The Cowpuncher (14 page)

He frowned as he recalled Lank’s report of a much greater volume of water coming from the cave in which the murdered Indians slept, the flow of which had been gradually lessening since the opening of the mine. The seepage in the lower levels had also greatly increased and the pumps were hard put to keep the workings free of water.

His slim hands dropped to the butts of the heavy sixes swinging low on either thigh, and his face grew grim as he eyed the silvery half-disc of the moon still peering over the lip of the western wall. Soon that moon would be behind the western crags—“top-side ‘neath,” as Ah Sing had expressed it.

Then the group would creep silently up the gloom filled canyon, knowing that only two men had been left there by the departing celebrants, and hoping for a quick surprise and little or no resistance.

“They’re the ones due for a surprise, though!” the cowboy growled, tightening his grip on his guns. There were rifles in the cabin, and Ah Sing and the engineer could shoot after a fashion.

Still, the odds were heavy. And there was something else that caused Huck Brannon to hesitate. From Ah Sing’s report, it appeared that the
majority of the raiders were actually mountain Indians—people who really believed that the reopening of
La Mina del Padre
was fraught with evil for them. Leaning their belief as they did on the traditions that had come down to them, heaven knew they had cause to think so, Huck was forced to admit.

They might be led by men who had other and more selfish interests in mind, men who had fanned the embers of superstition into flame to further their own ends, but the Indians were doubtless sincere enough in their beliefs. And Huck Brannon had a decided aversion to shooting down men who were doing what they believed to be right and acting under honest motives, no matter how mistaken they might be.

Huck Brannon, unlike many cattlemen, believed that Mexicans, Indians and other “lesser tribes without the law” had their rights to be respected, and had in them the making of good citizens if given the chance.

He did not propose to have his property destroyed by predatory interests, but he was determined that misguided dupes were not going to die at his hand if he could possibly prevent it. He racked his brains as he stared down the valley for some means of stopping the raiders without actually destroying them.

It was the sudden sputtering hiss of the safety valve on the big boiler which furnished steam to operate pumps and winding engine that gave him inspiration.

The engineer automatically stepped into the
pump-house and opened the injector, which sent a stream of cold water into the over-pressured boiler. He glanced at rising water gauge and falling steam needle and shut the injector. He turned and bumped into Huck Brannon, who was striding into the pump house.

“Hey!” bawled Mike in an injured tone, stumbling back and rubbing his bruised nose.

Huck paid no attention to his protest.

“I’ve got it, Mike!” he exclaimed. “I know how we can stop them without killing them! It’s a cinch.”

“Huh?” grunted Mike, staring.

Ah Sing, pattering at Huck’s heels, crowed exultantly.

“Can do! Me betcha you me!” he declared.

“Quick!” exclaimed Huck, “screw a sleeve into the blow-off cock at the base of the boiler—a sleeve with a union on the other end. Use a reducing bushing if you have to, and attach that big leather hose to the sleeve. Hurry, you grease monkey—you may have to cut threads on the sleeve, and we haven’t got all night—moon’s almost down!”

Grunting profane admiration, the little engineer went to work, swiftly and efficiently. Huck and Ah Sing meanwhile extinguished the lights in Huck’s cabin and banked the front wall of the pump house with coal and timbers to stop the passage of bullets through the flimsy planks.

“I got yore damn hose pipe fastened onto the cock,” Mike called before they had finished their task. “Moon’s outa sight,” he added heavily.

Huck nodded and extinguished all the lights
except one carefully shaded lantern. He examined the length of hose closely. It was new and strong and capable of taking plenty of pressure.

“Open the blow-off cock about half way when I give the word,” he told Mike. “Don’t open it all the way till we open the nozzle cock. If this damn thing bursts with that blow-off open, we’ll all three be parboiled like a salt-bacon rind. All right, now, take it easy and listen. I don’t want ‘em to get too close.”

The last faint glimmer of the moonlight faded above the western canyon wall. Darkness, intense and silent, filled the gorge. The mutter of the falls and the clank of the pumps sounded unnaturally loud to the straining ears.

An owl hooted sadly and the sudden bloodchilling scream of a panther punctuated his lonely plaint. Mike swore under his breath and Ah Sing muttered something in Cantonese that was certainly not a prayer.

Huck Brannon, peering through the narrow window, said nothing, and it was Huck’s keen ears that caught the first faint scrape of a moccasined foot on a loosened stone.

