Snow threatened.
When Jed woke, cold seeping into the marrow of his bones, the first light of the morning hardly scraped at the surface of the night. Cloud wrapped the land in a dull gray shroud, and the wind was rising again. Blowing the dust into small pillars of red sand that collapsed in on themselves.
He sipped a couple of mouthfuls of water from one of the canteens, and ate some more of the jerky. Jed was so chilled that he had to run around and do vigorous exercises to get the blood flowing again. Clapping his hands together, feeling the tips of his fingers tingling. He glanced around, seeing the mist that enveloped the tips of the Pinaleños, his brow wrinkling as he wondered how long it would be before the snow came.
Norwich Hills had sprung up, flourished and died all within a couple of years. A chase after a double killer had taken Jedediah Herne there some years back, and he could still remember the place. Already fading when he got there. He’d gunned down the man he wanted on the porch of what used to be the church.
He’d heard that the mine had closed and the little township had gone back to the wilderness of cactus and stone that had been there long before. Now it was a ghost town, a few miles into the hills on a winding road barely wide enough for a wagon.
As he pushed Jubal forwards through the dust and sleet that the wind was carrying, Jed stared down at the rutted trail. Seeing where the rain had washed out sections of the trail so that it was no wider than four or five feet.
At one turn of the track a slide had completely blocked it off, and he saw there were the prints of five horses going in. Two coming out. That meant that Cal and Luke were still in the place. Holed up and waiting for Danny and the Mexican to come back and tell them it was safe to move.
Only they weren’t coming back.
Not ever.
Because of the formation of the Pinaleño range at that point, Herne knew that there was no practical way out of Norwich Hills. A man alone, carrying a few days” supply of water, might make it.
Might make it.
But the trail stopped dead at the far end of the one street through Norwich Hills. Just past where there used to be a blacksmith. Beyond that there was raw stone and jagged ridges. Rising and falling until you got across forty or fifty miles of nothingness to the main western trail towards Phoenix. And by the time you got to Phoenix you’d be near to dying.
One trail into the mining camp.
The same trail out again.
There was a battered notice-board at a turn of the trail, not far from where Jed remembered the township began.
It lay on its side in the dust, half-covered. He swung down from the saddle, stretching his legs, feeling the strain of the long ride. Walked over to the board and pulled it out.
Someone had been using it for target practice, but all of the bullet-holes were years old. The wood weathered and torn.
The paint had faded over the years, but it was still readable.
“Welcome to Norwich Hills. Fastest growing little town in the Arizona Territory.”
Then it said that the population was one hundred and eighty-seven souls. At least, that seemed to be the highest number in a line of altered figures. Some crossed through. Some left.
As the population of the township rose with the lure of the silver, so it fell again when the lode ran out. And the numbers decreased. Down and down.
Herne stooped and peered at the board, trying to read what was written in white paint, the letters uneven and sprawling.
“I hav berried the last. It is ovr.” There was a signature, but it was illegible.
Whoever he’d been, he’d been right. But now the little ghost town was enjoying a flourishing revival. At present the population stood at two, with Herne about to make it three.
But if all went well it wouldn’t be long before Norwich Hills was down to one again.
Then to nobody.
Jed had remounted Jubal and walked him along until he reached the point in the trail where he knew he would be able to see down a small dip towards Norwich Hills. Along the trail, straight at that point, to the collection of ramshackle buildings, with the old mine working perched above it.
Not wanting to trot into view of anyone watching, he dismounted again and tethered the bay stallion to a large boulder, in the lee of the biting wind. Howling in among the mountains all about, it was carrying a few flakes of snow on it. Whisking them about, blowing them into Herne’s face so that he could taste them cold and sharp on his tongue.
Shading his eyes against the swirling snow, Herne stalked forward, the Sharps rifle gripped in one hand, shrugging his shoulders, sinking his head lower into the collar of his coat.
There was a ridge, and he moved slowly towards it, warily creeping through a jumble of scattered rocks until he could see down into what remained of the township.
“Jesus,” he whispered to himself as he saw what several years had done to Norwich Hills.
