An Enigma in Black

Front matter

AN ENIGMA IN BLACK

By ANTHONY M. RUD Author of “The Quota Kayo,” “Brass Checks,”etc.

I

II II

BILL’S preparations were swift. Urged to the utmost of action by that grimly tragic message, he slung a pair of filled canteens from a web sling from shoulder to hip, made a light pack of provisions and cooking utensils, and saw to it that both six-guns were oiled. One of the latter was buttoned down tightly in a “suicide flap” holster, a protection against the swirling grit which the stiff breezes of La Abra drive into every corner of a man’s outfit, while the other weapon swung in the pivoted “half-breed” sheath at his right thigh.

His rifle he cached with his provisions in a tarpaulin covered with rocks too heavy for the paws of prowling coyotes. Turning loose the burro, so the wise little beast could drink at the spring trickle as soon as that artificial basin below was replenished, he jerked down the lid of his sombrero against the blaze of the dropping sun, and strode out southwestward. There probably was no chance now to help the sufferer who had sent the message, yet Bill, grim faced at the horror he expected to find there at the rock battlements, would cut every corner and shave every instant that Maxwell Kurtt, whoever he proved to be, might have his chance for life.

“Blockhouse?” Bill muttered in reflection, as he swung into that easy, hip-swinging, apparently loose jointed stride which desert dwellers acquire. “Must mean those honeycombed, straight-up stone walls2”

Bill once had passed the eastern end of Quitobaquita, but at a distance. He was certain, however, that there could be no fort or other edifice in the region, though possibly the ruins of some ancient pueblo or Indian sun-dance shrine.

For a time now, as the light waned, he followed at a rapid pace the skipping, partially obliterated track made by the kite drag. This did not pursue an absolutely straight course, but bent in long sweeps to north or south—always returning to the general southwesterly direction. With the far distant line of Quitobaquita showing as a waved, black silhouette in the west, and the promise of a half moon at an early hour, Bill finally deserted the scarcely distinguishable trail, and made for the sierra, hoping later to cross the sign.

The wind was subsiding, now, as always with evenfall, and the quick coolness of shadow also aided his progress. With the straight away shuff-shuff of his bootheels in the grit, the miles trailed away into the gathering night. Over his left shoulder Bill saw the evening star, and for a time, roughly keeping this in the same position, he had a bearing by which to reckon the whereabouts of his objective.

Eighteen miles of cannot be traversed in a hurry, even by a lanky, earnest giant who improves every minute with a hundred or more forty-inch strides. On the most level stretches Bill bettered four miles an hour, There were broken, miniature mesas, however, and shallow arroyos and bare rock barriers like denuded bunkers—miles through which it seemed impossible that the kite drag could have passed without hanging up even as it had done in the stope of his mine. Here progress was more difficult.

Somehow the contraption had come this way, though; and somehow Bill shuffled, climbed, slid and dogtrotted the declivities and broken barriers. He once had seen the body of a man who had died of thirst, and the thought of that worst of all fates now confronting a fellow creature set his usually pleasant if homely features in a mask upon which two curling, dust whitened eyebrows met in a line above the bridge of a big, bony nose. Though himself partly a product of city knowledges and customs, Bill had turned to the stretches of harsh nature unadorned when he had weeks which could be given to venturing on his own. All the more, too, when in the completion of his war-delayed college course he had been swept by that burning urge of mystery which less shy men openly proclaimed as adoration, love.

The girl—well, for this tale of La Abra she need not appear. Suffice it to say that she smiled at Bill’s ungainly strength and awkwardness, still smiled when in perspiring, shivering solemnity he encircled her slender waist with a forearm which could have pulped a sack of potatoes, and waltzed like a great, precise Golem. There was a world of understanding behind the amusement in those gray eyes, too. She was real, and Bill knew that, but didn’t reckon it as any advantage to himself.

Dapper men, rich men, men who came in racing sulkies behind horses alleged to be blood cousins of Star Pointer or Salvator—and men who even could schottische with ease!—realized as well as Bill the one great, outstanding truth; namely, that in this daughter of a great railway president was the prettiest, decentest to a fellow, and altogether the most lovable bit of femininity between the High Sierras and the Golden Gate.