There was a considerable open space fronting the pumphouse, and in this space the stars threw a faint, elusive glimmer. Not much, but enough to etch the dark clump shadow that moved cautiously out of the growth, hesitated for an instant and then drifted forward in utter silence.

In that tingling silence, Huck Brannon’s ringing voice was like the explosion of a shell.

“
Alto!
Halt!” he thundered in clear Spanish.
“Don’t come a step closer. We’re ready for you and can put you down before you’re halfway to the doors! Get the hell out of this canyon while you’re in one piece,” he added in English.

The stealthy shadows froze as if turned to stone. Guttural exclamations sounded. For a moment it seemed as if the surprise-numbed raiders were going to rush from the gorge. Then a voice rang out, peremptory, commanding, vicious in intonation:

“It ees lie! There ees but two men there! Forward!”

The English words were followed by ripping guttural syllables that Huck could not understand. Screeching yells answered, and a spatter of shots.

A bullet or two whined through the open window, but Huck was standing well to one side, Mike cursed as one caromed off the boiler face and spattered him with splinters of lead. Outside sounded a rush of padding feet.

Huck Brannon gripped the hose nozzle in gloved hands and stepped close to the window.

“All right, Mike,” he said quietly.

The engineer’s wrench rasped against the blowoff cock. The hose writhed like a snake as the scalding water pounded into it. Huck felt the strong leather pipe swell to the bursting point.

The yelling, shooting crowd had crossed half the distance of the open space when Huck Brannon, risking a chance bullet, stepped to the window and thrust the glistening brass nozzle through the opening. Eyes narrowed to slits and smokily green, his face set in lines bleak as chiseled granite, he turned the nozzle cock.

Driven by the terrific power of the internal steam, the scalding water shot from the nozzle with a wicked hiss. Huck twitched the tip of the nozzle in a short horizontal arc, elevating it slightly.

Beyond the cloud of steam that roared up in front of the window, the screeching warwhoops changed to shrieks and screams of agony. Huck stood well forward now, having no further fear of bullets. He elevated the nozzle still more and drenched with the scalding spray the packed men behind the front rank of the raiders. He devoutly hoped that the instigators of the attack had been in the van and had borne the brunt of that first driving burst of boiling water.

Louder and wilder came the yells. There was a sound of hectic scrambling over the loose boulders, then the rattling thud of racing feet that had lost all interest in maintaining any sort of silence. Huck swished the nozzle, raising it as much as he dared. Fresh howls arose, swiftly receding from the vicinity of the pumphouse.

“Off, Mike, off!” Huck shouted.

As he heard the engineer’s wrench clang against the blowoff, he snapped the nozzle cock shut, dropped the hose and slid both big guns from their holsters. Aiming high, he pulled triggers as fast as his thumbs could fan the hammers back. Taking his cue from the rattling crash of the reports, old Ah Sing fired through the roof with a Winchester until he had emptied the magazine.

Far down the gorge yells of pain and panic still echoed, but soon they became only a drone in the distance and then died away altogether.

Brannon grunted as he reloaded and holstered his guns. “I kept the nozzle up pretty well,” he told the engineer. “I don’t figure I more than scorched ‘em good and plenty.”

“You’d had oughta give ‘em the full force,” growled Mike. “If they’d got in here, there wouldn’t have been enough left of any of us to grease a saw blade. You figger they’re all gone and ain’t comin’ back?”

Huck thought so, but to make sure, Ah Sing with a knife held between his toothless gums, slipped out like a yellow snake to reconnoiter. Twenty minutes later he came puffing back, his arms full of hardware.

“Plenty good lifles and sledge hammels left,” he chuckled creakily, thudding several new Winchesters to the floor. “Injun man no can find. Lun plenty damn fast. Laundly wolk pick up in Injun town, me betcha you me!”

Chuck cautioned Ah Sing and Mike to say nothing about the affray. He stored the hammers and guns dropped by the raiders in their flight; and when the pitmen came back to work there was nothing to indicate the hectic event that had taken place in their absence. One of the foremen, however, gave out a bit of interesting information.

