I dropped back of a rock where there was plenty of shelter and cut loose at the bush up on the ridge. I couldn’t see anybody, but I wanted to let Phil know I was all right and, besides, to warn the rurales back with the pack train.
Then I heard Phil’s gun roar up above me, and knew we were sittin’ pretty. Phil would be almost sure to try for the ridge, and he’d count on me to cover him from down in the cañon. My legs ain’t much for runnin’ uphill any more, but I can still see between the sights.
I knew Phil was out and running from the way the bullets quit spatterin’ against my rock. I flung up over it. A man’s head and shoulders were outlined against the sky above the ridge. He was sighting a gun up on the slope where Phil was jumping for a bush.’
I cut loose and beat that guy to it.
He settled, slumped, rolled, and lay still.
Somebody clipped a hole through my sombrero. But then, it was gettin’ old, anyway. I slammed home a shell and took a snap shot at a bit of motion on top of the ridge. I didn’t hit him, but I threw enough dust in his eyes to put him out of the fight for a while — and the fight wasn’t goin’ to last long.
Phil was out in the open now, walkin’ toward the ridge, trustin’ to me to see that nobody got up to take a shot. One fellow tried it. I think I hit him in the leg, from the way he went down.
Then there wasn’t any more firing. I heard the drum of a horse’s hoofs, and then the whinny of another horse. Phil broke into a run, and I saw him bring his gun to his shoulder as he took a couple of long distance shots.
That was all there was to it.
We got the rurales, and the man who was dead was properly checked off. He was a guy we had seen a couple of times with Pedro Gallivan. But he didn’t have anything that showed he’d ever belonged to Pedro, except a bullet hole in the back of his head. My bullet had gone through his shoulder and down into his innards. It’d probably have been fatal. But he might have talked a little bit if it hadn’t been for that bullet hole in the back of his head.
That was one of Pedro’s little tricks. Dead men didn’t talk, any.
The fellow I’d wounded in the leg had evidently made his bronc all right. There was only one horse left behind. It had been stolen from north of the border the night before.
Pedro was a clever cuss when it came to covering his tracks, and if somebody had to take a tumble, he always left a fall guy.
After that Phil and I got a new job. The mine owners hadn’t paid much attention to Pedro as long as he only went after money paid for booze and Chinks. But when he started going after bars of gold, he was getting too close to home for the big lads to take any comfort, so they told Phil and me to take a couple of months, ride trail on Pedro, and wipe him out when we got a good excuse.
But Pedro knew when he’d bit off more than he could chew. He kept pretty close to first base, and Phil and I just sort of stuck around where we could keep tabs on what was going on at his hacienda.
I think Pedro had us spotted. It wasn’t that he said anything; but the Mex who tried to knife Phil one night, and the gent of undetermined nationality who took a shot at me from ambush one full moon, made it look as though somebody knew what we were there for.
But Pedro was respectably at home in the hacienda both times.
We rode up there to make sure. He welcomed us with oily eyes and suave comments. We answered him with polite remarks that didn’t fool anybody. And that was the way things stood.
Then Walter Hedley showed up.
Hedley was just a bit of human wreckage, nothing more. He was the sort of backwater flotsam that collects at the border. They’re always more or less the same. Drink is the big thing in their lives.
Hedley must have had some pretty good stock in him. He was a gentleman after he got drunk, and that’s about the best indication of breeding you can get — along the border, anyway.
Pedro looked Hedley over and invited him up to the hacienda.
Phil and I knew what that meant. Pedro was in need of some more fall guys. He liked the fellows who had breeding and education. He shifted ’em from booze to dope, got them so they could put up a good front when they were hopped up, and sent ’em out on border business that wouldn’t bear too much of a searchlight.
We didn’t want fall guys. We wanted Pedro. So we discussed how maybe we could get this guy Hedley to talkin’ with us before Pedro got him branded.
But it was the Desert Queen who dealt herself in on the hand. I don’t know how she found out what it was all about, but she called herself in on the play, and from then on things moved fast.
Through Phil, I’d found out more about this girl they called the Desert Queen, the one whose real name was Dixie Carson. She made a specialty of getting the human wreckage of the border, patching it up so it could sail once more, and starting it off on another voyage.
Mostly she dealt in the sort of women who are thrown into the border and left there. She had a secluded ranch way south and she built up the people she took in down there, gave ’em lots of fresh air, staked ’em with money, and gave ’em self-respect.
That was why she raided the roulette every once in a while. She was a genius on mathematics, had a college degree in it, and she’d figured out things about a roulette wheel. Phil said she called it the Calculus of Chance, or something like that.
Anyhow, the Queen got track of Walter Hedley, and he fell for her like a ton of brick. The Queen wanted Hedley to straighten him up. Pedro wanted Hedley to drag him down. It was a battle.
Pedro got Hedley to visit him at his hacienda. Dixie got Hedley one night, invited him to her place, and drove off with him the next morning. A week later Phil came to me.
“I’m quittin’,” he said.
“Quittin’ the job, Phil?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Goin’ to work for the Queen.”
I looked him over. He didn’t ring true somehow.
“What’s the big idea, she won a lot of gold she wants guarded?”
“Nope. She wants me to take Walt Hedley out into the desert an’ make a man of him. Pedro got him started using dope while he was at the hacienda. She can cure him of booze, but he keeps getting out and smuggling in dope. She says he wants to kill himself when he realizes what he’s done, but when the craving gets on him he can’t resist.”
I didn’t say anything. I ain’t never craved dope myself, and a man who hasn’t had any particular craving ain’t in any position to pass judgment on a guy that has it.
“When do you start?”
“To-night.”
“The mine people sending in anybody to work with me?”
“No. They figure Pedro’s lying low as long as somebody’s watchin’ him, and they figure one man can watch him just as well and twice as cheap as two men.”
I grunted. Mine people get that way. Some smart bookkeeper out in New York was auditing the books and telling the superintendent in Mexico how to handle a slick bandit like Pedro Gallivan. But I let it go. It was bread and butter for me, and that’s one thing I won’t fight with.
“Where you goin’?” I asked.
“Out to the Phillips prospect. If you get out that way, drop in.”
“You don’t seem cheerful, son.”
He looked down his nose.
“She loves him,” he said.
There wasn’t anything I could say, so I put one of my hands on his shoulder.