His memory had been of a typical small township, centered around a narrow street, with the houses and saloons and brothel jostling each other on a steep hill. And above it all hung the mine, gaunt wooden piling scattered all around it.
That was how it had been.
Now there was virtually nothing left. It looked as if there had been a massive land-slip, obliterating all but a couple of the buildings. The street had gone, but Jed could make out a few tracks over the pile of red dirt, heading up towards the mine.
There again nature had been at work. Ripping down the skeletal derricks and winding-gear, leaving only two or three small huts around the base of the diggings, with another close by the gaping tunnel of the main shaft into the mountain.
That was all.
Sheer beyond it rose the Pinaleño Mountains, their tops obscured by driving snow and cloud. When Herne had been there before it had been in baking heat, the orange dust blowing everywhere.
There was Norwich Hills.
Where were Cal Ryder and Luke Barrell?
The blizzard was worsening so fast that there was no danger of his being seen, but there was a risk that his horse might die. A quarter of the distance to the shattered remnants of Norwich Hills there was the shell of a building, with a corner of the roof still hanging on to the beams.
If it hadn’t been for the storm, he would never have dared risk bringing Jubal along that trail, but visibility had closed down to only fifty yards or so. Even if Cal and Luke were there, and Herne didn’t doubt they were, there was no risk of them seeing or hearing the stallion.
Slithering around on the carpet of freezing snow, Herne returned and brought the horse along to the old shed, leading it into the comparative warmth and safety of the building. Despite the huge holes in the roof, there was shelter remaining to keep Jubal from freezing to death or becoming buried in the snow.
Herne tethered him to a fallen rafter, throwing one of his own blankets over his back, patting him on the flank before walking out again into the teeth of the blizzard.
If the Apaches said that the white men hadn’t been seen leaving Norwich Hills, then that meant they hadn’t left it. Since the main street was so flattened and destroyed, the odds seemed to be that they would be up nearer the mine, where the handful of huts would offer the best chance of protection.
Carrying the Sharps, Herne clambered down towards the street, constantly stopping to wipe snow from his face and eyes. Nerves alert for any sign of either of the men. In that sort of situation, he might easily walk straight into them, unable as he was to see more than a few yards. Then it would be down to who was quicker. Herne knew that he’d have the edge, because he knew that they were there. They had no idea where he was, but they must have had a reasonable hope that he would be lying dead in a Tucson alley by now.
For a few moments the snow eased, just as he came level with the first of the remaining houses in the street. Aware that the lull would expose him to anyone looking out, Herne dodged into the building, feeling the floor-boards creaking under his boot-heels.
The interior had been stripped at some time when the township was dying, and little remained to show what it had been. Jed couldn’t remember who might once have owned it, but guessed it had been a private dwelling.
An old mattress lay crumpled in one corner of the floor, with stains on it that showed it had been through a variety of uses. A large black mark in the centre was long-dried blood.
On the wall immediately above it, someone had used a stub of blunt pencil to write the words: “It was God that made me a prostitute.”
In another hand beneath it someone had scrawled: “If I give him five dollars will he make one for me?”
The dust was so thick inside the wrecked house that it was obvious that nobody had set foot in it for several months. More probably for several years.
So Jed felt safe enough in using it as a temporary base. He clambered up the rickety remains of the stairs to look out through the snow towards the huts clustered about the mouth of the Norwich Hills mine.
It was only a little after midday, but the light was poor, and he squinted through the cracked window-pane to see if he could detect any sign of life.
A spider’s web fluttered at the edge of the glass, trembling in the draught. Across the land-slip and up the hill, Herne saw that the snow was banking up. From what he remembered the main shaft ran into the side of the hill, with another deep pit opening up a hundred yards or so away, where they’d been trying to find another way of reaching the mother lode.
The group of huts was just visible, and he watched in silence for several minutes, the first nagging doubts beginning to creep into his mind.
Suppose they weren’t there?
In a lull in the storm he saw a black square appear in the side of one of the huts. A door was being opened. A figure appeared and looked out at the blizzard. Then the door was quickly shut again.
Herne let out a sigh of contentment.
They were there.