She might have let Bill know something that had occurred to her more than once; and yet who may fathom gray eyes that have warmth as well as common sense? She let him go back to his beloved desert where he said gold was. And if the smile that remained after his stiff, stammering half agonized farewell, seemed a little wistful during ensuing days and evenings, the strutting swains who imagined themselves in favor simply conceded by a unanimous, tacit vote that Dorrie Richmond became more beautiful every day she lived. And since she lacked a month of her twenty-first birthday, that was even probable.

The desert moon rose. It was not the full silver dollar of a few nights back, yet even its waning half-face threw a light over La Abra which seemed unearthly. Every greasewood clump and higher clustering of chaparral loomed up in magic. The great sierra, nearing now, seemed to Bill a silvered wall.

The rescuer had run when he had not walked at the limit of his stride True, the run was little more than a doubling of the long paces combined with a shortening of their length. Yet he had made unbelievable time. The fourth hour of his journey was not expended, and he was almost before the honeycombed walls which flank the desert.

Here he would have to trust to the moonlight, and cast about until he discovered the tracks of the drag. Any attempt to guess the particular involution of the rock walls called The Blockhouse by the dying man, would be well-nigh hopeless. Bill had reached the formation he supposed to be the one named, but there was no sign of a camp or a human body. The wind had died completely, so he could not use even the unsure method of tracing back the source from which the kite must have flown. At this point the Sierra, ravaged by the age-long assault of sand and dust, was cut into sterile bayous and canyons of rock. And somewhere in here a man lay dying, or was dead.

Bill took his third drink from the first canteen, a long, gurgling, throaty swallow. He had earned it by abstemiousness. Then, capping the felt covered retainer, he began a thorough scanning of the parched soil, a search which took him first a half mile to the north, then, more slowly, more than that distance to the south of the place he had stopped.

The moonlight was excellent, yet it did not show up the sign of the drag. Perhaps that trail had been drifted under long since. At any rate Bill snorted as if in pain. He suddenly straightened. “I’m not asking anything for myself I don’t deserve,” he began abruptly, “but if there’s a poor devil out here2”

He had been walking as he talked. And he broke off short. Of what use is prayer to an Almighty, if that Great One cannot guess its full import before it is phrased?

Bill’s eyes caught the reflected flicker of a fire. It was a tiny fire, and well hidden in a one hundred yard break in the rocks; yet Bill’s eyes, used to the flooding of silver, caught the red-yellow twice reflected. He started, stopped in his tracks. In a moment he was loping speedily for a part of the sierra more than a half-mile distant.

He came upon the scene with startling suddenness. Rounding a turn of the rock he stopped suddenly. Ahead was the hand-wide blaze of twigs used by desert wanderers. Crouching there, short necked like a buzzard in the queer flare of light and shadow, was the figure of a man whom Bill stared at and found oddly familiar. It was not more than a fugitive sense of something wrong that stirred in him, yet it called for caution; and Bill respected the desert and its messages so greatly that he would not knowingly disregard a single one of its occult waves. Hunches, some men called them. Well, they often were right.

He abandoned his forthright stride. He bent, tying the rawhide strings which bound his right, pivoted holster, to his thigh. Silently, as his eyes searched that bent, scavenger-like figure near the fire, he transferred the protected six-gun from its sheath at the left. And he allowed the butt of the discarded gun to remain outside the hampering flap.

There was something here he had not expected to find; that was sure. He crept forward silently. That man crouched, apparently searching through a pack. That was not one dying of thirst!

Had Bill not seen something sinisterly familiar in that neckless crouch, he doubtless would have strode to the fire and paid the penalty for his rashness. As it was he looked upon “Chotty” Bedell, fugitive rustler, supposed murderer, cowardly gunman, with only a straining of memory, and caution finally confirmed itself. Bill caught a glimpse of the features of the human vulture, and remembered. Two years before Bill had seen the man in Ajo. At that time several drinkers at the bar had been able to whisper guardedly of the outlaw, though none thought it his business to kill, or inform upon the man.

