Anywhere off that bald granite ridge would look like heaven to me, and I hurried to the trail. Once I heard rocks fall behind my horse, but we kept going down, with me walking and leading.
When I reached the meadow at the foot of the trail, I looked up. It was like standing on the bottom of a narrow trough with only the dark sky above me.
The trail led out of the meadow, and on it were those same tracks. Hurried by the storm, I followed them.
Thunder rumbled like great bowling balls in an empty hall of rock. Suddenly, an opening appeared in the wall ahead of me and I drew up, calling out
There was no answer.
Leaving the appaloosa, I shucked my gun. In front of the opening there was a ledge, maybe thirty yards along the face of the cliff, and a dozen yards deep. A body could see folks had lived and worked there for some time. I called out again, and my voice echoed down the canyon.
There was only the fading echo, only the silence, and emptiness. A few large drops of rain fell I went slowly across to the mouth of the cave.
A sort of wall had been fixed up, closing off part of the opening. It was made of rocks, fitted together without mortar. Stepping around it, I looked inside.
On the wall hung an old bridle. In a corner was a dried-up saddle and a rifle. Dead coals were in a fireplace that had seen much use. Over against the wall was a pallet, and on the pallet a girl was lying.
I struck a match, and got the shock of my life. She was a young girl, a little thing, and she was mighty pretty. A great mass of red-gold hair spilled over the worn blankets and bearskins on which she was lying. She wore a patched-up dress, and moccasins. Her cheeks were flushed red.
I spoke to her, but she made no sound. Bending over, I touched her brow. She was burning up with fever.
And then the storm broke.
It took me only a couple of minutes to rush outside and get my horse. There was an adjoining cave—actually part of the one the girl was in—that had a crude manger. At one time a horse or mule had been kept there.
When I had tied my horse I went back and, taking wood from a stack by the entrance, I kindled a fire and put some water on to heat.
With a fire going I could see better, and I found another blanket to cover her over with. It was plain enough that two folks had been living here, though there was only one now. Likely there had been only one for quite a stretch.
The rifle had been cleaned, but the chamber was empty and there was no ammunition anywhere I looked. There was a flint knife with quite an edge to it—probably the knife used to cut my meat that first time.
Looked to me this girl had been living here quite some time, and by the look of her, not living too well. She was mighty slight, almighty slight.
When that water was boiling I fixed some coffee and, with my own jerked beef, made some broth.
Outside the thunder was rolling something awful and there were lightning flashes almost two or three a minute, seemed like, lighting up that gorge where the cave was. Rain was falling in great sheets, and when the lightning flashed I could see the rocks glistening with it.
Cap was down at our camp by himself, and the country would be filling up with mighty unpleasant folks. I was realizing that after a rain like this nobody could get back up that chute, and unless there was another way out, I was stuck And me with a sick girl on my bands.
When I had that broth hot, I held the girl in my arms and fed her some of it. She was out of her head, delirious-like. It seemed to me she had got back to the cave with her last strength, but she tasted that broth and liked it.
After a while she went back to sleep.
Back home on the Cumberland we did for ourselves when it came to trouble and sickness, but in a storm like this there was no chance to go out and get any herbs or suchlike. All I could do was keep her from getting chilled and build up her strength with broth.
Might be she only had a cold, and I was praying it wasn’t pneumonia or anything like that. She was run down some, and probably hadn’t been eating right. What she could get from her snares wouldn’t amount to much, and she had no weapons to kill anything larger. What bothered me was how she got into this wild country in the first place.
While she slept I hunted around the cave and found a man’s wore-out boots, and a coat hanging on the wall. I taken that down and used it for more cover over her.
Hours later, while the storm was still blowing and lightning jumped peak to peak, crashing like all get-out, she awakened and looked around, and called to somebody whose name I couldn’t make out. All I could do was feed her some more of that broth, but she took to it like a baby to mother’s milk.
All night long I sat by that fire, keeping it bright in case she awakened and was scared. Toward daylight the storm played itself out and went rumbling away far off down the mountains.
I rigged a line and went down to the creek. The chances of getting fish after the storm didn’t look too good, with the water all riled. Nonetheless, I threw out a hook. After a while I hooked a trout and, about a half-hour later, another one.
Up at the cave the red-haired girl was sleeping quietly, so I went to work and cleaned those trout and fried them up. I started some coffee and then went outside.
Wandering around, I came on a grave. Actually, I could see it wasn’t a dug grave, but a wide crack in the rock. Rocks had been rolled in at each end and the cracks tamped in with some kind of clay which had settled hard. Over the grave was scratched a name and a date.
JUAN MORALES 1790—1874
He had died last year, then.
And that meant this girl had been here in this canyon all alone for almost a year. No wonder she was run down.
Juan Morales had been eighty-four years old when he died. Too old a man to be traipsing around the mountains with a young girl. From his name he had been a Spanish man, but she did not look like any Spanish girl I’d ever seen. Yet I’d heard it said that some of them were blonde, so maybe they were red-headed, too.
I went back to the cave and looked at my patient. She was lying there looking at me, and the first thing she said was, “Thank you for the venison.”
She had the bluest eyes.
“Ma’am,” I said, ‘I’m William Tell Sackett, Tell for short, and leaving the meat was little enough to do.”
I’m Ange Kerry,” she said, “and I’m most glad you found me.”
Only thing I couldn’t figure out was how a girl that pretty ever got lost.
IX
Ange had gone to sleep again so, after adding sticks to the fire, I went out and sat down in the mouth of the cave. It was the first good chance I’d had to look around me.
The valley where I found the gold was lonely but peaceful . . . this was wild. Sheer black cliffs surrounded it on nearly all sides, broken here and there as though cracked by some thunderous upheaval of the mountain. The foot of each crack ended in a slope of talus, with broken, barkless tree trunks, their branches thrown wide and white against the rock like skeleton arms.
The stream descended through the valley in a series of ripples and miniature cascades, gathering here and there in a pool, only to go tumbling off down into the wild gorge that seemed to end in space.
The trees that rimmed the canyon were dwarfed and twisted, leaning away from prevailing winds, trees that the years gave no stature, only girth and a more tenacious grip on the rock from which they grew.
Landslides had carried away stands of aspen and dumped them among the tumbled boulders along the bottom. Slabs and crags of rock had broken off from the cliff faces and lay cracked and riven upon the canyon floor. There was scarcely a stretch of level land anywhere, only here and there an arctic meadow or stretch of tundra. The rocks were colored with lichen—green, orange, reddish, black, or gray—crusting the rocks, forever working at them to create from their granite flanks the soil that would build other growth.