CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“What are you doing here?” the man at the cabin door yelled. Then, his voice rising even louder, “If you’re robbers, the gold is all gone. They already took it, cleaned me out.”
“Who took your gold?” Dan Caine said. Clint Cooley had split to his left, giving himself gun room. “Was it Kyle?” Dan said. “Was it the outlaw Clay Kyle?”
“Never heard of him,” the man said. “I had five thousand gold coins and the Rurales took them. They carried them out of here on a pack mule, those sons of dogs.”
The man with the rifle was tall and thin and slightly stooped and he wore a ragged version of the Mexican peon’s shirt, pants, and sandals. Black eyes glittered in a long, wrinkled face, saved from the unremarkable by a great hook of a nose.
“We did not come here to find gold, we came to arrest the outlaw, Clay Kyle,” Dan said. “We have no ill intentions toward you.”
Thunder crashed above the arroyo and lightning flashed on its soaked walls and for brief moments turned them into sheets of glimmering steel.
“I do not know this man,” the rifleman said.
“Then we will trouble you no longer,” Dan said.
“Wait!” came the desperate cry of a lonely man desperate for human contact. “I have coffee and a fire and there is graze for your horses. You are welcome.” He lowered his Winchester. “Peace be upon you. You will be safe under my roof.”
* * *
Dan Caine and the others unsaddled their horses and let them graze behind the cabin on a patch of surprisingly good grass. Nearby, a thin fall of water from higher up the mountain cascaded into a flat boulder that over centuries had worn away into a holding tank that was filled almost to the brim. Dan figured that the man, whoever he was, had chosen the site of his hideaway well.
The Kiowa, as drenched as the rest, was reluctant to enter the cabin, a distrust of strangers strong in him. But Dan convinced him to at least stay long enough to dry off a little and drink a cup of coffee and the man finally agreed, though reluctantly.
Inside, the cabin was small and cramped and crudely furnished, but it boasted a rather beautiful stone fireplace that some amateur Mexican artist had decorated with well-painted scenes of deserts and palm trees and a few rather iffy camels. A door opened into a bedroom where the man told Estella Sweet she could remove her clothes, and he gave her a blanket to wrap herself in. The men removed as much of their sopping clothing as they could and laid them out in front of the fire, but Estella made room for her corset and underwear by pushing aside the male garments with a bare foot. Young Holt Peters thought she might blush, but she didn’t, so he did.
After they had all been settled in with small cups of bitter, spicy coffee, Dan introduced himself and the others and then said to their host, “And you are?”
With great dignity the man said, “My name is Sheik Bandar al-Salam.”
Cornelius Massey brightened. “Ah, you are from the Arabian lands.”
“That is correct.”
“How did you come to reside here?” Massey said.
“That was not my intention. I did not build this cabin. It was already here. I was very sick with a war wound, and the Mexicans led me to this place. They said it was safer than any village. I had two servants then who guarded my gold, but they were killed by the Rurales.” The Sheik’s face changed, closing down all expression. “With me was my young son, and Lihua, the beloved concubine. Her name means one who is elegant and beautiful, and that’s what she was.”
“Mr. Sheik, what happened to them?” Holt Peters said.
“The Rurales took them. I never saw Lihua and my son again. I begged the Rurales captain to take me with my family, but I was very sick and he thought it a good joke to leave me here to die.”
The newspaperman in him coming to the fore, Massey said, “Where did you get the gold?”
“I was a mercenary during the Second Opium War with Britain and under the orders of the Chinese Grand High Admiral, I commanded a war junk in the South China Sea with orders to stop and sink British opium ships.”
“Mr. Sheik, what’s a war junk?” Holt Peters interrupted, his face alight, suddenly a boy again, enjoying an adventure story.
“It’s a Chinese ship built to carry cannon,” the Sheik said. “My ship was the Shen Yang. She carried twenty guns and sailed across the ocean like a swan in flight.”
Massey tried his coffee, liked it, smiled, and said, “Good coffee, Sheik. Now, about the gold?”
“The day China surrendered to the British, I boarded a British merchantman carrying opium,” the Sheik said. “I also found six thousand gold sovereigns, profit from that vile trade. I hanged the captain from his own yardarm and then sank his ship with his crew locked up in the hold with the opium. From that moment on, the British wanted me dead. Another mercenary captain, an Irishman named O’Rourke, was tied to the mast and flogged to death on the deck of HMS Warrior, moored in Shantou harbor for that very purpose. I knew the British government wouldn’t rest until I joined him and would send assassins after me. I fled to Texas, but after a few years, though I posed as a poor man, word of my gold spread and I then, by night, escaped to Mexico where I thought I would be safer. But I was betrayed by a Chinaman I had befriended, and the British, may Allah take their souls, found me. The Britishers did not wish to soil their hands with the blood of a dirty Arab, so they paid the Rurales to kill me and recover their gold. But their Mexican captain thought I was already dying and saved his bullet.”
“How have you managed to live since?” Dan Caine said.
“The Mexicans feed me,” the Sheik said. “A father and son who live in a village about three miles to the east of here bring me beans and tortillas.” The Arab managed a weak smile. “They believe I’m favored by Santa Muerte, the holy lady of the dead.”
“Well, Sheik, I don’t want to alarm you,” Dan Caine said. “But I think your life is in great danger. I believe Clay Kyle, the outlaw I mentioned earlier, may be here in the Sierra del Carmen in search of your gold.”
“Then it will be the last of his sorrows,” the Sheik said. He waited until a peal of thunder crashed and then said, “Mr. Caine, the gold was cursed. I never spent a peaceful night as long as I possessed it. Six thousand golden sovereigns cost me the lives of my son, Lihua the beloved, and two faithful manservants. In my nightmares, I still hear the screams of the British sailors drowning in the hold of their ship and when I wake up in fright, their dreadful curses still ring in my ears. I am now dying of a cancer deep in my bowels, and thus it would seem that this man Clay Kyle can do no worse to me than I’ve already done to myself.” The Sheik smiled. “More coffee?”
“Right here in my cup,” Fish Lee said, grinning. “You make good coffee fer a heathen.”
A few minutes later, while the persistent storm still raged, keen-eared Holt Peters said, “What was that?”
“I hear it too,” Estella said, tugging up the blanket that had just slipped from her naked shoulder. “Was it thunder?”
“Hell no, it was gunfire,” Holt said.
“The boy is correct,” the Kiowa said.
“Everyone held their breath and listened. There it was again . . . a drumroll rattle cutting through the sound of the storm.
“It’s gunfire all right,” Dan Caine said. “And mighty close.”