Joe Millard - The Good the Bad and the Ugly

“I hope the captain was still alive to hear his big bang. I’d like to know, but I don’t see any point to going back to find out. We can stay here out of sight until they start to pull out. Maybe, with luck, we can grab us a couple of horses from one side or the other. They owe us mounts.”

“They owe us more.” Tuco screwed up his face and pounded his temples with clenched fists. “What fools we have been—What stupid idiots. What unbelievable muttonheads—”

“What in blazes is biting you?”

“That wine,” Tuco growled. “All that lovely, lovely wine. We could have put the whole case on the planks with the dynamite and brought it along to celebrate our great triumph. The captain has no more use for it. Now we will sit here and spit cotton while those pigs up there drink it all.”

CHAPTER 19

SENTENZA crouched at the edge of a dense thicket on the hillside overlooking Sad Hill Cemetery. The sorrel eyes were bloodshot from strain and veins throbbed in his temples above the high cheekbones. The fingers of his right hand opened and closed convulsively on the butt of his loner barrelled pistol.

“Why don’t they come?” he muttered. “Damn—why don’t they hurry up and get here?”

His head swivelled as his baffled gaze shuttled over the endless rows of identical graves. He had tramped over every foot of the immense cemetery, scrutinising each individual grave, digging his fingers into the mounded earth to feel its freshness, testing the firmness of each weather-beaten headboard.

More than half the markers bore only the single cryptic word, UNKNOWN. Even these drew his full attention as he searched frantically for a clue—a dab of extra paint or a notch cut into a board, perhaps, for later identification. He had gone over every mound on hands and knees, looking for a rock of an unusual shape or colouration or for a seemingly casual arrangement of smaller stones that would be meaningless to anyone but the man who had placed them—or to someone looking fora sign.

In the end he knew only continuing frustration for his pains. It was all too obvious that the dead Carson—or Jackson—had depended solely upon the name of the grave’s supposed occupant as painted on its head• board. And only one man in the world—the tall blonde bounty-hunter—knew that name and could identify the grave in which two hundred thousand gold dollars lay waiting.

He stared out over the empty landscape.

Come on, damn you. Come on...

He stiffened and leaped to his feet. A great distance off a small, pale dot of dust moved against the dark backdrop of the mountains. He stared at the spot until his eyes watered and blurred. He rubbed them and stared again. It was a good half-hour before he could make out the two dark pinpoints, moving side by side, that were stirring up a steady dust.

His hand whipped to the long pistol. He slid it in and out of its holster to try the slickness of the waxed leather. He thumbed back the hammer and eased it down several times, testing the hair-trigger action. He flipped open the cylinder gate and checked the loads, replacing the cartridge whose brass case showed the faintest trace of a dent. He snapped the gate shut with a grunt of satisfaction and slid the weapon back into its holster.

His tension and impatience vanished. His quarry was coming to lead him to the buried gold. He could afford to be patient—no, he had to be patient. He sat down with his back against a tree, folded competent hands in his lap and closed his eyes.

He had time for a refreshing nap while he waited for his destiny to arrive at Sad Hill Cemetery.

“Whitey,” Tuco said anxiously. “That Bill Carson, he was dying—pretty near dead—when he told you the name on the grave, wasn’t he?”

“As good as dead,” the hunter agreed. “He barely got the name out before his heart stopped for good.”

“His voice—it was pretty weak, eh? And with his tongue swollen for want of water—he couldn’t talk clearly, eh?”

“I had to put my ear right to his lips to make out what he was trying to say.”

Naked worry clouded Tuco’s eyes. “Whitey, how can you be sure you heard Arch Stanton? Maybe he said Art Landon or Bart Blanton or some other name that only sounded like Arch Stanton. What then, eh?”

“Then,” the hunter said, “you’re going to end up with blistered hands and empty pockets.” He grinned faintly. “Stop worrying, Tuco. I got the name straight enough. What I didn’t get was the location of the grave. We may have a mighty long search ahead of us, finding that one particular grave among thousands just like it.”

“The search will soon begin, Whitey,” Tuco said, pointing. “There is Sad Hill Cemetery on that slope ahead.”

“It’s big, all right” The hunter squinted through the heat haze. “But it’s going to get a whole lot bigger when the toll from Langston Bridge starts coming in.”

They dismounted at the edge of the immense burial ground. Tuco almost fell over his own feet in his wild haste to get to the nearest grave markers. He peered around.

“Unknown. Unknown. Pete Anson. Unknown—”

“Hold it, Tuco. We’ll find it a lot faster if we organise our search. You take the first two rows and I’ll take the second two. That way we won’t miss a single head-board as we work our way through.”

Heads turning right and left steadily, they tramped up the slope to the edge of the woods, then moved inward and worked their way back down. Tuco stopped at the end of his third row to mop his streaming face.

“Yon know, Whitey, I am so mad at those Yankees I could almost become a real Confederate myself.”

“What are you riled up about now? We traded them our spent mounts for fresh and better ones.”

“But the stinking tightwads could have at least thrown in a couple of shovels for us to dig with.”

It seemed they had been tramping for hours and there was still more than half the vast cemetery still to be covered. A few rows ahead of them the centre of the graveyard was marked by a large open space—an amphitheatre reserved for the holding of formal funeral services.

“When we get to that open space,” the bounty-hunter said, “we might as well call it a day. It’ll be too dark to see the names—and my head feels about ready to break right off my neck. We can get a good night’s rest and start on the other half at sunrise.”

“How can you think of sleeping when all those beautiful gold dollars are lying right around here somewhere—maybe so close one of us could reach out a hand and touch the spot, eh? I will keep on looking until my eyes balls pop out and my legs drop off.”

“All right. We’ve still got a couple of hours of daylight left.”

They reached the trees, shifted over to the next rows and started back down the slope. Tuco suddenly loosed a wild, incoherent howl and flung himself on to one of the grave mounds.

He clawed frenziedly at the dirt with his bare hands, yelling, “Here it is, Whitey. This is the one. I have found it at last. I have found my fortune.”

The hunter strode to the spot, bent to examine the marker. Storms and the fiercely beating sun had faded the paint but the name, Arch Stanton, was still plainly legible on the weathered headboard.

He straightened and turned to find himself looking into the muzzle of Tuco’s pistol.

“I am sorry about this, friend,” the bandit said, thumbing back the hammer, “but you know how it is sometimes, eh? There are two kinds of people in this world. Those with a little money and those with two hundred thousand. It is better to be one of those with two hundred thousand, eh, Whitey? This time I errs the one who is dissolving the partnership”

He pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with an empty, metallic click.