Bloom of Cactus Part 21

Slade hailed the tenderfoot with bluff cordiality when the mounted party loped up the slope to him.

"Gitting het up, huh? You act like an old-timer on a gold stampede.

Never before knew a prospector to go loco over copper."

"You should bear in mind I am an engineer, not a prospector," replied Lennon. "If I am successful over this copper project and it proves to be as large as I have been led to expect, I shall have won a place well up in my profession."

Slade grunted contemptuously and spurred his horse into a gallop. Within a mile he turned off trail to cut across country. Beyond the first mesas, which were a part of the trader-cowman's cattle range, came a jumbled waste of crags and broken ridges.

On the edge of this devil's dooryard of bare rocks and no less dry and sterile ravines Slade gave over the lead to the oldest of his Navahos. A white man could have found his way only by blind chance through the maze of twisted clefts that seamed the unscalable cliffs and crags.

Lennon soon lost all sense of direction. He realized that he could not hope to find his way out of these worst of bad lands without a guide. He must put off his plans to escape until the return to the trail. He began to surmise that Cripple Sim's inability to relocate the lost lode may not have been due altogether to his maiming by Apache arrows.

But this jagged waste that had kept the secret of the mine hidden for a generation would offer an impa.s.sable barrier to any railway. Unless an easier route could be found, the entire project was already proved hopeless. Even a vein of solid copper could not be worked at a profit if the metal had to be packed out on burros.

Yet there remained the chance of another route to the lode; and Lennon was not minded to confide his disappointment to Slade. He spurred his pony to keep pace with the others. The sooner the mine was relocated and the party back at the trail, the sooner he could make his attempt to escape. After Elsie had been freed from her dangerous prison in Dead Hole he could take time to search for a feasible route to the mine.

Toward sundown the old Navaho led the party clear of the shattered rock maze and up the side of a small mesa. From the table top Lennon saw the mighty towers of Triple b.u.t.te startlingly close ahead. Slade reined in to stare hard-eyed at the engineer.

"There's your b.u.t.te," he rumbled. "Which side do we head?"

"North," replied Lennon, without a moment's hesitation.

Though he had been lost since leaving the trail, he clearly remembered all the directions given by the old prospector as to the position of the lode in relation to Triple b.u.t.te. From the top of the mesa practical railway routes appeared to offer to the east and north of the great b.u.t.te.

Lennon studied the landscape until he noticed that the Navaho leader had headed south of east instead of north. Certain that his reply to Slade had been misunderstood, he spurred forward to explain that they were veering away from the lost lode.

Slade rode on without a word of acknowledgment. The presence of the Navahos made his contemptuous silence doubly galling. Lennon took it as a foretaste of what was to come and masked his chagrin. For Elsie's sake, he could not afford to quarrel with Slade at this stage of the dangerous game that must be played.

CHAPTER XVI

THE DROP

At sunset the reason for the guide's choice of route disclosed itself.

The party came to a group of small springs.

Lennon's throat had been parched for the last two hours. He spurred his jaded pony forward to the mesquite bushes where the Navahos were unsaddling, and slipped off to dip his empty canteen in the largest spring.

The guide muttered gutturally to Slade who was staring up narrow-eyed at the broken shoulder of Triple b.u.t.te. He wrenched himself about to scowl at Lennon. The engineer had straightened and was raising the half-filled canteen to drink.

"Hey, you!" bellowed Slade. "Drop that!"

The bullying command was more than Lennon could endure. He waved the canteen ironically at the trader, turned half away, and put the opening to his mouth. Slade whipped out his revolver and fired. The canteen flew out of Lennon's hand and thumped down upon the stone beside the spring.

For a moment Lennon was so astonished that he stood motionless, staring down at the canteen. The water gushed and gurgled through the holes pierced through the middle of the vessel by the heavy bullet.

