Sun and Sand Read online

  Jigger sat on his heels and closed his eyes. He was seeing in his mind all the details of the ground over which he would have to travel, if he wished to take a shortcut to Weldon Pass. Then he stood up, nodded, stretched again.

  “I’ll run along,” he said.

  “Have another spot of money?” asked the peddler. He took out $50, counted it, with a grudging hand, from his wallet, and passed it to Jigger, who received it without thanks.

  “How long before somebody cuts your gizzard open to get your money, Doc?” he asked.

  “That’s what salts the meat and makes the game worthwhile,” said Doc Landy. “Never knowing whether I’m gonna wake up when I go to sleep at night.”

  “How many murders do you dream about, Doc?” pursued Jigger casually.

  “I got enough people in my dreams,” said Doc Landy, grinning. “And some of ’em keep on talking after I know they’re dead. But my conscience don’t bother me none. I ain’t such a fool, Jigger.”

  Jigger turned on his heel without answer or farewell. Five minutes later he was traveling toward Weldon Pass on the back of the stallion.

  If Tim Riley had in fact started so long ahead of him toward the town of Weldon, it would take brisk travel to catch up in the narrow throat of the pass, so Jigger laid out an air line and traveled it as straight as a bird. There were ups and downs that ordinary men on ordinary horses never would have attempted. Jigger was on his feet half the time, climbing rugged slopes up which the stallion followed him like a great cat, or again Jigger worked his way down some perilous steep with the golden horse scampering and sliding to the rear, always with his nose close to the ground to study the exact places where his master had stepped. For the man knew exactly what the horse could do and never took him over places too slippery or too abrupt for him to cover. In this work they gave the impression of two friends struggling toward a common end, rather than master and servant.

  So they came out on a height above Weldon Pass, and looking down it, Jigger saw the moon break through clouds and gild the pass with light. It was a wild place, with scatterings of hardy brush here and there, even an occasional tree, but on the whole it looked like a junk heap of stone with a course kicked through the center of it. Rain had been falling recently. The whole pass was bright with water, and it was against the thin gleam of this background that Jigger saw the small shadow of the other rider coming toward him. He went down the last abrupt slope at once to intercept the course of the other rider.

  He was hardly at the bottom before he could hear the faint clinking sounds made by the hoofs of the approaching horse. A whisper made the stallion sink from view behind some small boulders. Jigger himself ran up to the top of a boulder half the size of a house and crouched there. He could see the stranger coming, the head of the horse nodding up and down in the pale moonlight. Jigger tied a bandanna around the lower part of his face.

  Ten steps from Jigger’s waiting place, he made sure that it was tall Tim Riley in person, for there Riley stopped his horse and let it drink from a little freshet that ran across the narrow floor of the ravine. It was a magnificent horse that he rode—over sixteen hands, sloping shoulders, high withers, big bones, well let-down hocks, and flat knees. A horse too good for a working cowpuncher to have, thought Jigger. And his last doubt about the character of Tim Riley disappeared. The man was a crooked card player with a crooked companion; he was probably a criminal in other ways, as well. Men are not apt to make honest journeys through the middle of the night and over places as wild as the Weldon Pass.

  When the horse had finished drinking, Riley rode on again. He was passing the boulder that sheltered Jigger when his mount stopped suddenly and threw up its head with a snort. Riley, with the speed of an automatic reaction, snatched out a gun. There was a well-oiled ease in the movement, a professional touch of grace that did not escape the eye of Jigger. He could only take his man half by surprise now, but he rose from behind his rampart of rock and leaped, headlong.

  He sprang from behind, yet the flying shadow of danger seemed to pass over the brain of Riley. He jerked his head and gun around while Jigger was still in the air, then Jigger struck him with the full, lunging weight of his body, and they rolled together from the back of the horse.

  The gun had exploded once while they were in the air. Jigger remained unscathed, and now he found himself fighting for his life against an enemy as strong and swift and fierce as a mountain lion.

