thought was with us all that Andre Baston, Hippo Swan, and whoever was riding
with them were comin’ up behind us.
No doubt, after shooting Pierre Bontemps and killing Angus and maybe pa, they
had taken off, carrying gold with them. However, they had unfinished business.
If Pettigrew got away, they had to run him down and kill him, or try. And that
was what they’d done.
We were lyin’ in our blankets when Orrin said, “They daren’t leave pa alive.
Philip Baston seemed a kindly man, but Andre fears him or fears what he can do,
and Andre is his own brother and knows him better than we do.”
“I’m wonderin’ where Pettigrew got that daybook. Did he steal it off pa? Or did
he come back and find it later?”
Tomorrow we had to go up the mountain with a lot of questions unanswered. Facing
us was a showdown with Baston, and there was no low-rating the man. Some of the
things we’d been reading about him in pa’s daybook were clumsy, you might say,
but Andre had twenty years to grow handier with his killing, and by all accounts
he’d not wasted his time. All of them seemed to have low-rated. Nativity
Pettigrew, including Andre, and they never guessed that Pettigrew had come by
some gold.
Lying there, before I dropped off to sleep, I worried some about Nell Trelawney.
Of course, she had that dog … if it was a dog.
Anybody going around there at night would be apt to lose a leg or an arm before
he knew what he was tangling with. One time I met a man told me about the
mastiffs they have in Tibet. They’re as big as the mastiffs we have only they
have much longer hair. This Neb dog might be one of them.
Morning found nobody wishful of using language. We set around glumlike, roasting
our meat over the fire and drinking coffee.
Orrin got up and took his Winchester. “Judas, stay by the camp, if you will. We
can’t afford to lose the stock or whatever else we’ve got. And Tinker, if you’ll
go see to Miss Trelawney we’d be pleased. Tell and I will scout around up top.”
It was no easy climb. Heavy timber, with game trails here and there, and we made
it up to the top. We Injuned around, looking for sign. It was there, all right,
but from down those forgotten years. Marks of axes where men had chopped wood
for fires long since burned up, branches cut to make a lean-to or to hang
kettles from. There was evidence enough that men had lived around about at some
time far gone.
We split up and worked back and forth across the top of the mountain, comparing
notes now and again. We wanted to find some sign of pa, but we kind of hoped we
wouldn’t. When you don’t see a body laid away, that person is never quite dead
for you, just sort of gone away, or not around right then.
We were playing against time. Whatever we were going to find we’d have to find
now, for Andre, Swan, and them would be coming up the slope. And I wondered a
little about Pettigrew. He was a sly man, maybe not as crippled up as he let on.
Orrin crouched beside me under a tree. “The story has it there were three
separate caches of gold,” he said. “Now, even if there was only five million, it
is still a lot of gold to carry, and none of them took more away than could be
carried on the horses they rode.
“It is my thought, and I believe it to be yours, that some soldiers kept some
gold for themselves. Perhaps they were permitted to. Perhaps they simply
high-graded it, but I believe that is what Pettigrew found, and what Andre
himself found.
“I think two things are at work here. They fear what we might discover and
reveal to Philip, but also they fear we may find the gold they failed to find.”
Sunlight fell through the trees, and a camprobber jay hopped from branch to
branch above us. I looked off through the trees, thinking of pa and what his
thoughts must have been when he had played out his deadly hand, knowing the fall
of any card might mean death to him.
At the end there, lying wounded in the brush with Pierre crippled and perhaps
beyond help, the rest of them riding away, what would pa have been thinking?
We had to find that place, but how, after so many years? Had Pierre Bontemps
died there?
My eyes wandered over the slope. The human eye has a readiness for patterns.
Much is not seen simply because the mind is blind, not the eyes. The eyes see in
lines, curves, and patterns. Man himself works in patterns simple or complex,
and such things are often evidence of man’s previous presence.
Twenty years ago some evidence of the old camps had remained, even after half a
century that had fallen between. “Orrin, there’s got to be some sign of those
camps. Stone walled, they said.”
“Yes, there should be something of them left.” He got up, and, skirmisher
fashion, we moved off through the scattered trees, walking on pine needles, eyes
alert for everything.
High up in the mountains you don’t have to think of rattlers. They stay down
lower where it is warmer, and they thin out mighty fast above sixty-five hundred
feet.
As we moved along under the trees the camprobber jay followed us, never more
than twenty feet off. They are the greatest companions in the high mountains,
but also the worst thieves. Anything left where they can get at it is eaten or
gone, and they’ll do things mighty nigh unbelievable to get at what they want.
“Tell?” Orrin pointed with his rule. Under the trees up ahead we could see a
dug-out hole, and when we got there we could see it was old. Somebody had dug
down four feet or so, but the edges had caved in, and plants were growing into
it. There was a patch of snow in the bottom where no sun reached.
It might be a hole dug by the folks we knew of, or it might have been dug by
some other treasure hunter. There was nothing up here an animal would dig for.
We studied around but found no sign to identify anything. We went west along the
slope. Right above us we could see the trees flagging as they do when the strong
winds work on them, and here and there were brown tops on the green trees where
the tops had stuck out of the snow and frozen.
My belly was asking questions of me before we spotted the first fort. It was
lined-up rocks, tumbled this way and that, but it was clear to see that somebody
had forted up here long ago. Not many yards west, we found the other camp, and
right away I saw what pa meant.
Whoever built the second camp knew what he was about. He had shaped it for
comfort and a good field of fire in all directions. A place had been found where
boulders and stunted trees made a partial wall against the prevailing winds,
which were indicated by the way the trees flagged. On mountain tops the branches
are apt to be all or mostly on one side of a tree, streaming out the way the
wind blows.
More time had been taken with this second fort, the rocks had been fitted
better, so some of them still sat fixed as they’d been left. It was obvious
that, although there’d been a split in the camp, each wanted to have support
from the other in case of Indians.
And from all reports, the Indians had come.
We poked around inside the second circle of rocks. We found a button and a
broken tinderbox and nothing else that spoke of human habitation.
“The three big caches were probably sunk deep by order of the officer in
command, and my guess is they were done damned well,” said Orrin. “The army
expected to return for them, and they would be buried to be excavated by the
army. Those little caches Baston found and the one Pettigrew probably found were
buried shallow or hidden in hollows of rocks or trees, somewhere the men who hid
them could grab them quick.
“Are you thinking what I am? That Indian or mountain man pa mentioned might have
taken that second outfit toward the west.”
“Uh-huh.” I said. “Two camps like this mean there was trouble, as pa figured,
and if they did go west they could have gone south from Pagosa Springs to Santa
Fe, or even further west.”
We sat silent, considering that. Our thoughts were strangely captured by that
mysterious mountain man who was with them. Had the military chosen him as guide?