He worked himself a little higher, threw the sack and got a good lift, gaining a full yard. He started to turn around, and suddenly heard a yell below. He looked down and saw a man he had never seen before pointing up at him and yelling. “Ben! Ben, we got him!”
“Fan,” he said quietly, “crawl right over me. Come on, quick … and don’t ask questions!”
She scrambled up, and he caught her by the waist. Lying almost flat, his feet braced against the rocks on either side, he literally lifted her over and above him. It was only a few yards to the top now.
“Keep going!” he said sharply. “When you get up there you can cover me with a rifle.”
He slipped the thong off his six-gun and, gripping it in one hand, he began to hitch himself up, keeping his eyes on the space below.
Suddenly a head loomed, and instantly he fired. He heard a scream, saw a man clap his hands to his head and fall … he fell a long way, his scream trailing out behind him.
A shot hit the rock near Noon, scarring the face of the wall with white slash; then came another … a near miss.
He scrambled higher, then deliberately dislodged a heavy rock with one foot and watched it fall. It rolled over and over, fell a few feet, hit a rock, and bounded into space, hit again, and then fell clear.
With bullets smashing the rocks below him, he threw himself at the rim, made it, and rolled over. There he lay still, panting. For a moment he lay sprawled on the coarse grass, his muscles trembling with the release from strain, his mind a vacuum. When he did glance around he saw Fan near him, her face pale.
“Are we all right?” she whispered.
“We’ll never be all right,” he replied, “until they are dead, or driven away. We are the hunted, and we have gone as far as we can go.”
“What will we do?”
“We will fight. We have not hunted trouble, but it takes two sides to make a peace. The hunters like nothing better than to see the hunted come walking to them, unarmed. We have no choice now, Fan, so we will fight . . . fight as they haven’t yet seen us fight.”
Chapter Sixteen
He shoved back from the rim and got to his feet. They were on top of the mesa in the clear, cool air. A soft wind stirred the air around Fan’s cheek. About fifty feet away were the ruins of an ancient village, which had once been two rows of houses, back to back, but was now no more than a few shallow pits and ridges of earth, littered with fragments of the red-on-black pottery.
The wide sky was above them and around them. They stood upon an island where only the clouds were close; nothing moved about them. It was a moment of pristine stillness.
They stood a little apart, merely living the stillness, with no thought of any other time than this. A rattle of rocks drove the stillness away, and brought back with a shock the immediacy of danger.
“I’ll stop them, Fan. You look around … see what else there is.”
He went back to the rim, crawling the last few feet, then toppled a heavy boulder down the chute. There was a cry, a scramble, a rattle of rocks, and the sound of someone swearing.
That would hold them for a little while. No man in his right mind was going to attempt that chute with somebody above him ready to send down rocks.
He got up and walked over to the ruins. Here men had lived, men in an early state of civilization, men organizing their first attempts at a settled community, men thinking out the rules that would give them freedom, for freedom and civilization can exist only where there are laws and agreement.
The man men called Ruble Noon kicked his toe against a pile of earth. Tom Davidge had accumulated treasure, and men wanted it now who were prepared to obtain it, who were ready to kill his daughter, his friends, anyone. Tom Davidge had excited the greed of men, and here in these western lands men were fighting again the age-old struggle for freedom and for civilization, which is one that always must be fought for. The weak, and those unwilling to make the struggle, soon resign their liberties for the protection of powerful men or paid armies; they begin by being protected, they end by being subjected.
Ruble Noon was sore and he was tired. He wanted no more of running and fighting, but no end was in sight. He looked across the mesa toward Fan, who had walked toward the edge and was looking for a way down. Her skirt blew in the wind, and he watched for a moment as she walked the rim, occasionally pausing to look over. He went back to the chute and trickled a few small rocks over the edge, merely as a warning.
Ruble Noon wondered where, exactly, they were. They had gone into the cave and moved away from the mountain cabin, and they had traveled what seemed to be half a mile or so, and now they had emerged on top of a large mesa. From this vantage point, none of the mountains around looked familiar. Obviously he was seeing them from a different viewpoint and their altered appearance left him unsure.
Already there was darkness in the canyon. When he peered over the edge of the chute, nothing was in sight. He listened, but he heard no voices. No doubt they had decided against attempting the climb for the present, or they decided on another approach. Ben Janish had ridden this country and might know a good deal more about it than Ruble Noon could recall.
For luck, he started a fair-sized rock rolling down the chute. Other rocks slid with it, and for a moment he could hear the rattle and bump as they went down. When the sound died the evening was empty.
He took up his rifle and pack and started after Fan. He plodded along, putting one foot ahead of another with effort. He was dog-tired, his head ached, and he wanted nothing so much as sleep.
As he went across the mesa, he several times saw bits of pottery, usually of the same type as those he had seen at the ruins.
Fan had seen him coming and had paused beside some low brush. “It will be dark soon,” she said. “I’ve seen no path, no animal tracks. Do you suppose that was the only way up, and that they have closed it off?”
He shook his head. “There’s got to be a way. I’ve seen some steep-walled mesas, but never one that couldn’t be scaled, either up or down.”
Already a star had appeared, for night fell fast in this desert land. The air was chill. He saw a line of trees and started toward it.
Suddenly the mesa broke off sharply in front of them in a V of rock filled with trees and brush, and sloping steeply down. He saw what he wanted, a thick clump of trees surrounded by blowdowns-trees flattened by the wind and long dead, their whitening bones sprawled across the ground.
They crossed over them, walking carefully, and when he was among the trees he cut branches for a bed for Fan on the ground under the pines. Pines meant a good chance that this was a south slope. Most of the trees below them were aspen, a thick stand, almost filling the notch. The place was walled in, secluded.
“We will sleep here,” he told Fan. “The bed of dead branches out there will warn us if anyone tries to come close.”
From dead branches he built a small fire, and they made coffee in an empty can after they had eaten the beans from it. There was a trickle of water coming down from a crack in the mesa wall above them, and he put out the fire, making sure every ember was dead. Then he placed the can in a fork of a tree. Some other traveler might need it.
He built his own bed well back under the trees. When he went back to speak to Fan, she was already asleep. He covered her with his coat, and returned to his bough bed. Chilly as it was, he was soon asleep.
He awoke suddenly, stiff and cold in the first light The trees were still dark around him, and Fan was sleeping. He got up, wiped off his rifle and hers, and then went a few feet away from the camp to listen. There was no sound but the distant wind in the trees.
Evidently they had moved well away from the ranch during their escape, and now must be several miles off. Below them, a mile or two away, he could see a meadow where there was what appeared to be a corral… he felt that he should know something about that. It was just a thought, the shadow of a memory that lurked at the rim of his consciousness.