After a bit of contemplating, I decided not to go there by night. It would be hard enough to come upon the gold in the daylight, let alone prowling among boulders and rock slides in the dark, and maybe falling into a hole, nobody knew how deep.
Most of all I wanted to get shut of Loomis and Sylvie and Ralph, and I got to thinking about what kind of people they were. With western folks a body knew where he stood. I mean, things were mostly out in the open, for the very good reason that there was no place to hide anything. People were scarce, the towns were small, and whatever a man did it had to be pretty well known.
Things were beginning to change, though, because with the railroads a new kind of folks were coming west. The cheats and the weaklings that hard times had weeded out in the earlier years could now ride west on the cushions.
Jacob Loomis was a man who might have come at any time, though he wouldn’t have been any great addition to the country. Sylvie and Ralph would not have come west at all but for the gold they thought they’d come by in an easy way.
Bishop might try to shoot me, I knew. Fryer might try dry-gulching me, but that was to be expected, more or less; anyway, this was Indian country where a man had to be on guard. Poison was another matter, and Sylvie and Ralph … well, there was something wrong about them, something evil, something twisted in their minds.
Finally I went to sleep, though I knew when I closed my eyes that I would wake up to a day of guns and gunsmoke. There would be blood on the rocks of the Rabbit Ears before another sundown.
The last stars hung lonely in the sky, and a low wind trembled the cottonwood leaves when my eyes opened and my ears reached out for sound. One by one I heard the sounds—the rustling leaves, the low murmur of the creek water, the pleasant sound of horses cropping grass. Out in the creek a fish jumped.
Picking up my boots, I shook them out—centipedes or scorpions have a way of crawling into boots at night; and then I tugged them on, stood up, and stamped them into place. My hat was already on, of course. First thing any cowhand does of a morning is put on his hat. I slung my gunbelt and settled the holster into place, then tied the thong about my leg.
It was not yet full daylight. A single red coal showed in the fire. I stretched the stiffness out of me, wiped the night sweat from my Winchester, and went down to the creek to wash and to brush my teeth with a frayed willow stick.
Moving quietly, I went to the dun and rubbed his ears a mite, talking to him in a low, friendly tone. Then I saddled up, rolled my bed, and made ready to move out. The old man was sleeping, breathing evenly. That tough old man, all bone and rawhide, would pull though all right. As for that girl Penelope—
She was gone. Her bed was there, but she had slipped away. Her horse was gone too.
My mustang hadn’t made any fuss because she came from within the camp, she was one of us, and she had a right to go. And for once I’d slept so sound I’d missed her going.
She had no business slipping off that way, but I had no business sleeping so sound that she could do it. The truth was, it made me mad to think anybody could slip out of camp without me knowing—but it worried me, too. My life depended on never sleeping that sound.
Kneeling down, I touched Mims on the shoulder. He opened his eyes right off, sharp and clear as if he had never slept.
“That girl kin of yours slipped off. No telling what’s happened to her.”
He sat up and reached for his hat. “She’ll have gone to that misbegotten canyon. We’d better get over there.”
Whilst he got himself up, I slapped a saddle on his horse, and only minutes after he opened his eyes we had all gear packed and ready, and rode out of camp.
We walked our horses out of the creek and started up through the trees. The Rabbit Ears bulked large and dark against the sky. A quail called somewhere out in the brush. I knew we weere riding to a showdown, and for once I wished it was over.
We kept to low ground, seeking all the cover we could find, and riding out in the open only when we reached the canyon mouth. There seemed to be plenty of tracks, but we could make nothing of them. As before, the dun wanted no part of the box canyon, but at my urging he went ahead hesitantly. I could see that several horses had entered the canyon since we had come out of it.
The first thing we saw was Steve Hooker, and he was dead. He lay crumpled on the ground, one knee drawn up, his six-gun still in its holster, the thong in place.
“Look!” Mims said hoarsely. He was pointing at Hooker’s tracks.
He had been walking along, taking slightly shorter strides than a man of his height might have been expected to take, which made me sure he had come in here after dark. Walking on uneven ground, unfamiliar to him, a man will usually take shorter steps.
He had fallen after a few staggering steps and had gone to his hands and his knees. He had gotten up and gone on, and then had fallen again. This time when he had risen he took not more than two or three steps before he collapsed.
“Something last night,” Mims spoke in a low, awed tone. “Sackett, I’m riding the hell out of here.”
“You wait just a minute,” I said. “No use goin’ off half-cocked.”
Nothing seemed any different from yesterday except for the body of Hooker. I stepped down from the saddle and turned him over. There was no sign of a wound, no blood. His face looked puffy and had a kind of bluish color to it, but that might have been the effect of the early light, or it might have been my imagination.
The low clouds that had come with daybreak hung over the Rabbit Ears, and tails of mist drifted past them. The canyon was a gloomy place at any time with its dark, basaltic rock and the uncanny stillness. I heard no sound at all, and saw no birds, no small animals.
What was it the Mexican had told me that night on the Neuces?
The gold had been pushed into a hole under a boulder, and rocks had been caved in over it. A cross had been scratched on the rock. Forty years or more had passed since the day that happened—I didn’t have a sure idea when it was that Nathan Hume had been caught in this trap and massacred.
“Look for a white cross, Mims,” I said, keeping my voice low, not knowing who there might be listening. “The sort of thing a man would scratch on a rock if he was in a hurry.”
We both saw it at the same moment and started our horses toward it.
The gray clouds seemed darker and lower still, and there was a hint of dampness in the air. I did not like the feel of it; I did not like anything about this strange, haunted place.
Dropping my Winchester into the boot, I swung down from the saddle, and tied the dun to some stiff brush nearby. I loosened the thong from my six-shooter, then walked into the hollow where the boulder stood. At the base of it, below the scratched cross, was a jumble of rumbled rock.
I looked all around. “Keep a sharp lookout, Mims,” I said. “Don’t watch me—watch for them.”
“I wonder where that girl is?” Mims said in a worried tone. “She’d no call to go traipsing off like that.”
“Let’s get the gold. Then we’ll hunt for her. I’ve got a hunch she can take care of herself.”
The hiding place was logical enough. Men defending themselves from Indians would probably retreat to just such a place as this. It would have seemed a good place to make a stand, although Indians up on the rim could have covered them with rifle fire.
One by one I started moving the rocks, most of them slabs, or boxilders from head-size on up. I worked as fast as a body could, but I was trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not so much that I suspected anybody was close by, but there was something about that canyon that made a man want to walk softly and speak in a low tone.