Rimrock Trail, Joseph Allan Dunn [miss read books TXT] 📗

saddles, though that would not have been an easy determination.

"Some one tipped this thing off," he said sternly to Buck. "Who was it?"

"Meanin' this visit's offishul?" asked Buck. "What's it fo', Sheriff? Moonshine or hawss stealin'?" He spoke in a jesting note, his weathered face impassive as the shell of a walnut, but Plimsoll scowled, noting the turn of Buck's bland countenance in his direction for the first time. It was whispered that the brands on Plimsoll's horse ranch were not those usually known in the county, nor even in the counties adjoining. There were rumors, smothered by Plimsoll's stand with the authorities, of bands of horses, driven by strangers, arriving wearied—and always by night—at his corrals.

"It don't matter—to you—what it's for," answered Jordan. "I'll overhaul 'em an' bring 'em back. Crossin' the county line won't do 'em any good with this warrant. Ef they try hide-out tactics or put up a scrap, it'll be kidnappin' an' that's a penal offense."

Buck whistled.

"Thought you wasn't goin' to let me know," he said. "It's the gel."

"Who's been here to tip it off?" asked Jordan.

Buck looked at him serenely, took a plug of chewing from his hip pocket, took his knife, opened it deliberately and slowly cut off a corner of the tobacco.

"Search me," he drawled. "Me, I don't stay up to the house."

Jordan, temporarily discomfited but still confident of bringing back his quarry, marked the trail of the buckboard in the alkali soil, noted the hoof-prints of the diverging riders and nodded with the semi-smile and half closed-eyes of conscious superiority. He had already elicited apparently reluctant information from Pedro as to the four passengers in the buckboard. Buck had been more reticent. To the sheriff Buck's reticence betokened desire to cover the fugitives. He fancied that Pedro's testimony was the result of Jordan's own cleverness in cross-questioning. Joe resorted to "no sabes."

"You 'tendin' ranch?" Jordan asked Buck, at last.

"Yep. Till I git fresh orders."

"I'll bring you back those orders, also yore bosses, before sun-down."

Buck permitted himself his first grin.

"You'll have to go some," he said. "Goin' to bring 'em back in irons? Figgerin' on abduction?"

Jordan gave no hint of how Buck's shaft might have targeted his intentions, but climbed into the car and started it. The powerful machine went lunging through the soft dirt, following the blurry trail of the buckboard's iron tires, throwing up dust as a fast launch churns spray.

After leaving the Three Star all semblance of road vanished. The alkaline soil was almost as fine as flour, and deep. This and the fear of losing the trail kept the machine down to a limit that would have been ridiculous on a real road but represented fast work on the desert. The water boiled in the radiator from the heat of the toiling engine and Jordan stopped, replenished, reoiled. Reaching the lava strip where the buckboard had halted for water and the noon meal, they found the trail skirting the flow toward the south. The main mass of the mesa, broken up into gorges, gaps, stairway cliffs, marked by purple shadows, scanty in the early afternoon but gradually widening, was about fifteen miles away. Jordan braked his car. He ignored the water in the spring. His spare supply was still ample and was distilled, not alkaline.

He turned to one of his deputies.

"Which way do you figger they're headin', Phil?" he asked. "Is there a cut or a pass through the mesa?"

"Dam'fino. Mesa's all cut up, but it's sure a Godforsaken country. Nothin' but rock an' clay an' cactus. No one ever goes there. I reckon I know as much of this country as most an' I sure never explored the dump. One thing's sure an' certain. Them fellers from the Three Star usually know where they are headin'. Trail's plain."

"Sure is." But Jordan scratched his head a trifle doubtfully. If Sandy Bourke and his chums had been tipped off, this trail was a little too plain to be true. Presently, as the machine plowed on south, they struck a patch of desert where the rock surfaced out and showed no trace of hoof or tire. Jordan stopped the car and the four got out, casting around, expecting that this outcropping had been used as a device to throw off the pursuit. Fairly fresh horse droppings showed that the buckboard had held to its course and, the rock passed, the trail showed plain again, curving in toward the broken wall of the mesa, leading toward a cleft that was plainly distinguishable.

"That's Bolsa Boquete," announced the deputy named Phil. "I never went through it."

"What's it mean—the name?"

"Boquete's gap. Bolsa's money—not jest the same as dinero. It's the word they have on the bank winders down in Mexico. Exchange."

"Money Gap? That don't tell us a thing," said Jordan. "But I'll bet my star they've gone through it all right. We ought to be not much more'n an hour behind them."

"They're on about us getting the papers," said Plimsoll. He had not said much on the trip so far. "Too much talk nowadays. You can't whisper in a dugout but what the news is all over the county inside of twenty minutes. Bourke sabes that getting the girl out of the county won't do any good; he aims to get her out of the state and any Arizona court or sheriff jurisdiction. He's the brains of the outfit. We've got to get her, Jordan."

"You ain't tellin' me a thing I don't know, Jim. But there's one thing you can tell me. Is that tip you got about Dynamite a sure one?"

Plimsoll, sitting beside Jordan, flashed him a look of contempt.

"Do you think I'm chasing this girl because I'm stuck on her? One of the party with this eastern crowd dropped into my place and talked. Showed some samples and I had a good look at them. He happened to leave a bit or two behind and I had them assayed. Here is where I get back the money I put up to grubstake Casey."

