THE NIGHT OF THE MURDEROUS MACHINATIONS (con'd)

 

[one]


Paladin was waiting for them, looming large and grim in silhouette against the sunrise on a ridge of brown grass overlooking the trail.


“He makes a lovely target, doesn’t he?” Gordon commented.


West squinted up toward the solitary figure. “He was careless in the study last night, too. I hope he’ll take fewer chances with our lives than he does with his own.” He scanned the ridge and then along their back trail, but saw no telltale clouds of dust or frightened grouse flushing from a shrub or sunlight reflecting off a rifle. “Then again, supposedly he’s safe until he gets too close.”


“Yeah, but we haven’t all conferred cordially about our terms. How close is ‘close’?”


Under the late-setting moon, a herd of antelope bounded up the slope of a ravine just ahead. Though the morning air was cool, the edge of the sun that topped the rise was already hot and glaring in a cloudless sky, the dust already hovering thick and choking above the trail. As they approached they could see that Paladin was dressed in black from his hat to his boots, the clothes as well-tailored as his evening finery but the fabric worn and the boots scuffed and creased: working clothes for a man at his work. On his black holster was affixed a bas-relief chess knight in solid silver, the same emblem as that embossed on his card; if the grip of the pistol was any indication it was a finely crafted weapon, well cared-for and well used. Such a costume would have looked ridiculous on a lesser man; Paladin wore it like a second skin, with competence and quiet menace. There was nothing of the dandy about him now.


“I’m glad we met him before he donned that getup,” Gordon muttered. “He means business, that’s for sure.”


“So do we.”


Riding down off the ridge to meet them, Paladin said nothing, merely touched his hat in greeting and led the way westward along the trail. Exchanging a wry glance, they fell in behind him.


In light of the bitter exchange they had overheard the night before, they were now inclined to regard the glowing report on Paladin by the San Francisco police with rather less skepticism. Clearly this enigmatic man had turned his back on an embarrassing past and transformed himself into a crusader for his idea of justice. Crusaders of any stripe, however, were a different sort of wild card all their own, and tended to make men who served the law very wary indeed.


Presently they spotted two riders a half-mile or so to the rear, making no attempt at concealment but also no threatening moves. This time the wry glance encompassed all three men. They rode steadily onward.


********************

Cauthen looked up from the plans he and Tandy were examining as Bullock hastened into the study. He didn’t knock, but at least he’d learned to slap dust from his clothes and scrape his boots before coming inside.


“What are you doing here? I ordered you to follow Paladin.”


“Jed and Mick are on him. I came back to tell you that he met up with those two cousins.” Bullock directed his report to Tandy, which made Cauthen grit his teeth in pique.


Tandy was just pouring himself a large neat whiskey from the decanter on the corner of the desk. “West and Gordon? Why on earth—?” He finished pouring in thoughtful silence, then sat back holding his glass and with his other hand began to toy with his watch fob. “So Horace Bird recommends them highly, does he? And Horace Bird is naturally concerned with territorial security, and known to confer occasionally with Colonel Richmond, head of the Secret Service—”


Cauthen snorted. “You think they’re government agents? Those two nitwits?”


“Yes, and good ones, considering how well they’ve played their parts. Better than we’ve played ours, if Bird has gotten wind of our plans. Or perhaps he can thank his good friend Burgin for the information.”


“You’ve been investigated so often you think everybody’s doing it.” Cauthen fiddled with his fountain pen, gold with opal highlights, then shrugged away his qualm of apprehension. “Well, so what if they are? They haven’t called in the cavalry, or our man watching Fort Selby would have reported in. They’re just fishing for evidence.” To Bullock he said, “Have your men pick them up before they’re close enough to see anything. But don’t kill them yet—just hold them until we get there. I’ve changed my mind—I want to see Paladin stripped of his supercilious air. And as soon as we consolidate our position, we’ll pay Mr. Burgin a personal visit.”


“And his luscious daughter,” Tandy added, with that cold glittering smile that always gave Cauthen a little chill. He had used to look at his whores that way just before he roughed them up.


Bullock grinned and sauntered out.


“Marjorie will never let her give you the time of day,” Cauthen taunted cheerfully. In the old days he had never dared to taunt Tandy. Things had certainly changed.


“She won’t have anything to say about it if she wants to save her husband’s life and her daughter’s position in society—not necessarily in that order of preference, of course.”


“You manipulate people like the Burgins very well. I don’t think you’ll find it so easy with Paladin. His character is firmer than it used to be.” Tandy had broken one doxy’s jaw, and Paladin—though of course he hadn’t been “Paladin” then—had done the same to Tandy after he’d smashed down the door in response to the girl’s screams.


“Then it will be all the more rewarding to finally crush him.” Tandy smiled that smile again. “And those who have allied themselves with him.”


********************

Paladin studied their back trail under the shade of his hat brim. The two horsemen following them had maintained the same steady distance. “They’ll make their move soon; we’re only about ten miles away now. I suggest we stop to eat and rest the horses while we have the chance.”


A house-sized boulder put a protective wall of stone at their backs and gave them shelter from the dust and wind, though its welcome shade was decreasing by the minute as the scorching sun approached its zenith. Continually casting alert glances over their wide field of view, they loosened the horses’ girths and retrieved their assorted trail rations from their saddlebags, West unwrapping a packet of buffalo jerky and hardtack and Paladin stabbing open a can of beans with his knife. Gordon, however, produced an assortment of pasties he’d made that morning from the previous evening’s leftovers, still warm in their layers of newspaper.


“Artie, those smell great,” West wheedled shamelessly, scooting closer.


Gordon snatched the pies out of his reach. “I offered to make enough for you, too, but you said no.” He handed a pie to Paladin. “Foie gras?”


With a hearty laugh, Paladin accepted. “Mr. Gordon, I do like your style.”


“I see no reason to suffer unnecessarily on the trail.” Gordon pointed with his chin at his partner’s humble repast.


“I like jerky and hardtack,” West protested, but he grinned boyishly when Gordon handed him a pie anyway.


“Canned beans will never hold the same appeal,” Paladin said around an appreciative mouthful.


Gordon opened another newspapered bundle, but at the first sniff he put it well away from him with a grimace. “I’m afraid the escargots, however, have not survived the heat.” He wiggled his fingers at West’s jerky. “Gimme some of that.” West obliged, though not without a superior cackle, and Paladin laughed again at their banter, reflecting on the unlikely circumstance of enjoying a good meal and pleasant company on the cusp of battle.


Perhaps it was that companionable mood that prompted Gordon to pose a question that few men—or women—ever risked. “You’re a civilized man, Mr. Paladin. How did you come to choose what must sometimes be a rather uncivilized line of work, if you don’t mind my asking?”


Paladin didn’t answer right away. Usually he didn’t answer such searching personal questions at all. But he had come to like and respect these men, and they deserved to know what drove the man to whom they had to some extent entrusted their lives. “It was in the manner of a commission from someone I did a great wrong.”


They traded a glance, clearly taken aback by his candor. West looked intrigued, but at the same time a little doubtful. “It’s a strange path to redemption, isn’t it—hiring out your gun?”


“I hire out all my skills, Mr. West, and I use my gun only as a last resort. I assume you don’t hesitate to use yours when the need arises, and I suspect you use it well.” Gordon made a brother-you-said-it! sort of sound, while West’s face took on an expression that could only very charitably be called humble. “Perhaps I had better strive not to put that theory to the test,” he added drily.


For a few moments they were busy devouring Gordon’s brandied peach pies. Then West asked a searching question of his own. “What if Cauthen and Tandy decide to test your theory?”


Paladin had already asked it of himself. “Tandy is power mad and violent; there will be no reasoning with him. But it’s possible that Cauthen isn’t fully committed to this scheme; he could be simply following a stronger man’s lead. He’s had time to think now—maybe I can still reach him.” His listeners exchanged a somber glance of something akin to pity. He had to admit to himself that, though he’d always known that Cauthen’s slick façade had masked a lack of true self-confidence, the degree of his former friend’s resentment had shocked him; probably Cauthen wasn’t capable of listening to him anymore, the years and distance and Tandy having taken away whatever influence he’d once had. “Men do occasionally see the error of their ways. I have to try. But if I can’t, I have no intention of stopping you two from doing your job, whatever that might entail.”


West gave a satisfied nod, brushed crumbs from his pants, and got to his feet. “We’d better not keep our escort waiting.”


“Aw, I was looking forward to a nice little siesta,” Gordon complained in jest as he bused his rock table.


“It’s your own fault for slaving in the galley before dawn. You can siesta when this is over—”


Again Paladin took the lead, knowing that when this was over, if it followed through to the conclusion he expected, he himself for a time would find sleep elusive—for he had meted out justice to foolish old friends before and knew the cost. At least he and Cauthen had never forged the close bond his present companions obviously had. Theirs had been merely the sort of rowdy association that seldom survives the loss of shared outlets for youthful male energy. Paladin had found his earliest outlet in making savage war against a “savage” people who refused to accept that they were already conquered, by an enemy who reneged on treaty after treaty and supplied free ammunition to buffalo hunters, the more quickly to eliminate the Indians’ primary source of food. For a time after he’d resigned his first commission he’d lived high and wild in every major city in the East, associating with men like Cauthen and Tandy. He then had reenlisted, as so many had, to fight a war whose initial idealism had quickly degenerated into savagery of another kind; that had preserved the young Union only at a horrifying price. Disillusioned and melancholy in the weary aftermath, he had sunk into pointless dissipation punctuated by reckless duels, until one of those duels had flayed his soul and set him unexpectedly on the path to reclaiming it; until the man called Smoke, in his dying, had offered his murderer purpose and thus salvation, a legacy he strove to honor with his every action, his every decision, his every breath—literally with his very life.


The riders trailing them were no longer in sight, and so they rode with increasing care, eyes traveling ceaselessly over the rocky foothills and along the deep ravines where the juniper and serviceberry were tall enough to conceal a mounted man, peering into the occasional stands of pine and aspen and cedar alert for the slightest sound or motion. Despite their caution the first shot took them by surprise, striking a towering boulder barely a foot from Paladin’s face, a splinter gouging his cheek; a split second later the rifle report echoed through the ravine. By the time the sound died the three men were off their horses and scrambling for cover among the rocks. More shots were fired, bullets chipping the sandstone above their heads.


“It’s coming from that ridge up ahead,” Gordon called over the crack and whine, tucking in behind a boulder. A bullet screamed off its edge and he flung up an arm to protect his eyes.