The big fact stuck upright now; if Chotty Bedell had sent that kite2 But of course he had not. His low-caliber, piggish brain, for all its cunning, was not capable of such imagination.

What then, was the answer?

Bill found it moments later. Creeping up as silently as an Apache, and entirely unsuspected by Chotty, who thought himself alone, save for the poor fool now unconscious and dying to whom this outfit belonged, Bill saw the ravaging of another’s possessions even before he glimpsed the limp, tragic huddle of dried-out human that was Maxwell Kurtt. Chotty had wasted only a second upon the man—a glance which determined that while not quite dead yet, the venturer into this desert never would regain consciousness unless helped. And Chotty was callous. He could use some of these supplies. He only failed to figure the help that Max had summoned as he lay there dying from lack of water.

III III

PUT ’em up!”

The words grated out harshly. The crouching figure of Chotty Bedell straightened, leapt upward. A squeaky sound was wrung from his own dry, greed-tightened throat, yet this involuntary reaction ceased almost as soon as it began. He knew the desert and its men of violence; only too well he knew them! With the steady, unyielding prod of a six-gun muzzle against the small of his back, he lost not an instant in complying with the curt demand.

“Wh-wha-a-at?” he gasped in sudden terror.

Bill Halliday was in no mood for explanations. Back there in the darkness, just an instant before he had flushed this ghoul of the wastes, Bill had heard a faint sound—the gasping, faint croak of a sufferer almost beyond help. It was the one who lay there untended, the man left to die while Chotty Bedell rummaged in his pack for valuables!

With one hand Bill emptied the outlaw’s holsters, thrusting the long, butt-notched irons into his own belt. Then, after a quick slapping search, he drew a keen bowie from its special sheath in Chotty’s right boot seam.

“Take that canteen—yours. Come here!” The command was uncompromising, gritty with a revolt of anger that anyone could be so lacking in common, human sympathy.

Chotty spat, made another queer sound, but complied without argument. In his heart he was quaking, but already scheming, seeking a possible way of avoiding the censure which must follow this revelation. Oddly; he feared the accusation of utter heartlessness, blame given for breaking the first and greatest tenet of all waterless lands—that anyone in need of water shall be supplied immediately—more than he worried over possible retribution for his previous more open crimes.

“The guy cashed in afore I come,” he offered. “Musta2”

“Liar!” The word was a knife edge of only half repressed fury. Chotty’s lowering brows raised suddenly. He clumped down to his knees, unscrewed the canteen cap, sloshed it appraisingly, shook his head. “I ain’t got much water left2” A sudden glint of recognition came into Chotty’s eyes. This was the damned dude tenderfoot he had made dance to the spitting of his guns in the saloon at Ajo, the previous spring!

“If that man dies I shall shoot your head off!”

“Yuh go to hell!” snarled Chotty in sudden defiance. He dropped his hands, forgetting the empty holsters.

Crack!

The lobe of Chotty’s right ear splashed a faint streak of red lead through the moonlight, and was gone. In its place remained a dribble of warm fluid and a stinging.

Chotty caved. He did not know for certain that the man had not aimed at his head and missed by that inch margin. It looked far more like shooting such as he could do when completely sober! And an unwavering Colt with the hammer thumbed back admits no argument, anyway. Somewhere, somehow, this despised tenderfoot dude had learned things which newcomers to the La Abra wastes often take years or decades to make their own.

Under Bill’s snapped directions, the sufferer’s head was raised, his face bathed with precious water, a trickle passed back of the caked and swollen tongue. For a moment it seemed that the man was too far gone even to swallow the lifegiving fluid; but then came a bubble, a choking. The first small mouthful choked down the man’s throat.

Chotty’s hands were shaking, now, but he was parsimonious with the water. Since much of the liquid would have been nearly as disastrous as none at all, Bill made no objection. Little by little, with long pauses between each two mouthfuls, a pint or thereabouts was administered. Then, as Maxwell Kurtt’s eyes came open and he croaked hoarsely for more water, trying to snatch the canteen, Bill made Chotty screw up the container and then carry the man over to the dying blaze.

