Valley of the Vanishing Men (6 page)

A
S THE
three riders went slowly down the slope of sand, Trainor said the same thing to himself. He had to die. There was no way out for him. He had taken up the fight against too many men, and men of a caliber too large for him, and he had to go down.

Now, from behind the mesquite, he saw the three riders pass, and his heart shrank when they came to that point where he had dragged himself across the sand, because under the brilliance of the moon the marks must have been perfectly clear to show his course right up to the mesquite. But those three riders seemed to be thinking forward and looking forward. They paid no attention to the ground they were riding over, but went down into the narrow shadows of the gulch beneath.

That new escape let Trainor breathe again. His nerves had not stopped shuddering when, through the open door of the stone hut, he heard the voice of a man call out, in an agony, words of protest that shambled together without syllabication. There was no need of making out the words to understand the appeal, but what lifted Trainor from behind the mesquite and started him running forward, suddenly, was that he recognized the voice of his brother.

The rush of savage emotion brought Trainor right up to the hut before good sense checked him again. He dropped to his knees beside the broken shutters of a window and looked in upon things that made his brain spin dizzily.

It was a room of very respectable size. In the very old days, perhaps as far back as the time of the Spanish occupation, this must have served as headquarters for the chief engineer of the abandoned mine whose mouth opened black in the side of the cliff behind this house. The sandy slope up which Trainor had just come was no more, as he could see it now, than the ancient dump of the mine, which had half filled the ravine. The sand itself was a mere facing which had been put on by a more recent century.

The room held one relic of its old importance — a huge table a dozen feet in length with carved legs and a great carved spanner. It must have been hauled out here at incredible cost of labor, perhaps at the demand of a wife of that unlucky man who was named master of the mine in the middle of this desert. Since then, it had been scarred with spurs and whittled with knives, but even so, only the edges were deformed. At one end of this table now sat Barry Christian, with Yates beside him. The similarity between them struck Trainor again — the same pale and handsome features. They might be brothers. Or perhaps the highest evil had to be cast much in the same form.

Opposite them, his hands roped before him, stood a haggard ghost of a man with a blood-soiled bandage about his head and with frightfully staring eyes. His clothes were in rags; through the rents Trainor could see purple welts and raw places, half scabbed over. Off at the side of this picture was a sandy-haired girl whose blue eyes were desperately fixed before her. And Blacky held both her wrists in the grasp of one capacious hand.

“You heard me, Trainor,” said Christian.

Ben Trainor started violently as he heard his name, but the parched lips of the ragged skeleton inside the hut answered:

“I heard you, Christian. But you wouldn’t go through with it.”

“Wouldn’t I?” said Christian. He smiled, looked aside at Yates, and pulled out a cigar and lighted it. He said, through the blue-gray clouds of smoke that left his lips: “He doesn’t think that I’ll go through with it, Doc.”

Yates turned a bit in his chair.

“Give her a crack or two with the whip, to warm her up, Blacky,” he commanded.

Blacky, straightway lifted the short-lashed quirt and stiffened the arm that held the girl away from him. Then, over his shoulder, he said:

“All right, chief. But if the gal screeches, maybe Perry and the rest will come peltin’ up here. They wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to a gal. Some gents are funny, that way. They wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen.”

“If they come pelting up here, they’ll go pelting back again, damned pronto,” answered Yates. “Do what you’re told to do and stop the talking.”

“It’s all the same to me,” said Blacky. “Male or female, what the hell do I care?”

He stood back, measuring the girl, but the sleep-walking stare in her eyes had not changed in the least. And Ben Trainor, looking at the horror in the face of his brother, had to set his teeth to keep from groaning. From a shed behind the house, he heard a sudden trampling and snorting of horses. It seemed as though even dumb brutes were protesting against this thing that was about to be.

“Give it to her!” commanded Christian, turning suddenly in his chair, half rising.

The hand of Blacky swung back with the quirt, but the cry that came out of Clive Trainor was such a wild scream that it stopped the stroke.

“I’ll talk, Christian!” he yelled. “Don’t touch her. I’ll tell you where the mine is. I’ll tell — ”

He tried to run around the corner of the table, but he struck the projecting angle and even that shock was enough to throw him off his balance. He fell heavily to the floor and lay still. The girl dropped to her knees and covered her eyes with one arm.

