swung his horse around and cantered over to him.
“Pa told me what you did last night,” Jim said. “You might have been killed.”
“A man takes his chances.”
“None of that stock was yours,” Jim said. “It was different with Teel. He had a
lot to lose.”
“I couldn’t have done anything without him,” Fallon said. “He’s quite a man,
Teel is.”
They talked for a few minutes about the stock, the grafting, and the water, and
then Fallon rode on into the hills. He went north, and soon found himself
picking his way up the slope. It was in his mind that he might find a deer, and
he had not ridden this way before. He was looking for sign when he found the
remains of the fire.
Night or day, a man might ride very close to that little hollow without seeing
it, and any fire would have been invisible. Whatever tracks there might have
been had been wiped out by the rain … or had they?
He stepped down from the saddle and stirred the remains of the fire. Rain had
pounded the ashes into a mass, but the charred sticks were plain enough.
Squatting on his heels, he moved a few of them. There was sand and ash beneath
them, and beneath that, more ash and a few sticks that had not burned. Dirt had
been kicked over the fire once, and then another fire had been built on top of
it.
Somebody had come here, more than once … why? There was no water nearby, no
grazing for horses within half a mile, except for the sparse brush. Altogether,
it was an unlikely place for a camp, except that it offered concealment.
Mounting the black horse, Fallon found a way out of the hollow, and he had gone
only a short distance when he came on the same trail Al Damon had discovered.
Fallon, wiser in these things than Al Damon, recognized it for what it was, an
ancient Indian trail. It undoubtedly had also been used by game, but it had been
made by Indians.
It was not much over six inches wide, for Indians habitually walk with one foot
placed ahead of the other and their trails are narrow. If Indians had made it,
it led to something … probably to water or to some source of food.
He lost the trail, found it again, and then as he walked his horse under a great
leaning slab of rock he saw the track. A horse had stepped under the shadow of
the leaning rock where the earth had been sheltered from rain and wind. When he
had gone a little further his eye caught something glinting in the sun. When he
reached it, he saw that it was a whiskey bottle.
Al Damon had been drunk. And he had not had the whiskey from Brennan, who did
not sell by the bottle, anyway. Had it been Al Damon who met with somebody back
there at the hollow? Or had he merely stumbled on the place as Fallon had? Yet
what reason could Damon have for being here? His job had been to watch the
stock.
Turning his horse back, Fallon sought out the continuation of the trail. He
followed it by guess, by hunch, by a sort of instinct for such things, as much
as he did by what he saw on the ground. An Indian rarely walked right out on a
ridge; he usually followed the contour of a hill, and habitually sought the
easiest going.
When Fallon had ridden for half an hour he realized that he was getting deeper
and deeper into the mountains. He had ventured into a gigantic cleft, invisible
from the flat below, or even from the hollow where he had discovered the remains
of the fire. A shoulder of the mountain presented a false wall and he had ridden
behind this. The sides of the cleft sloped back steeply, ragged with projecting
crags and spurs.
It was very hot, and the air was still. He was climbing steadily. Twice he drew
up, studying the hills around, giving the black horse a breather. As he left one
zone behind and entered another the growth was changing. The higher slopes were
dotted with plain pine, and the growth was thicker there.
He knew he should start back, but the lure of the trail led him on. There was
always another bend, always another projecting rock around which he wished to
see. Suddenly the trail dipped sharply, and went into a narrow cleft where the
bottom was in the shadow of the towering cliffs above. The air was amazingly
cool, and he smelled water.
When he found it, he saw that the water lay in a tank, a natural stone formation
some fifty feet across and deep in the shadow where the sun could never reach
it. A trickle of water flowed from the tank and lost itself among some rocks off
to one side. There were sheep tracks a-plenty, but no tracks of horse, cow, or
man.
Yet on the wall above there was Indian writing. He studied it curiously,
wondering what it was meant to say. Perhaps it was an invocation to the gods of
the hunt.
He watered the black, then rode on through the cleft until it suddenly dipped
around and down into a great open park of grassland. This park was all of two
miles wide, and perhaps three miles long. A small stream ran down the center.
All around the great bowl, the mountains towered at least fifteen hundred feet,
but to the north there seemed to be a gap, and that gap could very well be the
canyon that ran past the town of Red Horse.
Suddenly a marmot scrabbled in the gravel on the slope, and Fallon turned his
head sharply, his hand going automatically to his gun. He saw the little animal,
and saw it vanish among the rocks.
He was about to start on when suddenly he saw that the trail he had been
following branched here, and the left-hand branch, which he would not even have
noticed had it not been for the marmot, went up, up, up among the great crags
that rimmed the valley.
Only a small section of the ancient trail was visible, and it might have seemed
a patch that was naturally bare, but his eye followed the hint the marmot had
given and he saw there was a break in the rock.
Dismounting, he took his rifle and, scrambling over the rocks, reached the place
he sought. There was a trail, and a trail a horse could climb. He looked up,
drawn by the lure of the unknown trail, drawn as he had always been. But the
hour was late and he was far from town.
Descending into the open space, he started across the grassland and, when he was
near the stream, a deer suddenly started from the grass. He lifted his rifle,
catching a quick sight of the back of the neck just above the shoulders. He
squeezed off his shot, and the deer fell.
When he had butchered it, he started for the break in the hills which he was
sure was the canyon leading toward home. Suddenly a rider appeared, riding up
from some hollow where he had remained hidden until now. And then another
appeared, and another and another. And then another rider appeared, far on his
right, and there were five, six riders there.
Utes….
Macon Fallon touched the black horse on the shoulder. “Ready, boy … we may
have to run again.”
He held his rifle in his right hand and he rode forward, seeming to look neither
to the right nor to the left, head up, the butt of the rifle on his thigh. Wind
stirred the grass, and he looked ahead to the opening of the canyon.
How far? Half a mile? A mile? Distance was deceiving on these hot, still
afternoons. The wind stirred again, faintly, like a living thing awakening from
a long sleep.
The riders were drawing nearer. “All right, boy,” Fallon said quietly, and the
black horse began to lope. It was an easy, space-eating lope, and he was riding
toward the point of a triangle, of which the lines of Indians made the two
sides.
His mouth was dry, and when he touched his tongue to his lips they, too, seemed
dry. They were closer … within rifle-shot soon. The black had come a long way,
but the horse was good for the run to the canyon.
How far now? He had gained a few hundred yards, perhaps as much as a quarter of
a mile. “All right, boy … now!”
With a bound the black horse was off, running as if it was shot. Before him the
canyon gaped. Suddenly the Indians had begun to whoop, and they were coming on,
running hard.
The nearest one was overanxious … he fired, and the sound of the shot racketed