“More than those two who were following us,” Paladin replied. “Somebody went to get reinforcements from the mine while we stopped.”


“But all we want to do is look around!” Gordon’s mock indignation was mingled with real alarm.


“I think we can now safely assume that there’s something there to see.” West popped up to let off three quick shots, then curled up tightly again and reloaded.


“In that case we could head straight to Georgetown to send a message to Fort Selby. We could be there in a couple of hours.” Crawling a little to his right, Gordon peered around a protrusion of rock, seeking an escape route. Shots rang out; bullets whistled close overhead and ricocheted off the rocks nearby. He ducked back into cover. “It was just a thought—”


Paladin risked a glance up the slope behind them, then surveyed the terrain below. “They picked a perfect spot for an ambush. They can keep us pinned down here while they get close enough to finish us off.” The jumble of rocks along the trail offered equally good cover to their attackers.


If that’s what they have in mind,” West said. “Most of the shots have been high and wide. They might still have orders to take us alive.”


“Or they might simply plan to hold us here while they complete their preparations at the mine.”


“Either way, I’m not in the mood to oblige them. Ready, Artie?”


“Ready.”


And West was gone, alternately bounding up the rock slope like a mountain goat and flattening himself against the steep incline when more bullets rained down. If the gunmen were aiming high they were poor shots, or perhaps they were entertaining themselves, for again and again dirt and pebbles sprayed up near West’s agile form. Several times he spat sand from his mouth, and once his arm jerked away from the sting; when he moved again Paladin saw a streak of red along the back of his hand.


Gordon waited a few seconds, observing his partner’s progress, then scuttled across to the rocks at the opposite side of their small redoubt. “No time to explain,” he threw over his shoulder to Paladin. “Just trust us and stay put, please.” He clambered away, digging in his coat pockets as he slipped and slid along a narrow ledge. Up and up he climbed, while West continued to draw fire from the men above him on the ridge.


There was movement to Paladin’s left and a little below: a gunman changing position in order to get a clearer shot at Gordon where he was zigzagging among the scant cover of some young privet. Paladin whistled and the gunman wheeled and dropped, but not before Paladin’s bullet went through his shooting arm; the gun fell harmlessly into a deep gully. Two others had spotted Gordon; Paladin fired several quick shots to keep their heads down until Gordon was safely over the ridge. As he reloaded he moved back to his right to see if West could use some cover fire, but West was no longer in sight.


No, there he was—balancing on the impossibly narrow summit of a boulder twice as tall as he was, then launching himself down onto three men who were trying to get a glimpse of him on the slope. Paladin heard fists strike flesh, heard grunts of pain and boots scuffing against rock. He started up the slope but a gunman moving to aid his fellows spotted him and fired. Diving flat, he snapped off a couple of shots and then quickly moved several feet to one side; the next time the man changed position his own line of sight was clear and he clipped him in the shoulder.


Suddenly up on the ridge there were three small explosions, like firecrackers rather than artillery shells, and plumes of colored smoke rose into the sky, surreal columns of pink and green and blue. The wind was generally away from him but he caught a whiff of an acrid chemical that seemed to go straight up his nostrils into his brain. Momentarily lightheaded, he swayed and fell off his haunches, but the sensation soon vanished and his head was clear again.


The shooting eased off and then stopped, and in the silence he heard voices but couldn’t make out the words. West and Gordon didn’t appear on the ridge, nor did they call an all-clear. Cautiously he emerged from the protection of the boulders. Choosing Gordon’s route for its marginally superior cover, he started up the slope and soon looked down upon a small plateau in back of the ridge. No shots had hampered his progress. The voices became more distinct, brought to him on the breeze that rustled the spindly cedars and pines and blew dust into his eyes. He crept forward, stepping carefully over pebbles and brush. Through the thin screen of trees he could make out the forms of eight or ten men. Moving closer he saw West and Gordon standing a couple of feet apart with their hands raised, covered closely by the pistols of the remaining gunmen. The numbers arrayed against them had been insurmountable; their daring assault had failed.


Quickly Paladin sized up the situation. He was a fast and accurate shot, but he couldn’t possibly dispatch all the gunmen before they could dive for cover. West and Gordon weren’t yet bound, however; if they could grab weapons and get themselves out of the line of fire the three of them together could finish this bunch off. He chose his targets, and took aim.


“Two of you go get that other one,” said a tall, beefy gunman who seemed to be in charge, “but look sharp. He was pinned down pretty good but I ain’t heard any shootin’ from down there in a while. You two tie them.” The two men closest to the rim broke away from the group, while two others moved toward West and Gordon and the rest tightened their circle around the prisoners so that Paladin couldn’t see them anymore.


He had no compunction about backshooting men who deserved it when there was no alternative, but if he did that now he risked wounding or killing one or both agents; a bullet from his powerful .45 could easily pass through a man’s body at such close range. He would have to open that circle up again by drawing their fire, though to do so would cost him the advantage of surprise. He tensed to spring and drew breath to shout—


Hold it!!


Absurdly, Gordon shouted first. Absurdly, all the gunmen froze. For a split second only, but they froze, and in that split second Gordon’s arm rose and fell and another cloud of smoke rose all around. The gunmen’s sharp surprised intake of breath sucked the smoke deep into their lungs, far up their nostrils, and in seconds all of them were crumpling to the sand. West and Gordon had clapped handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, and Paladin, understanding now what he had smelled down below, followed their example. He called out to them and rose from cover—


—and saw two men just gaining the plateau from the direction of the mine, reinforcements or perhaps simple messengers. Seeing the litter of bodies on the ground they grabbed for their guns. West and Gordon were completely exposed, the smoke dissipating quickly in the breeze and their backs to the new arrivals; but they saw the expression on Paladin’s face and they were already turning and springing apart, squinting through the thinning smoke, bringing up the weapons they’d retrieved from the guards—


—when Paladin fired twice like lightning and dropped the two gunmen in their tracks.


The two agents rose from their defensive crouch and holstered their weapons. Gordon removed his handkerchief and cautiously sniffed the air, and at his reassuring nod Paladin and West also breathed freely again.


“We did have everything under control, but thanks,” the latter said blithely, surveying the modest carnage with hands on his hips.


Paladin’s eyebrows climbed. “That was your idea of ‘under control’?”


“We just needed to draw them all in closer—Artie only had one knockout pellet left.”


“It’s always a guessing game, how much gear to bring,” Gordon put in cheerily. “I’ve got more in my saddlebags, though.”


“That’s handy stuff.”


“My own formula,” Gordon said with pride. “I’ve got an odorless and colorless version, too, for when subtlety is called for.”


“‘Subtle’ is not a word that springs immediately to mind with regard to the two of you.” Their grins flashed through dust and sweat. “Now what?” For Gordon had wet a handkerchief from a small bottle and was pressing it to the noses and mouths of the unconscious men. “Another secret formula?”


“No—just plain old chloroform. We’ll drag them into the shade and they’ll be out until we’re finished at the mine and can telegraph the fort to come round them up.” He added on a note somewhere between humorous and dire, “And if we’re really finished at the mine, they can get themselves loose.”


This they did, huffing and puffing in the high altitude and drenched with sweat, and then slid back down the slope and did the same with the gunmen Paladin had accounted for—though one of those, too, wouldn’t be waking up again. After they’d picketed the gunmen’s horses near a rivulet and some grass, West planted his hands on his hips again and jerked his head toward their former shelter, where new bullet scars gleamed white in the weathered rock walls. “By the way, Mr. Paladin,” he said casually, “Mr. Gordon told you to stay put.”


Paladin shoved his hat back on his head and struck an innocent pose. “He did? Well, with all this commotion, Mr. West, I guess I must’ve missed that.”


Gordon turned with a satisfied air to West. “Yep, I’d say he’s on our side.” He tossed a stray hat onto the pile of henchmen. “Listen, Jim,” he went on, all humor gone, “now that we’ve eliminated the advance guard, we’ve regained the option of alerting Fort Selby.”


West finally took his eyes away from Paladin. “But we still don’t know what to tell them; they’d be going in blind. And we don’t know how much time we have to spare; we might have to take action ourselves. Let’s have a look around first. Besides—” His gaze slid back to Paladin. “I don’t think we could persuade Mr. Paladin to come with us. Could we, Mr. Paladin.”


In his tone was the slightest hint of challenge; in his stance the slightest hint of invitation. Paladin really wasn’t sure if he was in earnest. Slowly he shook his head. “Nope.”


There was a silence broken only by the wind whistling through the scrub lining the ravines. Gordon looked from one of them to the other in disbelief.


And then West’s whole body seemed to loosen; his chiseled features split into a grin. “See Artie, I told you he’s a wild card.”


Gordon blew out his held breath. “He isn’t the only wild card around here. What was all that silly posturing for? You know perfectly well—”


Paladin couldn’t stand it any longer. “You two are without exception the most eccentric government agents I’ve ever met!”


They didn’t even blink. “We do our best,” said West.


“It’s an art, really,” said Gordon.


Respectively chortling and remonstrating, they mounted up and headed into the hills. Staring after them, Paladin reflected that he in his turn was also entrusting them with his life, and decided that he was probably doomed.


********************

“I must say I’m looking forward to seeing Paladin again,” Tandy was saying, having to throw the comment over his shoulder because he always insisted on riding in front. “He departed Boston before I had a chance to take him to task—the coward.” Rude laughter at this insult drifted forward from Bullock and a thug whose name Cauthen had never bothered to learn, who were bringing up the rear.


“I detest him as much as you do, but I wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking him a coward,” he countered. Tandy hadn’t seen the unyielding resolve in Paladin’s eyes, or heard the threat and the promise in his voice.


“Probably not, knowing cowardice so well yourself.” Cauthen winced. “Why didn’t you kill him when he admitted searching your safe?”


“And take a chance on the police believing that he’d surprised a burglar, who murdered him with my gun? Do I really need to explain what might happen to your ambitious scheme if I should be embroiled in a scandal like that? Don’t believe you can bring your plan to fruition without me.”


Cauthen frowned as Tandy looked past him at Bullock and then forward again, saying nothing. Who did they think they were, trying to exclude him just as they were about to implement their plan? Tandy had been acting more and more superior of late, completely disregarding the fact that it had been he, Cauthen, who had wooed investors and amassed the capital Tandy needed. Looking down on him with Bullock of all people, that mindless ox. He should have let West take him on after all—one or the other of them would now be out of his way. Perhaps he should claim Matilda Burgin, as a reward for his energy and perseverance. She found his company more appealing than Tandy’s, after all; once they were ensconced in their new positions he could marry Matilda and have his own fortune and hers as well. That would put Tandy in his place.