“Shall I whang her?” asked Blacky, his brutal face looking over his shoulder for orders.

“What’s the use, if that half-wit will talk, at last?” said Christian. “Doc, take a look at him and see if the fool is alive.”

Yates went to the fallen body and with a thrust of his foot turned it on its back. He kneeled and put his hand over the heart of Clive Trainor. There was a long, sick moment during which Ben Trainor waited for the report.

“All right,” said Yates. “Not much to it, but it’s still beating, all right.”

He stood up, picked a canteen from the table, and emptied a quantity of water over the prostrate man.

“That’ll bring him to,” said Yates. “You were right about the girl, Barry. I would have put her through her jumps, sooner or later, but I never would have thought of doing it in front of Trainor. It broke him right up. And yet there’s a nervy fellow, Barry. But he crashed when he saw the girl about to get it.”

“Here, you, Nell!” commanded Christian. “Stand up.”

The girl did not move.

“Get her up on her feet,” said Christian.

Blacky took her by the hair of the head and lifted her up. She stood wavering before them, with the same unconscious look in her eyes.

“Now that your man is ready to talk and tell us where the mine is,” said Christian, “why don’t you save him the trouble and tell us yourself?”

She stared before her, unanswering. Her eyes seemed to find those of Ben Trainor beyond the broken shutters.

“She’s out of her head,” said Yates. “Maybe the gal loves this Clive Trainor. Maybe she’s off her nut, Barry.”

“Maybe, maybe,” said Christian carelessly. “Lock the girl in that back room again, Blacky, and throw Trainor out into the open. The fresh air may bring him back. Lies there like a dead snake, doesn’t he?”

Blacky pushed the girl through another door and locked it after her. He went to Clive Trainor and bent to get a grip on the hair of his head. That seemed to be Blacky’s favorite grip. Perhaps it was in that manner that he, Ben Trainor, had been dragged out of the Golden Hope and so dropped into the dust of the street.

In the same way he dragged Clive Trainor, now, to the threshold of the hut, pausing there to say, over his shoulder:

“Two tough hombres, in their own ways. I mean, these here Trainor brothers.”

“Tough, a little tough,” agreed Yates, “but they’re being softened, little by little. Drop him out there and fan him with something.”

“I’ll fan him, all right.” Blacky laughed, as he disappeared through the door with his burden.

“Where could that other Trainor be?” wondered Yates.

“I don’t know,” answered Christian. “Perry hasn’t heard the last about that case. When a man fails me once, he never has a chance to fail me again — unless it’s Jim Silver that he slips on.”

“Ah, well,” said Yates. “Silver’s different, of course.” Then he added heartily: “You’ll get him if he puts his head too close to our affairs, down here. Even a Jim Silver can’t manage an organization like the one you’ve built up here, Barry.”

“He’s a rock that’s broken some big machines,” said Christian calmly. “But I’ve an idea, Doc, that the time may be coming when I’ll have my turn of luck with him. There’s one queer thing about it. If I had him in my hands, I wouldn’t quite know what to do with him.”

“I know some Indian ways that you’d be pretty much interested in,” said Doc Yates.

Christian shook his head, answering: “He’s smashed me half a dozen times. There was a day, Doc, when hundreds of hard men were ready to ride the instant that I lifted a finger. But that day has gone by. Because Silver has shown people, over and over again, that I can be broken. He’s had me in jail more than once, with the rope practically around my neck. But each time I’ve managed to get out from under and now I think that I may be able to have my innings. How will I take them? With fire or water or steel? I don’t know. If there were a hundred of him, Doc, I’d need to use up all of his bodies to carry out some of the ideas that I have.”

“You can’t tell,” said Doc Yates. “I may be there to give you some inspiration.”

There was a loud, continuous clapping sound outside the front door.

“See what that is,” said Christian.

Yates went to the door and called out:

“Stop that, Blacky! I told you to fan him, not beat him to death.”

He turned and came back toward Christian.

“The blighter was whanging Trainor on one side of the face and then on the other,” he reported.

Ben Trainor waited to see and hear no more. Right at his feet there was a stone that had fallen out of the old wall. He picked up the weight and walked with it to the corner of the house. There he could see Blacky. That gentle soul even now was not fanning the helpless man on the ground. Instead, he had taken a good grip on the hair of his head and was twisting it slowly and powerfully.

