Duke pointed a shaking finger at him.
‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Blade repeated. ‘That’s the truth. I never saw the old man make a switch. I thought we had the gold here.’
‘You tell me,’ Duke said again.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ Pilar said. ‘All the time we thought the gold was there under the blanket. It was not our gold. How should we know the trick the old man had played?’
Bill Weyland dropped his poke on the ground.
‘I’ll make the son-of-a-bitch talk, Duke, don’t you fret,’ he said. ‘I owe him. By the time I’ve finished with him you won’t be able to stop him talkin’.’
Blade said: ‘I’m not a fool. I know what you’ll do if we don’t give you the gold. You can take me to pieces—I still can’t tell you where it is.’
His hand was on the butt of the gun.
Weyland said: ‘I’m goin’ to beat the livin’ shits outa you, any road, Blade.’
He moved forward lightly on his feet, a strongly-made man, honed down to muscle and bone from years in the saddle. If the damage Blade had done him back at the river gave him any trouble, he gave no sign. The mark was on his pride.
Blade lifted the gun. As it showed in the firelight, Weyland stopped.
‘Stay still, all of you,’ Blade said.
They froze.
A voice said: ‘Blade, I have a gun in the girl’s neck.’
A wave of physical sickness broke over Blade.
‘Is it true, Pilar?’ he asked. There were men now between himself and the girl.
‘It’s true,’ she replied. ‘But they will kill me later if they do not kill me now. Save the others, Joe.’
His mind seemed incapable of clear thought. Suddenly, from out of nowhere there came a thin thread of an idea.
He gave a short barking laugh.
‘There ain’t much I can do about it,’ he said. ‘This gun’s empty.’ He dropped it on the ground.
Weyland took one long pace forward and hit him. It was a long swinging blow and it caught him in the throat. Blade fell back against a boulder and choked painfully. The fall jarred his injured shoulder. He was no more than half-acting when he sank to one knee. He sucked breath desperately into his starved lungs and started to retch.
The outlaw yelled ‘Haaa!’ as though he were striking a horse and lashed out at him with his booted foot. Blade acted instinctively, his right hand flicking as fast as it would fall on to the butt of a gun holstered at Weyland’s side. Weyland went over backward and Blade rose. Before anybody could prevent him, Blade stamped down hard on the man’s belly. The wind went out of Weyland noisily. He rolled over on his face, rose very slowly to his hands and knees and fell flat.
Blade heard the man coming from behind, a jingle of spurs, a quick hard intake of breath and Blade knew that the right hand was raised to bring a hard object down on his head. He turned and went in low, wrapping his arms around the man’s legs below the knees, driving forward hard with his shoulder. He felt the pain of his injury and then the man landed. Blade was half to his feet in a second and dropping forward with his knees. The man below him gave a shuddering groan of agony. He made a feeble attempt to strike at the man above him, but Blade was already gone and charging the man who was advancing on him with a rifle held like a club.
This fellow was taken completely by surprise by the speed of the attack. He struck a blow at the man who was already on him, but it was too late. The air in the cave seemed full of the sound of blows and men yelling. Blade’s head took the man full in the face. As the fellow staggered back, off balance, Blade caught him by the arm, whirled him a half turn and released him. The man tripped on his own feet and fell into the fire. He screamed shrilly as a hand touched a red ember. He thrashed about insanely to escape the flames.
Blade was now berserk, wanting only to get his hands on these men, unthinking of any future, living entirely in the present of ultimate violence.
A man was yelling: ‘The girl! I’ll kill the girl.’ But the words meant nothing to Blade. The dark figure of a man loomed near him and he charged it.
Something hard smashed into his face and every feature of it seemed to explode.
He found that his face was pressed into the hard rock of the floor. Somebody turned him over roughly with the toe of his boot. He looked up into cold eyes of Duke Dukar.
‘Where’s the gold, Blade?’ he asked.
Blade tried to speak, but he could not produce a word. He passed out.