It was a far-off sound, like rushing wind in a great forest, or like the distant sound of steam cars running on rails. It grew as we moved nearer, and I knew it for the sound of falling water.
I came to another keyhole pass, even narrower than the first, and the trail led into it. Alongside the narrow trail rushed the outflow of that ghost lake, spilling down the chute in a tumble of white water.
I could see it falling away in a series of falls, steep slides, and rapids. The pass was no more than a crack, not a canyon or ravine, just a gash in the face of the mountain wall, a gloomy place, shadowed and spattered by spray. A thread of trail skirted the rushing stream, a trail that must, much of the time, be under water.
Believe me, I took a good long look down that dark, narrow crack, filled with the roar of the water. Yet on the wall, in a place dug out for the purpose, was a sliver of quartz, and now I had come too far to turn back.
My horses shied from that opening, liking it not at all, but I was less smart than my horses, and urged them on, starting gingerly down the slide.
That rail was narrow ... it was almighty narrow. If it played out there would be no way of turning back. No mustang was ever taught to back up, and I'd no way of controlling the pack horse, anyway.
Once I got him started, that appaloosa was as big a fool as I was. Ears pricked, he started down, sliding on his rump in spots, it was that steep. A body couldn't hear a thing beyond the roar of the water.
Rock walls towered hundreds of feet overhead, closing in places until there was scarcely a crack above us, and it was like riding through a cave. Ferns overhung the water in places, and there was more than thirty yards in one place and twice as far in another where a thin sheet of water actually ran over the trail.
In other places, where the stream fell away into a deep chasm beside the trail, I lost all sight of the water, and could only hear it. In two or three spots, near waterfalls, the mist and spray was thick enough to soak a man and blot out everything. It was a death trap, all right, and I felt it. A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.
For about three miles I followed that trail. I went down it more than a thousand feet, judging by the vegetation in the valley that I found. It opened on my right, narrow at first, and then widening. The creek tumbled off and disappeared into a narrow, deep canyon shrouded by ferns and trees growing from the rock walk. But the trail turned into the valley.
At that point the valley was no more than twenty yards wide, with steep walls rising on either side. A man on foot might have climbed them; a horse couldn't have gone six feet. The last of the sunlight was tinting the canyon wall on the east, but for maybe a hundred and fifty yards I rode in deep shadows.
Then the valley broadened. It looked to be a couple of miles long, and from a quarter to a half-mile wide. A stream ran along the bottom and emptied into that run-off stream beside which I had been riding.
The bottom was as pretty a high mountain meadow as a body would care to see, and along the stream there were clumps of aspen, some dwarf willows, and other trees whose names I couldn't call to mind. A few elk were feeding not far off and they looked up at me. It was likely there was another way into the valley, but a body wouldn't know it from their actions. When I rode nearer they moved off, but seemed in no way frightened.
The pack horse was pulling back on the lead rope, not at all sure he wanted to go into that valley. My mount was going, all right, but he hadn't decided whether he liked it or not. Me, I was feeling spooky as an eight-year-old at a graveyard picnic in the evening.
So I shucked my Winchester, expecting I've no idea what.
We walked it slow. Horse, he was stepping high, ears up and spooky as all get out, but you never saw a prettier little valley than this one, caught as now with the late shadows on it, and a shading of pink and rose along that rocky rim, high above us.
And then I saw the cave.
Actually, it was only a place hollowed out by wind and water from the face of the cliff, but it cut back maybe eight or ten feet at its deepest, and there were some trees, mostly aspen, growing in front, masking the entrance.
Getting down, I tied my horses to a tree, not risking them taking off and leaving me afoot.
No tracks , . . nobody had been around here for a long time.
Part of the opening had been walled up with stone the way cliff dwellers sometimes do, and the inside was all black with the smoke of forgotten fires. There was nothing much there but broken stone where part of the wall had fallen, and in back, at the deepest part, a polished log that had been cut off at both ends with an axe.
That big old log was polished smooth from folks a-setting on it, but at one end there were several rows of small notches. Counting them, they added up to groups of thirty and thirty-one and, figuring each notch as a day, they came out to about five months. In a place like this, that's a long time.
Sand had blown into the cave, and my toe stubbed against something on the floor at the back. Digging around it with my hand, I pulled out one of those old breastplates like the Spanish men wore. It was rusted, but it had been made of good steel, tempered to take the force of a blow.
All I knew about the Spanish men I'd heard from
Pa when he used to yarn with us about his old days as a mountain man. He told us much of Santa Fe, where he had lived for a spell, and I knew that Santa Fe was ten, eleven years old before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Hock.
Those Spanish men had done a sight of exploring, and much of it was only a matter of record away over in Spain. How many expeditions had gone exploring, nobody rightly knew, and this might have been the tag end of one of them.
The trail I'd been hunting as I rode south was one Pa had told me about, and of which I heard more from miners in Montana. Spanish men had used that trail for trading expeditions to the Ute country. Traders had traveled that route to the north before Father Escalante, even before Captain John Smith sighted the Virginia shore, but they left little record. Rivera had scouted through here in 1765, but he was a late-comer.
