The Boss of the Lazy Y, Charles Alden Seltzer [top 10 best books of all time .txt] 📗

wasn't a sound from his lips as he shot down into the awful blackness of the canyon. I got sick and dizzy, but not so sick that I couldn't see what was happening to Taylor. Taylor didn't jump for the ledge. He turned like a cat and grabbed a rail of the bridge, trying to climb back to the level. He'd have made it, too, but the Toltecs wouldn't let him. They jabbed at him with their spears and arrows and threw knives at him. One of the knives struck him in the shoulder, and when I heard him scream I pulled my guns and began to shoot across the canyon. I hadn't thought of it before; there are times when a man's brain refuses to work like he'd like to have it. But the Toltecs didn't mind the shooting a little bit.

"Three or four of them got hit and backed away from the edge of the canyon, but there were enough others to do what they were trying to do, and they did it. I stood there, helpless, and saw them shove Taylor off the bridge with their spears. When he finally let go and went turning over and over down into the black hole, my whole insides fanned up into my throat. That sensation has never left me; I wake up nights seeing Taylor as he let go of the bridge, watching him sink, tumbling over and over into that black gash, and I get sick and dizzy just as I did that night.

"But just then I didn't have much of a chance to be sick long. While I was standing there wondering what to do I saw a Toltec priest come out of the cave. He had a spear in his hand and was sneaking up on Taggart—who stood there almost fainting from fright. There was murder in the priest's eyes; I saw it and bent my gun on him. The trigger snapped on dead cartridges, and I yanked out my knife. I'd have been too late, at that. But the girl saw the priest, and she dodged behind him and gave him a shove. He pitched out and went head first down into the canyon.

"The Toltecs on the other side were watching, and they saw the priest go. Until now they hadn't shot at us, probably afraid of hitting the girl, but when they saw her push the priest over the edge of the canyon they saw that her sympathies were with us, and they let drive at us with their arrows. We were all slightly wounded—not enough to mention—and we got back into the cave where their arrows couldn't reach us. Three or four times the Toltecs tried to swing the bridge back into position, but they couldn't make it because there was no one on our side to help them, and Taggart and me made things mighty unpleasant for them with our sixes. They finally went away and held a council of war, which seemed to leave them undecided. They evidently hadn't figured on the girl turning traitor. If she hadn't they'd have got me and Taggart in short order.

"We'd got where the treasure was, all right, but it was a mighty bad outlook for us. We were kind of anxious about the bridge, being afraid the Toltecs would get it back into place; but the girl, who called herself Ezela, showed us that getting the bridge back wasn't possible without help from our side. She said that the priest she'd dumped down into the canyon was the only one with the tribe at the time; the others had gone to a distant village. She said, too, that there was a secret passage from the cave; she'd discovered it, and no one but her and the priests knew anything about it, but that the Toltecs would send runners for the priests and we'd have to get out before they came, or they'd lay for us at the outlet.

"Well, we hustled. We felt bad about Nebraska and Taylor, and were determined not to leave without some of the treasure, and after Ezela showed us where it was I kept her busy talking while Taggart got about as much as he could carry. Ezela offered no objections; on the other hand, when Taggart came back she told me to get some of the treasure too. Taggart hadn't taken enough to miss; there were millions of dollars' worth of gold and diamonds in the room, where they'd raised a kind of an altar, and I had my choice.

"I took some of the gold, but what attracted me—not because it was pretty, but because I saw in a minute that it was valuable—was a hideous image about six inches high. I had had an idea all along that Queza had been lying about the diamonds, but when I saw the image I knew he'd told the truth. There were about a hundred diamonds on the image, stuck all around it, the image itself being gold. The diamonds ran from a carat to seven or eight carats, and there was no question about them being the real thing. I stuck the thing into a hip pocket, figuring that with the few other ornaments I had I would have plenty to carry. Then I went back to where Ezela and Taggart were waiting for me.

"Ezela led us through a long, narrow passage, down some steps to another passage, and pretty soon we were sneaking along this and I began to get a whiff of fresh air. In a little while we found ourselves on a narrow ledge in the canyon, about thirty or forty feet below the level where the bridge had been, and it was so dark down there that we couldn't see one another.

