Sackett (1961) s-9 Read online

  Starting the appaloosa ahead, I saw his ears come up. Following his look, I saw a movement, far off, at the edge of a clump of aspen on a slope. But before I could get out my glasses, whatever it was had gone. Riding on, I came to a place where somebody had been kneeling beside a snow-stream, evidently for a drink. If my guessing was right that was the third drink in the last couple of hours. Possibly it was less time than that... and in this high country, with moisture in the air, it seemed too much drinking. Nor was the weather that warm.

  Puzzled, I started on again. All of a sudden the tracks weren't hard to follow. Whoever it was had headed straight for some place, and was too busy getting there to think of covering trail ... or else I was believed to be lost down below somewhere.

  A moment later I saw where the person I followed had fallen down, then got up, and gone on. Sick... that drinking could mean fever. Sick and, unless I missed my guess, all alone. The tracks disappeared. It took me several minutes of circling and scouting to find the likely spot. From here on it was judgment more than tracks, for the person had taken to rock, and there was a-plenty of it.

  The appaloosa made work of scrambling over that rock, so I got down and walked.

  It was coming up to night, and there was no way I knew of to get down off the mountain at night.

  Time to time I stopped, trying the air for smoke or sound, but there was none.

  Whatever I was hunting had taken off in a wild area of boulders and lightning-struck trees, where the gray ridges had been lashed and whipped by storm.

  Off on the horizon I could see great black thunderheads piling up, and I knew this place would be hell during an electrical storm. Somehow I had to get down from there, and fast. Time or two before, I'd been caught in high peaks by a storm, although never so high as this. I'd seen lightning leaping from peak to peak, and sometimes in sheets of blue flame.

  The boulders were a maze. Great slabs of rock stood on knife edges, looking like rows of broken molars, split and rotten. Without warning, a canyon dropped away in front of me for maybe five hundred feet of almost sheer fall. Off to the left I could see an eyebrow of trail.

  Anywhere off that bald granite ridge would look like heaven to me, and I hurried to the trail. Once I heard rocks fall behind my horse, but we kept going down, with me walking and leading.

  When I reached the meadow at the foot of the trail, I looked up. It was like standing on the bottom of a narrow trough with only the dark sky above me.

  The trail led out of the meadow, and on it were those same tracks. Hurried by the storm, I followed them.

  Thunder rumbled like great bowling balls in an empty hall of rock. Suddenly, an opening appeared in the wall ahead of me and I drew up, calling out

  There was no answer.

  Leaving the appaloosa, I shucked my gun. In front of the opening there was a ledge, maybe thirty yards along the face of the cliff, and a dozen yards deep. A body could see folks had lived and worked there for some time. I called out again, and my voice echoed down the canyon.

  There was only the fading echo, only the silence, and emptiness. A few large drops of rain fell I went slowly across to the mouth of the cave.

  A sort of wall had been fixed up, closing off part of the opening. It was made of rocks, fitted together without mortar. Stepping around it, I looked inside.

  On the wall hung an old bridle. In a corner was a dried-up saddle and a rifle. Dead coals were in a fireplace that had seen much use. Over against the wall was a pallet, and on the pallet a girl was lying.

  I struck a match, and got the shock of my life. She was a young girl, a little thing, and she was mighty pretty. A great mass of red-gold hair spilled over the worn blankets and bearskins on which she was lying. She wore a patched-up dress, and moccasins. Her cheeks were flushed red.

  I spoke to her, but she made no sound. Bending over, I touched her brow. She was burning up with fever.

  And then the storm broke.

  It took me only a couple of minutes to rush outside and get my horse. There was an adjoining cave--actually part of the one the girl was in--that had a crude manger. At one time a horse or mule had been kept there.

  When I had tied my horse I went back and, taking wood from a stack by the entrance, I kindled a fire and put some water on to heat.

