Except for plenty of guns of all sizes and more than plenty of ammunition to fit, we didn’t find anything very exciting until we came to a heavy door—barred and padlocked—set half in the foundation of the principal building, half in the mound on which the building sat.
I found a broken piece of rusty pick, and knocked the padlock off with it. Then we took the bar off and swung the door open.
Men came eagerly toward us out of an unventilated, unlighted cellar. Seven men who talked a medley of languages as they came.
We used our guns to stop them.
Their jabbering went high, excited.
“Quiet!” I yelled at them.
They knew what I meant, even if they didn’t understand the word. The babel stopped and we looked them over. All seven seemed to be foreigners—and a hard-looking gang of cutthroats. A short Jap with a scar from ear to ear; three Slavs, one bearded, barrel-bodied, red-eyed, the other two bullet-headed, cunning-faced; a swarthy husky who was unmistakably a Greek; a bowlegged man whose probable nationality I couldn’t guess; and a pale fat man whose china-blue eyes and puckered red mouth were probably Teutonic.
Milk River and I tried them out with English first, and then with what Spanish we could scrape up between us. Both attempts brought a lot of jabbering from them, but nothing in either of those languages.
“Got anything else?” I asked Milk River.