  A hundred times Jigger had fought with his hands, but always victory had been easy. The ancient science of jiu-jitsu, which he had spent patient years learning, gave him a vast advantage in spite of his slender bulk. He had struggled with great two-hundred pounders who were hardened fighting men, but always it was like the battle between the meager wasp and the huge, powerful tarantula. The spider fights with blind strength, laying hold with its steel shears wherever it can; the wasp drives its poisoned sting at the nerve centers.

  And that is the art of jiu-jitsu. At the pits of the arms or the side of the neck or the back, or inside the legs or in the pit of the stomach, there are places where the great nerves come close to the surface, vulnerable to a hard pressure or a sharp blow. And Jigger knew those spots as an anatomist might know them. Men who fought him were rarely hurt, unless they hurled their own weight at him too blindly, for half the great art of jiu-jitsu lies in using the strength of the antagonist against him. Usually the victim of Jigger recovered as from a trance, with certain, vaguely tingling pains still coursing through parts of his body. But not a bone would be broken, and the bruises were few.

  He tried all his art now, and he found that art checked and baffled at every turn. Tall and spare of body, Tim Riley looked almost fragile, but from the first touch, Jigger found him a creature of whalebone and Indian rubber. Every fiber of Riley’s body was a strong wire, and in addition, he was an expert wrestler. Before they had rolled twice on the ground, Jigger was struggling desperately in the defense.

  Then the arm of Riley caught him with a frightful stranglehold that threatened to break his neck before it choked him. Suddenly Jigger lay still.

  Tim Riley seemed to sense surrender in this yielding, this sudden pulpiness of body and muscle. Instead of offering quarter, Riley began to snarl like a dog that has sunk its teeth in a death grip. He kept jerking the crook of his arm deeper and deeper into the throat of Jigger, who lay inert, face down. Flames and smoke seemed to shoot upward through Jigger’s brain, but in that instant of relaxation, he had gathered his strength and decided on his counterstroke.

  He twisted his right leg outside that of his enemy, raised the foot until with his heel he located the knee of Riley, then kicked the sharp heel heavily against the inside of the joint.

  Tim Riley yelled with agony. The blow fell again, and he twisted his body frantically away from the torture. That movement gave Jigger his chance, and with the sharp edge of his palm, hardened almost like wood by long practice in the trick, he struck the upper arm of Riley.

  It loosened its grip like a numb, dead thing. With his other arm Riley tried to get the same fatal hold, but Jigger had twisted like a writhing snake. He struck again with the edge of the palm, and the blow fell like the stroke of a blunt cleaver across the million nerves that run up the side of the neck. The head of Riley fell over, as though an axe had struck deep. He lay not motionless but vaguely stirring, making a groaning, wordless complaint.

  Jigger, in a moment, had trussed him like a bird for market. Still the wits had not fully returned to Riley as Jigger rifled his pocket. But he found not a sign of the little, flat, white key that had the number 1265 stamped upon it.

  He crumpled the clothes of the man, feeling that such a small object might have been hidden in a seam, then he pulled off the boots of Riley, and when he took out the first insole, he found what he wanted. The little key flashed like an eye in the moonlight; then he dropped it into his pocket.

  The voice of Tim Riley pleaded from the ground: “You ain’t gonna leave me here, brothe
r, are you? And what on earth did you use to hit me? Where did you have it, up your sleeve?”

  Jigger leaned and looked into the lean, hard face of the other. Then he muttered: “You’ll be all right. People will be riding through the pass in the early morning. So long, partner.”

  Then he took the horse of Riley by the reins and led it away among the rocks toward the place where he had left Fanfare, the stallion.

  IV

  Neither on the streets of Weldon nor in the post office itself did people pay much attention to Jigger, because the Weldon newspaper had published an extra that told that the body of Joe Mendoza, the escaped fugitive from the state prison, had been found. That news was of sufficient importance to occupy all eyes with reading and all tongues with talk, but all it meant to Jigger was the cover under which he could approach his work.

