The aztec treasure, p.1
The Aztec Treasure, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Teaser chapter
SHURIKEN SURRENDER
“Talk, you ol’ buzzard, or that wet rawhide’ll cut your gullet in two!” snarled one of the white men. “Just nod your head when you get ready to cave.”
Realization chilled Ki, and he saw that a thong had been tied tightly about Shukka’s bony throat. As the rawhide dried, it would contract and Shukka would be slowly strangled to death. And the old Indian would die before surrendering.
Something had to be done—and fast. A throwing dagger appeared in Ki’s right hand, and he sent it winging toward the larger of the two men. The man cursed bitterly, and, ripping the dagger out of his thigh, he crashed limping into a fringe of timber.
Deserted by his compadre, the other man flung his pistol at the leaping Ki, whirled, and dived into the underbrush....
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LONE STAR AND THE AZTEC TREASURE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with
the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / November 1992
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eISBN : 978-1-101-16920-9
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Chapter 1
Like a vast fortress hewn from a single block of stone, Malazo Mountain glowed in the white fire of the moon. South and southwest of the mountain, southern battlement of the Malazo Range, stretched the desert, an arid waste of sand and salt and alkali. Grotesque buttes and chimney rocks rose from its burning floor, and strange, symmetrical spires that almost seemed to be monuments set by man, instead of what they were—tombstones of ages long dead. Farther west were mountains, a purple shadow upon the Texas skyline, and farther to the south, beyond the Rio Grande, were other mountains, ink black against the dusky night—the mountains of Mexico.
The old Spaniards mined much gold and silver from Malazo’s stony breast, legends said, but for hundreds of years no prospector ever discovered traces of precious metal in the Malazo Range. What wealth had been found stretched to the west and north of Malazo, where valley rangeland lay rich in grass and curly mesquite. And on the northern slopes of the mountains that formed the western wall of the wide valley were a few mines of value; their dark tunnel mouths gaped down at the cattle and mining town of Hope.
Flanking the Malazos ran the Malazo Trail, once trod by Coronado and the iron men of Spain, and immeasurably ancient when the Conquistadors first set mailed foot on the soil of Texas. Northward it rolled from the canyoned waters of the Rio Grande, veering slightly to the east across the fiery desert, up along the craggy foothills of the mountains, a broad ribbon of tarnished silver in the moonlight. Remote, lonely, desolate. Empty save for two riders on horseback heading toward Malazo’s mighty slopes.
One was Jessica Starbuck, astride a travel-weary sorrel mare. Tall and lissome, in her twenties, Jessie wore a flannel shirt and denim jeans and jacket, all powdered with the gray dust ofthe desert, and a sweat-stained floppy-brimmed hat under which was tucked her long, coppery-blond hair. And despite an expression on her face mirroring the exhausting effects of her long journey, the night chill could not dampen the warmth of her sultry face with its high cheekbones, audacious green eyes, and the provocative if challenging quirk of her lips.
Close by her rode her companion Ki, on a tuckered Apaluche gelding as black as the soul of the night. He, too, wore typical rangeland garb showing signs of hard and long travel, with his hatbrim tugged low, visoring a lean face etched with deep lines of fatigue. In his early thirties, with bronze skin, blue-black hair, and almond-shaped eyes, Ki had been born to the Japanese wife of an American sailor. When orphaned as a boy in Japan, he’d trained as a samurai and become adept in martial arts.
Upon immigrating to America, Ki had been hired by Jessie’s father, Alex Starbuck, head of the worldwide Starbuck business empire. Consequently Ki and Jessie had virtually grown up together, and after her father’s murder it seemed only fitting for him to stay on, but as a loyal confidant to the young heiress. She took control of her huge inheritance and far-flung responsibilities, proving to be strong and capable, and harder than a keg of railroad spikes if need be. Working together, as close as any blood brother and sister, they made a formidable team.
Winding up into the foothills, they began discussing where they might camp for the remainder of the night. The prospects did not appear overly promising, for though they had passed from the barren desert flats, their immediate surroundings mainly consisted of stone and hardpan, the vegetation scraggly and scattered, with only occasional patches of pine and gorse and grass offering scant shelter. But camp they would have to, before their horses gave out, having ridden steadily all day and the day before from El Sabinas, the nearest stage depot, after an interminable trip across Texas from Jessie’s Circle Star ranch. They’d had to buy the horses and gear, since El Sabinas’ liveries insisted rental nags be returned in short order, but fortunately they’d found Jessie a tough, surefooted sorrel, and Ki had picked a black that had sand and bottom to spare.
And now, increasingly, came another reason for finding shelter soon. The full moon, having crossed the zenith and pouring a flood of ghostly light down the vast rampart of Malazo’s western slope, was silvering the edges of storm clouds that rolled slowly up from the western horizon. On the dark breast of the cloud bank was a flicker of lightning. The air quivered to the mutter of distant thunder.
