reached into one of the saddlebags behind his saddle and pulled out a strip of jerky. He gnawed a chunk off it with his strong white teeth, and tossed the rest forward to McClatchey. “I’d shore hate to have you die hungry!” he remarked.
* * * *
They were still gnawing on the leathery jerky a half hour later when the rattle of hoofs on stone brought them from their reclining positions against a big boulder, some fifty feet below the edge of the trail.
Nevada led the way to peepholes they’d already prepared in a copse of chaparral. He had barely settled himself when a chill that felt like icy water running down his back, prickled the length of his spine. He felt Utah stiffen beside him.
“Leapin’ blue blazes,” he whispered, “weren’t you the hombre who claimed you could scatter these modern lawdogs with a boo?”
Nevada Jim James was the one who had claimed that all right, and now to himself, he admitted his mistake. Some lawmen had little stomach for facing the half ounce slugs good old-fashioned Peacemakers packed, but the young, hard-faced, blue-eyed man who had faced them at the Bronco was evidently not one of that kind. For that was who trod the trail above them. Nevada felt certain that he was not mistaken.
A man couldn’t help but recognize those eyes which were as direct and straight as the barrel of a forty-five. The stranger was right above them now. Except for those eyes, he would pass for a Mexican anywhere. His disguise was perfect, and whoever had dyed his skin a chocolate brown, had known how to do it.
“Phew!” Utah McClatchey wiped his brow when the stranger passed on out of sight. “I swear that hombre was lookin’ straight at us. Jim, that young cuss is sure enough one tough jiggero. You suppose he’s come down here trailin’ us?”
For once in his life Nevada Jim didn’t know what to think. “That cuss ain’t no ordinary lawman, Utah,” he pointed out, “on account of they stay on their own side of the Line. Course he could of slipped across. That could account for his disguise.”
“He must figger he’s one skookum hombre if he thinks he can take us single-handed,” Utah grunted.
Nevada made no answer. He was just easing from the chaparral to go and get their mounts and mule tethered behind the nest of boulders where they had hidden, when a sound alien to these peaks sent his long body diving back to cover.
It was the roar of an airplane motor, an ear-shattering sound the echoed back from the iron peaks like the thunder of a mammoth blast. He had barely time to settle himself, when both of them saw the low-winged, silver monoplane sail out from the edge of the plateau, and start climbing into the clear blue sky.
Utah watched it with an expression of disgust twisting his seamed face. “Looks like a danged overgrown trout, ’ceptin’ it’s got wings, and a trout ain’t. Why in hell we hidin’ here in the brush?” he demanded acidly. “If any of ’em in that airyplane are lookin’ this way they’ll see our cayuses. Dang it, yuh got to crawl in a hole and pull it in after yuh to keep one of them critters from spottin’ you!”
Nevada crawled from the chaparral, and brushed twigs from his shirt and pants after watching the airplane all but disappear into the blue above them. Shading his eyes, he saw it level off finally, and streak away, a silver flash in the afternoon sunlight, toward the Arizona border. He reached for his bandanna, and his hand touched the thin, leather book he had been carrying since finding it beneath the body of the dead foreigner in Dan Conover’s bunkroom. Thoughtfully he pulled the book from his pocket and stared at it.
“What you lookin’ at that danged thing for?” Utah queried irascibly. “Figger to find the answers to why that that plane’s headin’ back to Arizony?”
Nevada put the little red book back in his pocket sheepishly. “I was just thinkin’,” he explained as they went for their horses, “that mebbe that sky-buggy is headin’ back to Dan’l’s to look for this thing. They shore as heck ain’t pyrootin’ off in that direction for nothing.”
“You got more imagination than good sense, Jim,” Utah grumbled. “But dang it all, I suppose yore guess is good as mine. There’s only one thing I’ll lay you odds on,” his creaky voice turned grimly serious for a moment, “and that is that us two hellers from Helldorado have got to do all the plain and fancy hellin’ we’re going to afore that flyin’ chariot gits back here. They saw our hosses, that’s a lead-pipe cinch, and they didn’t see us, which is goin’ to make ’em mighty suspicious. We’re goin’ to have a fine time now convincin’ anybody that we’re just a couple of harmless ol’ prospectors!”
* * * *
The charcoal burner was a good half mile ahead of them by the time they gained the trail again, but the shadows were thickening so rapidly now along this flank of the mountain that they did not think the disguised lawman would notice them.
But in that surmise they were wrong. They had barely lined out single file again when a harsh curse from McClatchey in the lead made Nevada lift in his stirrups and crane his neck to see what had brought on the exclamation.
The answer was simple. The woodcutter had halted his burro. He was leaning negligently against the animal’s rump looking back at them. Then he waved.
Utah cursed again, heartily. “I’ll lay you my last centavo,” he growled back to Nevada, “that that hombre knew we were hidin’ in the brush here all the time. An’ if he ain’t standin’ there laughin’ at us, I’ll eat that straw sombrero he’s wearin’. Jim, we been out-smarted by that hombre! If he knew we were down here in the brush, why in Hades didn’t he cut loose at us with that fancy smoke-pole he’s packin’?”
Nevada Jim shook his head, and his thin, hatchet-face turned sour. “There ain’t but one answer tuh that,” he grunted as disgustedly as Utah.
McClatchey’s black eyes widened. “You mean he ain’t here lookin’ for us?”
Nevada nodded. “You guessed it the fust time,” he answered dryly.
“Then what in blue blazes is he here fer?” Utah demanded.
“If we knew that,” Nevada drawled, “and a few other things, mebbe we wouldn’t have to foller the gent to Tres Cruces!”
* * * *
Dusk was touching the plateau on which the Penitente town, Three Crosses, had been built, by the time the Hellers reached the top of the precipice trail. The charcoal burner had crossed the rim a good ten minutes before them.
“Let’s you and me be smarter’n that gent,” Utah remarked with one of his ugly grins, that showed his broken, tobacco-stained teeth, “and take a look for ourselves afore we stick our necks in a noose.”
Nevada nodded. Keen excitement stirred through him as he dismounted. Adventure such as this was meat and drink to the pards, and beneath that feeling coursing through him was another, deeper feeling that he could not analyze. He felt like a man on the threshold of some great discovery, for certainly there were forces at work here that neither of them could understand.
He was right behind Utah as the old outlaw dropped to his stomach and inched the remaining way to the rim, but he was as unprepared as his partner for the sight that met them.
Shimmering like lace in the last rays of sunlight striking the plateau, was a high steel-wire fence surrounding Tres Cruces. A single gate at the end of the trail in front of them was the only means that Nevada Jim could see of entering the town. And that was guarded by two Mexican sentries standing by their rifles on either side of it. The Mexicans appeared to be wearing some kind of military uniform.
Utah McClatchey, always the more vocal of the outlaw duo, was already voicing his surprise in a low, excited monotone. “Hang me for a hoss thief,” he exclaimed vociferously, “I never counted on seein’ a sight like this. Why that town’s done up tighter’n a dogie in a loadin’ chute!”
Nevada had been thinking fast. Now he voiced his thoughts as