City of Gold

by Will Hobbs

  “Poke around doing what?”

  I had no idea. “Looking for fossils,” I heard myself saying.

  “Stupidest thing I ever heard. You’ll starve out or break your necks. You’re coming with me.”

  Watching all this while, Butch up and said, “No they ain’t, Clark, and that’s that.”

  The marshal scowled. “Have it your way. I could care less.”

  A short while later the four of us watched Clark ride out down the creek, trailing his packhorse. “Owen, you done good,” Sundance said.

  “I’ll second that,” Butch chimed in. “Both of you,” he added, with a nod in Till’s direction.

  Till tipped his hat. “Thanks for the cover, Butch.”

  That evening they roasted what they had left of a desert bighorn. We sat on those logs at right angles back from the fire, the famous outlaws on one, Till and I on the other. Their faces in the firelight made a picture to remember.

  “Our last night at the Roost,” Butch was saying. He didn’t seem the sentimental sort but his voice was unmistakably wistful.

  “How come is that?” Till asked.

  “Well, kid, we been chased all over the West, lawmen every which way, bullets flying, so many close scrapes, but we always had the Roost. If there was ever gonna be a sign, today was it. Our time is up.”

  “We pushed our luck and then some,” Sundance agreed.

  “The telegraph was one thing, but it won’t be long before they can telephone from town to town.”

  Sundance chuckled. “A recent railroad job we did, they had a horse car all ready for us. Threw upon a door and mounted men rode out, rifles blazing!”

  Butch poked his pal in the ribs. “Think about it this way, pardner. They finally ran down Geronimo but we’re still free. If we’re gonna have the last laugh, it’s time to throw in our cards and leave the table.”

  “It was bound to come,” said Sundance. “I feel relieved, to tell you the truth.”

  “Where will you go?” I asked them. “I mean, what will you do?”

  Butch shrugged. “Good questions. With that Fort Worth picture everywhere, we might have to leave the country.”

  “Canada, maybe?”

  “Too cold, and the Mounties are too good. We wouldn’t last a month.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Already got chased around there, same as Geronimo.”

  “South America!” Till cried. In a blur, he jumped up and ran over to where we’d pitched our tarp.

  Butch watched him go. “The snapper’s growin’ on me. You never know what to expect.”

  Sundance laughed. “He might be onto something. In South America nobody would know us from Adam.”

  Till came back to the firelight with our National Geographic. He was all lit up. “There’s this article in here called ‘Road to Bolivia.’ Tells about Argentina, too!” He handed it to Butch. “You can keep it.”

  “Okay, I will.” Cassidy chuckled as he took the magazine in hand. “We’ll look into it. You keep that mule saddle, okay?”

  Till was all smiles. “Gee whillikers, it’s a deal. It’ll remind us how much you admirated Peaches.”

  “After all my years on horseback, I was ready to try a mule. Heard they ride better and can’t be beat in rough country. Talk about footing . . . supposedly their vision includes their back feet as they’re looking ahead.”

  “Kit Carson always rode a mule,” Till informed him.

  “Why, there you go. As it turns out, it was late in the game to be trying a new trick.”

  “I reckon I’ll ride Peaches from here on. I can trail the marshal’s colt if you got a halter rope.”

  Butch grinned. “We got a halter rope and some grub, too, if you don’t mind eatin’ out of tin cans.”

  “We’re good at that” was Till’s reply. “I reckon we’ll be pullin’ out in the morning.”

  Sundance had something on his mind. “Which way you boys headed?”

  I said, “The way we came, I suppose.”

  He shook his head. “The marshal’s likely camped just down the creek. He’s got no further use for you two, and you know too much. That man’s got more sins on his head than everybody who’s rode with the Wild Bunch, combined.”

  “So, which way do we go?”

  “Out the back door with us. We’ll show you the way.”

  26

  Spellbound

  WE RODE NORTH with the outlaws, out their “back door” as they called it, into a vast desert wilderness of bare rock in monumental shapes that beggar description. They were going to show us the best way to get back to Telluride.

