“Hoste-Ne-Bega,” she said.
The men exchanged glances.
“He’s got one of those little timber-and-mud houses up here a half mile or so. It’s hard to find at night, but you won’t have any trouble at all in the morning.”
“We can find it,” I said, confidently.
“Better wait until morning. Then we can show you right where it is. He used to come over and visit with us at night some, but we haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
I lit a cigarette.
A voice, hard, dry, and brittle with menace sounded from the darkness. “Well, friend, suppose we both walk in — together.”
It was the fifth man, the one who had been wise to the desert. He’d evidently circled around until he’d got behind Ed Kaplin, and had got the drop on him.
I heard Ed’s voice, closer than it should have been. “Sure,” he said. “I was sort of lookin’ for you.”
The words made the men around the fire go for their guns again. Bess and I, however, sat motionless. Kaplin was a nice chap and he knew something of the desert, but there are some things a man learns only after he’d had a flock of years in the open spaces.
For instance, when he saw but four men in there he should have gone ’way back, so that it would have been impossible for a prowler to circle him. Then he should have lain down back of a bush and listened. The way it was, he’d probably crowded on in to hear what the men near the fire were saying. Then again, he was in love with Bess, and he wanted to be where he wouldn’t miss if he had to do any shooting.
Anyhow, he’d been discovered. We could hear the sound of the feet crunching the loose sand of the Painted Desert, and then they came in near the campfire together, two shadows looming up out of the night.
I sized up the man who brought him in, and I didn’t like that man any more than I liked the city chaps. He was part Mexican, I guess, for his skin was bronze, and his eyes were a smoky, restless black. He had a gun at his hip; and something about the way the right hand flicked around the top of the holster made me feel that he might be able to use that gun to advantage if he ever started for it. He’d probably snake it into action without wasting any time.
I merely grunted a greeting and sat motionless, puffing out smoke.
“He’s looking for Hoste-Ne-Bega,” said one of the men. “Think they could find him at night, Pete?”
And the desert man grunted an affirmative. “Sure,” he said, “this man here, squatting down by the fire, is Bob Zane. He could find anything in the desert.”
I looked at him sharply, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before. The name didn’t mean much to the city men, evidently. They looked me over with a placid curiosity. Now that this Pete had come in by the fire, he seemed to be the dominant spirit.
“Maybe, if you’d sort of give me the direction, we’d find the place,” I said.
He grinned, and his teeth were white against the bronze of his leathery skin. The light from the campfire glinted from the matched rows. I didn’t like him any better when he grinned.
“It’s over there to the east and north,” he said. “You’ll find a little draw running in that direction. He’s made his hogan just over the little ridge, where the draw heads. He’s been here for some time, I guess.”
I watched the smoke from my cigarette. “Here when you came here, then?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Been here long?” I wanted to know, realizing that I was violating the etiquette of the desert in asking so many questions, but feeling vaguely uneasy, knowing that there was going to be trouble anyway.
“So-so,” he said.
I watched the night wind take a little eddy of smoke from my cigarette. Glancing over at the light of the campfire, I turned so that I could see something of their outfit. It was an outfit that had been packed in by manpower — light and compact.
“One of the boys said it had been a couple of days since they’d seen the Indian,” I said.
“Did he?” asked Pete.
“Yes,” I said.
“I see,” he remarked.
That finished the conversation. I finished the cigarette, and then straightened.
“We’ll be moseying along, I guess,” I said.
“Good luck. See you later — maybe,” observed Pete.
“So-long,” I told him.
I motioned to Ed and Bess to go ahead; I stayed a little behind. After they’d got off into the desert a short distance, I moved over to one side. The men we’d left behind were spreading out, too. They were moving in unison, as though there’d been another order. They shifted around on the other side of the blaze, so that the fire was between them and us. It made them almost invisible. I hurried up to catch Bess and Ed.
III. Six-guns Versus Rifles
“Think we’ll find the hogan here?” asked Ed as I caught up with them.
“Can’t tell,” I answered. “We’ll push right on toward it, and if there’s a little ridge there, we’ll wait on the other side of it. If we see anything silhouetted against the stars we’ll ask it to get its hands up.”
I could tell from his grunt of assent that he didn’t like the outfit any better than I did. Bess wasn’t saying anything, which was one of the things I liked about Bess. She took things as they came. I knew that her eyes would be steady, her hand ready, and that if she had to get her gun, her aim would be true.
We found the draw and worked up along it. There was a little ridge, all right, and we dropped over that and waited. I thought I could hear motion, but I couldn’t see anything. Down the slope was a blotch of blackness that was probably the hogan we wanted.
I pushed on down toward it, saw that it really was the hogan, and called for the others. Then I walked around to the east. There wasn’t any entrance to the place. I looked it over as well as I could in the starlight, then I leaned forward and felt the side of it with the tips of my fingers. There’d been an entrance there, all right, and it had been moved.
I walked around the structure. There was a low entrance to the west, then the little tunnel that ran into the cone-shaped structure. I whistled, a little whistle of surprise.
“Something fishy here, all right,” I said, pausing to listen.
A rock rattled somewhere on the slope.
“Quick, Bess!” I said, pulling her back. “Get out of there. Don’t go in that place!”
“Why not?” she asked.
“The entrance,” I told her. “That’s one thing about the Navajo. He’d never go into a hogan that had an entrance to the west. They build them with the entrance to the east. You can even feel where this entrance has been on the east side, then was changed to the west. That’s a warning to us that there’s something wrong.”
I led her out, away from the hogan. Ed Kaplin was right with us, pushing through the sand with swift strides. We covered distance as fast as we could, going toward the west.
I heard another rock, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a shadow, moving across the blurred reflection of desert light. Then there was the spurt of flame from a rifle, the roar of an explosion, and I could hear the thunk of the bullet.
Other rifles joined in the chorus. I could pick them out from the location of the flashes. They had the hogan surrounded on three sides, and were pouring lead into it. One man was standing with his back to us, rattling a fusillade down the entrance to that hogan.
I grunted permission to Ed, and cut loose with my six-gun. It was shooting in the dark, and the work had to be done by the feel of the weapon rather than the alignment of the sights. But a man who knows his gun can sometimes do quite a bit of execution, shooting just by a sense of touch.