Getting up from behind the stacked wood, I moved outside and eased along the rock wall until I could look both ways. Nothing at first . . . then a faint whisper of coarse cloth brushing on branches. Waiting until I detected a movement, I lifted the rifle, located the movement again, and fired.
There was a grunt, a heavy fall, and a bullet struck rock near my face. I ducked and half fell back into the tunnel. Outside there was cursing, and several shots. Catching up the packs, I slung one on my back. Ange already had the small one. An instant we paused. I levered a shot at a stab of flame from the trees, and then we slipped out.
The area around the tunnel lay in heavy darkness. We went swiftly along the wall and, when well away from the tunnel, turned up through the trees.
We had to go down the trail up which they had come, and go down it in darkness. Then we had to go up the opposite side, climb that steep talus slope to the bare, icy ridge that overlooked the Vallecitos. Whether Ange could make this, I did not know.
Once into the trees and moving, working away from the valley of the mine, we slowed down, holding to a steady pace. The snow had frozen, and we moved now across a good surface where there was no need for snowshoes.
The crude pair had been abandoned, as they were in bad shape anyway after the rough usage they had. As long as the cold held the snow would remain solid, but when it began to get warmer the ice beneath the snow, left from the sleet storm, would melt. Once that happened, travel would become impossible. At the lightest step, snow might slide, bringing down all the snow upon an entire mountainside in one gigantic avalanche. The cold was a blessing, severe as it was.
We traveled steadily. Nobody would be too anxious to investigate the mine, even when they began to believe we had escaped. And when they did investigate, they would start at once to seek for gold. Most of that in sight had been taken by me, and they were going to have to do some digging to get at the rest.
And before long they would have other things on their minds.
Time to time I stopped to give Ange a chance to catch her breath and ease her muscles. She didn't complain, and seemed to be holding up.
The moon was bright on the canyon wall when we came to the path down. Ange caught my sleeve. "Tell? Do we have to?"
"We have to."
I tried a foot on the trail. The frozen snow might make it a lot easier going down than loose snow over that sleet. Moving carefully, like a man walking on eggs, I started down.
Wind bit at exposed flesh, stiffening our muscles. The canyon below was a great open mouth of darkness. Above us the ridges and peaks towered pure, white, and glittering with wild beauty in the moonlight. It's rare in a man's Me to see such a sight, and I stopped for a minute, just taking it in. Ange was standing close behind, her hands on my back.
"I wish Ma could see that," I said. "She favors lovely things."
The wind gnawed at our faces with icy teeth, as we moved along. Snow crunched as we put our feet down, each step a lifetime of risk and doubt.
The path was scarce three feet wide, widening to four at the most but looking broader in spots because of the cornices of snow that hung over the lip. It was a steep path where every step had to be separate, the foot put carefully down, the weight rested gradually, and then the other foot lifted.
The sky above was amazingly bright; the moon made the hills and peaks like day. High above, on a frosty ridge where I hoped to be by daylight, the snow blew, throwing a brief veil across the sky. The snow hanging on the slopes above the trail made me mighty uneasy. Snow like that can start to slide on the slightest provocation, and with daylight it would become worse.
When we were halfway down, we stopped again, and Ange came up beside me. "You ready for it?" I asked her. They'll be coming soon, Ange."
"How long has it been?"
"Couple of hours ..."
We hit bottom with our knees shaking, and headed for the cave. By daylight they would realize we were gone. With the fire out, they would soon guess that we'd lit a shuck, and they would come a-helling after us.
We were almost to the cave before we smelled smoke. Catching a whiff of it, I pulled up short. Somebody was in the cave.
Stepping into the opening, gun up and ready, I found myself looking into the muzzle of a .44 gun. That gun muzzle looked as great as the cave mouth, as black as death itself.
"Mister," I said, "you put down that .44 gun. If you don't, I'm sure going to kill you."
And all the while he had the drop on me.