  With a fire going I could see better, and I found another blanket to cover her over with. It was plain enough that two folks had been living here, though there was only one now. Likely there had been only one for quite a stretch.

  The rifle had been cleaned, but the chamber was empty and there was no ammunition anywhere I looked. There was a flint knife with quite an edge to it--probably the knife used to cut my meat that first time.

  Looked to me this girl had been living here quite some time, and by the look of her, not living too well. She was mighty slight, almighty slight.

  When that water was boiling I fixed some coffee and, with my own jerked beef, made some broth.

  Outside the thunder was rolling something awful and there were lightning flashes almost two or three a minute, seemed like, lighting up that gorge where the cave was. Rain was falling in great sheets, and when the lightning flashed I could see the rocks glistening with it.

  Cap was down at our camp by himself, and the country would be filling up with mighty unpleasant folks. I was realizing that after a rain like this nobody could get back up that chute, and unless there was another way out, I was stuck And me with a sick girl on my bands.

  When I had that broth hot, I held the girl in my arms and fed her some of it. She was out of her head, delirious-like. It seemed to me she had got back to the cave with her last strength, but she tasted that broth and liked it.

  After a while she went back to sleep.

  Back home on the Cumberland we did for ourselves when it came to trouble and sickness, but in a storm like this there was no chance to go out and get any herbs or suchlike. All I could do was keep her from getting chilled and build up her strength with broth.

  Might be she only had a cold, and I was praying it wasn't pneumonia or anything like that. She was run down some, and probably hadn't been eating right. What she could get from her snares wouldn't amount to much, and she had no weapons to kill anything larger. What bothered me was how she got into this wild country in the first place.

  While she slept I hunted around the cave and found a man's wore-out boots, and a coat hanging on the wall. I taken that down and used it for more cover over her.

  Hours later, while the storm was still blowing and lightning jumped peak to peak, crashing like all get-out, she awakened and looked around, and called to somebody whose name I couldn't make out. All I could do was feed her some more of that broth, but she took to it like a baby to mother's milk.

  All night long I sat by that fire, keeping it bright in case she awakened and was scared. Toward daylight the storm played itself out and went rumbling away far off down the mountains.

  I rigged a line and went down to the creek. The chances of getting fish after the storm didn't look too good, with the water all riled. Nonetheless, I threw out a hook. After a while I hooked a trout and, about a half-hour later, another one.

  Up at the cave the red-haired girl was sleeping quietly, so I went to work and cleaned those trout and fried them up. I started some coffee and then went outside.

  Wandering around, I came on a grave. Actually, I could see it wasn't a dug grave, but a wide crack in the rock. Rocks had been rolled in at each end and the cracks tamped in with some kind of clay which had settled hard. Over the grave was scratched a name and a date.

  JUAN MORALES 1790--1874

  He had died last year, then.

  And that meant this girl had been here in this canyon all alone for almost a year. No wonder she was run down.

  Juan Morales had been eighty-four years old when he died. Too old a man to be traipsing around the mountains with a young girl. From his name he had been a Spanish man, but she did not look like any Spanish girl I'd ever
seen. Yet I'd heard it said that some of them were blonde, so maybe they were red-headed, too.

  I went back to the cave and looked at my patient. She was lying there looking at me, and the first thing she said was, "Thank you for the venison."

  She had the bluest eyes.

  "Ma'am," I said, 'I'm William Tell Sackett, Tell for short, and leaving the meat was little enough to do."

  I'm Ange Kerry," she said, "and I'm most glad you found me."

  Only thing I couldn't figure out was how a girl that pretty ever got lost.

  Chapter IX

  Ange had gone to sleep again so, after adding sticks to the fire, I went out and sat down in the mouth of the cave. It was the first good chance I'd had to look around me.

  The valley where I found the gold was lonely but peaceful . . . this was wild. Sheer black cliffs surrounded it on nearly all sides, broken here and there as though cracked by some thunderous upheaval of the mountain. The foot of each crack ended in a slope of talus, with broken, barkless tree trunks, their branches thrown wide and white against the rock like skeleton arms.

