CHAPTER 16
HE SHOVED BACK from the rim and got to his feet. They were on top of the mesa in the clear, cool air. A soft wind stirred the air around Fan’s cheek. About fifty feet away were the ruins of an ancient village, which had once been two rows of houses, back to back, but was now no more than a few shallow pits and ridges of earth, littered with fragments of the red-on-black pottery.
The wide sky was above them and around them. They stood upon an island where only the clouds were close; nothing moved about them. It was a moment of pristine stillness.
They stood a little apart, merely living the stillness, with no thought of any other time than this. A rattle of rocks drove the stillness away, and brought back with a shock the immediacy of danger.
“I’ll stop them, Fan. You look around…see what else there is.”
He went back to the rim, crawling the last few feet, then toppled a heavy boulder down the chute. There was a cry, a scramble, a rattle of rocks, and the sound of someone swearing.
That would hold them for a little while. No man in his right mind was going to attempt that chute with somebody above him ready to send down rocks.
He got up and walked over to the ruins. Here men had lived, men in an early state of civilization, men organizing their first attempts at a settled community, men thinking out the rules that would give them freedom, for freedom and civilization can exist only where there are laws and agreement.
The man men called Ruble Noon kicked his toe against a pile of earth. Tom Davidge had accumulated treasure, and men wanted it now who were prepared to obtain it, who were ready to kill his daughter, his friends, anyone. Tom Davidge had excited the greed of men, and here in these western lands men were fighting again the age-old struggle for freedom and for civilization, which is one that always must be fought for. The weak, and those unwilling to make the struggle, soon resign their liberties for the protection of powerful men or paid armies; they begin by being protected, they end by being subjected.
Ruble Noon was sore and he was tired. He wanted no more of running and fighting, but no end was in sight. He looked across the mesa toward Fan, who had walked toward the edge and was looking for a way down. Her skirt blew in the wind, and he watched for a moment as she walked the rim, occasionally pausing to look over. He went back to the chute and trickled a few small rocks over the edge, merely as a warning.
Ruble Noon wondered where, exactly, they were. They had gone into the cave and moved away from the mountain cabin, and they had traveled what seemed to be half a mile or so, and now they had emerged on top of a large mesa. From this vantage point, none of the mountains around looked familiar. Obviously he was seeing them from a different viewpoint, and their altered appearance left him unsure.
Already there was darkness in the canyon. When he peered over the edge of the chute, nothing was in sight. He listened, but he heard no voices. No doubt they had decided against attempting the climb for the present, or they decided on another approach. Ben Janish had ridden this country and might know a good deal more about it than Ruble Noon could recall.
For luck, he started a fair-sized rock rolling down the chute. Other rocks slid with it, and for a moment he could hear the rattle and bump as they went down. When the sound died the evening was empty.
He took up his rifle and pack and started after Fan. He plodded along, putting one foot ahead of another with effort. He was dog-tired, his head ached, and he wanted nothing so much as sleep.
As he went across the mesa, he several times saw bits of pottery, usually of the same type as those he had seen at the ruins.
Fan had seen him coming and had paused beside some low brush. “It will be dark soon,” she said. “I’ve seen no path, no animal tracks. Do you suppose that was the only way up, and that they have closed it off?”
He shook his head. “There’s got to be a way. I’ve seen some steep-walled mesas, but never one that couldn’t be scaled, either up or down.”
Already a star had appeared, for night fell fast in this desert land. The air was chill. He saw a line of trees and started toward it.
Suddenly the mesa broke off sharply in front of them in a V of rock filled with trees and brush, and sloping steeply down. He saw what he wanted, a thick clump of trees surrounded by blowdowns—trees flattened by the wind and long dead, their whitening bones sprawled across the ground.
They crossed over them, walking carefully, and when he was among the trees he cut branches for a bed for Fan on the ground under the pines. Pines meant a good chance that this was a south slope. Most of the trees below them were aspen, a thick stand, almost filling the notch. The place was walled in, secluded.
“We will sleep here,” he told Fan. “The bed of dead branches out there will warn us if anyone tries to come close.”
From dead branches he built a small fire, and they made coffee in an empty can after they had eaten the beans from it. There was a trickle of water coming down from a crack in the mesa wall above them, and he put out the fire, making sure every ember was dead. Then he placed the can in a fork of a tree. Some other traveler might need it.
He built his own bed well back under the trees. When he went back to speak to Fan, she was already asleep. He covered her with his coat, and returned to his bough bed. Chilly as it was, he was soon asleep.
He awoke suddenly, stiff and cold in the first light. The trees were still dark around him, and Fan was sleeping. He got up, wiped off his rifle and hers, and then went a few feet away from the camp to listen. There was no sound but the distant wind in the trees.
Evidently they had moved well away from the ranch during their escape, and now must be several miles off. Below them, a mile or two away, he could see a meadow where there was what appeared to be a corral…he felt that he should know something about that. It was just a thought, the shadow of a memory that lurked at the rim of his consciousness.
