Outlaw m-3

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “How did you know this was here?” Ten asked.

  “No juniper or pinon,” Diana said absently as she turned the relic of the past over and over in her hands.

  Ten glanced around. She was right. Despite the luxuriant growth of big sage on the ground, there were no junipers or pinons for fifty yards in any direction.

  “They don’t grow on ground that has been disturbed,” Diana continued, measuring the area of the big sage with her eyes. “When you see a place like this, there’s a very good chance that Anasazi ruins lie beneath the surface, covered by the debris of time and rain and wind.”

  Gray eyes narrowed while Ten silently reviewed his knowledge of the surrounding countryside.

  “There are a lot of patches of big sage on Wind Mesa,” he said after a minute. “My God, there must be hundreds of places like this on both sides of Picture Wash. That and the presence of year-round water is why the MacKenzies bought rights to this land more than a century ago.”

  “It was the water and the presence of game that attracted the Anasazi a thousand years ago. Human needs never change. All that changes is how we express those needs.”

  With the care of a mother returning a baby to its cradle, Diana replaced the rock in its hollow and smoothed dirt back in place.

  “That’s what is so exciting about the whole area of Wind Mesa,” she said as she worked. “For a long time we believed that the Durango River was the farthest northern reach of the Anasazi in Colorado. September Canyon proved that we were wrong.”

  “Not all that wrong,” Ten said dryly. “You talk as though we’re a hundred miles from the river. We’re not. It just seems like it by the time you loop around mountains and canyons on these rough roads.”

  Absently, Diana nodded. When she stood up, she was quite close to Ten. She didn’t even notice. Her attention was on the area defined by the silvery big sage, and she was looking at her surroundings with an almost tangible hunger.

  “This could have been a field tended by a family and watered by spreader dams and ditches built by Anasazi,” she said. “Or it could have been a small community built near a source of good water and food. It could have been the Anasazi equivalent of a church or a convent or a men’s club. It could have been so many things…and I doubt if we’ll ever know exactly what.”

  “Why not?”

  Diana turned and focused on Ten with blue eyes that were as dark and as deep as the storm condensing across the western sky.

  “This is Rocking M land,” Diana said simply. “Private land. Luke MacKenzie is already bearing the cost of excavating and protecting the September Canyon ruins. I doubt that he can afford to make a habit of that kind of generosity.”

  “Luke’s partner is absorbing the cost, but you’re right. Ranching doesn’t pay worth a damn as it is. The cost of protecting the whole of Wind Mesa…” Ten lifted his Stetson and resettled it with a jerk. “We’d do it if we could, but we can’t. It would bankrupt us.”

  The sad understanding in Diana’s smile said more about regret and acceptance than any words could have.

  “Even the government can’t afford it,” she agreed, rubbing her hands absently on her jeans. “County, state, federal, it doesn’t matter which level of government you appeal to. There just isn’t enough money. Even at Mesa Verde, which is designed to be a public showcase of the whole range of Anasazi culture, archaeologists have uncovered ruins, measured them, then backfilled them with dirt. It was the only way to protect them from wind, rain and pothunters.”

  Ten looked around the rugged mesa top and said quietly, “Maybe that’s best. Whatever is beneath the earth has been buried for centuries. A few more centuries won’t make any difference.”

  “Here, probably not,” Diana said, gesturing to the big sage. “But on the cliffs or on the edges of the mesa, the ruins that aren’t buried are disintegrating or being dismantled by pothunters. That’s why the work in September Canyon is so important. What we don’t learn from it now probably won’t be available to learn later. The ruins will have been picked over, packed up and shipped out to private collections all over the world.”

  The passion and regret in Diana’s voice riveted Ten. He was reaching out to touch her in silent comfort when he caught himself. A touch from a man she feared would hardly be a comfort.