Jessie glanced wearily toward the ominous clouds. “Along with everything else, Ki, it looks like we’re in for a good soaking.”
Nodding, Ki shifted his gaze from the approaching storm to the mountain slope, and his eyes quickened with interest. “Maybe not, Jessie,” he replied, pointing. About a hundred yards above the trail was a broad bench well-grown with grass, stands of sotol, and bristles of thicket. In the face of the beetling cliff beyond was a dark opening. “Seems to be a cave, and from the looks of the grass and stuff, there ought to be water. I’ve a notion we could do worse than hole up there till the storm is over.”
“Yes, and we still have some coffee, bacon, and a few eggs left in the saddlebags,” Jessie said, eyeing the bench speculatively. “Suppose we take a try at it.”
The bench was a hard scramble up the slope, but their horses made it without too much trouble. In front of the cave they dismounted, and Ki, breaking off a dry sotol stalk, touched a match to the splintered end. The sotol burned with a clear flame, providing a satisfactory torch. They approached the cave.
“Don’t want to den up with a rattlesnake,” he remarked.
Jessie shook her head. “No, nor with that big man-eating cougar that’s supposed to be prowling hereabouts.”
The floor of the cave, however, was clean and dry, and there were no signs of predatory occupancy. A trickle of water flowed along one wall, in a shallow channel, to lose itself amid the growth outside. Heartened, they unsaddled their mounts, picketing them to graze just outside the mouth of the cave. They unrolled their blankets on the cave floor, then gathered a quantity of sotol stalks and dead branches in the nearby thickets. Soon they had a good fire going, and shortly coffee was bubbling in a little flat bucket, and eggs and bacon were sizzling in a small skillet. With appreciation they sat down to a savory meal, which they consumed by the light of the fire, and to the music of the loudening thunder.
Afterward they cleaned and oiled their firearms, as was their custom and a damn good, even lifesaving, habit to get into in gritty, dust-clogging weather. In saddle boots they both toted Winchester .44-40 carbines—reliable, effective weapons in wide-open country. Jessie also carried a Colt pistol bolstered on her right thigh, and a two-shot derringer hidden behind the brass buckle of her belt. Other than the carbine, Ki packed no firearm—he didn’t care for them, as a rule—but he was far from defenseless. Sheathed behind his waistband was a short, curved tanto knife; and for a belt he used a surushin, a six-foot cord with a leather-covered ball at each end; and stas hed in the pockets of his worn leather vest were slim throwing daggers and shuriken, little razored steel disks shaped like stars.
With guns ready to hand, they went to sleep to the accompaniment of rolling thunder and dashing rain. They did not sleep too soundly, but with one eye open and ears cocked for any unusual sound that might filter through the uproar outside.
It was an unusual sound that roused Ki shortly before dawn. He sat up, feeling greatly refreshed, and listened to a peculiar creaking and rumbling that drifted up from the trail below. The fire had died to gray ashes, but the storm had passed, and reddish light streamed into the cave mouth from the great globe of the sullen moon that hung just over the western mountain crests. Pausing for a moment, he glanced over at Jessie, who was beginning to stir in her blankets. Then he slipped to the mouth of the cave and peered out.
Along the trail, clearly outlined in the lurid light, crept a high, two-wheeled cart drawn by four sturdy oxen, and accompanied by a rider on a bay cow pony. Features hidden by the brim of a Stetson, the slim rider was either a youth or a young woman, clad from what Ki could see in buckskin-foxed riding breeches and a burgundy shirt. What appeared to be a peon of Mexican heritage, wearing a sarape and a straw sombrero, was hunched on the cart’s drivers seat. The box of the cart was heaped high with something that gleamed in the waning moonlight.
“Salt cart heading for town,” Jessie surmised with a yawn, joining Ki at the mouth of the cave. “My guess is it’s been to the salt lakes to the east of here and’s bringing back a load to sell.”
Ki gave a noncommittal grunt and eyed the moon, the lower edge of which was now touching the western crags; it still wanted almost an hour till dawn. Turning back to his blankets, he settled cross-legged, crossed his arms and cupped his hands over his ears. He remained thus, relaxing and meditating. To a Westerner, his posture would have looked strange and uncomfortable; to a Japanese, it was a vital position for concentrating one’s inner forces and reviving one’s intrinsic energies, which were fundamental for health and strength. And Ki, aware of the mission they were on, sensed that he would probably not have another opportunity for some while to come.
