A space too narrow for a horse opened on my right, and gasping for breath, I went into x, turned sidewise and edged through. A brush-choked hollow lay before me, but I thought I saw a place where animals had gone through, and dropping to my knees, I crawled in, and fortunately had the presence of mind to scatter some leaves behind me, and to pull down a branch so no opening was visible.
On elbows and knees, I wormed my way along the passage, if such it could be called.
All around me was thick brush, much of it blackberry brush with thorns like needles. But wild animals had used this opening, and I made my way through.
At the end it opened on a sheet of bluish rock scattered with pebbles fallen off the mountain.
There were slender aspens here, and I stood up and faced into them, loading the Ferguson as I went.
They were no more than a hundred yards away, and it would be only a matter of time until they found me. What I needed now was a place to hide.
Or a place in which to make a stand.
Falvey was shouting angrily. Suddenly I heard a shot, then a burst of firing… and silence.
A moment I listened, but they would be searching for me, knowing me trapped against the face of the mountain.
I went down the dry watercourse through the aspen, their leaves dancing overhead, and then turned and found myself with a sheer wall of rock on my right hand, a wall at least thirty feet high, and without a break!
The place was shadowed and still, dappled by sunlight falling through the leaves. I walked on, careful to make no sound. My enemies were close beyond the scattered boulders, brush, and trees on my left, and on my right a rock wall not even a squirrel could climb.
Soon they would discover it was not thick brush and boulders to the rock wall. They would find there was this ancient watercourse…. Suddenly it ended.
The rock bed along which I had been walking suddenly turned right, dipped slightly down, and came to an abrupt end.
From around that corner, back up the way, came a shout. They had discovered my hidden path. In a moment I would be fighting for my life.
Glancing quickly around I saw what I had not seen before, a black slit at the foot of the rock wall into wh the water had evidently poured. It was narrow, but there was just a chance. Suppose it dropped off fifty or a hundred feet into blackness? I’d wind up in a cave with a broken leg and no way to get out. The thought was not pleasant.
Nevertheless, there might be a foothold, something to which I could cling– Dropping to my knees, I lay flat, then backed my feet into the hole. Squirming back, only my shoulders, arms, head, and rifle still outside, I felt for a foothold.
And something grabbed me!
Before I could yell, I was jerked bodily back into the hole and tumbled in a heap on the sand at the foot of it.
There was a moment when I saw a grizzled old man in ragged, dirty buckskins, and then he was fitting a stone into the slit.
“Shush now!” he whispered. “They’re a-comin’ on the run.” I heard their boots pounding on the rock outside, shouts, then swearing as they found nothing.
We could hear them threshing in the bushes, hear boots scraping on rock. “Hell,” somebody said, “I’ll bet he never came this way at all!” The old man whispered. “We got to set awhile, let ’em work off their mad. They won’t stay long.” I was too astonished to speak, and sat, clutching my rifle… only I wasn’t.
My hands should have been gripping my rifle and they were not. It was gone!
Faint light came from a crack around the rock that blocked my point of entry. The Ferguson rifle was in his hands, the muzzle pointed right at me!
CHAPTER 16
The hands that gripped the Ferguson were gnarled and old, but they were also thick and powerful. “You jest set quiet, boy. I ain’t about to let them find you. Or me,” he added, with a faint chuckle.
Surprisingly, we could hear well. Their boots grated on the rock, they threshed in the brush, and then somebody spoke again, farther away, the voice coming faintly. “Nobody come this way.
He’s hidin’ in the bresh somewheres.” Their footsteps receded, and I looked slowly around. The cave in which I sat was about twenty feet across, but longer, and growing narrower as it led away from the basin. Evidently the water had spilled through the crack, swirled around in here, then found its way out by a passage widened by years of erosion.
The floor of the cave was sandy with rock underneath.
There was a little driftwood lying about, and on a shelf an old pack rat’s nest.
The old man stood up. In his day he must have been a man of enormous strength. Even now his wrists were thick and strong. His shoulders were slightly stooped, like those of a gorilla. He turned from me and picked up his rifle, which he had leaned against a wall. At the same time he extended mine to me. “I was afeared you might be skeered an’ take a shot at me, grabbin’ you like I done.” “Thank you,” I said. “You probably saved my life.” “Figured on it.” He turned toward the passage. “Let’s mosey out’n here. Ain’t no place to talk, this here. When a sudden rain comes, this place fills up mighty rapid.
Seen it a time or two.” He led the way into the passage. It was completely dark there and I had no liking for it, but he walked along fearlessly so I judged he not only knew the place well but also that there were no obstacles.
“Weren’t always like this. I cleaned it up. Never know when a body might have to git out an’ git, an’ when I take to runnin’, I don’t want nothin’ in the way.” After sixty counted steps, I saw light ahead, and then another twenty steps and we emerged in a much wider room where a little light filtered in from some crack above.
Several openings left the cave.
“Seen you from above.” He indicated with a lift of his head the mountain above us. “Seen them folks a-huntin’ you. Seen you turn down the crick bed yonder, figured to help.” “Thanks again. That’s a bad lot.” “I seen him before. Two, three years ago he came up here, poked around all over the country. I seen a Injun he got holt of.
… That’s a mighty mean man yonder.” His buckskins were worn and dirty, and his hands showed him to be old, but there was no age in his eyes.
“Are you a trapper?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Time to time. I’m a hunter, too, time to time. I’m whatever it needs to get what I want.” “My name is Ronan Chantry. I joined up with some others to trap the western mountains but we ran into a girl in trouble, and we’ve been helping her.” “Girl?” He snorted. “They’re mostly in trouble, an’ when they ain’t, they’re gettin’ other folks into x.” He loaded his pipe. “Who’s with you?” “Solomon Talley, Degory Kemble, Davy Shanagan–was “Huh! I know Talley. Good man. An’ that crazy Irishman… I know him, too. The others?” “Bob Sandy, Cusbe Ebitt, Isaac Heath, and there’s a Mexican lad with us named Ulibarri.” “I knowed some Ulibarris down Sonora way. Good folks. Sandy, he’s that Injun hunter. I never cottoned to him much. I always get along with the Injuns. The Blackfeet.
well, they’re hard folks to get to like, although I expect a body could. The Sioux… they’re huntin’ me all the while.
“Take pleasure in it, I reckon, but they can’t find me.” His eyes glinted with humor.
“Good folks, them Sioux! I wouldn’t be without ’em. They come a-huntin’ for my hair an’ they keep me on my toes.
“Can’t find me, nohow. This here mountain is limestone. Don’t look it, because she’s topped off with other rock, but this here”–he waved a hand about–“is limestone. This whole mountain is caves… must be hundreds of miles of them.
I got me a hideout here with twenty-five or thirty entrances.
“I don’t hunt trouble with no Injun, but when they hunt me, I give ’em a-plenty. Ever’ time I kill a Sioux I post a stick alongside the body with another notch in it.
nine, last count.” “And you?” “They got lead into me oncet, arrers a couple of times, but I got more holes’n a passel o’ prairie dogs, an’ I always crawl into one of them an’ get away. One time I ducked into a hole I didn’t know an’ it taken me three days to find my way to caves I knowed.