He came back and sat down. He cleared the action of his rifle and checked the barrel. It was clear and clean, considering the shooting that had been done. Then he checked his Colt.
Fan sat up. “Have you been waiting for me?” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll go down this notch,” he said. “There’s a corral or something down there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to fight. They want war, and we can’t wish them away, so I’ll give them war. I’m tired of running, and now I’m going after them.”
“I’m coming along. After all, you’re fighting my fight.”
He did not protest. She would come anyway, and there was no place to leave her.
They worked their way down the steep slope through the aspens. Ruble Noon felt better, although his shoulder was sore. He moved carefully for fear it might begin bleeding again.
Beyond the aspens there was a growth of scattered pines, and after that the meadow, with grass standing more than two feet high. Beyond it was a corral and a log cabin. No smoke came from the chimney, nor was there any sign of life, so far as they could see.
“I know this place,” he said. “I am sure I do.”
She looked at him, waiting.
“There’s a well there, just the other side of the cabin. And there are horses in the pasture beyond. There’ll be a saddle or two in the cabin, and food there, too.”
“You have been here before?”
“I am sure of it. Remember, as Ruble Noon I was always hiding out. Nobody ever saw me. That means I must have had several places to hide. Using the same routes all the time would be a dead giveaway, and this may have been one of the places I used….”
He did not remember clearly, and he must think it out. He must try to reconstruct in his mind the plans that would have been used by Ruble Noon, and drawing on the same memory source, he might come up with the right answers.
Apparently his center of activity had been the
se mountains, and the cabin in the mountains above the Rafter D had been one hideout, perhaps the principal one. The ranch below where the old Mexican had lived had been merely a place to pick up a horse when needed. This ranch on which he now centered his attention was obviously on the other side of the mountain, with different lines of communication, different sources of supply.
But had this actually been a hideout for him? Or was it, too, merely a place to pick up a horse? Or was it a place with which he had no connection?
“All right,” he said at last. “We’re going down there.”
He knew that no place was safe. At any point he might come upon enemies and not know them as such. Even though no smoke was coming from the ranch house, that proved nothing. Keeping to the trees, he began to skirt the meadow, with Fan close behind him.
The log cabin was built in two sections, with a roofed porch joining them, Texas fashion. There were pole corrals and the well he seemed to remember. What he did not remember was the old man sitting on a bench at the door, mending a bridle.
The man glanced up, without surprise. “Howdy,” he said. “Been expectin’ you. Want I should catch up a horse or two?”
“You’ve been expecting me?”
“Well, there was a lady here. She was inquirin’ for a man of your appearance. A right purty woman she was, too.”
Peg Cullane!
“Was she alone?”
The old man chuckled. “Now you know darned well no woman that purty would be ridin’ out alone. Not so long as there’s an able-bodied man in the country. She had two gents with her. Not that I’d call them gents. If I ever seen a couple ridin’ the owl-hoot trail, they was. I’d have knowed those two a mile off, an’ they come right up close.”
“Did they know you?”
He cackled. “Nobody ever knowed me, no more than you. But those two…Finn Cagle an’ German Bayles. Two real bad boys. Me, I didn’t know from nothin’.
“ ‘Lady,’ I said, ‘the other side of the mountain is a world away from here. I never been yonder, never figure to go, an’ nobody ever comes over. There’s no trail.’ I pointed up yonder. ‘You figure anybody could cross that?’ Well, they all taken a look an’ shook their heads an’ rode off.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Two days ago. She described you almighty well, mister. Too durned well.”
He was a gnarled and wizened old man with a face that looked old enough to have worn out two bodies. Only the hands looked young as they worked at the lacing of the leather. The fingers were quick, adroit, and did not suffer from rheumatism. He wore no gun in sight, but the bib overalls he wore had a slight bulge at the waist line, and a shotgun stood just inside the door.
“I’ll catch up a couple of horses for you.” He hesitated a moment, fumbling with his rope. “Now, I ain’t one to butt in, mister, but if’n I was you I’d ride almighty careful. I got an idea those folks didn’t just ride off. I figure they left somebody behind, somebody with a mighty good rifle.”
“Thanks.” Ruble Noon looked at the surrounding country thoughtfully. There were dozens of places where an ambush could be waiting.
He watched the old man ride after the horses. Old he might be, but he was far from feeble. His cast with the rope was deft and unerring. He caught up one horse, and then another.
When they had drunk deep from the cool water and had eaten what the old man set out for them, they went out into the air again and Ruble Noon studied the hills, seeking for some gleam of sunlight on a rifle barrel, some indication of an ambush.
“They were most inquirin’ about places hereabouts,” the old man said. “I told ’em nothin’, but the way I figure, there was a point to their askin’. I think that woman knowed what she was lookin’ for.”
“Yes?”
“They asked most partic’lar about cliff houses an’ the like. Now, that was easy. This whole country around was lived in by cliff-dwellin’ Injuns. The mesa south of here is split with canyons, and most of ’em has cliff houses. So I told ’em about ’em, and said nothin’ at all about the tree house.”
