For a half minute Chloride Charlie Raines was silent. Then: “All right, Neal. I got us into this. Now, how we gonna git out of it? Those bastards, if they hurt Amy—”
Fargo’s brain was already clicking, responding to the challenge. “It’s the same thing all over again, like that ambush at Windy Pass. They ain’t gonna kill you nor Amy—you two they gotta have alive. It’s me they want outa the way.” He grinned, a snarl exactly like that of a hunting lobo with game in sight: combat—it was his business and his pleasure. “Well, we got our own fort and plenty of guns. Okay, Charlie. Up into the wagon, quick as you can. You and Amy hoist the tailgate from the inside, by the chains. Me—” Quickly he dodged beneath the vehicle, sprawled flat in the cover it provided.
Charlie obeyed, scrambling up the high side of the wagon like a squirrel, and Fargo heard the thump as he dropped inside. Footsteps sounded on the bottom of the wagon box, and then the rattle of the stay-chains of the tailgate. Slowly, for its weight was enormous, it swung into place. Then Charlie called, “Okay, Neal. She’s closed.”
Fargo watched the men surrounding them. They only sat their horses, patiently. His mouth twisted. Well, it was time for him to go. He was the one who’d be the target of that sniper out yonder with the Springfield—but, by God, he’d be a moving target!
Hugging the Winchester and shotgun, he rolled out from his cover, his long body moving so swiftly it was almost a blur. Then he was on his feet, swarming up the high spoked rear wheel of the wagon. A rifle cracked once, twice, out there in the desert. Simultaneously, Fargo felt the rush of lead inches from his body, heard the flat crack of a passing bullet. He seized the edge of the wagon box, leaped and pulled. Lead chunked into the heavy oaken sides, sent splinters flying. Then Fargo was slithering across the side of the wagon like a snake. Charlie seized him, pulled, helped to break the impact of the eight-foot fall. Two more slugs plowed into wood, but did not penetrate the heavy oak. Then Fargo was on the wagon floor, scrambling to his feet. Rushing to the gear piled under a tarp, he jerked out an ax and hatchet. “Loopholes all around!” he yelled, tossing the hatchet to Raines. The prospector caught it deftly, and immediately he and Fargo began to chop, working frantically to open rifle ports in the sides and ends of the big wagon.
Meanwhile, there was no more shooting. Within five minutes, he and Raines made openings that would allow them to look out and use their weapons. Charlie tossed his hand ax aside, picked up his long-barreled Winchester. Amy, crouched in one corner of the wagon, stared wide-eyed. “Now,” her father crowed triumphantly. “Let them sidewinders come! We’re prepared to offer ’em discouragement in a variety of calibers!”
But they made no move to come, only waiting, just out of rifle range. Fargo circled the wagon restlessly, carbine in hand, watching every flank. But, suddenly, he halted as a voice rang out from somewhere out there on the desert. “Raines! Fargo! This is Mace!”
Charlie stiffened, staring at Fargo. “Neal. You hear that?”
“I heard it,” Fargo said. “Vance Mace.” His face was grim, remembering what had happened in the Chicago hotel. Well, he had not expected such a crew to be led by an amateur. Mace knew his business, despite his failing of overreaching. And he would have seen to it that those men with him knew theirs, too.
“Raines!” Mace yelled again. Fargo pinpointed the voice’s source. While they’d been chopping loopholes, Mace had worked in close, sheltered in a draw. He had good cover, was wholly invisible. “Raines, I wanta palaver! I got a deal to make!”
Charlie opened his mouth to yell defiance. Fargo snapped: “Damn it, talk to him! Let’s find out the score!”
“Awright, Mace! Speak yer piece!” Charlie bawled.
“I got thirty-two men out here!” Mace’s voice was clear and strong in the silence of the morning. “Thirty-two of the best damn fightin’ men ever wore boots! You ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance, Charlie! You’re boxed in! But you deal with us, you don’t need to worry! You won’t be hurt, and neither will your daughter!”
“Keep talkin’!” Charlie hollered.
“I’m workin’ for Snell and the Widow Rogers! All they want is for you to show us where your mine is! Tell us that, they’ll take their fair share—half, and that’s the end of it!”
“Fair share?” Charlie exploded like a geyser of fireworks. “Fair share? That damn floozie’s not entitled to one ounce of gold! Tell you where the mine is? In a pig’s eye! Mace, you go to hell!”
“Charlie, you’re askin’ for it!”
“Awright, then you come and give it to us! There’s me and Neal Fargo and plenty of guns and ammo! And I got some dynamite, too, ole buddy, and a damn good throwin’ arm! You jest come on, Vance Mace! Maybe you’ll git us and maybe you won’t. But, by God, there’ll be blood and meat all over the desert afore we’re finished!”