Chapter XIV
Newton was holding that pistol--that white headed kid I'd talked out of trouble back down the line.
He was lying on his back, looking sick, and the gun in his hand was shaky. A blanket was pulled over him, and I could see from the fire that he had been feeding sticks into it without getting up.
"What's the matter, Kid? You in trouble?"
He kept the gun on me. Could I swing that Winchester up in time to nail him? I was hoping I wouldn't have to try.
"Busted my leg."
"And they left you? That ain't hardly decent, Kid." Using up all the nerve I had in store, I put my rifle down. "Kid, put that gun away and let me look at your leg."
"You got no cause to help me," he said, but I could see he wanted help more than anybody I'd ever seen.
"You're hurt, that's cause enough. Maybe when you get well I'll have cause to shoot you, but right now I wouldn't leave no man in your kind of trouble."
I said to Ange, "You stay in the opening and keep a lookout. We may have to shoot our way out of here yet."
Taking the pistol from his hand, I pulled back the blanket. He had made a try at splinting his leg, but the splints had come loose. The leg was swollen and looked a fright.
I cut a split in his pants leg, and cut his boot to get it off. No cowhand likes to have a good pair of boots ruined, but there was no other way about it. Looked like a clean break a few inches below the knee, but those splints had been a lousy job. I cut some fresh ones, then I made a try at doing something to ease him.
I heated some water, and put hot cloths on that leg. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure how much good they'd do, but they would make him think he was being helped, a comfort to a man that's been lying alone, half-froze to death in a lonely cave.
"You drag yourself here?"
"They left me."
"That's a rawhide outfit, Kid. They aren't worth shootin'. You ought to cut loose from them and line up with a real bunch."
Breaking some sticks, I built up the fire, and all the time I was thinking what a pickle we were in. We had it bad enough, Ange and me, trying to take out over that ridge. And as if we weren't in trouble enough, we were now saddled with a man with a broke ... broken leg.
Folks might say it was none of my business, that my first duty was to get Ange out of here, and myself. It was nip and tuck whether we would make it or not--I'd say we were on the short end of the odds. The Kid had come with men who intended to rob me, probably murder me. And before that he had tried to pick a fight with me. Someday, somebody was going to have to shoot him, more than likely.
But left here, he would freeze to death before he could starve. There was no two ways about that. And none of that gold-hungry crowd would lift a hand to help.
Taking the axe, I walked down to the trees. The moon was gone now, but day was not too far off. Searching through a bunch of second-growth timber, stuff that had grown up after a slide had ripped it down, I found in a thick cluster of aspen just what I wanted, and cut two slim poles about eight feet long.
I carried them back to the cave, after trimming the branches off, and then took the axe and smoothed off one side. My axe was sharp and I'd split enough rails for fences back in Tennessee to know how to trim up a young tree. On the bottom end I made a bevel, curving the end upward a mite.
Going to the woodpile, I cut some crosspieces, notched the poles to take four of them, and then fitted them into the notches.
"What you fixin'?"
"Yo
u set quiet. Can't pack you out of here on my back, so I'm fixing a toboggan . . . such as it is."
"You'd take me out of here?" The Kid was not expecting any favors, seemed like.
"Can't let you lie here and freeze," I told him irritably. "Best thing you can do is stay quiet. If we get out at all, you'll be with us, but don't get your hopes up. Our chances are mighty poor."
For several minutes, while I wove some rawhide around the crosspieces, Kid Newton had nothing to say. Finally, he eased his leg a mite. "Sackett, you and that girl better take out. I mean, I'm no account. Why, I was fixin' to kill you back along the trail."
"Kid, you'd never have cleared leather. I wasn't hunting trouble, but I cut my teeth on a six-shooter."
"You can make it, you two. You're never going to get me over any trail on that sled."
"We aren't going by trail." I sat back on my heels. "Kid, if you get out of this alive you can sure tell folks you've been up the creek and over the mountain, because that's where we're going."
