Bushwack Bullets Page 6

  "You'll pay me back, all right, kid," slurred Everett Kingman. "Es seguro! I was comin' to that."

  "What do you mean?" Kingman's voice was low, puzzled.

  "Did you think for a minute," sneered Everett Kingman, "that I risked my men's lives to snatch you out o' that juzgado just because we was raised together?"

  Hap leaned forward, a scowl gathering between his brows.

  "Put your cards on the table, Everett!" he demanded. "What are you drivin' at? Why do you call these hombres your men?"

  Everett Kingman leaned over to open a small pair of saddlebags on the table. He drew forth several small tin cans, and brown glass bottles which glittered in the lantern light.

  "These cans are full o' opium, to sell to the chinks who work in the Arizona mines," was Everett's astonishing disclosure. "These bottles contain morphine, cocaine."

  Hap stared aghast at the contraband, as comprehension dawned slowly and reluctantly within him.

  "You mean—this is a smugglin' gang's headquarters? You mean to tell me, Everett, that you're a contrabandisto?"

  Everett exposed yellow-stained teeth in a leer.

  "How else would I get the dinero to gamble with, to buy liquor an' treat the señoritas with? Not from what I earned from our damned Flyin' K spread." He inhaled deeply. "Hap, you might as well know that I'm the segundo—the right-hand man of the smugglin' chief, Señor Giboso. An' I have been, ever since I was seventeen."

  Señor Giboso! The name made Hap Kingman sway as if struck by a hammer. Señor Giboso was the name of an elusive smuggler who had terrorized the Rio Grande country for ten years; a masked smuggler who had slipped through the fingers of the Mexican rurales and the American border officers on countless occasions, usually leaving dead men behind him. Sheriff Kingman had been one of them.

  It was almost too much to comprehend. And yet these sinister-visaged Mexicans, this well-hidden rendezvous, all bore out Everett's frank confession.

  "Why are you tellin' me this, Everett?"

  His brother leaned forward, twin ropes of smoke dribbling from his nostrils.

  "Why not? You're goin' to join us, Hap. Don't forget you're an escaped murderer in the eyes of the law. There'll be a reward posted on your head, dead or alive. You ain't in any position to balk. You'll help us smuggle contraband, or—"

  Everett left his sentence unfinished, but its implication of swift doom was clear enough.

  Hap Kingman's face drained of color as he leaped to his feet, jaw outthrust, hand dropping to the cedar handle of Dev Hewett's deadly six-gun.

  Everett did not flicker an eyelash or twitch a muscle, but behind him the four Mexicans leaped to their feet, knives flashing in the lantern shine, naked gun barrels glittering.

  "What if I refuse to become a smuggler, Everett?"

  Everett shrugged.

  "You wouldn't get out o' this cave alive, for one thing. Besides, kid—don't you owe us somethin' for gettin' you out o' jail tonight?"

  Hap Kingman slowly relaxed his taut muscles. He seemed ringed about by leveled guns, glittering eyes. He was helpless, enmeshed in a criminal web from which there could be no escape.

  "All right," he husked out finally. "I'll work for you and Señor Giboso—on one job. Then I'm quittin', and you can shoot me or be damned. Maybe I am an outlaw. Maybe they will post a bounty for my capture. But I'm no smuggler, Everett, and never will be."

  Everett Kingman motioned for his swart-skinned henchmen to sheath their weapons.

  "I knew you'd see it my way, kid," he purred menacingly. "You'll lay low for three or four days, an' then I'm sendin' you to Señor Giboso for futher orders, savvy? We need a man who can use his guns—who'll have to shoot to save his own hide. That's why I saw to it that you didn't swing for Siebert's murder."

  In the ghastly quiet of the dank cavern, Everett's pronouncement was more sinister than Judge Peddicord's death sentence had been—and infinitely more positive.

  Anna Siebert returned to her home on the Triangle S immediately after the sheriff had refused her a chance of talking with the condemned prisoner, Hap Kingman.

  She spent a troubled night, tortured by nightmares of seeing the clean-cut young puncher dangling at rope's end for the slaying of her father.

  Next morning, after a breakfast which threatened to nauseate her, the girl found herself drawn by some strangely impelling force to the north porch of the ranchhouse, to the place where George Siebert had gone to his doom.