The tree house? Ruble Noon felt a little thrill of excitement; something rang a bell in his mind, but he waited. More things were coming back to him, his brain seemed to be clearing of the fog that had settled over it. But the tree house? Where was it? And what about it?
“You’ve known the tree house for a long time, haven’t you?” he said.
The old man shrugged. “I reckon. It was me that found it and showed it to Tom Davidge. We’d been huntin’ elk, him an’ me; an’ old Tom, he put a bullet into one and I went after it, tryin’ for another shot. I passed that there tree, noticed somethin’ odd about it, an’ later I come back for a look-see.
“It was big an’ old—a sycamore, an’ they ain’t too many growin’ right around here. Great big limbs all bent and gnarled where they run into the flat face of the cliff. That sycamore was healthy an’ strong, but what taken my eye was some sort of polished places on the branches up close to the rock. It looked like somebody had been climbin’…so I climbed.
“That was the way I found that cliff house,” he went on. “Old? I’d say it was as old as any hereabouts, but this one had been patched up, an’ that a mighty long time ago. Up there in that house I found me an old Spanish dagger an’ an axe, the kind those Spanish men used who first come into New Mexico. The way I figure it, somebody found this place, maybe somebody who was with Rivera when he come through here ’way back in the 1700s.
“Later, that gent needed a hideout. Maybe he killed somebody down in the Spanish settlements, maybe he just wanted to git away. Anyway, he fetched up back here, fixed that place up, an’ lived there maybe for years. I figure he finally broke a leg, or maybe tangled with a grizzly, or some Utes. A lot of things can happen to a man alone.”
“Did Tom Davidge go there often?” Noon asked. Then, seeing the old man glance at Fan, he added, “This is Mr. Davidge’s daughter Fan.”
“I reckoned it. Fact is, Davidge went there mighty few times until toward the last, when he made a few trips. He liked to set up there, he said.”
Ruble Noon walked inside and poured another cup of coffee. It was reasonable to suppose that the tree house would be just the sort of place Tom Davidge might choose in which to hide whatever he had. There were a lot of things about Tom Davidge that might have been explained if one had only known his past. He had the ways and the style of an outlaw, or of a man who expected that someday he would need to make a last-ditch fight. His was obviously a devious mind, but that was not unexpected. Many men had come west to escape the consequences of some lawless act, or to find surroundings in which to begin anew. Whatever he was, after coming to this region Tom Davidge had apparently lived a good life and had built well.
Ruble Noon knew that he and Fan must get to the tree house. There was a good chance it was the place where Tom Davidge had hidden his money, and it was just possible that Peg Cullane was acting upon some clue, or some definite information that she had. On her own, she might locate the tree house and find whatever was there.
“You know,” he said, “I think we may be able to end all this. We will go to the tree house.”
He did not know where it was, and he said to the old man, “You can come with us. We will all go together.”
The old man looked up, smiling slyly. “I cannot go. I think the lady and the man with her will come back, an’ if I’m not here they’ll search for me. There’s no way to figure what they might do then…or what they might find.”
Then he added, “Not even you, Ruble Noon, want to tangle with the likes of German Bayles an’ Finn Cagle…not both of ’em together, you don’t.”
CHAPTER 17
FINN CAGLE AND German Bayles…he knew of them. They had been involved in several sheep and cattle wars, and Bayles had ridden for a time as a shotgun guard for Wells Farg
o. His activities had seesawed back and forth on both sides of the law. Cagle had always been on the wrong side, and he had served a term in Yuma’s Territorial Prison. Both men were professionals, and they were expensive to hire. And so was Lyman Manly, who had hunted him down on the Rio Grande.
Had Peg Cullane broken with Ben Janish? Or were these men her insurance that she would get a square deal? Or her kind of a deal, whatever it might be?
The thought that had come to him while the old man was speaking was simple enough. If they could find the money and get it into a bank in Denver, there would no longer be any reason for a fight.
Without getting the Davidge money, Peg could not afford to hire such men, nor would there be any reason to hire them. Ben Janish might just drift away. If not, he must be driven out; but the money was the thing. Get the money safely away from their grasping fingers and there was no longer a problem.
Denver…if he and Fan could find the money, they would have to get to Denver.
But first, the money, and that meant the tree house, but he did not know where the tree house was. Moreover, he dared not ask directly. The question would arouse the suspicions of the old man, and might even create a desire to act on his own…or to communicate with Peg Cullane.
He turned and went back inside and filled his cup with coffee….He carried it out to the porch, and took his time over it….The tree was a sycamore, and it grew against the face of a cliff. It was very little to start with, but it was something.
Carefully, he studied the area. There would be a trail of sorts toward the tree house, but it would not be an obvious one, for only Tom Davidge had gone there often. From where Ruble Noon stood he could see no cliffs, only trees and the mountains beyond.
“I was thinking,” he commented, “that Spanish soldier, if that’s what he was—the one you figure lived in the tree house—he must have had some troubling times, all alone like that, with nobody to help him watch for Indians. And if they chose to camp nearby he’d never dare leave the place.”
The Man Called Noon (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 14