He didn't get it. And reason enough he couldn't. No man in his right mind would try what I figured to do.
Some of the trails by which we had come into the mountains would by now be a dozen feet under the snow. What I figured to do was go over the ridge ... to go right down the steep side of the mountain into camp.
Crazy? Sure . . . but the chute was choked with snow and ice, the upper valley was full by now, and the other trails, the one by which Ange came in ... the passes would be choked with snow there.
We had all come in on horseback, but no horse could get out. In places the snow might carry the weight of a man alone, but never the weight of men and horses. We might make it out, but it was a risk scarcely worth thinking about.
It is one thing to ride a horse through unknown country; it is another to go back afoot. It would take twice, maybe three times as long. The gang up there had figured to come in and go right out...
"What do you mean?" The Kid was looking at me now like he was afraid he did know.
Pausing in my work, I gestured at the mountain opposite, "The one above us is higher, and we're going over it."
He knew I was crazy now. One lone man taking a girl and a wounded man over that mountain!
The sky was gray overhead when we started out of there, me towing that crude toboggan behind me. The slope of talus was steep, but easier going with the snow on it, for the rock did not slide under me. Still, it was a struggle to get up to the foot of that chimney.
Ange looked up at it, and her eyes were mighty big when she turned back to me. 'Tell," she whispered, "you can't do it. It's impossible."
To tell the truth, I didn't feel very good about it myself. That was a high mountain, and that climb was going to be something. Slinging my rifle around my shoulders and hanging a coil of rope to my belt, I told Ange to come on.
The Kid, he was tied onto that sled, and he laid there looking at me. "You going to leave me, Sackett? I don't blame you. Unless you can fly, you ain't going up there."
I made one end of the rope fast to the head of the toboggan, and got ready to climb. The rope was made fast by taking a round turn on each runner, then tying the end of the rope to the standing part, so the sled would hang straight when I started to pull it.
Going up ahead, I cut a few toe-holds in the ice, and found a couple I'd used before where no ice had collected. When at last I climbed the chimney, I guided Ange.
She was little, but mighty lithe and strong when it came right down to it, and she made easier work of that climb up the chimney than I had.
The old, gnarled bristle-cone was standing there where I'd remembered it, atop that chimney and rooted deep in the rock. Taking a turn around that old tree, I dug my heels in and started to hand over hand that rope. Like I said, I'm a big man with a lot of beef in my shoulders and arms, but when I took the strain of that full weight, I surely knew I was in trouble.
Getting him clear of the ground was only part of it. He had to fend himself off the rocky face with his hands. A time or two, I could feel him helping me where he could get a hand-hold.
Ange stood behind me and cleared the rope around the trunk of the pine so we could hold what we had got. My hands were stiff, and I didn't think I'd ever get my fingers unwound from about that rope. But I hauled away.
Stopping to rest myself, with the Kid hanging there like a papoose slung on a pack board, I looked off across the valley.
Somebody was coming down the trail. How far? Maybe a quarter of a mile, a bit more or less. There were only four of them, the man behind was making a slow thing of it.
One of them jerked up his rifle and we heard the sound of a shot. What happened to that bullet I never could say, but it came nowhere near us. Judging distance across a canyon like that, when the target is higher than you--that's quite a stunt. Why, I've missed a few shots like that my own self.
Digging in my heels, I took hold of that rope. My arms ached and I was fighting for breath. Those high-up ridges surely took a man's wind. But I got him up a couple of feet farther, beat my hands to warm them, and started at it again.
There was no time to look across the canyon. There was only time to haul away. Heave, and heave again . . . catch a breath, and heave again.
Then the toboggan brought up against something and stuck.
"Ange," I said, straightening up, "I'm going down. When I ,clear the sled, you get as much rope around that pine as can be."
"Tell?"
Turning around, I looked at her. She was looking right at me. "Why are you doing this? Is it because of the way I acted?"
