The moves he planned could lead to disaster, but no matter what happened to him, someone must know, for if there was life on the other side, and he had evidence of it, there was no telling what their intentions might be.
Volkmeer drove up to the motel at sundown. He was a tall man with narrow shoulders, somewhat stooped, with a weather-beaten face. He was fifty years old but looked ten years younger. He wore a battered black hat, a blue shirt, gray vest, a pair of well-washed jeans, and boots with run-down heels. “Been years,” he said, when seated. “Heard of you now and again. Never expected your call.”
“I need help, Volk.”
“Figured as much, but it’s hard to imagine. Last I knew of you, you could do it all.”
“Ever ride that No Man’s Mesa country?”
Volkmeer took a cigar from his breast pocket, regarded it thoughtfully, then bit off the tip. “Time or two. It’s a place to fight shy of.”
He struck a match on the seat of his pants and lit the cigar. “Used to be Paiute country—Navajos never liked it much. I never liked it much, either.”
“There’s a mesa on this side of the river. Odd sort of place. Looks like the top was cultivated at one time or another.”
“Witch plants.”
“What?”
“Witch plants growed there. That’s what an Injun boy told me. Forty-odd years ago when I rode in there with this boy, there was still a few volunteers comin’ up.
“Mostly they died out over the years or been gathered and not replanted, but here and there some still lived. That kid an’ me, we climbed up there one time to get a drink out of a natural tank in the sandstone. He knew about that mesa and when he seen the plants, he taken out. I mean we left.”
“You never went back?”
“Some years later I was huntin’ strays and hunted that tank for a drink. Rainfall collected there, thousands of gallons of it, and good to drink unless some animal fell into it. I remembered what that Injun kid tol’ me—that the plants were planted by witches who wanted them for bad medicine.”
“Ever camp up there?”
Volkmeer glanced at him, his hard old eyes cynical. “I did. Camped in an old ruin. Wall made a good windbreak and she was blowin’ up cold. Eerie sort of place. I left out of there came daybreak. My horse didn’t like it no better than I did.”
Volkmeer put his hat on a chair. His hair was thin now, and gray, but he was still the man he had been, a grim, hard man with no nonsense about him. Years ago he had caught three rustlers with some cattle of the brand he rode for. He brought them in, two of them over their saddles and the third with a knot on his skull.
“I remember when you rode for that outfit over in the Blues,” Raglan commented.
“The Blues, the Henry, and the La Sals. I rode ’em all. There was still some bad ones hangin’ out on the Swell back in them days. Cassidy was gone, and so was Matt Warner, but there were others around. Cassidy never bothered us, nor any of his crowd. Some of that later bunch, they didn’t know no better, there at first. We had to dust a few of them with our Winchesters before they taken us serious.”
He brushed ash from his cigar. “What you want of me? I was just settin’ around goin’ to seed up yonder, just wishin’ something would happen.”
“This may not be to your taste,” Raglan said, and explained.
Volkmeer listened, then stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “You figure to go in there?”
“I am.”
“I won’t say you’re crazy. I heard the like from old Injuns a time or two. Some of the young ones don’t believe anymore. You got to talk to the old men and women, the kind I growed up with. Stories make your hair stand on end, believe me.”
He paused. “What d’ you want me for?”
“Backup. I want somebody who won’t stampede. When I go through that window I want somebody standing by who will be there when I come back.”
“You pulled me out of that mine, years ago. I owe you one. You came in an’ got me when I figured myself a goner. There was nobody else around and you taken your life in hand when you come after me. You could have gone off an’ left me and nobody would’ve known. Now, what do we do?”
“First, I’ve got to see a woman. Eden Foster.”
Volkmeer gave him a bleak look. “Know her, do you? She come up to my place a few years ago.”
Raglan was surprised. “Your place in the Blues? What did she want?”
“She’d heard I guided some parties back on the Ute reservation. Showed them a cliff dwelling called Eagle’s Nest. You know it?”
“I do.”
“Seemed like some kinfolk of hers lived there one time. She didn’t actually say that, but I gathered it. She wanted to know what was around, any paintings on the rocks, and suchlike.”
“What else?”
“She wanted to know if I ever got down to No Man’s. I was sort of curious but I didn’t let it show. I made no mention of No Man’s or the Hole.”
“Johnny’s?”
“You know about Johnny?”
“No, not much. I do know about the Hole. I’ve been there and I’m going back.”
“I never knew Johnny. He was before my time, but I heard talk. Johnny was a top hand, rode for several of the old outfits, and was a well-liked man. He was a rider. Broke the rough string for a half-dozen outfits, so they were all some cut up when he disappeared.
“Johnny usually rode alone. He’d come back a time or two tellin’ about this Hole he found, with water, trees, and all. Folks didn’t know whether to believe him or not but nobody wanted to ride forty mile just to prove him a liar. Johnny brung back some strays, mostly our stock that drifted south. Then he went back after some others and we never seen him again.
“It was common talk when I was a youngster. There’d been an Indian outbreak led by Old Polk and Posey, his son. That was about 1915. They killed a couple of Mexicans and when a posse went hunting them, they killed one of the posse. They’d been camped in Cow Canyon near Bluff when the posse came up on them, and there was a lot of shooting.
“Johnny had been riding over west of Bluff and when he didn’t show up, folks just naturally figured he’d run into Posey and his bunch of renegade Indians. Anyway, he disappeared.”
“He’s still alive, Volk. Somehow he got over to the Other Side and couldn’t find his way back.”
“I find that hard to believe. Johnny was just a youngster but he was a good tracker.” He paused. “Alive, you say? Why, he’d be over a hundred years old!”
“Not quite. But he’d be close to ninety, or maybe a year or two older.”
“I’ll be damned! Well, he was a tough man. If anybody could make it, Johnny could, from all I heard about him. You expect to find him?”
“I’ll be looking, Volk. He’s my key to what’s over there, he and the two I mentioned; the girl named Kawasi and the man Tazzoc.”
They talked the moon out of the sky and then Volk turned in on the twin bed. Mike Raglan sat awhile in the dark, just thinking. Then he went to bed himself, only to lie awake trying to consider all aspects of his problem.
What had happened to the Anasazi in the years following their return? They were far from a static culture when they vanished, and although changes were few, there were experiments with architecture brought about by the demands of the cliff caves in which they built their cities, if such they could be termed.
What would they have become had they remained here and been able to resist the attacks of the wild nomadic Indians who were coming in from the North and West? How would their civilizations have developed?
So much depended on water and the use of water that eventually their civilization, like those of Egypt, Babylon, the Indus Valley, and the Maya, would have had to agree to an overall control of water use by someone.
Lying in the darkness after he got into bed, Mike Raglan turned the problem over in his thoughts. There had been so much concentration on the native Americans found in possession when the white man came that little thought had been given to those who preceded them.
There had been excavations at Cahokia Mound, at Hopewell, and other places, as well as speculation about the Mound Builders, but much had been ignored that did not fit accepted theory. Too many workers in the field were inclined to ignore, as an intrusion, anything that did not fit previously conceived ideas. It was time for all such ideas to be set aside and for each bit of evidence to be examined with a completely open mind.