Ralph Compton - Blood on the Gallows

Denver Dora Ryan, a woman with a past, and demure Clare O’Neil. It was an unlikely alliance and one that troubled McBride. Were both women now in league with Lance Josephine and his father, accepting a share of whatever spoils Rest and Be Thankful had to offer?

The incentives were there. Dora might have done it for power, Clare for money.

Money and power could tempt any man—why should women be any different?

Sammy was balanced on the front of the saddle, interested in the flight of white clouds overhead and the rustle of quail in the sagebrush. McBride rubbed the kitten’s warm back. ‘‘Right, Sammy,’’ he said, ‘‘here’s a question for you: why does Clare O’Neil want to kill me so bad? Is it just because she doesn’t like me anymore?’’

The little cat lifted amber eyes to McBride and blinked like an owl.

‘‘You can’t figure it either, huh? Well, if you come up with something, let me know.’’

It took McBride an hour-long search among the Capitan foothills before he was pretty sure he’d found the arroyo where Clare O’Neil had bush-whacked him. He was about a mile south of Sunset Peak and in the rainy darkness everything looked different. But a rock formation and a stunted juniper on top of one shoulder of the arroyo stirred a vague memory, as did the mesa that rose in the background.

He drew rein and listened into the morning, but heard only the rush of the wind and the chirrup of Jerusalem crickets in the grass. The climbing sun bathed the entrance to the arroyo in light, but beyond shadows still gathered.

Aware of his limitations with a rifle, McBride drew Boone’s Colt from his waistband. The revolver was engraved, nickel-plated and adorned with an ivory handle on either side of which steer skulls had been carved, rubies in their eye sockets. Boone had obviously taken great care of the Colt, yet he had crudely chopped eight notches into the right side of the handle where it met the frame.

The fancy gun said much that was detestable about the man who owned it, and McBride was determined to replace it at the first opportunity.

He set Sammy behind him where he was less likely to get hit by a bullet, then rode into the arroyo. The mustang picked its way through stands of prickly pear and cholla that littered the arroyo’s sand and gravel bottom. To McBride’s surprise, outcroppings of sandstone on the walls of the gulch showed signs of having been worked with hammer and chisel. The tool marks were weathered, so the work was not recent. McBride guessed that several hundred years ago the rock had been cut back to widen the arroyo for wagons.

But why? It was a road to nowhere unless the animals that hauled the wagons could climb the sheer slopes of mountains.

As McBride ventured deeper into the arroyo, the walls opened up until they were about thirty feet apart. Here the rock had been worked extensively and falling debris had formed a series of small talus slopes.

The floor of the arroyo rose gradually in low, uneven steps and changed direction several times. Finally it opened out into a clearing strewn with gravel and chips of sandstone and directly ahead of McBride, half-hidden by a screen of juniper, was what looked like the entrance to a cave. But as he rode closer, he realized that this was not a natural feature. Someone had worked a hard-rock claim here and had dug a tunnel into the base of the mesa.

McBride drew rein and looked around him. To his left, there was a wide overhang of limestone and under that the ash of a campfire. The ground around the fire had been flattened, cleared of rocks and was mostly sandy. Sheltered from the worst of the elements by the overhang, it was a good place for a man to spread his blankets. Or a woman.

To his right, the wall of the arroyo climbed sharply upward, rising to a height of several hundred feet before it met the base of the mesa. The shoulder was covered in juniper and piñon and jays were quarreling noisily in the branches.

The clearing was sheltered from the wind on all sides, and the heat was intense. McBride removed his plug hat and wiped the sweaty band with his fingers.

He climbed out of the saddle and put Sammy on the ground. The kitten immediately began to explore and was soon involved in stalking a lizard. McBride left him to his own devices.

The sun hung above McBride’s head and branded a white halo into the powder blue sky as he walked to the entrance to the mine. Behind him the mustang was grazing on a patch of bunchgrass and the jays had gone silent among the junipers. A big diamondback, as thick as a man’s wrist, unraveled itself from under a stand of prickly pear and twisted away from McBride, leaving S-shaped tracks in the sand.

It was cooler inside the mine and the going was easy, the drift only slightly elevated. The tunnel was as wide as a freight wagon and it had been cut almost horizontally into the mesa. As McBride explored deeper, darkness blocked his path and he returned to the entrance, wary that the drift might suddenly end in a vertical rock shaft.

Several lamps stood in a row just inside the entrance. He found one that still had oil in it, lit the wick and stepped into the darkness again. The lamp held high, he followed the drift around a sharp bend and immediately the tunnel narrowed to the width of his shoulders. On the rock wall to his left ran a wide seam of rotten quartz and McBride brought the lamp closer to examine it. He knew next to nothing about mining, but there were chunks of greenish rock embedded in the quartz that he took to be copper ore. He also found ore of a different kind, large, irregularly shaped pieces that looked like petrified ferns and gleamed in the lamplight.

McBride found a rock and pounded chunks of the metals out of the quartz. He had no doubt about the copper ore. After examining it closely, he finally recognized the other metal as silver. And there seemed to be a lot of it. He made his way farther along the tunnel, and the quartz seam widened to a depth of several feel, heading straight as an arrow into the living rock of the mesa. With every step he took, the silver deposits grew more plentiful, the surrounding quartz so rotted, McBride was able to lift out a sizeable nugget with his fingers.

Now he knew why Lance Josephine wanted the O’Neil ranch so badly that he’d kill for it. Even to McBride’s inexpert eye, it was obvious that here was a vast fortune in silver for the taking.

And Clare now knew that as well. He suspected that she’d learned of the mine only recently, perhaps from Dora Ryan, who seemed to keep a finger on the pulse of all that was happening in Rest and Be Thankful.

Clare had tried to kill him to keep him from learning about the silver. She had nothing against him personally, and had even saved his life, but she would not let anyone stand between her and a fortune.

When she’d shot him in the belly it had been simply a matter of economics. ‘‘Take that, and no hard feelings, John, huh?’’

McBride smiled, but there was no humor in him. He was not a man who hated, knowing well that hate was a cancer of the soul. But the urge was rising in him to destroy, smash the outlaw town and all who lived there.

To Clare O’Neil, the life of John McBride had not even been worth thirty pieces of silver. And that he would never forgive.

He followed the drift, but the seam did not narrow and continued to run perfectly straight. After a while he retraced his steps to the mine entrance, extinguished the lamp and bent to leave it with the others. It was then he saw something he’d missed before. Behind the lamps, half-buried in the sand, lay a brass cross.

McBride lifted it free of the sand, the object heavy in his hand. Remembering his days as an altar boy at St. Mary’s Church in the Hell’s Kitchen slums of New York, he recognized it as a processional cross, the kind carried through the chapel by a priest on feast days.