The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (80 page)

“I’m with Madden here, on a little survey job.”

“Madden?” Fagin smiled. “What is this, a meeting of the lost souls department? Or a reunion of the veterans of the Chaco?” His eyes held on Madden. “Well, what do you want with me? If you think I want to leave, you’re wrong. I won’t leave here until I kill every last one of these dirty savages.” His voice was low and vicious and shook with repressed hatred. “They bobbed my legs.” He chuckled grimly. “An’ all because I went to their cursed Chipan!”

He hitched closer on the crutches, his eyes gleaming. “Madden, you’re a man with spine. There’s gold in that place. Gold, diamonds, everything. It makes Cuzco look like a piggy bank, take it from me. I got there, an’ I’d of gotten away, too, if it hadn’t been for that Cantal, there. He spotted me, an’ when the priests got through, they’d taken my legs so I could never go back.

“Take me back there, man. I’ll show you where it is.” He hitched closer and the excitement made his veins swell in his head. “Listen, man.” His voice boomed loudly, and Turk saw other natives coming nearer, and he suddenly wondered how much of this Natochi could grasp. “There’s loot there enough for all of us. Everyone. Gold to buy the world.”

“You’d better take it easy,” Turk advised softly. “These natives won’t like that. They’ll understand.”

“Understand? Them?” He sneered. “They don’t savvy anything, but their pig talk.” He leaned forward, thrusting his head out at them. “But you should see Chipan. What a city. It puts the Maya and the Inca to shame. An’ old? Why that town’s older than Rome. Older than Athens. Probably older than Babylon. You take it from me, this is something.

“You can take me,” he hissed, leaning toward Turk. “To the devil with these gugus. Kill the lot of them. You’ve got guns. Mow ’em down. Let’s get their gold an’ get out of here.”

C
ANTAL TOUCHED
T
URK’S ARM
, and his face was severe. He spoke quickly. Nato interpreted.

“He says we must go now,” she said, her eyes were frightened. “I think he understands, as I do, and it will be bad for you.”

“No,” Turk said, looking at Fagin, “I won’t be involved in any venture that will take me to Chipan. If it is tabu, I shall respect their tabu. If you want to get out of here, to get back to civilization, I’ll take you out, some way.”

Fagin glared wildly. “Fool!” he screamed. “You blithering fool! There’s gold there, I tell you.
Tabu!
What do their fool tabus mean to a white man?”

Madden turned abruptly away and accompanied by the others, walked rapidly off. Behind them, Fagin raved and shouted.

“I’ll get there!” he screamed. “I’ll get there, an’ to the devil with you all. I’ll see the whole bunch of you dead. All of them an’ all of you!”

Madden stopped when they were well away from Fagin and he glanced at Buck Rodd. The big prospector’s face was grim.

“Crazy,” Rodd said. “Crazy as a loon.” He scowled. “But they seem to be takin’ good care of him. I wonder why.”

Turk voiced the question to Nato, and she replied quickly, “We do not like the—what do you say?—break of tabu, but we have much feeling for one touched by spirits. The priests took his legs so he could not go back, for there is much danger there, spirits that cause much sickness. But we care for him. We always shall.”

“Rodd,” Turk said, “there’s probably something to this tabu. Lots of white men scoff at them, but usually what a native calls evil spirits is something with a very real foundation. In New Guinea once a guy investigated a tabu and found it originated with an epidemic of smallpox. Tabu was the native method of quarantine. There’s probably some good reason for this one.”

“Yeah,” Rodd agreed, then he looked at Turk. “I wonder if Fagin’s nuts or if there is a lot of gold there. Man alive! What a find it would be!”

“Right now I’m thinking of something else,” Turk admitted. He shook a cigarette from a pack and handed it to Rodd, then took one himself. “Buck, did you happen to look past him into the doorway? I did, and lying on the table, half covered by a cloth, was the torn end of a package of cigarettes. The same brand as these.”

“The devil!” Rodd shoved his thumbs down in his belt and squinted his eyes. “Then he’s seen somebody else recently, and if that’s true, I guess we both know who.”

“Sure, Boling’s crowd.” Turk shrugged. “This may come to a showdown mighty quick now.”