It would also, however, destroy their rewarding partnership, for it was never prudent to come between Tandy and a woman he wanted. But there was one sure way he could win Tandy’s lifelong regard.


He, J. Carroll Cauthen, would kill Paladin, that general nuisance and self-anointed protector of women and other weaklings—and now, apparently, nations. He would be the one to erase forever the haughty condescension from that forbidding aristocratic face and clear Tandy’s way to whatever conquest he wanted to pursue.


He urged his horse to a faster walk to close the distance between himself and Tandy as much as he thought Tandy would permit. As for West and Gordon— Well, this was perilous country, wasn’t it? Even men who knew these hills as well as he knew the halls of banks and courthouses died in them every day, of falls, of snakebite, of fatal encounters with bandits who would rather steal another man’s gold than toil for it themselves. Even Secret Service agents might simply disappear, despite the diligent efforts of the new state governor to find them. Tandy would be pleased with him then, very pleased indeed.


Cauthen smiled to himself, remembering his pleasure that morning when he’d noticed in the mirror while shaving how much like Tandy’s his smile was becoming.


********************

Unconscious of the irony of her name, the forsaken Lady Luck mine nestled near the foot of Placer Mountain, on a ridge below which flowed a long slope of tailings like a bank of dirty snow, waste rock that with better extraction techniques would probably yield significantly more raw ore. Above the mine entrance and shafthouse rose a nearly vertical slope capped with an escarpment of bare granite, and beyond marched the vast blue-gray ranges of the imposing Rockies, their crowns of snow a blinding white in the afternoon sun. The approach road showed recent activity, West noted—old ruts filled in, rockfall cleared away. When the mine itself was still hardly more than a dot against a distant blur of gray and green, he and Gordon and Paladin left the road and followed deer trails through pine- and fir-scented ravines so the lookouts posted up on the mountain—one a half-mile down the road within earshot of a shrill whistle and a mirror flash, another on the ridge above the mine itself—wouldn’t notice their arrival. As they rode nearer they could see that the men lounging around the shafthouse and the tunnel entrance were a casual crew; they had mounted no patrols, the lookouts evidently serving merely to warn against a large-scale assault so the guards could take firing positions or run. There was no obvious indication of current mining activity—no drilling or blasting, no active sluices or mills; the guards’ primary occupations seemed to be playing cards, cleaning their weapons, and overseeing the gang of Chinese coolies packing crates and loading them into wagons, about a dozen of them toiling ceaselessly in the unrelenting heat. West recalled that in his character of eager investor he’d said to Cauthen that everybody would win in a mining enterprise. Everybody, that is, but those who did the work; Chinese laborers were lucky to make a dollar a day.


Hiding behind some upthrust rocks, peering between them where blown sand made a natural embankment, he and Paladin cleaned the blood that continued to seep from their respective wounds while Gordon passed around a canteen. Eyes burning with dust and glare, they waved away a few persistent horseflies attracted by the sweat that trickled down their faces and dripped onto the sand.


One of the gunmen, a stocky Mexican, slouched over and said something to one of the coolies in what sounded at a distance like a mixture of several different languages. As he slouched away the Chinese spokesman translated for his brethren, and a sudden flurry of agitated conversation broke out among the group.


Straining to hear, Gordon slapped a palm against a rock in frustration. “I didn’t get that—it’s too far away.”


“And too fast for me,” Paladin said.


“You speak Chinese?”


“After a fashion, or so I’m told by a magnanimous Chinese friend.”


West scuttled back behind the rise. “Artie, do you have your kit?”


“I always have my kit, oh clever Occidental one.” Gordon assumed a beatific Oriental smile and bobbed his head over his conjoined palms.


“Your talent for disguise is remarkable, Mr. Gordon, but surely you aren’t thinking of trying to play a Chinese?”


In flawless Mandarin Gordon said, “I’ve done it before and lived to tell the tale.” At Paladin’s amazed look he gave an actor’s flamboyant bow. West didn’t know a syllable of Chinese but had no trouble understanding his partner’s immodest tone.


Paladin regarded Gordon’s fleshy Western features with open skepticism. “Even with makeup, that was surely a case of people seeing what they expect to see.”


“People usually do. I depend upon it.” Gordon gazed thoughtfully over the scene below. “Not this time, though. I’m six inches taller than most of those men, especially in boots—I’d stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. But I’ll think of something.” He headed off to where they’d hidden the horses in a cluster of boulders.


West mopped sweat from his face with his sleeve. “Once Artie has a look around we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”


“That assault back there makes it pretty clear that Cauthen and Tandy know we’re working together, and also that they at least suspect you two are lawmen. They’ll be on the alert.”


“So might those men at the mine, if somebody from the assault squad was supposed to report back and hasn’t.”


The sun beat down from the cloudless sky. West almost envied the laboring Chinese; at least they were in the shade of the escarpment. Paladin’s black outfit was splotched with sand where it stuck to patches of sweat.


Shuffling steps sounded nearby, and Paladin turned to see an old bowlegged prospector, his faded plaid suspenders barely holding his shapeless britches up over his red union suit, tottering along the trail just below their stakeout position. “Uh oh,” he muttered, and hastened down the slope to warn the fellow. “Old timer, you need to take yourself away from here—there’s liable to be some gunplay soon and you could be hurt—” He got close enough to see the mischief in the “old timer”’s shrewd brown eyes, and drew away with an exhale of self-disgust. “Gordon.” He’d been ready for it, and still he’d been fooled!


All bristly gray beard and eyebrows and stinking of tobacco and whiskey, Gordon spat a stream of brown juice just next to Paladin’s left boot. “Gunplay? Gunplay?? Lemme tell you somethin’, sonny—I’ve survived more gunplay in my time than the ducks in a shootin’ gallery. Now you jes’ scuttle outen the way and let a feller git to snoopin’—”


Anticipating a good joke, West had jogged down, too; now he hopped aside when he saw Artemus working up another mouthful. “Snoop fast, Artie; company’s coming.”


“Right.” Gordon’s confident wink was nearly hidden by his mane of gray hair. He disappeared into the scrub, and West and Paladin hunkered down to wait.


“You can’t tell me the Secret Service trained him to do that.”


West laughed. “No, Artie’s an original.” His admiration and affection were obvious.


Paladin smiled. “I’d say you both are.”


West ducked his head and turned back toward the mine, and Paladin was charmed by his unexpected—and uncharacteristic—humility. West really was quite young, surely not much more than thirty, to display such extraordinary competence in all the varied skills that his job demanded, at least the way he and his partner seemed to perform it. Gordon was eight or ten years older, with a “lived-in” sort of face, as Paladin’s acquaintances had said of his over the years. On the surface they were an unlikely pair; but looking closer one saw complementary opposites, each appreciative of the other’s talents. Gordon was animated and affable but cagy and prone to dissemblance, West reserved and stoical but more plainly spoken; the more noncommittal his poker face, the more one assumed he agreed with whatever Gordon was expressing. They were honest, courageous men devoted to their duty, yet they possessed a rare joie de vivre that really seemed to save them from brooding about the risks that duty required, and for all their idiosyncrasies he found that he was very glad to know them. Yes, he could trust these men with his life.


And he must remember to cadge Gordon’s recipe for peach crêpes; Chef Henri at the Carlton needed a new specialty dessert . . .


“Now I’m doing it, too,” he muttered to himself; joie de vivre must be catching.


West looked over his shoulder. “Beg pardon?”


Paladin tipped his hat down over his eyes and growled low in his throat. “Never mind.”


********************

Having veered well away from the stakeout position so he could approach the mine as if from the Georgetown road, by the time Gordon caught the perimeter lookout’s attention he had trudged nearly a mile over rough terrain and his sweat and aching feet were real. It was so hot that even the two rattlers he’d passed hadn’t had the initiative to warn him away from their small patches of shade. A reception committee of a couple of Mexicans and a mixed-blood black man with pale blue eyes came out to meet him.


“You can’t come in here, old man,” said the black. He was clearly accustomed to giving orders. “Go back where you came from.”


Adios, viejo, go away,” echoed the stocky Mexican who had spoken to the coolie foreman.


“I’ll on’y be a minute, fellas, jes’ wanna buy a horse or better a mule, you see my sweet old Maudie, she were a mule, best I ever had, she stepped in a gopher hole a ways back and I had to, well I had to put her out of her mis’ry, you know, she were a good ol’ girl, toted my packs all the way from Caribou without nary a heehaw o’ complaint.” Real tears poured down his cheeks and tickled in the glue adhering his beard to his face. He smeared them aside with the back of a suitably filthy hand. “Looka here, I ’as hopin’ to buy a mule or a horse from ye, big operation like this you must have some to spare, I got two claims, see, an’ if I had to carry my gear from one t’other ever’ day, why I’d be buzzard pickin’s fer sure, you young whippersnappers don’t know how it is when a man gits on, and ever’ toe and knuckle aches, an’ then it starts in the knees and the hips and pretty soon you cain’t even sneak up on a rabbit for supper cuz you creak so loud—”


He could have extemporized in this fashion for hours but they had finally had enough. “Two claims, eh, viejo? So you are rich now, si?” the taller of the two Mexicans teased.


“Wa’ll, wa’ll, no, I cain’t say’s I am, but any day now, any day—”


“So how you gonna pay for this horse or mule?”


“Wa’ll, I got me a stake, you know, enough for supplies, and a little powder comes down the sluices now and then, they ain’t quite played out yet, kinda like me, I figger I’ll jes’ pitch face first into the sluice one o’ these days and the gold’ll pick right then to flow like a river—”


“And you brought this money with you?” the stocky Mexican broke in.


“I brung just enough,” Gordon snapped. “I ain’t no beggar but I ain’t no fool neither. I brung just enough for one pack animal and that’s all.”


“Let’s see it,” said the black, his pale eyes flashing with sudden entrepreneurial interest.


Gordon fished into his britches and produced from his sweaty nether regions a malodorous pouch of badly tanned leather rubbed with essence of rotting snails. He waved it under their noses. “Wanna count it?”


All three took a hasty step backward and then tried to pretend they hadn’t. “Okay, old man,” said the black. “No mules here but we might have an extra horse. Set down over there.”


