Sackett (1961) (12 page)

"Thanks, 'Steban. Thanks very much."

After he left I gave it some thought. It was important to make one more trip up there. I not only wanted to get enough gold to start buying my ranch, but I wanted to cover up the work I'd done at the mine in case somebody found the way up to the valley. The trip was a risk I would have to take.

Cap was getting around pretty good now, better than before, and Esteban would look in on him from time to time. He was well enough to care for himself, and he had friends in the town.

"You going down to see Ange?" Cap asked suddenly. "It's getting late."

I got into my saddle and started for town. The lights seemed brighter than before, and there was excitement in me.

Ange....

A shadow stirred in the brush and I waited a moment before riding on. It was a man all right, and he was watching our camp.

Esteban had been right.

Chapter
XII

Late as it was, the store was crowded. Joe waved 'a hand to me from where he stood waiting on a customer, and I glanced toward the other counter where Ange was. If she had noticed me, she gave no sign of it.

Most of the people in the store seemed like newcomers, although there were a couple of familiar faces.

"Mr. Sackett, I believe."

Turning around, I faced Tuthill. He was a handsome man, no question of it, tall and well-dressed in storebought clothes.

"How are your I asked. "I wasn't expecting to see you this far from home. What happened to the bank?

"I left it in good hands."

Glancing toward Ange, I saw she was no longer busy, so I excused myself and walked over to her. "Ange," I said, "I want to buy some clothes."

Her eyes met mine for the merest instant. "All (sectin missing)

So I gave her my order, aware that Tuthill was watching from a short distance away. She brought me some shirts, jeans, socks, and a sheepskin coat.

"... And two boxes of .44's," I said.

Her eyes lifted to mine and her face stiffened. Abruptly, she turned and walked to the ammunition shelf and took down two boxes and came back, placing them on the counter before me.

"Ange," I said, "I've got to talk to you."

"You brought me out of the mountains and I'm very grateful,'' she said, "but I don't think--"

"Ange, part of that gold belongs to you. Your grandpa was hunting it, and it was probably some ancestor of his who found it first. So you should have a share."

"Whatever you think is right. There's no need for talk."

She turned away from me with my money and made change.

"Ange," I said, "I had to shoot those men."

"Did you? It was the most brutal, the most callous thing I ever saw! And I thought you were so gentle, so nice--"

She broke off and walked away from me. A moment I stood there. When I turned around, Tuthill was beside me. "I didn't know you knew Ange Kerry," he said.

"You make a habit of listening in when folks are talking?" I was mad. "Look, Tuthill, I think you're no gentleman. I also think you're a thief, and that you travel with thieves. You keep that Boyd out of my sight--do you hear? If I see him, I'll come looking for you both."

Brushing past him, I started for the door. Rugger was there. "Something wrong, Tell?"

Ange was looking at me with something mighty close to horror in her eyes. She could not know about Will Boyd following me down that street in Las Vegas, or about his connection with Tuthill, or what Esteban had overheard. All she knew was what she heard now -- that I had made what looked like an unprovoked attack on an innocent and respectable man.

"Nothing, Joe." My voice lowered. "Only Tuthill's curious about me and that claim of mine. So are the people with him. He followed me here from Las Vegas."

Getting back to the claim, I made up my mind. I would head for the high hills now, before day-Break, get a lead on anybody who might try to follow me, and keep it. Once I came down with the gold, I would head south to Mora or somewhere and buy myself a ranch. Ange could do what she had a mind to.

Every time I came to be near her something happened to make me look worse than I had before.

She probably had never seen anyone killed before that night I shot Kitch.

Back at camp, Cap could see I was mad, and he no comment when I threw a pack together brought out pack saddles. I was taking two pack horses, and the appaloosa. There was no need to take much gear ... I would be gone only two days. Yet, just on chance, I took enough food for a week, and four boxes of .44's, aside from what was in my belt. It was an hour short of day when I mounted up to ride out. "You be careful," Cap warned. "I saw Tuthill," I told him. "He smells gold. some bank, or Wells Fargo, or something, he's had a smell of that gold . . . and he knows it isn't placer gold."

Holding close against the wall of the mountain, I rode north, weaving among the scattered trees on the bench. It was still overcast and there was a smell of dampness in the air.

Where Rock Creek entered the Vallecitos I turned southeast, riding in the creek bed. By daylight that water would have washed away what tracks I made.

The sun was painting the sky with a lavish brush when I topped out on a rise in the trees and looked back. Far below, several miles back, I saw movement. Sun gleamed for an instant on a rifle barrel.

No use taking a chance on leading them to the mine. So, turning off to my left I went up a rocky ridge, using several switchbacks, and rode over the saddle to the east. About a half-mile off I saw a lake, larger than the one in the high valley. Riding swiftly in that direction, I held to a good pace. Near the shore of that lake I bedded down for the night, and made camp without a fire.

Awakening to a patter of rain on the leaves overhead, I crawled out on the ground, put on my hat and boots, slung on my gun belt and then rolled my bed.

Without even waiting for coffee, I saddled up and left the woods at a fast trot. Working my way around a dozen small lakes and ponds, I topped out on a ridge overlooking miles upon miles of the most magnificent country under heaven.

Nothing moved through the gray veil of the rain. I rode down into my valley. The mine was as I left it. But the trail along the chute was two feet deep in water, and the rain would soon make it impassable. The other route would have to be my way out.

Picketing my horses, I went into the mine and went to work with my pick. The gold was richer than ever, and the quartz so rotten that it crumbled tinder my boots.