Mace was silent for a moment. He was chewing that over in his mind, assessing its truth. He could charge the wagon—but he knew Fargo and he knew Raines. And he knew that, given the cover the wagon offered, a lot of men would die once they got in close enough to be effective.
“I tell you, we don’t want a fight! We want a deal! You give us Fargo, show us your lode, it’s all done and finished. That’s a promise!”
Charlie’s sarcastic laugh was not unlike Lot’s Wife’s bray. “Give you Fargo? That might take a little doin’ if he don’t wanta be traded off! Besides, he’s workin’ for me and his job ain’t finished yet! I reckon it won’t be, now, until you’re layin’ dead!”
Another silence. “All right,” Mace yelled finally. “So it’s a stand-off. But you’re boxed in, Charlie, and you can’t git away! We got men coverin’ your castle, you can’t git back to it. We got the passes blocked; you can’t git outa Death Valley. And you can’t give us the slip on foot, neither! I got two of the best trackers in Chihuahua out here—the Lopez brothers! No matter where you go; how you twist and turn, they’ll always be on your trail! So you either bargain now or later, suit yourself! Not even you and Fargo can stand against an army!”
Charlie spat. “Mace, I ain’t got no army! But I got somethin’ better! You might as well fold your hand and go on home while you’re still alive!”
“Meanin’ what?”
“Meanin’,” Charlie bawled, drawing himself up, “I got Death Valley. And because I know Death Valley, it’s on my side! And if you don’t pull out now, I promise you—I’ll use Death Valley to kill you with!” He laughed hoarsely. “Mace, this ain’t your league! If I was you, I’d run on home to Mama!”
Mace did not answer immediately. Presently, he yelled, “Suit yourself, Charlie. We can wait.”
Raines shouted back an obscenity. Mace did not answer. Fargo squinting into the sun, watched the draw. The men out there did not move. Presently, from the draw’s head, far out of range, Mace emerged, riding hard. He joined the men on the ridge, and they drew back a little. Charlie turned to Fargo, smiling grimly.
“Well,” he said, eyes gleaming, “the cards are dealt. Now we’ll see if Mace holds enough aces to stay alive.” He spat. “The polecat! Afore I’m through, I’ll teach him a thing er two.”
“Papa—” Amy began, rising. “Papa—”
“Now, you hush, girl. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you. Fargo, let’s rig that tarp to throw a little shade. We’re gonna play the waitin’ game a while.”
Fargo looked at him narrowly. “What you got in mind?”
“Simple.” Charlie grinned. “This waterhole yonder’s the only good water within fifteen miles or better. Mace can’t git to it long as we are parked here. And unless he’s got one hell of a lot of water fer his men and mounts, he can’t wait out yonder long before he has to go somewhere to drink. I reckon you noticed the dumb idiot’s got all his men on horses, not on mules.” He gestured toward where his own animals were tied. “Whur as, them desert canaries yonder can go a good forty-eight hours without drinkin’ if it comes down to that. So let’s set tight a spell and see what happens.”
~*~
They did. They had water in abundance, in filled canteens and in the water casks on the wagon. The mules suffered, became restless. Presently they pulled on the picket rope until it broke. Hobbled, they went to the water hole and drank their fill. But they did not leave camp. They would always follow a gray mare mule, and Lot’s Wife was their leader. Every time she started to wander off, Charlie would yell curses at her and she’d prick her ears, and shamble back awkwardly.
“Mules live a long time,” Charlie said, “and I’ve had that ole huzzy fer twenty years. She’s cranky and mean, but in her own way she kinda loves me, I reckon. Long as she sticks around, so will the others.”
“Which still gets us nowhere,” Fargo said. “Even if Mace pulls out, he’ll be back. And if he’s got the passes blocked and the castle surrounded—”
“That’s somethin’ we’ll worry about later. Me, I come out here to git a load of ore, and I aim to git it.”
Fargo stared at him. “Charlie, you gone crazy? You mean you’re still goin’ to your mine?”
“Shore. I ain’t about to let a piss-ant like Mace stop me. Anyhow, it’s what he wants me to do. Otherwise, he’da shot my mules. You and Amy’ll hafta stay in the wagon. The minute you show your nose, they’ll burn you down. But me, I’m safe. They kill me, they lose the mine. And as long as you’re alive and holed up in this rollin’ fort, they can’t git close enough to capture me.”
Fargo digested this, frowning, then shook his head. “That still don’t make sense.”
“Not to you, maybe, because you don’t know Death Valley. Me, I do. So it’s my show now fer a while, Neal. You leave it to me.”
