The Boss of the Lazy Y

by Charles Alden Seltzer

"Queza had called the place a town, and maybe that name fits it as well as another. It made me dizzy to look at it. We'd been climbing the slope of a mountain all afternoon—traveling in the daytime now, because we were getting near the end of our journey—Nebraska in the lead, the rest trailing him. We saw Nebraska stop and duck back into some brush. Then we all sneaked up to him and got our first look at the town.

"It looked to me as though the place had been made to hide in. The mountain dropped away below us, straight down about a hundred feet, a smooth rock wall. Another wall of rock joined it on the right, making a big L. There was a level that began at the two walls and extended both ways for probably half a mile, until it met the slope of the other side of the mountain. It was nothing but two shoulders, joined, on the top of the mountain.

"Just below us there was a break in the level—a wide gash about fifty feet across, so deep that we couldn't see the bottom. There was a ledge on our side about three or four feet wide, and a bridge stretched from it across the canyon. We decided that the bridge was the one Queza had told the boys about—it led to the cave where the treasure was kept. We laid there for an hour, watching. The buildings were all huddled together—a lot of flat, brown adobe houses. We could see the natives moving down among them, but none of us noticed anything unusual going on until Taggart calls our attention.

"'Did you notice?' he said.

"'Notice what?' we all answered.

"'That they're all women down there—I ain't seen a man!'

"That was a fact. There didn't seem to be a man anywhere about. We talked it over and concluded that we'd got there at a most advantageous time. We decided that the men were away, on a hunt, most probably, and after we'd watched a while longer we decided that we'd sneak down some way and go after the treasure about midnight. We figured they'd all be sleeping about that time. After dark they lit fires and sat around them.

"We watched until about eleven—until we saw that nearly all the fires had gone out—and then we sneaked down the slope of the mountain. We didn't make any noise; we were silent and slippery as ghosts as we made our way through the timber on the slope. It was slow work, though; the woods were full of tangled vines and prickly bushes, and we got clawed up considerable and had all we could do to keep from cussing out loud when a thorn or something would rip a cheek open. It was blacker than any night I've ever seen before or since; we couldn't see a foot ahead, and the sounds we heard in the woods didn't make us feel any too comfortable, for all we'd got used to living in the open. We knew, of course, that the sounds came from birds and bats and moths and such, but when a man is out on a job like that his nerves are not what they are at other times—every sound seems unusual and magnified. I didn't like so much silence from the village down below us—it seemed too quiet; and it appeared to me that the noises we heard in the woods were most too continuous to be caused by only us four. We went in single file, one man almost touching the other, to be sure we'd all stay together. I'd hear a bird go whizzing away at a distance, and it appeared to me that there was no call for it to light out with us two or three hundred feet away from it; and then there were queer noises which I couldn't just place as coming from birds. I don't know why I noticed these things, but I did, just the same, though I didn't say anything to the other boys, because they'd probably thought I was losing my nerve. And, besides, there wasn't time to talk.

"It took us more than an hour to reach the level where the village was, and it was long after midnight when we, keeping in the shadow of the cliff, started toward the bridge over the canyon, which led to the cave where we thought we'd find the treasure.

"We'd got pretty near the bridge, Taggart and me in the lead, Nebraska and Taylor stringing along behind, when I heard a sudden scuffling and looked around. It wasn't so dark on the level as it had been in the woods, and I saw a dozen dark figures grouped around Nebraska and Taylor. The dark figures were all about us, and more were coming from the huts, all yelling like devils. And they were men, too; they'd been hiding in the huts; they'd discovered us the day before and suspected what we came for. I found that out later.