  Shuddering, Anna Siebert averted her eyes from the spot where her father had been smoking peacefully in his wheelchair. She gripped a stucco-plastered porch pillar for support, her eyes suddenly blinded with tears.

  Then it was that the syndicate owner's daughter caught sight of something on the smooth surface of the porch post which brought her nerves tinglingly alive.

  One corner of the post had been chipped off, and the faint trace of a furrow had been grooved along the smooth plaster, at a slight angle off horizontal.

  It was a recently made bullet track. Instinct told Anna Siebert that it could be nothing else.

  "I wonder… it can't be—"

  The girl's heart seemed to freeze within her as she unconsciously followed the angle of the tiny furrow downward, saw that it lined up with the exact spot where George Siebert had been sitting at the time of his death.

  With a low cry, Anna Siebert turned about to face outdoors, and knelt for a moment to squint along the bullet furrow in the porch post as she might peer down the sights on a gun barrel.

  The bullet's angle led her eye to a clump of buckthorn brush on the skyline of Manzanita Hill, the hog-back ridge which overlooked the ranchhouse.

  Hardly conscious of what she was doing, the girl ran down the porch steps and off across the lawn, keeping her eyes fixed on the clump of buckthorn chaparral.

  Pushing open the yard gate, she began scrambling up the steep rocky slope of Manzanita Hill, with a goat-like agility which she had mastered during her girlhood. She had climbed this hill a thousand times, at play.

  Now her face was set in grim lines as she climbed doggedly, clinging to sagebrush clumps and manzanita scrub for support, her boots slogging on the flinty soil, pounding on sun-dried adobe.

  Five minutes later she had gained the ridge crest.

  Her heart was beating furiously as she pushed her way through the buckthorn brush.

  Then she halted, her eyes riveted to a shimmering piece of metal which the sun's rays picked up, a piece of furbished brass which shed dazzling spears of reflected light.

  Leaping forward, Anna Siebert snatched up the metal object. It was a center-fire .30-30-calibered cartridge case, empty of powder or bullet.

  Not until then did Anna Siebert notice something else.

  The Texas sun had dried the adobe mud which the previous week's rains had formed on the crest of Manzanita Hill. And that sloppy ooze, hardening, had held fast the molded imprint of a man's hobnailed boots, the indentations in the mud where the knees of a kneeling man had pressed.

  She followed the tracks, down the east slope of the ridge, reading sign like an Indian scout as she came to the marks of a horse's hoofs. The horse tracks led off in the direction of Mexitex town.

  Anna Siebert wasted no time then. She raced back to the ranchhouse, and gave swift orders for a mozo to saddle a fast pony for her.

  Ten minutes later found the girl spurring at full gallop along the tree-bordered lane, heading for Mexitex town in the distance.

  The hour was yet early, so that few men moved on the main street as she flung herself from saddle in front of Doc Hanson's office and undertaking parlors.

  Bursting through the door, Anna Siebert recognized the deputy coroner, Dan Kendelhardt.

  "Where's Dr. Hanson, Dan?" she asked breathlessly. "I've got to see him—at once!"

  Kendelhardt scratched his head.

  "That's what I been wonderin', Miss Siebert. Doc ain't been in for two nights. It's got me worried. He ain't out on a call, because his kitbag
is in the closet there. It's not like Doc to vamoose without leavin' word with me."

  Anna Siebert gripped the young undertaker's wrist.

  "Listen, Dan," she said hoarsely. "You… you'd have the authority… to perform an autopsy on my dad's body, wouldn't you?"

  "I reckon so, Miss Siebert. But the… that is, the cause of death is known. Gunshot wound. Doc Hanson—"

  Brushing tears from her eyes, Anna forced herself to go on:

  "I want you to probe out the bullet that killed daddy, and do it quick. A… a man's life may depend on it. I can't wait for Doc Hanson to show up and do the job."

  Kendelhardt started to protest, and then turned and vanished inside the morgue room.

  For the better part of a half-hour, Anna Siebert paced the doctor's office in an agony of tortured emotions. Her face was white and spent when Kendelhardt finally re-entered the room, bearing a white towel draped across one hand.

  Cradled on the towel was a twisted blob of metal, jacketed in a case of cuprous steel.