Trainor made one long step forward, swayed the stone, and brought it down heavily on the thick skull of Blacky. He slumped noiselessly beside his victim.

T
HE
yellow arm of lamplight reached the boots of Clive, the outflung arm of Blacky. Perhaps the two men inside the hut could see that much of the scene outside. Ben Trainor drew the two Colts from Blacky’s holsters. He wanted to turn to the doorway of the house and open fire. One of the pair he would surely get with his first bullets; perhaps he could be sufficient benefactor of mankind to kill them both.

But what of that?

Down there in the neck of the ravine were three more armed men, practiced fighters, who would come like wolves at the sound of the firing, and he knew that he could not play his hand against the three of them. They would murder him, and finish the nearly completed job on Clive Trainor.

So Ben Trainor handled the great temptation for only an instant. Then he put up the two revolvers and lifted the body of Clive from beside the fallen gunman. He saw a great gash across Blacky’s skull, and there was enough light to show him the running blood. Vaguely, he remembered having heard that blood will not run after a man is dead. Perhaps he ought to deal one more blow before he tried to escape, but the thought of crushing the skull of the inert body sickened him.

He held the body of Clive in his arms, the head and arms and feet trailing down. It seemed to him that there was not half the weight that should have been in the bulk of a grown man. He could feel the wasted, bony frame he was bearing, as he rounded the further corner of the stone hut.

Right before him was a shed out of which came sounds of feeding horses and the sweet fragrance of hay. He laid Clive on the soft sand and went inside. He could make out the forms of six horses by favor of the moonlight that sloped in through the open door and a window. The big gray, most visible in this light, he started saddling at once, and the tall horse turned its head and sniffed at him curiously, without fear. It seemed to Ben Trainor like an omen of good fortune.

A knocking commenced inside the house. He heard it clearly, and also the voice of Christian, calling:

“Well, what is it now?”

“Will you let me take care of him?” said the voice of the girl.

If she would only be still, if she would stay in her place, perhaps Trainor could get her away with Clive. But the devil of bad luck was making her spoil her own chances.

“Take care of him? I don’t know why,” said Christian. “He’s got Blacky out there taking care of him now, and you know what a good nurse Blacky is!”

“Hello, Blacky!” called Yates. “How are things going?”

Trainor, with desperate, trembling fingers threw the saddle on the back of the next horse.

“He won’t answer,” said Yates, after a moment. “The sulky brute won’t speak up till he’s brought his man around.”

“A form of professional pride, and you ought to be glad that he has it,” said Christian easily.

“If you’ll let me out, if you’ll let me take care of him,” pleaded the girl, “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Let me go to him, and I’ll tell you everything you wish-things that he doesn’t know!”

“There’s an idea, chief,” muttered the voice of Yates.

“Perhaps it is,” said Christian. “Bring her out here.”

Hinges creaked.

“You’ve come back to life and sense, have you, Nell?” said the voice of Christian, with a sort of sneering gentleness in it. “You can see, Doc, that we ought to have played these two beauties off against one another a long time ago. You want this fellow, Trainor, do you, Nell?”

“I want to help him,” said the girl. Her voice went to pieces: “Don’t you see that he’s dying?”

The voice and the words curdled the blood of Ben Trainor as he turned and led the pair of horses toward the wide doorway.

“Oh, he’s a tough lad,” said Christian. “He’ll get all right, with a good nurse. You and Clive are going to marry at the end of the romance, eh?”

“No,” said the girl. “Let me go to him now.”

“Steady, steady,” said Christian. “We have to have a little bargain first. I want your solemn oath, Nell. Raise that sweet little right hand in the air and swear that you’ll tell us everything that will help us to the mine, after we’ve let you go to Trainor.”

“I’ll swear it. I do swear it!” said she.

Trainor, lifting the weight of his brother, heard the voices dimly. He slid one of Clive’s legs into the stirrup. He laid the loose weight of the body forward on the saddle, and then thanked his fortune that these were not wild, dancing mustangs, but big horses, well-trained, gentle as lambs even in the hands of strangers. One step forward on the part of the gray would dislodge that helpless burden. For one instant, Ben Trainor lingered, his hand pressed over the heart of his brother until he was assured of the feeble flickering of the pulse. Then he mounted the bay horse he had saddled for himself and brought it close to the gray. He managed both pairs of reins with one hand. With the free hand he raised the limp torso of Clive and supported it.

