Lookout Hill (9781101606735) (21 page)

The half-breed’s knife stayed stuck in Juan Lupo as Lupo rolled away to once again reach for his own lost dagger. This time he closed his hand around his dagger’s handle and felt a layer of dirt and grit that allowed him the traction he needed. He swung the knife hard as he rolled back to the half-breed and saw the blade open a deep, long gash on his shoulder.

But the half-breed wasn’t finished. Even as blood spewed from his shoulder, he grabbed his knife and gave it a hard merciless rounding before jerking it from Lupo’s bleeding side.

Lupo bellowed in pain and he flung himself atop the half-breed, pinning the man’s knife hand to the dirt with his knee. He jabbed a bloody thumb deep into the half-breed’s eye until he felt the eyeball pull loose and jump to one side. Still he pressed his thumb even deeper, to its hilt into warm, soft substance and membrane. Gripping his bloody head like a punctured melon, he held Cold Foot in place as he stabbed his blade deep into the exposed side of the half-breed’s neck—once, twice, three times.

On the third vicious stab, he fell way on the ground
and stared up, blinking at the sky, feeling the earth sway beneath him like the deck of a troubled ship. The dagger fell from his hand onto the ground beside him. He felt for it and closed his hand back over it. He patted the bloody knife as if for a job well done. Beside him he watched blood fountain up from the half-breed’s throat, three feet in the air, then fall away to nothing.

Turning onto his side, knife in hand, he crawled over and looked down at Cold Foot’s grim bloody face. The half-breed’s remaining eye stared straight up into the endless sky with a look of disbelief.

“It’s all right…,” Lupo gasped. He patted Cold Foot’s bloody chest. “It’s okay….” He tugged at the half-breed’s shirt, trying to close the wide slash in the material. “It’s all right…,” he whispered again. He patted Cold Foot’s dead chest one last time, then rested his head down on it and felt a warm darkness close in around him.

When the three hours it should have taken Lupo to ride to Copper Gully and back turned into five, the Ranger set out down the trail searching for him. At a turn in the trail, the Ranger saw a horse coming at him, no rider on its back. He fell in beside the trotting horse, caught it by its bridle and brought it to a halt.

He was glad to see that it wasn’t Lupo’s horse, yet he had a suspicion that the horse had something to do with Lupo’s trip into Copper Gully, and that made him wish he’d waited for Lupo closer down the trail. But this was how Lupo had wanted it, he reminded himself,
nudging the stallion on along the trail, leading the horse beside him.

Before he’d gone a mile farther, he saw Lupo riding his horse toward him at a walk. Sam let out a breath, rode closer and stopped again, this time seeing how Lupo sat bowed in his saddle. Looking past Lupo, he eyed the trail behind him closely. Then he moved forward again, seeing the drawn look on Lupo’s face.

“What took you?” he asked, studying Lupo even closer, seeing something was wrong.

Lupo had washed the blood from his face and hands with canteen water and torn a shirt from his saddlebags into strips to dress the worst of his wounds as best he could.

“One of Pettigo’s men followed me,” he said, “a half-breed Cheyenne named Clayton Cain. That’s his horse you have there. I couldn’t risk him getting on our trail, so I killed him.”

Noting Lupo’s hand clutching his lower side beneath his poncho, Sam asked, “Are you shot? I didn’t hear any gunfire.”

“No, I’m not shot,” said Lupo. “It was a knife fight. I took some cutting before I finally pinned him down.”

Sam looked at him closer, seeing a stark paleness to his face and hands.

“We’ll make camp here. I’ll take a look at those wounds,” he said.

“No, not here,” said Lupo. He nodded farther toward a turn in the trail. “Up there in the turn. From there we can see most of Copper Gully. I need to show it to you.”

“Following you,” Sam said, backing the stallion a step and letting Lupo pass him. As he fell in behind Lupo, leading the half-breed’s horse behind him, he watched the wounded Mexican riding slightly hunched over but otherwise unimpaired by his wounds. When Lupo stopped at the turn thirty yards ahead, Sam watched him step down from the saddle stiffly.