"Ezela whispered to us to follow her, and to be careful. We had to be careful, and after what had happened, crawling along that ledge wasn't the most cheerful job in the world. It would have been a ticklish thing to do in the daytime, but at night it was a thousand times worse. I kept thinking about poor Taylor and Nebraska, and there were times when I felt that I just had to yell and jump out into the black hole around us. Taggart showed it worse than me. It took us an hour to traverse that ledge. We'd strike a short turn where there wouldn't be more than six or eight inches of ledge between us and eternity, and we couldn't see a thing—I've thought since that maybe it was a good thing we couldn't. But we could feel the width of the ledge with our feet, and there were times when my legs shook under me like I had the ague. Taggart was pretty near collapse all the time. He kept mumbling to himself, making queer little throaty noises and grabbing at me. Two or three times I had to turn and talk to him, or he'd have let go all holds and jumped.

"We finally made solid ground, and it was a full hour before me or Taggart could get up after we'd sat down, we were that tuckered out. The girl didn't seem to mind it a bit; she told me she'd discovered the secret passage that way. She'd been nosing around the mountain one day and had crept along the edge, finding that it led to the treasure cave.

"There wasn't any time lost by us in getting away from that place. Ezela told us there wasn't any use hoping that Nebraska and Taylor were alive, because the canyon was over a thousand feet deep and there was a roaring river at the bottom. I don't like to think of that fall.

"Taggart objected to Ezela going with us, but I couldn't think of letting her stay to be punished by her tribe for what she'd done—they'd have burned her, sure, she said. Besides, I may as well tell the truth, I'd got to liking Ezela a good bit by this time. She was good to look at, and she'd been hanging around me, telling me that she wanted to go with us, and that she'd done what she had for my sake, because she liked me. All that sort of stuff plays on a man's vanity when it comes from a pretty girl, and it didn't take me long to decide that I was in love with her and that, aside from humane reasons, I ought to take her with me. So I took her.

"We reached the boat after a week of heart-breaking travel, and we hadn't got over two miles out in the bay when we saw that we hadn't left any too soon. A hundred or so Toltecs were on the beach, doing a war dance and waving their spears at us. We had a pretty close call of it for grub, but we made a little town on the gulf and stocked up, and then we headed for the mouth of the Rio Grande. We camped one night a week later on United States soil, and that night while I was asleep Taggart tried to knife me. I'd showed Taggart the diamond image one day while Ezela was asleep in the boat, and he'd got greedy for it. Ezela screamed when she saw him getting close to me with the knife, and I woke in time to grab him before he got a chance to get the knife into me. He finally broke away, leaving all the treasure he'd brought except a little that he had in his pockets—he'd had a bundle of it strapped to his belt besides that—and I didn't see him again for four years.

"I took Ezela up the Pecos to the Connors', where I'd left you, bought a wagon and horses and a few things—bedding and grub and such stuff—and lit out for New Mexico. I figured that I had enough of the kind of friends I'd been keeping, and I didn't want to be ridiculed for tying up to an Indian girl—white folks don't like to see that. I came here and took up this land, figuring that I wouldn't be disturbed. I'd been here four years when Taggart came. I'd sold some of the treasure, but, for some reason which I've never been able to figure out, I kept the idol. I think I was afraid to try to sell it on account of the big diamonds in it.

"I gave Taggart the treasure he'd left behind the night he tried to knife me, but he wasn't satisfied; he wanted more, wanted me to sell the Toltec image and split with him. Of course I wouldn't do that because of the way he'd acted, and he swore to get it some day.

"He took up some land about fifteen miles down the river, and he's stayed there ever since. I've been afraid to go anywhere with the idol for fear he'd waylay me and get it. One day while I was away somewhere he came here and told Ezela about me having the idol. From that time on I led a life of hell. Ezela turned on me. She said I'd desecrated the altars of her tribe, and she kept harping to me about it until I got so I couldn't bear the sight of her.

"I discovered soon after we came here that I had been mistaken in thinking I had loved her—what I had thought was love was merely gratitude. My gratitude didn't last, of course, with her hounding me continually about the idol. Finally I discovered that she and Taggart were plotting against me. Of course, Taggart was after the image himself. He didn't care anything about her religious scruples, but he made her believe he sympathized with her, and made a fool of her. I tried to kill Taggart the day I found that out, but he got away, and after that he never traveled alone and I didn't get another