“Musta had one helluva time over in the Mexican quarter,” the foreman, who had spent most of his time in the Blue Whistler saloon bucking the tiger, told Huck. “This mawnin’ jest ‘fore we piled inter the car to come back to camp, I saw three, four jiggers all tied up like pigs in pokes. One was that blackfaced Estaban Garcia what does odd jobs
for Jeff Eades, the drift foreman at the Coleman gold diggin’s. Couldn’t see hardly anythin’ of him but his eyes. I asked him what the hell happened and he spit out a string of Spanish I couldn’t make head or tail of and the way he looked murder at me outa them pig eyes, I thought he’s gonna stick a knife in me. You’d think, from the way he looked, that I’d had something to do with him bein’ wrapped up in rags thataway!”

In his office not far from the mouth of the mine, Huck Brannon glanced approvingly at a balance sheet and bank statement lying before him on his desk.

Outside, the mellow sunshine of late Autumn streamed over the western lip of the canyon wall. The shadows were long across the canyon floor and a few minutes later the pumphouse whistle tooted a shrill blast. The workers on the loading tipple came clattering down the stairs, laughing and joking among themselves, and soon clots of men, the black smudges of their toil upon their faces, trickled from the mine mouth.

Huck could hear the whine of the winding engine raising the cages from the lower levels. Soon the workers of the upper levels would leave the mine, it being a rule that the lower levels should always be emptied first for safety’s sake. The ratchet of the big drum clicked for the last time and the sinuous cable came to a halt. The lower levels were cleared of men.

Huck glanced up as Lank Mason entered. He nodded to his partner and held up the balance sheet.

“Well, we’re even up now and a little better,”
he told the big miner. “Looks like we’re due to make a little
dinero,
after all, feller.”

“Yep, even if old Don Fernando de Castro did send all the silver to Spain or carted it off to Hell with him,” chuckled Lank. “We don’t need his darned silver!”

Lank walked to the inner room to wash up. Huck turned back to his figures.

And then—the window glass smashed to fragments, the chairs danced on their legs, the whole building rocked and swayed like in a hurricane. The air quivered to a pulsing roar which was followed by a terrible silence broken only by the monotonous clank of the pumps.

Dazed, numbed, Huck Brannon picked himself up from the floor, to which he had been flung as by a giant hand. Outside was a pandemonium of yelling voices. Lank Mason, swabbing at his bloody face, came pounding from the inner room.

“It’s a blow!” he yelled.

Huck darted to the door. Black smoke was pouring from the mine mouth. Men were running madly about, shouting insanely. Huck saw one of the lower drift foremen hurrying toward the mine.

“Is everybody out, Watt?” he roared to the man.

“Lower levels,” the foreman shouted back. “Forty or fifty men still in the upper.”

Huck darted to the pump house. Mike, the engineer, was pulling levers, testing, examining, staring at the falling hand of the pressure gauge.

“Blower system’s gone to hell,” he barked in answer
to Huck’s question. “Winding engine can’t move the cage to the lower levels. Pumps is still suckin’ water.”

Huck ran outside again. The mine no longer vomited smoke in dense clouds, but wreaths and whorls still floated up the cliff face. Men were reeling through the smoke, now, burned, bruised, bloody. Huck and Lank and the foreman checked them as they emerged. Their faces grew stern as the blackened trickle dwindled and ceased.

“Twenty-two short,” said Brannon quietly after a wait of long minutes during which the mine mouth yawned emptily save for vagrant wisps of smoke that continued to drift forth.

Huck eyed those recurrent wisps with a darkening face. There was an ominous threat in them. They might be but the residue of pockets that remained in the rooms after the blowers ceased to function.

But they might mean that the explosion of methane gas had set fire to the mine. In which case, other explosions might follow, especially as the blower system which tended to lessen the accumulation of gas had broken down.

After a wait of several more minutes, Huck turned to the foremen and miners clustered about the tunnel mouth.

“All right,” he said quietly. “Volunteers. Who’ll go with me to look for those twenty-two men and bring them out, if any of them are alive? Wait,” he said as Lank and the three foremen stepped forward. He pointed to the drifting smoke wreaths. “You all know
what that means,” he said significantly. “Don’t forget the chance you’re taking. Nobody
has
to go.”

“Hell!” grunted old Lank in reply.

The foremen snorted derisively. Men began to crowd forward.

“All right,” said Huck, and his voice was a trifle unsteady, “but you can’t all go. So we’ll take only single men. Single men to the front, six will be enough.”

Half a dozen brawny young miners shouldered up ahead of the others.

“Back, Miguel,” growled one, giving a companion a shove that sent him sprawling. “You have the old mother and the two young sisters.”