Lupo gestured a hand out across a steep drop.

“We cannot be seen from this distance,” he said, directing the Ranger’s vision up along the jagged gully. It ran straight and deep, stretching up the side of a steep, rocky hill that dwarfed the hills surrounding it. From their position above the lower end of the gully, Lupo traced his gloved finger upward, following the gully into the far distance where it ended short beneath the crest of the hill.

“It looks as if some higher power sank a giant ax into the hillside, eh, Ranger?” he said. “Perhaps in a fit of rage against my people.”

Sam only looked at him. He could see Lupo fighting against the pain of his wounds, trying not to give in to them.

“Not the kind of higher power we both know, of course,” Lupo added, crossing himself idly as he spoke. The Ranger recognized a note of wry irony in his statement.

Sam looked up the deep-walled gully, and at the high walls of rock that terraced its sides at random intervals.

“I can see why this gully is the only access to the mines,” he said. Then he looked at the roofline of the
town below the deep gash in the hillside and spoke its name in Spanish.

“Barranca del Cobre,” he said. “I can also see how nobody gets past the town in any great numbers without being seen. There’s no other way up the gully except riding along the main street.”

“This was the intentions of the early Spaniards,” Lupo said. “They knew how to use the land itself to keep others out.” He gazed at the up-reaching gully. “But there is more to the Pettigos’ security than this alone,” he added.

“I figured there might be,” Sam said, staring into the distance where the eleven-mile gully ran out of sight.

“The Pettigos have so many gunmen they leave one posted as guard, stationed every few miles apart along the gully floor,” said Lupo. “There are four in all. The one closest to Copper Gully listens for any unusual gunfire coming from town. If he hears anything, he fires warning shots for the next gunman, who passes along warning shots in return. Finally the warning makes its way up the gully to the mines.”

Sam considered it.

“No wonder nobody ever makes it up to the mines and pulls a surprise attack on them,” he said.

“Sí,”
said Lupo, “the Pettigos are not fools. They pay the peasants they employ to mine the copper so little that they can afford many guns to keep their world protected. The peasant miners are little more than slaves. Yet the Pettigos’ gunmen live a good and prosperous life.”

The Ranger thought it over as he surveyed the rugged, steep terrain.

“This is the perfect place to hide a wagonload of stolen golden ingots,” he said. As he spoke, the two turned to their horses and swung up into their saddles, Lupo taking only a second longer, owing to his pain. Sam observed him in silence as they turned their horses and rode twenty yards deeper into the brush and rock cover above their trail.

This time when they stepped down from their saddles, Lupo held on to his saddle horn for a moment. Sam continued to keep a close eye him.

“Until I get my sights on Bellibar and Siebert, this is your show,” he said, watching Lupo straighten up enough to walk over to a rock and sit down, clutching his lower side. “But I have to ask, are you going to be able to do this?”

“I
will
do this,” Lupo said with determination. “You must believe me.” He didn’t mention Bellibar and Siebert just yet.

“All right,” said Sam, “I do believe you.”

“
Gracias
, Ranger,” he said, keeping the pain out of his voice.

“But I will ask, how do you plan on us getting up the gully to the gold without the posted guards tipping off the mines?” He pulled down both of their bedrolls from behind their saddles and pitched them on the rocky ground.

Lupo gave a tight, forced smile as Sam gathered dried brush and kindling twigs into a circle for a fire.

“Sometimes to solve a problem in the present, one must look to the past,” he said. “I could not imagine the Spaniards putting themselves on a hilltop which had only one trail in and out of their encampment. So I searched the other side of this hill for two weeks until I found an old, tunneled trail.”

The Ranger listened as he stepped over a few feet and brought back dried scrub pine branches.

