Making a handle out of a stick I split the end and wedged in a rounded stone, then lashed it in place. Using that and a few blades of stone, I started to work on that ore in the end of the tunnel. By sundown I had broken my axe handle twice at the hammer end, but had knocked off about three hundredweight of ore.
Long after nightfall I sat beside my fire and broke up that quartz. It was rotten quartz, some of which I could almost pull apart with my fingers, but I hammered it down and got some of the gold out. It was free gold, regular jewelry store stuff, and I worked until after midnight.
The crackling of my fire in the pine-scented night was a thing to pleasure me, but I walked down to the bank of the stream in the darkness and bathed in the cold water of the creek. Then I went back to the cave where I was camped and went to work on a bow.
Growing up with Cherokees like we did, all of us boys hunted with bows and arrows, even more than with guns. Ammunition was hard to come by when Pa was off in the western lands, and sometimes the only meat we had was what we killed with a bow and arrow.
My fire was burning wood that held the gathered perfume of years, and it smelled right good, and time to time the flames would strike some pitch and flare up, changing color, pretty as all get-out. Suddenly the heads of my horses came up, then I was over in the deep shadows with my Winchester cocked.
Times like that a man raised to wild country doesn’t think. He acts without thinking … or he may never get a chance to think again.
For a long time I waited, not moving a muscle, listening into the night. Firelight reflected from the flanks of my horses. It could be a bear or a lion, but from the way the horses acted I did not think so.
After a while the horses went back to eating, so I took a stick and snaked the coffeepot to me and had some coffee and chewed some jerked beef.
Awakening in the gray morning light, I heard a patter of rain on the aspen leaves, and felt a chill of fear … if it started to rain and that chute filled up with run-off water it might be days before I could get out.
So I sacked up my gold. The horses seemed happy to have me moving around. There was about three pounds of gold, enough and over for the outfit I’d need.
When I went outside I saw that the trout I’d cleaned and hung in a tree against breakfast were gone. The string with which I’d suspended the meat had been sawed through by a dull blade . . . or gnawed by teeth.
I stood looking at the ground. Under the tree there were several tracks. They were not cat tracks, they were the tracks of little human feet. They were the tracks of a child or a small woman.
My skin crawled . . . nothing human could be in a place like this; yet come to think of it, I couldn’t recall ever hearing of a ha’nt with a taste for trout.
We Welsh, like the Irish and the Bretons, have our stories of the Little People, all of which we love to yarn about, but we do not really believe in such things. But in America a man heard other tales. Not often, for Indians did not like to talk of them, and never spoke of them except among themselves. But I’d talked to white men who took squaws to wife, and they lived among Indians, and heard the tales.
Up in Wyoming I rode by to look at the Medicine Wheel, a great wheel of stone with twenty-odd spokes, well over a hundred feet across. The Shoshones copied their medicine lodge from that wheel, but all they can say about who built the wheel is that it was done by “the people who had no iron.”
A hundred miles away to the southwest there was a stone arrow pointing toward the wheel. It pointed a direction for someone—but who?
My gold was sacked to go, but I needed meat, and disliked to fire a gun in that valley. So I stalked a young buck and killed him with an arrow, butchered him, and carried the meat back to the cave, where I cut a fair lot of it into strips and hung them on a pole over a fire to smoke.
Then I broiled a steak of venison and ate it, decided that wasn’t enough for a man my size, and broiled another.
Hours later the wind awakened me. The fire was down to red coals and I was squirming around to settle down for sleep again when my mustang blew.
Me, I came out of those blankets like an eel out of greased fingers, and was back in the shadows again with my rifle hammer eared back before you could say scat.
“All right, boy.” The horses would know I was awake and they were not alone. At first there was no sound but the wind, then after a bit a stirring made by no bear or deer in the world.
My bronc snorted and my pack horse blew. I could see their legs in the faint glow of the coals, and nothing moved near them . . . but something was out there in the night.
A long slow time dragged by and the coals glowed a duller red. Leaning back against the wall, I dozed a little, but alert for trouble if need be.
There was no other sound.
Morning was painting a sunrise on a storm-gored ridge beyond the dark sentinel pines when I got up, stretched my stiff muscles. Studying the trees across the valley and the slope above them, I failed at first to notice what was closest to home. The rest of that meat had been pulled from the tree and a good-sized hunk had been cut off.
Whoever had cut it off had made work of it with a dull blade, and to take the risk of approaching a man’s camp whoever it was must have been hungry.
Hanging the meat up again, I went out and killed and dressed another buck. I hung it in a tree also, and rode away, I wanted nobody going hungry where I could lend a hand. Whoever or whatever it was would have meat as long as that buck lasted.
The trail going out was worse than coming in, but with some scrambling and slipping we reached the high basin. We rode past that lake of ghost water and headed for the lowlands once more. But once through the keyhole pass I did not follow the same trail, taking a rough, unlikely way that nobody was apt to find, unless maybe a mountain goat.
Turning in my saddle, I looked back at the peaks. “Whoever you are,” I said aloud, “expect me back, for I’ll be riding the high trails again, a-hunting for gold”
IV
I sighted the ranch, I drew up on the trail and looked across the bottom. There was a rocky ridge where the Mora River cut through, and the ranch was there beside it. That light over there was home, for home is where the heart is, and my heart was wherever Ma was, and the boys.
Walking the appaloosa down the trail, I could smell the coolness rising from the willows along the Mora, and the hayfields over in the big valley called La Cueva.
A horse whinnied, and a dog started to bark, and then another dog. Yet no door opened and the light continued to burn. Chuckling, I walked my horse along and kept my eyes open. Unless I was mistaken, one of the boys or somebody would be out in the dark watching me come up, maybe keeping me covered from the darkness until my intentions were clear.
Getting down from the saddle, I walked up the steps to the porch. I didn’t knock, I just opened the door and stepped in.
Tyrel was sitting at a table with an oil lamp on it, and Ma was there, and a girl who had to be Tyrel’s wife.
The table was set for four, and I stood there, long and tall in the door, feeling my heart inside me so big I felt choked and awkward. My clothes were stiff and I knew I was trail-dusty and mighty mean-looking.
“Howdy, Ma. Tyrel, if you’ll tell that man behind me to take his gun off my back, I’ll come in and set.”
Tyrel got up. “Tell… I’ll be damned.”
“Likely,” I said, “but don’t blame it on me. When I rode off to the wars I left you in good hands.”