Jordan gave him a grin of derision.

"You an' yore grubstake," he jeered.

Plimsoll said nothing more.

As they neared the gap, translated by Phil in the unconsciousness that Bolsa had two meanings in Spanish, Jordan slowed up.

"No shootin' in this deal," he warned. "Come to a show-down, Bourke won't buck the law soon's we show papers. So long's he ain't been notified the court is makin' a ward of the girl they ain't done nothin' wrong. But—if he resists, that's different."

"I ain't goin' to be awful anxious to start shootin'," said Phil. "They done some pretty shootin' at the bridge that time. Sandy Bourke's a two-handed lead flinger an' Soda-Water Sam's no slouch. Neither's Mormon. Me, I'll be peaceable 'less it's forced on me otherwise."

They entered the split in the mesa. The cliffs shimmered in the heat, their outlines fuzzy. Branched and pillared cactus showed in gray-green reptilian growths. The soft earth, through which here and there the volcanic cores of the range were thrust, seemed as if it could supply the paint shops of a nation with almost any hue desired, ready for mixing with oil or water. Waves of heat beat between the walls of the cleft. The floor was fairly smooth, swept clean by occasional cloud-bursts, save for the skeleton of a tree and another of a too-far wandering steer, both blanched white as the alkali-crusted boulders. It was nearly level going and the car pounded along, all the occupants looking for trail sign. The mesa corridor, nowhere more than thirty feet wide, twisted and snaked, three hundred feet of sheer wall on either side topped by sloping cliffs mounting far higher toward the actual top of the mesa.

"Keep an eye peeled for rain, Phil," said Jordan, "I'd sure hate to get caught in here with a cloud-burst."

"Right," answered Phil. "I c'ud see better if I had a drink. Plimsoll, you got somethin' on the hip, ain't you?"

Plimsoll produced a bottle and the four of them drank the fiery unrectified, unstamped liquor. Ahead was an abrupt turn. Jordan slowed. Making the curve, a fence stretched across the gorge, reaching from wall to wall, a four-strand barrier of barbed-wire, strung on patent steel posts. Jordan braked with emergency. The sight of such a fence in such a place was as unexpected as the sun-dried carcass of a steer would be on Broadway. Plimsoll and Jordan cursed, the former in pure anger, the latter with some appreciation of the stratagem for delay.

"We can tear it down quicker'n they fixed it," he said. "I've got a pair of nippers in the tool kit. They can't have driven in those posts deep. Come on."

A voice floated down to them.

"You leave that fence alone, gents. If you please. I went to a heap of trouble puttin' up that fence. It's my fence."

They looked up, to see Mormon seated on the top of a great boulder that had land-slipped from the cliff into the gorge. From thirty feet above them he looked down, amiably enough, though there was a glint of blued metal in his right hand.

"Hello, Jim Plimsoll," he went on. "I ain't seen you-all fo' quite a while. You fellers out fo' a picnic?"

Jordan advanced to the foot of the rock, producing his papers.

"I have a bench warrant here to bring into court for the appointment of a proper guardian, the child Molly Casey, she being a minor and without natural or legal protectors. I've got yore name on these papers, Mormon Peters, as one of the three parties with whom the girl is now domiciled. I warn you that you are obstructing the process of the law by yore actions. You put up that gun an' come down here an' help to pull down this fence, illegally erected on property not yore own. Otherwise you're subject to arrest."

"That is sure an awful long speech fo' a hot day," said Mormon equably. "But I don't sabe that talk at all. Molly Casey ain't here, to begin with. Nor she ain't been here. An' I don't sabe no obstruction of the law by settin' up a fence in a mesa cañon to round up broom-tails."

One of the deputies snickered.

"Broom-tails?" cried Jordan. "That's too thin. There's no mustangs hangin' round a mesa like this, 'thout feed or water." He flushed angrily. He was short-tempered and he was certain the fence was a ruse to gain time, with Mormon left behind to parley. It all seemed to point to Sandy Bourke making for the railroad.

"You never kin tell about wild hawsses, or even branded ones," said Mormon pleasantly. "Ask Plimsoll. He picks 'em up in all sorts of places."

Plimsoll cursed. Mormon still held his gun conspicuously, and he restrained his own impulse to draw. Jordan wheeled on the gambler.

"You keep out o' this, Jim Plimsoll," he said. "I'm runnin' this end of it. He's talkin' against time. You come down an' help remove this fence," he shouted up at the smiling Mormon, "or I'll start something. It ain't on yore property and it's hindering the carrying out of my warrant."

"It ain't on a public highway neither," retorted Mormon. "But I'll come down. Don't you go to clippin' those wires an' destroyin' what is my property." He slid down the rock and commenced to unbend the metal straps that held the wire in place. Jordan and one of his men followed suit with pliers from the motor kit. The job took several minutes.

"You'll come along with us," said Jordan. "You lied about the girl comin' this way. I've a notion to take you in for that. But I reckon you can go back in the buckboard with yore partners."

"Reckon I'll travel in the buckboard, when you catch up with it," said Mormon. "But I'll come erlong with you fo' a spell—of my own free will.