“We’ll tie ’em up,” I decided, “and then look around.”
Milk River did most of the tying, having had more experience with ropes.
He trussed them back to back on the ground, and we went exploring.
XIII
Except for plenty of guns of all sizes and more than plenty of ammunition to fit, we didn’t find anything very exciting until we came to a heavy door—barred and padlocked—set half in the foundation of the principal building, half in the mound on which the building sat.
I found a broken piece of rusty pick, and knocked the padlock off with it. Then we took the bar off and swung the door open.
Men came eagerly toward us out of an unventilated, unlighted cellar. Seven men who talked a medley of languages as they came.
We used our guns to stop them.
Their jabbering went high, excited.
“Quiet!” I yelled at them.
They knew what I meant, even if they didn’t understand the word. The babel stopped and we looked them over. All seven seemed to be foreigners—and a hard-looking gang of cutthroats. A short Jap with a scar from ear to ear; three Slavs, one bearded, barrel-bodied, red-eyed, the other two bullet-headed, cunning-faced; a swarthy husky who was unmistakably a Greek; a bowlegged man whose probable nationality I couldn’t guess; and a pale fat man whose china-blue eyes and puckered red mouth were probably Teutonic.
Milk River and I tried them out with English first, and then with what Spanish we could scrape up between us. Both attempts brought a lot of jabbering from them, but nothing in either of those languages.
“Got anything else?” I asked Milk River.
“Chinook is all that’s left.”
That wouldn’t help much. I tried to remember some of the words we used to think were French in the A.E.F.
“Que désirez-vous?” brought a bright smile to the fat face of the blue-eyed man.
I caught “Nous allons à les États-Unis” before the speed with which he threw the words at me confused me beyond recognizing anything else.
That was funny. Big ’Nacio hadn’t let these birds know that they were already in the United States. I suppose he could manage them better if they thought they were still in Mexico.
“Montrez-moi votre passe-port.”
That brought a sputtering protest from Blue Eyes. They had been told no passports were necessary. It was because they had been refused passports that they were paying to be smuggled in.
“Quand êtes-vous venu ici?”
Hier meant yesterday, regardless of what the other things he put in his answer were. Big ’Nacio had come straight to Corkscrew after bringing these men across the border and sticking them in his cellar, then.
We locked the immigrants in their cellar again, putting Rainey and the Mexican in with them. Rainey howled like a wolf when I took his hypodermic needle and his coke away from him.
“Sneak up and take a look at the country,” I told Milk River, “while I plant the man you killed.”
By the time he came back I had the dead Mexican arranged to suit me: slumped down in a chair a little off from the front door of the principal building, his back against the wall, a sombrero tilted down over his face.
“There’s dust kicking up some ways off,” Milk River reported. “Wouldn’t surprise me none if we got our company along towards dark.”
Darkness had been solid for an hour when they came.
By then, fed and rested, we were ready for them. A light was burning in the house. Milk River was in there, tinkling a mandolin. Light came out of the open front door to show the dead Mexican dimly—a statue of a sleeper. Beyond him, around the corner except for my eyes and forehead, I lay close to the wall.
We could hear our company long before we could see them. Two horses—but they made enough noise for ten—coming lickety-split down to the lighted door.
Big ’Nacio, in front, was out of the saddle and had one foot in the doorway before his horse’s front feet—thrown high by the violence with which the big man had pulled him up—hit the ground again. The second rider was close behind him.
The bearded man saw the corpse. He jumped at it, swinging his quirt, roaring:
“Arriba, piojo!”
The mandolin’s tinkling stopped.
I scrambled up.
Big ’Nacio’s whiskers went down in surprise.
His quirt caught a button of the dead man’s clothes, tangled there, the loop on its other end holding one of Big ’Nacio’s wrists.
His other hand went to his thigh.
My gun had been in my hand for an hour. I was close. I had leisure to pick my target. When his hand touched his gun butt, I put a bullet through hand and thigh.
As he fell, I saw Milk River knock the second man down with a clout of gun-barrel on back of his head.
“Seems like we team-up pretty good,” the sunburned boy said as he stooped to take the enemy’s weapons from them.
The bearded man’s bellowing oaths made conversation difficult.
“I’ll put this one you beaned in the cooler,” I said. “Watch ’Nacio, and we’ll patch him up when I come back.”
I dragged the unconscious man halfway to the cellar door before he came to. I goaded him the rest of the way with my gun, shooed him indoors, shooed the other prisoners away from the door, and closed and barred it again.
The bearded man had stopped howling when I returned.
“Anybody riding after you?” I asked, as I knelt beside him and began cutting his pants away with my pocket knife.
For answer to that I got a lot of information about myself, my habits, my ancestors. None of it happened to be the truth, but it was colorful.
“Maybe we’d better put a hobble on his tongue,” Milk River suggested.
“No. Let him cry!” I spoke to the bearded man again. “If I were you, I’d answer that question. If it happens that the Circle H.A.R. riders trail you here