Well, I declare! I hadn't thought of that. "No, Ange, I never gave thought to that. No man can abide much by what a woman thinks, at times like this. He does what it's his nature to do. That man down there ... we had words one time. He was figuring to shoot me, and I was planning to beat him to it.
That there's one thing, this here's another. That's a helpless man, and when I get him up here and get him safe, then maybe 'hell come a-gunning for me. So I'll have to shoot him."
I started down the slope, then stopped and looked back. "Seems a lot of trouble to go to, doesn't it?"
Well, I cleared him, and we hoisted him out on top of the ridge, using the same route I'd found on that day when I left Ange in the cave.
Down below was Cap, our log house, and our claim -- down there in those trees. And up here the wind was blowing a gale, and a man could scarcely stand erect. One thing I knew: we had to get off that mountain, and fast. It was clouding up again--great banks of gray, solid cloud. That could mean more snow. That canyon could be twenty feet deep in snow before the week was out.
Camp was a half-mile as the crow flies, but a good five thousand feet down. Looking north to where I'd spotted what looked like a way down, I could still see it, despite the snow. Once into the trees, we could make it all right, although it would be work.
This ridge was about thirteen thousand feet up, and the wind was roaring along it All the gray granite was swept dean, although there were flurries of snow in the air from time to time. Leaning into the wind, we started on, towing the sled. Finally we got down over the edge of the ridge. Right away, the wind seemed to let up.
My face was raw from the wind, my hands were numb. My fingers in their gloves felt stiff, and I was afraid that the Kid, held immovable the way he was, would freeze to death.
Lowering the sled away ahead of us, we made it down. One time the wind came around a shoulder of the mountain and lifted the sled, man and all, like it was a leaf, but set it down again before the rope tore from my hands. We both heard the Kid scream when the drop jolted his broken leg.
Bracing myself on great shattered rocks, I lowered him. Climbing after, lowering Ange, I lost all sense of time, and could not remember when it ever had been warm.
Below us was a huge old tree, ripped from the rock by its roots. It sprawled like a great spider, petrified in the moment of death, legs writhing. A little below it were some wind-tortured trees, an
d then the forest We could see the tops of the trees and, far off below, a white, white world of snow, with here and there a faint feather of smoke rising from some house.
Hugging that wind-torn mountainside, and looking down into those treetops, I could hardly believe there was a house with a fire burning in it, or Ma a-rocking in her old rocker, or Orrin a-singing. It was a world far away from the wind, the cold, and snow that drove at your face like sand.
But, easing the sled down a little farther, we got into the trees. From there to the bottom it was mostly a matter of guiding the sled, belaying the rope around a tree here and there to ease it, and working our way through. One time Ange almost dropped, and my own knees were buckling most of the way.
By the time we reached the path I'd cut to build a little fort above the camp, I had fallen down a couple of times, and I was so numb with cold and so exhausted I could scarce think. The draw rope over my shoulder, and one arm around Ange, I started through the tall pines toward the house.
The snow was deep under the trees, but there was a slow lift of smoke from the chimney, and a light in the window. Seemed like only a short time ago it was coming daylight, and now it was night-time again.
Then I fell, face down in the snow. Seemed to me I tried to get up ... seemed to get my hands under me and push. I could see that light in the window and I could hear myself talking. I hauled away and got to the door, where I couldn't make my fingers work the latch.
The door opened of a sudden and Cap was standing there with a six-gun in his hand, looking like he was the old Cap and ready to start shooting.
"It ain't worth the trouble, Cap. I think I'm dead already."
Joe Rugger was there, and between them they got Kid Newton off the sled and into the house. Ange, she just sat down and started to cry, and I knelt on the floor and put my arm around her and kept telling her everything was all right.
Kid Newton caught my sleeve. "By God," he said, "today I seen a man! I thought--"
"Get some sleep," I said. "Joe's going for the doctor."
"I seen a man," the Kid repeated. "Why, when I hung those guns on me I thought I was something, I thought--"
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