Yet careful questioning of both Natochi and Cantal failed to elicit any information about white men other than Fagin. Wherever Russ Fagin had been, or whomever he had talked to, these two knew nothing about it. Yet Turk could see that his questions aroused curiosity, and before he left the village he had the promise from both Cantal and Nato that if any other white men came around, he would be notified at once.

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK
passed swiftly and without incident. The amphibian was constantly in the air, shuttling back and forth from the base to Obido, and the film and records piled up swiftly. Yet, as the days went by, Turk found himself growing more and more worried, and the strain was beginning to show on both Mora and London as well. Rodd took it easy. He hunted occasionally, or relieved Mora or London, who instructed him in their work. Often he prospected one of the nearby streams, or roamed the mountains with a sack and a hammer, taking samples. These trips Turk knew were more than prospecting trips, for Buck Rodd was keeping an eye on the country. He was not trusting to the natives.

On the tenth morning, Turk gestured at the stack of film, waiting in its cans to be transported to Obido.

“We’ll take that in tomorrow,” he suggested, “but today we knock off. I’m taking a flight over the jungle. You come along, Dick, an’ the rest of you take it easy around here, but keep your eyes open.”

They took off in the bright morning sunlight and headed due north as usual, but when a few miles were behind them, Turk banked the ship steeply and circled low over the jungle.

“Keep your eyes open, Dick,” he said, “this is a reconnaissance flight. Boling’s outfit has me worried.”

With the two Pratt & Whitney motors roaring along pleasantly, Turk moved the ship down to a thousand feet and swung over the green carpet of jungle. Somewhere, not too far away, Boling would have a base camp. Twice his planes had been seen, but if they were actually conducting a survey it was not obvious, or else they were working far to the west.

That Vin Boling or one of the men with him had established secret contact with Russ Fagin seemed obvious, and if they had, they would know about Chipan. Knowing how inflammatory natives can become over violation of a tabu, Turk Madden understood that if the newcomers invaded Chipan it might mean disaster for every white man in the area.

Movement caught his eye, and he turned his head. The small plane they had seen before was just rising over the tops of the trees, and as it lifted, it turned in a wide swing toward them.

Turk yanked back on the stick and began to reach for altitude. What was coming he didn’t know, but he wanted to be ready for anything. He went up in a fast climbing turn and it took him over a long savanna, the one from which the small ship had risen.

“Look!” Dick yelled. “There’s some planes! Three of them!”

Vin Boling’s headquarters lay before him. In air line distance it was no more than twenty miles from his own, with the native village between them. He scowled. It was odd that nothing had been seen of Boling’s planes when he had been running a survey with the magnetometer.

He glanced back at the smaller plane and saw it was climbing fast and already a little above him.

“Looks like trouble!” he said, nodding quickly. “If that boy is armed, we may have plenty of it!”

London looked at him, astonished. “You don’t mean they’d fight us? Like in war?”

Turk chuckled grimly. “Brother, when you tangle with that crowd it’s always war. Petex knew what they were doing when they hired Boling. And Bordie, Mather, and Pace are fit running mates for him.”

The small ship was a high-powered job with a terrific rate of climb, and it had passed them in the air. Suddenly, it went into a wingover and came down toward them in a screaming dive.

With one fleeting glance at the small ship, Turk opened the throttle wide and hit the straightaway, streaking off over the jungle. Yet he knew he could not hope to keep away from the smaller ship, which was much faster and more maneuverable than his own.

He saw it pull out of its dive and level off in pursuit, and he deliberately slowed. The heavens were almost cloudless, and there was little chance of escape that way. His only chance lay down below or in a sudden break that would put the ship in his sights. He cleared his guns with a burst of fire and saw Dick’s startled glance. Then as the small gray ship came hurtling up on his tail, Turk did a half roll and came out of it only a few hundred feet over the jungle.

Several towering trees loomed before him, and he pointed the nose for them and put the stick forward, screaming in a long, slanting dive. He heard a yell from Dick and saw the bright spark of tracer as it leaped up alongside the cabin then fell away behind. The trees, like a solid wall, seemed rushing to meet them, and when they seemed certain to crash, he yanked back on the stick and the ship zoomed up and over. He put the stick forward and did a vertical bank with a wingtip almost touching the jungle below and turned right back on his trail, hauling back on the stick and grabbing at the space above him.

