you’d open a can of sardines. Tonight—”
The words stuck in Nevada’s throat. For a moment both of them were too stupefied to speak. They lay there with their mouths open. One of the sentries had moved a little nearer the gate he guarded, and as he stepped forward, his movement startled a mother hen and brood of chickens busily scratching in the dust near his feet. Eyes bugging, they saw the startled hen rush against the steel fence, saw its feathers appear to puff out all over its body, and then it fell, a limp, shapeless think against the dust.
“So yuh want tuh ram a pair of wire-cutters ag’in that fence, eh?” Utah’s eyes were still bulging with surprise. “Jim, I dunno much about electricity, but I heard somewhere that metal sorta takes it from here tuh there. If you stick pinchers again that wire yo’re goin’ to look wuss than that thar chicken. Leastways they can throw it in the stew pot!”
Nevada had no answer for that. His faded, blood-shot eyes were watching the charcoal burner never waver in his march on the guarded gate, and his busy brain was full of calculations.
He spoke swiftly out of the corner of his mouth to McClatchey. “That wood-hoppin’ hombre is a heap sight smarter than we are, Utah. He must figger he knows a way to get them entries to open up that gate for him, or he’d be layin’ back here like us, lookin’ things over. Watch him close. If we’re ever going to get inside Tres Cruces, it’ll have to be the same way!”
“I see now,” Utah responded, “why we ain’t met none of them Penitentes out huntin’ or snoopin’ around. Jim, I’ll give you odds them jiggeros are prisoners in their own town! We—”
Nevada’s hard fingers bit into the old outlaw’s arm and stopped him. His eyes were watching the pseudo wood-chopper’s every move and gesture, for some signal that might make those gates swing open. The signal came as he studied the strange lawman. The man’s right arm shot skyward in some kind of stiff-arm salute.
The sentries answered it smartly. Then one of them pressed a button on a panel board alongside the small, adobe sentry house a few feet inside the fence. At his move, the gates swung open.
The charcoal burner, leading his donkey, passed through. Nevada watched the gates swing silently shut again, and then his eyes were shuttling to the sentry house. Six men in those same black uniforms came marching from the house. Nevada heard an order barked in some nasal-sounding, unintelligible tongue, by a small, mustached man who seemed to be the leader of the platoon of Mexican soldiers. Instantly they surrounded the wood-chopper and his burro.
Nevada felt Utah’s arm jerk. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the lifting sheen of metal, and only his quick move saved trouble for them right then. His fingers clamped McClatchey’s wrist.
“Let go, dammit,” Utah snapped. “That danged wood-cutter’s a white man, and I ain’t goin’ to see him handled rough by no furriner and a bunch o’ greasers. I may be an outlaw, but—”
“You’ll be a dead outlaw if you unlimber that smoke wagon!” Nevada cut him short.
The sound of a shot snapped his attention back to the tableau within the electrified gates of Tres Cruces. He hadn’t seen the gun appear, but now there was a long-barreled, ugly-looking automatic in the hand of the small leader of the sentry-house platoon. Laughter, that sounded more like the hiss of a desert sidewinder, was coming from the man’s throat. He stood there looking down at the inoffensive burro. The little animal was dead.
“That dirty, low-down skunk!” Utah was muttering. “Jim, get yore hands off me. Jest give me one shot. Only one. That jack needs company!” It was more than the pseudo lawman could stand, too. Perhaps, Nevada realized with sudden insight, that had been the little foreigner’s reason for shooting the burro. The man probably knew that any red-blooded American couldn’t stand the sight of seeing animals mistreated needlessly. And he was right.
* * * *
The ragged charcoal burner, who had been standing humbly beside his burro, suddenly became a raging whirlwind of a man. Nevada nodded admiringly as he saw the lawman knock two Mex heads together, drop them like discarded sacks, and make his spring at the little foreigner with the gun. Before the man could so much as lift the weapon, a pistoning fist plowed straight into his face. Blood spurted from the man’s nose like geysering water as he stumbled backward. But the fight was too one-sided to last. Sheer weight of numbers carried the nameless lawman to the ground.
“I’m goin’ in there!” Utah raged. “Jim, whar’s yore sportin’ blood? We cain’t let them kill that gent, even if he would like tuh see us behind bars.”
“They won’t kill him,” Nevada said grimly. “They want somethin’ from him. Notice the way they’re going through his clothes?”
For a few minutes they watched in silence as the strange lawman was thoroughly searched. Then four of the Mexicans picked up the unconscious American. “Good gosh a-mighty,” Utah groaned. “They’re takin’ the pore devil to the Castle of No Return!”
“The Castle of No Return? I don’t savvy, amigo?”
Utah relaxed like a spent runner and gestured at the town. Nevada followed his pointing arm. For the first time since they had reached the rim he was really getting a chance to look over Tres Cruces. “The town covered, perhaps, a square mile of the wide plateau. Crooked alleys wandered between the houses. There seemed to be only one straight street in the whole village, and that ran from the gate in front of them straight toward twin hillocks around which Tres Cruces was built like the spokes around the hub of a wheel. The hills were low, rising barely a hundred feet above the tile roofs of the town’s adobes. Three great, ironwood crosses stood on one of the hills, stark against the dusk. A grim reminder to the Penitentes that their creed demanded crucifixion.
Nevada turned his pale eyes to the other hillock. Sprawled across the summit of it was a great stone and adobe building, that made the huts squatting in the village below it took meaner by contrast.
“The Castle of No Return,” Utah McCatchy was saying, “on account of plenty hombres who git inside never come out again. Even the Penitentes ain’t got much use for the place!”
Nevada was listening to his partner with only half of his attention. His eyes were on the two tall stone towers rising from either end of the great hacienda. Wires were strung between them. He could just make them out through the gathering dark.
“I’ve heard it said,” McClatchey was going on, “that parts of the castle was built clean back in Aztec times. The Penitentes have added to it since. The boss Penitente hangs out thar and some of the things I’ve heard it said they do thar would curl yore hair. They go clean back tuh Bible times for a lot of their notions.”
“And right up to date for the rest of ’em,” Nevada cut in. “Those wires strung between them towers are one of these here aerials, which means they got a rad-io in one of the towers. And I’ll betcha on a outfit that size they can send out stuff as well as git it in. Fella, yore Penitentes didn’t put up that rad-io. It’s the work of them damned furriners.”
Utah nodded. “Yo’re right there, Jim. Makes my toes itch to tromp them sidewinders. An’ now,” he added gloomily, as they watched the platoon of soldiers carrying the pseudo woodcutter’s figure up the hill toward the castle, “we got to figger out a way to get inside that gate, grab that hombre they’ve done pulverized, git our gold which is bound to be in that danged castle, and the hombres responsible for killin’ ol’ Dan Conover, and then get them and us back out to the Border.”
Nevada chuckled. “Let’s just concentrate on getting inside that fence,” he said dryly.
He had hardly spoken the words when a far-off drone, like a bumble bee buzzing, came to them. Utah jerked. “Leapin’ blue blazes,” he exclaimed hoarsely, “it’s that danged airyplane comin’ back.” Then his canny old eyes surveyed the darkening plateau, and he relaxed a little. “They won’t see us here, at that,” he chuckled comfortably. “It’s gittin’ too dark.”
“Yeah?”