The Spook Hills Mystery/Chapter 11

Shelton came to himself in a little while, went through the common stages of mental confusion, and groped his way back to clear thinking. By sunrise he was master of his muscles to the extent that he insisted upon crawling out of the wagon and helping Spider look for tracks. But he owned finally to a roaring headache, and even admitted that he felt "groggy." He was therefore persuaded to stay at the wagon while Vida and Spider went forth upon the man trail; vengefully, determined not to be fooled by any cunning stratagem; ready to kill, even, if they were brought face to face with Burney. They were armed—Spider with an old shotgun which Vida lent him and his own forty-five; and Vida with her revolver and the little twenty-two that seemed ridiculously inadequate in a fight with a giant like Burney. And they were armed also with the fine courage that had been born of sturdy pioneer stock and nurtured by the life each one had lived.

Tracks they found; the great, tell-tale footprints of a giant's boots marking the length of a giant's stride. Spider's eyes clouded anew when he discovered them in the sandy soil, for he had liked Burney well—and Burney was his boss. He had eaten at the same table with Burney, had slept under the same tent, had used tobacco from the same sack with that democratic freedom which is the true essence of the Western type. He had watched over Burney's cattle; with Burney's money he had paid for the clothes he wore. He was proud of Burney's immensity of frame, of his tremendous strength, of his fairness, and the quiet masterfulness of his manner. Big in every way he had believed Burney to be. Too big, certainly, for petty crime or foul murder; so big that he did not need to defend himself or his rights with the weapons of ordinary men. Burney, in the two or three years that Spider had known him, never had owned or carried a gun. He never hunted animals, for pleasure or profit—and for men he did not need one. That was why he killed with his hands—if he killed at all.

He went forward grimly enough upon the trail, did Spider, but he went with a great bitterness in his heart. He would kill Burney if he came close enough, but he would sorrow always over the memory of Burney's fall.

The trail wound here and there through the sage, and there were times when they lost it altogether, but the general trend of the tracks was toward the hills—rather, toward the highest, roughest peak of the hills—so that Spider, heading for the logical route into the heart of its deep-scarred cañons, picked up the trail twice after several minutes of traveling by guess over rocky ground.

Vida kept beside him or close behind. She seemed tireless as he, yet her face was drawn and colorless from worry and lack of sleep and food; for the breakfast that she cooked hastily for the two men she left untouched herself, except for a few sips of black coffee. Spider tried to save her strength for her, since she seemed to have no care for herself. But she would not have it so. If he sat down to rest after a sharp climb, Vida went on ahead—which brought Spider some fearful moments and made him hurry after her. Once he remonstrated with her for hurrying too fast; her answer then was characteristic.

"When I hear a rattler," she said, "I never quit till I find him and kill him. I'm scared of snakes. And I'm scared of that great big beast of a Burney—and I won't take a long breath till I catch him. While he's free and I don't know where he is, I'm—I just expect every minute he'll sneak up and grab me."

"Not while I can stand on my two feet," Spider interjected, repressing a shiver of horror at the thought. "Only, I don't want you going on ahead. And you've got to save yourself, too. We're a long ways from camp a-ready. I wish we'd brought the horses."

"You don't either," she contradicted flatly. "You knew he'd take to the hills where we couldn't ride. Being afoot, he'd be sure to pick the roughest going he could find. And—it looks like we're up against it right now."

This, because they came to a stand before a bare cliff which shut off the small box cañon which they had entered at its mouth, led on by two of the tracks they were following. These they had found in the loose sand of a dry channel leading up the cañon. The cañon walls had been high, overhanging ledges of rock, unbroken save where slides had ripped off great sections here and there and left the spaces unclimbable because of the banks of shale. The hills were full of such cañons, and sometimes they were passable at the head and gave access either to a higher plateau or to other cañons leading on into the hills. Here, however, the head was cut straight across with a cliff.

"Maybe Burney could get up there," Spider said dubiously, eying the narrow ledge two feet above his highest reach. "But I can't, and you can't. Unless there's some other way outa here we're done for the present."

Vida searched the cliff from wall to wall. She stood back and stared up at the ledge, and puzzled over some means of getting up. She gave up after a little, and consented to go back—at least as far as the cañon's mouth. Perhaps by following the top of the cañon to its head they might pick up the trail beyond, they decided.

