He came back and sat down. He cleared the action of his rifle and checked the barrel. It was clear and clean, considering the shooting that had been done. Then he checked his Colt.
Fan sat up. “Have you been waiting for me?” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll go down this notch,” he said. “There’s a corral or something down there.”
“What are you going to do?”
‘I’m going to fight. They want war, and we can’t wish them away, so I’ll give them war. I’m tired of running, and now I’m going after them.”
“I’m coming along. After all, you’re fighting my fight.”
He did not protest. She would come anyway, and there was no place to leave her.
They worked their way down the steep slope through the aspens. Ruble Noon felt better, although his shoulder was sore. He moved carefully for fear it might begin bleeding again.
Beyond the aspens there was a growth of scattered pines, and after that the meadow, with grass standing more than two feet high. Beyond it was a corral and a log cabin. No smoke came from the chimney, nor was there any sign of life, so far as they could see.
“I know this place,” he said. “I am sure I do.”
She looked at him, waiting.
“There’s a well there, just the other side of the cabin. And there are horses in the pasture beyond. There’ll be a saddle or two in the cabin, and food there, too.”
“You have been here before?”
“I am sure of it. Remember, as Ruble Noon I was always hiding out. Nobody ever saw me. That means I must have had several places to hide. Using the same routes all the time would be a dead giveaway, and this may have been one of the places I used. . ..”
He did not remember clearly, and he must think it out. He must try to reconstruct in his mind the plans that would have been used by Ruble Noon, and drawing on the same memory source, he might come up with the right answers.
Apparently his center of activity had been these mountains, and the cabin in the mountains above the Rafter D had been one hide-out, perhaps the principal one. The ranch below where the old Mexican had lived had been merely a place to pick up a horse when needed. This ranch on which he now centered his attention was obviously on the other side of the mountain, with different lines of communication, different sources of supply.
But had this actually been a hide-out for him? Or was it, too, merely a place to pick up a horse? Or was it a place with which he had no connection?
“All right,” he said at last. “We’re going down there.”
He knew that no place was safe. At any point he might come upon enemies and not know them as such. Even though no smoke was coming from the ranch house, that proved nothing. Keeping to the trees, he began to skirt the meadow, with Fan close behind him.
The log cabin was built in two sections, with a roofed porch joining them, Texas fashion. There were pole corrals and the well he seemed to remember. What he did not remember was the old man sitting on a bench at the door, mending a bridle.
The man glanced up, without surprise. “Howdy,” he said. “Been expectin’ you. Want I should catch up a horse or two?”
“You’ve been expecting me?”
“Well, there was a lady here. She was inquirin’ for a man of your appearance. A right purty woman she was, too.”
Peg Cullane!
“Was she alone?”
The old man chuckled. “Now you know darned well no woman that purty would be ridin’ out alone. Not so long as there’s an able-bodied man in the country. She had two gents with her. Not that I’d call them gents. If I ever seen a couple ridin’ the owl-hoot trail, they was. I’d have knowed those two a mile off, an’ they come right up close.”
“Did they know you?”
He cackled. “Nobody ever knowed me, no more than you. But those two . . . Finn Cagle an’ German Bayles. Two real bad boys. Me, I didn’t know from nothin’.
” ‘Lady,’ I said, ‘the other side of the mountain is a world away from here. I never been yonder, never figure to go, an’ nobody ever comes over. There’s no trail.’ I pointed up yonder. ‘You figure anybody could cross that? Well, they all taken a look an’ shook their heads an’ rode off.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Two days ago. She described you almighty well, mister. Too durned well.”
He was a gnarled and wizened old man with a face that looked old enough to have worn out two bodies. Only the hands looked young as they worked at the lacing of the leather. The fingers were quick, adroit, and did not suffer from rheumatism. He wore no gun in sight, but the bib overalls he wore had a slight bulge at the waist line, and a shotgun stood just inside the door.
“I’ll catch up a couple of horses for you.” He hesitated a moment, fumbling with his rope. “Now, I ain’t one to butt in, mister, but if’n I was you I’d ride almighty careful. I got an idea those folks didn’t just ride off. I figure they left somebody behind, somebody with a mighty good rifle.”
“Thanks.” Ruble Noon looked at the surrounding country thoughtfully. There were dozens of places where an ambush could be waiting.
He watched the old man ride after the horses. Old he might be, but he was far from feeble. His cast with the rope was deft and unerring. He caught up one horse, and then another.
When they had drunk deep from the cool water and had eaten what the old man set out for them, they went out into the air again and Ruble Noon studied the hills, seeking for some gleam of sunlight on a rifle barrel, some indication of an ambush.
“They were most inquirin’ about places hereabouts,” the old man said. “I told ’em nothin’, but the way I figure, there was a point to their askin’. I think that woman knowed what she was lookin’ for.”
“Yes?”
“They asked most particular about cliff houses an’ the like. Now, that was easy. This whole country around was lived in by cliff-dwellin’ Injuns. The mesa south of here is split with canyons, and most of ’em has cliff houses. So I told ’em about ’em, and said nothin’ at all about the tree house.”
The tree house? Ruble Noon felt a little thrill of excitement; something rang a bell in his mind, but he waited. More things were coming back to him, his brain seemed to be clearing of the fog that had settled over it But the tree house? Where was it? And what about it?
“You’ve known the tree house for a long time, haven’t you?” he said.
The old man shrugged. “I reckon. It was me that found it and showed it to Tom Davidge. We’d been huntin’ elk, him an’ me; an’ old Tom, he put a bullet into one and I went after it, tryin’ for another shot. I passed that there tree, noticed somethin’ odd about it, an’ later I come back for a look-see.
“It was big an’ old-a sycamore, an’ they ain’t too many growin’ right around here. Great big limbs all bent and gnarled where they run into the flat face of the cliff. That sycamore was healthy an’ strong, but what taken my eye was some sort of polished places on the branches up close to the rock. It looked like somebody had been climbin’ … so I climbed.
“That was the way I found that cliff house,” he went on. “Old? I’d say it was as old as any hereabouts, but this one had been patched up, an’ that a mighty long time ago. Up there in that house I found me an old Spanish dagger an’ an axe, the kind those Spanish men used who first come into New Mexico. The way I figure it, somebody found this place, maybe somebody who was with Rivera when he come through here ‘way back in the 1700’s.
“Later, that gent needed a hide-out. Maybe he killed somebody down in the Spanish settlements, maybe he just wanted to git away. Anyway, he fetched up back here, fixed that place up, an’ lived there maybe for years. I figure he finally broke a leg, or maybe tangled with a grizzly, or some Utes. A lot of things can happen to a man alone.”
“Did Tom Davidge go there often?” Noon asked. Then, seeing the old man glance at Fan, he added, “This is Mr. Davidge’s daughter Fan.”
“I reckoned it. Fact is, Davidge went there mighty few times until toward the last, when he made a few trips. He liked to set up there, he said.”