Gary handed the shotgun to Tuck and took the rifle. The three of them had their gear slung about them. It was no time to be choosy. There was one way to go. They slogged on along the echoing drift, spurred on by their fear.
Twice more they had to clear their way through blockages, but they were nothing as compared to the big one far behind them. The drift sloped upward and the draft became stronger; a wet, freshening smell replaced the dusty odor of the drift.
Gary rounded a sharp turn in the tunnel and saw a steep slope. He scrambled up it. They had been climbing steadily almost since the time they had left the gold cache. Water was trickling along the side of the drift now and he could have sworn he heard the faint rumbling of thunder. He rounded yet another turn and found himself in another large room. At the far side was a tattered sheet of cloth waving in the strong breeze that blew into the room. He started toward it, then stopped short. An odd, eerie feeling came over him. Tuck and Sue came into the room, puffing and blowing.
Gary turned slowly and swung the lamp. To one side was a crude bunk and in the bunk was a hunched figure, covered with a filthy blanket. One arm hung over the side of the bunk, and the hand that rested on the floor was nothing but drawn, parchmentlike skin that clearly showed the bones.
"What is it?" said Sue weakly. "Not again, Gary!"
"He's long dead," said Tuck. "The dead ones don't bother me any more."
Gary's feet grated on rusted tin cans as he walked toward the bunk. He slowly and steadily pulled back the blanket to look into a mummified face framed by thick, coarse black hair. The mummy had been there a long, long time, preserved by cool dry air. A dingy headband bound the hair to the head. Gary stepped back. His feet struck tin cans again. He flashed the light down on them. Some of the labels were still legible. "Elberta peaches," he said quietly. He raised the lamp. A Winchester rifle leaned against the wall, covered with a patina of rust and dust. Gary walked to it and picked it up. He knew enough about guns to recognize a Model 1886. He worked the stiff action and ejected a heavy brass cartridge. He picked it up and looked at the base of it. "A .50/110 caliber," he said. Gary looked at his two friends. "I think we've found Asesino. He's been dead many years."
Sue shivered in the draft. The wind whipped the tattered cloth at the room entrance and moaned down the drift.
"If that's Asesino, and I don't know who else it could be," said Tuck quietly, "who was that back there?"
Gary leaned the heavy rifle against the wall, flicked out the lamp, and walked to the curtain. He pulled it to one side and stepped out onto a rock shelf with a rough and almost natural-looking breastwork of rocks along the outer edge. For a moment he expected to be looking down the canyon of The Needle. Instead he saw the thick grayness of the false dawn and far below, a canyon. For a moment he was confused, until he realized it was the very canyon in which the entrance to the Lost Espectro was. From where he stood he could easily see anyone who moved on the slopes or in the canyon. Even now he saw a stealthy movement. Someone was skulking along the edge of the canyon. Someone with a heavy rifle in his hands and a dirty cloth bound about his dark wet hair. He was looking down toward where the entrance to the mine should be.
Gary stepped back into the room. He lighted the lamp, knowing well enough the man outside could not see the light. "Our little friend is out there," he said, eying his two partners closely, "looking down toward the mine entrance. Maybe he figures we just might dig ourselves out that way. He knows now we found the gold. What do we do? Sit it out here? Try to make a break to get away? Or clean his clock for him?"
Tuck grinned. "You think I'm leaving here without taking a crack at him? After the way he scared me? No, sir!"
Sue spit inelegantly into her left palm and smacked it with her small right fist. "Let me at him," she growled fiercely. Lobo began to growl, too, as he started for the entrance.
Gary flicked off the lamp. "Quiet, Lobo," he said. "Stay! Our boy probably won't look back this way. That's a break for us. If we get close enough we can get the drop on him."
"Supposing he doesn't surrender?" said Sue anxiously.
There was a long moment of quietness.
Sue spoke again. "Now that was a stupid question, wasn't it?"
The rain pattered down steadily and the wind whined through the canyon as the three of them made their plan.
14
End of a Killer
The rain was drumming on the Espectros, streaming from a real buster of a cloud that hung over the mountains. The cloud was a huge and threatening mass with a distended belly of gray and black which held a mighty tonnage of water. The Espectros had long been notorious as the breeding place of storms, and when the Thunder People rumbled their great drums in the deep canyons and lanced the streaming skies with their shafts of lightning tipped with flashing death, it was no place for frail man to stand up against nature. The wind bellowed through the gorges and lashed the scrub trees. Water had begun to course through the dry stream beds at the bottoms of the canyons, rising with frightful speed and sweeping everything before its fluid power.
Gary Cole knew it had been pouring rain for most of the night while he and his companions were burrowing in the belly of the Lost Espectro. There had been other rainstorms of more than average intensity over the Espectros that summer, but he could not recall any as fierce as this one. It was almost like dusk in the canyon country as he peered from behind the breastwork to spot the killer who haunted the canyon rim. Then he saw a movement in a clump of brush at the very edge of the chasm. "Ready?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Hold it a minute," hissed Tuck from within the cavern. "I'm not finished with my makeup!"
Gary turned to look at Sue and his heart went out to her. Her great brown eyes looked like those of a frightened doe as she hunched back against the rock face out of the driving rain, holding onto Lobo's collar. "Remember, Sue," he said quietly, "I want you to release him only if things turn against us."
She nodded. "I'll remember," she said.
Gary looked at the shotgun beside her. "It's loaded. I showed you how to throw off the safety catch. Don't fire both barrels at the same time! If anything happens to Tuck and me, lay low. He might not find you. If he gets too close let the dog go at him, then use the gun."
She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, then nodded again.
Gary crawled around the edge of the tumbledown breastwork and bellied down the slope behind a screen of wet rock. In no time at all he was wet to the skin, but it didn't matter. The hunt he was on and the tension of it was enough to keep his mind from his discomfort. He was halfway down the slope when he looked back. Tuck's head popped up. The lean one waved, then vanished again. Gary gave him time to get into position, then crawled on.
The killer was well hidden in the tangled brush that covered one side of a huge tilted slab of rock at the very brink of the canyon. Gary could just make out the outline of his prone figure. Gary inched along, cradling his Winchester in the crook of his arms, until he reached a place to one side of the slab of rock where the ground was a little higher. He was no more than thirty yards from his quarry.
He waited again, feeling the cold rain beating steadily against his back. Minutes ticked past and then he saw a furtive movement to his right, beyond the slab of rock. Tuck was in position now with Asesino's old rifle.