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CHAPTER 2

      HIGHWAY 80 stretching north from El Paso was two narrow lanes of cracked, melting asphalt that shimmered like water in the distance.

      At Anthony, straddling the Texas-New Mexico line, Rand had to detour around a crew of Civilian Conservation Corps men installing a culvert under the road. The dust whipped up by passing cars was streaked with sweat on their faces.

      The road went through the heart of the valley, loosely following the Rio Grande, which provided irrigation for the cotton and cantaloupe fields that bordered the road. Before he and Hannah had separated, they used to go to Las Cruces once in a while to buy the melons fresh from the fields. Melons too ripe to ship were a nickel a crate.

      He turned onto Las Cruces' Main Street at Loretto Academy and went North to Griggs Street, just about the center of the business section. There he made a right turn. After several blocks, he drove past an old cemetery with rough-chiseled crosses and concrete angels set among wind-seeded cactus and scorched patches of Johnson grass.

      The gravel road dissolved into a dirt road that wandered around a scattering of adobe and frame houses set among mounds of mesquite and yucca. It had rained a few days before, and there were red flowers on the tips of scattered ocotillos. One good rain and the desert came alive.

      Hood had one of the better-looking houses. It was solidly built of white-plastered adobe, hugging the ground under a red Mexican tile roof. The front of the house was half shaded by a silvery vitex tree. There was a cactus garden in the front yard, and up against the house, a couple of yellowing japonicas. There was an empty corral behind the house.

      Rand saw a gray-haired man peering out at him through one of the windows. He parked and walked past a new brown and tan Packard sedan to the front door and rang the bell.

      The way Noreen Hood sounded on the phone, setting aside the waterworks and becoming all business, he figured she'd be a tough cookie. Instead, except for her dark reddish hair cut short, she looked soft and vulnerable, sort of like a young Mary Pickford (but not quite the dish). She was probably no more than five foot four, maybe thirty-five years old, light brown eyes, good-looking body under her blue dress. She looked tired and her eyes were red.

      "You're Rand?" she asked. The way she looked at him, he had a feeling she disapproved.

      He nodded.

      She stepped aside and he entered a short foyer that led to a living room with smooth white walls lined with crowded bookcases. There was a pueblo-style beehive fireplace in a corner and Navajo rugs on the dark hardwood floor. Two windows faced north toward the Organ Mountains, named because of their pipe-organ spires. A small oil painting of them hung by the fireplace.

      The gray-haired man Rand had seen through the window came out of the kitchen carrying three glasses. His face fell into a horse-toothed smile as he handed one to Noreen and another to Rand and shook hands with him. "I'm Len Pritchard," he said. "This stuff is lemonade. If you want something with a little more kick, I'll get it."

      "Lemonade's fine," Rand said, grateful for it.

      Pritchard didn't beat around the bush. "This has been a terrible day. Noreen told you what happened."

      "Just the bare bones," Rand said. "When did it happen?"

      "Around nine this morning. He was about five miles north of Anthony."

      "How?" Rand asked.

      Pritchard lowered his voice. "Somebody ran him off the road and then shot him in the head."

      Rand saw Noreen Hood's hands squeeze down on her glass to keep them from trembling. She looked ill. Maybe she hadn't been so indifferent to her husband's death after all.

      "You told me you knew who the killer was," Rand said to her. "How can you be sure it wasn't somebody else - maybe a hitchhiker he picked up?"

      "That's what the sheriff thinks," Noreen said. "But why would a hitchhiker kill him and not take the car? And the sheriff said Nick was not robbed - his billfold was still in his pocket with twelve dollars in it. Anyway, Nick wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker, not with what he was carrying." She shook her head in frustration and anger. "It was Bill Brennan who killed him. He's been following Nick on and off for weeks."

      "Why?" Rand asked.

      "I think he knew what Nick found."

      "What was that?"

      Pritchard broke in smoothly, "Nick was a geology professor at New Mexico A&M here, and he did some prospecting on the side. He crossed Brennan's land when he rode out to the mountains. Apparently Brennan thought Nick was onto something. He spied on him with field glasses and kept trying to follow him."

      "Was Nick on to something?"

      Pritchard and Noreen exchanged glances. Then Pritchard stared at him with expressionless eyes. "You going to work with us, Mr. Rand, or are you planning on walking away?"

      "Sure, I'll work for you," Rand said. "Start with a five-day minimum, half up front."

      They looked at each other. Then Noreen nodded.

      Pritchard cleared his throat, and Rand thought his flat eyes actually warmed. "Nick had found gold. At first it was just little traces of it here and there, little placer deposits in a stream, nothing big . . . nothing to get excited about. Then he stumbled onto something that he really didn't even think existed. You heard of the Conquistadors, Rand?"

      "The Spanish explorers? Sure."

      "I've been readin' up on them lately." Pritchard said. He eased himself into a mohair-covered easy chair. "Cortez landed in Mexico with a 500-man army in 1519 and invaded Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital - the site of today's Mexico City. After he whipped Moctezuma, the emperor, he and his soldiers made the Indians give up their gold - and there was a lot of it. He melted it down, destroyed priceless artifacts, and hid it for safe keeping, and I guess he killed the Indians who helped him hide it."

      Pritchard drained his lemonade and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Cortez sent a letter back to Spain with a map in it, telling about the gold, and then he went right on exploring for God and King. He never got back to the gold, and back home, they thought it was just hype to justify his doggie biscuits."

