The Max Brand Megapack (220 page)

“It’s easy to figure what he was doing. He was trying to get his hands on that iron box of old Cosslett’s and he wanted to get it for himself and not have to share up with the band. Moon let him stay on there for a month, hoping that maybe Whitwell would find the box; and then they’d kill Whitwell and take the box from him. But Whitwell didn’t have any luck, it seemed, so finally Moon came to me and gave me the job of killing Whitwell.

“I tried to beg out of it, but there was nothing to do but go and kill or else get killed myself. That was the rule under Jack Moon, and that’s the rule under him still.

“When I reached Cunningham Lake, I found that Whitwell was gone; but I picked up a fresh trail and followed it two days. It brought me up at last to an old deserted camp, and there I nailed Whitwell. There wasn’t anything to it. He was sound asleep in a chair. When he woke up, I had my gun shoved under his chin.

“Well, he didn’t even so much as blink. He just sat up and grinned at me. First thing he said was: ‘I’m ready to divvy up, if that’s what you want.’

“‘Divvy up on what?’ I asked him.

“‘The box,’ says he. ‘I found it.’

“That took my breath. I’d heard so much from Moon, he seemed so sure that that box held the clue to the treasure, that I gaped at Whitwell. He went on to talk smooth and easy. He figured that I’d come along for him. He admitted that I had him, and that I could blow his head off, but what was the good? I told him, and I told him true, that I couldn’t kill him, that the job had been forced on me, and that I hated Moon and the rest of his band. That was music to Whitwell. He told me the whole story right off. He’d found the box by dragging. But it was heavy; weighed forty pounds, even if it was small. He tried to break it open, but he didn’t have a sledge hammer; and while he was trying to smash the lock against a rock he saw somebody coming up the river road. He took his glasses and made out that it was me.

“He knew, of course, why I was after him. He saddled and jumped onto his horse. But he couldn’t take that heavy box with him, so he left it behind at Cosslett’s house and then tore off across the hills. What he intended to do was to shake me off the trail, get some giant powder, return and blow up the box, and then see what was to be seen.

“Now he offered to share everything with me. I thanked him, and we were shaking hands to seal the bargain when a gun was fired through the window, and Whitwell was shot out of his chair.

“Of course Moon had just been trying me out, and when he sent me on the trail he sent a tried man after me to see what I did. He had orders to simply kill me if I tried to dodge the work. And that was what his man tried to do, because the second Whitwell spilled out of his chair, another shot was sent at me and just clipped through my hair. I dropped to the floor beside Whitwell. My ear was close to his lips. I heard him whisper: ‘Under the veranda,’ and then he was dead.

“In the meantime, the front door of the cabin opened, and big Si Treat came in. He figured that he’d killed us both with those two shots, from the way we’d both dropped. There was nothing for it but to get him out of the way. I shot for his legs, saw him go down, and then I scrambled through the door and rode like mad for Cunningham Lake.

“But I never got there. Treat hadn’t come alone. Moon and two others were with him, and they rode like devils to cut me off. They did it and turned me into the south mountains. For a month they hunted me, and for a month I managed to keep out of bullet range. By that time I was away south, and I saw that the country was too hot for me. I could never get back to Jerry. They’d watch around her and lay for me. There was only one thing left and that was to get as far away as I could, start to work, and support Jerry.

“I couldn’t send for her, because the minute she left that devil Moon would trail her to me. I just had to live where I was and work and send her the money to live on. And that’s what I did. Ten years of it, lad, without ever seeing her face. But I gave her enough for an education. Then when she was independent I made up my mind that I’d come back and risk the chance to get Cosslett’s gold. I came back then, told Jerry simply that I was in danger from Moon and his band, and started to plan to get to Cunningham Lake and Cosslett’s old shack. But before I got well started, you know what happened. You arrived in time to drag me out to safety. You arrived in time to give me a fighting chance at that money—and give yourself a chance at the same thing!”

“And Jerry knows—”

“Only that we’re trying to get that iron box. She knows the story behind that, and how Moon killed the old man. She knows that I can’t call down the law on the head of Moon because there are complications; but just what those complications are, she can’t say. Is it all clear to you now, Ronicky, just how we stand?”