Fargo rubbed his stubbled face. “If you’re figurin’ on shakin’ Mace, it won’t work. Didn’t you hear him? He’s got the Lopez brothers with him. Everybody in Chihuahua knows ’em, and hates their guts. They’re Yaqui half-breeds, work for the Rurales usually. Maybe the best trackers in the world. Good God, no matter where you go, they’d find you. And with twenty mules and a wagon big as a damn riverboat, they couldn’t miss. Mace don’t even have to follow you. They can do it for him.”
“Well, then,” Charlie said casually, “if it works out like that, I reckon you’ll have to kill the Lopez brothers, won’t you?”
Fargo looked at him and Charlie looked back.
After a moment, Fargo said, “Yeah. I will.”
~*~
The day wore on. Mace’s men had vanished now, holed up anywhere there was shade. From the height of the wagon, Fargo had a good view of the sun baked surroundings, and nothing moved in that jumble of sand, boulders, and scrub.
“Are they out there?” Amy was more restless, it seemed, than frightened. The heat under the tarp was stifling. Fargo and Charlie had stripped to the waist, but that was a luxury she could not enjoy.
“They’re out there,” Fargo said.
“And Mace is likely wishin’ they were ridin’ camels instead of broncs,” Charlie said. “I’ll give ’em another twelve hours. Then they got to pull out and go to water somewhere.”
Fargo said, “Don’t underestimate Vance Mace. He won’t do that without makin’ some kind of try. We’d better keep a damned close watch come dark. If it was me, I’d make up a party of picked men, men that know how to make a stalk. Half a dozen would be enough. About two in the mornin’, when everybody’s lowest, tiredest, groggiest, I’d have ’em move in on foot. Then, when they got close enough, storm the wagon, up and over, take me out, capture you and Amy. And then work on you until you spilled the secret about the mine. Or, more likely, Mace bein’ what he is, work on her until you did.”
Charlie’s face paled beneath his beard. “You think he’d try that?”
“How you fixed for miner’s lamps?” Fargo asked.
“Why, I got three. And plenty of carbide.”
“Then rig ’em up,” Fargo said. “We might need ’em.” With his Batangas knife, he began to enlarge the loopholes in the wagon ...
The sun spilled down behind the Panamints, bringing the valley to glorious color for a half hour. The mules, capable of cropping and digesting almost anything, browsed on salt brush and any other growth that took their fancy. Fargo, Amy, Raines ate cold beans and waited.
Night blanketed the desert. Above, in the immense arch of the sky, the stars came out by millions, a vast display of glittering jewelry against night’s black velvet. The heat dissipated, the wind turned chill. Amy huddled in a blanket, drowsed. Fargo and Raines stood alternate watches, an hour on, an hour off.
The stars wheeled across the sky. Past midnight now, and one o’clock ticked away on Fargo’s railroad watch. Now and again he and Charlie pulled on a bourbon bottle against the raw night chill. Then Fargo said, “Wake up Amy. We’ll need her before long, maybe.” When she was roused, Chloride Charlie hunked beside her. “This here’s a carbide miner’s lamp, honey, and here’s how it works. Now, when the time comes, we’re gonna need you to hold a light ... ”
He went on explaining to her, and she listened closely. “Papa, I’ll do the best I can.”
“Fine. Now, let’s be dead still. And remember, you don’t turn on that lamp until I tell you.”
In breathless hush they waited, Fargo gripping the loaded sawed-off. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty. Ten past two, now ... Another quarter hour ticked away.
The sound that shattered the desert air was thunderous, discordant, half shriek, half sob—the loud bray of a mule. Chloride Charlie tensed. “Neal,” he whispered. “That’s Lot’s Wife and she’s caught a scent. They’re comin’!”
“You take the right and the rear,” Fargo said. “I’ll take the left and front. Wait until I give the signal.”
“Right.” Charlie moved across the wagon, Amy with him.
Fargo waited. Lot’s Wife brayed again. They were out there somewhere in the darkness—how close, he had no way of knowing. Five minutes passed. The white mule calmed, having acknowledged the strange scent, placidly cropped brush. “Fargo—” Charlie hissed.
“Wait,” he whispered. The men would have frozen at the mule’s alarm. But now they would be moving in again, reassured.
One minute, two. Fargo held the carbide lamp in one hand, the shotgun in the other. Even his nerves were strained painfully taut. If he miscalculated—
“Now!” he snapped and lit the lamp and rayed its white beam through the loophole. It swept the desert—and two men froze, startled, fifteen yards away caught in its merciless glare. For an instant, like jackrabbits, they only blinked—and that instant sealed their doom. Fargo rammed the shotgun through the loophole, and the right barrel thundered. A shrill scream split the night as nine buckshot plowed into flesh, and the man spilled backwards, body kicking, snapping, like that of a headless chicken.
