Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 29

Chapter 17

Slater had saddled his mount, a big, broad-chested roan. He was taking nothing but a two-gallon water bag, beans and tortillas, jerked antelope, and ammunition. He wore a large black broadcloth shirt loose and over his pants. Under the shirt, two double-sided, black, oiled-silk money belts crisscrossed his back and chest while a third was buckled tightly around his waist just above his gun belt. He was taking only what was his and what he needed. He was leaving the tools and everything else for Moreno, who had become clearly obsessed. He had been laboring in that damn mine like a madman. He even worked nights by torchlight, napping down there. Searching for that drift lode had driven Moreno muy loco, and now his obsession was driving Slater muy loco as well. He couldn’t stand it any longer. Slater had told Moreno he was going to leave, and he was finally doing it. He’d dug too much ore in Díaz slave-labor prison mines, and this mine was too goddamned dangerous.

I rob banks and trains, the outlaw said to himself. I don’t tunnel through rock and dirt like a goddamn mole.

Most of all Slater couldn’t bear to wait here and watch his friend die, crushed under a collapsing mountain of rock.

“Hasta luego, maníaco,” Slater said to himself under his breath. “You want to kill yourself, you’re doin’ it on your own time and by yourself. Maybe someday I’ll catch up with you again—probably when I see your soul in hell.”

He swung onto the roan, leaned back in the saddle, and lifted the reins. He was wheeling the big horse around when he heard the slow-building boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM! Boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM! Boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM!

The roan was up on his hocks, spinning around, crow-hopping, whinnying insanely, the mountain’s roar echoing in his ears, each reverberation bouncing and banging off the surrounding mountains, canyon cliffs, and vertiginous chasms, each sound reproducing itself in an infinite progression. Sooty black smoke was billowing and mushrooming out of that hole, while hell itself thundered out of that mine shaft like a portent out of Revelation and detonating death and destruction all across Sonora.

“Well, that’s that,” Slater said softly. “You put it to him coldcock and country-simple, but the man wouldn’t listen. He went in anyway. So, Moreno, you done it to yourself. You brought that whole goddamn mountain down on your ass. I can’t do nothin’ for you now, not nohow. Time to slope on out of here.”

But somehow he couldn’t do it.

He sat there frozen immobile in his saddle.

Goddamn it to hell.

He swung down off his heaving roan and slowly quieted him down. Taking him to a patch of mountain grass under a pine, he staked him out and pulled off the saddle. Putting on an old torn shirt, he attached a canteen to his belt and wrapped his bandanna over his mouth and nose. He roped together a dozen precut shoring timbers, to brace and prop up the collapsed tunnel in front of him. Picking up a two-foot pickax, a half-dozen candles, and matches, he crawled, bent over, into the mine. He dragged the shoring timbers behind him.

He was determined to save his friend.