Chapter 10. The Setter Of Traps

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_ CHAPTER X. THE SETTER OF TRAPS

The unlocked door squeaked shrilly on its hinges as it swung in before the heave of Carmena's shoulder. Elsie peeped fearfully back past Lennon. Carmena pushed on into the secret room.

Lennon had expected to see some kind of treasure chamber. He stared blankly at the big object in the centre of the room--a complex object that somehow reminded him of his laboratory experiments in college. A step nearer, with his own and Carmena's candles upraised, gave him a clear view of the bulging copper boiler, the tubes and worm and fermenting vats. The air of the room was pervaded with a sour smell.

At his exclamation Carmena gave him a sombre glance.

"You see now?"

"A still," he said. "This tizwin you've been talking about--it's moonshine whiskey. Your father----"

"No--Slade!" broke in the girl with passionate emphasis. "He brought the thing into the Hole and forced Dad to run it. He's the one to blame--not Dad. He bootlegs it to the Indians."

"Indians? That's a Federal penitentiary offense!"

"What could we do? If he's convicted, he'll swear that Dad is just as guilty. You see why I couldn't go for the sheriff?"

"Yes," said Lennon; but he looked at Elsie.

Carmena's face whitened.

"If it hadn't been for Dad, there's no telling what Cochise would have done with her. Anyhow, he's my father."

To this Lennon could make no answer. He turned again to stare at the big still. Fuel had been placed in the firebox, ready for lighting. Carmena knelt down before it and dipped her hand into the Indian basket. One after the other, she laid out the six sticks of dynamite and the caps and fuses that she had saved from Lennon's prospecting outfit.

She looked up at him, gravely expectant.

"You said you'd help us, Jack. I want this whole thing fixed so it will never make another drop of poison."

"At once?"

"No. They'd be sure we did it, and I figure---- Can you fix it so it will go off a quarter minute after the fire is lighted?"

"Oh-h, Mena!" cried Elsie. "What you going to do? You know Dad always lights the fire."

"Never fear, Blossom. I'll take good care of Dad. If Jack does what I want, there'll be no more of the nasty tizwin to make Dad cross and sick."

Lennon found himself regarding the girl with rekindled admiration for her ingenuity and daring.

"So this is why you saved the dynamite?" he remarked. "Will it not be dangerous--I mean, to anger that man Slade, you know?"

"Anything to save Dad---- If you're afraid, just tell me how to fix it. I'll do the work and take all blame--if it fails. You can go back with Elsie and be able to swear you didn't have a hand in it."

The girl's tone was as contemptuous as when, at their first meeting on the trail, she had jeered him into cutting across the desert with her. He looked the still over with a professional eye.

The chimney stones were laid in mud plaster. But the stones of the firebox, or furnace, were loose. On one side they extended out in a rough platform that held the water-cooled vat of the condensation worm. From the two-foot space between the furnace hole and the vat Lennon began to pull out the stones. He was able to make a hole down to the solid stone floor.

A crack gave opening enough to thrust the stiff fuse from the firebox into the hole. To make certain of results, Lennon used three pieces of fuse, which were attached with caps to the sticks of dynamite, in the bottom of the hole. He then put the stones back in their places. The ends of the fuses were hidden by the tinder of the fuel in the firebox.

When Lennon stood up and dusted off his hands, no slightest sign was left to betray that the charge of dynamite had been planted.

"There you are," he said. "The fuses are cut for fifteen seconds, and they will start burning as soon as the tinder is fired."

"You're sure the boiler will be blown up?" queried Carmena. "Your dynamite is out from under it, and there's all the rock in the way."

Lennon smiled at her ignorance of explosives.

"The stones will double the destruction. After that charge detonates, there will be a hole in the floor, a good deal of shattered stone, and some splinters and shreds of metal. Everything in the room will be smashed. Is that satisfactory?"

Carmena shuddered as if seized with a fever chill, but pulled herself together. "All right. We'll go now."