  The stream descended through the valley in a series of ripples and miniature cascades, gathering here and there in a pool, only to go tumbling off down into the wild gorge that seemed to end in space.

  The trees that rimmed the canyon were dwarfed and twisted, leaning away from prevailing winds, trees that the years gave no stature, only girth and a more tenacious grip on the rock from which they grew.

  Landslides had carried away stands of aspen and dumped them among the tumbled boulders along the bottom. Slabs and crags of rock had broken off from the cliff faces and lay cracked and riven upon the canyon floor. There was scarcely a stretch of level land anywhere, only here and there an arctic meadow or stretch of tundra. The rocks were colored with lichen--green, orange, reddish, black, or gray--crusting the rocks, forever working at them to create from their granite flanks the soil that would build other growth.

  The matlike jungles of arctic willow hedged the stream in places, and streaks of snow and ice lay along cracks where the sun could not reach.

  About an hour short of noon the sun came over the mountain and warmed the cave mouth. New streams melted from the snow banks, and I watched several mountain sheep go down a narrow thread of trail. A big old black bear showed on the mountain opposite. Had I shot him it would have taken me all day to get where he was. Anyway, he wasn't bothering me.

  Despite the quiet of the place, there was something wild and terrible about it that wouldn't let me settle down. Besides that, I couldn't keep from worrying about Cap.

  It was midafternoon when Ange Kerry woke up again, and I went back in and fixed her a cup of coffee.

  She looked up at me. "You've no idea how good that tastes. I've had no coffee for a year."

  Thing puzzles me," I said, "is why you came up here in the first place. You came with that Juan Morales?"

  "He was my grandfather. He and my grandmother raised me, and when she died he began to worry about dying and leaving me with nothing. Grandfather had an old map that had been in our family for years, telling of gold in the San Juans, so he decided to find it for me. I insisted on coming with him.

  "He was very strong, Tell. It seemed nothing was too much for him. But we couldn't follow the map, and we got lost in the mountains. We were short of ammunition. Some of it we lost in a rock slide that injured his shoulder.

  "We found this place, and he was sure it was close by--the gold, I mean. He never told me why he believed it, but there was some position in relation to two mountain peaks. One was slightly west of north, the other due west.

  "Grandfather must have been hurt worse in the slide than he let me know. He never got better. One of his shoulders was very bad, and he limped after that, and worried about me. He said we must forget the gold and get out as best we could.

  "Then he became ill... that was when you came into the valley, and when I took some venison from you at night."

  "You should have awakened me."

  "I--I was afraid."

  "Then when you came back and found the venison I left for you . . . you knew I was all right then?

  "I thought--oh, I don't know what I thought! When I came back here after getting that first piece of meat, that was when grandfather died. I told him about you."

  "He died then?"

  "He told me to go to you, that you would take me out of here, and that most men were good to women."

  "When I saw the grave I thought he'd been dead longer than that."

  "I wasn't sure of the date. We lost track of time, up here."

  She must have had a rough time of it. I thought of that while I went to work and made some more broth, only this time with chunks of meat in it.

  "How did you get into this place?"

  "We came up a trail from the north--an ancient trail, very steep, or perhaps it was a game trail."

  From the north, again. What I wanted was a way down on the west The way I figured, we couldn't be much more than a mile from Cap right now, but the trouble was that mile was almost straight down.

  Ange Kerry was in no shape to leave, and with all the men hunting me that had a figuring to fill me full up with lead, I wasn't planning to go down until I could take Ange along. Suppose I was killed before anybody knew where she was?

  Just in case, I told her how things were. "We got us a camp, Cap Rountree and me, down on the Vallecitos, west of here. If something happens to me, you get to him. He'll take you to my folks down to Mora."

