“There was no sign of them,” said Cynthia. “They lay in wait for us. They saw us coming and they laid in wait for us. We couldn’t see the fire, for it was in a fairly deep ravine . . .”
“They had sentries out, of course,” I said. “It was just our IUCK that we fell foul of them.”
We moved down to the fire and stood around it. It had fairly well died down, but we did not stir it up. Somehow we felt just a little safer if there were not too much light. Boxes and bales were piled to one side of it and on the other side a pile of wood that had been dragged in as fuel. Cooking and eating utensils, guns and blankets lay scattered all about.
Something splashed very noisely across the stream and came crashing through the brush. I made a dive to grab up a gun, but Bronco said, “It’s only Elmer coming back,” and I dropped the gun. I don’t know why I picked it up; I had not the least idea of how it might have worked.
Elmer came crunching through the brush.
“They got away,” he said. “I tried to catch one of them to hear what he might have to say, but they were too nimble for me.”
“They were scared,” said Bronco.
“Is everyone all right?” asked Elmer. “How about you, miss?”
“We’re all right,” said Cynthia. “One of them hit Fletcher with a club and knocked him out, but he seems to be all right.”
“I have a lump,” I said, “and my head, come to think of it, seems a little sore. But there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Fletch,” said Elmer, “why don’t you build up the fire and get some food to cooking. You and Miss Cynthia must feel some need of it. Some sleep, too, perhaps. I dropped the stuff I was carrying. I’ll go back and get it.”
“Hadn’t we ought to be getting out of here?” I asked.
“They won’t be coming back,” said Elmer. “Not right ..now. Not in broad daylight and dawn’s about to break. They’ll come back tomorrow night, but we’ll be gone by then.”
“They have some animals tied out in the woods,” said Bronco. “Pack animals, no doubt, to carry those bales and boxes. We could use some animals such as that.”
“We’ll take them along,” said Elmer. “We’ll leave our friends afoot. And another thing-I’m most anxious to look into those bales. There must be something in them they didn’t want to have anybody poking into.”
“Maybe not,” said Bronco. “Maybe they were just spoiling for a fight. Maybe they were just mean and ornery.” :
Chapter 12
But it wasn’t just meanness.
They had reason to want no one knowing what was in the bales and boxes.
The first bale, when we ripped it open, contained metal, crudely cut into plates, apparently with chisels.
Elmer picked up two of the plates and banged them together, “Steel,” he said, “plated with bronze. I wonder where they’d get stuff like this.”
But even before he got through saying it, he knew, and so did I. He looked at me and saw I knew, or guessed, and said, “It’s casket metal, Fletch.”
We stood around and looked at it, with Bronco back of us, looking over our shoulders. Elmer dropped the two . pieces he’d been holding.
“I’ll go back and get the tools,” he said, “and we’ll get to work on Bronco. We have to get out of here sooner than I thought.”
We got to work, using the tools that Elmer had taken from the tool shack back at the settlement. One leg we fixed up with little effort, straightening it and hammering it out and slipping it back into place so that it worked as good as new. The second leg gave us some trouble.
“How long do you think this might have been going on?” I asked as we worked. “This robbing of the Cemetery. Certainly Cemetery must know about it.”
“Perhaps they do,” said Elmer, “but what can they do about it and why should they care? If someone wants to do
some genteel grave-robbing, what difference does it make? Just so they do it where it doesn’t show too much.”
“But they would surely notice. They keep the Cemetery trimmed and . . .”
“Where it can be seen,” said Elmer. “I’ll lay you a bet there are places where there is no care at all-places that visitors never are allowed to see.”
“But if someone comes to visit a certain grave?”
“They’d know about it ahead of time. They’d know the names on any Pilgrim passenger list-the names and where the passengers were from. They’d have time to put on a crash program, getting any sector of the Cemetery cleaned up. Or maybe they wouldn’t even have to. Maybe they’d simply switch a few headstones or markers and who would know the difference?”
Cynthia had been cooking at the fire. Now she came over to us. “Could I use this for a minute?” she asked, picking up a pinch bar.
“Sure, we’re through with it,” said Elmer. “We’ve almost got old Bronco here as good as new. What do you want with it?”
“I thought I’d open up one of the boxes.”
“No need to,” Elmer said. “We know what they were carrying. It’ll just be more metal.”
“I don’t care,” said Cynthia. “I would like to see.”
It was growing light. The sun was brightening the eastern sky and would soon be rising. Birds, which had begun their twittering as soon as the darkness of. the night had started to fade, now were flying and hopping in the trees. One bird, big and blue and with a topknot, moved nervously about, screeching at us.
“A blue jay,” Elmer said. “Noisy kind of creatures. Remember them of old. Some of the others, too, but not all their names. That one is a robin. Over there a blackbird-a redwing blackbird, I would guess. Cheeky little rascal.”
“Fletcher,” Cynthia said, not speaking very loudly, but her voice sharp and strained.
I had been squatting, watching Elmer put the last touches to straightening out and shaping one of Bronco’s hooves.
“Yes,” I said, “what is it?” not even looking around.
“Please come here,” she said.
I rose and turned around. She had managed to lift one end of a board off the top of a box and had pushed it lip and left it, canted at an angle. She wasn’t looking toward me. She was looking at what the lifting of the board had revealed inside the box, unmoving, as if she had been suddenly hypnotized, unable to take her eyes away from what she saw inside the box.
The sight of her standing in this fashion brought me suddenly alert and in three quick strides, I was beside her.
The first thing that I saw was the exquisitely decorated bottle-tiny, dainty, of what appeared to be jade, but it could not have been jade, for there was painted on it small, delicate figures in black and yellow and dark green, while the bottle itself was an apple green-and nothing in its right mind would go about painting jade. It lay against a china cup, or what appeared to be a china cup, emblazoned in red and blue, and beside the cup a grotesque piece of statuary, rudely carved out of cream-colored stone. Lying half hidden by the statuary was a weirdly decorated jar.
Elmer had come up to us and now he reached out and took the pinch bar away from Cynthia. In two quick mo-dons, he ripped the rest of the boards away. The box was filled with a jumble of jars and bottles, bits of statuary, pieces of china, cunningly shaped bits of metalwork, begemmed belts and bracelets, necklaces of stone, brooches, symbolic pieces (they must have been symbolic pieces, for they made no other sense), boxes of both wood and metal, and many other items.
I picked up one of the symbolic pieces, a many-sided block of some sort of polished stone, with half-obscured etchings on every face of it. I turned it in my hand, looking closely at the engraved symbols presented on each face. It was heavy, as if it might be of metal rather than of stone, although it seemed to have a rocklike texture. I could almost remember, almost be sure, although absolute certainty escaped me. There had been a similar piece, a very similar piece, on the mantel in Thorney’s study, and one night while we had sat there he had taken it up and showed me how it had been used, rolled like a die to decide a course of action to be taken, a divining stone of some sort and very, very ancient and extremely valuable and significant because it was one of the few artifacts that could unmistakably be attributed to a most obscure people on a far-off, obscure planet-a people who had lived there and died or moved away or evolved into something else long before the human race had found the planet vacant and had settled down on it.