Twisted Hills (13 page)

“In a minute,” said Kelso.

“In a minute . . . ?”
said Charlie Ray. “What about the money? What about the damn 'paches watching this trail
like hawks
?”

“I said
in a minute
,” Kelso repeated in a strong tone. “First I want to know about my pard, Rudabell.” He nudged his horse forward in the wavering heat. “You don't side with a man as long as me and Curtis rode together and not want to know what became of him.”

They rode on.

When they'd followed the thin path over a mile, they stopped again where a flurry of faded hoofprints lay in the sand. From this point only one set of prints led off across the sand. The second set led to a dead horse resting in the sand, a saddle leaning sideways against it.

Kelso glanced at the animal, now merely bones and decomposing flesh. His eyes then wandered off the path where a strewn pile of rock lay as if thrown down from the distant hills by the hand of God.

The rocks where Jones said he'd dragged the body . . . ?
he asked himself.

“What the hell . . . ?” said Charlie Ray, nodding toward Kelso. He nudged his horse along behind him as he spoke. Hazerat followed.

They stopped on either side of Kelso's horse as Kelso stepped down and walked forward to where strewn scraps of clothes lay all around the skeletal remains of Curtis Rudabell.

“Well, adios, ol' trail pal,” said Kelso toward the bones, feigning a look of sadness as the Hookes walked up and stood on either side of him. “I'd take off this hat were it not for my condition,” he said, giving the Hookes each a piercing look.

The brothers took off their hats grudgingly and held them to their chests.

Kelso stepped around the skeleton and began turning over any rock that one man might be capable of overturning.

“What are you doing?” Charlie Ray called out.

“What do you
think
I'm doing?” Kelso replied. “I'm gathering some stones to roll over him—keep the creatures from scattering his bones.” He glared at them. “Don't think it will offend me if you give me a hand here.”

“Preston, I'm just going to throw this out. You're acting plumb unnatural over a no-good bastard like Rudabell. Are you sure you and him was all that close? I heard once that you tried to kill him in his sleep.”

“What are you saying, Charlie Ray?” Kelso asked, his gun hand going once again the butt of his new Colt.

Charlie Ray and Hazerat had both already managed to slip their guns from their holsters; they held them ready at their sides.

“I'm saying you're acting like a man who's feeling his way along, trying to figure things out as you go.”

“Yeah,” said Hazerat. “So stop Sally-gagging around. Where's the money?”

“All right,” Kelso said. “I've gone as far as I can go. It's time we had an honest talk about this.”

“I'll say it is,” said Charlie Ray. Both his and Hazerat's guns cocked and leveled at the same time, before Kelso got a chance to draw. “Now lift that Colt with two fingers like it's red hot and drop it to the ground.”

“It's a brand-new gun!” Kelso protested, glancing down at the rocky sandy ground.

“Drop it, or drop
with it
,” Hazerat said firmly.

“Damn it to hell, all right,” said Kelso. He raised the Colt with his finger and thumb and let it fall. “I hope neither one of you thinks I was out to deceive yas?”

The Hooke brothers didn't answer, slowly lowering the hammers on their guns.

For two days and nights the Ranger rested, recuperating from the countless bruises, cuts, abrasions and pain that being run to exhaustion and dragged through the rocky hill country had brought upon him. On the third day, seeing that he was fully conscious and more able to get around on his own, Lilith placed a tin cup of coffee in front of him and seated herself on the blanket beside him.

“I must leave here and return to Agua Fría for a day,” she'd told him.

Sam just looked at her.

“I will be missed by business owners who are expecting me,” she explained. “Soon someone will come looking. It is always better to not be noticed.”

Sam nodded and sipped his coffee.

“Also, it is how I support myself,” she said. “Aside from peddling home goods, I sharpen anything that requires an edge. ‘Axes, knifes, scissors or saws, Lilith Tettovia sharpens them all.'” She smiled as she quoted her business slogan. “It is the trade I learned from my father, and he from his father before him.”

“I understand,” Sam said. “It's what you were doing when I saw you outside the mercantile.”

“Yes,” she said, an air of resolve in her voice. “And it is what I will be doing until the day I die.” As she spoke, she reached her fingertips to his bruised forehead and pushed aside a strand of his hair. “I have come to accept that we are all what we are. I was short with you when we left each other on the trail. For that, I apologize. I know you are one of those men, yet I feel there is something different about you.” She paused, then added, “I hope I am right.”

