Only You o-3
Page 24
«And even if his Comancheros can read the sign,» Reno continued, «I’ll bet Jericho got to thinking about how much plain hard work gold mining is.»
«It didn’t make him give up.»
«No. He’s just going to wait for us to find the mine and get a bunch of gold together,» Reno said. «Then he’s going to come down on us like a blue norther’.»
Silence followed Reno’s calm words.
Finally Eve asked faintly, «What are we going to do?»
«Find the mine and the gold and hope to God above that Cal or Wolfe or Rafe gets wind of Slater before he gets impatient and kills us, and to hell with the gold.»
«What good would Caleb or one of the others be? It would still be three of us against however many Slater has.»
«He’s got at least two men scouting us, and the rest are raising enough dust for an even dozen. And the longer he’s on the trail, the more the word goes out. But he’s replaced the men he lost in that ambush three times over.»
«Do you think there’s much chance of Caleb following us?»
«More chance than there is of us finding Spanish gold,» Reno said succinctly.
«How will he know where we are?» Eve asked.
«News travels fast in a wild land, and Cal is a listening kind of man.»
«Then Slater could know about other people following us, too.»
«He could,» Reno agreed.
«You don’t sound worried.»
«Cal isn’t hunting me with death on his mind,» Reno said. «Slater knows Cal as the Man from Yuma. He’ll be real unhappy about having Cal on his trail. Cal, Wolfe, and I caught Jericho’s twin brother in a cross fire. What happened to Jed would have been a lesson to a man smarter or less mean than Jericho Slater.»
TWO days later, Eve was still watching the back trail as often as the way ahead. Hand shading her eyes beneath her hat brim, she stood in the stirrups and she looked out over the way she and Reno had come.
She thought she saw a thickening in the air way back where the Abajos began rising from the last broad step up from the stone maze, but it was hard to be certain. In the dry air, it was possible to see eighty or a hundred miles. At that distance, things smaller than mountains and mesas tended to flow together in a muted rainbow blur.
The slight haze she thought she saw could have been caused by a group of wild horses that had been startled by something and had galloped off, leaving a cloud of dust to rise behind.
The vague darkening in the air could also have been caused by wind blowing up dust, but it was beneath one of the blue-black clumps of cloud that were marching over the land. Dust and rain didn’t seem a likely combination.
It could have been simply a trick played on her by eyes tired from straining forever into the distance, seeking something that might or might not be there.
Or it could be Slater and his gang, dogging Reno and Eve’s trail with unnerving patience.
Eve turned away from her scrutiny of the back trail.
She felt a distinct thrill of pleasure as she watched Reno ride closer. He called hergata, but he was the one who moved with feline quickness and grace in everything he did.
Even before Reno spoke, Eve sensed his buried excitement in the way he held himself. It was a difference few people would have noticed, but she had come to know him very well during the long days and passionate nights on the trail.
«What did you find?» Eve asked before Reno could speak.
«What makes you think I found anything?» he asked, reining in alongside her.
«Don’t tease,» she said eagerly. «What is it?»
Smiling, Reno reached back into a saddlebag. When his hand emerged again, he was holding a piece of curved wood wrapped in rawhide that was cracked with age and dryness, and bleached nearly white by the sun.
Eve looked at the junk lying on Reno’s palm. Then she looked at him, perplexed by his excitement.
Smiling, he hooked his arm around her neck, pulling her close for a brief, hard kiss before he released her once more and explained.
«It’s a piece of stirrup,» Reno said. «The Spanish didn’t always use iron stirrups. This one was carved from a hardwood tree that grew half a world away from here.»
Hesitantly Eve touched the fragment of stirrup. When her fingertips brushed the smooth, weathered wood, she felt a spectral chill down her spine. Awe and curiosity rippled through her.
«I wonder if the man who used this was a priest or a soldier,» Eve said. «Was his name Sosa or Leon? Did he write in the journal, or did he watch while another man wrote? Did he have a wife and children in Spain or Mexico, or did he give himself only to God?»
«I was thinking the same things,» Reno admitted. «Makes you wonder if someone two hundred years from now will find that broken cinch ring we left next to the campfire ashes yesterday, and if they’ll wonder about who rode there and when and why, and if we’ll somehow know someone is thinking about us hundreds of years after we died.»
Eve shivered again and withdrew her hand.
«Maybe Slater will find the cinch ring and use it for target practice,» she said.
Reno’s head came up sharply. «Did you see sign of him and his gang?»
«I couldn’t be sure,» Eve said, pointing. «It’s so far back.»
Standing in the stirrups, Reno stared along the back trail. After a long minute, he sat once more and looked at Eve.
«All I see in that direction are some storm clouds trying to rain,» he said.
«I thought it might be the wind kicking up dust,» she said, «but the clouds were right over that spot, and it looked dark almost all the way to the ground. Rain and dust don’t mix.»
«They do here. In the summer it’s so hot and thirsty that rain from a small storm like that never reaches the ground. The drops just dry up in midair and vanish.»
Eve looked back at the clouds. They were the color of slate on the bottom and cream on the top. A ragged, slanting veil of lighter gray came from the base of the little storm.