  He went straight into the post office and found there what he had expected in a town of the size of Weldon—a whole wall filled by the little mailboxes, each with a glass insert in the door so that it could be seen if mail were waiting inside.

  And in the right-hand corner, shoulder high, appeared Number 1265. Inside it, he could see a single, thin envelope.

  The key fitted at once; the little bolt of the lock slipped with a click, and the door opened. Jigger took out the envelope and slammed the small door so that the spring lock engaged.

  On the envelope was written: Mr. Oliver Badget, Box 1265, Weldon. And in the upper left-hand corner: To be delivered only to Oliver Badget in person.

  * * * * *

  The camping places of the peddler in his tours through the mountains were perfectly known to Jigger. Therefore he was waiting in a wooded hollow just outside of Weldon when Doc Landy shambled into the glade late that afternoon.

  Doc Landy shouted an excited greeting, but Jigger remained flat on his back, his hands cupped under his head while he stared up through the green gloom of a pine tree at the little splashes of blue heaven above. The sun in slanted patches warmed his body.

  But the peddler, not waiting to pull the packsaddles off his tired mules, stood over Jigger and stared critically down at him.

  “That gent Riley was a tough hombre, eh? Too tough for you, Jigger?” he asked.

  “I got the key from him,” said Jigger. “There was a box numbered one-two-six-five at the post office, and this was what was inside.”

  He fished the envelope from his pocket and tossed it into the air. The big hand of the peddler darted out and caught the prize. Jerking out the fold of paper that it contained, Doc Landy stared at a singular pattern. There was not a written word on the soiled sheet. There was only a queer jumble of dots, triangles, and one wavering, crooked line that ran across the paper from one corner to the other. Beside one bend of the wavering line appeared a cross.

  “This here is the spot,” argued the peddler.

  “The cross is the spot,” agreed Jigger. “And a lot that means?”

  “The triangles are trees,” said Doc.

  “Or mountains,” answered Jigger.

  “The dots . . . what would they be, kid?”

  “How do I know? Cactus . . . rocks . . . I don’t know.”

  “This crooked line is a road, Jigger.”

  “Or a valley, or a ravine.”

  “It’s hell,” said Landy.

  He stared at Jigger, who remained motionless. The wind ruffled his black hair; the blue of his eyes was as still and peaceful as the sky above them. Doc Landy cursed again and then sat down, cross-legged.

  “Put your brain on this here, Jigger,” he said. “Two brains are better than one.”

  “I’ve put my brain on it, but you can see for yourself that we’ll never make anything out of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s simply a chart to stir up the memory of Oliver Badget. Oliver is the boy who knows what those marks mean. Call it a road . . . that crooked line. Well, at the seventh bend from the lower corner of the page, there, along that road, there’s something planted. Oliver wants to be able to find it. But where does the road begin? Where does he begin to count the bends?”

  “From Weldon,” suggested the peddler.

  “Yes. Or from a bridge, or a clump of trees, or something like that. And there’s twenty roads or trails leading into Weldon.”

  Doc Landy groaned. He took out a plug of chewing tobacco, clamped his teeth into a corner of it, and bit off a liberal quid with a single, powerful closing of his jaws. He began to masticate the tobacco slowly.

  “A gent with something on hand wants to put it away,” he said, thinking aloud. “He takes and hides it. He hides it in a place so doggone mixed up that even he can’t be sure that he’ll remember. So he leaves a chart. Where’s he going to hide the chart, though?”

  “Where nobody would ever think of looking,” agreed Jigger. “He rents a post-office box and puts the chart in an envelope, addressed to himself. Nobody else could get that envelope because nobody else has the key, and nobody could call for mail in Badget’s name and get the envelope, either. Because that letter would have to be signed for in Badget’s signature before the clerk would turn the thing over. But now that he’s got the chart hidden, all he has to do is to hide the key. And where would he hide the key? Well, in a place just as public as the post-office box, where everybody could see it. So he hocks that key ring and all the keys on it at a pawnshop.”