When this fire was replenished, Bill forced Chotty to lie flat on his back at the farther side of the fire. The outlaw whined, obviously becoming more and more frightened of what was due to happen to him. “Gimme back my guns an’ I’ll git,” he offered. “I ain’t done nothin2”

“Correct,” said Bill with quiet deadliness. “You simply didn’t do anything. Until dawn, you'll stay right there. Then we'll see.”

The job of resuscitating Kurtt was by no means finished, but now Bill took it ever. Allowing Chotty to get up only at times when the fire needed more mesquite branches, Bill made a small pot of coffee. The aroma of the boiling liquid reached Kurtt’s nostrils and appeared to give him a trifle of strength. He rolled over to his elbow and raised his gaunt, wizened visage. “Thank you, friend,” he managed to articulate. Thus far he had not noticed Chotty.

Bill grinned. “I was struck by your novel method of sending a message, old timer,” he replied. “Fairly bowled over.”

“The—kite?”

“Yep. Don’t talk much now. Try a cup of this. We’ll have plenty time to chin later. When you feel up to it, I’ll stir a mess of biscuits and fixin’s.’

The little chap smiled weakly.

“I—all I think I ever shall want is water,”

He tried to lift a hand and take the tin cup of steaming liquid proffered, but Bill pushed it away. Sheathing his six-gun, Bill thrust an arm behind Kurtt and helped him drink.

Whatever Chotty Bedell may have imagined would happen to him at dawn only may be surmised. Probably he envisioned a return to Ajo under guard, a mob of enraged citizens all too ready to believe anything of which this scarcely tolerated. holdover from the quick-triggered nineties might be accused, a rope from that convenient beam stretching streetward from the ridge of the blacksmith shop2

At any rate he had been watching Bill. The hot rage which caused his piggish little eyes to glitter with more than the reflection of the firelight, crisscrossed each second with questioning. At the first false move or lapse of attention on the part of his captor Chotty meant to regain control of the situation, He looked at this tall, bony youth with the contempt that chunky, muscle bound men often feel toward a rangy capability far beyond their own. City dude! Sure, the guy could shoot, but that didn’t mean nothin’. Give Chotty just one chance to get his knotty, short fingered hands on that long piece of string, and he’d show him! He’d2

Then, unbelievably, came the awaited chance! With Bill’s two hands occupied, his revolver back in its holster, and no more than eight feet separating him from Chotty, what more could the latter ask? With a suddenness next to incredible in one of his stodgy proportions, Chotty leapt to his feet, bunched and sprang, a wild, throaty scream of combined hatred and fear making audibly terrible the contorted visage and outreaching, crooked arms.

Straight over the fire he came, flopping in a plunge like some ungainly toad. Bill had not relaxed vigilance, yet he had not counted on such surprising agility in a man of Chotty’s stature. With one powerful shove he tossed the wisplike body of Kurtt to one side, threw the hot coffee as ineffectual spray, and himself leapt in the opposite direction. For the split of a second the stubby, clawing talons raked his shoulder. They almost held, but shifted suddenly to an iron grip on Bill’s ankle.

“Arrh!” The throaty sound told of triumph; but it was shortlived. Realizing to the full that encumbered as he was by the weight of four guns, he was handicapped badly, Bill acted so speedily that his backflung boot seemed merely a continuation of his leap.

The heavy leather caught Chotty full on the breast bone, and while it did not deprive him of wind, it brought forth a grunt of beastlike acknowledgment. His hands loosened imperceptibly.

It was enough. With a sudden twist Bill freed himself, rolled over like a flash, and gained his feet in a backward leap. His eyes, often a smiling blue, were hard and glittering with the joy of combat and recklessness. He detested this chunky scoundrel, loathed him as he loathed Gila monsters and the scaly, legless things that slithered into the warmth of a man’s blankets at night.

With a swift motion he unbuckled the heavy belt, tossing it with the knife and the two loose revolvers, sidewise toward Kurtt, who now had hunched up, his eyes widened in misery and terror.

“If he gets me, protect—yourself!” cried Bill. The pause came as he ducked beneath the spreading arms of Chotty’s headlong rush, instantly hooking back a rabbit punch to Chotty’s short, columnar neck, a blow which surely would have broken Bill’s own, but which had no more effect upon the outlaw than to make him stagger slightly and mouth horrible curses as he wheeled, again threw down his head and rushed.