Sam studied her face in the glow of the small fire. A sadness had shown itself in her dark eyes, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Was there something else there, he asked himself, something between them?

Yes. He believed there was. He only returned her gaze in silence. There was nothing more he could tell her, about himself, about why he was here, about how far he actually was from being the kind of man she'd labeled him to be.

After a moment, she stepped away from him, back to the horse.

“Anyway,” she said, “you will be all right here. I should be back in two days.” She took a small four-shot pepperbox vest gun from under her shawl and handed it to him. “There is a panther who thinks this ruins belongs to her. If she gets unruly with you, just scare her away with this if you can.”

“I generally get along with critters,” Sam said, turning the small gun in his hand. “If you see a chance, please check on my dun at the livery.” He hefted the little pepperbox. “And if you happen upon a
real
gun somewhere . . . ?”

“Of course, if I can,” she said. She stood up and walked to where Andre stood chewing on a mouthful of dry wild grass she'd carried and piled in front of him.

“What about Segert and his men?” he asked as he'd watched her feed and ready the horse. “Won't they be asking you questions?”

“No,” she said. “Even if they saw my wagon tracks, the tracks did not reveal who they belong to.” She looked over at him and smiled. “Like all who live here in these Twisted Hills, I have learned how to avoid Segert and Madson and their men. It is how life is here. Anyway, I sharpen the knives for Segert's hacienda. I am a person who is seen, yet not seen.”

Sam watched her pick up a rope hackamore she'd fashioned and slip it over Andre's head.

“Then you know Segert?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but only as one for whom I provide a service. I know his cook. But I have never spoken to Segert himself.”

“Be careful,” he said.

“Yes, I will, Joe,” she said. She stepped away from Andre and over to where Sam sat. She picked up a thick candle from the floor and lit it from a flame in the small fire. “When I return, I will continue to take
good care
of you . . . if you will allow me to, Joe.” She gazed down at him in the flicker of firelight.

There it was again. Something he'd seen in her dark eyes, some slightest suggestion in her words. . . .

“Obliged,” he'd said, not about to say more right then, lest he find himself mistaken.

He watched as she led the horse away, and continued watching as the glow of candlelight moved away, out of sight along a stone corridor, and disappeared ahead of a soft echoing click of hooves.

•   •   •

The following day, some of his soreness gone and his body felt more rested and recuperated from his ordeal. Sam pulled on his shirt and boots and ventured along deeper into the mountainside. The woman had told him there were other paths to the outside world should they need them. He decided it would be a good idea to learn where they were ahead of time. He checked the small pepperbox pistol and stuck it down behind his belt. Using a long walking stick he found leaning against the chiseled stone wall, he set out walking stiffly, the glowing lantern swaying in hand.

He traveled down the stone corridor, seeing now and again the flickering light passing across ancient drawings on either side and looming on the soot-smudged ceiling overhead. Like a scholar walking the hall of some ancient museum exhibit, he witnessed layer over layer of time recorded and passed forward one generation to the next. When the exhibit fell away and the drawings spaced out less and less and finally ran out altogether, he stopped at another wide-floored cavern and looked at three black holes—pathways exiting on the other side of the mountain.

As he walked toward the three exits, he felt a rumble deep down in the earth's belly. And he felt his feet shift back and forth like a drunkard's on the stone floor. Yet, before he could even brace himself against it, the world beneath him seemed to drop an inch and the rumble stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

He stood still for a moment with his hand and walking stick pressed against the wall. He moved his hand when he felt a slight stream of dust sprinkle down from the ceiling. But when he looked up, he saw no place for the dust to have come from, no small crevice, no tiny crack in the stone artwork. Only crudely drawn moonlike faces with mouths and eyes agape stared down at him. Obscured in torch smudge from centuries past, stick figures danced around licking flames, wielding spear shafts above ornate and feathered heads.

Time to go,
Sam told himself.

From the three corridors facing him, he chose to follow the one that had a footpath that appeared the most worn down in the center. Reasoning this exit to be the closest and for that purpose the most used, he walked into it with the lantern held before him. When he'd walked no more than a hundred feet and rounded a turn, he felt a difference in the freshness of the air around him. In the distant blackness he saw a jagged slash of light as slim as a needle. Yet, upon following the slash of light, he watched it grow into a doorway wide enough for man and horse.