  It wasn’t but an hour before Sundance held up, pointing, and said, “We’re going thisaway, and you need to go thataway.” Our destination, as he explained, lay to the northeast. The town of Green River was sixty or seventy miles away, on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. We could put our animals on the train there, eastbound. “Make sure you go with them,” Sundance joked.

  “And don’t forget to change trains at Grand Junction,” Butch added, “or you’ll end up in Denver.”

  I had a feeling they were making this sound easier than it might turn out to be.

  “We like to steer by the North Star,” Sundance suggested. “You know where it’s at?”

  “In the north,” Till answered. “Pa showed us.”

  Butch pointed out the San Rafael Reef to our right. “You crossed through the Reef yesterday when you came up the Muddy. Looked like a line of cliffs running north to forever. From this side it looks like a ridge. Keep a few miles clear of it, just keep following the ridge north until you strike the railroad. Follow the tracks east and you’re at Green River.”

  We thanked them kindly and were about to say goodbye. Till was watering up. “You should come see us at Hermosa someday.”

  Butch looked doubtful. Sundance said, “¿Quién sabe? Hasta la vista, amigos.”

  Till had the last word. “So long, fellers. Gosh all fish hooks!”

  They went their way and we went ours, trying to keep them in sight as long as we could: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, armed with their Colts and Winchesters, saddlebags full of plunder, riding into the far distance. From one moment to the next, they disappeared into the folds of the land.

  We rode on, keeping the Reef to our right, into a world too fanciful to be real. We clattered across slickrock terraces and rode over sand dunes turned to stone. I was taken by all of it, spellbound by the immensity of time. I was keeping my eye out for the Morrison formation, and had a pretty good idea what it would look like. Late the night before, I built up the fire and found what I was looking for in Behold the Dinosaur: the illustration of all the rock layers of the Colorado Plateau, like a tall stack of building blocks. Fairly high up, among the younger layers, it showed the Morrison formation atop the San Rafael Group. Where the two met it said PRIME DINOSAUR HUNTING.

  Here I was in the San Rafael Desert, in a place where maybe nobody had searched. I was looking for greenish or reddish bands of mudstones and siltstones. The dinosaurs lay buried in remnants of meandering streambeds.

  The cold weather had passed through and it was warming up fast. About an hour after we said goodbye to our outlaws, I spied a promontory off to our left with bands of various colors. It resembled a colossal ship coming at us head-on. “That’s gotta be the Morrison!” I cried.

  Till doffed his hat and scratched. “What the heck’s the Morrison?”

  Little brother thought I was nuts when I insisted we go over there. “It’s miles out of our way! How much water you think we got?”

  “Not much, but if I find a dinosaur, I’ll die happy.”

  “I won’t. Your chances stink.”

  “I know. Give me one hour.”

  “Starting now?”

  “Starting once we get there!”

  It took longer than I guessed to reach my ship-like promontory. Its hues included green, purple, gray, tan, and maroon. Unfortunately, its slopes were too steep to cl
imb. Only along its base could I get a close look, to the right of its blunt prow or to the left.

  I went right. Till borrowed Pa’s pocket watch and went left.

  Studying that rock face took more concentration than I’d summoned in my life. I was looking for a pattern, anything that might be a fossil bone.

  I had covered maybe eighty yards when Till appeared at my elbow wearing a triumphant grin. On his outstretched palm was an agatized shark’s tooth nearly three inches long. “Your hour’s up!”

  “Lucky kid, where’d you find that?”

  “On the ground, where else?”

  I hadn’t been looking on the ground.

  “Let’s get going, Owen!”

  “Gimme that watch.”

  He handed it over. “Half an hour,” I said. “Why don’t you visit with Peaches or take a nap? Better yet, go back to your side and find me a dinosaur!”

  Till was disgruntled, but at least he was gone. I redoubled my efforts, studying the ground as well as the slope. Time was running out and my vision was swimming.