She picked up her basket and backed out after the others, scrutinizing the floor to make certain they had left nothing to tell of their visit.

"It's a secret, Blossom," she cautioned. "Promise you'll never tell any one?"

"But--you'll have to tell Dad, Mena. He always goes in with Slade and Cochise to measure the mash--And you know he sometimes goes in first to start the cooking."

"Didn't I say I'd take care of Dad?" reassured Carmena.

Lennon stepped before her, his gray eyes wide with dread.

"Wait," he demanded. "What is it you plan to do? Elsie says your father's partners---- But I have told you the dynamite will destroy everything in the room. If you scheme to get those men in there, give me that key. I shall not permit such a trap to remain."

"Why not? You promised to help."

"Not this way. It would be cold-blooded murder."

"You say that when they----?"

Carmena checked her indignant protest and gazed down at her foster-sister.

"Well, then, how if I use that blast to blow Slade and Cochise apart?" she inquired. "Suppose I make each think the other put the giant power in the furnace?"

"Too great a risk. We will explode the charge at once, or draw it."

Carmena's eyes flashed.

"No. They shall not make another drop of poison in that devilpot. But if we blew it up now, Slade will put the blame on us---- Tell you what--I'll just misplace the key. That will give us time to act after Slade comes."

"Have I your promise you will not try to get him into that death trap?"

"Yes."

Back in the living room they became aware that the day was almost gone. Carmena asked Lennon to cover her from above with his rifle while she went down to milk the goats. He offered to change places with her, but had to confess that he did not know how to milk.

The ladder had been drawn up. To save time, the girl directed Lennon to lower her by means of the hoist rope. Though there was no sign of an Indian nearer than the corral and she smiled at the suggestion of danger, he saw her slip her small revolver into the bosom of her dress.

The moment the slackening of the hoist rope told him she had reached the ground he hurried with his rifle to an embrazured window in the living room. He looked down and saw her calmly walking away toward the goat pens. The goats flocked to nibble the salt that she had brought for them. She knelt down and started milking.

Elsie had already busied herself at the charcoal brazier. After a time, when her pots were simmering, she came to cuddle up in the window beside Lennon.

"My goodness, but hasn't it been an awful nice day, Jack," she sighed in heartfelt contentment. "Mena is--is the best sister in all the whole world. But it's doubly nice to have a brother like you. Isn't it, just?"

She snuggled her head against Lennon's right shoulder. He reached across and stroked her silky hair without looking away from the valley.

"I am glad you like me, Blossom. You know, Carmena brought me to help her get you away from this place."

"Me--and Dad, Jack. Don't forget Dad. Mena never does. And Dad won't ever give up the Hole, 'cause he said so. That's why Mena shot your burro to make you fight Cochise."

Lennon chuckled.

"Carmena came along after the Apache shot my burro."

"Oh, but that's the joke," tittered the girl, in her turn. "Mena was the 'Pache. She shot your hat off and your burro to see how you'd behave, and when you didn't scare, she rode 'round to make you come with her."

The enlarged version struck Lennon as just so much the more preposterous.

"To be sure," he made mock agreement. "Only, by the way, what was the point of the joke?"

"You mean, why did she do it?"

"Yes. Why ruin a twelve-dollar sombrero and a ten-dollar burro?"

"So's you'd get mad and fight Cochise, of course. She was desp'rit, so she told him she'd get another man into the Basin to be caught and made to pay. But she planned, when she signalled them, to warn you and slip away while you fought them."

"Ripping!" praised Lennon. "Wonderful flight of fancy. And after the fight?"

"Oh, that depends. You'd prob'ly been dead. But if you'd killed all that part of the bunch, Mena would have brought you into the Hole to shoot up the rest and make Slade quit."

"I see. Quite in keeping with the burro. But why, then, did she help me run away?"

Elsie's playful tone sobered.

"Why, 'cause you couldn't fight, of course. After she signalled Cochise you went and got bit by the Gila monster and saved her life. Course she had to save you then."

