Thea slowly the sound began to die and the water receded suddenly as it had come. Clinging together, soaked to the skin, they waited in the cave’s darkness. They were free. They were safe. The water was gone.
Chapter 7
“Lance?” Nita stirred in the wet darkness. “Do you think they were killed?” “No telling.” He got up and, holding her hand, led the way down the slanting floor into the gray light of outer day. Wet and bedraggled, they looked down the canyon, unchanged except that now the sand was hard-packed and the walls were wet and dripping. Painstakingly they made their way to the canyon’s bottom. They walked on, anxious to keep moving. Slowly warmth returned to their flesh and watching ahead, Kilkenny could see they were bearing directly into the heart of the Blues.
“Where are we going, Lance?”
“Home. We’re going home.”
Mounting an alluvial fan, they found their way through a shattered opening in the canyon’s upper wall and came out on the plateau. Before them was the towering rampart of the Blue Mountains. Three mighty peaks loomed against the sky, and forward of their position, three more peaks. The sky was heavily overcast, the peaks shrouded in black masses of cumulus. About them the desert was gray, tufted with midnight blue clumps of shrubbery. The scene was shocking in its majesty, breathtaking in its power. The great shoulders of the mountain vanished into the clouds, the gray earth was streaked with the white trails of runoff water.
Turning, they looked over a vast panorama of foothills and valley. Despite the clouds the rainwashed air was piercingly clear, and miles to the south a few faint trails of smoke marked the town of Horsehead. Nearer the terrain was slashed with ragged canyons, ripped deep into the rocky terrain and tufted here and there with juniper.
“We’re going up and through those mountains.” Lance indicated the vast jumble of peaks, black under the clouds.
“Now? In this storm?”
“Now,” he said grimly, “right now!”
They mounted the gray, who switched his tail at the added burden. There was no trail, for they followed along a mountainside with the vast sweep of forty miles lying below and beyond them. In the distance gray rain drew a veil across the valley. Twice they passed the paths of small slides, and once worked their way through a great gully ripped from the mountain by a rush of water. There was nothing to be gained by worrying of what might happen in Horsehead. The men were seasoned in frontier warfare and he had first to get Nita to a safe place, and the only one that might be secure was the Valley of Whispering Wind. Despite the lateness of the hour the sky retained a strange afterglow as of distant fire, but now that had gone and they were left in utter darkness broken only by far-off lightning and the mutter of thunder among the canyons. They could go no further in the unknown darkness.
“We’ll make camp,” he told her. “There’s some cliff dwellings near here.” He had seen the dwellings from afar, days ago. A white gash of the cliff marked the canyon. A flare of distant lightning showed them a steep path and they stumbled up and into one of the dwellings. Obviously, the place had been used for shelter at some distant date for a few dry sticks lay near the remnants of a fire. Drawing them together, Kilkenny soon had a fire going. Roaming through the other rooms, Kilkenny found a pack rat’s nest, a mine of fuel. Nita started to make coffee.
“Ruined?” He looked at the soggy mass.
“We can use it.”
He dropped to a seat near the fire. Cold and wet they might be, but her very presence changed everything for him. She caught his glance and smiled. “I never imagined I’d start housekeeping in a ruin! And both of us soaked to the skin!” Twice he went into the darkness and listened, every sense alert to the sounds of night. And he heard nothing but the wind, the rumble of distant thunder, and the occasional stirring of some small animal. He found grass and rubbed down the gray horse.
Nita was waiting with coffee when he returned, and they sat beside the fire and sipped the coffee in silence, listening to the faint hiss of the fire as the flame drained the strength from the dry wood.
Long after she was asleep on the blankets, he sat feeding the flames. Once he thought he heard horses, but after a long time of listening believed he was mistaken. Sometime after that he slept, awakening suddenly in the first light of coming day. He awakened Nita, threw sticks on the fire and went outside. When he looked into the overhang where it had left the gray, two more horses stood beside it!
Both were saddled, and one was Nita’s mare, Glory. Searching for their tracks, he realized the horses had not been ridden but had found their own way here, evidently following some scent left by his own horse. After a quick cup of scalding black coffee, Kilkenny stripped the extra horse of saddlebags, rifle and canteen and took them to his own horse. He had just hung the canteen to the pommel when Nita spoke. “On your left. You’re covered.” Kilkenny turned carefully and found himself facing Jess Baker. The cut on the big man’s face was an ugly red scar. He held a .44 Colt and he was grinning. “Never figured on no such luck. I was a-trailin’ them horses. Havalik figured we might need ‘em.”
“Where is he?”
“Maybe eight mile back.” The big man was vastly pleased. “Means I get to kill you and keep your woman.”
Kilkenny turned and walked away from Nita. He knew Baker would do just what he said. “Stand still!” Baker yelled.
Kilkenny halted abruptly. “Why, sure Jess. Look, can’t we talk this over? I mean—“ He drew and fired.
That draw was incredibly, unbelievably fast. Baker had not dreamed any man would attempt a draw when covered at thirty paces. One instant Kilkenny’s voice had been pleading, a salve to the big man’s wounded pride, and the next that hand blurred and flame spouted. Something struck Baker hard in the stomach and he took a step back, his eyes blinking. The gun slid from his fingers and he went to his knees, then simply rolled over and curled up dead. All day they pushed on, higher and higher into the stormswept peaks. He had taken the slicker from the spare horse, probably belonging to the man killed when he rushed their camp.
Rain fell intermittently, washing out any trail. They topped the pass among heavy clouds and Kilkenny had to bend low from the saddle to study the earth. The way dipped down and they entered a forest rich with pine smell and the sound of rushing water. At last Twin Peaks loomed on their right and Kilkenny turned, weaving a pattern among the trees, then skirted a great rock slab and drew rein on a ledge.
Nita rode up beside him and sat for the first time overlooking the Valley of The Whispering Wind.
Walled upon two sides and almost upon the third, the valley lay between, a rolling expanse of lush green grass dotted with clumps of trees and bounded by the ridges covered with green forest. Even under the lowering clouds the valley was indescribably lovely.
“It’s home,” he said, his heart suddenly full. “I call it the Valley of The Whispering Wind.”
“How did you come to name it?”
“Wait … you’ll see.”
A mile further into the valley he drew up and waited. Nita paused beside him. A minute passed, and then another, and slowly she became conscious of a nameless stirring, a faint rustling through the grass and leaves. It was a sound not unlike the rushing of a fast train, sometimes heard in big timber, but something fainter, as though from wind singing in the strings of a far-off violin. A whispering wind, a singing wind.
“Hear it?” he asked gently. “When you hear that sound it means you’re home.”
On the day of Kilkenny’s arrival in the valley, Dee Havalik returned to Horsehead.
He was in a savage mood. Kilkenny’s sudden charge from darkness had caught him flat-footed. Despite their pursuit they had found nothing, and only precipitate flight saved them from death under the torrent of water. Returning to confess failure did not sit well with the gunman, nor did he like to think of Kilkenny outsmarting him. Yet rain had washed out all tracks, and the canyons were a maze.
The street of Horsehead was deserted. Nobody was in the Westwater dining room, and the stove was cold. Havalik walked out on the street with his two remaining men. No horses lined the hitch rails. The Emporium was closed and the shutters were up. Crossing to the Pinenut, Havalik shoved through the swinging doors. A bartender read a week-old newspaper and the saloon was empty. “Where’s everybody?”