They started over to the picket line in the deep shade between the slope and a wall of tall boulders. “Hey, Jonas, whose horse you planning to sell?” the lanky Mexican asked in Spanish. “We got no spares.”


“Yeah, we do—that old brokedown mare,” Jonas replied in the same language. “She ain’t worth feedin’ anymore; Billy was gonna shoot her before we left. If that old fool wants to pay good money for her, let him. He might get another month or two of work out of her if he’s careful.”


They moved out of earshot, and Gordon said under his breath, “Thanks, fellas, you’re all heart.”


Ignoring the slapped-together bench Jonas had pointed at, he wandered with apparent aimlessness about the camp until the few guards paying any attention to him lost interest; he then edged gradually over to a group of coolies. Many of the workers were very young, hardly more than boys. Some wore typical Western dungarees and muslin, but others, perhaps more recent arrivals, were dressed in their loose native trousers and tunics and conical straw hats. One man’s queue was very short, probably cut off by drunken white miners or cowboys; Gordon hoped that was all they’d done to him. To his dismay, at first all he heard were dialects he didn’t know; would he have to make do with the foreman’s pidgin English? Finally, however, he caught a few scraps of Mandarin and gravitated toward a half-dozen men at the end of the old track. Boldly he inspected the crates of beans and flour and nails and rope. He heard the usual labor-gang bickering about aching backs and shiftless coworkers and bad food—and at last a fairly clear indication that the Chinese were not involved in Cauthen and Tandy’s scheme.


“First we unload supplies, and now we’re loading them again—and never any ore,” one young man muttered to another as they strained to heft a large crate onto the wagon bed. “What are they doing in there?”


“I don’t know,” said his companion, “and I don’t want to know. I just want to be paid so I can go back to Golden. Wong Chan!” He caught the attention of the foreman as he passed by on his rounds. “Try to find out when they’re going to pay us.”


Wong Chan looked to be about thirty-five and carried himself with the poise of a natural leader. “I’ve already asked three times today,” he protested.


“Ask again. They’re riding out tonight and we need our money.”


Tonight! Gordon thought. We are out of time.


Wong nodded and sighed and motioned the younger men back to their work. Presently, using hand signals, he indicated to a nearby guard that the wagon was fully loaded and its crates roped down. The guard climbed up to the seat and drove the wagon to one side, perhaps the first in a long line if the camp was moving tonight; another guard brought in a second wagon, while two more put aside their cards and began to hitch a team to a third. Noting the activity, the stocky Mexican came over to check their progress, and Wong, with unhappy resolve, greeted him with a respectful bow.


“We are wondering, Señor García, when we will be paid.”


“I told you before, when the work is done.” They communicated with a mixture of hand signals and pidgin English, Spanish, and Chinese.


“So you said when we unloaded the supplies, but you never paid us.”


“So we’ll pay you today. After all the supplies are loaded, get the big wagon ready.” García pointed into the shadows, and Gordon could just make out the tongue and front half of a massive vehicle built to carry tremendous weight. “The boss will pack the machine. Then you can load it. Then we’ll pay you. Now get back to work.”


Wong bowed and withdrew, and relayed the information to his group in several different dialects. Gordon, wondering whether “the boss” was Cauthen or Tandy, noted the two Mexicans conferring together and moseyed a little nearer.


“What did he want?” asked the taller one in Spanish. He was younger than García by a good ten years.


“Begging for their pay again. The only pay they’re going to get is a faceful of our dust.”


The young fellow frowned and glanced at the Chinese. “The boss really ought to pay them. He pays us. What’s a few more dollars to him?”


“He didn’t get all his dollars by paying for what he could get for free,” García pointed out. “He don’t get us for free. What are they gonna do, lay a Chinese curse on us?” The young one laughed and shrugged, and the two sauntered away. Gordon saw that Wong was watching them with an air of resignation.


He moseyed back to the wagon, where Wong was directing the placement of a particularly heavy crate toward the front of the bed. Though his oft-patched dungarees were nearly threadbare and the calluses were thick on his hands, Wong possessed the air and speech of an educated man. What had he been in his native land? A merchant, perhaps, or possibly even a doctor or lawyer who had a large family to feed in a time of flood and famine at home. Clearly he possessed the high standards of personal hygiene common to his people; when Gordon stopped a few feet upwind he drew away, nose wrinkling.


“Sorry about the stench.” Gordon spoke in Mandarin, his lips barely moving. “Just keep doing what you were doing, and don’t let on that I speak your language. Understand?” He made an arc around the man and caught his eye for an instant as he kicked a wheel and gestured as if making a comment. Wong nodded, but he was goggle-eyed and frozen unnaturally in place; Gordon could only hope that none of the guards gave the coolies a second thought when they weren’t directly harassing them.


Wong found his voice. “I must oversee the carts,” he said with exaggerated nonchalance and much too loudly, like an amateur actor who couldn’t keep his eyes off the audience.


“I’ll stick close.” Gordon drifted a few feet away to poke around in one of the carts, disgruntling its handlers, then drifted back again; Wong jumped a little when he brushed against him. “I thought you’d like to know that those men have no intention of paying you. I heard them talking just now.” He pitched his voice for Wong’s ears alone; it wouldn’t do to get all the workers riled up. Some of them did follow him about with their eyes, but it would have been strange if they hadn’t stared at a smelly old prospector who kept getting in their way.


Wong was cursing elegantly and at length. “We never trusted them, but it was good money and not laundry work, and some of us have families in Golden. What fools we were!”


No, just desperate, Gordon thought. “Do you know what they’re doing?”


Wong stiffened. “They told us they were mining.”


“But you know better, don’t you?” Come on, friend, he urged silently. Put it together, and fast.


Wong’s sigh was very nearly a sob. “I suppose so. I didn’t want to believe— If they aren’t miners, what are they? A robber gang?” He glanced about at the boys for whom he was responsible, his eyes wide with sudden fear.


“They’re traitors, and my colleagues and I are here to stop them.”


Wong’s eyes boggled again. “You’re the law?”


Gordon’s lips twitched beneath the beard. “You betcha, sonny.” The closest he could get to “sonny” in Mandarin was “youngster,” but Wong didn’t seem to take offense. “And I need you to answer some questions for me.” Wong very nearly snapped to attention in his eagerness to assist.


He continued his supervision as before, telling his story in a low voice while Gordon wove back and forth, poking into this, prying into that, always staying within earshot of Wong’s quiet narration. Some six weeks before, Jonas and García had come to Golden looking for a labor gang. With the hateful expulsion of all Chinese from many of the mines in the area, Wong and his men had found only laundry and domestic work open to them; Jonas’s offer had made them feel smiled upon by fortune. Gordon asked about the guards’ usual schedule and about recent activity at the mine, and in the course of their roving conversation Wong loosened up and proved adept at subterfuge; considering the life he was leading, Gordon reflected, he probably got plenty of practice. Now and then other workers caught parts of their exchange and looked up, too curious for safety; cleverly getting into the spirit of the proceedings, Wong told them to keep working and not encourage the funny old gentleman.


“What’s this machine they’re talking about?” Gordon asked.


“Over the last few weeks we unloaded a dozen wagons of machine parts. Metal casings, panels, gears, nozzles, tubing. Gaskets of rubber. Cans of something sticky, like glue—some had spilled around the edges.”


“Sealant, maybe,” Gordon speculated. “But you haven’t seen the completed device?”


“No, but it’s still in the mine. Boss—I don’t know his name—came to work on it every day for two weeks or more. The guards inspect it daily.”


“Any idea how far in?”


Wong considered, while Gordon made his way to a protrusion of rock and pressed his nose against it as if he could sniff out a mother lode like a pig sniffing out truffles. When he worked his way back, Wong said, “When one of the men says he’s going to check on the machine, he often returns in about ten minutes.”


Not too deep, then. It should be possible to get in, take a look, and get out before Cauthen and Tandy arrived. “Good man. Listen, when the shooting starts, tell your people to take cover in the rocks and stay down. But don’t go too far away—we’ll make sure you all get your wages.” After what he and Jim had already promised Paladin, Uncle Sam would hardly notice.


Wong’s face brightened with gratitude and amazement. “May your ancestors watch over you,” he said warmly.


Gordon touched his floppy, sweat-stained hat in salute and thanks. “Brother, I’ll take all the help I can get.”


He dug for a minute in a bucket of tools, making as much noise as he could, then peered again at the cliff face—whereupon he froze and then began to tremble and sputter as if awestruck before a miracle. García and the pale-eyed Jonas were heading toward him, no doubt to inform him of a great deal on a first-rate pack mare. Waving his arms like a madman, he marched purposefully to meet them.


********************

“He certainly throws himself into character.” Paladin felt like a spectator in the third balcony of a playhouse.


West had whipped a small telescope from a jacket pocket. “He does, but right now he’s sending me a message.” The telescope, of Artemus’s design, wasn’t much larger than his index finger, but it was more powerful than even standard military issue and gave him a clear view of his partner’s arms and hands. “The Chinese are innocent but he got some information from them,” he translated for Paladin, who was clearly impressed with Artie’s ingenuity. “He needs a closer look at a machine inside the mine. Possibly not conventional artillery. Cauthen and Tandy on their way.”


“‘Not conventional artillery,’” Paladin repeated in a grim tone. “Tandy was a gifted engineer and mechanic and a confirmed misanthrope. I’m not surprised he made his fortune in the weapons of war. West, if Gordon goes in there alone he might not get out again.”


Beneath the telescope West’s mouth quirked in a confident smile. “Artemus always gets out.”


Down below, Gordon’s snooping was becoming more aggressive. He pried the tops off the crates the coolies were trundling over to the wagon and rummaged in boxes right in front of the mine entrance, while the guards seemed to be debating what they should do about him. A couple of them grasped his arms as if to steer him away; he jerked free and bellowed into their faces with much wild gesticulation.


“Something else?” Paladin asked.


West grinned. “No, he really is just ranting now.”


Gordon had to keep his performance at fever-pitch for a good two minutes and actually sally past the mine entrance before the beleaguered guards finally threw up their hands and dragged him on inside.


West was quite obviously delighted, and Paladin found himself wondering how many details of their method the two unpredictable agents included in their reports to their superiors. “How long should we give him?”


“We have to assume he’s tied up or otherwise confined. Say a minute or two to get loose, a few minutes to look around, and a little margin for error. Fifteen minutes.”


Only ten had passed, however, when the first lookout whistled. Seeing the dust raised by several horses a half-mile or so down the approach road, West again clapped the telescope to his eye. His cheerful confidence had vanished. “It’s Cauthen and Tandy.”