  At last I spotted something about nine feet up, a pattern my mind detected as my eyes were moving on. I looked again and locked onto a telltale shape embedded in a gray background: a brownish, curving, bladelike tooth. How I wished I could get closer.

  “Eureka!” I hollered, so loud Till came running.

  “What is it?” he yelled.

  He arrived at my side all out of breath. I pointed. “My dinosaur, Till, up there!”

  “I don’t see no dinosaur.”

  “The tooth of one—as long as my middle finger—right there! The tooth of a huge meat eater!”

  Till squinted. “Good job, Owen. Lucky for us he’s good and dead.”

  I was beside myself. Was the rest of the dinosaur hidden in the rock, waiting to be excavated? Its dimensions must be enormous. Was this another Allosaurus, the carnivore Arthur Lakes discovered, or something different? Every cell in my body was buzzing.

  “Off we go,” sang Till.

  I thought about marking the spot with a rock cairn but realized that would be the height of folly. I just had to fix everything about this place in my memory so I’d be able to find it again. On we rode with me craning my neck to make a mental picture of the promontory and surrounding landscape.

  The day turned into a scorcher. By midafternoon we were sharing our spare canteen. How long could the animals last? As for forage, there wasn’t any.

  We rode a long, long way, keeping a couple miles off the Reef like Butch had said. The sun was close to setting and we were about to camp in a dry wash with nothing to recommend it.

  Like us, the horses were glassy-eyed and resigned. Not so, Peaches. Till was about to unsaddle her but she didn’t like the idea. Her eyes were alert and her nostrils quivering. She bobbed her head, blew a couple times, and whinnied for good measure. “Smells water,” said Till.

  Rather than camp, we continued down the stony wash as it cut through the Reef. We were going off course, but that mattered little compared to finding water. Till could barely hold Peaches back. She led us to a spring on the cliffy side of the Reef where the view opened up far and wide. The water trickled from a long, fern-decorated seam between a thin band of shale and the surrounding sandstone. The flow collected in a series of deep stone potholes. We and the animals drank our fill.

  We pitched our tarp at the base of a colossal, sharp-edged slab of red sandstone maybe forty feet high that had fallen from the cliffs. Its nearly vertical face was rippled with wavy parallel lines. I took it for petrified mud, an ancient creek bottom. To my surprise I recognized improbably large birdlike tracks in the mud turned to stone. “Look, Till, a dinosaur walked through our camp!”

  He craned his neck. “Reckon it was missing a tooth?”

  We talked about our route and figured there was no need to backtrack. As the Reef marched north, we could follow it on its east side as well as its west.

  From our campsite, as we were eating some canned salmon, we spied a freight wagon in the distance. It was pulled by a team of six mules and was headed south, with supplies for Hanksville and Hite City as we got to figuring. Where we’d left the road outside of Hanksville, Cass said it was headed north to Green River.

  Our detour had not only delivered water but a road to follow. Green River, here we come!

  27

  Homeward Bound

  IN GREEN RIVER we stabled Peaches and the marshal’s horses, and stayed at a nearby hotel. It rained all night, and it was raining when we changed trains in Grand Junction, Colorado. We spent another night in a hotel in Montrose. From Ridgway, where we boarded the Rio Grande Southern, the San Juans were something to see. The rains had fallen as heavy snow on the jagged string of peaks that included Mount Sneffels. In full sun they shone brilliantly white. I was thinking about Molly and hoping to see her and Merlin Custard.

  We pulled into Telluride around 2:00 p.m. There was a train leaving for Durango at 2:35 we might catch if we were lucky. Till ran into the depot to buy tickets while I led the buckskin and the colt down the tracks, headed for the marshal’s stable.

  The kid working there was about as curious as the post he was leaning on. He had no idea who I was or where I’d been with the town’s horses. He mentioned that the marshal was away but didn’t know where. I didn’t fill him in. I grabbed our bedrolls and such off the horses, threw them in a grain sack, and took off running.

  Nearing the depot, I made a beeline across the street to the bakery. I was out of breath as I came through the door. Just like the first time, there was nobody there but Molly and me. “Owen!” she cried. “You’re back!”

