Nevada saw why as he reached the second tower room. Utah had found himself an iron bar somewhere, and his powerful old arms were laying it here and there into every mechanical device that filled this room.
The old Heller grinned at Nevada, gesturing at the tangled mass of machinery and wires that he was demolishing with each swing of his bar. “Reminds me of a nest o’ rattlesnakes, Jim, an’ I always tromp ’em.”
Nevada stared at the wreckage, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Feller, there ain’t no tellin’ what we’ll run into before we’re through here. Let’s keep movin’, until we locate that gringo lawdog.”
Utah eyed the destruction he’d wrought. “Nobody’s goin’ to fix this outfit very soon,” he said with satisfaction. “I jest hope there’s more of these contraptions in the room above this’n.”
Nevada’s Peacemaker punctuated his partner’s words with a roar, echoed almost instantly by the sharper explosion of an automatic. Utah turned just in time to see a figure that seemed to be all arms and legs come tumbling down from another tower room above them.
Nevada leaped forward. He kicked an ugly looking automatic from the man’s fingers. “This hombre,” he explained casually to McClatchey, “tried to pull a sneak on us.”
“You only hit him in the laig,” Utah remarked. “Yo’re slippin’, Jim,”
“Hell!” Nevada exclaimed, “all I could see was his foot and gun hand. I had to sort of aim around the corner.”
Some sort of battering ram had been brought to bear on the heavy door downstairs. The sound of the ram against the solid oak sounded like the boom of an ancient Aztec drum.
The man on the floor heard it, too. He showed his gold-filled teeth and snarled at Nevada Jim’s ugly, beard-stubbled face above him. “You will pay for this, mister!” He spoke English with a clipped, Oriental accent.
Nevada bent over him, smiling evilly. “I’m shore glad you can talk English,” he drawled. “On account there’s somethin’ we wanta know.”
“I will tell you nothing!” the man snapped. “When The Commandante captures you, you will pay for this with your life.”
“My life ain’t wuth a tinker’s damn, right now,” Nevada grinned. “So I got nothin’ to lose, amigo, by taking you with me when I go.” He twirled one of his big Colts on a finger, and looked speculatively at the little Oriental. “All you got to do is tell me where they took the gringo dressed up like a Mex woodchopper, and I’ll leave you here for yore pards to find when they git this far.”
The saffron-faced man stared fascinatedly at the big gun in Nevada’s hands. It looked very much to him as though the lanky, ugly American would just as leave shoot him as look at him. He decided that life was very sweet.
“The man you speak of is in the other tower,” he said sullenly, “in The Commandante’s office.”
A crash from the room above punctuated the man’s statement. Nevada saw him wince. “That’s my pard,” he explained dryly. “His life ain’t wuth a tinker’s damn either,