Paladin’s jaw worked. “Then we’re too late.”


********************

“I seen it! I seen it! I seen what you been tryin’ to hide from these canny old eyes!” Gordon braced his feet against the dirt floor of the mine hard enough that the guards had to expend some effort to shove him along, but not hard enough to damage his own knees. “You hit a vein! You hit a righteous mighty vein, and you don’ want nobody else to know about it! That’s why you all’re here, why you got all them Chinamen out there totin’ away the takings! I bet ever’ one o’ them crates is full o’ nuggets, you jes’ tell me they ain’t—” he screeched into Jonas’s ear.


“For the love of Pete, shut him up!” the man ordered his fellows. “Put him in a storeroom until the boss decides what to do with him. He’s gotten awful curious, and if we let him go now he’ll hang around and see more than he should.”


Gordon maintained his high-decibel expostulations until they had thrown him into a small chamber hewn out of rock and fitted with a strong door, its floor crisscrossed with cart and foot tracks, ceasing his tirade only when García brandished a pistol at his head. Jonas waved the other two out, then slammed and locked the door.


Thirty seconds later Gordon had picked the lock and cracked open the door; the tunnel was empty. Quietly he headed deeper into the mine, glancing into chamber after chamber; the air grew ever cooler, the smell of stone and earth more pronounced. Torches mounted into old bore holes and pick-seams cast only feeble illumination, and occasionally he stumbled over bumps and depressions in the sandy floor. Trash from the old mine littered the edges of the tunnel at either side of the rusted track—broken pick and ax heads and drill bits; splintered handles; slats and rusted rings and frames from smashed buckets and wheelbarrows. Most of the chambers were empty, either never used by the current unsavory crew or cleaned out in preparation for their move. The odor emanating from one announced its purpose as an emergency latrine. “Indoor plumbing,” he commented softly to himself. Several held ominous caches of weapons: guns and ammunition, mortars, even a small cannon and crates full of cannonballs—but no device he would have described as a “big machine.”


As he moved further into the mine the sconces were few, and he appropriated a torch to light his way. At intervals pitch-black branches intersected the main tunnel, but since no telltale footprints or cart tracks turned into them he passed them by. Silence filled the tunnel; he would easily hear any pursuit. He came across four chambers used as barracks, with bedrolls, decks of cards, and spare clothing littering the floors; judging by the Oriental pattern on a few handkerchiefs drying on a line and a couple of family photographs tacked to the walls, all the Chinese were crammed into the smallest room. Two locked chambers were furnished simply but comfortably with rope beds and small chests of drawers—no doubt the quarters used by Cauthen and Tandy when they were in residence. Behind the chest in one room he found a small safe bolted into the wall; so quiet was it beneath the immeasurable tons of rock that the tumblers were clearly audible, and the flickering light from the torch was sufficient to show him the stacks of bills within. Thumbing through a stack he estimated the total at several thousand dollars. “Good help doesn’t come cheap.” In sudden inspiration he stuffed a few stacks into the capacious pockets of his britches.


He heard a distant bustle and shouting. “The old coot is gone—he’s escaped!” He doused the torch in the bucket of sand by the bed and closed the door.


A snarled oath and the slamming of a door carried along the corridor. “The boss will be here any minute.” Jonas’s voice. “Search farther down—he’ll be looking for that strike he thinks we found. He can’t be far.” Running feet approached; when they had passed by, Gordon emerged into the dim corridor and continued his explorations, knockout pellets ready in his hand.


More footsteps in the corridor, voices speaking Spanish. He ducked into an alcove and peered around its edge; he could just see the wide brim of a Mexican sombrero.


“Hey, try in the machine room.” García.


“No place to hide in there.” The tall young one.


“Then it won’t take long to check, will it, dunce?”


Gordon waited until García stumped past the alcove in a haze of mesquite and cigarillo smoke, muttering about lazy good-for-nothings. He then slipped silently back into the tunnel and caught up with young Lazybones, letting him lead the way another hundred feet past several more doors and branch tunnels to a door much larger than the rest. Holding a torch aloft, Lazybones took one step into the room beyond, then stepped out and locked up again, muttering in his turn about wasted effort. He disappeared into the darkness.


The lock yielded in a moment to Gordon’s skilled hands. Lifting the torch the young Mexican had used from its sconce, he stepped inside—


—and realized he was looking at a custom-designed deliverer of death.


Taking up fully half the small room, the machine hulked in the shadows, illuminated at its sinister edges by the wavering torchlight. Yards of tubing snaked around tanks and cylinders; polished pump handles glimmered. Racks of spare tanks filled one corner of the room; examining them, he found enough soporific gas to put an army fort or a small town to sleep in a matter of minutes. Along the adjacent wall were stacked cases of specialized ammunition: nasty exploding shells that would rip apart anyone they hit, or, when filled with the gas, disperse it over a much wider area. He thought with sorrow of Paladin’s hope of reasoning with Cauthen, knowing that a man involved in the manufacture of such an uncompromising weapon would not be dissuaded from putting it to use.


More footsteps approached in the tunnel, and Jonas’s voice rang out. “Get the room ready for inspection. The boss is here.”


“We haven’t found the old man yet.” Young Lazybones.


“He better have sense enough to stay out of sight.” The footsteps broke apart, one set receding, at least two sets coming on.


“Great-aunt Maude would say I haven’t shown that much sense in years.” Gordon’s gaze darted around the room. Lazybones was right; there was no place to hide. And there was no other way out.


A key jangled in the lock and the door began to open.


********************

“What now?”


Actually Paladin knew perfectly well what he was going to do, but he wanted to know whether West’s plans meshed with his.


“I go down there.” West started over the embankment on his stomach.


Not quite a match. Paladin grasped his arm. “We go down there. I’ll keep them occupied while you go after Gordon.”


West looked him in the eye. “Mr. Paladin, your skills are certainly impressive, but facing down twenty men on your own isn’t part of your job description.”


“I hope it isn’t usually part of yours. May I point out that this way we double our odds of success—from impossible to merely slim,” he added on a wry growl.


West considered this notion for perhaps two seconds. “I have to admit I like the way you think.” He scanned the slope below and pointed. “Let me get down to that boulder, then you ride in.”


Paladin gave a nod. “Good luck.”


In West’s sharp eyes was a new regard. “Same to you.” And he was gone, slithering down the slope with arms tucked tightly against his body so as to raise as little dust as possible, his green suit blending in with the shrubbery.


Paladin’s route down the slope approached the camp from the opposite direction, so that when the nearer lookout whistled the eyes of all the guards and coolies were drawn away from West, who darted across the camp and dived amid stacks of crates and a wagon awaiting repair in the shadow of the shafthouse.


“I’m looking for Cauthen and Tandy,” he announced to the assembled gunmen, whose pistols and rifles immediately pointed his way. He displayed no surprise or nerves. “We’re—old friends.”


“You picked a right convenient time to call,” challenged a skinny, pock-marked man.


“Did I? Fancy that.”


“They’re just down the road, on their way in. Who’s askin’ for ’em?”


“My name is Paladin.” There was a general stirring among the guards. Some of them glanced worriedly along his back trail. “I’m afraid your associates won’t be joining us.”


There were no objections as he rode at a deliberate pace over to where the Chinese laborers were tying down the crates piled high in the second wagon. Turning his horse so that his back was to the rock wall but not yet dismounting, he spoke in Mandarin to the man Gordon had talked with, whose speculative gaze was intent upon him. “Good afternoon. That’s heavy work on a hot day.”


The man’s eyebrows climbed and there was a surprised murmuring among his crew to hear a white man speak their language with such ease. Taking advantage of their distraction West sidled a few paces nearer the mine entrance, his pistol drawn and ready. The man glanced at the cave mouth and then back to Paladin with a question in his eyes, and Paladin guessed that he hadn’t yet told his fellows what was going on and so didn’t want to speak freely where they might hear. Under cover of adjusting his hat he nodded, and the man’s eyes grew round. He swallowed hard, then spoke under his breath to the two men nearest him coiling up extra rope. “Don’t stop working, but be prepared to take cover if there is trouble.” He moved from man to man, issuing his low-voiced warning. All of them paused, one or two questioned him, but every man obeyed, though all their eyes were now riveted on Paladin and the guards standing watch over him.


When the far lookout whistled, the eyes of guards and Chinese alike turned toward the approach road, and from the corner of his eye Paladin saw West scuttle from behind a stack of crates and crouch between the rock wall and an old mine car sitting lopsided on frost-heaved rails. Cauthen and Tandy were rounding the last turn into the camp at a jog; in seconds West would be in their direct line of sight when he covered the last few yards into the mine.


Paladin urged his horse a step forward. To a man the guards covered him with their weapons, and West dashed into the mine.


When Cauthen and Tandy saw him, they pulled up so sharply that the horses behind them, ridden by Bullock and a big blond fellow Paladin had seen several times at Cauthen’s house, ran into them. He waited patiently while the horses sidled and snorted and their riders worked to steady them down; any delay out here would only benefit West and Gordon in the mine.


Tandy recovered first, jerking hard on the reins until his mare stood trembling but still. None of his men had so much as smiled. “Meddling again, Paladin?” he asked in a casual tone, as if it hadn’t been fifteen years and more since they’d seen each other, as if their last encounter hadn’t been one of mutual ferocity that had left bloodstains on carpet and sheets and paid a surgeon’s expenses for a month. “I assure you it is to no avail, and it will be the last time. Get off your horse.”


Paladin fixed them both with a baleful glare and didn’t move. Cauthen glanced from him to Tandy and back again as if wondering whether he should do something. His hand caressed the grip of his pistol but he didn’t draw. Tandy nodded to his men and the rattle of cocking bolts and hammers reverberated off the rock walls. As if in surrender, Paladin obeyed.


********************

Gingerly Gordon prodded the nasty mess of wires, eyes watering in the smoke from the torch in its sconce above the access panel. It was probably his imagination, but the ticking seemed to be getting louder, small drumbeats of destruction in his ears.


Behind him, the faint click of the door latch was most definitely not his imagination. With a low grunt of frantic irritation he positioned himself yet again behind the door, a heavy drill bit in one hand and the chloroform-soaked cloth in the other. He’d quickly dispatched the first pair of guards assigned to the room, and then the two sent to hurry them along. He was running out of space in the small chamber.


He was also running out of time.