Dimly, inside the house, he could hear the girl crying out that she would make any promises they wished, if only they would let her come to Clive Trainor.

And Clive Trainor, in the meantime, was being taken slowly forward up the continuing slope of the sand, and now over the head of it and toward better footing below, where the high plateau rolled gradually down toward the desert — a vast sweep of land that looked as though the wreckage and the fragments had been cast over it when the higher mountains to the south were first created. Boulders larger than houses rose up, here and there, and now stones and clean rock gritted under the shod hoofs of the horses.

Could even Barry Christian and Yates follow the trail over such a hole-in-the-wall country as this?

Then, from over the sandy brows of the hill, Trainor heard a trio of revolver shots in quick succession. He heard shouting that seemed horribly close. And far down the ravine, he heard an answering Indian yell.

He got the horses into a trot that jounced Clive horribly in the saddle. He put them into a soft lope, at which, strangely enough, he could manage the loose burden of his brother’s weight much better. And now the boulders were drifting behind them, thickening like the trunks of trees as one enters a wood, throwing up to their rear a screen which no human eye could see through.

But, in the meantime, five keen and savage men were on the way. Three of them would rush out in the van. Christian and Yates would follow as soon as their flying hands could fling saddles on the backs of their horses. Or would one of them remain behind to make sure of the girl?

The sound of her voice remained in the ear of Ben Trainor like a sweet taste in the throat, and the blue, blank stain of her eyes, remembered now, made him want to turn back and try his chance of dodging through the enemy and coming to her help.

He made himself put that temptation out of his mind.

He went on, with the great stones moving about him, until he heard in the distance the sound of beating, galloping hoofs. At that, he was tempted to flog the horses into full speed. But he could not handle them if they went too fast. He could not dare to let them keep at a canter, or even a trot, for fear the noise they made would come to the ears of the man hunters. With all his soul straining forward, anxious to make haste, he had to bring the horses down to a walk. That was the way they went forward, side by side, the arm of Ben Trainor strained about the body of his brother, and the head of Clive wavering on the support of Ben’s shoulder.

The face that the moon showed to the younger brother was a horrible thing. A new trickle of blood had commenced from beneath the head bandage, and it ran slowly down the cheek and dripped off the chin. The mouth of Clive hung open, and the loose jaws worked, and the teeth clicked, now and then, moved by the swaying of the horses, until there was a horrible semblance of munching food, continually.

It seemed to Ben Trainor that he could not endure the strain of the thing any longer. The noise of the riders, swinging this way and that around him, beat into his brain like so many lines of fire, but the danger was nothing compared with this monstrous ride with a dying man.

He saw, not far before him, the gleam of water under the side of a mighty rock that rose like a cliff from the ground. Well, speed would not save them, anyway. Only chance could rescue them from the eyes of Christian and his men, and, therefore, they might as well halt here — and hope. After all, they had covered enough ground to prevent the men of Christian from quartering the space between that and the deserted mine and combing every bit of it, thoroughly.

Into the shadow of the rock, therefore, Ben rode, and tied the horses to a projecting knob of stone. Then he slid the entire lower part of Clive’s body into the pool, and drew him out again upon the dry land.

He dropped flat, and listened to the heartbeat. It was feeble, very feeble, and there were frightful pauses into it that seemed like death itself, but always the slow thumping or the uncertain fluttering began again.

He sat up and considered the wan, starved face of his brother. Pain had fretted it deeply. Pain had worn it away.

He looked up, suddenly, at the sky where the moon had put out the stars, and he wondered what hell on earth or hereafter could be sufficient for men like Yates and Barry Christian.

Then, in a voice that seemed to come from a great distance, he heard Clive speaking. It was a low muttering. It increased to a clear sound. It grew into a shout!

“Be quiet!” pleaded Ben Trainor. “Clive, you’re safe. I’ve got you away from them. Be still or you’ll have them on us!”

For close, terribly close, he heard the beating of hoofs. But Clive Trainor, with the face of a madman, strove to struggle to his feet.

Ben clapped a hand over the mouth that gaped to screech. Straightway his brother’s teeth bit his hand to the bone, and the cry, half-stifled, rose into the night.

For both their sakes, with an agony in his heart, Ben Trainor struck down the delirious man, and then held the crumpling body in his arms. With a steady beat, he heard the cantering hoofs of a horse sweep straight toward him.