Except for the man’s astounding speed and desperate anxiety to rend, tear, destroy, Bill might have found him ludicrous. As matters stood the prospector had no difficulty hitting Chotty Bedell. He did so, delivering solid, foot-long smashes and twisting uppercuts that smashed into the solid midriff, that broke a wide flap of skin from one side of the outlaw’s mouth, made him spit fragments of blackened teeth, yet which did not stop or even appreciably slow him!

Grunt, curse, dash, grab, Bill did not escape unscathed or easily. At each meeting of those two fighting men the clutching fingers nearly got their hold. They tore Bill’s flannel shirt to shreds, gouged across his arms and right cheek deep nail wounds that welled blood. And once, as Bill inadvertently stepped in the fire while dodging, Chotty grasped a small handful of hair and ripped it out.

Bill grimaced with the pain. His reflex was instant. Leaping forward this time to meet the attack instead of dodging or sidestepping, he planted a straight right to the bent forehead which almost caved the brute’s skull and actually stopped him in his tracks! The piggish eyes blinked redly. Chotty swayed. That second a stinging, terrible left cross slammed into Chotty’s wounded ear.

Without impetus or a good clutch on balance, it sent him spinning like a stick of bowling alley wood struck by a heavy ball. Bill was after him like a cat, striking, plugging home short lefts and rights of punishment the instant Chotty reeled upward from his knees.

Down he went again, and this time inertly, although no other blow had been of knockout quality. Bill failed to realize this, and was satisfied. Breathing in great gulps he stood with arms hanging an instant, then backed away. “A—rope!” he managed to gasp. “Tie him—this time.”

But Chotty was not quite finished. Driven by desperation, and actually not unconscious for as much as a second, he struggled back to his feet, intending one last rush.

That instant there came a stunning report from Bill’s side, and an answering scream from Chotty. Kurtt, evidently viewing the combat far differently than had Bill, had decided to take a hand.

“Oh!” he gasped, looking at the smoking Colt and then at the man he had hit. “I didn’t—mean to2”

But whatever he had intended, he had creased Chotty Bedell most painfully. The heavy slug caromed from his shinbone midway between ankle and knee, inflicting a wound agonizing though not at all dangerous.

In a whisk Bill had the weapons again, and was reproving his unwanted ally in no uncertain terms. Kurtt, summoning all his strength, as it seemed, burst forth in shaky explanations that he had meant only to frighten Chotty; that the gun had been aimed far to the left but had swerved with the trigger pull, as doubtless was the case.

Bill paid little attention. He had run to Chotty, who now was on the ground, cursing and moaning as he clutched his leg. Considering the extent of his facial damage the wound really was not worth such a powwow; yet it is doubtful that the outlaw quite understood that his temporarily paralyzed leg ever would be fit for service again.

“Well, you had all that coming,” decided Bill briefly when he saw the gouge. “That, and a hell of a lot more! We'll let you get away this time, though. Lie there and don’t make any funny moves. It’s a couple or three hours till dawn, and that’s when you’re going to be well enough to travel!”

IV IV

SO IT was done. The first red edge of desert sun saw Chotty Bedell limping, packless, weaponless, on the long, arid trail to Sediente, nearest of the adobe towns on this, the Mexican side of the line. Chotty had his own canteen, one quarter full. For a tenderfoot this would have been a ration insufficient, but Chotty, with one cupful tendered him following the fight, would win through.

Perhaps he would not have much to spare, traveling in the day; yet Bill calculated just exactly how much he himself would need as a minimum, and had given the outlaw exactly that amount. All Chotty’s whining and pleading moved Bill not a jot. He and the little man had none too much water as it was. Unless Max Kurtt perked up enough to travel during this day, it would mean that Bill would be forced to a round trip back to his own digging.

Chotty’s swollen, distorted face inclined toward the ground. Hate unmentionable held him in its searing grip, yet now had come something near to a sane appraisal of his predicament. He had less than a quart of water, and more than thirty miles of hard trudging, part of which could not be done in the heat of the day. So he emitted no sounds save an occasional gritting moan, and kept to his elliptical course about the sierra.