The rain continued ... a steady, persistent downfall that could easily turn to snow.

No time to think of Ange . . . nor of Cap, or anything but getting the gold out and down the mountains.

When next I came out the rain had ceased, but there was an odd lightness to the air that left me uneasy, and it bothered the horses also.

Several deer and an elk were feeding in the meadow across the valley, and that might mean a Storm was coming. They usually came out about sundown. The valley was quiet, the clouds pressing low down over the peaks. The rain started again, scarcely more than a mist.

Returning to the mine, I worked hard for another and then built a fire and made coffee. My head ached a little from not eating, and it was hard to settle down, with that feeling in the air.

But part of my uneasiness was the fear of being (missing section -- snowed in?)

Beside my fire I worked long into the night, pounding up the quartz. Maybe the gold I'd come was only a pocket. Maybe the quartz would harder farther own into the rock, or the gold change its character and require milling to get it out. Of such things I knew next to nothing. When night came I brought the horses in close cave, built a fire deeper inside, and mixed batch of sourdough bread. I made a good meal turned in.

Middle of the night I woke up.

It was cold. I mean, it was really cold. It was colder than I'd ever believed it could be. The horses were crowded together, heads down. I stepped out of the cave into a strange, weird world of ice.

Ice ... crystal ice in the moonlight that fell through torn clouds. Ice on the trees, ice on the rocks, gleaming ice on the meadow grass. Ice on the willows, making them like a forest of slim glass sticks.

It was strange, and it was beautiful, and it had the shine of death.

Nobody would be traveling any trail in the mountains until that ice was gone. Those eyebrow trails . . . those brink-of-the-precipice trails, those rocky crossings, those sheets of rock--all would be sheets of ice now, where no horse could maintain its footing, where even a man in moccasins would scarcely dare to move.

The thought of the trail into the valley where Ange had been made my hair stand on end.

If the sun came out it would melt fast enough. But it was late in the season ... suppose it snowed first? Any step might start an avalanche.

Going back inside I built my fire bigger, and then I came out with a piece of sacking and commenced to clean off the horses. Ice was on their winter coats, and it crackled when I broke it free. They knew I was trying to help them and they stood very still, their eyes helpless and frightened.

It was the worst sleet storm I'd ever seen, worse even than the pogonips in Nevada. A lot of tree branches had broken under the weight of the ice. It was a white, crystalline world . . . like glass, everywhere.

Food ... I would need food the worst way.

With the intense cold I would need more than usual to keep warm, and there was no telling how long I'd be stuck here. Maybe all winter.

There was no sense wasting time. Every step, even on the flat, would be taken at the risk of a broken leg. The trails were out of the question now, the gold itself was unimportant. From now on, it would be a fight to survive.

It was still a couple of hours until daylight, but I got my axe, went outside, and cut a couple of good chunks from a log that I'd dragged up, and built a fire that would last.

The horses stood stiff-legged, afraid to move on the slick ground, so with a shovel I went around and broke up the ice and shoveled some of the waste rock from my mine over the ice. Then I went to the woods, knocked the ice loose from a tree trunk, cut off the heavier limbs, and packed them back to the cave. The moonlight was gone. I added fuel to my fire, put on the coffeepot; and commenced to study out the situation. There might be some way of getting out that I'd overlooked.

With daylight, the first thing would be to find and kill a deer or two. As long as the cold held I'd not have to worry about the meat spoiling. 'Dawn came under a sky of cold gray clouds. I went out and started to hunt for a deer. The appaloosa moved to the edge of the ice that sparkled the grass and began to paw at it to get at the grass. He was a Montana horse and used to such.

Shortly before noon I found a buck.

nightfall it was colder, if anything. I'd butchered my deer and hung the meat up. I'd skinned properly and saved the hide. If I was here for the winter I was going to need as many such hides as I could get. And all the game I would have a chance at was right there in the valley now.

Huddled in my blankets, I sat over the fire all night long. I was going to have to wall up the mouth of that cave. The wind crept in there, fluttered my fire, and brought the cold with it. The morning broke with the flat gray clouds still shielding the sun, the wind knife-edged and raw, the glassy branches shaking slightly, clashing one against the other like skeleton arms.

The horses tugged woefully at the frozen grass, and the ice cut their lips until they came to me, whimpering. Down by the stream where the grass grew taller, I shattered the ice and cut the grass to take back to them.

This could not go on. Somehow I was going to have to get down the mountain. I wanted to take the horses with me if it could be done. Yet I knew it could not. ... And without me in this high valley they would die.

That night I broiled a venison steak, and ate it, hunched over the fire, cutting it in strips to handle it better.

Snow fell that night, and when day came one of my pack horses was down with a broken leg. The shot that killed him echoed down the ice-choked valley.

Through lightly falling snow, I went down the valley to the chute. The stream was frozen over, and the chute was a solid mass of ice. The water had risen still more, and the ledge down which the trail wound was now under several feet of water. To get out by that route was out of the question. Ange had lasted out a winter up here with her grandfather. How had they done it?

Their cave was bigger and better sheltered, and there was a lifetime of firewood in the huge old logs that lay among the boulders . . . but could I get down the trail to the bottom?

Could I even get to the canyon? Up where the bristlecone pines grew the wind had a full sweep, and it would be even colder than here. The trail, if I could reach it, was five hundred feet down a sheer face that was probably sheeted in ice.

That would be a last resort. For the time being I would remain where I was and try to last out the storm.

Taking the shovel, I went out and knocked more ice from the grass to give the horses a fighting chance. They knew how to get at it themselves, but the ice roughed up their lips and bloodied