The door crept open the breadth of a hair, and then another, and then another; this one was careful. An inch. Another inch. The countdown timer was relentless. A hat brim appeared, allowing him to judge the man’s height. In the diffuse light of the torch, the barrel of a pistol gleamed, and then the cylinder. When the man’s wrist was visible beyond the edge of the door Gordon smashed down with the drill bit on the convergence of tendon and bone and nerve. The gun loosened but didn’t fall; this one was going to take some effort. More time lost. In fact, the man was already swinging with the arm that wasn’t numb, but he was off-balance with surprise and pain, and Gordon was able to get in a punch to the solar plexus before driving in with the cloth at the man’s face—


“Jim!” He jerked the cloth away, and though the motion left him open to West’s fierce uppercut West recognized him in time to pull his punch. Another inch closer and Jim would have inhaled enough chloroform to make him woozy. “How’d you find me?” As he talked he hurried back to the machine.


West rubbed his smarting wrist; he was lucky it wasn’t broken. “I followed a couple of men who were heading for a ‘machine room.’ That sounded like a place you’d gravitate to.”


“Where are the men?”


“Oh, they’re taking a little nap. Artie, Cauthen and Tandy are here. Paladin and I thought you might be able to use some help getting out.”


Gordon adjusted the torch in a futile effort to cast more light on the timer mechanism. “In about—” he checked the clock “—six minutes we’re all going to need some help getting out.”


“What is this thing?” West gazed in wonder and dread at the baroque contraption.


“The usual ingeniously diabolical weapon. This Gatling-gun-type apparatus fires exploding shells that can be loaded with conventional charges or sleeping gas. Or in closer quarters the operator—wearing a mask, of course—can just spray the gas with these pumps.”


Immediately West grasped the flexibility of the design. “Paladin said Tandy was a gifted engineer. He might start with sleeping gas but he could easily load those pumps with something toxic. And once the design proves itself he can make more machines.”


“It might not have a chance to prove itself—it’s ticking. One of those henchmen fell against a wire that was evidently attached to a wind-up mechanism somewhere in the guts of this thing—must be a self-destruct. And you might have noticed there are quite a few weapons caches down here.”


“So if Tandy can’t use his toy he doesn’t want anyone else to use it either. Can you stop it?”


“I don’t know yet—I keep getting interrupted.”


West now saw the bodies piled in a heap behind the door—three, or maybe four; in the darkness he couldn’t tell how many arms and legs there were. “You’ve been a busy boy,” he noted with approval.


“Too busy. Five minutes now. Keep an eye out, will ya?” Gordon had succeeded in removing the timer housing only to find that four different wires connected to it, two of them stretching away toward another housing behind the mass of wires that he could barely see, let alone reach.


West took Gordon’s former position near the door. “Well, one way or another we’re about to put a monkey wrench into Cauthen’s plans. Mission accomplished, more or less.”


“I’ll think of that with pride as I blow sky-high. Where is Paladin?”


West’s tone was suddenly grim. “Burying a long-dead friendship and buying us some time—I hope not with his life.” Paladin might have looked like a black-clad force of nature as he confronted the guards, but he was in fact a mortal man, and five minutes could be an eternity. “Hurry, Artie.”


Gordon didn’t waste the seconds answering. The countdown clock ticked over to four.


********************

“You always had a penchant for oratory, Paladin, but there’s no need to waste your breath now.” Tandy’s tone was snide. He had dismounted to refresh himself at a water barrel, soaking his bandanna and sponging trail dust from his face and neck. Cauthen swiftly mimicked his actions. “We won’t be swayed.”


“It’s my breath to waste,” Paladin said, his voice deceptively mild. They hadn’t yet disarmed him. Simple overconfidence in their favorable odds, or a calculated dare? For the moment he kept his hands well away from his weapons. “Carroll, it isn’t too late to separate yourself from this. If you turn yourself in you can probably escape a charge of treason. Don’t let Tandy’s delusions of grandeur destroy you as well.”


Cauthen laughed. “Hugh isn’t deluded and neither am I. We’ll share power most men only dream of.”


“You think he’ll share? Can you be that naïve? Look around—are any of these thugs paying the slightest bit of attention to you?”


Roundly humiliated, for an instant Cauthen seemed to shrink in stature; but then he drew himself up, his ruddy face reddening further with rage. “You still think you’re so superior.”


“I’ve surely got more common sense than you do, and obviously I read men a little better. You’re nothing more than Tandy’s flunky. He wants to attach himself to respectability and indulge his appetites in secret. He controls this gang, and he’ll be the puppeteer pulling your strings, using you to get money, power, women. Matilda Burgin is his current obsession, and you know what he’ll do to her.” In the past Cauthen had sometimes voiced hesitant objection to Tandy’s brutality; but even as he spoke Paladin could see that he was not about to do so now.


Tandy could see it, too, and smiled a victor’s smile, his prize a weak man’s soul. “A somewhat hypocritical accusation from a confirmed Lothario. What I want from the ripening maid Matilda is no different from what you usually want from a woman.”


“Perhaps not, but seduction and assault are not equivalent, and I have never seduced a child!” Tandy only smiled all the wider, the movement of his mouth accentuating the misalignment of his jaw.


A blue-eyed black man emerged from the mine entrance and hurried over to Bullock, who frowned at his report. Bullock relayed the message to Tandy while the messenger waited for instructions, and Paladin could see that Cauthen was incensed by this slight from a man who until today had been working in his household and subject to his orders.


Bullock withdrew to one side, and Tandy turned to Paladin with an air of mock astonishment. “My men seem to be vanishing as if by magic. They go into the mine but they don’t come out again.”


“West and Gordon,” Cauthen announced, in a pitiful attempt to seem sharp-witted and tough.


“Yes, the so-called ‘cousins.’ Federal agents you invited into our investment group.” To Bullock he snapped, “You and Jonas take some men and find them.”


Bullock’s salute of acknowledgment was for Tandy alone. He and Jonas culled four other men and started into the mine. Now only eight guards remained in support of their leaders, a number easily dispatched, Paladin knew, by one of Gordon’s knockout pellets if he could keep them bunched together. A small corner of his mind was struck by his easy assumption that, despite the number of henchmen sent in after them, the two agents would soon pop out of the mine unharmed.


“But Bird recommended them,” Cauthen was whining, begging for renewed approval from the man he had believed to be his partner. “How was I to know—”


“I pay you to know. I pay you a very great deal.”


Threat was heavy in Tandy’s voice and Cauthen heard it. Not the threat of death, for Tandy still needed him, at least until he had obtained his immediate goals. No, what Cauthen dreaded was Tandy’s contempt.


He took a few steps toward Paladin, a new look of reckless desperation in his eyes. Paladin wasn’t sure if Cauthen was somehow blaming him for Tandy’s ire or simply wanted to win back Tandy’s favor, but whatever his motivation his action would be the same, as would be the price he was about to pay. Turning his body slightly to protect his vital organs, Paladin let his right hand drift toward his gun, flexing his fingers to loosen them.


The guards moved in, their weapons raised; but Tandy lifted a hand and they halted. “Goodness, Paladin—I believe you’ve sparked real courage in Cauthen.”


Paladin never took his eyes from Cauthen. “Now he’s letting you challenge me so he won’t have to risk it. Carroll, don’t do this. You say you’ve changed in fifteen years—well, so have I.” Cauthen wore his gunbelt too high and stood with his legs too stiff; however he might have used a gun in the intervening years, it was not in situations like this. “Playing cards isn’t the only thing I do better now than when we knew each other a lifetime ago. You can’t beat me this way. Please don’t try. You won’t live to regret it.”


Tandy observed, smiling his crooked smile.


Cauthen’s hand moved, but Paladin’s gun was already clearing its holster.


Beneath their feet the earth rocked and split asunder.


********************

“Jim, we’re out of time!” The inexorable countdown was down to thirty seconds when Gordon at last admitted defeat.


They raced out of the machine room and up the dim corridors, bowling searchers aside like tenpins, dodging dropped torches and ignoring the guards’ yelps of pain from singed hands and faces. Rounding a corner, West was a stride ahead when a stray thug tackled Gordon from a lightless branch tunnel just as the murderous machine blew itself to smithereens. Concussion waves swept along the corridors like giant hands, slamming men right and left against rock, flinging posts and lintels every which way like kindling. Groggy but mobile, West was staggering back to where Artemus was extricating himself from semi-conscious henchmen when just in front of him the tunnel roof collapsed with a roar, separating them with a dam of rock and splintered shorings.


“Artie!”


Choking on the haze of dust, he began to move some of the smaller boulders aside, hoping the weight of the others would cause the whole wall to tumble down of its own accord. Overhead a new fault was visible in the ceiling. He tried to remember how many guards they’d shoved aside as they sped up the corridor, Bullock and the foreman and several others; he wondered how many knockout pellets Artie had with him, and whether he dared use them in such a tight space.


“Artie!”


He clawed more rocks away, hopping back from the miniature slides he caused. He had no way of knowing how thick the barrier was, or whether the sleeping gas had flooded the sealed section, or how soon the flames quickly consuming the air on the other side of the wall would be licking at the kegs of gunpowder in the armories.


From beyond the rock dam he heard a gunshot, a whining ricochet, another shot.


Artie!


********************

The earth trembled and bucked. Men lost their balance and fell into collapsing piles of crates; more crates crashed down on top of them. Some weighed fifty pounds or more; screams rent the air as bones broke and flesh tore. Buckets of tools and nails rocked on their benches, then rocked off, scattering their contents over the ground where they tripped up men who were struggling to dodge the accumulating debris. Loose rocks and pebbles rolled off the edge of the escarpment and thundered down the slope; one man’s leg was crushed, two other men were knocked senseless. Where shoring on the lower levels gave way, small sinkholes opened up, one of them swallowing a man; he lay yelling at the bottom with a broken leg, but no one could help him. The Chinese very sensibly did as Gordon had instructed them and fled down the road. Two henchmen followed, looking back over their shoulders as if they expected the entire top to blow off the mountain.


Paladin and Cauthen both lost their footing, so that Paladin’s shot went low, into Cauthen’s thigh rather than his chest. Cauthen was conscious, but moaning and out of action, the bone shattered, his trouser leg soaked with blood. His own shot had gone wild and Paladin sprang up uninjured, but one of the smaller crates had smacked his arm and his gun had vanished beneath debris. Before he could grab another from one of the unconscious guards, Tandy was standing unsteadily before him, gun drawn, hammer cocked.