The other man’s paralysis broke. Thickset, short legged, he turned, tried to run. Fargo followed him with lamplight and gun barrel, pulled the other trigger. The man kept on running for another fifteen feet, then plowed face down into the sand, lay still, back riddled.
“Damn it, Amy!” Charlie rasped behind him. “Shine the damn-blast light!”
“Papa, I can’t make it work!”
Fargo whirled, breaking the shotgun on the way, rammed his own lamp through the loophole, swept the terrain. A startled face, not five yards from the wagon, was a white blotch in its glare. Charlie grunted something, and his Colt .44 roared. The face disappeared in a blotch of red, but a gun flamed and Fargo’s lamp went out as a bullet smashed its lens and jerked it from his hand. Then there was scuffling at the tailgate of the wagon. Against the starlight, a hat and head were silhouetted, and a knife gleamed between clamped teeth. The man scrabbled for purchase, trying to come up and over. Fargo turned, leaped for the tailgate. Jumping high, he slammed upward with the shotgun stock. It smashed against the clenched knife, drove it inward. He felt flesh give and warm blood sprayed him. There was a muffled shriek, and the sound of a body hitting sand. Fargo rammed in two shells, scrambled up the tailgate, fired both barrels blindly toward the earth. Somebody groaned, then there was silence, save for the thud of running feet—running in the opposite direction.
By now, Charlie had snatched the lamp from Amy, was raying its light through one loophole after another. “They’re skeedaddlin’, Neal!” he crowed, and his gun thundered. “Missed!” he swore. “Damn it—”
Fargo ignited the third lamp, checked the terrain through loopholes. The two bodies of the men he’d blasted lay sprawled where they’d fallen. A bloody mess of flesh and cloth was all that remained of the one who’d fallen from the tailgate. Face split wide by the knife, his body had taken the full charge of eighteen pellets at point blank range.
Another corpse lay on Charlie’s side. Otherwise nothing moved, save for the restless, snorting mules, disturbed by the gunfire and the smell of blood.
Chloride Charlie did a crazy little dance in the wagon. “First blood for us. And Mace has lost four men! By the ole Harry, the Iron Man was sure watchin’ over us that time!”
“The Iron Man—?”
Charlie was suddenly sober. “Never mind. We did it.”
“We damn near didn’t.” Fargo turned to Amy. “You left us blind on your side.”
“I’m sorry.” Her voice quavered. “I couldn’t make it go.”
“Lay off her, Neal,” Charlie commanded. “It warn’t her fault. She never even held a miner’s lamp before.”
“No,” said Fargo. “I reckon not ... ”
~*~
Morning. Again, save for the bodies, there was no sign of Mace’s men. Charlie yawned, rubbed his face. “They bound to have pulled out. Cover me, Neal. Gonna feed the mules, and then it’s time to hitch and roll. It’ll take me a while to do it singlehanded ... ” Fargo waited, rifle ready, while Charlie climbed over the wagon side, dropped to the ground.
Nothing happened. There was no sign of life out there save for tiny black spots circling high up in the sky: vultures.
Boldly, Charlie went to work. In an incredibly short time, he had the animals caught, fed, hitched on either side of the enormous wagon tongue, a solid piece of oak hewn from a single tree, thirty feet long, as big around at its base as a man’s thigh. The jerk line, by which he would guide the animals, ran a hundred and twenty feet to the lead mule of the hitch. Charlie snapped it, threw a few rocks, and the great wagon lumbered into motion. Indeed, as Charlie had said, a rolling fort.
Inside of it, Fargo stood guard, watching the terrain through the loopholes. Somewhere out there, he knew, Pedro and Ernesto Lopez were watching, the bloodhounds of the hated Rurales. In Chihuahua and Sonora they were legendary, and cursed by the honest people persecuted by the brutal riders of the border country. Once they were on your trail, it was said, you were doomed. Fargo himself, with the Rurales on his trail in Sonora, had been unable to shake them, had only made it across the border into Arizona just in time ...
He shook his head. This was the weirdest fight he’d ever been mixed up in. He did not see how either side could win. Mace had them bottled up in Death Valley like bees in a jug, and they could not escape him, though he dared not attack them. They could not get out, nor seek refuge in the castle-fort, which he had sealed off with probably at least a third of his riders. All they could do was ramble around Death Valley like a beetle, with the Lopez brothers following and Mace waiting to see what Charlie would do.
Charlie himself made no sense. To go to the mine with Mace here and trackers following was, as near as Fargo could figure, insanity. But he had long since ceased to underrate this strange old desert rat, and there was nothing to do for the present but let Charlie have his way. The cards would fall, and he would play them as they lay.