      Pritchard was warming to his story. "Now turn the clock up around twenty years, okay? Around 1540, Charles V, the good King of Spain, and damned near every place else, sent Francisco Vazquez de Coronado to the New World. Nobody knows for sure, but we think he gave Coronado a copy of Cortez' map and told him to look around for that gold and if he found it, to bring home with him. And evidently Coronado did find it, and he made his Indian slaves carry it up this way through the Pass of the North on the way to the Spanish garrison at Santa Fe. But he ran into some hostile Apaches in the Organ Mountains near here and they killed off most of his party. Coronado had to hide the gold a second time before he and his surviving men fled north to safety."

      Pritchard grinned at Rand. "Now a lot of that is supposition on my part because nobody left a record of what happened. But subsequent developments make me think it worked out that way. Beginning to get my drift?"

      "You're going to tell me Nick Hood found Coronado's gold," Rand said.

      Pritchard nodded. "That's exactly right! Nick Hood found a ton of gold, maybe more, all smelted up and stacked high like cords of wood, just like Coronado left it."

      "Why didn't Coronado come back and get it?"

      "I don't know. Maybe he couldn't remember where he hid it. Those mountains are big. There's box canyons, all sizes and shapes of peaks, mazes within mazes. People still get lost in 'em and die of thirst within a quarter of the mile of the road."

      Rand said to Noreen Hood, "When you called me you said you wanted me to get evidence that a rancher named Brennan killed your husband, and you wanted me to get something back. Could that something be the gold?"

      Pritchard answered for her. "Yeah, it could have been and it was." He turned to Noreen and said, "Why don't you bring out the paper bag?"

      Noreen got up and walked into the bedroom.

      Pritchard asked, "How's about a refill on that lemonade?" Rand followed him into the kitchen, and the lawyer pointed to a half-full bottle of bourbon. "I think I'll have a little of that instead. Care for some?" When Rand nodded, Pritchard poured an inch into each glass, got some more ice from the refrigerator and diluted it with tap water.

      "We're all busted up about this," Pritchard said. "Nick and Noreen have been friends of my wife and me for five years, ever since they moved here. Nick and I belong to the Lions Club, and we're both 32nd degree Masons. He was a fine man. Well respected."

      When they went back into the living room, Noreen was waiting for them. An empty paper bag rested on the coffee table. Next to the sack were two gold bars. Each one was four inches long, two inches wide, and about an inch-and-one-half thick. The casting was uneven, and there were small indentations on it, as though it had been formed by pressing an object into sand and then filling the depression with melted gold. A mark that looked like a "C" was stamped into each bar with a crude die.

      The metal gleamed dully. Rand picked up one of the bars and examined it. It was heavier than he expected.

      "Nick brought forty of these back from the mountains in his saddlebags. These two are all Noreen has left," Pritchard said. "The other thirty-eight bars were in the car this morning when Nick left here. But they weren't there when somebody called the sheriff and reported finding his body."

      Rand replaced the bar on the table. "You said there were tons of gold bars up there in that cave, and he only came back with forty of them?"

      "That's right," Pritchard said. "A little more than two-hundred pounds. Counting his own weight, that was about all his horse would carry.

      "He didn't go back?" Rand asked.

      "Yeah, many times . . . dozens of times. But he couldn't find the cave again. Just like Coronado! So all this time, that gold has been sitting up there in the mountains, just waiting for somebody to find it."

      "You know for sure that this man, Brennan, was following him?" Rand asked.

      "I don't know if he followed him today, but it fits," Noreen Hood said. "Brennan has a white beard that fans out over his chest. You could spot him a mile off, and I saw him nosing around our place before Nick left."

      "You told the sheriff about that?"

      "Yes, around noon when I went down to identify Nick's body." Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them with a swipe of her hand. "They told me they'd look into it, and I guess they will, but Brennan knows a lot of people, and they'll treat him with kid gloves."

      "If he's the man who stole those bars, we want them back," Pritchard said. "The gold is valuable by itself, you understand. But we need it for another reason. It's proof Nick found the cave."

      "You have these two bars. They're proof," Rand said.

      Pritchard nodded. "That's true. But think of the impact of all the gold. Two bars ain't enough."

      "Who do you need to impress?"

      "People."

      "What are you going to do - sell shares and use the money to hunt the gold?" Rand asked, grinning.

      The lawyer nodded. "As a matter of fact. And we want to bring Brennan to justice, of course."

      Noreen said, "You'll never convince Brennan you're a drifter in those clothes."

      "I've got old clothes in the car," Rand said. Now he knew why she had looked at him with disapproval when he came to the door."

      Noreen got her purse and counted out twenty-five dollars. "Here's the half you asked for. I'll give you the rest and your expenses when the job's done. I think you should check into one of the tourist courts here - the Las Cruces Courts is on the north edge of town, closest to Brennan's place. Walk the five or so miles to Brennan's ranch house tonight and ask him for a job. He'll hire you, and pay you peanuts. A sane man would be daffy to work for him. But you'll tell him you're from Oklahoma, maybe. Or Texas - and you don't know any better. Don't worry, he'll hire you."

      She gave him careful directions to Brennan's place.

      As Rand left, Pritchard wished him good luck and shook hands with him.

      "Get me that gold," Noreen said. "Steal it if you have to."

      Rand smiled. "One more question. Who was Nick on his way to visit in El Paso?"

      "I don't know," she said.

      She must have seen the doubt in his eyes, because she added, "I'm telling you the truth. I really don't know."

      "Sure," Rand said. "But if somebody telephones you tonight and asks why Nick didn't show up, take down his name and address."

     


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