HE SPENT THE night on a straw mattress in a Mexican miner’s loft. In the morning the miner’s wife served him a breakfast of cornmeal tortillas and green chili peppers that he washed down with powerful coffee; he gave the woman a dollar and asked directions to the Pendleton mine, and rode northward along the wagon road an hour after sunup. Six miles out of Washington Camp he turned off to the west, going up a narrow road deeply carved by the iron-rimmed wheels of ore wagons and the shod hoofs of many mules. The road led him through a series of gulches into country that grew progressively more jagged, with sharp cutbanks and abrupt rock pinnacles forcing the road into a tortuous path. Presently he turned into the mouth of a wide canyon that grew quickly narrower as he rode forward and he found himself threading an eighty-foot-wide trough bounded on either side by sheer cliffs of yellow limestone and red shale.
This, then, must be Coronel Gorge, the only route up to the Pendleton mine, and right where his horse stood was probably the piece of land that McKittrick had wanted him to file on. He looked it over and had to congratulate McKittrick’s strategy. Well forted-up, a single trained man could hold off almost any onslaught coming down the canyon toward him. The floor was visible from both directions for quite a distance, and the cliffs at either side were at least three hundred feet high, almost straight up, and anyone trying to come down either cliff on a rope would make an easy target for a man with a rifle. No ore wagon or large shipment of supplies could be brought to or from the mine except through this gorge.
For Marriner, the real reason why the Pendletons refused to exploit their own wealth remained a mystery. McKittrick’s idea that the Pendleton family were old-fashioned poor white trash, ambitionless and shiftless, was hard to reconcile to the practical-minded picture of Celia Pendleton.
But other considerations were more important at the moment. Marriner sat his horse in the bottom of the gorge, looking up at the heights with his head thrown far back and felt the pressure of those massive parallel cliffs narrow the world and squeeze in the sky. When he looked down again he was nodding with satisfaction. A plan was forming in his mind.
He rode to the point where the south wall of the gorge met the floor and left the horse ground-hitched in a patch of low-growing shrubs. Then he removed his spurs and left them in his saddle-bags, loosened the cinch, and tested the hang of his gun before setting out on foot up the gorge.
He wanted to have a private, personal look at the Pendleton diggings. He moved unhurriedly along the floor of the gorge, keeping close to the wall. There was a cocksure swing to his bantam body, his arms moved briskly and his head had a way of rolling slightly as he walked.
From what Celia Pendleton had said yesterday, it seemed clear that McKittrick’s intentions were already known to the Pendletons, or at least that he had made some sort of threat, using Marriner’s name. Marriner therefore assumed that the Pendletons probably would have a guard posted at the head of the gorge.
As he approached the point where the walls spread farther apart, he pressed close against the wall, and his eyes swept yonder rocks with infinite care. After a while his pace slowed until he took only a single step at a time, then stopped to look. From here, the road climbed a steep grade, rising between the lips of a narrow notch in the sheer rock wall that formed the circular base of Coronado Mountain. Thus, the mountain gave the appearance of a huge biscuit, its top round and soft with timber and beneath that top, the ring of vertical rock. The single notch gave out onto the Coronel Gulch road.
Marriner’s attention moved from every possible point of cover to every other, and after a half-hour he was rewarded by the glint of sun off a distant belt-buckle or brass rifle frame. The tell-tale reflection was almost unnoticeable, halfway up the mountain at the edge of a rock outcrop.
Marriner stood in the shadow of a high wall, sure that the lookout had not spotted him. From the movement of the brassy glint, he knew that the lookout had shifted his position, but there was no alarm. Thus assured, Marriner inched forward and proceeded cautiously upslope, taking advantage of every bush and rock between himself and the lookout. Finally, he was almost parallel to the guard, a hundred yards to one side. From here the going was relatively easy and arroyos and troughs among the huge boulders permitted him to move without being seen.
At last he had threaded the notch in the biscuit-side and was in the first fringe of mountaintop timber. From this point it was a simple matter of keeping within the trees and paralleling the road to the mine. The sharp aura of pine needles was strong in his nostrils; the air was thin and cool.
Then, at the edge of a clearing, he reached the outskirts of the mine community. Here he settled down for a good long survey.
What he saw was not impressive, but it was a good example of quiet working efficiency. There were three or four shafts, one of which was surmounted by a skeleton frame and a hoist rig. That one would be the main shaft; the others would be either air shafts, abandoned diggings, or lesser offshoots of the principal vein. Timber had been chopped down in a wide area and stumps were numerous. A number of trees had been allowed to remain around one long log structure, and Marriner assumed that the shaded building was the main house. There was also a large building nearer the central mine shaft, which probably would be an ore barn. A string of ore wagons waited, the first half-full and the others empty, high-sided and big-wheeled. There was a tack-shed, a horse stable, and a big corral housing perhaps thirty or thirty-five mules. This central area was surrounded by a litter of cabins in which the crew members lived; there were odd sheds and lean-tos, and a milk house deep in the shade. The milk house made him look for cows, and he found a small group of cattle in a pen beyond the mule corrals.