  “Don’t sell this countryside short when it comes to protecting its own,” Ten said. “The big sage may be a giveaway on Wind Mesa, but this is a damned inconvenient place to get to. There’s only one road and half the time it’s impassable. There’s a horse trail through the mountains that drops down to September Mesa, but only a few Rocking M riders even know about it and no one has used it in years.”

  Slowly, almost unwillingly, Diana focused on Ten, sensing his desire to comfort her as clearly as the kitten had sensed its safety within Ten’s hands.

  “As for the scores of little canyons that might hold cliff ruins,” Ten said, watching Diana, sensing the soft uncurling of her tightly held trust, “most of those canyons haven’t seen a man since the Anasazi left. Any man. The Utes avoided the ruins as spirit places. Cows avoid the small canyons because the going is too rough, so cowhands don’t go there, either. What’s hidden stays hidden.”

  Ten’s deep voice with its subtle velvet rasp swirled around Diana, holding her still even as it caressed her. She stared at the clear depths of his eyes and felt a curious mix of hunger and wariness, yearning and… familiarity.

  “And if some of those ruins are never found, is that so bad?” Ten asked softly. He spoke slowly, watching Diana’s eyes, trying to explain something hehad never put into words. “Like the Anasazi, the ruins came from time and the land. It’s only right that some of them return to their beginnings untouched by any but Anasazi hands.”

  A throaty muttering of thunder rode the freshening wind. The sound seeped into Diana’s awareness, bringing with it a dizzying feeling of deja vu; of overlapping realities; of time, like a deck of cards, being reshuffled, and the sound of that shuffling was muted thunder. Her breathing slowed and then stopped as an eerie certainty condensed within her: she had known Ten before, had stood on a mesa top with him before, had walked with him through pinon and sun and silence, had slept next to his warmth while lightning and rain renewed the land…

  The feeling passed, leaving Diana shaken, disoriented, staring at a man who should have been a stranger and was not. Thunder came again, closer, insistent. She took a deep breath, infusing herself with the elemental, unforgettable pungency of sage and pinon, juniper and storm. And time. That most of all. The scent of time and a storm coming down.

  Closing her eyes, Diana breathed deeply, filling herself with the storm wind, feeling it touch parts of her that had been curled tightly shut for too many years. The sensation of freedom and vulnerability that followed was frightening and exhilarating at the same time, like swimming nude in a midnight lake.

  “Storm coming,” Ten said, looking away from Diana because if he watched her drink the wind any longer he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from touching her. “If we’re going to cross Picture Wash, we have to hurry. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”

  Diana’s eyes opened. She saw a powerful man standing motionless, silhouetted against sunlight and thunderheads, his head turned away from her. Then be looked back at her, and his eyes were like cut crystal against the darkness of his face.

  “Diana?”

  The sound of her name on Ten’s lips made sensations glitter through her body from breastbone to knees.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to sound businesslike and failing. “I’m coming.”

  6

  There was some water running in Picture Wash, but the big ranch truck crossed without difficulty. Splash marks on the other side of the ford told Ten that he wasn’t the only person who had driven toward September Canyon today. Ten glanced quickly around but saw nothing. They had passed no one the entire length of the one-lane dirt road, which meant that the other vehicle was still in
front of them.

  Frowning, Ten turned right and drove along the edge of the broad wash. There was no real road to follow, simply a suggestion of tire tracks where other vehicles had gone before. Tributary canyons opened up on the left of the wash, and more were visible across the thin ribbon of water, but Ten made no attempt to explore those openings. After three miles he turned left into the mouth of a side canyon.

  Diana looked at him questioningly.

  “September Canyon,” Ten said. “The mesa it’s eaten out of didn’t really have a name, but we’ve started calling it September Mesa since we’ve been working on the site. Wind Mesa is behind us now, across the wash.”

  “What’s upstream?”

  “More canyons. Smaller. If you follow the wash upstream long enough, it finally narrows into a crack and disappears against a wall of stone, which is the body of the mesa itself. Almost all the canyons are blind. Only one or two have an outlet on top of the mesa. Other than that, the canyons are a maze. Even witha compass, it’s hard not to get lost.”