Oh, there would be a reckoning! Though for all his bullying brutality and bestial code Chotty did not lack one whit of a killer’s courage, something approaching a total loss in morale kept him now from contemplating any open revenge upon that blaze-eyed knotty youngster whom he had decried as an unruly dude. Bill Halliday was pizen, and Chotty had found out the fact. As long as he lived he would carry the scars of that epic combat. And he would kill the man who dared to joke.

First need that Chotty mulled over was, of course, water. He would swash down untold gallons of the bitter hogwash that passed for water, at Sediente. He even might douse himself in old Ramon’s horse trough! Three years before, following a prolonged carouse, he had done that, as a nerve tonic, when he learned that a rival gunman had come to town, boasting of conquests greater even than those accredited to Chotty Bedell. Since then he had not thought of bathing. Right now, as he grudgingly wet his bruised and swollen tongue from the tepid canteen, Chotty pictured himself lying full length in the trough, luxuriating, drinking in moisture through every pore as once in the memory of man had the desert lava in the astounding cloudburst of ’95.

No, Chotty was not thinking of what he would do to Bill Halliday. After water would come a jug of Old Ramon’s twice distilled maguey juice, a beverage three lusty swigs of which would make a sand tortoise stand up on its hind legs and make passes at a sidewinder.

With mescal or tequila sufficient, Chotty could think and plan. Meanwhile, even his rudimentary brain could envision six or seven satisfying things to do to that half dead little tenderfoot Kurtt whose rich stores almost had provided Chotty with a grubstake. Not that he would have used the grubstake himself. Far from it. With that much to offer, though, he could have gone to Ajo or any other town peopled by unfortunate prospectors, and bought a half share in a whole season of gold seeking. Chotty rather liked that sort of thing. He didn’t object at all to the desert, or to the arid crags where men sought flecked white quartz or veins of knife-soft silver; but the pick and drill, or even the circling pan of the placer hunter, did not appeal. As all the deluded or wise old rats who made their home where nature’s skull is bare to the fangs, he loved gold and desired it.

That little hombre, Kurtt, would be alone sometime! That day would be a time of sordid horror in the Kurtt family. Damn him! He'd rue that shot, and even the moment when he had struggled back to life! Chotty, his alkali dusted, lashless lids nearly closing, saw clear and stark the little scientist pegged out in the manner of the Digger Indians of California, suffering untold agony.

There were no ants here, worse luck. There was alkali, though. Some of that, with sand, poured into the eyes was a torment—well, a first motion, anyway. Then2

Chotty’s thoughts and lusts may be forgotten. He dismembered little Kurtt by degrees, the saliva coming to even his thirsty mouth when he gloated over the precise moment the little man would die from the multiplied agonies.

And before ten o’clock of the next morning the outlaw had his trough of water, and likewise his jug of tequila and a full sack of strong, sweetened cigarette tobacco. His thoughts had shifted to the greater hate.

When he embarked upon even the lesser of the two ventures, however, he met an obstacle. Two days later, sneaking upon. the spot where that tiny campfire had blazed, Chotty found the spot deserted and the sifting grains of white and yellow unwilling to tell of the direction in which Bill Halliday and his charge had disappeared,

WHEN Bill looked upon the figure of his conquered enemy receding, he dismissed Chotty Bedell for the time being, and gave sole attention to the little man whose life he had saved.

Max Kurtt was an odd figure for La Abra. He was a man no more than five feet four inches in height, slight of bone and slighter still of flesh. Much poring over pestles and microscopes and classroom desks had given him a premature stoop of both shoulders and spine. His skin, on his face and the back of his hands, was the color of weak tea, rather muddy tea, with milk. Below his collar, above the wrists of his cambric shirt, and over the rest of the skimpy, rather pitiful body, however, it was the dead white of the blond Germanic races.

His hair remained only as a ring of spiritless, grayed straw above the prominent ears which bore the marks of heavy spectacles. The forehead was a vertical expanse of buff seamed by squinting during the time he did not wear the spectacles. He was fifty-one, a bachelor who still could blush and quaver in speaking if any woman smiled and spoke to him.