Jessie, too, relaxed. From the pocket of her jacket she drew a smeary scrap of paper upon which was an illiterate-appearing scrawl. Her brows drawing together, she read the disjointed sentences:Matt Beemis stay out of malazo country you aint wanted here and you aint got a chance in an hundred to git out alive we aint fooling
Quantrell
Jessie turned the paper over in her slim fingers, turned it over again, gazed at it with a thoughtful look. It had come to her at Starbuck headquarters two weeks before, clipped to a request from Matt Beemis, the on-site manager of the Twisted Bar, a Starbuck subsidiary ranch in the Malazo Valley. He had asked for help, and not only in dealing with “Quantrell,” the writer of the threatening note. An extremely ferocious and wily cougar was preying on young livestock, and recently had turned man-killer. Also called pumas or mountain lions, cougars very rarely attacked humans unless cornered, wounded, or in defense of their cubs, but this maverick had for no apparent reason killed the owner of a neighboring ranch as well as the previous manager of the Twisted Bar, old Zeb Quale—as Jessie already knew; it was the reason she had appointed Beemis to the post. The cougar was terrorizing the region, and had so far eluded all attempts to track it down and kill it. Beemis wanted Jessie to send the best hunter available. Well, if Ki wasn’t the best hunter around, he was right close to the top of the list.
Equally if not more troubling to Jessie was the rash of robberies and rustlings—many targeting the Twisted Bar—carried out by a cutthroat gang led by someone taking the name of Quantrell, the Civil War raider. Evidently the local authorities weren’t faring any better catching the outlaws than they were the cougar, and Beemis’s aggressive actions to stop the losses of Twisted Bar livestock were now proving to be a threat to him personally. And Jessie took it personally, as she did the affairs of all her operations and personnel. When she received Beemis’s message, the note’s warning scrawl had galled her. She had been about to cast it contemptuously away, when she noticed a peculiarity of wording and decided to keep it. And now, studying it intently by the gray light of coming dawn, she mused:
“Handwriting disguised, all right. Nobody who could write at all ever wrote this bad. And one little slip. Not much, but perhaps enough to drop a loop around some jigger’s neck before the last brand’s run.”
The stillness was broken by their horses suddenly blowing through their noses, their ears pricking forward. Jessie folded the paper and stowed it back in her pocket, rose to her feet and called softly to Ki.
Ki opened his eyes and glanced inquiringly toward Jessie, now clearly outlined in the strengthening light of dawn. He sat up as the sound that had attracted their horses’ attention reached them: a rhythmical clicking drawing quickly near—the sound of swift hooves beating the hard surface of the trail. Stepping to the mouth of the cave, Ki stood with Jessie well back in the shadow, and gazed toward where the trail curved around the mountain base to the south.
From around the curve bulged seven or eight hard-riding horsemen. Gigantic, unreal in the elusive light, the troop swept past, drumming toward the hills that were now bathed in a tremulous golden glow.
Jessie and Ki stepped forward and followed their progress with interested eyes until they disappeared around the next bend. Much of the trail from there on was lost from view as it twisted between bouldered clefts and through tree-studded thickets. Far ahead, though, some two miles or more distant, they could spot the salt cart and accompanying rider ambling northward across an open patch. They saw the rider and driver twist about and gaze at the approaching horsemen. Abruptly the driver faced front, and from the movement of his arm, they judged he was urging his shambling oxen to greater speed.
The racing horsemen swiftly closed the distance. Jessie uttered a sharp exclamation.
A puff of whitish smoke mushroomed from the ranks of the riders. Even before they heard the crack of the distant rifle, Jessie and Ki saw the ox-cart driver throw up his arms, pitch sideward from his seat, and sprawl motionless on the ground. The oxen stopped, turning their heads to look about. With one hand the accompanying rider struggled with a shying mount, while raising the other as though aiming a pistol. It was a futile defense; the horsemen charged forward with unabated speed, half reining in by the cart, half dragging the rider from the saddle, their assault so swift and furious that it was temporarily lost from sight in swirling dust. As the dust cleared, Jessie and Ki glimpsed horsemen roughly subduing the rider, while other horsemen swarmed over the cart, the salt misting through their hands as they scooped it up and flung it from the heaped-up bed.
With lightning speed, Jessie and Ki saddled their mounts and sent them skittering down the slope. Once on the trail, the clearing with the salt cart again lost from view, they leveled off to a smooth running walk, eager to close the distance as quickly as possible, yet without forewarning the murderous attackers of their approach. Manes tossing in the wind of their passing, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring red, their horses charged up the trail until, Ki estimated, they were roughly a hundred yards from the clearing, hidden only by one last blind curve. He slowed, gesturing for Jessie to rein in as well.
At the same instant, a new sound cut like a whiplash through the air—the shrill, terror-filled scream of a woman!
Quick pressure of their knees sent the horses into a thicket beside the trail. Ki leapt to the ground, Jessie an instant behind him, and tethering their mounts to trees, they snatched carbines from their saddle boots. Then, with soothing words to their mounts, they gained a line of scrawny conifers and went in a crouching run around through the timber toward the clearing. Gaining the shelter of a bordering thicket, they paused again to listen and get their bearings. The woman had not screamed again. Except for the harsh scolding of a blue jay, a deep, eerie silence lay over the area. But they were not fooled. They knew that a woman didn’t scream out in wild fear or pain without reason.