  Diana turned around, trying to orient herself. “Where is the Rocking M?”

  Ten gestured with his head because he needed both hands for the wheel. “North and east, on top of the big mesa.”

  “It is? I thought the ranch was on the edge of a broad valley.”

  He smiled slightly. “So do most people who come on the Rocking M from the north. You don’t know the valley is really a mesa until you drive off the edge. The mountains confuse you. All of the Colorado Plateau is like that.”

  Diana reached into her back jeans pocket, pulled outa United States Geological Survey map and began searching for the vague line that represented the ranch road they were on. The bouncing of the truck made map reading impossible.

  “Perspective is a funny thing,” Ten said, glancing at the map for an instant. “Coming in from the south and east, you see the wall of the mesa, the cliffs and gorges and canyons. That’s where the explorers were when they started naming things-at the bottom looking up. You can’t see the Fire Mountains from that angle, and everything looks dark and jumbled at a distance, so the whole area was once called Black Plateau or Fire Mountain Plateau, depending on which old-timer you talk to.”

  Diana folded up the map and put it away.

  “On the other hand,” Ten continued, “if you’re coming in from the mountain end of the territory, you see a mesa top as more of a broad valley, and you name it accordingly.”

  “Is that what happened on the Rocking M?”

  Ten nodded. “Case MacKenzie started out with a ranch at the base of what became known as MacKenzie Ridge, which is a foothill of the Fire Mountains. From his perspective, the mesa top is a broad, winding valley. But history named the hunk of land for a hundred miles in all directions Black Plateau, even though it’s more like a mesa than a plateau. Then you add a hundred years of Spanish and American cowboys translating Indian names and adding their own to the mix, and you have a mapmaker’s nightmare.”

  “You also have a lot of lost tourists.”

  The left corner of Ten’s mouth lifted slightly. “Just remember that September Mesa and Wind Mesa and all the nameless mesas are nothing but narrow fingers stretching out from the huge hand known as Black Plateau or MacKenzie Valley, depending on which direction your mapmaker came from.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why men invented satellite photos. It’s the only way to see how the pieces all fit together.”

  Ten shot Diana an amused, approving glance, but only for an instant. The truck, moving at barely five miles an hour, bumped and thumped over the rocky, narrowing canyon bottom. To Diana’s eyes there was nothing to distinguish the cliff-rimmed canyon they had entered from the many other tributary canyons that emptied into Picture Wash. The mouth of September Canyon was perhaps eighty yards across, marked by nothing but a faint suggestion of tire tracks in the sand. The cliffs were of a vaguely muddy, vaguely gold sandstone that overlay narrower beds of shale. The shale crumbled readily, forming steep, slippery talus slopes at the base of the sandstone cliffs.

  Scattered on the surface of the gray-brown shale debris were huge, erratic piles of sandstone rubble that were formed when the shale crumbled and washed away faster than the more durable cliffs above, leaving the sandstone cliffs without support at their base. Then great sheets of sandstone peeled away from the overhanging cliffs and fell to the earth below, shattering into rubble and leaving behind arches and alcoves and deeper overhangs-and, sometimes, filling pre-existing alcoves.

  In many cases the shale had been eroded by the seeping of groundwater between layers of sandstone and shale. When the water eventually reached the edge of a cliff or a ravine, it became a spring, a source of clean, year-round water for the people who eventually sought shelter in the arching overhangs that the springs had helped to create. Without the water there would have been no cliff-hanging alcoves for men to take shelter within, no easily defended villages set into sheer stone. Without the very special circumstances of sandstone, shale and water, the Anasazi civilization would have developed very differently, if it developed at all.

  That interlocking of Anasazi and the land had always fascinated Diana. The fact that their cliff houses were found in some of the most remote, starkly beautiful landscapes in America simply added to her fascination.