“All clear, I guess,” said Doone. “But it looks to me as though there’s a trail of crimson, spilled all around that gold of Cosslett’s. First men were killed so that he could get his hands on it. Then other gents were bumped off because they were his agents. Then Cosslett was killed because he had the gold; and then several other gents were killed because they were trying to find out where Cosslett hid the stuff. Now here we go, you and me, and take your girl with us; and all three of us walk up and rap at the same door. Well, Dawn, it looks like black business to me!”

“You’re losing heart, Ronicky?” asked the elder man gloomily.

“I’ll stay with it as long as the next man,” declared Ronicky. “One thing I’d like to know. Won’t Moon suspect that we’re heading for Cosslett’s old shack? Won’t he be apt to drive straight for that place and wait for us there?”

“It’s a chance,” said Hugh Dawn, “but that’s a chance we got to take. Moon don’t know Whitwell’s secret. I’m the only one that knows it except you and Jerry.”

“But if he strikes around blind for the trail and doesn’t find it,” said Ronicky, “he might start straight for Cosslett’s, and then we’d simply be running into the trap. Besides, maybe he guesses that you know something.”

“He guesses that Whitwell knew something, and that Whitwell told me. What it is, he can’t guess. But if he’s at Cosslett’s—then that’s fate. And if fate’s agin’ us, well be beat any way we look at it. But we won’t be beat, son. I feel lucky! We can get to Cosslett’s inside of two hours of hard riding. And Moon ain’t apt to get there as quick as that. Then a look under the veranda—”

“But what if somebody else has looked there in the last ten years?”

“Not a chance. That veranda was built close to the ground. If Whitwell put it there, he must have put it there because he knew nobody’d look there.”

“Then, Hugh, well start.”

“Yes. Jerry has rested enough by this time!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

At Cosslett’s Cabin

It seemed to Ronicky that there was more than an ordinary admixture of superstition in the nature of Hugh Dawn. If fate aided him, he would get Cosslett’s gold. If fate were against him, he would get death instead. So he went ahead blindly trusting in luck. He had made only one sensible provision to meet danger, and that was enlisting the aid of another man, Ronicky himself. The more Ronicky thought of the affair, the more of a wild-goose chase it seemed to him.

Yet he knew that it was madness to attempt to dissuade Hugh Dawn, and he dared not let the big fellow go on with his daughter to face Moon. And face the outlaw chief he knew they would, before the adventure was finished.

Returning to the cabin, they found Geraldine Dawn already up, and they found, moreover, that she had reached the conclusion to which they had already come. She dared not go back and live alone in the big house of her father; a thousand times she would rather continue the trip and face whatever lay before them, than make the return.

Only one thing upset her—what would the people of Trainor say when she did not appear to teach the school? But there was, in the village, a girl who had substituted for her once before during an illness. Therefore the classes would be taken care of. With that scruple cared for—how slight a thing it seemed to Ronicky Doone!—she was ready to face the adventure.

They started on within a few minutes, swerving now to the left and striking through rougher mountain trails. Hugh Dawn had correctly estimated the distance. In the early evening they came upon Cosslett’s cabin.

It stood in an imposing place on the cliff above Cunningham Lake. On all sides the ground sloped back. There were no trees near, though in all other directions the forest stepped down from the mountaintops to the very edge of the lake.

“You see?” exclaimed Hugh Dawn. “The old boy picked a place where he could look on all sides of him. He wouldn’t trust a forest where gents could sneak up on him.”

Ronicky smiled to himself. Such reasoning simply proved that Dawn had already convinced himself, and was willing to pick up minute circumstances and weave them into the train of proof.

They climbed the slope and found that ten years had dealt hard with the little house. The roof was smashed in. The sides caved out, as though the pressure of time were overcoming them. But the first place to which they ran, the veranda, showed no opening beneath its floor and the ground.

Hugh Dawn looked at it in despair. The ground, indeed, was flush with the top of the flooring.

“I must of remembered wrong,” he muttered, “but it seems to me that in the old days they used to be a space between the floor and the hill. I dunno how this come!”

Ronicky had been surveying the site carefully.

“Maybe the house had settled,” he suggested. “We’ll tear up the boards and see.”