A man stood by the head of the mineshaft, working the horse-pull hoist. Four horses were hitched to the ropes and in response to a shouted signal from below, the hoist-man cracked his whip over the horses’ ears. The big plow-horses moved slowly forward and presently from the black maw of the shaft the cart appeared. A second man came out, joined the first, and they pulled the ore cart off the hoist platform forward along a ramp until the ore cart stood in what seemed precarious balance above the first of the big ore wagons. Thereupon the miners opened the gate on the cart, worked a crank to tilt it, and spilled the ore into the wagon. When the cart was emptied the two men wheeled it back to the hoist platform; the hoist rigger backed up his horses and then let the cart platform down with a ratchet.
It worked, Marriner reflected; he would give it that much credit. But it was a crude and painfully slow method of bringing out ore. He shook his head and hunkered down beneath a tree, once more putting his eye on the yard.
Celia Pendleton felt crowded and as always she disliked the feeling. She stood at the gabled window in her bedroom, looking out at the treetops and could not rid herself of the sense of impending trouble, imminent and serious. She opened her hallway door and stood on the threshold looking toward the head of the stairs.
From the parlor below, her father’s voice, strong and distinct, drifted up to her: “What’s your plan, then, Seth? Do you intend to take the war to McKittrick?”
“No, Pa. But, my God, we’ve got to do something. How can you stand the waiting?”
Celia shrugged, thinking that her brother Seth was a man constantly on edge. She smoothed back her hair and went to the top of the stairs and paused, hearing Seth say:
“Pa, we can’t just sit here and wait for him to come and blow our heads off! Maybe we ought to hire some gunfighter of our own. Maybe that would make McKittrick back off.”
“No,” her father answered, and lapsed into silence.
Having descended the stairs, Celia stopped in the parlor doorway, looking at the men in the room. Her father’s gray spade beard was a little ragged at the edges; his eyes were black and bright as a squirrel’s. He sat in his tall-back rocker near the stone fireplace. His head was thrown back so that he could look at her brother Seth, who stood before him with his arms folded across his thin chest, frowning down.
Back across the room, sitting on the arm of a stuffed chair, was her second brother Josiah. Josiah seldom spoke, yet behind his façade of quiet there was a great shrewdness and a powerful, immovable love for his father. Josiah took after his father both in his outlook and in his squat, powerful physical build. Seth, on the other hand, was like Celia, like their dead mother: slim and quick and sensitive.
Her father had the capacity for easy relaxation. But now his expression was gravely wooden, and while he looked up at Seth whom he had never quite understood, he did not relax the stern lines set about his lips.
“We owe a responsibility to every man on this mountain-stop, Seth,” her father said. “If we import hired gunmen, were announcing to the world that we’re willing to kill.”
“I never heard anybody object to a man defending his own property,” Seth said doggedly.
Her father said, “If defending it will lose the lives of some of our men, or even our own, nothing is worth that cost.”
Celia moved forward with a loose swing of her supple shoulders to stand beside Seth, touching his arm. She said, “Sometimes you’ve got to fight, Sam.” She had always used her father’s first name.
“I know,” her father said wearily. “But I’d rather be damned as a coward than as a murderer. If McKittrick wants Coronado Mountain badly enough to kill for it, perhaps we ought to give it to him.”
“Without a fight?” Seth demanded. He shook his blond head. “While I’m alive, no McKittrick man will get an ounce of ore out of this mountain. You mark my words, Pa. I mean that.”
“Your weakness,” her father answered, his face unmoved, “is your brashness, Seth. Think a minute about Clint and Cole and the rest of our miners. Think about Celia. Do you want to see them all caught up in the midst of a bloody gun-battle?”
“I’d rather see that, by God,” Seth said, “than to see us run.”
“You don’t have to run.”
The voice was vaguely familiar; Celia wheeled and saw a small figure standing in the deep shadows by the side of the open door.
Seth was quick to react: “Who the hell are you?”
And Josiah, big and reluctant with words, followed his brother closely: “How’d you get in here, mister?”
“Walked in,” the small man said.
Celia recognized him now. She said, “Watch him, Josiah—that’s Wes Marriner.”
She felt Seth stiffen beside her. As Marriner moved forward into better light, she saw the gun hanging idly in his hand; saw his blade of a nose and an expression both flippant and arrogant. In the room, all remained frozen in their places by the silent threat of Marriner’s handgun, which he now held loosely, pointed in no particular direction, but ready.