The longer she stared, the more Eve was certain that Reno was right. The veil became thinner and thinner as it approached the ground. By the time the surface of the earth was reached, there was no moisture left.
«A dry rain,» Eve said wonderingly.
Reno shot her a sideways look.
When Eve realized he was staring at her, she gave him an odd, bittersweet smile.
«Don’t worry, sugar man. You’re safe. I’ve seen ships made of stone and a dry rain, but even the smallest light casts a shadow.»
Before Reno could think of an answer, Eve urged her horse forward, heading deeper into the mountains, searching for the only thing the man she loved would count on.
Gold.
For two more days they followed a trail that was so old it appeared only to the half-focused eye or very late in the day, when sunlight slanted steeply and was the color of Spanish treasure. The valleys they rode through became smaller and steeper the higher they rode in the mountains. Every afternoon thunder rumbled through the mountains while first one peak and then another played host to the elemental dance of lightning. Rain came down cold and hard, running off the trees in veils of silver lace.
Between storms, aspens on the highest slopes lifted their golden torches to the indigo sky. Deer and elk were everywhere, fleet brown ghosts that withdrew before the horses. Creeks of startling purity abounded, filling shadowed ravines with the sound of running water. Only game trails were visible. There were no tracks of wild horses or man, for there was nothing on the steep slopes or in the rugged mountain canyons that couldn’t be found more easily at lower elevations.
When Reno and Eve came to the last, high valley described by both the shaman and the Spanish journal, they rode its length silently, looking all around.
There was no sign of Cristobal Leon’s lost mine.
19
«It’s hard to believe we aren’t the first people to see this land,» Eve said as they came back to the mouth of the small valley.
«Feels that way,» Reno agreed, «but there’s plenty of signs that men have been through here.»
He reined in, hooked his right leg around the saddle horn, and lifted the spyglass again, but not to look at the meadow. Slowly he surveyed the green patchwork of forest and meadow falling away to the dry lands below, seeking any sign of the men he was certain were following them. The brass casing of the spyglass glowed in the muted light with every shift in direction.
«What signs?» Eve asked after a minute.
«See that stump at the edge of the meadow, right in front of that big spruce?»
Eve looked. «Yes.»
«You get close enough and you’ll see ax marks.»
«Indians?» she asked.
«Spaniards.»
«How can you be sure?»
«Steel ax marks, not stone.»
«Indians have steel axes,» Eve said.
«Not when that tree was chopped down.»
«How can you tell?»
Reno lowered the spyglass and gave his attention to Eve. He had come to enjoy her curiosity and quick mind as much as he did her feline grace.
«That big spruce has roots that were shaped around the fallen log that came off that stump,» Reno said. «Since the spruce has been there a long time, the log must have been there, too.»
«Why would someone go to all the trouble of chopping down a tree and not take it?»
«Probably they were forced to leave by weather or Indians or news that the Spanish king had double-crossed the Jesuits and they could look forward to going home in chains.» He shrugged. «Or maybe they only wanted the top of the tree to use as thatching or to make a chicken ladder for the mine.»
Eve frowned. «What’s a chicken ladder?»
«If I could find the damned mine, I’d probably be able to show you one,» muttered Reno, putting the spyglass to work again.
«If you stopped looking over our back trail, maybe you’d find the mine,» she said dryly.
With an impatient movement, Reno collapsed the spyglass and straightened in the saddle.
«There’s nobody there,» he said.
«I think you’d be happy about that.»
«I’d be a lot happier if I knew where they were.»
«At least they can’t be preparing an ambush up ahead,» Eve pointed out. «There’s only one way into this valley.»
«Which means there’s only one way out.»
Distant thunder rumbled from a peak that was buried in a mound of clouds. Wind twisted through the forest like an invisible river, stirring everything within reach of its transparent currents. The air smelled of evergreens and an autumn chill sliding down from the heights, riding the crest of a golden wave of aspens.
Reno looked around with narrowed green eyes, bothered by something about the high valley that he couldn’t quite define.
Yawning, Eve closed her eyes, then half opened them, enjoying the rich color of the late afternoon light and the knowledge that they would be making camp soon. Lazily she looked around, trying to guess if Reno would choose this place to camp or press on beyond the head of the valley to see if there was a way through the massed peaks.
An odd pattern of meadow growth caught Eve’s attention, plants arrayed in a nearly perfect circle. She knew that natural outlines were rarely geometrical. Man, not nature, had invented formal gardens with precise curves, right angles, and hedges pruned into unlikely shapes.
The circular patch of plants lay near one of several small springs that formed the headwaters of a branch of the creek that drained the valley. Eve reined the lineback dun closer to the plants. Dismounting, she went to check the circle on foot. At its edges the ground was bedrock covered by a thin skin of soil. Yet in the circle itself, there was a profusion of plants that usually preferred richer ground.
When Reno turned to say something to Eve, he saw that she was on her hands and knees at the edge of the meadow. In the next instant he realized what had seemed wrong to him about the landscape.
Beneath the growth of grass and trees, there were angles and arcs that suggested man had once cut, cleared, and built in the meadow.