“And you—Pedro—you are betrothed to three in
Mejico
and the saints alone know how many more elsewhere!” the indignant Miguel bawled. “Would you widow a village?”

“What terror, think you, holds Senor Death for me,
amigo?
” replied Pedro with a flash of white teeth.

Quickly Huck picked his crew from the eager volunteers. Scant minutes later, equipped with tools, blasting powder and restoratives, the body of men marched into the mine.

Most of the smoke appeared to have escaped, but the gas content of the atmosphere was dangerously high, as proved by the increasing glow of the gauze envelopes of the safety lamps.

“If we don’t run into choke-damp, we’ll be lucky,” muttered Brannon.

He knew that even more dreaded and deadly was the heavy, low-lying “damp,” mainly carbon
dioxide, that all too often choked to death the survivors of the explosion of fire damp, the miners’ term for methane.

“Wait,” cried Huck suddenly. He held up a hand in warning, and listened intently. He turned on his heel.

A cry, long and drawn out, had come, seemingly from the direction in which they had just come—the entrance to the mine. Then they all heard, in the distance, the sound of running feet approaching them.

“Wonder who it is?” snapped Lank Mason, his nerves on edge.

“We’ll see in a minute,” said Huck. “Whoever it is, is coming in a hurry. Must be plenty important.”

A figure emerged from a bend in the tunnel, and as the flickering light from the safety lamps picked out the features, a gasp ran through the men.

“Sue!” thundered Huck, astounded and angry at the same time. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

She stopped to catch her breath, and she stood speechless for a moment, facing them, brushing back from her eyes her raven-black hair which had become disheveled in her pursuit of the men. Her face seemed ruddy in the lamplights, and her eyes were flashing. She had never seemed as beautiful to Huck. Finally she spoke.

“I wanted to be with you, Huck,” she said simply.

“My God!” he cried. “It’s too dangerous in here for you. I can’t let you. You’ve got to go back!”

“You asked for volunteers, didn’t you?” Sue demanded. “So I volunteered.”

Later, Old Tom was to tell Huck how Sue had volunteered. She had been on a visit to the far side of the camp when the blow came, and had returned on the run. When she learned that Huck had gone into the mine, she announced her firm decision to follow him. No talking could dissuade her, and Tom told of the futile attempt he had made to hold her back.

It was like fighting a wildcat, he said. She had slipped out of his grasp and had darted into the mine opening. It was then that a cry went up from the men grouped outside—the cry that Huck and the men inside had heard.

“Quick,” shouted Huck, his teeth set, his brow furrowed. “Why did you come in here?”

“Because,” she replied, and her answer was somewhat slower in coming than his question, “I would want to die if you didn’t come out alive.”

For a brief moment, Huck gazed down at her, then before the eyes of the men, unembarrassed, he took Sue in his arms and kissed her. Quickly, he put her aside.

“All right,” he said. “Come along. No time to stop now.” But he took her hand in his and they walked side by side.

Almost immediately they came upon the terrible results of the explosion. Dead men, dead mules, timbering rent and shattered, the walls of rooms blown down, side galleries blocked.

“Most of them twenty-two fellers belongs to the workin’s up beyond the shaft tunnel,” said Lank
Mason. “There’s old-timers in that crowd and they may be holdin’ back for fear of choke or knowin’ another blow is liable to let go if the coal happens to be afire. The force of a blow is out, not in, and choke damp gathers in the low parts fust, so they may figger they’re safer up there till they know for shore what’s goin’ on.”

Huck nodded agreement and quickened his pace. They were far into the mine, now, almost to the tunnel shaft. Suddenly he heard a sound up ahead. Somebody was groaning there, calling feebly for help. Huck broke into a run, halted abruptly. His men found him kneeling beside a man who was pinned beneath a fall of slate and timber.

The man was conscious, but his swarthy face was ghastly with pain. Huck knew all his men by sight, but his face he did not recognize. One of the foremen, dropping on his knees beside Brannon, gave vent to a startled oath as he peered into the dark, agonized face.

“What the hell’s this jigger doin’ here?” he demanded. “He don’t work for us.”

“You know him?” asked Huck, tugging at a beam which lay across the injured man’s legs.

“Uh-huh,” grunted the foreman, adding his strength to raise the timber. “Uh-huh, his name’s Estaban Garcia and he works for Jeff Eades, Cale Coleman’s drift foreman. How in hell did he get in here in this mess?”