Wes Marriner’s insolent glance was a little remote, as if he were listening for outside sounds. Then the gunfighter’s head straightened and his eyes moved, missing nothing. Celia noticed that he did not advance farther, but merely pushed the door gently shut behind him, careful not to place himself between Seth and Josiah who stood at opposite sides of the room. Celia, standing at Seth’s shoulder, felt her brother’s increasing tension, the heat of his frustrated anger.
Seth’s voice was pitched a little high. “You aim to kill us?”
“If that had been my idea, you’d be dead by now. Just relax.”
“Then,” Celia said, “what do you want?”
Marriner’s free hand rose to touch his hat brim in a sign of courtesy to her, but his eyes were mocking. “I wanted to see what McKittrick’s after and why he wants it. Is that gold vein as rich as he thinks it is?”
“Probably is,” Sam Pendleton said, low-voiced. “But why trouble yourself with that?”
“You ought to do a better job at guarding the place, then. You’re defenses aren’t worth a damn.”
Seth’s head snapped up. “Why do you come here? To spy for McKittrick?”
“No. I came to talk.”
“Deliver your warning, then,” her father said. “And then get out.”
Marriner returned his gun to the holster. He walked forward, picked up a straight-backed chair, swinging it about and sitting down on it backward, his arms folded over its back, his feet hooked in the side rungs.
“All I want,” he said, “is for you to listen to me for five minutes. Then I’ll be on my way.”
Celia felt irritated by his impudent self-assurance. She felt Seth stiffen again and she looked at him, warning him with her eyes. Seth was wild enough to make a try at Marriner, but Celia knew Seth could never carry it off. She put her hand on his arm.
“Talk, then,” her father said again.
Marriner’s head was turned. He was looking across the room at Josiah, recognizing that Josiah was the most dangerous of the Pendleton men simply because Josiah was less impulsive than Seth and faster and stronger than his father. Josiah watched Marriner warily. Josiah had not yet made up his mind.
Marriner turned to face Sam Pendleton. “Mike McKittrick sent me a letter. He offered me five thousand dollars. I rode from Wyoming to Washington Camp and landed there last night. I was curious to know what made me worth that kind of money to him.”
“That shouldn’t have been too damned hard to figure out,” Seth said, glancing at Marriner’s holstered gun.
“Let the man speak his piece,” his father said, stirring in the rocker.
“McKittrick wanted me to stake a mining claim,” Marriner said.
Celia frowned. “What?”
Marriner grinned. “That’s what he told me. Then I found out where the claim is … on the floor of Coronel Gorge.”
There was a moments silence. Then came Sam Pendleton’s slow, “I see … I see.”
Seth lifted his hand, balling it into a fist. “Why, that yellow-livered—”
“Simmer down,” his father growled. “Go on, Marriner.”
“I was supposed to stake a legitimate mining claim and do legitimate improvement work. That way, McKittrick stays strictly within the letter of the law. His plan, naturally, was for me to keep all trespassers off my claim.”
“We’ve got a right to use that road,” Seth said hotly. “McKittrick doesn’t think so,” Marriner answered, a crooked grin on his mouth.
“If all you came here for was to laugh at us—” Seth began, and subsided when Celia clasped his arm. She recognized that Marriner had something to say; she wanted to hear him out. Still, she resented the arrogance in his smile and his manner.
Across the room, Josiah was frowning darkly at his boots. Now his head rose and he commanded Marriner with a level glance. “You talk as though you turned McKittrick down.”
“That’s right,” Marriner said. “I did.”
“I don’t believe it,” Celia said promptly.
Marriner shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Why should a two-bit gunman turn down five thousand dollars?” Seth demanded.
Marriner regarded him with a touch of contempt. “I didn’t like the cut of McKittrick’s cloth. I don’t like yours much either, sonny, so put a rein on your tongue.”
Seth’s face colored; his hand rose. In a quick instinctive motion, Celia lifted the revolver from Seth’s holster and tossed it on the floor. As Seth swung toward her, darkening with rage, Wes Marriner’s voice lazily cut in:
“Stand still, sonny. The lady just saved you some grief.” He looked at Celia and said one further word: “Smart.” And returned his attention to her father, going right on as though there had been no interruption:
“I work because I want to, not because I have to. I don’t need McKittrick’s five thousand dollars. I came up here to tell you that unless you throw this fight right back in McKittrick’s face, he’s going to walk all over you. He looks big and he talks tough and he lives up to it, but I can tell you this much: McKittrick can be whipped, if you know how.”
“How?” Seth said immediately.
Marriner ignored him. He was watching Seth’s father. But it was Josiah who spoke: “I don’t quite get the reason for your concern, Marriner.”