  “Does the Rocking M run cattle here?” Diana asked.

  “Not for several years.”

  “Then how were the ruins discovered?”

  “Carla was returning a potshard that Luke had found years ago in the mouth of September Canyon and given to her. She drove out from Boulder alone and spent several hours walking the canyon floor. There had been a storm recently and a tree had fallen. She came around a bend and there the ruins were.”

  “That must have been incredible,” Diana said, her voice throaty with longing.

  “I doubt that Carla was in a mood to appreciate it. She had come here to say goodbye to everything she had ever wanted-the land, the ranch, and most of all the man.”

  “Luke?” Ten nodded.

  “What changed her mind?”

  “Luke. He finally got it through his hard head that Carla was the one woman in a million who could live on an isolated ranch and not go sour.”

  Diana’s mouth turned down in a sad curve. “I was ranch-raised. It’s not for everyone, man or woman.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “I loved it. No matter how bad things at home got, the land was always waiting, always beautiful, always there. I could walk away from the buildings and the land would…” Her voice shivered into silence as she realized what she had almost revealed.

  “Heal you?” Ten suggested softly. Diana’s eyes closed and a tiny shudder went through her. Ten was too perceptive. He saw things with dangerous clarity.

  “The land was here long before a primate climbed down out of a tree and put a kink in his back trying to see over the grass,” Ten said matter-of-factly.

  “The land will be here long after we’re gone. That frightens some people because it makes them feel small and worthless. But some people are made whole by touching something that’s bigger than they are, something enduring, something that lives on a different time scale than man.”

  The words slid past Diana’s defenses, making her realize that Ten was one of those who had come to the land to be healed.

  “What hurt you?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  The lines of Ten’s face shifted, reminding Diana of the cold, deadly fighter who had come over the corral fence and flattened a larger, whip-wielding opponent in a matter of seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said quickly. “I had no right to ask.”

  Ten nodded curtly, either agreeing with her or accepting her apology, she wasn’t certain which.

  It was silent in the truck for a few moments before Ten said, “We’re coming up on the base camp. It’s beneath that big overhang on the left.”

  Diana heard more than the word
s; she heard what wasn’t said, as well. Gone was the subtle emotion that had made Ten’s voice like black velvet when he talked about the land. His tone was neither reserved nor outgoing, simply neutral. Polite.

  Telling herself that Ten’s withdrawal didn’t matter, Diana looked beyond his handsome, unyielding profile to the smooth cliff wall rising above scattered pinons. The sandstone gleamed against the thunderheads that had consumed the sky. Something bright flickered at the edge of her vision. A few seconds later thunder pealed through the narrow canyon, shaking the ground. Spectral light flickered and danced again, and again thunder reverberated between stone walls.

  Diana closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, savoring the pungent, suddenly cool wind. Soon it would begin to rain. She could feel it. She could smell it in the air, the unique blend of heat and dust rising upfrom the ground and countless water drops reaching down to caress the dry land.

  Thunder belled again and then again. A gust of wind came through the open truck window, pouring over Diana. She laughed softly, wishing she were clone so that she could hold out her arms and embrace the wild summer storm.

  The subdued music of Diana’s laughter drew Ten’s attention. He looked at her for only an instant, but it was enough. He knew he would never forget the picture she made with her head thrown back and her hair tousled as though by a lover’s hands, her cheeks flushed with excitement and her lips parted as she gave herself to the storm wind.

  The persistent male curiosity Ten had felt at his first sight of Diana retreating from the skirmish at the corral became a torrent of desire pouring through him, hardening him with a speed he hadn’t known since he was a teenager. Cursing silently, he forced his attention away from his quickened body and onto the demands of the terrain. The last quarter of a mile to the ruins was tricky, because most of it was over greasy shale slopes studded with house-size boulders of sandstone that had fallen from the thick, cliff-forming layer of rock. The truck bucked and tires spun in protest at the slippery going as the vehicle groaned up the final hill.