He wasn’t smiling now.


********************

Frantically West dug at the rocks until his hands were scraped raw. Drumming on the barrier with an old broken pick head, he called Artie’s name, praying to hear some response. At last he heard a tapping that sounded impossibly far away, and then a muffled voice he couldn’t identify. “Artie?” He managed to pry away a rock twice the size of his head, and the voice was suddenly clear and wonderful to hear.


“Jim! You okay?”


“I’m fine. What about you?”


“I’m all right—just a few bruises.” Artie sounded battered and in some discomfort, but whole. “One of the guards is dead and the others are unconscious. I’ve got air now and a bit of light and some tools—I can get out. Go help Paladin.”


“You’re sure? The gas, and those armories—”


“I can get out! Get up there and stop Cauthen and Tandy!”


“All right—see you soon—”


West sped forward until he could see the spill of daylight from the mine entrance, then slowed and crept toward the opening and peered out. Paladin was unarmed and in trouble, covered not only by Tandy’s pistol but those of two guards who looked upset and trigger-happy. Two other guards were stirring and would soon be on their feet.


“We’ll start again,” Tandy was saying, “and next time you and your—associates—won’t be there to stop us.” His hat was gone and he was sweating in the heat, but other than that he looked unscathed, hardly one oiled hair out of place.


“I told you you were a shining example, Paladin,” Cauthen gasped from where he lay on the ground, trying to make a tourniquet for his leg from a rag that had blown near on a hot breeze heavy with dust. “You taught us both perseverance.” For the moment West discounted him as a threat; no weapons were within his reach and he was in no shape to drag himself along in order to find one.


“Then you know that I don’t give up easily either.” Paladin’s shoulder moved, and suddenly West knew he wasn’t unarmed after all.


Gun drawn, he stepped into the open. “Neither do I.”


Tandy and the guards froze, and Paladin completed his draw of the derringer from beneath his gunbelt. “Toss them over here, butts first.” They obeyed.


Tandy’s wide-set eyes held a calculating gleam. In a silky tone he said, “Why if it isn’t ‘Cousin James’—”


“Fascinating place you have here. Did you tell him about the machine?” Paladin cast him a questioning glance. “It was a versatile gadget, able to dispense bullets or shells or any kind of gas he wanted with the crank of a handle or the press of a plunger. It was so big it had to be stored in a room all its own.” Paladin said nothing, but his face sagged with contempt and bitter disappointment as he realized just how far Cauthen had fallen under Tandy’s spell. “Of course that room is somewhat larger now than it was a few minutes ago—”


Another distant rumbling buckled the ground. The weathered storage buildings that hadn’t already collapsed began to lean and creak. Paladin was thrown sideways into the remains of the shafthouse; West heard his bark of pain, saw him fire both barrels of the derringer at the guards diving toward the small pile of guns, catching one in the arm before he was forced to take cover and scavenge for a weapon. West, recovering his balance and about to fire, grateful that at least there were no piles of anything left to fall on top of him, felt a sudden ominous dragging under his feet like an undertow of sand; he scrambled away to more solid ground, and by that time Tandy and the guards had regained their weapons, even Cauthen wielding a pistol that Tandy had thrown to him. More rumblings, and this time a cloud of dust roiled from the mine. Artie, he thought, and then he couldn’t think about Artie anymore because bullets were flying and he needed better cover; he couldn’t help Artie or Paladin either if he got himself killed. Scuttling around a wagon broken in half by a boulder that had dropped from the cliff high above, he spied Paladin’s .45, the polished metal dulled by a coating of dust. He reloaded it with his own ammunition, then with a shrill whistle caught Paladin’s attention and tossed him the weapon over the disorder of shattered planks and ruined supplies. In one smooth motion Paladin rose up to snatch the weapon from the air, came down into a roll, and fired twice at the nearest guards; both fell back lifeless.


Upon witnessing this unsettling display of ruthless marksmanship the two remaining guards seemed to confer with each other, and without prompting they lobbed their guns over the flattened wagon behind which they had taken cover. “We’re comin’ out!”


“This way,” West ordered, beckoning, planning to truss them up until their employers were also in custody.


“Cauthen, Tandy, it’s over!” Paladin shouted. “We have a clear field of fire along the road and the slope, and we’re between you and the horses. Give it up!”


Shots rang out from behind a storage shed that was improbably still in one piece. The two guards in the process of surrendering dropped dead.


There was a stunned silence. Then Paladin’s outraged shout echoed from the rock. “Leave no witnesses, eh, Tandy? What about Cauthen? Is he expendable, too?”


Cauthen had evidently been wondering the same thing. A gun flew over yet another smashed wagon. “I surrender, Paladin—I surrender! West, I’ll tell you everything!” Tandy fired toward the panicky voice and chips flew from the wagon’s splintered planking, but Cauthen was well shielded.


West caught Paladin’s eye and with hand gestures suggested that they should flank the shed. Paladin nodded, and gathered himself to dash to the next good cover. Just then bullets spat into the ground, and some of the picketed horses, already terrified and straining at their tie-ropes, squealed in pain. Craning his neck West could see at least half a dozen men gathered at the edge of the escarpment—the lookouts and some of the guards who had run away when the shooting started—effectively pinning them down.


“Why aren’t they getting away?” Paladin called out, his question more or less rhetorical. “They can see it’s a rout down here.”


“Not if they can pick us off. Artie found a safe full of cash in there. They think they’ll get it all now that they’re the only ones left. They don’t know it’s already burned to ash.”


“Where is Gordon?”


West’s mouth tightened. Explosion after explosion jarring unstable ceilings in danger of further collapse, Artemus in the path of smoke and gas, the guards confined with him beginning to wake up— “Trapped in the mine—”


“Oh no I ain’t, sonny!” shouted the voice West most wanted to hear. “Jes’ bunged up a leetle, that’s all—” When he emerged from the clouds of dust still billowing from the entrance, Gordon was hatless and wigless and dirt grayed his dark hair; his shirt and union suit were torn and the rents across his back and shoulders showed smears of blood, but he was alive and ambulatory and toting something that looked like a portable cannon—another of Tandy’s lethal inventions, no doubt. “That last explosion blew a big hole in that wall and peppered me with some interesting gewgaws, too. Let’s see if I can do something about the scavenger population.”


West and Paladin provided furious cover fire upward and toward the shed as Gordon dashed out of the mine and knelt behind a fallen boulder, the weapon mounted on his blood-specked shoulder. Angling it toward the cliff he fired, and shards sprayed from the granite face just below the edge. At first West assumed that due to his inexperience with the weapon Artemus had missed and would immediately fire again; but when the colored smoke began to rise and envelop the guards he realized Artie had loaded the weapon with a couple of his knockout pellets. One of the men fell perilously near the edge of the cliff, but his comrades were able to drag him back before they too succumbed.


“That’ll teach ’em to be greedy,” Gordon commented with satisfaction. “And the money didn’t all burn up—I liberated some for Mr. Wong and his men.”


“Artie, that money is evidence,” West pointed out, not very seriously.


Was evidence—it all burned up, remember? And if I’d known it was gonna burn up, I’d’a grabbed ever’ las’ doller, by ding-dang!”


After all the confusion the sudden quiet roared in their ears. Gordon, moving slowly but after being nearly entombed and then nearly blown up thankful just to be moving, went to tend to Cauthen, while West and Paladin again started toward the shed, from which there had been suspiciously little activity during the last round of weapons fire.


“Maybe one of your shots got lucky,” West said quietly.


“Maybe.”


They made no assumptions, however, and stayed behind crates and wagons and jumbles of rock until they could spring around the sides of the shed, guns drawn and hammers cocked.


Tandy sat in the dirt with his back to the steep embankment, knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs, his gun set to one side well out of his reach. So he had cowered the night Paladin had stopped him from beating the saloon girl to death, had simply folded up to nurse his injuries, knowing full well that Paladin would not keep pounding him if he was down.


Paladin wished now that he had. “Get up,” he ordered. Tandy didn’t move. Paladin pressed the nose of his pistol against Tandy’s temple. His voice softened and deepened into something far more menacing than a shout. “I said get up.”


He was not surprised when he heard West say, as he had said before, “Don’t.” And as before, he looked up to see West’s pistol aimed in its turn squarely at his heart. Their eyes met in a matching glitter. “I thought you said you weren’t an assassin.” West’s voice was very calm, his hand very steady.


And then Paladin made a sound that was something between a sigh and a snarl. Forcing the murderous tension from his body, he holstered his weapon. West released the hammer on his own with a restrained sigh of relief; he really hadn’t wanted to end the day by shooting an ally he had learned to value highly. Devil-knight, Artemus had called him. In that moment the devil had been ascendent.


He stepped aside, and Paladin dragged Tandy to his feet and gave him a mighty shove. Faced with a choice between falling face first into planks with upturned nails or catching his balance and picking his way, Tandy chose the latter.


The explosion that had finally freed Gordon had also, unfortunately, freed the guards trapped with him; as these gradually regained consciousness, they stumbled one by one out of the mine. Seeing that their boss had been caught, most made their escape, freeing horses from the picket line and tearing away at a gallop. West and Paladin heard them go, but being much more concerned with Tandy than with his minions, did not attempt to pursue.


Bullock, however, afflicted with a certain mercenary loyalty, decided to try to rescue his boss, who had paid him well and made him feel important; he could not know that this same boss had moments before murdered two of Bullock’s comrades without a qualm. Quite possibly the knowledge wouldn’t have dissuaded him; Bullock was as confident as Cauthen had been that he enjoyed Tandy’s special favor.


He launched himself from the cover of some boulders, tackling West and driving him full force into Paladin, who fell sprawling backward into the rubble beneath the weight of two grappling men. West’s gun flew out of his hand and skittered away; Paladin’s was still in its holster but before he could draw it as he came up into a crouch the instant he was unencumbered, Tandy plowed into him and knocked him to the ground again.


As he was fashioning a splint around Cauthen’s leg, Gordon heard the smack of fist against flesh, the grunts of falling men. Leaving Cauthen to fashion his own splint, he swung around what was left of the wagon to see two separate brawls in full tilt. Scanning the area, he saw no other henchmen drawing a bead or waiting to pounce, so he brushed the dust off a cracked wheel and settled in to watch, his gaze darting back and forth from one scuffle to the other as if he was watching a tennis match—though he did pick up Cauthen’s gun and hold it ready, in case Tandy or Bullock found one of his own. These battles had been brewing for a long time; who was he to spoil anybody’s fun?


