Chapter One: BUSHWHACK

Old Picket-Stake Hendry’s features usually softened about this time of day. He had seen ten thousand sunsets filter through the thin desert air to wash the Calicoes and their shrouding thunderheads in all the colors that heaven’s palette held, and it was always new to him. It was as close as he ever came to religion.

As the last gold shaft crept up the tip of old Monarch and leaped off into the blue, Picket-Stake’s gaze returned to earth, and to business. He regarded the dead man sprawled before him.

“It might work,” he repeated aloud, taking up his train of thought where he left it twenty minutes before. “He’s got my sandy hair and my length o’ leg. With my clothes on and a little mussin’ up, it might work.”

To Picket-Stake, the dead man represented only a small triumph. Two days before, Picket-Stake knew for sure he was being followed. It hadn’t worried him, for he had been followed many times in his thirty years of prospecting the Calicoes. He knew the follower would wait until Picket-Stake led him out of the maze of canyon country to water before he gulched him; for Picket-Stake, rightly or wrongly, was deemed a rich man of the Cosmos country. His worldly goods consisted of two burros, a change of clothes, and a burroload of prospecting-tools, but only he knew that. To the rest of the country it seemed unreasonable that this gaunt, desert-blackened lath of a man should have prospected the Calicoes for thirty years and still have no gold. So they made him rich—in story. Didn’t he always have money? Hadn’t he taken in that waif and raised him to manhood, this same Johnny Hendry who was deputy sheriff of Cosmos county? Had either of them ever lacked for anything?

Pick could have told them that any man, if he’s half smart, could make wages by placer mining at any of a hundred places on this side of the Calicoes. But what Pick couldn’t have told them up to a week ago, was that a man could make a fortune, a solid, fabulous, undreamed-of fortune. He hadn’t known it himself, for the mother lode of this field had always been a part of his dream. Now it was reality.

“I’m rich,” he had kept saying calmly to himself these last two days. “So danged rich I’ll never live to spend a hundredth of it—no, not even a five-hundredth.”

In a tiny box canyon, just at the head of some copper stain, far up into the savage, waterless, and labyrinthine canyons of a vast and nameless valley of the Calicoes, his monuments were up. All that remained was to register the claim at Cosmos and watch the rush start—a futile, heartbreaking rush that would end where the rainbow ends. For Pick had it sewed up. He had waited until he was sure.

Then, two days back, two men had picked up his trail. Pick had too much to lose to try and shake them, for in the tattered vest he wore were the claim locations. Pick had been raised in a tough and deadly school, and he acted accordingly. It meant losing a half day to go around by way of the Kiowa rim, but he went.

There, perched a thousand feet above the foothill, the trail followed the rim around a series of pinnacle rocks. Close to sunset, Pick had hazed his burros on ahead, had cast one glance at his back trail, then had faded into the rock.

The only weapon he carried was a double-barreled derringer fitted for shotgun shells. So he waited, bellied down close to the trail. In an hour, the man came. He was a thin, rawboned man, afoot, packing two six-guns and a big canteen. Picket-Stake let him get within ten feet of him, then he called, “Hey!”

The man in the same second, in the same jump of surprise, was streaking for his guns, and Picket-Stake had let him have it—both barrels.

He figured the shots would blast the man over the rim, but they hadn’t, and now Pick was glad.

Like all desert men, Pick was a philosopher, and as he lit his cob pipe to take his mind off his thirst, he reflected on the whims of fortune. “Funny how luck runs. That coulda been me. And the only soul woulda missed me woulda been Johnny.”

But would Johnny, even? Asking himself that question, Pick laid bare the only real bitterness of his life. Twenty-five years ago, down in the Ute country, when the Indians were making reluctant way for the whites, Pick had found Johnny. He was prospecting in the Six Pillar country, and had stumbled onto a burning shack one afternoon. A glance at the dead woman and her husband inside the burning house told Pick the Utes had done their job well. He was about to leave when the dim wail of a baby came to his ears. A search revealed the baby hidden in a chest under the rough bunk. It had been the last protective gesture of a cornered and frantic mother.

Pick had taken the baby, had sweated blood corralling and milking wild range cows to pull it through until he could reach a settlement. And Johnny had been raised in the desert mountains of Calico.

He had grown to a big, amiable young manhood—too amiable, Picket-Stake knew. Johnny didn’t care much about anything, and never worried a moment in his life.

“And that’s bad,” Picket-Stake mused, feeling his own seamed face. Not all those creases had got there from physical strain. Plenty of them came that time he nursed Johnny through double pneumonia over in the Panamints. Worry shouldn’t kill a man, but it’s the fire he needs to temper him.”

Picket was thinking especially of this last job of Johnny’s—his deputy-sheriffship. Cosmos was a tough county, Cosmos town was tougher. Cattlemen were harried by rustlers, murders were committed and forgotten to make way for more murders. The law, under a slack, easygoing sheriff, was a mockery.

And Johnny, grinning through it all, said to Picket-Stake, when prodded, “Pick, you was in the West before I was in rompers. Like seeks like. Let the gunman kill off the gunman. If a man can’t take care of his own, let him lose it. You never went to the law in your life. No man does. As long as women and kids is safe, let the best man win.”

“Force is only for them that know when not to use it,” Pick would say angrily.

“That’s me,” Johnny would reply, his eyes laughing. “That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you. Crowd a peaceful man and you got a killin’ slated.”

And Pick, never too eloquent, had no answer.

Yes, this dead man would fit the bill. Change clothes with him, plant false location papers on him, put a poke of dust in the tattered jeans. The shotgun derringer had taken care of the man’s face. He could dump the body close to a trail.

He got up, lay on his belly, looked over the rim to the country in shadow below. There, directly down, lay the thread of a trail. It was used by the Bar 33 cattle as the only entrance to a water hole abutting the rim some miles to the south. Cows were calving now, and he knew some Bar 33 rider would make the rounds of the water holes on a last cleanup before the herds were moved into the mountains for summer range. Buzzards would attract a rider.

Pick reflected he had thirty days in which to file his claim. Four of them were gone. In twenty-six days, he would know Johnny as he had never known him before.

“And if he ain’t what I hope he is, then my fortune can go bum. I’ll be ready to die,” he admitted to himself.

By failing light, he wrote out his fictitious location papers. Then he hurried through the distasteful job of dressing the dead man in his own clothes. Finished, he dragged the dead man over to the rim and put a poke of dust in the pocket, along with several of Pick’s own recognizable belongings. Then, his mouth grim, he shoved the corpse off the rim. An hour later he had caught up with Jenny and Bertha, his two burros. He changed back into his own clothes, burned the ones he had exchanged with the gulcher, planted two pokes of dust on the burros, then set out again.

At midnight, he picked up the old familiar pack freighter’s trail. He gave Jenny and Bertha the last of his water, then cut them across the rump.

They vanished into the darkness, and he knew some traveler would pick them up in a day or two, or they would be found at one of the outlying ranches where there was water. At worst, they would wander into town from habit.

He listened to the night, to the dying patter of the burros. He fondled the six-guns he had taken from the ambusher. On them depended his food.

Off to the east lay the sparse water holes of the Calicoes, where game was to be found.

“Good luck, Johnny,” Pick muttered. “An unbroke horse ain’t no use to anybody, least of all hisself.”