Jack was a machineman and had been running a stoper on the same shift with him for several months. He was a congenial, easygoing man of sixty or more with memories of the great days at Goldfield, Tonopah, Randsburg, and Cripple Creek. He had grown up in the Four Corners area and his grandmother had been a Paiute. He spoke the language well.
They had driven to Flagstaff and then to Tuba City. Farther along somewhere they had turned into an old trail for Navajo Mountain. There were few places Jack hesitated to go with his old car. Its high center enabled it to straddle rocks that would have disabled a later model. He carried a kit of tools, a spare fanbelt, and odds and ends of nuts, bolts, and baling wire, as well as an axe, shovel, and saw. There were always a couple of five-gallon cans of gasoline, one of water, and a roll of steel mesh used in crossing deep sand. There was literally no place he would not go when traveling or prospecting.
They had been eating supper in a greasy spoon restaurant in Flagstaff when they met the old cowboy. He was an acquaintance of Jack’s from years past.
“Know this country,” he said to Mike. “When I was your age I cowboyed all over. Rode for the Hashknife an’ the French outfit. Then I taken to huntin’ for the Lost Adams gold. Found color here an’ there, made a livin’. Punched cows around Winslow and down on the Big Sandy. Then I come back to this country an’ prospectin’ again.”
He peered at Mike. “You’re young. Years ahead of you. You prospectin’?”
“I’m rustling a job. Jack an’ me worked together down Arizona way.”
“Remind me of m’self when I was your age. Full o’ dreams o’ what I’d do if I struck it rich. Well, I never got rich but I did make a good livin’. Found me a good woman, too. Still got her. Got enough to last our years.” He sized Mike up. “You got nerve, boy? You easy skeered?”
“About the same as most.”
“He’s got sand,” Jack interrupted. “Seen him in action. He’s a scrapper and a damn good one.” Jack got up. “I’m turnin’ in, Mike. We’ll pull out at daybreak.”
“I’ll finish my coffee,” Mike said.
The old man filled the cups, then leaned back in the booth and looked at Mike. “Boy, I’m eighty-eight m’ last birthday. I can ride as good as ever but I can’t climb. Don’t want to, anyways. Like I said, we got enough put by, me an’ my woman. We lost a boy. Never had no others.
“Never told my story to anybody. Never felt no call to, an’ didn’t want to be called a liar. Folks always figured I’d struck me a pocket, an’ I surely did.” He chuckled. “Only it weren’t raw gold but ree-fined gold. Pure! I found some all right an’ there’s aplenty where it came from if’n you aren’t skeered of ha’nts and the like.
“Eighty-eight, that’s what I am, an’ my woman’s almost as old. No way you figure it do I have much time left. I never told my own boy. I was skeered for him. Never told nobody until now an’ I’m fair itchin’ to get it off my chest before I go.
“But I’m warnin’ you, boy—git you some gold an’ git out. Don’t try to stay, an’ once out, for God’s sake don’t try to go back!
“They never knowed what I found. They hunted me, but believe me, nobody’s goin’ to trail this here coon across no desert. Nobody!
“They never knowed who it was got through an’ I fought shy of that country ever since. I tell you, boy, there’s things about this world nobody knows. That there desert now, them mountains around Navajo an’ east of there?
“That’s wild country, boy! Wild! There’s places yonder you see one time an’ they never look the same again. There’s canyons no man has seen the end of, nor ever will, either, unless they get through to the Other Side.”
“The other side?”
“That’s what I said, boy. The Other Side. Folks are forever sayin’ there’s two sides to everythin’.
“Well, why should there be only two sides? Why not three sides or even four? I don’t know nothin’. I don’t even claim to know, only I stumbled onto somethin’ mighty strange out yonder. I figured on it some an’ I spent some months just a-watchin’ an’ layin’ low. I ain’t claimin’ I know how it works, but I know when. I don’t know what causes it, or how such things can be, but it worked one time for me. Trouble is, they knew. Somehow, they knew. Only by the time they got there I was gone, an’ I stayed gone!”
He took a swallow of coffee, wiped the back of his hand across his mustache, and said, “I’m goin’ to give you a map. It’s on canvas an’ I made it my ownself. Only part of it was copied from a gold plate on a wall. That part I know nothin’ about. I copied it, figurin’ it was the key to somethin’, I don’t know what.”
“You found pure gold? Was it high-grade? Jewelry rock?”
“It was ree-fined gold, boy. Discs, like. Size of a saucer. An’ there was cups, dishes, an’ the like o’ that, besides.”
Mike Raglan remembered the evening. He liked the story but he was a skeptic. The West was filled with stories of buried treasure and lost mines, treasures whose value increased as prices inflated. Years ago the treasures had been worth thirty or sixty thousand dollars, but all figures had become astronomical, so the value of hidden treasures had inflated as well. Thirty million was a popular figure nowadays.
If even half the stories were true, a large part of the population must have been engaged in burying treasure and losing mines. Outlaws were popularly supposed to have buried their loot when most of them couldn’t spend it fast enough. Most of them spent their loot on wine, women, and song, although there’s not much record that they wasted much time singing.
“I’ve got a map …”
Here it was, the pitch. The map of the hidden gold would be sold only to him, for X number of dollars. Well, he’d heard that pitch before and still had his first map to buy.
“How much?”
“Ain’t for sale. Not for any price. I aim to give it to you, son, but I’ll warn you. I’m givin’ you grief. Least you do as I did. Study it, learn it well, then make your move an’ get out. There’s no other way.”
The old man was silent as he refilled the cups. “I got to warn you about that country, boy. I been there twenty, thirty times, maybe. Just when you think you know it, somehow it’s all twisted all bally-which-way. You stand where you stood before but nothin’ looks the same.
“Nothin’ even feels the same. Did you ever wake up in the night an’ find everythin’ out of kilter? The door seems in the wrong place? Everythin’ switched around? Well, that country can be that way, only it doesn’t stay that way for minutes—it’s like that for hours!”
He paused, staring out into the night’s darkness. “You listen to me, boy. You do like I done. When that country seems all catty-corner-wise, you stay where you’re at. Don’t you move! Don’t let nobody get you down into that crazy, twisted-up country!
“Three, maybe four times in thirty years I seen it. Each time I had sense to stay right where I was.
“I had me an ol’ burro them days. Canny beast! Follered it over mesa an’ canyon for nigh thirty years. It was that ol’ burro learned me. With green grass an’ water right down the slope, that ol’ burro wouldn’t take a step! I pushed him one time, tol’ him not to be such a damn fool, but he jus’ laid back his ears an’ wouldn’t move!”
He reached into an inside pocket and brought out a piece of canvas, opening it on the table. “There she be. This here is Navajo Mountain. Nobody’s goin’ to miss that. Biggest thing around, an settin’ right in the middle of some of the roughest country you ever did see. Canyons so deep you have to look twice to see the bottom. You look as far as you can see, then you start from there an’ look again.
“That squiggly line? That’s the San Juan River. Empties into the Colorado. Most of the time she flows in the bottom of a canyon. There’s a trail leads from Navajo goin’ east. Mighty rough.”
“That’s the way we’re headed.”
“Keep goin’, son. Just don’t stop. You keep a-goin’.”
II
The old cowboy put his finger on a mesa, carefully drawn on the canvas map. “That’s the place to fight shy of. You’re gettin’ into cliff-dweller country but you won’t find any up there. Them old Injuns was smart! They wanted no part of that place!