Jak’s wife smiled and shook her head. “You got a good day for it. Jenny’d slow you down some. No, we’ll all three stay right here. Michael’s got plenty of chores. Barn needs sweeping out and the hayloft could do with some attention. We’ll work the day away while you people all play.” But she still smiled as she said it.
Jak stood quietly by his midnight-black stallion. He handed the bridle over to J.B. and went to kiss his wife goodbye.
“See you later, dearest,” he said.
They didn’t embrace. There was that ease of love between them that generally comes to couples who’ve shared each other’s company for many years. Jak kissed her once on the cheek, and she touched his face with her fingers.
“Come back safe, love.”
“Will do. Bye.”
Taking the reins back and swinging agilely up onto his mount’s back, Jak kicked his heels into its flanks and moved off at a fast trot toward the nearby hills, the rest of the group trailing along after him at their best speed.
Ryan glanced back once.
It was a vision of perfect peace and happinessa thread of smoke from Christina’s cooking oven; Michael waving to them, the child asleep in his arms; the woman, taking off her apron to wave it over her head, stepping with a clumsy grace down the three wooden steps to the yard.
THEY WERE STRUNG out over a hundred yards, Jak leading, and Doc, on a raw-boned gray gelding bringing up the rear. Ryan allowed his own horse to fall back off the pace to accompany the old man for a while.
“Enjoying this, Doc?”
“Do you wish for the truth or for the diplomatic lie, my dear fellow?”
“I thought you’d done a fair bit of riding, Doc, way back inin”
“My past life? My idea of riding, Ryan, was a gentle canter along Rotten Row in London’s Hyde Park on a well-schooled, broad-backed ambler, raising my bowler to the many elegant courtesans, admiring the fetching way they set their silver spurs into their spirited stallions, allowing my thoughts to wander away along rather forbidden lines, I fear.” Doc grinned at the salacious memory. “Though my suspicions at the time were that every single one of the sporting chaps watching the pretty little fillies at exercise were fancying themselves prancing between their thighs.”
“But you were a respectable married man, Doc. I’m shocked at you.”
“I was shocked at myself, my dear Ryan. But as for this creature” he slapped the horse on the neck, “I shall be damnably glad when we reach our destination and resort once more to the legs God gave us. Walking doesn’t involve bouncing along on this articulated sawhorse of an animal.”
“Be at the place Jak mentioned in about an hour, Doc. Can you hang on until then?”
“An hour is approximately fifty-nine minutes too long,” Doc replied. “But I shall relish the pleasure of ceasing this painful mode of transport all the more when we stop.”
THEY FINALLY STOPPED about an hour and a half later. Jak had led them upward on a winding trail that gave them a view across the scrub plain below, the gray dust vanishing away to the shimmering blur of the horizon. The house and the slant-roofed barns stood out, seeming to be surrounded by rectangles of finely ground emeralds, where the irrigation had brought fresh life to the desert.
Then the path wound higher, snaking around the flank of the mountain, rising higher, and taking them out of sight of the Lauren spread. The trails finally leveled out again in a clearing among some live oaks.
Doc swung his leg across the pommel and nearly fell as he reached the solid ground. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” he said. “For this relief, much thanks.”
All of the horses were tethered to a rawhide rope, stretched between two trees.
“How about Indians?” J.B. asked, slinging the scattergun across his shoulder.
“Lot of tribes,” Jak replied. “Hopi, Zuni, Navaho, Mescalero and Chiricahua. Get on well with all. Christina tended sick Navaho kid few months back, and we gave failed hunting party young steer. They give furs and bring meat and fish. Know us. We know them.”
“Wouldn’t steal the horses?”
Jak shook his head at J.B.’s question. “No way. Renegade breeds and whites. Mex raiders. Heard about gang up toward Sangre de Cristo mountains.”
“What sort of gang?” Ryan asked, tucking the weighted ends of his white silk scarf inside his coat.
“Wags, they say.”
“War wags, Jak?”
