Only You (20 page)

“They do here. In the summer it’s so hot and thirsty that rain from a small storm like that never reaches the ground. The drops just dry up in midair and vanish.”

Eve looked back at the clouds. They were the color of slate on the bottom and cream on the top. A ragged, slanting veil of lighter gray came from the base of the little storm.

The longer she stared, the more Eve was certain that Reno was right. The veil became thinner and thinner as it approached the ground. By the time
the surface of the earth was reached, there was no moisture left.

“A dry rain,” Eve said wonderingly.

Reno shot her a sideways look.

When Eve realized he was staring at her, she gave him an odd, bittersweet smile.

“Don’t worry, sugar man. You’re safe. I’ve seen ships made of stone and a dry rain, but even the smallest light casts a shadow.”

Before Reno could think of an answer, Eve urged her horse forward, heading deeper into the mountains, searching for the only thing the man she loved would count on.

Gold.

For two more days they followed a trail that was so old it appeared only to the half-focused eye or very late in the day, when sunlight slanted steeply and was the color of Spanish treasure. The valleys they rode through became smaller and steeper the higher they rode in the mountains. Every afternoon thunder rumbled through the mountains while first one peak and then another played host to the elemental dance of lightning. Rain came down cold and hard, running off the trees in veils of silver lace.

Between storms, aspens on the highest slopes lifted their golden torches to the indigo sky. Deer and elk were everywhere, fleet brown ghosts that withdrew before the horses. Creeks of startling purity abounded, filling shadowed ravines with the sound of running water. Only game trails were visible. There were no tracks of wild horses or man, for there was nothing on the steep slopes or in the rugged mountain canyons that couldn’t be found more easily at lower elevations.

When Reno and Eve came to the last, high valley
described by both the shaman and the Spanish journal, they rode its length silently, looking all around.

There was no sign of Cristóbal Leon’s lost mine.

“I
T’S
hard to believe we aren’t the first people to see this land,” Eve said as they came back to the mouth of the small valley.

“Feels that way,” Reno agreed, “but there’s plenty of signs that men have been through here.”

He reined in, hooked his right leg around the saddle horn, and lifted the spyglass again, but not to look at the meadow. Slowly he surveyed the green patchwork of forest and meadow falling away to the dry lands below, seeking any sign of the men he was certain were following them. The brass casing of the spyglass glowed in the muted light with every shift in direction.

“What signs?” Eve asked after a minute.

“See that stump at the edge of the meadow, right in front of that big spruce?”

Eve looked. “Yes.”

“You get close enough and you’ll see ax marks.”

“Indians?” she asked.

“Spaniards.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Steel ax marks, not stone.”

“Indians have steel axes,” Eve said.

“Not when that tree was chopped down.”

“How can you tell?”

Reno lowered the spyglass and gave his attention to Eve. He had come to enjoy her curiosity and quick mind as much as he did her feline grace.

“That big spruce has roots that were shaped around the fallen log that came off that stump,” Reno said. “Since the spruce has been there a long time, the log must have been there, too.”

“Why would someone go to all the trouble of chopping down a tree and not take it?”

“Probably they were forced to leave by weather or Indians or news that the Spanish king had double-crossed the Jesuits and they could look forward to going home in chains.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they only wanted the top of the tree to use as thatching or to make a chicken ladder for the mine.”

Eve frowned. “What’s a chicken ladder?”

“If I could find the damned mine, I’d probably be able to show you one,” muttered Reno, putting the spyglass to work again.

“If you stopped looking over our back trail, maybe you’d find the mine,” she said dryly.

With an impatient movement, Reno collapsed the spyglass and straightened in the saddle.

“There’s nobody there,” he said.

“I think you’d be happy about that.”

“I’d be a lot happier if I knew where they were.”

“At least they can’t be preparing an ambush up ahead,” Eve pointed out. “There’s only one way into this valley.”

“Which means there’s only one way out.”

Distant thunder rumbled from a peak that was
buried in a mound of clouds. Wind twisted through the forest like an invisible river, stirring everything within reach of its transparent currents. The air smelled of evergreens and an autumn chill sliding down from the heights, riding the crest of a golden wave of aspens.

Reno looked around with narrowed green eyes, bothered by something about the high valley that he couldn’t quite define.