That was what Huck Brannon wanted to know, but this was no time to question the injured man. Old Lank was pointing to the gauze of his safety lamp. It was almost redhot.

“She’s gettin’ bad, Huck,” he said. “We better be gettin’ farther in, pronto.”

“Get the men t’gether and start ‘em up the lead,” Huck ordered quickly. “I’ll have this feller loose in another minute. Go on, I tell you, there isn’t room for more’n one to work here. Go on, and keep outa my way.”

Huck looked up and saw clearly in Sue’s face the determination to remain, come what may, so his—

“You, too,” sounded weak.

“I’ll stay here, Huck,” said Sue.

Huck shrugged his shoulders. “A’right, Mason,” he cried, “get going.”

Muttering profanity, Lank obeyed, herding the crew forward as Huck removed the last of the debris from Estaban’s crushed legs. The halfbreed had sunk into a kind of stupor from pain, but his eyes showed he still knew what was going on around him.

A moment later Huck lifted the broken body in his arms and with Sue beside him started after the winking lights of his companions. He had taken less than a dozen steps when he felt a sudden ominous suck of air.

“Down on yore faces!” he roared to the men ahead. “Down, Sue!”

He saw the winking lights fall to the floor, took three long strides up a side gallery and threw himself flat, sheltering Sue with his own body and the injured halfbreed with his left arm.

There was a blazing flash of reddish light, a crackling roar and a wave of blasting heat. Huck
was lifted from the floor by the force of the explosion and hurled down again. For an instant he lay stunned, then he scrambled to his knees, beating out the fire that smoldered his clothes, shaking his ringing head to clear it from fog.

“Sue,” he cried anxiously, lifting her up. “Are you all right?”

“Ye-es,” she replied. “Not a scratch. You?”

“Fine,” he said.

He heard Lank’s voice roaring anxiously and shouted back reassurance. Picking up the moaning halfbreed, he hastened from the gallery and up the tunnel, Sue following close behind.

He found that his companions had suffered more sorely than he had from the blast, whose greatest force had ripped along the main gallery.

One man lay stunned. All of them were cut and burned and bruised. Old Lank dripped blood, but he shook it from his face impatiently and went hurrying back down the gallery muttering anxiously to himself. Huck, conscious that the little stream which flowed down the gallery was spreading over the floor, motioned the others to await his return.

Soon Lank was back, his fat face grim in the flickering light of the lamps.

“Thought I heard it after the blow,” he said. “Yeah, she’s down—gallery blocked by a bad fall. Can’t tell how far it extends, but she’s liable to be plenty.”

“We got tools and powder,” Huck said quietly. “Besides, the boys will work to us from the other side when they find out what’s happened. Come on, let’s be getting higher up.”

Lank glanced at him queerly, but made no comment. “Okay,” he agreed heartily, “let’s go.”

They stumbled on up the lead, finding more and more evidence of the rending force of the last explosion. Huck anxiously watched the gauze slowly take on a pinkish hue. The fiery gas was seeping from the shattered seams, accumulating in pockets close to the roof.

Huck reckoned that they were now less than a quarter of a mile from where the lead ended at the wall built across the mouth of the dead men’s cave. A plan was forming in his mind, a plan that offered faint hope for escape. For Huck Brannon knew, as old Lank had known, that, barring little short of a miracle, they were doomed.

Moreover, if ever he had been in doubt about Sue returning his feelings, the doubt was at an end. She loved him too! Now he wasn’t only struggling for his own life and his men’s, but for Sue’s life. And that was more important to him than anything else. Now he had to get out!

He looked down at her. What a girl. Not a word out of her—not a complaint. He pressed her hand in his, and felt her respond. How cool her hand was, how steady her fingers’ grip.

Even as they stumbled on, he felt a faint shock of air follow almost immediately by a distant rumble. It was another explosion beyond the barrier of fallen roof which blocked their way to the mine mouth.

And those recurrent explosions meant only one thing: the mine was on fire and rescue from outside
was impossible. Successive explosions as the gas accumulated would bring down more and more of the gallery roof, and not until the slowly rising water flooded the mine and put out the fire could the men on the outside start the work of rescue. And by that time it would not make any difference to Huck and his companions.

The Mexican miners were muttering among themselves. They too had read correctly the message of that ominous rumble. The halfbreed in Huck’s arms moaned between his set teeth. Brannon shifted the burden slightly and strode grimly on.