“You don’t have to know my reasons,” Marriner said. “I’ll admit they’re selfish and that’s as far as I’ll go. The point is that you can lick McKittrick if you want to. I came up here today to find out if you want to.”
Celia looked at her father. His face bore a troubled frown. He said, “I’m not willing to fight if it’s going to mean wholesale bloodshed.”
“Don’t put conditions on it,” Marriner said. “If you commit yourself to fight, you can’t quit halfway. Will you fight him, or won’t you?”
“In that case,” her father said, “no. We will not fight.” He seemed to become smaller and heavier in the chair.
“Then you may as well pack up and leave right now,” Marriner said. “You may as well hand the mine over to McKittrick. If you’re not willing to fight for it, then you don’t deserve to have it. McKittrick deserves it more than you do.”
“Because he’ll kill for it?” Celia said.
“Because he’s got enough self-respect to fight for himself.”
“That’s a hard philosophy you’ve got there, young man,” her father said quietly. “Who gives you or McKittrick the right to take someone else’s life?”
“Nobody gives a man any rights. If you sit back waiting for somebody to give you your rights, then you’ve got a long wait ahead of you. Mister, if you won’t fight for your own then you belong in a gutter.,>
Her father did not stir. It was Seth who moved, swinging his thin body around defensively toward Marriner. Marriner’s only answering motion was a tilt of his head, and a rising contempt in his glance: “Back off, or make a fight of it, sonny. I’m sick of your bluff.”
Seth backed off. Celia regarded Marriner with unconcealed hostility. “You’ve no right to push us around, Marriner.”
“I haven’t got all day,” Marriner answered, shifting his glance back to her father. “Do you want to protect this place?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Answer my question, and I’ll answer yours.”
Her father stood up slowly. He seemed weaker than he had before. Celia looked angrily at Marriner, thinking, You’ve done this to him. She watched her father move his chunky body across the room, lacing his fingers together behind him. He stood before the front window looking out toward the hoist rig at the head of the mine. “For myself,” he said, “I don’t care that much about the mine. That’s the truth of it. But the future of the Coronado Mine now belongs to my children, and I know their views. Josiah will stand with me in this, but he will stand by me because I am his father and not because he believes I am: right. Seth and Celia are not willing to see the property fall into Mike McKittrick’s hands. I think both of them are willing to fight.”
“That’s right, Pa,” Seth said evenly.
His father did not turn; he said, “In that case I’ll bow to them. If there’s a way of avoiding defeat, we’ll take it.”
“All right,” Marriner said. When Celia looked at him she saw that he was watching her father, and that all the insolent contempt had gone from him. What she saw there now was only ^ regret. Marriner said, “I can stop McKittrick.”
Seth wheeled. “In exchange for what?”
Marriner gave him a look of dry amusement. “Twenty per cent of your mine.”
“The hell!” Seth said.
Marriner stood up, putting his chair back where he had got it by the wall. “All right,” he said. “Give the whole thing to McKittrick. It’s four-fifths or nothing. Make up your minds.”
Her father turned from the window, facing Marriner. “Why … this is blackmail.”
“I don’t think so,” Marriner said. “I could just wait for McKittrick to drive you under, and then take it away from him. That way I’d get the whole thing. But I’m not that greedy.”
“I’d like to see you take it away from McKittrick,” Seth said, with a jeer in his voice. “You’re not that tough, Marriner. His crew’s too big.”
Marriner didn’t look at him. “Do you want me to keep your mine or lose it? McKittrick can hire plenty of men to do the same thing he wanted me to do. Do you want me to stop him?”
His father moved forward to the center of the room. His eyes fell on them, one by one. Seth met his glance with considerable bravado. Seth said, “Eighty per cent or nothing, Pa.”
“You think this man can do it, then?”
“I think so,” Seth said grudgingly, not looking at Marriner. Celia noticed Marriner’s grin, insolent once more, cocksure and intolerant. It was, she thought, a shield he put up around himself.
She glanced at Seth, seeing the concealed plea behind his eyes, and she said to her father, “All right, Sam. We’ll fight.”
Sam Pendleton turned to Josiah, big and powerful and taciturn. All the while, Josiah watched Marriner, judging the little gunfighter. Presently Josiah said, “It’s worth a try.”
“All right,” her father said. “We’ll draw up an agreement.”
“Not necessary,” Marriner said. “I’ll take your word.”
“Then it’s settled,” Sam said. “Now, what do you want us to do?”
“Arm your men,” Marriner said. “Send one of those ore wagons into town and stock up on supplies and ammunition. You’ll have to prepare for a siege.”
“And what will you be doing meanwhile?”
“Taking the fight to McKittrick,” Marriner said, grinning a little, turning toward the door.