Studying around in the little time I had before it got dark, I figured that no more than three or four men had reached this valley, and two of them had never left it, because I found their graves. One of them had a stone marker, and the date of death was 1544.
Maybe I was the first to see that grave in three hundred years.
That shelter might have slept four in a pinch, certainly no more. Yet at least one man had to get out of here to leave the trail I'd found, and I had a hunch it was two men. The only puzzle was how they had come upon this valley in the first place.
On the wall, half concealed by aspen leaves, was carved a Spanish word: Oro. Beside it an arrow pointed up the valley.
Oro is a word that most men recognize, even those who know no other Spanish. Serving in the army with a couple of men who spoke the Spanish tongue, I'd learned a bit of the language, and much more while in Texas.
The shadows were long now, but there was still light, and I had that word to lead me on. Stepping into the saddle, I walked my horses up the valley. Sure enough, a half-mile up I found a. tunnel dug into the side of the hill, and broken rock around it.
Picking up a chunk from a pile stacked against the wall of the tunnel, I found it heavy--heavy with gold. It was real gen-u-ine high-grade, the kind a body hears tell of, but rarely sees.
Those Spanish men had found gold all right. No matter how they came to be here, they had found it, and now it was mine.
All I had to do was get it out.
Chapter III.
So there I was, up to my ears in a strange country, with gold on my hands.
We Sacketts never had much. Mostly we wanted land that we could crop and graze, land where we could rear a family. We set store by kinfolk, and when trouble showed we usually stood against it as a family.
The Higgins feud, which had cost our family lives, had ended while I was away. Tyrel ended that feud on the da
y when Orrin was facing up to marriage. Long Higgins had come laying for Orrin, figuring Orrin's mind would be all upset with marrying. Long Higgins missed Orrin when his bride pushed Orrin out of the way, but she took the lead meant for a Sackett.
Trouble was, Long never figured on Tyrel, and you always had to figure on Tyrel.
He was a man who could look right along the barrel of your gun at you just like you'd look across a plate of supper. He would look right down your gun barrel and shoot you dead. Only Tyrel never hunted trouble.
We were nip and tuck with a pistol. Maybe I was a shade better with a rifle, but it was always a question.
Right now the question was one of gold. Pa, he always advised us boys to take time to contemplate. I taken it now.
First off, I had to figure what to do. The gold was here, but it had to be kept secret until I could get it laid claim to officially, and get it out.
Gold is never a simple thing. Many a man has wished he had gold, but once he has it he finds trouble. Gold causes folks to lose their right thinking and their common sense. It had been lied for and killed for, and I was in a lawless land.
Gold has weight, and when a body carries it, it is hard to hide. Gold seems almost to have an odor. Folks can smell it out even faster than gossip.
Finding the gold had been one thing, but getting it out was another. I'd no tools, and nothing in which to carry it but my saddlebags. Nearly all my money had gone to buy grub and gear for this trip south. I wanted to take enough gold out now to buy a mining outfit.
Seemed to be a sight of gold here, near as I could judge, as much as a body could want, but mostly I wanted enough for cattle and a place of my own, and enough to buy time for a little book learning.
It ain't right for a man to be ignorant, but in the hills we had school only one year out of three, and the time might not last over two, three months. When I got all squared away with a pencil I could write my name ... Pa and Tyrel could read it, too. Only one of my officers in the army could read it, but he told me not to worry. "A man who can shoot like you can," he said, "isn't likely to have anybody question the way he signs his name."
But even if a man pays no mind to himself, he has to think of his youngsters, when and if. We Sacketts were healthy breeders, running long on tall boys. Counting ourselves, we had forty-nine brothers and cousins. Pa had two sisters and five brothers living. Starting a feud with us didn't make any kind of sense. If we couldn't outshoot them we could outbreed them.
A man who expects to sire children doesn't want to appear the fool in front of them. We Sacketts believed young folks should respect their elders, but their elders had to deserve respect. Finding the gold could mean all the difference to me.
While I was contemplating, I was unsaddling my horses and settling down for the night. The season was well into spring and fetching up to summer. The snow was almost off the mountains although in this kind of country it never seemed to leave entirely, and there was no telling when it might snow again.
If I went out, got an outfit and came back, it would be a close thing to get out some gold and leave before snow fell. High up as I was, snow could be expected nine months out of the year. And when snow fell, that valley up above would fill up and the stream would freeze over. Anybody caught in this valley would be stuck for the winter.
Yet a heavy rain could make that narrow chute impassable for days. Allowing for rain spells and snow, there were probably not over fifty or sixty days a year when a man could get in or out of the valley. ... Unless there was another way in.
It left me with a worried, uneasy feeling to think I was in a jug that might be stoppered at any time.
Making coffee over my fire, I studied about my situation. Those Bigelows now, the brothers of the man I'd had to shoot . . . they might think I had run from them, and they might try to follow me.
During that ride south I'd taken no more than usual precautions with my trail, and it fretted me to think that they might follow me south, and bother Orrin and Tyrel. Our family had had enough of feuding, and I'd no right to bring trouble to their door.