Reno dismounted in a rush, grabbed a shovel from the outside of one of the pack saddles, and headed for Eve. She looked up as she heard him approach.
«There’s something odd about this,» she began.
«There sure is.»
He positioned the shovel, rammed it home with his boot, and struck stone six inches down. He went to another part of the circle and then another. Each time it was the same — six inches of plants and soil, and then solid stone.
Reno walked slowly toward the center of the circle, testing the depth of the soil every few inches. When he got to the center, the shovel bit deeply but didn’t find stone.
«Reno?»
He turned to Eve with a slashing grin and pure excitement dancing in his green eyes.
«You found yourself anarrastra, sugar girl,» he said.
«Is that good?»
Reno’s laughter was as bright and golden as the sunlight.
«It sure is,» he said. «Next best thing to finding the mine itself.»
«Really?»
He made a purring, rumbling sound of satisfaction.
«This is the center hole,» Reno said, gesturing with the shovel for emphasis. «It supported the mill that dragged the stone over the ore, crushing it as fine as sand.»
Before Eve could ask a question, Reno bent and began digging once more, working methodically until he had bared a section of rock.
«They worked this crusher long and hard,» he said. «The millstone wore the bedrock down so much that it left a circular trough for plants to grow in once the mine was abandoned.»
«What turned the millstone?» she asked. «Even with a dam, there isn’t enough water in the little springs to do the job.»
«No sign of a dam anywhere nearby,» Reno said.
The shovel scraped against bedrock, gouging away dirt, leaving bare stone behind. Cracks and seams in the surface were marked by soil that was darker than the stone.
«They could have used horses to turn the mill,» Reno continued. «But likely it was slaves. They had more of them than they had horses.»
Eve rubbed her hands over her arms. Though she wore one of Reno’s dark shirts over Don Lyon’s old gambling shirt, she felt chilled. It was as though the very ground were infused with the cruelty of the Spaniards and the misery of the slaves.
Reno went down on one knee, used the shovel blade to ream out a crack, and made a triumphant sound.
«Quicksilver in the cracks,» he said succinctly. «No doubt of it. Thisarrastrawas used on metal ore.»
«What?»
«The Spaniards used quicksilver on the crushed ore. The mercury stuck to the gold but not the ore itself. Then they heated the amalgam, vaporizing the quicksilver and melting the gold. Then they poured the gold into molds.»
Brushing off his hands, Reno stood and stared around intently.
«What are you looking for?» Eve asked after a time.
«The mine. The Spaniards weren’t stupid. They didn’t move the ore one more foot than they had to before they refined it.»
«There’s supposed to be a trio of big fir trees just to the left of the mine opening when you’re standing with the sun at your back at three o’clock on the third Saturday in August,» Eve said eagerly.
He grunted and kept looking.
«Reno?»
«There are a lot of big fir trees growing three to a bunch no matter what time of the day or month it is,» he said after a few moments.
Frowning in concentration, Eve tried to remember the other clues from the journal. She and Don had once taken turns reciting them to each other while Donna sat nearby, smiling and shaking her head at the dream of wealth that wouldn’t die.
«There’s a turtle carved on a gray rock fifteen paces to the right of the mine,» Eve offered.
«A pace can be anywhere from two feet to three, depending on the height
of the man doing the pacing. But if you want to look at every boulder for a turtle, I won’t get in your way.»
Eve grimaced. The little valley was carpeted with boulders of all sizes and shapes.
«A burn scar on the north side of —» she began.
«Burn scars heal,» Reno interrupted. «Little trees grow into big ones. Big ones die and get blown down. Lightning starts new fires. Downed trees rot or are overgrown with brush. Landslides change the shape of the mountain.»
«But —»
«Look up there,» Reno said, pointing.
Eve looked and saw a pale scar on the mountain where rock and thin soil had sheered away, scouring down a ravine and finally filling it, burying whatever might have been a landmark before.
«That could have happened twenty years ago or two hundred and twenty years ago,» Reno said. «Without evergreens or aspen growing in the scar, it’s hard to tell. Fireweed and willow or alder can grow in a few seasons and regrow each season forever. Landmarks that rely on plants are damn near useless.»
«Then how are we going to find the mine?» Eve asked in dismay.
«The same way you found thearrastra. Look for something out of place, and keep on looking for it until it jumps up and slaps you in the face.»
For the rest of that day and all of the next, Reno and Eve quartered the valley like patient hounds, crossing and recrossing the area around the overgrownarrastra. They found a rectangle whose outline had once been logs and now was little more than a mulch in which various plants flourished. They found bits of leather nearly petrified by long exposure to the dry, cold mountain air.
They found no sign of the mine itself.
Eve scrambled up a rubble slope and found a shallow alcove tucked beneath a wall of rock, protected from all but the most violent storms. With an eye sharpened by hours of searching, she noted that the lines of rotting wood that came out from the alcove were too orderly to be accidental. Once there had been a lean-to or shed extending outward.
In the farthest recess of the alcove Eve found a pile of rubble and a crushed sack made of woven leather strips. Nearby were the charcoal remains of an ancient fire. Quickly she went to the ledge and called across the meadow.