  First thing, Molly took me out the door and onto the street. “I’ve been seeing Hercules! They’re not keeping him up at the Tomboy. They rented him to Rogers Brothers. He overnights in town and goes up and back every day.”

  Till showed up, and the three of us flew down the street toward a long line of mules—on their own, with empty pannier bags—on their way back from the mines. “Got tickets for us and Peaches for the two thirty-five to Durango,” Till panted. “We might make it!”

  Lo and behold, there was Hercules, headed for the stables. I could’ve cried.

  Seconds later the big fellow was shaking his ears at us as I hurried to free his halter rope from the pack frame. Quick as we might, we stuffed everything from the grain sack into his panniers. We started running and Hercules broke into a trot.

  Molly was at my side as I raced down the tracks with Hercules. Till veered off to collect Peaches from behind the depot. “Buy a ticket for Hercules!” I yelled after him. A few minutes later we were all together at trackside. Hercules and Peaches nuzzled and snorted, reunited at last. I kept looking to see if anybody was after me for grabbing Hercules. If they tried to stop me I would . . . I didn’t know what I was going to do, only that I was taking him and that was that.

  Till held up our tickets for the conductor. The conductor called down the line to the man at the stock car, who was about to go up the gangplanks and close the door. I said we would stick with our mules. “Suit yourself,” said the conductor.

  Down to the stock car we hustled. The engineer blew the warning whistle.

  Till went up the planks with Peaches. I was about to follow with Hercules but turned to face Molly.

  “Write,” she told me.

  “Count on it,” I promised. I looked into her eyes and didn’t know what to say. I kissed her instead, which surprised her and me both.

  “See you,” I said.

  Molly was beaming. “Hope so, Owen!”

  I went up and into the car with Hercules and handed him off to Till. I remembered something I was dying to tell Molly and turned around in time. She was still there. “Saw a dinosaur tooth in the rock!” I called with fingers far apart. Molly gave a cheer as the door was closing.

  The whistle screeched and the train lurched into motion. It had all happened so fast, Hercules was still harnessed, packsaddle and pannier bags and
all. After the value beyond reckoning the Tomboy got out of our stolen mule, I wasn’t going to lose sleep over a cheap pack outfit. As to ownership of Hercules, I doubted they would argue it after they talked with the train people and figured out it was me who took him. They knew he was mine and would lose any attempt to prove otherwise.

  Cresting Lizard Head Pass, I was already thinking about spring thaw, and pulling stumps and rocks out of the field with mule power. I saw myself harnessing Hercules and Peaches to the riding plow, taking the seat, reins in hand and calling, ”Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  Late afternoon, our train pulled into Durango. I’d been gone three weeks but it felt like a whole lot longer. Eleven miles to go. Till rode Peaches on the fancy new saddle and I walked the big fellow by his halter rope. We were wearing our mackinaws against the chill of the evening. “Well, brother,” I said, “it took some doing but we pulled it off. We’re bringing both of them home safe and sound.”

  “Yes sir. I was just thinkin’ the same thing. With only one shot fired!”

  “You ain’t disappointed?” I asked with a grin.

  Till laughed. “Not hardly.”

  It was all but dark as we turned into the lane that led to Trimble Hot Springs. Ominously, the air was pungent with a burnt smell. Minutes later we learned why as we spied the eerie silhouette of a ruin where Trimble’s elegant hotel had stood. The nearby buildings had also burned down, but the stables were still standing.

  No one was around. Knowing Ma had been staying in one of the cottages, we feared the worst. I was queasy all over. We stopped up the road at the nearest house and I asked about the fire. “Somebody knocked over a lamp, was what I heard,” the man told us. “Three days ago.”

  Till was on the verge of tears. “Our ma worked at the hotel.”

  “Don’t worry, boys. Nobody got hurt.”

  What a relief that was. What would have become of us? With only a mile to go, we headed for home. When we turned into the driveway and saw light in the windows, I was overcome.