  Landy sighed. “Nobody would go to all of this trouble, Jigger,” he commented, “unless what was hidden out was a dog-gone big pile.”

  “Nobody would,” agreed Jigger.

  “And now Mister Badget turns up and tries to get his key and finds that his time has just run out. He hurries like the devil to get to that key in time, but he’s too late. Jigger has the key. He gets it away from Jigger . . . Why, that all sounds doggone reasonable and logical.”

  “Badget isn’t another name for Riley or for Mahoney,” declared Jigger.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Badget himself could go to the post office without the key and get the letter any time by signing for it.”

  “True,” agreed Landy. Then he added, after a moment of thought: “Badget couldn’t come himself. He had to send friends to make sure that that key didn’t get into the wrong hands. He sent friends to maybe just pay the interest due on the pawnbroker’s loan and renew it, and pay for the post-office box. Why didn’t Badget come himself? Sick? In jail?”

  “Or dead,” said Jigger.

  “Jigger, there’s something important hidden out where that cross is marked.”

  “We’ll never find it without a key to the chart,” said Jigger. “It’s a good little map, all right, but unless we know what part of the country to fit it to, we’ll never locate what’s under the cross. It may be a district five hundred miles from here, for all we know.”

  “What’ll we do?” asked Doc Landy.

  “Wait, Doc. That’s the only good thing that we can do.”

  “What good will waiting do?”

  “The postmaster has a master key for all of those boxes. Well, the postmaster is going to lose that key today or tomorrow. And right afterward, Box One-Two-Six-Five is going to be opened.”

  “There won’t be anything in it,” protested Landy. “Whatcha mean, Jigger?”

  “You can copy the chart, and then I’ll put the original back in the post-office box.”

  “What happens then? You mean that Riley and Mahoney come along, rob the postmaster of the master key, get the chart, and then start out on the trail with us behind them?”

  “With me behind them,” corrected Jigger. “I don’t need you.”

  The big peddler swore. “Yeah,” he said, “you can disappear like a sand flea and turn up like a wildcat whenever you want to. You’ll be able to trail ’em, all right.”

  Jigger sighed. “Copy the chart,” he said. “I’m going to sleep. Because after I take that envelope back to the post office, I’ve got to find a place and stay awake day and night to see who goes
into that building, and who comes out again.”

  Landy, without a word of answer, sat down to his drawing.

  V

  There was a three-story hotel opposite the post office, and here Jigger lay at a window, night and day, for four long days. They were hot, windless days, and he hardly closed his eyes for more than a half hour at a time, but the keenness of his attention never diminished. Over the low shoulders of the post office, from his place of vantage, he could look all around the environs of the building he spied upon. The nights were clear, with moonlight. The days were the more difficult, because he could not tell when Riley or Mahoney would appear in one of the sudden swirls of people who slipped suddenly through the swing doors of the building, disappeared, and came out again a few moments later.

  It was quite possible that they would attempt to disguise themselves. But even then he would have more than a good chance of identifying them. He had learned long ago to look not only at the face of a man but also at the shape of his head, the angle of nose and forehead, and particularly at any strangeness of contour in the ear. A man may become either thin or fat, but his height is not altered. And the general outline of the head and shoulders, whether the man comes toward the eye or goes from it, may often be recognized.

  Even so, hawkeyed as he was, it would be fumbling in the dark—and like a patient fisher, he remained waiting. Agonies of impatience he hid away behind a smile.

  One cause of his impatience was his desire to finish up the job for Landy. Doc had helped him in his great need but had expected a three months’ servitude in exchange. Jigger loved danger, and Doc could supply it, but it was unsavory, unclean, and Jigger liked things as shining clear as the coat of the stallion, Fanfare. But his code made him live up to his given word. What he would do to Doc when his term of service was up put the only good taste in his mouth in many a day.

  * * * * *

  It was on the fourth day that tall Doc Landy stalked into the room and pushed his dusty hat back on his head. The hot reek of the outdoors entered with him.