  "Tears to be a .30-30 slug, Miss Siebert. Fired from a rifle. Six guns don't shoot steel-jacketed bullets."

  Controlling herself with difficulty, Anna Siebert pressed into the deputy coroner's hand the bright cartridge case she had found on the crest of Manzanita Hill, above her father's home.

  "Run over to the jail and give this to Sheriff Reynolds, Dan!" she gasped hysterically. "Tell him what you found. Tell him to cancel Hap Kingman's hanging, do you understand? We've got to have a new trial—"

  Understanding seized Kendelhardt, made him mouth a low oath and then reach for his hat on a nearby peg. A moment later he was gone, sprinting at top speed toward the jail building.

  A violent reaction seized Anna Siebert then, and she was just recovering from her hysterical weeping when Kendelhardt came back to the doctor's office, ten minutes later.

  "All hell—beggin' your pardon, Miss Siebert— busted loose last night!" panted the excited deputy coroner. "Somebody knocked out the sheriff, and Hap Kingman escaped. Busted jail! Bob Reynolds an' a posse are out scourin' the country for him, now!"

  Anna Siebert pressed a trembling hand to her breast, and closed her eyes as she leaned against the coroner for support.

  "Thank God! Thank God," she whispered brokenly. "We almost… sent an innocent man… to the gallows, Dan."

  11

  SEÑOR GIBOSO

  After three days of hiding out in the Rio Grande cavern headquarters of his brother, Hap Kingman left under cover of a cloud-blanketed night for an obscure inland town named Maduro, from the fig trees which flanked its plaza.

  With his speaking knowledge of Spanish, the gringo cowboy had no difficulty in locating the posada where Everett had told him Señor Giboso would be found.

  On presentation of a password, the innkeeper bade Hap Kingman wait a short period in the lobby, before taking him up a flight of steps to a dimly lighted room in the rear of the Mexican hotel.

  There, his eyes blinked by a kerosene lamp backed by a nickel-plated reflector, Hap Kingman faced for the first time the sinister border character who had been dubbed "Giboso" because his spine was misshapen and humped—Giboso being Mexican jargon for "the humpbacked one."

  Squinting at the dazzling light, Kingman saw the malformed smuggler boss seated behind a table, his face hidden by the shadow of a steeple-peaked sombrero, features masked with a flung-over hem of his gaudy serape.

  Without speaking, the cowboy tendered a brief letter of introduction from Everett, which Señor Giboso accepted with a gloved hand and read swiftly in the lamplight.

  "Ah, si," whispered Señor Giboso, in a voice which sounded to Kingman like a reptile's hiss. "You will make a good contrabandista, Señor Kingman. Your hermano's letter tells me you are a desperado wanted by gringo sheriffs, for murder."

  Kingman flushed angrily.

  "I'm goin' to deliver one shipment of dope for you in Mexitex's native quarter. I promised my brother I'd do that much, because he saved my life," snarled the cowboy. "Then I'm on my own. I wasn't cut out for this owlhoot business—especially not for trafficking in narcotics."

  Señor Giboso's intake of breath sounded like hissing steam in the ill-smelling room, but without comment the deformed smuggler passed over a pair of saddlebags which were packed with what Hap knew to be narcotic contraband.

  "You will deliver this to the casa of Juan Fernandez, on the Avenida de las Palmas, in Mexitex," ordered Señor Giboso, still speaking in his oily whisper. "Everett will give you further orders, and payment for this work. I have no doubt, señor, that you will reconsider. Once a smuggler for Señor Giboso, always a smuggler, my gringo friend—if you want to keep on living long."

  Kingman shouldered the saddlebags, clamped on his sombrero, and strode out of the room. He was glad to be rid of the smuggler chief's presence; the very atmosphere was shot with evil, giving Kingman the impression of wallowing in a sewer, consorting with some foul breed of rat.

  His face was covered now with a week's scrub of beard, but he had little fear of seeing anyone in Maduro town who had attended his trial in Mexitex the week before.

  Grimly remounting the cayuse which Everett had loaned him, Hap Kingman spurred out of the town and headed northward along a winding trail which snaked through the cactus-dotted Chihuahua badlands.

