190CHAPTER XX
THE WAR EAGLE
Since a bullet from nowhere had shot him through the leg, Wunpost had learned a new fear of the hills. Before, they had been his stamping-ground, the “high places” he was so boastful of; but now they became imbued with a malign personality, all the more fearful because it was unknown. With painstaking care he had checked up on Pisen-face Lynch, to determine if it was he who had ambushed him; but Lynch had established a perfect alibi–in fact, it was almost too good. He had been right in Blackwater during all the trouble, although now he was out in the hills; and an Indian whom Wunpost had sent on a scout reported that the Shoshones had no knowledge of the shooting. They, too, had become aware of the strange presence in the hills, though none of them had really seen it, and their women were afraid to go out after the piñon-nuts for fear of being caught and stolen.
The prowler was no renegade Shoshone, for his kinsmen would know about him, and yet Wunpost had a feeling it was an Indian. And he had another hunch–that the Indian was employed by Eels and Pisen-face Lynch. For, despite Wilhelmina’s statement, 191there was one man in Blackwater who did not consider him a bag of hot air. Judson Eells took him seriously, so seriously, in fact, that he was spending thousands of dollars on detectives; and Wunpost knew for a certainty that there was a party in the hills, waiting and watching to trail him to his mine. His departure from Los Angeles had been promptly reported, and Lynch and several others had left town–which was yet another reason why Wunpost quit the hills and went north over the Death Valley Trail.
Life had suddenly become a serious affair to the man who had discovered the Willie Meena, and as he neared that mine he veered off to the right and took the high ground to Wild Rose. Yet he could not but observe that the mine was looking dead, and rumor had it that the paystreak had failed. The low-grade was still there and Eells was still working it; but out on the desert and sixty miles from the railroad it could hardly be expected to pay. No, Judson Eells was desperate, for he saw his treasure slipping as the Wunpost had slipped away before; it was slipping through his fingers and he grasped at any straw which might help him to find the Sockdolager. It was the curse of the Panamints that the veins all pinched out or ran into hungry ore; and for the second time, when he had esteemed himself rich, he had found the bottom of the hole. He had built roads and piped water and set up a mill and settled down to make his pile; and then, with that strange fatality which seemed to pursue him, 192he had seen his profits fail. The assays had shown that his pay-ore was limited and that soon the Willie Meena must close, and now he was taking the last of his surplus and making a desperate fight for the Sockdolager.
Half the new mine was his, according to law, and since Wunpost had dared him to do his worst he was taking him at his word. And Wunpost at last was getting scared, though not exactly of Eells. For, since he alone knew the location of his mine, and no one could find it if he were dead, it stood to reason that Eells would never kill him, or give orders to his agents to kill. But what those agents were doing while they were out in the field, and how far they would respect his wishes, was something about which Eells knew no more than Wunpost, if, in fact, he knew as much. For Wunpost had a limp in his good right leg which partially conveyed the answer, and it was his private opinion that Lynch had gone bad and was out in the hills to kill him. Hence his avoidance of the peaks, and even the open trail; and the way he rode into water after dark.
There were Indians at Wild Rose, Shooshon Johnny and his family on their way to Furnace Creek for the winter; but though they were friendly Wunpost left in the night and camped far out on the plain. It was the same sandy plain over which he had fled when he had led Lynch to Poison Spring, and as he went on at dawn Wunpost felt the first vague misgivings for his part in that unfortunate 193affair. It had lost him a lot of friends and steeled his enemies against him–Lynch no longer was working by the day–and sooner or later it was likely to cost him dear, for no man can win all the time. Yet he had thrown down the gauntlet, and if he weakened now and quit his name would be a byword on the desert. And besides he had made his boast to Wilhelmina that he would come back with his assailant’s back hair.
It was a matter of pride with John C. Calhoun that, for all his wild talk, he never made his brag without trying to live up to his word. He had stated in public that he was going to break Eells, and he fully intended to do so; and his promise to get Lynch and Phillip F. Lapham was never out of his mind; but this assassin, this murderer, who had shot him without cause and then crawled off through the boulders like a snake–Wunpost had schemed night and day from the moment he was hit to bring the sneaking miscreant to book. He had some steel-traps in his packs which might serve to good purpose if he could once get the man-hunter on his trail; and he still fondly hoped to lure him over into Death Valley, where he would have to come out of the hills.
No man could cross that Valley without leaving his tracks, for there were alkali flats for miles; and when, in turn, Wunpost wished to cover his own trail, there was always the Devil’s Playground. There, whenever the wind blew, the great sandhills were on the move, covering up and at the same time 194laying bare; and when a sand storm came on he could lose his tracks half an hour after they were made. It was a big country, and wild, no man lived there for sixty miles–they could fight it out, alone.
From Emigrant Spring, where he camped after dark, Wunpost rode out before dawn and was well clear of the hills before it was light enough to shoot. The broad bulwark of Tucki Mountain, rising up on his right, might give a last shelter to his enemy; but now he was in the open with Emigrant Wash straight ahead and Death Valley lying white beyond. And over beyond that, like a wall of layer cake, rose the striated buttresses of the Grapevines. Wunpost passed down over the road up which the Nevada rush had come when he had made his great strike at Black Point; and as he rollicked along on his fast-walking mule, with the two pack-animals following behind, something rose up within him to tell him the world was good and that a lucky star was leading him on.
He was heading across the Valley to the Grapevine Range, and the hateful imp of evil which had dogged him through the Panamints would have to come down and leave a trail. And once he found his tracks Wunpost would know who he was fighting, and he could govern himself accordingly. If it was an Indian, well and good; if it was Lynch, still well and good; but no man can be brave when he is fighting in the dark or fleeing from an unseen hand. From their lookouts on the heights his enemies could see him traveling and trace him with 195their glasses all day; but when night fell they would lose him, and then someone would have to descend and pick up his trail in the sands.