He turned sharply into the brush, not wanting his back to the man, then changed course and went into the deepest part, moving softly as possible. Turning west again he passed the ruins of an old pueblo, and paused to study his back trail. There was no sign of movement. Then he examined the country around him, and chose the best route toward the lava beds. He wanted to keep off the horizon, not being eager to reply to inquiries nor to encounter any of Nugent’s men.
An hour later, from the crest of a ridge he could see far and away the smoke of a train. The air was very clear and fresh, and he breathed deeply. Off to the north he could see two mesas lifting their square rock shoulders against the sky. One of them was topped by buildings and a thread of smoke went up from them. That would be Acoma, the sky city.
The sky was very blue, here and there a fluff of white cloud. It was a lovely country, and too bad he had so little time left to enjoy it.
For the first time he felt a sharp twinge of regret, and he walked on with long, swinging strides. It would not do to find things to love at this late date, even so fair a land. Inside him this thing was growing, slowly capturing his life, and it was better that he go remembering nothing that he wanted to remember.
There was a place on the edge of Ceboletta Mesa that he had to find, where the mesa sent a rocky shoulder toward the lava beds. That point was the key to the opening he was looking for.
Several times he sat down to rest, although he did not like to sit down, and had never been one to delay short of a goal. Yet his strength was waning and his legs were growing very tired. The walking here was nothing like the walking he had done behind hunting dogs in Virginia or New Jersey. This was rough and rocky, and he had climbed nearly three thousand feet since leaving the railroad.
Skirting the edge of a wooded area he crossed a plateau dotted with small lakes and emerged within fifty yards of the point he had been seeking. Before him, and some distance lower down, lay the lava beds, the dreaded malpais.
Like a fat, enormous snake it lay stretched across the country, a black and ugly mass of twisted, rope-like rock, clinkers and piles of lava, that looked like hell with the fires out, filling its sterile sink and winding south and north for many miles.
This was desolation. This was what remained after Mount Taylor and El Tintero spewed forth their flaming rock and drenched the country with liquid fire so that the Indians fled the country in terror and were long in returning.
The river of lava had flowed southward, killing everything in its path, flattening stone houses or flowing through them, flowing downhill, piling up to cross over hills, falling in cascades down steep cliffs, until finally it solidified into a great stream of natural glass, leaving behind all the formations lava can create. Hardening from the outside, often the lava continued to flow beneath the surface and left vast caverns, roofed over in places by blisters of apparently solid rock that was actually eggshell thin.
Splitting at places into separate streams it left islands of grass like sunken parks, dotted with trees and surrounded by walls of lava sometimes fifty feet high. Underneath were perpetual ice caves.
It was in one of these islands of green, Kettleman knew, that Flint had found his hideout.
No tracks or other evidence of travel lay in the bottom of the narrow crack Flint had followed to the hidden oasis. So narrow throughout most of its length that a horseman’s feet brushed the lava walls on either side, it was at no place wider than a tall man’s outstretched arms could reach.
It wound, twisted, bent sharply and seemed to end a dozen times before reaching a rock-walled acre of grass and trees. Against the wall, Flint had built a rock house, using the building blocks provided by the lava flow itself. Adjoining the rock house he built a wall, closing off a cave mouth to be used as a stable. By facing an undercut cliff with stone, he had constructed a passage from the cabin to the stable so he could move from one to the other in perfect shelter.
The cave itself was a long tunnel that led through two hundred yards of rock to a much larger island of grass and trees where a small stream flowed. In this place Flint had released several horses. One a stallion, three mares.
The entrance to the crack that led to this hideout was extremely difficult to find and Flint had discovered it purely by accident. The opening was masked by an overlapping wall of rock, invisible from even a few feet away.
Seated by the trunk of a cedar, Kettleman shed his pack and got out his glasses. The sun was far down in the west, and shadows had gathered in the hollows and cracks of the malpais. With infinite care Kettleman began to study the terrain below him.
Far away across the lava beds, perhaps six or seven miles distant, he could see an island of green. Otherwise what lay below him was a nightmare of desolation and death, and he could see no other oasis, no such place as Flint had mentioned.
Turning north he worked his way, his pack once more riding his chafed and aching shoulders, along the edge of the cliff. A path would be here, a narrow lip of a path negotiated by deer, antelope, and bear, occasionally by half-wild cattle.
The sun would soon be gone. It was unlikely that he would find the crack in the wall tonight. Several times he stopped, twisted by the pain in his stomach.
When he found the path he looked upon it with awe. Flint had said a good mountain horse could manage it, but if he did the rider’s foot would hang over space.
Below all was blackness. Farther out the dying sun had turned the lava beds into a red flaming mass that relived for an instant in the sunset their former molten terror. Beyond the lava, miles away, a dark bulking shoulder of rock might be El Morro, the Inscription Rock, where, more than two hundred and fifty years before, Spanish men had signed their names.
Although the cliff down which he made his way lay deep in shadow the path could be clearly seen, and the lava beds were still bathed in slowly dulling red fire.
At the bottom the path ended in a maze of boulders and rocky debris outgrown with low brush and a few stunted trees. Once he barked his shins on the edge of a rock, and again he stumbled and fell to his knees. Finally he sat down and slid the pack from his back. He was exhausted.
Kettleman had never known weakness in his life, and never illness. His physical strength was enormous and he had learned to rely upon it, and now for the first time he was feeling weakness. He had walked a long way, driven on as much by determination to get where he was going as anything.
He sat very still, breathing hoarsely. He felt sick at his stomach and was afraid he was going to have more of those agonizing pains.
The shadows grew darker and the light faded from the lava beds. Only the sky remained a deeper blue, and here and there a bright star hung against the sky like a lamp. Still he did not move. His breathing eased, and the pains did not come, yet still he waited.
It was too late to find the crack in the rock now, and it might take him days, even with the landmarks Flint had provided. It was odd, how all through the years he had kept this place in mind as if he had known that some day he would come here.
He had no faith in people. He had avoided all close contacts with them when possible. Occasionally he had tricked himself into little kindnesses from some deep inner instinct or perhaps some vague desire for warmth and friendship. But he had brusquely rejected all thanks, and fled from appreciation.
He had never hated his wife or her father for what they had planned to do, nor for the times they had tried to profit by the connection. He did not hate them, for he had been taught to expect nothing better, and they were acting as he expected people to act.
From the day of his arrival in the East he had known but one ambition, and that was for wealth and power. He fought as Flint had taught him to fight, but using the weapons of his knowledge gained at school, his reading since that time, and the information acquired from day to day. He acted coldly, ruthlessly, yet shrewdly.