  He passed dingy-looking peons driving ox carts or mounted on burros, during the day; but they gave the gringo no more than a passing glance. Still Kingman knew that the only gringos who ever frequented Maduro town were Americans wanted by the law north of the border.

  As he rode, many thoughts tangled in Kingman's mind. His future plans were vague, indefinable.

  A week ago he had been conducting the business of his foster parents' Flying K Ranch, with little on his mind save the ever-present, sub-conscious thirst for revenge which had been in the back of his head ever since that terrible night during the third year of his life when he had seen a red-masked killer shoot his father and mother.

  Strangely enough, the death of George Siebert gave Kingman little satisfaction. He realized, now, that the fulfillment of revenge brought little solace to a human heart. Siebert's death would not restore his slain parents to him.

  "I'm glad I didn't fire the bullet that killed him," he found himself admitting out loud. "At any rate, I'm not a murderer, even if the State of Texas thinks I am. My conscience is free enough."

  And then another thought struck the unhappy cowboy. If his father was named Dev Hewett, then his name was Hewett likewise. But he could not remember his father. His father's place had been taken by the kindly, generous old Texas sheriff named Les Kingman.

  Out of respect for that foster-father's loving care and fatherly companionship during his adolescent years, Hap knew the least he could do to thank Sheriff Kingman for all he had done was to retain Kingman's name.

  He had brought dishonor and disgrace to that proud Texas name, it was true; but the clearing of that name gave him something to live for now. And—although the cowboy might not have realized it—he would not know a peaceful moment until Anna Siebert knew the truth about her father's death; knew that he was no common killer, taking human life without compunction.

  Thus ran the trend of Hap Kingman's thought, as he saw the darkness of the Mexican night overtaking him five miles south of Mexitex.

  He was firmly resolved not to continue working with Señor Giboso's smuggling ring, despite the hunchbacked chieftain's grim threat of personal revenge if he quit their ranks.

  He would turn over this night's shipment of contraband to the waiting Mexican accomplice, Juan Fernandez; and then he would be through. And if Everett should ever cross his trail and seek to blackmail him into outlaw servitude for assisting him out of jail, Hap knew that he would return Everett's bullets in kind.

  During his youth, Hap had visited the Mexican side of Mexitex frequently enough to know where the Avenida de las Palmas was located, deep in the shabbiest section of the peon town.

  He did not
know, as he made inquiries from street loafers, that the home of Juan Fernandez had once been the home of the outlaw he believed to be his father, Dev Hewett. He did not know that Hewett's true offspring, Everito, had been born inside the soot-blackened adobe walls of that thatch-roofed jacal.

  Dismounting in pitch blackness outside Fernandez's shack, Hap Kingman slung the dope-laden alforja bags over a weary shoulder, and knocked at the door of the hut.

  A blast of garlic and chili-laden air hit him in the face as a buxom-hipped Mexican woman admitted him. In answer to his request for Juan Fernandez she pointed to one of four Mexicans seated at a table devouring tortilla cakes and mescal.

  Fernandez was a towering Mexican, his face a horrid caricature speckled with smallpox scars.

  Without bothering to tender Señor Giboso's official password which would identify him as a smuggler, Hap Kingman rasped out words which left a sour taste in his mouth:

  "Here's some contraband from Señor Giboso."

  Fernandez shoved his chair back from the table as the American flung the saddlebags on the floor with a gesture like ridding himself of a load of decayed garbage.

  Only when he saw the startled suspicion on the countenances of Fernandez's three Mexican diners did Hap Kingman realize he had unintentionally revealed to them the fact that their host was a contraband smuggler.

  But the verbal slip did not concern Kingman particularly. It was Juan's headache, not his. With a shrug, he turned and stalked out of the ill-smelling hovel.

  "Contrabando?" rasped one of Fernandez's guests. "Porque does this stranger leave contrabando with you, amigo?"

  The smuggler's face twitched with dread. Over in the corner his slovenly wife was trembling visibly. No one in Mexitex had dreamed that her esposo was a secret henchman of Señor Giboso's. Now this loose-tongued gringo had given away that deadly secret—

  "Quien sabe?" answered Fernandez. "But I have seen that gringo's face somewhere. I wonder—"

  And then a heaven-sent inspiration came to the smuggler's aid, as he faced the accusing eyes of his guests.