The Early Adventures of El Borak, page 27
He tossed the bag into the back seat, helped the girl in the front, untied the horses, and got in.
“I suppose yuh had supper on the train?” he asked.
She answered that she had, and stole a glance at him. He seemed extremely capable and able to take care of himself, yet he flushed and stammered each time he spoke to her.
“You haven’t introduced yourself,” she reminded, smiling.
“Me? I’m Billy Buckner. ‘Drag,’ most folks call me.”
“Drag? What does that mean?”
“Oh, nuthin’ much,” he squirmed. “Just foolishness.”
“Where is Steve?” asked the girl.
“Roundin’ up some mavericks,” he answered.
[. . .]
“The Hades Saloon” (untitled and unfinished)
The Hades Saloon and gambling hall, Buffalotown, Arizona, was in full swing when two sun-bronzed and dust-covered riders swung down in front of the saloon and strode through the doors.
They had hardly entered when they were recognized. And from the events which followed, it would seem that they did not crave recognition. Red McGaren, gunman of note, walked toward the two, something sinister in his catlike stride, his hands swinging lightly near the heavy guns that hung at either thigh.
He stopped directly in front of the two.
“In from a long ride?” he said in his sneering, menacing voice.
“Maybe,” was the noncommittal reply.
“I figure the sheriff might be interested in you two birds,” McGaren said cooly, half-crouching, his hands hovering close above his gun-butts, a sinister figure.
Silence fell over the saloon, the gamblers paused, the bartenders made ready for a swift duck behind the bar. Dancing girls and cowboys drew back against the wall. A few hard-looking individuals edged forward.
McGaren spoke, “There’s a big reward out for the Sonora Kid and Drag Buckner, and I figure on collectin’ it.”
McGaren went down, riddled by the bullets of the Sonora Kid, his only shot striking the saloon wall. Then the Kid and Buckner proceeded to shoot up the saloon, which deed speaks for their nerve, for the Hades Saloon was well-named and was the rendezvous for the outcasts and ruffians of three states. The two outlaws escaped in the confusion, leaving behind them a raging mob.
Helen Channon came to the West on the invitation of a ranchgirl friend, and she came with little idea of the country or the people. She had always been skeptical in regard to the stories she had heard of the West.
[. . .]
“A blazing sun” (untitled and unfinished)
A blazing sun in a blazing sky reflected from a blazing desert. Two horsemen riding slowly over the desert; no other sign of life except a Gila monster basking in the sun. Blazing heat, furious heat, desert heat.
The horses of the two men were tough, wiry cayuses, well adapted for desert travel. The riders were young, boys in fact. They dressed alike in wide-brimmed hats, plain, serviceable clothes, boots and spurs. Except for one thing they were no different from any of the other cowboys that rode the Arizona ranges. Low on the hip of each hung a heavy black Colt in a stiff black leather holster; and one of the youths wore two. Moreover, the end of each holster was tied to the leg of the wearer. The guns were big, single-action Colts and their stocks were polished from much use.
The riders themselves were both of a type: clean-built, wiry youths of medium height with black hair and gray eyes. They might have been mistaken for brothers, but in reality there was little real resemblance between them. The one with the two guns was slightly taller than his companion and of a somewhat slimmer build. His eyes, too, were different, being long and narrow and of a steely glint.
In the features of both could be read determination and courage, with a liberal amount of humor; one could see at a glance that here were two young men who lived clean and thought clean.
He with the two guns shifted in his saddle and gazed ahead at the mountains which flung up their jagged crests against the skyline.
“We’ll be there presently,” he remarked.
“Oh, yeah,” replied his companion. “A few hundred more miles of this—desert and we’ll have the privilege of climbin’ those confounded mountains. This was a fool idea of yours, Steve.”
“The urge of exploration, Buck,” explained Steve Allison whimsically. “That everlastingly driveth the weary wayfarer onward to discover new worlds to conquer. The what-do-you-call-it of, well, you know what I mean.”
