that was done, Longarm felt much better and took a moment to glance up at a circling buzzard.
“Not this time,” he said to the ugly scavenger as he hobbled off to inspect the caves. He was anxious to see what kind of supplies he’d find and if there was any trace of Jimmy Cox that would give him a clue as to the old prospector’s fate.
There was a series of caves, all of them cut out of the sandstone by the action of spring runoffs. Each varied in size, but only a few were large enough so that a body of men could enter them and take shelter. In the first one of size, Longarm discovered the supplies. It was clear that this was where the ambusher had been living, and it took only a few minutes to see that there was a good supply of food, although mostly just coffee, flour, and dried beans. There were, however, casks of precious water, enough to keep him and Dan going for several weeks.
Longarm also saw evidence that several other men had recently been living in this large sandstone cave. A pile of tin cans and other assorted trash including many empty whiskey bottles told him plenty. He found prospecting tools too. Picks, shovels, and even a few sticks of dynamite.
“They haven’t found what they were looking for yet,” he muttered to himself as he went back outside and began to explore the rest of the caves.
It took only a few minutes to glance inside some of the smaller caves, but in one he was half turned and leaving when he froze, then slowly revolved back around and stared. Inside, he found a skeleton and it was wearing a rusty breastplate. Longarm dropped down on his hands and knees and eased inside, wondering if there were more skeletons. He quickly realized that this particular cave, though small in circumference, was at least twenty feet deep. As he eased past the skeleton, he saw more scattered bones including four skulls which had been placed by someone so that they rested in a neat little circle, face to noseless face.
Longarm lit a match and held it in front of him. He discovered several more pieces of rusty armor in such a deteriorated condition that it was impossible to guess their original purpose. The cave was very cool and dark, and Longarm was sure that the dying Spaniards had probably taken their last refuge here as if crawling into their own crypts. Unfortunately, their decaying bodies would have drawn scavengers who devoured them and then scattered their bones. Someone, perhaps the man Longarm had killed or one of his friends, had taken sick humor in putting the skulls in that little circle as if they had been talking at each other for the last few centuries.
Longarm backed out of the cave and went to finish his explorations. In the next to the last cave, he found signs that a good deal of excavation had taken place. The cave was more like a funnel, some six or seven feet round, and its natural shape narrowed like the point of a cone. Longarm found candles and holders and lit one. He crept back into the cave and saw that the original back wall, which could not have been more than a yard square, had been opened up just enough to reveal another cavern. To enter it, Longarm had to get down on his knees, turn sideways, and squeeze through. Back here, the air was cool and still. Longarm shoved his candle out before him and beheld a very large cavern, one big enough to have housed at least a dozen men and maybe a few horses, if they had been able to reach it.
Longarm stood up in this larger, deeper cavern and gazed all around. It was clear that this had been the place where the Spaniards must have opened up and then lived in until they became extremely weak or had died. There were bones all over the floor, and someone had smashed the skulls beyond recognition. Longarm found dozens of shattered whiskey bottles here too. Dark black smoke smudges told him that hundreds of campfires had burned in this cavern. He studied the walls, hoping to see some early Indian petroglyphs, but there were none.
Longarm felt very sure that Jimmy Cox or some earlier prospector had discovered this secret cavern and used it for extended periods. As in the smaller cave where he’d found the circle of skulls, this one also had a large pile of trash. Longarm moved over to sift through it and that was when he found an old burlap sack stenciled with the letters JC.
“Oh, Jimmy,” he said with a deep sigh of sadness, “I don’t give you much in the way of odds as for being alive. I’ll bet anything that I find your bones somewhere around close. Or maybe your killers took the time and trouble to cover you up just like I did to the ambusher.”
Longarm spent a quarter of An hour in the cave. By then, he was convinced that he could find nothing else that would give him any useful information about Jimmy Cox. So he retreated from the cave as his candle flickered low and went back to tell Dan about his findings.
When he was finished, Dan said, “It does sound pretty grim. But, Marshal, we can’t just give up on Jimmy. He could still be alive.”
“No,” Longarm said. “They followed and then obviously murdered him somewhere around here. I just wish I hadn’t used my shotgun on the one that was left behind. If he were still alive, we’d have all our answers to this riddle. We’d know the real story about what happened to Jimmy.”
“What do you think the chances are of others returning?”
Longarm eased his wounded leg out before him and sat down heavily. He felt a little unsteady and realized that he was going to have to go slower for the next couple of days, if he was to get strong again.
“I think that whoever did this hasn’t found what they wanted. Or maybe they did find all the Spanish treasure but, for some reason, believe that there is still more. Jimmy might have played that card, hoping to keep himself alive.”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Dan said.
“Yes. Let’s suppose that you were Jimmy Cox.”
“I’d rather not,” Dan said. “He was a godless man.”
“Never mind the moral judgments for now, Preacher. Just suppose that you were Jimmy and had found the Spanish coins here. You had used some of them to pay off your doctor and other medical bills, then had come back out to collect the rest of the treasure but had been followed.”
“I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be followed,” Dan said. “I mean, wouldn’t he have expected something like that to happen, given the greed of most men?”
“Sure,” Longarm said. “And if he had been followed by just one or two killers, he probably would have been able to shake them and reach this place without anyone knowing it. However, if there were a good number of killers …”
“You mean a gang of outlaws.”
“That’s right, Dan. I mean a gang like Hank Bass used to have.”
“I see.”
