The place I’d found was deep under the overhang, masked by some brush, and I’d heaved a couple of rock slabs up to make added shelter. My horse couldn’t get into it, but I found him a place under the trees where intersecting branches made cover of a kind.
Before me the ground broke away into the canyon of the Carrizo, and as I looked down the canyon I saw the rider, who drew rein, turned in the saddle, and looked carefully around, like a man who is lost.
I could guess what happened, and it didn’t take a lot of figuring. That rider had mistaken the Carrizo for the Cibecue, for back up where the two canyons headed up they weren’t more than a couple of miles apart, maybe even less. And there was one branch of the Cibecue that began only a couple of hundred yards from the Carrizo. Somebody not used to the country might easily mistake the one for the other.
That rider was in trouble, for the two canyons ran parallel to each other for only a few miles, and the further down the canyon he rode … no, she rode, for by that time I was positive the rider was a woman … the further down the canyon she rode, the further she would get from where she was going.
Suddenly lightning flashed and thunder crashed, and the rider’s horse reared up and bolted. And then the rain came … it came hard, and in a real old back-country gully-washer. The rider disappeared below the walls and out of my sight, her horse running wild and crazy in the kind of country where a horse would do well to walk.
The rain drew a gray veil across the landscape, a veil like shimmering steel, that shut out the crags, shut out the darkness of the pines, and started big drops falling over the edge of my overhang.
Here I was snug and dry, but I was unquiet in my mind, for I was thinking of that woman, her horse running away over wet rocks in a wild canyon. If she could stay with the horse and he didn’t break his fool leg or her neck they would be all right. Only I didn’t think for a minute she would get through.
I sat there maybe ten minutes, secure in my hideaway, with the rain falling outside. The canyon, I knew, was going to be running belly-deep for a tall horse within the next couple of hours … maybe sooner. If anybody was down, but conscious, they might have a chance; unconscious, anybody down there on the ground would be dead.
Finally I got up, cussing myself for being a damned fool to go off a-helping somebody in a country full of enemies.
When I slung a saddle on my horse he gave me a hurt look. He was as tired of it all as I was, and I hadn’t my strength back. I had figured to sit right where I was and rest up a couple of days while my enemies worried about where I was. I found her, and sure enough, she had fallen or been thrown from the saddle. She was lying among the rocks, her face white as all get-out, her black hair spilled around her on the wet sand.
Her horse was fifty yards off, standing three-legged with the saddle under his belly. When I walked over to get the horse and fix the rig up, I saw that he’d gone lame. The leg wasn’t broken, but it was hurt, and that horse wasn’t going to carry anybody very far, not for a while.
So I led him back to where the lady lay, and I picked her up and slung her over my shoulder and heaved her aboard my own horse. Holding her on the saddle in front of me, I returned to the overhang and my fire.
When I put her down beside the fire she opened a pair of the deepest, blackest eyes I had ever seen, and she said, “Thank you, Mr. Sackett. I was afraid I would never find you.”
chapter eight
Now I was never no hand with womenfolks. Mostly when I went to dances back in the Tennessee hills I went for the fighting that went on between times or after. Orrin, that brother of mine who was a hand to sing and play the fiddle, he could talk to women. Those Trelawney gals back there were always a-taking after him, but he had a way that could charm the prissiest ones into walking out with him. Seemed like he knew every pretty girl from Cumberland Gap to the Highland Rim.
Here was I, a long homely man and no hand to talk, rained into an overhang cave on a Tonto ridge with one of the prettiest little girls you ever did see, and the trails buried stirrup-deep under rushing water. The way she looked up at me, I was almighty sure she was less put out than me.
“What do you mean, ma’am? And how did you know me?”
She was lying there beside the fire, looking as cute as a cub ‘coon in a hollow tree, and she seemed in no mind to sit up, although I was fairly a-sweating, wishing she would.
“There’s no man anywhere so tall,” she said, “or so strong. My! You picked me up as if I was a baby!”
Well, she wasn’t any baby. She was little, but she was doing her share where it counted, judging by the way she shaped out her clothes.
“Now see here. I’m not fixed to take care of any woman. I’m a foot-loose, long-riding man, and when this storm is over, you go back to your ma.”
“I don’t have one.”
She gave me a woe-begone look that would have curled my socks, if I’d owned any. I just shoved my bare feet down into my boots.
“And if you keep on I won’t have any father, either,” she said.
That set me back. So I made up to work over the fire. Only thing wrong with it, that horse of hers wasn’t wearing any Lazy A brand. The horse had followed along, limping up the mountain after us, and he was standing under the trees with my two horses.
“How did you expect to find me?”
She sat up and locked her hands around one knee. “By just riding. Only I got lost, somehow.”
That didn’t make any impression on me. I went about fixing up a bite of something to eat, knowing nobody would smell smoke in all that rain, and probably nobody would be riding until it was over. Nonetheless, I kept an eye on the country around, not really believing this girl was out alone. But the rain was going to wash out any tracks, and anybody hunting me was going to have to wait until I started moving again, or until this girl told it around that she’d seen me.
All the while I fussed over the fire, I was thinking over the business of this girl showing up. Now, this Mogollon country was wild. Over here where I was now, over half the country stood on end, and it was crags and boulders, brush and fallen trees. It was really rough, and no place a body would be likely to find a hot-house flower like this girl. She had soft hands and soft skin, and showed little sign of being out much in wind and sun. She could ride, all right, but she was no cow-country girl. Leastways, she hadn’t been for some time. If such a girl was in this country at such a time, she was bait for something. And who was everybody fishing for? Me.
The best thing I could do was get shut of this girl as fast as I could, but I surely couldn’t drive her out in the rain. Yet the more I thought of it, the uneasier I became. From time to time I sneaked a look at her. She was in no way upset by being caught with a strange man in wild country. She was young, all right, maybe not more than seventeen or eighteen, but there was a kind of wise look about her eyes that made me think that, girl-wise, she’d been up the creek and over the mountain. I began to think that killing me wasn’t enough. Now they were fixing to get me hanged.
Making coffee and broiling a couple of venison steaks took little time. Whilst we ate that, and the last of my bread, I figured out what I was a-going to do.
By the time we’d finished eating, the last of the light was going. Maybe I was wrong, but I wasn’t going to chance it. I stowed away my eating gear and taken up my saddle. She sat up straight then and looked at me.
“What are you going to do with that?” she asked.