“Oh, yeah!” Buckner answered sarcastically. “Quite so; very clear.”
Steve grinned. “You know that yuh want to explore those old pueblos as much as I do.”
Billy Buckner merely grunted. Ever since Steve had told him of the lost pueblos up in the mountains of the _______ range, Bill had looked forward eagerly to the rediscovering and exploring of them.
For a while they rode in silence, broken only by the creak of saddles or the clink of a hoof striking a stone.
“I betcha Miguel Gonzales is hidin’ out in those mountains,” opined Drag. “And furthermore, I betcha he sees us before we see him and ambushes us.”
“He can try, if he wants to,” Steve answered.
“He’s some gun-fanner, for a Mex,” mused Buckner. “Those two gamblers he drilled were pretty slick with a gun, themselves.”
“They had no business framin’ on him to roll him for his money,” said Steve. “Cheap crooks, I call ’em.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Drag.
Less than an hour’s ride brought the two to the mountains. The range was wild, steep and rugged. They rode on, going higher and farther into the mountains, until they were forced to dismount and go on foot, after hobbling the horses and leaving them close to a mountain spring where there was water and mountain grass in abundance.
“Just right for Gonzales to grab a horse and make a slick getaway,” Drag remarked.
“They wouldn’t let a stranger come near them,” Steve answered. Which was true, for Steve was always careful to train his horses in certain ways.
After something like an hour’s climbing, they came to a ledge overlooking a wide valley. On all sides of the valley, high, steep cliffs stood. The valley seemed a barren waste; the soil was dry and appeared alkaline and was bare except for a scattering of mesquite and sagebrush.
“What’s the idea of comin’ here?” Buckner asked. “I don’t see any place where the pueblos could be.”
“The pueblos are in that valley,” Steve stated.
“Huh? In that valley? Nix, Steve. There’s nothing in that valley.”
“Have you explored it?” Steve demanded.
“No.”
“Has anybody ever explored it?”
“No, why should they? It’s nothing but a desert, nothing growing, no springs, and besides there’s no way of getting down into the valley. The cliff’s at least a hundred and fifty feet high at this ledge and on the other sides the cliffs are higher. And they are straight up and down.”
“Anyway,” Steve said, “we’re going into that valley.”
“But say, Steve,” Buckner protested, “we can see most of the valley from the ledge and if there were any pueblos we’d see them.”
“They’re there, all right,” Steve replied imperturbably. “And I’m going into the valley, myself.”
Buckner shrugged his shoulders. “All right, let’s get started.”
Steve chuckled. He turned to a rope that lay on the rocks and picked it up.
“Good hundred feet of hair-rope here,” he announced. “That lariat I had you bring along is about forty feet long. Extra long lariat. We’ll have to drop about ten feet, maybe not so far.”
“I bet we get our hands burned goin’ down,” remarked Buckner. “And how are we going to get back up the cliff?”
“We can climb up easy, with knots in the rope,” Allison replied. He tied the two ropes together carefully and made one end fast to a stunted oak several feet back from the edge of the cliff.
“I’ll go first,” Steve said, and wrapping the rope loosely about his waist he started down the cliff. The trip was none too easily accomplished, for though Steve was as active as an acrobat or a mountain-cat and the rope was knotted at intervals, at places the cliff bulged outward and the rope, not being fastened at the lower end, had a tendency to swing back and forth. Steve stopped frequently to rest and even then he was tired when he dropped the few feet from the rope to the floor of the valley.
Buckner, who had watched Steve’s progress closely, and experienced much relief when he landed, then drew up the rope again. He tied the two rifles and the canteens to the rope and lowered them to Steve, who managed to reach them by standing on a boulder.
Then Buckner started down the rope with Steve bracing himself against the lower end to steady it.
He came down successfully and picked up his rifle and canteen.
“Now show me your pueblos,” he demanded.
Steve looked up the cliff swiftly.