For all his bellicosity, the mountainous Bullock had no notion of how to use his greater height and weight against a more compact and agile opponent. He stomped with his tree-trunk legs and jabbed with his massive arms, but West dodged and ducked, landing punch after punch that Bullock never saw coming, taking few himself and so conserving energy and keeping his head clear. He hopped backward over debris that bounced beneath his weight and then kicked it into Bullock’s path, picked up a shovel handle and pummeled with it until it snapped over Bullock’s broad back. Finally Bullock tried to wrestle him, lumbering forward bearlike with arms opened wide to engulf him; West dropped to a crouch and kicked sideways at Bullock’s shins. Bullock landed flat on his face, but rolling quickly he lashed out with a long arm and grabbed West by the ankle. West fell backward and landed hard on some broken boards, tucking his chin to save himself a dizzying bump on the skull. He flung a couple of boards to keep Bullock at bay until he could regain his feet amid the treacherous footing, then jumped on him from the rear, kneeing him in the kidney. Even as he yelped and gasped, Bullock grabbed West around the neck and pulled him forward over his head. West had no choice but to yield to the throw; then, ignoring the gouging of the boards, he spun on the sturdy muscles of his back, lodged a boot against Bullock’s ribs, and shoved upward; Bullock flew over him at an angle and came down with a crash. West was up first but lost his balance on boards that slid under his feet, stumbling to his hands and knees. Bullock kicked at his ribs but West was already rolling away and the kick did little damage. He rolled several times to give himself some distance, then sprang again to his feet and reached for his gun, but Bullock’s long stride closed the gap too quickly; his guard briefly down, West took a jab full in the mouth and tasted blood. Bullock laughed, and West got mad. Bounding nimbly over the debris underfoot, he fell back just far enough to plant himself; then, as Bullock rushed him again, he crouched and leaped into a heel kick to the jaw that stopped Bullock in his tracks. A couple more hooks, a double-fisted chop, and Bullock was down and out.


The cut on Paladin’s cheek had opened up again; air and salty sweat stung in the wound. Tandy was not a skilled fighter but he was fierce and determined, old awakened enmity powering his fists, driving his legs, keeping him on his feet though he stumbled repeatedly among the strewn boards and tools, and the papers and laundry that fluttered in the breeze and obscured the ground. Neither man had any advantage of size, but Tandy’s anger cost him discipline, made his punches wild; again and again Paladin got under his guard, hammering at Tandy’s ribs until they gave, snapping his head back, breaking his nose this time and possibly the jaw again where the old fracture was imperfectly healed. Tandy’s years of soft, self-indulgent living also began to tell; his punches lost force and he tripped more frequently, and Paladin, who had lived hard and tough and had the stamina of wind and muscle to show for it, was able to settle into a steady rhythm of left, right, and dodge that Tandy was growing too fuzzy-headed to anticipate or counter.


Tousled and panting, and seeing that Paladin had no need of his assistance, West joined Gordon on the wagon wheel to watch the end of the bout, his head cocked with an evaluating air. Quick-footed and flexible for so large a man, Paladin threw punches with his whole body, channeling a primal strength from powerful legs through his limber hips and well-muscled back and shoulders into his ham-sized fists. He was good. He was very good. But he tended to box and wrestle, techniques in which his size would usually be an advantage; he made little use of the kicks or spins that West liked to incorporate into his fighting moves and was thus very likely less practiced in blocking them.


They saw the moment Tandy broke, all the fight going out of him between one breath and another, though he continued to flail; Paladin stopped setting up his punches and simply slugged, his blows swift and savage. Blood streaming from his mouth and nose, Tandy staggered farther backward with every punch, Paladin taking two and then three strides to close the distance, his knuckles split and bloody. At last, evidently wearying of Tandy’s refusal to accept that the battle was lost, Paladin planted his feet and waited for Tandy to gather himself and rush him, whereupon he drove a sledgehammer left uppercut into Tandy’s solar plexus with a force that lifted him a foot off the ground, then delivered a solid right roundhouse to Tandy’s left temple. Tandy dropped like a poleaxed cow, Paladin looming over his motionless form like a triumphant gladiator surviving to fight another day.


Gordon whistled admiringly. “I feel like shouting ‘He’s had it!’ the way they did in the Coliseum. Sure would like to have seen that fight in Limestone.”


West folded his arms and leaned back against the wagon bed, exuding self-assurance. “I could take him.”


Now Paladin was hauling Tandy one-handed to his wobbly feet. Gordon snorted. “Yeah, but you’d be sore afterward.”


West laughed, but knew better than to deny it. “Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re friends.”


********************

“So with all the evidence we found when we searched Cauthen’s and Tandy’s houses,” Gordon was saying, “including the plans for that machine and various others just as deadly, and correspondence with the manager of Tandy’s factory in Pennsylvania—who doesn’t seem to have had any idea what his boss was up to, by the way—”


“—not to mention the detailed statements from Cauthen and all the gang members we rounded up—” West put in. They had also obtained statements from Wong and his crew before wishing them well and sending them back to Golden with sufficient funds to tide them over until they found other, hopefully safer jobs.


“—you probably won’t be needed at the trial, but we’ll let you know.”


“I can be reached at the Carlton,” Paladin replied. “If I’m on a job, Hey Boy—Kim Chan—will usually know where to find me.”


It was the evening of the second day after the arrest of Cauthen and Tandy and their minions. Stopping by the train on his way out of town and once again clad in gentleman’s attire, Paladin had accepted a postprandial liqueur but waved away Gordon’s apology that in the press of tying up loose ends—reports to Horace Bird and the duped investors, with particular explanation to Charles Burgin and his family (during which Burgin was mortified and silent, Mrs. Burgin was relieved and grateful, and the inconstant Matilda was clearly revising her opinion of the erstwhile Cousin James), as well as directing the searches of two large mansions and the shambles at the mine—he hadn’t had time to prepare another gourmet feast.


At the moment Gordon was again in the throes of rapturous envy. “Ohhhh, some of the finest meals in San Francisco can be had at the Carlton, especially since Henri Fourneau became head chef.”


“One of several inducements for making it my permanent residence—though I think I might enjoy a rolling existence for a short time, as long as I could travel with an adequate staff.” Paladin glanced appreciatively around the parlor, reflecting on the surprising similarities of their lives. “You know, I’m beginning to suspect that all those preposterous stories you told me over dinner were true.”


They looked at each other. “Pretty much,” said West.


“More or less,” said Gordon, “—the ones in which we emerged victorious, of course.”


Paladin laughed. “Of course. Well, I have a train to catch, so this seems a good time to present my bill.” He held out an envelope.


Gordon opened it and read its contents; wincing, he handed it to his partner. “Like the man said—one thousand dollars, ‘for expert consultation and services rendered.’” To Paladin he added with a pained smile, “Thanks for making it so official—much tidier that way.”


West tucked the envelope beneath a paperweight on the desk. “You understand it might take some time to pry this amount out of—our uncle.”


Paladin’s smile was sardonic. “I’ve worked for the government before.”


“Well, I was going to say that I hope we can work together again one of these days,” Gordon said, “but I don’t think we can afford you!”


The three shared a good-natured laugh. Then Paladin said, “That bill is for our mutual employer. The two of you will always be able to afford me if you should ever need my assistance in a private matter.” Both agents acknowledged his offer with gracious half-bows, knowing he did not make it lightly. “And even if you don’t, I hope you’ll look me up sometime. I’d be delighted to return your hospitality under more pleasant circumstances—and to spar with you, Jim, at my club.” West bounced a little on his toes, while his partner shook his head with a boys-will-be-boys expression. “Oh, and Artemus, in addition to your crêpes recipe, when you finish that composition I’d be honored to receive a copy of the music.”


“I’d be honored to send it—as long as you provide me with your piano arrangement.”


“It will be a pleasure. Good-bye, gentlemen.” Their handshakes were firm. An apt quotation sprang to Paladin’s mind: Aristotle, when asked “What is a friend?” had replied, “A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Passion he had experienced often, and occasionally even love, but never a friendship as close as this, a sympathy deeper than that of brothers and not likely to be sundered by unwelcome revelation. “I wish you well, and I do hope to see you again.”


From the back stoop they waved him down the siding platform until he disappeared into the lamplit station, then went back into the parlor to face the less rewarding aspects of their work. “A thousand dollars!!” Gordon was wailing before the door even closed. “For one day’s work!! And his only war wounds are a few swollen knuckles and that little bit of plaster on his face, while I’m wrapped in ointment and bandages from neck to waist!”


“He’s a good man, Artie. We were lucky to have him with us.”


West drew out Paladin’s bill and perused it absently. The devil-knight had been lucky to have them, too. With time to think about that chaotic day, the rapid-fire culmination of a seemingly endless period of watching and waiting, West had found himself reflecting on Paladin’s merciless elimination of the two guards during the gun battle. It had been an amazing display of shooting, Paladin a blur of black, but the move had left him exposed to fire from both his flanks in yet another example of that occasional startling disregard for his own safety. Had he simply been confident that West would cover him, or had he fallen victim to a self-destructive or even a self-sacrificial streak born of guilt over those early wicked choices and especially that one great wrong—as if in that moment he hadn’t much cared what price he paid to accomplish his goal?


He sighed. He was only guessing about a question to which he would probably never know the answer. Maybe Paladin didn’t know either. A wild card, he thought with a smile. Or maybe it’s just that he’s as crazy as we are.


“Well, I agree, of course,” Gordon was saying, “—but a thousand dollars!!” Even as himself, he was prone to expostulation. “Jim, I gotta tell ya, I really thought he was kidding. Or that he might at least offer us a discount— Cauthen and Tandy were his friends, after all! What if Colonel Richmond won’t approve direct payment? I already bought all that wine as part of our cover—if we have to pay Paladin out of our expense account we’ll be in arrears for months!”


West propped a hip against the desk. “Artie, I have an idea.”


“Yeah?” Gordon’s agonized expression became pitifully hopeful.


“Let’s not worry about it tonight.” From a pocket he produced two tickets which he fanned under Artemus’s nose. “The show starts at ten at the Nugget. They’re promising the can-can,” he coaxed. “Carpe diem?”


Gordon’s characteristic ebullience had at once returned. “And it’s only money, right? James, my boy, I had no idea you were such a philosopher.” He snatched his cloak from the rack. “By all means, carpe diem!—and maybe carpe noctem, too!”



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© 2008 Karen A. Beckwith

 

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