Moments later he stood in a shaft of afternoon sunlight and looked across more ruins. He saw more piles of fallen weathered stone, and tangles of vines, some as old and thick as trees. A remaining tracing of stone outlined what he decided could have been a public marketplace complete with a tiled floor somewhere down there beneath the encroached moss, earth and fauna.

Across Sam's perceived and long-abandoned marketplace stood a wall ten feet high. The wall, interlocked in itself as if by wizardry, tipped forward at a deep angle from the pressing back of cast-off mountain stones that had tumbled down and gathered there behind it. Vines and thorns like a shredded flowered curtain draped from the wall's edge to the ground. In the moss and shadow behind the curtain lay a pool of water, a thin stream still trickling into it.

As he stood looking up, Sam saw the panther stand up atop the wall in a rustle of dried brush weed and stare down at him from thirty feet away. The panther Lilith had warned him about?

Probably,
he told himself.

But it didn't matter. The cat was there, staring him down, growling, poised low in its front shoulders.

Easy. now.

Sam took a slow step backward, raising the small gun from behind his belt. He cocked it. He knew the pepperbox was useless at this distance. More than likely, it would be useless even if he were closer. But it might scare the animal away, distract it long enough for him to duck into the cavern and get out of sight. But even as he thought it, he saw the cat spring down from the wall in a flash of fur and the whip of its tail land facing him—less than twenty yards away now, he reminded himself.

He prepared to back up another step, out of the shaft of sunlight back into the mountain, his finger on the trigger, ready to pull it, for all the good it would do him. But as he started his slow, cautious step, the cat only stepped forward with him.

“Now what?” Sam whispered to himself. He didn't want to shoot the animal and send it off wounded. Especially now, he thought, suddenly noting two rows of dark sagging milk teats lining the cat's underbelly.

Seeing the cat drop lower, he tensed his fist around the pepperbox, ready to fire.

Please don't . . . ,
he thought, staring into the cat's determined eyes.

He backed one more step, yet still the cat came forward, dipping farther, ready to launch itself into him.

“Here goes,” he whispered aloud. He saw the cat ready to pounce. It was coming, gun or no gun. He tightened his fist around the gun, squeezing the trigger.

But before he got the shot off, he felt another rumble rise in the ground beneath his feet. The cat felt it too, he could tell.

The animal swung its head back and forth, not knowing what to make of the world trembling beneath it. The big mother cat looked back at Sam, but he could see any idea of lunging at him was gone, overshadowed by a much greater threat, that of the world coming apart around her.

She bared her fangs in a silent hiss. She spun in a flash and shot back across the ground and leaped atop the wall, all in what appeared to be one single seamless move. Sam swayed with the rumbling earth and steadied himself. In seconds the earth settled and he found himself standing alone, a small gun pointed aimlessly across the ruins. Weeds, brush and vines trembled in place and settled as if swept by some strange passing breeze.

Sam lowered the pepperbox but continued to stand for a moment, listening closely to the earth beneath his feet. He looked around at the stone pathway leading into the belly of the mountain, questioning the safety of going back inside.

As he wondered, he heard the tumbling, thrashing, tree-splitting sound of a mammoth boulder that had broken loose from its seating higher up atop a sloping bed of scree and rolled, bounced, lunged and finally plowed its way through a talus ledge and launched out off the mountainside. The earth rumbled again when the boulder landed farther down.

All right, he thought, nodding to himself, taking some sort of solace in the fragility of life. Yet instead of walking back inside, he walked out and across the open space and found a long, narrow, weathered stone ledge standing knee high to him. He sat down to rest on the narrow ledge, noting how his backside extended out inches beyond it. Curious, he turned and looked down into a deep overgrown trench running in a straight line behind the ledge.

“What the . . . ?”

He stood up and dusted his seat, realizing he had perched himself on some ancient public privy. Standing, he looked all around as if to make certain no one had been watching him.

“Enough for one day,” he whispered. Satisfied that he had not been seen by anyone in the present, he shook his head, smiled wryly to himself, embarrassed somehow, and limped across the ruins and back inside the mountain, as if leaving thousands of ghosts there in the marketplace to scratch their heads in wonder.