“Quick, duck into the sage!” he exclaimed, springing back into the scanty bushes. Buckner did likewise and as they did so the report of a high-powered rifle rang out and a bullet buzzed through the sagebrush close to Steve. Steve’s own rifle spoke as he fired at a movement of the bushes at the top of the cliff.
Then the rope came sliding down the cliff.
“Adios, señors!” came a mocking voice from the cliff.
“Gonzales, _____ him!” swore Buckner, firing in the direction of the voice.
Allison swore softly. Then he rose cautiously.
“Hey!” exclaimed Buckner. “You boob! You wanta get drilled?”
“Gonzales has gone,” Steve answered. He stood erect and walked to the foot of the cliff.
Buckner rose and came forward. Steve picked up the rope.
“He didn’t even cut the rope,” Steve remarked. “See, he untied it. I’m glad he did. It’s a good hair rope.”
“I’m glad he didn’t cut the rope while I was coming down it,” Buckner said.
“And now for the Indian pueblos,” said Steve.
[. . .]
“The way it came about” (untitled and unfinished)
The way it came about that Steve Allison, Timoleon Lycurgus Casanova de Quin and me came to be in the mountains of Thibet, was like this.
Steve and me went up there just for the fun of it and because Steve read where some scientist said that accordin’ to his calculations and researches, the missing link was somewhere in the Himalaya Mountains, in Thibet. I didn’t take much stock in that; I have seen lots of guys which easy pass for the missing link, but Steve said we’d make up an expedition and invade Thibet.
As for Timmy, which is Timoleon etc., he went along partly because he was studying botany and partly because Steve allowed the trip would make a man of him. Anyhow, Tim is wealthy and stood a lot of the expense.
So we rambled up the Himalayas, through northern India and Nepal and up into Thibet.
No use in describing the whole trip. I’ll just start at the place where the guides scooted with most of the luggage and left us sitting on a mountain in central Thibet.
“This,” remarked Steve, kicking over a camp chair, he was that peeved, “is some how-de-do. Why should those unmentionable coolies light out and leave us here?”
I’d been wondering about that myself.
“Maybe a hostile tribe of cannibals or somethin’ is lurkin’ about,” I suggested. “Maybe the coolies got wind of it and blew.”
“Cannibals? In Thibet?” Steve says. “But it may be something like that.” He drew his gun and looked it over careful. Then he picked up his rifle and examined it.
“Anyhow,” says he, “here we are, stranded in Thibet, and we gotta find our way out of these mountains, which is all Thibet is, anyway.”
He looked all around at the high, snow-covered peaks.
“Some country, Thibet.”
It is, too. It isn’t all mountains, of course. It’s more like a high, wide plateau, with tall peaks here and there. Mostly just desert-land. A bleak, barren country, but we were there in the summer, and it wasn’t so bad. Cold enough, though.
Our camp was located on the top of a big, round mountain, as bare as the desert.
Our idea of camping so high up was so we could see anybody if they tried to raid the camp or anything, though Steve says the Thibetans were friendly and peaceable as a rule. He said the same thing, oncet, about some Sioux Indians that later tried to scalp him.
“Lookit here,” says Steve, gettin’ down on his hands and knees and drawin’ a map on the ground with a stick. “Here’s Thibet. We ain’t far north enough to be anywhere near the Kuenlun or any of those other mountains. Moreover, we ain’t nowheres near the borders of East Turkestan because there’s not enough mountains and we haven’t seen any Taghliks. East and south I know the country better. The way I figure it, we’re in the nomad plateau of Thibet, somewhere north of Bogtsang-tsangpo.”
“And havin’ deducted that,” says I, “what are you goin’ to do?”
“Well,” says he, “we had to have a startin’ place, didn’t we?”
“Why?” I want to know. “We’re here, ain’t we? And what does it matter what the name of the place is, so long as we’re lost in it?”
“Well, you sap,” says Steve, “how’d we know which way to start if we didn’t know where we was?”
There’s somethin’ in that, come to think about it.
Just then we noticed Timoleon Casanova was missin’. He usually was when we was busy.