The first coherent thought of the engineer was that Slade had intended to murder him. He put his hand to the pocket that held Farley's revolver and turned to face Slade. The trader's weapon was already back in its holster. His stained teeth showed in a wide grin.

"May I ask what you mean by shooting at me?" demanded Lennon.

Slade's mirth burst out in a roar of laughter.

"Shooting at you--shooting _now_?" he jibed when he could speak. "You must figger I'm plumb loco. Any fool ought to know anybody would hold off till you located the mine. Even supposing I was going to plant you, I'd wait, wouldn't I, huh?"

Lennon saw the point even clearer than the trader intended. He was supposed to take the piece of grim humour as a rea.s.surance. The derisive banter was an unintentional notification that he could expect to be murdered immediately after the finding of the lost lode. But until then he must continue to play the dupe.

"I must confess I do not fancy your Western jokes," he said. "You have spoiled a perfectly good canteen."

"Happens you're worth more to me than it; and you was dead set on filling up with that poison water," rejoined Slade.

"Poison?"

The old Navaho was drinking from the second spring, less than two paces away from the first. Lennon pointed at him.

"Sure," said Slade. "It's not the only case I know of finding good water 'longside a.r.s.enic, in a copper district."

The actions of the Indians bore out the truth of their master's a.s.sertion, or at least proved that they believed the first spring poisonous. The horses were picketed well away from it and from the joint rill of the two springs, which trickled down slope a few yards before seeping away among the stones.

The camp supper of bacon and flapjacks was soon followed by the spreading of blankets on the nearest stretches of sand. The Navahos went off to one side. Slade ordered Lennon to keep near him and carefully encircled their bedding-down place with the coils of a horsehair lariat.

The purpose of the lariat became apparent to Lennon when he was roused by the chill of dawn. He saw one of the Navahos rake out of the embers of the evening's fire a torpid tarantula as big as his hand.

Lennon thought of Elsie's daintiness and soft ways. The girl was utterly out of keeping with this fierce land of desolation and thirst, of thorns and poison springs, of venomous reptiles and insects, of ferocious beasts and men. She did not belong and never would. She was a garden flower.

Carmena was different. Her rich bloom was more like the flowers of the desert growths--the thorn-guarded yucca and needled cactus. There was nothing soft and cuddly about _her_.

At the realization of where his thoughts were drifting, Lennon wrenched his mental focus back to Elsie. What concern could the fate of Carmena be to him? She belonged with her drunken, criminal father in Dead Hole.

All thought and effort must be centred on the rescue of Elsie.

After a hasty meal of flapjacks, bacon, and coffee, the party started out to work north around Triple b.u.t.te. The country was now unknown ground even to the old Navaho guide. But he showed great craft in puzzling out the directions given to him.

An inner pocket hid the map that Lennon had brought from the East. He took care that Slade and the Navahos thought he was going by memory. Had he told of the map at any time after reaching Dead Hole he now felt certain that he never would have lived to get this near the mine. Slade would have taken the map and killed him out of hand. So at least Lennon believed.

Once the party rounded upon the northern slopes of Triple b.u.t.te, the points described on the map became easily recognizable. All that remained to do was to ride around a spur ridge and slant into the valley that headed up between the western and central towers of the great b.u.t.te. Here the searchers came upon trees and gra.s.s and running water.

Farther up stood a small cabin, near a spring that had been blasted out and rimmed with rock to form a convenient basin.

Lennon spurred forward beside Slade.

"Promising. What?" he remarked.

"Not what, but where?" growled the trader. "Hold on--that looks like an old burro trail."

"Yes. Up first ravine toward left edge of middle b.u.t.te, half a mile to lode," Lennon quoted the last directions that he had read on the map.

Slade signed for the Navahos to wait at the spring. A brutal jab of the spurs sent his horse bounding off at top speed. Lennon's pony was left behind until the leader wheeled into the first ravine and came up against a steep slide of loose rock. To force even the nimblest of mounts to attempt such an ascent would have meant risking a bad fall.