The Coyote Part 16

"Don't want him," said Rathburn curtly. "You going in to see the sheriff?"

Lamy nodded. "His orders. Say, Coyote----"

"He'll probably meet you on the way," Rathburn interrupted with a sneer. "You can be figurin' out what to say to him. My saddle with the horse?"

"It's hanging from a tree where you go into the pocket. Big limestone cliffs there below the shale. Say, Coyote, my sister an' kid brother was tellin' me about your visit that morning, an' I guess I understand----"

"We can't stand here talkin'," Rathburn broke in, pulling the tobacco sack from his shirt pocket. He extracted a folded piece of paper.

"Here's a note I wrote you in jail before I left. Read it on the way in when there's no one watching you. Maybe you'll learn something from it; maybe you won't. I expect you wanted money to fix that ranch up; but you'll get further by doing a little irrigating from up that stream than by trying to be a bandit. You just naturally ain't cut out for the part!"

With these words he handed Lamy the note and bounded back up the slope. The screen of cedar bushes closed behind him as Lamy pushed on, looking back, wondering and confused, with heightened color in his face.

It was late that night when Lamy returned to the little ranch house.

Frankie had gone to bed, but his sister was waiting up for him with a meal and hot tea ready.

He talked to his sister in a low voice while he ate. When he had finished he read the note for the third time; read it aloud, so his sister could hear.

"LAMY: I meant to take you back and give you up, for I was pretty sore. Then I saw your resemblance to your small brother by the freckles and eyes and I remembered he had said something about you saying some decent things about me. I guess you thought they were nice things, anyway.

"Then I thought maybe you got your ideas about easy money from the stuff you'd heard about me, and I sort of felt kind of responsible. I thought I'd teach you a lesson by flirting with that posse and telling you that killing story to show you what a man is up against in this game. I guess I can't get away from it because they won't let me. But you don't have to start.

I was going to give you a good talking to before I let you go, but I hadn't counted on the little kid in the house. I'm glad he told the truth. He'll remember that. I gave you back your gun because you hit the nail on the head when you said if I was square I'd give it to you and let you make a run for it.

"I took the money off you so if they got us I could take the blame and let you off. I can take the blame without hurting my reputation, so don't worry. I'm not doing this so much for your sake as for your kid brother and your sister. I figure you'd sort of caught on when I heard they hadn't located my horse. That was a good turn. Do me another by getting some sense. There's plenty of us fellows that's quite capable to furnish the bad examples.

"RATHBURN."

The girl was crying softly with an arm about her brother's neck when he finished reading.

"What--what are you going to do, Eddie?" she sobbed.

"I'm goin' to irrigate!" said Ed Lamy with a new note in his voice.

"I'm goin' to build a sure-enough ranch for us with this piece of paper for a corner stone!"

Dawn was breaking over the mountains, strewing the gleaming peaks with warm rosettes of color. A clear sky, as deep and blue as any sea, arched its canopy above. Virgin stands of pine and fir marched up the steep slopes to fling their banners of green against the snow. Silver ribbons of streams laughed in the welcome sunlight.

In a rock-walled gulch, far above the head of Sunrise Canon, a fire was burning, its thin smoke streamer riding on a vagrant breeze. Near by lay a dun-colored horse on its side, tied fast. A man was squatting by the blaze.

"I hate to have to do this, old hoss," the man crooned; "but we've got to change the pattern of that CC2 brand if we want to stick together, an' I reckon we want to stick."

He thrust the running iron deeper into the glowing coals.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WITNESS

The morning was hardly two hours old, and the crisp air was stinging sweet with the tang of pine and fir, as Rathburn rode jauntily down the trail on the eastern slope of the divide and drew rein on the crest of a high ridge. As he looked below he whistled softly.

"Juniper, hoss, there's folks down there plying a nefarious trade, a plumb dangerous trade," he mused, digging for the tobacco and brown papers in the pocket of his shirt. "I reckon they're carrying on in direct defiance of the law, hoss."

The dun-colored mustang tossed his head impatiently, but his master ignored the animal's fretful desire to be off and dallied with tobacco and paper, fashioning a cigarette, lighting it, breathing thin smoke as his gray eyes squinted appraisingly at the scene below.

Winding down into the foothills, in striking contrast to the dim trails higher up, was a well-used road. It evidently led from the saffron-tinted dump and gray buildings of a mine which showed on the side of a big, bald mountain to southward. At a point almost directly below the ridge where the man and horse stood, it crossed a small hogback and descended a steep slope between lines of jack pines, disappearing in the timber farther down.