We looked around and saw him fussing around on the mountain slope with his fool magnifyin’ glass and botanist outfit. We yelled at him and he came up to the camp.
“Lycurgus,” says Steve plumb stern, “you gotta stick closer to camp and to us. This is a strange country and they is no tellin’ what is lurkin’ in the offing.”
“Ah, yes,” says Timoleon, blinking like a mild mannered mud-turtle. “I have been examining a specimen of the genus—” and he went off into a lot of botany names and words and such that maybe Steve understood, but not me.
“Well,” says Steve, “try not to roam no further away from camp than you think is your bounden duty.” Well knowin’ Timoleon would be chasin’ off the next minute, like as not. Butterflies was Timoleon’s specialty. He knew more about them than Steve Allison did about guns, which is goin’ some.
“Oh, yes,” says Timoleon, “I nearly forgot. I found this.” And he handed Steve what looked like a yellow pebble.
Steve took it and then gave a kind of a snort.
“Drag,” says he, “look here!”
I looked. That “pebble” was as big as a goose-egg and it was solid gold!
“Gosh!” says I.
Steve pounced on Timoleon. “Where’d you find this?”
“Why, down the slope there, somewhere. I really do not remember exactly. I stumbled on it while pursuing the genus—”
Me and Steve was breakin’ speed records down that mountain.
“Half an’ half,” says Steve, “or rather thirds.”
Well, we searched that slope up and down but we didn’t find any more gold.
Finally we sat down and rested.
“Funny about that nugget,” I said. “You reckon somebody dropped it?”
“If they did and I can find ’em they’ll drop some more,” says Steve. “That gold is the real stuff. But there’s gold somewhere in Thibet.”
And just then we heard a noise and looked around to see ten big tribesmen covering us with rifles. Just like that.
That’s the way. When a man gets after gold he can’t see, feel or think of anything else. Ordinarily an Indian couldn’t sneak up on Steve and me, but we were so busy gold-huntin’ we hadn’t noticed.
“Shall we put up a fight, Steve?” I asked, not putting my hand on my gun but getting ready to.
“No,” said he, “these Thibetans are a peaceful people.”
[. . .]
“The hot Arizona sun” (untitled and unfinished)
The hot Arizona sun had not risen high enough to heat the clear, chill air of the morning. The shadows still lingered among the cliffs and the desert had just begun to shimmer in the sunlight. Along the cliffside a trail ran, skirted on one side by a sheer precipice and on the other by the cliff wall that grew lower and lower as the trail ascended, until at last it emerged upon a kind of high-flung plateau. This was the highest point of the trail; beyond, it dipped down into the lower levels.
Along this trail two horsemen rode. One of the riders was not what you would expect in a scene like this. It was a girl. She was a slim, lithe young thing, her rosy, untanned complexion proving her to be a newcomer, yet she rode with the ease that comes only with much riding and with a grace that proved her to be a Westerner. She possessed a fresh, vivacious beauty such as is seldom met with.
Her companion was a young man of medium size and a light, wiry build. He was dressed in ordinary cowboy outfit: Stetson hat, chaps, boots, and so on; a very commonplace figure except for two things. The first was his eyes; they drew the glance of one as a magnet draws metal. They were long, narrow eyes, of a grey that glinted like steel. Ordinarily they were perfectly inscrutable, but on occasion they blazed like flame or leaped like daggers. The other thing that drew the attention was the fact that, low on each hip, swung a heavy Colt in a black leather holster.
The girl and boy, (for he was little more) showed plainly some marks of kinship. There was a certain resemblance about the nose and the girl, too, had grey eyes, but there the resemblance ceased. There was no likeness between the lean, rather long jaw and thin lips of the youth and the soft, ruby lips and delicately molded, dimpled chin of the girl. Even the eyes differed, for hers were large and soft and gentle. But the main difference was in the hair, for while his was black and straight, hers was a silky, wavy, gold which cast back the beams of the sun most beautifully.