“I followed the trail until I could see a guarded building where the wagon sits,” Lupo continued. “I could have taken it that very day, but I could never have gotten away without the mercenaries catching me. The wagon tracks would have led them to the hidden trail and all would be lost.”

“What makes you think they don’t already know about the tunnel and the hidden trail?” Sam asked, stooping, striking a wooden match and starting a low fire.

“The trail has not been used for a very long time,” said Lupo. “There were no hoofprints or boot prints to be seen.” He paused, then said, “Besides, it would no longer matter if they know or not. I have dynamite hidden halfway down the trail. As I go escape through the tunnel, I blow up the trail behind me.”

“What will my part be in this?” Sam asked, bringing the fire to a working level for boiling water.

Lupo looked at the Ranger until Sam realized he could answer the question himself.

“You need somebody to help you take out the guards,” Sam said. “Somebody with a rifle who can
hold them back until you get started down the back of the hillside.”

“If I am lucky, I can slip in and get the wagon and get out unseen while the Cadys are attacking the Pettigos from up the gully.”

“But if you
are
seen,” Sam said, “you’re dead, and the gold is never recovered.”

“I could never get down the back trail with horsemen riding after me,” Lupo said.

“It’s not going to be easy for your rifleman either,” said Sam. “The mercenaries will be stirred up like hornets, with the outlaws from Lookout Hill coming up the gully at them and the backside of this hill blowing up at the same time.”

As they talked, Sam had taken a small pot from inside his bedroll, poured water from his canteen into it and set it beside the growing campfire. Steam curled as the water bubbled on the fire side of the pot.

“I know it is a lot to ask, Ranger,” Lupo finally said.

“Then don’t ask,” Sam replied before the Mexican agent could finish. “I’ll give you the cover you need.” He paused before saying, “How do you know Wilton Marrs was telling you the truth, that the Cadys will be attacking the mines this week?”

“He has not lied to me before—that is all I can go on in this line of work. He told me the Cadys know about the gold but they are keeping it a secret from their men. If they successfully raid the mines, the gold will be in their hands. This is my only chance to get the gold back to my government.”

Sam heard urgency and stifled pain in his voice.

“I understand,” he said. “I’m after Bellibar and Siebert. They’ll be there. So will I.” He picked up the pot of water and set it beside Lupo. “Now throw off the poncho. Let’s see the damage.”

Lupo lifted the faded poncho with the Ranger’s help. Seeing the bloody shirt and the crimson bandages behind the opened bib, Sam kept the worst of his opinion to himself.

“He got you good, Easy John,” he said.

“
Sí
, he got me good,” Lupo replied, looking down at himself. “And now we clean the wounds and cover them”—he made a determined expression—“and back to work.”

In the middle of the night, Hodding Siebert felt himself being watched, hovered over by someone or
something
that had no business being there. Cautiously, he opened his eyes just enough to see the healing woman standing over him in her long black robe.
Uh-oh
…Above her he saw two small wispy birds circle and touch down lightly onto her shoulders. They stepped back and forth in place, as silent as death—no chirping, these birds, he noted.

No fluttering of wings, nothing….

He felt a cold sweat form at the back of his hairline. There was something eerie and wrong about those quiet birds.

I—I killed you,
he said to the hooded woman, or did he only think he said it aloud?

He batted his eyes, sitting up with his Remington drawn from under his saddle, cocked and aimed. Only now the healing woman was gone. He stared across the circle of low campfire light in time to see one of the
silent little birds go skittering off into the darkness, vanishing into the brushy terrain.

“Damn!” he murmured, the Remington out at arm’s length.

From across the campfire, standing guard with his trademark shotgun, Hayworth Benton had looked around at the sound of the gun hammer cocking. He swung around with his ten-gauge shotgun at port arms as Siebert rose from his blanket, the gun lowered now but only a little.

“What’s going on over there?” Benton asked.

Siebert just started walking in the direction of the small fleeing bird, staring straight ahead as if in a trance.