The gaze of the man on the ridge was concentrated on the bit of road which showed on the hogback and the slope beyond. A truck was laboriously climbing the ascent. But the watcher evidently was not so much concerned with the approach of the truck as with certain movements which were in progress on the hogback at the head of the grade.

Three persons had dismounted from their horses behind the screen of timber. One, a tall man, had donned a long, black slicker and was tying a handkerchief about his face.

"Juniper, hoss," said Rathburn, "what does that gent want that slicker on for? It ain't going to rain. An' how does he reckon to see onless maybe he's got holes cut in that there hanky?"

A second man had made his way down the slope a short distance. He took advantage of the timber which screened him from sight of the driver of the oncoming truck.

"I 'spect that's in case the truck driver should suddenly take it into his head to slide down backwards," said the observer, speaking his thoughts aloud in a musical, ba.s.s voice. "One in front, one behind; now how about the kid?"

As if in answer to his question the third member of the party, evidently a boy, led the horses a short way up the hogback where a good view could be obtained of the road in both directions.

The watcher grunted in approval. "One in front to do the stick-up, one behind to stop a retreat and get whatever it is they're after, and one on the lookout to see there ain't any unexpected guests. Couldn't have planned the lay any better ourselves, hoss."

He was too far distant to interfere, even if he had had any desire to do so, which was doubtful from his interested and tolerant manner.

Anyway it could have done no good to shout a warning, for the driver of the truck could not have heard anything above the roar of his machine, and the trio had gone about the preparations with dispatch.

Already the truck was climbing the last steep pitch to the top of the hogback.

The tall man in the black slicker and mask now quickly stepped forth from the edge of the timber. The watcher above saw his right hand and arm whip out level with his shoulders. There was a glint of morning sunlight and dull metal. The truck came to a jarring stop as the driver jammed on the brakes. Then the driver's hands went into the air.

Stepping from the timber at the roadside behind the truck, the second man leaped upon the machine. The watcher grunted again as he saw that this man was also masked. The driver was disarmed and searched, then forced to clamber down from the truck into the road, where the man in the slicker kept him covered while the other quickly searched about the seat and cab of the truck. Then the second man released the brakes and dropped nimbly from the machine which plunged backward down the steep slope, crashed into the tree growth on one side of the road, and overturned.

The boy mounted and led the other two horses down the hogback in the scanty timber to the head of the grade. There the man in the slicker and his companion joined him, mounted, and the trio rode quickly along the hogback in a southerly direction and disappeared on a blind rail into the forest.

Rathburn rolled himself another cigarette with a grin as he watched the truck driver stand for some moments uncertainly in the road and then start rapidly down the slope toward his disabled machine.

"C'mon, hoss," said the erstwhile spectator, turning his dun-colored mount again into the trail. "So far's I can make out, this is the only way down out of these tall mountains to the east, so we might as well get going. We ain't got no business south or west. We'll be just in time to get blamed for what's happened down there."

Whatever there might be in the prospect, the rider did not permit it to have any influence on his cheerful mood. He drew in long breaths of the stimulating air and sniffed joyously at the fragrance of the murmuring forests which clothed the higher hills. Far below the timber would dwindle, the ridges would flatten into round knolls and lose their verdure; then would come the dust and lava slopes, and beyond--the desert.

A wistful light came into the horseman's eyes. "Home, Juniper, hoss,"

he said softly. "We've just got to have cactus an' water holes an'

danged blistering heat in ours; and I don't care so much as the faded label off an empty tomato can if it's in California, or Arizona, or Nevada, so long as it's desert!"

The trail he was following wound tortuously around ridges, through the timber, into ravines and canons; now treading close upon the bank of a swift-running mountain stream in a narrow valley, and again seeking the higher places where there were rocks and fallen trees and other obstructions. An observer would have gleaned at once that the rider was not familiar with the trail or territory he traversed.

So it was past noon when he finally reached the hogback where the outstanding event of the morning had taken place. The rider looked back up toward the divide and grinned as he rested his horse just above the scene of the holdup.

"Don't reckon they'd have heard me if I'd hollered, or seen me if I'd waved," he mused. "They picked out a good spot for the dirty work," he concluded, looking about.

Shortly afterward, as he was staring down at the tracks in the road, he smothered an exclamation. Then he dismounted, picked up two small objects from the dust at the point where the trio had started on their get-away, examined them with a puzzled expression, and thrust them into a pocket.