"Saved!" bantered Lennon. "A fact--a solid fact at last, in this sea of fiction. What a slip! I was beginning to fancy you quite a consistent fairy-tale tinker, Blossom. Take that last touch about her signalling Cochise. She sent a message by wireless, I presume."

"Wireless? Is that what you call smoke signalling?"

"Smoke?"--Before Lennon's mental vision flashed a vivid picture of the puffs of smoke rising into the noontime desert sky from the ridge near the waterhole--"Smoke signalling!"

What a dupe he had been! Even now, when the truth had been spread out before his eyes, he had taken it for pure fiction. Yet every seeming absurdity in Elsie's account became credible the moment he considered the facts he knew, in the light of understanding.

Though Carmena had made much of probable danger from the "bronchos," she had sent up those telltale puffs of smoke. During the flight across the Basin she had changed from boots to moccasins, which he now knew to be of Apache style, if not of Apache make. They would account for the moccasin print behind the crag from which his hat had been shot off and his burro killed. For her to cut down to her pony, pull on her boots, and ride around to the wash along the trail had been easy.

The purpose of her strange attack clearly had been to break up his prospecting trip by the death of the burro and to test whether he could and would fight. No less clear, now, was the subtle manner in which she had both spurred his daring with her derision and appealed to his chivalry for protection against the murderous bronchos. All the time Cochise and his band were over in the Basin, waiting for her to lure a victim within their power.

On this point was it not probable that Elsie was mistaken? Had not Carmena's intention been to have her savage accomplices capture him and hold him for ransom? The game might well have included a pretended capture of herself, so that chivalry would lead him to pay a larger ransom.

No--Elsie's explanation was the more probable. And he could trust her truthfulness. Whatever he might think of Carmena, this child-minded girl at least was absolutely innocent of any scheming. Her dread of Cochise could not possibly have been feigned.

Even Carmena must be given her due. She had been driven desperate by the threats of Cochise to take Elsie as his squaw; and the partnership of her father in the illicit making and bootlegging of moonshine whiskey had prevented her from appealing to the law for protection. But, on the other hand, she had deliberately taken the risk of killing the first chance stranger that came along the Moqui trail----

Lennon frowned as he pictured the hole through the crown of his sombrero. That had been an uncomfortably close shot. Why had not the girl met him face to face on the trail and frankly asked for his aid? Instead of that straightforward, above-board procedure, she had risked shooting him, had deceived him, had led him into a trap where he would have had to kill all the bronchos or be killed. In the first case, according to Elsie, she would have had him help her attack the rest of the Apaches in the Hole. But if he had been killed she undoubtedly had planned to put all the blame on him.

He was no coward. As he mulled over the situation his eyes sparkled at the thought of how, with his long-range rifle, he might have out-fought Cochise and his followers. But that was not the rub. Carmena had treated him as a blind dupe--had thrown dust in his eyes and beguiled him into the double snare that she had set for him and Cochise.

He would have been only too glad to take the venture with her if she had told him beforehand. But she had not trusted him. The accident of the Gila monster's bite alone had blocked her scheme to make him chance the sacrifice of his life in complete ignorance of her real purpose.

With his hand disabled, he of course had become valueless at the time as a tool to rid her of Cochise. Yet there was the chance that he could be used in the Hole. That would account for the seeming devotion and self-sacrifice by which she had saved him from the Gila monster poison, from death by thirst, and from Apache torture.

The prejudice that had been first implanted in Lennon's mind by the repulsiveness of the girl's drunken father now prevented him from making any allowances for her difficult position. Had it not been for her relationship to that weak-faced besotted moonshiner, Lennon might have stopped to consider how love for her foster-sister had driven her desperate, and how desperation might have kept her from telling the truth of the situation to the stranger on the trail.

The average stranger would have referred her to the sheriff--and she loved her father. But Lennon could see only her lack of trust in him and her deceit. _

Read next: Chapter 11. Cross Currents

Read previous: Chapter 9. The Man Who Was

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