  Seemed likely that with another few days of rest she might be ready to try coming down off that mountain. Mostly she was starved from eating poorly. I went out and went across the canyon. There I looked back, taking time to study that cliff. A man might climb that slope of talus and work his way to the top of the cliff through the crack that lay behind it. A man on foot might.

  Chances were that right down the other side was camp. Studying it out, I decided to have a try at it. Down by the stream I had seen an outcropping of talc, so I broke off a piece and scratched out Back Soon on a slab of rock.

  Taking my rifle, I rigged myself a sling from a rawhide strip, and headed for that slope. Climbing the steep talus slope was work, believe me. That rock slid under my feet and every time I took three steps I lost one, but soon I got up to that crack.

  Standing there looking up, I was of a mind to quit, though quitting comes hard to me. That crack was like a three-sided chimney, narrow at the bottom, widening toward the top. The slope above the chimney looked like it was just hanging there waiting for a good reason to fall. Yet by holding to the right side a man might make it.

  I hung my rifle over my back to have my hands free, and started up that chimney and made it out on the slope. Holding on to catch my breath, I looked down into the canyon.

  It made a man catch his breath. I swear, I had no idea I'd climbed so high up. The creek was a thread, the cave mouth looked no bigger than the end of a fingernail, and I was a good two thousand feet above the floor of the valley. My horse, feeding in the meadow where I'd left him on a picket-rope, looked like an ant.

  Clinging to the reasonably solid rock along the side of the rock slide, I worked my way to the top, and was wringing wet by the time I got there.

  Nothing but sky and cloud above me, and around me bare, smooth granite, with a hollow where there was snow, but nowhere any trees or vegetation. I walked across the top of that ridge, scoured by wind and storm ... the air was fresher than a body could believe, and a light wind was blowing.

  In a few minutes I was looking down into the valley of the Vallecitos.

  A little way down the forest began, first scattered, stunted trees, then thick stands of timber. Our camp--I could see a thin trail of smoke rising --was down there among them.

  From where I stood to the point where camp was, I figured it to be a half-mile, if it was level ground. But the mountain itself was over a mile high, which made the actual distance much greater. Here and there were sh
eer drops. And there would be no going straight down. One cliff I could see would take a man almost a mile north before he could find a place to get down.

  Off where Cap and me had laid out the town site there was a stir of activity. There were several columns of smoke, and it looked like some building going on, but it was too far to make out, even in that clear air.

  It was sundown when I got back to the cave, and Ange broke into a smile when I showed up.

  "Worried?'

  She smiled at me. "No . . . you said you'd come back."

  She was looking better already. There was color in her cheeks and she had started to make coffee. Coming back I had killed a big-horn sheep, and we roasted it over the fire, and had us a grand feast. That night we sat talking until the moon came up.

  After she went to sleep I sat in the door of the cave and watched the moon chin itself on the mountains, and slowly slide out of sight behind a dark fringe of trees.

  At dawn, five days later, we pulled out. We crossed toward that stream that ran down to the north or northeast and followed the old game trail Ange had mentioned. She showed me where they had lost their pack mule with some of their grub, and then she told me that there was a way which would lead down to our camp, a deer and sheep trail off to the south of the canyon.

  With Ange riding and me leading the appaloosa among those rocks and thick forests, it was slow going and it took a long time to get to the bottom. I led the horse on through the trees until I reached a point maybe a half-mile from the town site.

  There must have been forty men working around over there, with buildings going up, but I could see no sign of Cap. Somehow the set-up didn't look right to me.

  I helped Ange down from the horse. "Well rest," I said. "Come dark, we'll go to our camp. That bunch over there look like trouble." I'd no idea of facing up to a difficulty with a sick girl on my hands.

  Dark came on slowly. Finally, thinking of Cap, it wasn't in me to wait longer. I helped Ange back into the saddle, and took my Winchester from the scabbard.