They went back, climbed laboriously up the bluff which became the right wall of the cañon, and went on. The way was rough—so rough that Spider began to feel more and more uneasy on account of Vida. But until they reached the point where they could look down the cliff that had halted them in the cañon below she had been deaf to his arguments. Then she saw how fruitless the search was. Like the black cañon they had reached the night before, they faced the fact that Burney might be an impassable mile or two away—absolutely safe from their most eager pursuit—or he might be hiding almost within the reach of his long arm from them.

Certainly he was safe, so far as their presence in the hills might be termed a menace. They rested a while—Spider taking care that they were not exposed to any sudden onslaught—and then they went dispiritedly down to where the land rolled gently out to the arid plains where her father's sheep had foraged among the sage for the grass which the winter snows and spring rains had coaxed into growing there.

When they could look down over the slopes to where the dead man lay still under his canvas covering, Spider's sharp eyes saw movement there, the moving about of various black objects he knew to be men and horses. It might be fellows whom Spooky and Jim had brought or sent. It might as easily be the coroner whom Vida said one of their herders had gone after. Whichever it was, they turned that way and hurried down a long, sloping ridge that would bring them to the camp.

Well, they came to the gruesome spot, and they recognized Spooky and Jim among the group. Spider, after a minute of fast walking, recognized others also: Bell, the sheriff, and also the coroner, whose name was Walters. And there were men whom he had probably brought with, him to make up a jury. Spider knew most of them, having lived in that country for more than two years.

But there was one, at sight of whom Vida gave a suppressed scream and gripped Spider by the arm: Burney—huge, quiescent, towering above the others with the patient inaction of a great Newfoundland dog in the midst of a pack of terriers. He was not handcuffed nor under any apparent restraint, and at that Spider wondered.

Vida hung back, for the first time afraid to face the situation. But Spider reassured her with a sentence or two, and she went reluctantly up to the group and sidled close to her father.

Spider went straight to the sheriff, a broad-shouldered, red-faced man with a bull neck, who stood a little to one side filling an age-blackened pipe. The sheriff glanced up at him from under his black hat brim, nodded a greeting, and looked sidelong toward the giant. Spider looked also.

"Where did you git Burney?" he asked in an undertone. And then: "I should think you'd want to chain him up instead of leaving him loose."

The sheriff made two attempts to light a match on his lifted leg, got it going at last, and cuddled the flame in his pipe bowl. "I didn't git him," he said when he was through. "Burney got me. The fellow Williams sent in caught the night train to Pocatello—I was down there on business. He was hunting around for me, and Burney happened to hear about it. So Burney come and told me about it. We got the p'tic'lars from the man, and Burney, he come on up with us. Seems Williams accuses Burney—but you've gotta show me." He jerked his head backward toward the coroner. "It's up to him," he said. "He'll likely be able to place the time of the murder, but if it was yesterday Burney's got a gilt-edged alibi. He was in Pocatello all day"

"Sure?" Spider plucked Bell by the arm, and drew him farther away. "Last night," he stated deliberately, "Burney came to the wagon where Miss Williams was and tried to git in. She saw him at the door and screamed, and I heard her and run up. Burney beat it when he heard me running"

Bell had been shaking his beefy head throughout the speech. Now he began to tap Spider impressively on the chest with his forefinger. "Burney was with me last night in Pocatello," he said. "We caught the early train to Corona together. It wasn't him."

"But we saw his tracks," Spider insisted bewilderedly. "We tracked him up into the hills. And earlier in the evening I seen him myself for a minute"

"Oh, piffle!" exclaimed the sheriff impatiently. "Man, I seen him from nine o'clock till now." He put his pipe back into his mouth, sucked hard on it for a few breaths, and then grinned wryly. "They say you've got a spook out here in the hills," he said. "Maybe that's what yuh seen. You sure didn't see Burney. They's a dozen men—yes, a hundred!—that'll swear to that. Burney ain't a man that's easy mistook."

"No, you're right. He ain't," Spider agreed, and went away and sat down on a rock and rested his elbows on his spread knees and stared hard at the ground. He wanted to think the thing out, and he was too bewildered to think. As he had told Shelton before, not one single, solitary fact seemed to fit in with any other fact. "The things you know for a fact are plumb impossible," he muttered to himself while he made himself a smoke. He glanced up at the stark, frowning hills above them. "I guess it must be spooks, all right," he added. And that was as far toward a solution as Spider could go.