Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

eyes opened suddenly.
    But his voice remained even when he said, “To a friend, you offer a gift. You do not repay him.” He hesitated. “And I say offer, for you need not accept it. Approaching El Sangre del Santo is not the same as entering the great city of Chihuahua. Often there is danger.”
    Struggles’ cigar almost slipped from his mouth. “You know where it is?” he asked, amazed.
    The Indian nodded his head.
    Sketchily then, the story of the mine formed in the surgeon’s head. He relaxed in his chair, putting the pieces together. He had almost forgotten the legend of Tomas Maria.
    â€œWhat about the padre who acts as watchman?” he asked cautiously. “Is he the danger you spoke of?”
    Juan Solo smiled faintly. “Here they say that he and I are good friends. No, the danger is from those who would take all the wealth from the poor padre.”
    Struggles smiled at the Indian and said, “I imagine he gets pretty lonely up there,” but Juan Soloonly shrugged his shoulders. Struggles added, “I mean your ex-friend, the American.”
    The Indian nodded. “After leaving me the thought would come to him that if I died his chance of discovering the mine would be remote. So he would return and find that someone had taken me. First he would curse, then inquire discreetly through one of his men if I had been brought to Soyopa; and finding this to be so, his choice would then be to wait for me to go out again and then to follow.”
    â€œWell, you’re just guessing now,” Struggles said.
    Juan Solo shrugged again. “Perhaps.”
    On the fourth day after leaving the pueblo, Juan’s conjecture came back to Struggles suddenly. From that afternoon on, there was little room in his mind for doubting the Indian’s word.
    They were in high, timbered country moving their horses and pack mules single file along a trail that cut into the pines, climbing to distant rimrock. Where the slope leveled, they came out onto a bench that opened up for a dozen yards revealing, down over the tops of the lower pines and dwarf oaks, the country they had left hours before. In the timber it was cool; but below, the sandy flats and the scattered rock eruptions were all the same glaring yellow, hazy through a dust that hung motionless. At first, Struggles thought he was seeing sun spots from the glare.
    He blinked before squinting again and now he was certain there were no sun spots. Far off against the yellow glare, a confused number of moving specks were pointing toward the deep shadows of a barranca. Juan Solo was watching with the palm of his hand shading his eyes.
    He looked at the surgeon when the specks passed out of sight. “Now there is no doubt,” he said.
    Struggles’ rough face turned to him quickly. “Why, that could be anybody.”
    â€œSeñor Doctor,” Juan said quietly. “This is my country.”
    Â 
    A T SUNDOWN they stopped long enough to eat a cold supper, then moved on into a fast-falling gloom. The country was level now, but thick with brush; mesquite clumps which in the evening dimness clung ghostlike to the ground and were dead silent with no breeze to stir them. Struggles, riding behind the Indian, felt his eyes stretched open unnaturally and told himself to quit being a damn fool and relax.
    He chewed on the end of the dead cigar and let his stomach muscles go loose, but still a tension gripped him which his own steadying words could not detach. They were being followed. He knew that now, and didn’t have to close his eyes to picture what would happen if they were overtaken. But there was more to the feeling than that. It was also the country—the climbing, stretching, never-ending wildness of the country. The Sierra Madre was like the sea, he thought. Both of them deathless, monotonously eternal, and so indifferent in their magnitude that either could accept the dust of all the world’s dead and