It was easily done. The rotted wood gave readily around the nail-heads, and in a minute or two every board had been torn up. But they saw beneath no sign of such a thing as a forty-pound iron chest. Hugh Dawn was in despair.

“Maybe somebody else has lived here and found it and—”

He could not complete the sentence, so great was his disappointment. Ronicky, expecting nothing at all, was quite unperturbed. He looked at Jerry Dawn. She was as calm as he, but something of pity was in her eyes as she looked to her father. Was it possible that she, too, saw through the whole hoax and had simply undertaken the ride to appease the hungry eagerness of her father?

“We’ll go inside,” she suggested.

They entered the cabin through the front doorway, stepping over the door itself, which had fallen on the inside. All within was at the point of disintegration. The cast-iron stove was now a red, rusted heap in a corner. The falling of a rafter had smashed the bunk where it was built against the wall. The boards of the floor gave and creaked beneath their steps. In the corners were little yellowed heaps of paper—old letters, they seemed. And on the floor beneath the bunk Jerry Dawn found, face down, and yet with every page intact, the Bible which was always mentioned whenever the name of Cosslett was brought into conversation.

When she raised the book, it seemed that she raised the ghost of the old white-bearded hermit at the same time. In spite of the ruin, the terrible scene rushed back upon the memory of each of the three—Jack Moon and his men tumbling through the door—the two explosions of guns—the hurling of the casket through the window—the fall of the hermit.

Suddenly Hugh Dawn shouted in alarm. Making a careless step with his great weight, he had driven his foot crashing and rending through the flooring where rain had rotted away the wood except for a mere shell. He scrambled out of his trap, half laughing and half alarmed.

“The old gent had a cellar,” said Ronicky, “judging by the way your leg went through that floor.”

Jerry Dawn looked up from the Bible, whose yellowed, time-stained leaves she had been turning with reverent fingers. The awe went out of her eyes, and bright interest came in its place.

“A cellar?” she asked. “Then let’s look at it. Perhaps that’s the place where he hid all the gold, dad?”

Her father snorted.

“Are you trying to make a joke out of this?” he asked heavily. “Hide the gold in the cellar! Hide fifteen or twenty million dollars’ worth of gold in a cellar!”

“Twenty millions?” gasped Ronicky, beginning to fear for the sanity of his companion. “Are you serious about that, Dawn?”

“Why not? The band must of took a clean forty millions, and out of everything that they took, that old hawk, according to Hampden, got fifty per cent. He was a business man, right enough! And what’s half of forty? Twenty millions, boy!”

That hungry glittering came into his glance again, and Ronicky shook his head.

“But we’ll see about the cellar.” He nodded to Jerry Dawn.

She leaned to see him put his fingers through a gaping crack between boards, work them to a firm grip, and then rip up the whole length of the plank. Below them opened the black depth of the cellar. Ronicky lighted a match and dropped it into the aperture.

“Six foot of hole,” he announced. “Down I go!”

Two more boards were torn away, and he prepared to lower himself.

“But what good does all that foolishness do?” groaned the despairing fortune hunter. “If the box ain’t under the veranda—”

“Ladies bring luck,” answered Ronicky, grinning. “I’m going to follow her orders every time I get a chance.”

And down he dropped into the hole.

“Ever hear of such crazy work?” growled the father.

But Jerry was becoming interested in the fate of her own suggestion.

“Who’d put a box like that in a cellar!” exclaimed Hugh Dawn. “Who’d do that—put it right out in plain view!”

“Plain view? Who suspected a cellar under a house like this until you put your foot through the floor?”

Ronicky was lighting matches in the darkness below. Presently he called: “I see how come the veranda to be down to the ground level. All the stringers holding up the floor on this side are rotten and smashed over sidewise. And—”

He stopped.

“We’re beat,” said Hugh Dawn, “before we get fairly started. I’ve come back and put my head into the mouth of the lion for nothing. That skunk Whitwell aimed to make a fool of me, that was all! Why should he of told me the truth, anyway?”

“Because dying men don’t lie!” shouted Ronicky Doone through the hole in the floor, and at the same time he cast up what looked like a great, rectangular chunk of rust. It fell with a crash onto the floor, the jar of the impact knocking off from its sides long flakes of the red dust, so that the metal looked forth from beneath.