W
ITH A QUICK GLANCE
around as he turned, he saw the fighter had safely missed the trees, but had overshot on his unexpected turn and was pulling up now in an Immelmann. Kicking the throttle open, Turk streaked away for the rising ship and let go with a burst of fire that streaked by the nose, but as the other ship was pulling out, it staggered suddenly in the air, and Turk banked sharply and swung around.

Although he had not noticed it, one of his bullets must have gone home on the other ship. Coolly, he hung above it and behind, watching the pilot fight the ship. He moved in closer, and, suddenly, the gray ship snapped out of it, pulled up sharply and, banking, swept toward Turk, guns blasting fire.

Cursing himself for a fool, Turk Madden made a flat turn, opening up on the smaller ship. But the burst was a clean miss, and the next thing he knew tracer was streaking by his plane. There was no chance to get away. The issue must be decided here. Pointing the amphibian straight at the gray ship, he opened the throttle wide.

He was hoping the pilot would take it for a suicide attempt, an effort to get him while going down himself. But whatever the pilot of the gray ship thought, he pulled up suddenly, and Turk let go with a burst that riddled his tail assembly.

The small ship fell away sharply, clearing Turk’s wingtip by inches, and Madden caught a fleeting glimpse of Bordie’s face, white and desperate, as the man fought the falling ship.

Madden pulled out and streaked away. Suddenly he was shaking all over and felt sick and empty inside. He glanced over at London, and Dick’s face was as white as his own must have been and his eyes were round and bright. Suddenly, Turk was sweating. He wiped his face and glanced back. A puff of smoke rose suddenly from the jungle, and then a tiny spark of flame. Madden turned his head and started back for camp.

“Do you think he got out of that?” Dick asked hoarsely.

Turk shrugged. “There’s no telling. When a ship crashes into the jungle like that, a man’s got a chance, anyway. A mighty slim one, but I’ve known them to walk away. Those trees right there are mighty high, and that jungle’s like a web. He didn’t have much speed when he hit.”

“What now?” London asked.

“Their base,” Turk said grimly. “They asked for a fight, an’ they can have it.”

Yet when he zoomed over the savanna where Boling’s planes had been, the craft were gone. However, the tents were still there, and what was obviously a storage tank. Madden turned at the end of the field and came streaking back, his twin motors wide open. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a man ducking from one of the tents, and then he cut loose with his guns and saw the tents go up in a burst of flame.

Turning, he made another pass at the field, this time pointing a finger of tracer at the storage tank, and getting it. There was an explosion and a puff of red rolling flame following a burst of black oily smoke.

At the end of the field, Turk leveled off and headed for the horizon. It had been a hot bit of work, but a good one. He streaked away, then made a wide circle and headed back for his own base. He felt suddenly let down now that it was over, and yet he knew just how lucky he had been. If Bordie had waited him out, or hadn’t pulled up when he did, it would have been only a matter of a minute or two until he would have shot down the heavier, less maneuverable amphibian. In the last analysis, in such a scrap, it was how much spine a man had, and the breaks.

Madden mopped the sweat from his face again and swung low over the lake. Then he cut the throttle and came in for a landing. The ship touched the water lightly, then took it and taxied toward the shore.

“Hey!” London leaned forward. “Where is everybody?”

Turk’s brows drew together. The shore was empty.

F
ACING UP THE BANK
, they started for the tent, yet even before they reached it, they saw Phil Mora. The geologist and cameraman was struggling to get off the ground, his head bloody.

Turk bent over him. “Phil! What happened? Where’s Rodd and Shan?”

Mora’s lips struggled to shape the words, and London came running with a pan and some cloths.

“Relax,” London said. “Take it easy.”

Madden’s eyes swept the clearing. A few quick steps in each direction showed him no one in sight. If Rodd and Shan were alive, they were in the jungle. At least, he told himself with sharp relief, they were not lying here. He strode back to Mora.

“Tell me what happened,” he pleaded, dropping beside the man.

“Six of them,” Mora said. “They came out of the jungle when I was in the tent. Shan had gone to the spring for water. Buck was off looking around in the jungle. They slugged me when I came out.”