That the Bigelows would follow me to this place I did not expect. From my first discovery of the strange trail, I had taken care to cover my tracks and leave nothing for anybody to find.
A wind scurried my fire, just a mite of wind, and my eyes strayed to that old breastplate against the wall. Did the ghosts of men really prowl in the night? Never a man to believe in ha'nts, I was willing to believe that if a place was to be ha'nted, this was a likely one.
Empty as this valley seemed, I had the feeling of somebody looking over my shoulder, and the horses were restless too. Come sleeping time, I brought them in off the grass where they had been picketed and kept them closer to the fire. A horse makes the best sentinel in many cases, and I had no other. However, I was a light sleeper.
At daylight I shagged it down to the stream and baited a hook for trout. They snagged onto my hook and put up a fight like they were sired by bulldogs, but I hauled them in, fried them out, and made a tasty breakfast.
Making a handle out of a stick I split the end and wedged in a rounded stone, then lashed it in place. Using that and a few blades of stone, I started to work on that ore in the end of the tunnel. By sundown I had broken my axe handle twice at the hammer end, but had knocked off about three hundredweight of ore.
Long after nightfall I sat beside my fire and broke up that quartz. It was rotten quartz, some of which I could almost pull apart with my fingers, but I hammered it down and got some of the gold out. It was free gold, regular jewelry store stuff, and I worked until after midnight.
The crackling of my fire in the pine-scented night was a thing to pleasure me, but I walked down to the bank of the stream in the darkness and bathed in the cold water of the creek. Then I went back to the cave where I was camped and went to work on a bow.
Growing up with Cherokees like we did, all of us boys hunted with bows and arrows, even more than with guns. Ammunition was hard to come by when Pa was off in the western lands, and sometimes the only meat we had was what we killed with a bow and arrow.
My fire was burning wood that held the gathered perfume of years, and it smelled right good, and time to time the flames would strike some pitch and flare up, changing color, pretty as all get-out. Suddenly the heads of my horses came up, then I was over in the deep shadows with my Winchester cocked.
Times like that a man raised to wild country doesn't think. He acts without thinking ... or he may never get a chance to think again.
For a long time I waited, not moving a muscle, listening into the night. Firelight reflected from the flanks of my horses. It could be a bear or a lion, but from the way the horses acted I did not think so.
After a while the horses went back to eating, so I took a stick and snaked the coffeepot to me and had some coffee and chewed some jerked beef.
Awakening in the gray morning light, I heard a patter of rain on the aspen leaves, and felt a chill of fear ... if it started to rain and that chute filled up with run-off water it might be days before I could get out.
So I sacked up my gold. The horses seemed happy to have me moving around. There was about three pounds of gold, enough and over for the outfit I'd need.
When I went outside I saw that the trout I'd cleaned and hung in a tree against breakfast were gone. The string with which I'd suspended the meat had been sawed through by a dull blade . . . or gnawed by teeth.
I stood looking at the ground. Under the tree there were several tracks. They were not cat tracks, they were the tracks of little human feet. They were the tracks of a child or a small woman.
My skin crawled . . . nothing human could be in a place like this; yet come to think of it, I couldn't recall ever hearing of a ha'nt with a taste for trout.
We Welsh, like the Irish and the Bretons, have our stories of the Little People, all of which we love to yarn about, but we do not really believe in such things. But in America a man heard other tales. Not often, for Indi
ans did not like to talk of them, and never spoke of them except among themselves. But I'd talked to white men who took squaws to wife, and they lived among Indians, and heard the tales.
Up in Wyoming I rode by to look at the Medicine Wheel, a great wheel of stone with twenty-odd spokes, well over a hundred feet across. The Shoshones copied their medicine lodge from that wheel, but all they can say about who built the wheel is that it was done by "the people who had no iron."
A hundred miles away to the southwest there was a stone arrow pointing toward the wheel. It pointed a direction for someone--but who?
My gold was sacked to go, but I needed meat, and disliked to fire a gun in that valley. So I stalked a young buck and killed him with an arrow, butchered him, and carried the meat back to the cave, where I cut a fair lot of it into strips and hung them on a pole over a fire to smoke.
Then I broiled a steak of venison and ate it, decided that wasn't enough for a man my size, and broiled another.
Hours later the wind awakened me. The fire was down to red coals and I was squirming around to settle down for sleep again when my mustang blew.
Me, I came out of those blankets like an eel out of greased fingers, and was back in the shadows again with my rifle hammer eared back before you could say scat.
"All right, boy." The horses would know I was awake and they were not alone. At first there was no sound but the wind, then after a bit a stirring made by no bear or deer in the world.
My bronc snorted and my pack horse blew. I could see their legs in the faint glow of the coals, and nothing moved near them . . . but something was out there in the night.
A long slow time dragged by and the coals glowed a duller red. Leaning back against the wall, I dozed a little, but alert for trouble if need be.
There was no other sound.
Morning was painting a sunrise on a storm-gored ridge beyond the dark sentinel pines when I got up, stretched my stiff muscles. Studying the trees across the valley and the slope above them, I failed at first to notice what was closest to home. The rest of that meat had been pulled from the tree and a good-sized hunk had been cut off.
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