“Sure, Ryan. But talk’s talk out on frontier. Never seen no war wags all time down here.”
“What sort of armored vehicles, Jak? We talking tanks or PAVs?”
The white hair blew in the fresh breeze. The red eyes turned toward the Armorer. “Told you, J.B., it’s talk. Probably old truck with sheet of iron stuck up on it.”
“How far to where we’re going to get the deer, Jak?” Dean was carrying a single-shot homemade rifle that he’d been lent for the hunt, and he couldn’t wait to get up into the higher country and use it.
“Hour. Bit more, bit less.”
The weather was glorious, unsullied blue stretching from east to west and north to south. Jak knew the countryside around his spread like the back of his hand and drew them higher, into the shadowed brush-lined canyons.
The late-morning air was still and sultry, making all seven of the companions sweat as they climbed upward between the stark walls of red rock.
“Christina loves it here,” Jak said, pausing to allow Doc to catch them up. He laughed. “Said she’d like to be buried up here.”
“It’s a lovely place.” Krysty sat down on a rounded boulder. “Wouldn’t mind too much if I had to pass eternity here myself. Reserve me a spot, will you, Jak?”
“Sure. Just for family and friends.”
“When do we get to the deer?” Dean asked, eager to get on with the hunt.
“Soon. Pass old Indian ruin, then trail gets out into open, above stream. Find them there.”
“What kind of a ruin is it, Jak?” Mildred asked. “Anasazi?”
“Old ones. Heard called that, Mildred. Pueblo people. Like joined houses with small doors and windows, under overhang, farther up canyon.”
“I have been fortunate to visit many of the great Anasazi ruins of the Colorado Plateau. The Three Mesas and Acoma, Chaco Canyon and the wonders of the great Pueblo Bonito.” Doc sighed and wiped perspiration from his forehead.
Mildred nodded. “Don’t forget that my minor was Native American Sociological Groupings. I forded Chinle Wash to look at the White House, back before they stuck those seriously ugly link fences all around them.”
“I’ve seen a lot of those places, as well.” Krysty sighed. “Sure is hot here in the canyon. Thing that surprises me is that they were mostly built around the year 1000, up to 1200, and loads of them still survive. Our cities were modern and strong, and should’ve lasted a million years. Yet they were all gone within a few sky dark days. Gone forever.”
“How about the deer?” Dean asked plaintively. “We didn’t climb up here to talk about old ruins.”
“No,” Doc said gently, “but it would be a vile heresy to pass such wonders by without at least the most cursory glance in their direction.”
EVEN DEAN WAS SILENCED by the ruins. They were concealed beneath the lip of the cliff, the rock above stained by the countless cooking and heating fires. The sandstone was also discolored by the rain-leached desert varnish. The adobe was cracked in a few places, and one of the interior walls had collapsed. The site had obviously been carefully explored and excavated by professional archaeologists sometime, back before the long winters, and there were no potsherds or other human artifacts in the buildings.
The only evidence of occupation was a scattering of animal remains, mostly deer, but with some sheep and even a few horse and cattle bones.
“Cougar,” J.B. guessed.
“Coyote?” Jak offered.
“No.” The Armorer shook his head. “Coyote wouldn’t climb this high. Not dragging haunches of a carcass behind it. Got to be something bigger.”
Doc wandered from room to room, ducking to squeeze through the oddly narrow T-shaped doorways, his grizzled head protruding unexpectedly through dark windows.
“This is wonderful,” he proclaimed. “Pure Anasazi. Look at the kiva down there. And another one farther along.”
“What were they for, Doc?” Dean asked. “They look like sort of wells. Or some kind of storage rooms for wheat and olden-times stuff like that.”
“No, dear boy. The kiva was the center of the religion for these ancient people. They believed, simplistically, that the underworld was literally thatexisting just below our feet, like a dark mirror of our own universe, so they descended into the kiva for their spiritual ceremonies to be nearer to this other world. This is wonderful, Jak. But I confess some surprise that they have not been occupied.”