Yawning, Eve closed her eyes, then half opened them, enjoying the rich color of the late afternoon light and the knowledge that they would be making camp soon. Lazily she looked around, trying to guess if Reno would choose this place to camp or press on beyond the head of the valley to see if there was a way through the massed peaks.

An odd pattern of meadow growth caught Eve’s attention, plants arrayed in a nearly perfect circle. She knew that natural outlines were rarely geometrical. Man, not nature, had invented formal gardens with precise curves, right angles, and hedges pruned into unlikely shapes.

The circular patch of plants lay near one of several small springs that formed the headwaters of a branch of the creek that drained the valley. Eve reined the lineback dun closer to the plants. Dismounting, she went to check the circle on foot. At its edges the ground was bedrock covered by a thin skin of soil. Yet in the circle itself, there was a profusion of plants that usually preferred richer ground.

When Reno turned to say something to Eve, he saw that she was on her hands and knees at the edge of the meadow. In the next instant he realized what had seemed wrong to him about the landscape.

Beneath the growth of grass and trees, there
were angles and arcs that suggested man had once cut, cleared, and built in the meadow.

Reno dismounted in a rush, grabbed a shovel from the outside of one of the pack saddles, and headed for Eve. She looked up as she heard him approach.

“There’s something odd about this,” she began.

“There sure is.”

He positioned the shovel, rammed it home with his boot, and struck stone six inches down. He went to another part of the circle and then another. Each time it was the same—six inches of plants and soil, and then solid stone.

Reno walked slowly toward the center of the circle, testing the depth of the soil every few inches. When he got to the center, the shovel bit deeply but didn’t find stone.

“Reno?”

He turned to Eve with a slashing grin and pure excitement dancing in his green eyes.

“You found yourself an
arrastra,
sugar girl,” he said.

“Is that good?”

Reno’s laughter was as bright and golden as the sunlight.

“It sure is,” he said. “Next best thing to finding the mine itself.”

“Really?”

He made a purring, rumbling sound of satisfaction.

“This is the center hole,” Reno said, gesturing with the shovel for emphasis. “It supported the mill that dragged the stone over the ore, crushing it as fine as sand.”

Before Eve could ask a question, Reno bent and began digging once more, working methodically until he had bared a section of rock.

“They worked this crusher long and hard,” he said. “The millstone wore the bedrock down so much that it left a circular trough for plants to grow in once the mine was abandoned.”

“What turned the millstone?” she asked. “Even with a dam, there isn’t enough water in the little springs to do the job.”

“No sign of a dam anywhere nearby,” Reno said.

The shovel scraped against bedrock, gouging away dirt, leaving bare stone behind. Cracks and seams in the surface were marked by soil that was darker than the stone.

“They could have used horses to turn the mill,” Reno continued. “But likely it was slaves. They had more of them than they had horses.”

Eve rubbed her hands over her arms. Though she wore one of Reno’s dark shirts over Don Lyon’s old gambling shirt, she felt chilled. It was as though the very ground were infused with the cruelty of the Spaniards and the misery of the slaves.

Reno went down on one knee, used the shovel blade to ream out a crack, and made a triumphant sound.

“Quicksilver in the cracks,” he said succinctly. “No doubt of it. This
arrastra
was used on metal ore.”

“What?”

“The Spaniards used quicksilver on the crushed ore. The mercury stuck to the gold but not the ore itself. Then they heated the amalgam, vaporizing the quicksilver and melting the gold. Then they poured the gold into molds.”

Brushing off his hands, Reno stood and stared around intently.

“What are you looking for?” Eve asked after a time.

“The mine. The Spaniards weren’t stupid. They
didn’t move the ore one more foot than they had to before they refined it.”

“There’s supposed to be a trio of big fir trees just to the left of the mine opening when you’re standing with the sun at your back at three o’clock on the third Saturday in August,” Eve said eagerly.

He grunted and kept looking.

“Reno?”

“There are a lot of big fir trees growing three to a bunch no matter what time of the day or month it is,” he said after a few moments.

Frowning in concentration, Eve tried to remember the other clues from the journal. She and Don had once taken turns reciting them to each other while Donna sat nearby, smiling and shaking her head at the dream of wealth that wouldn’t die.

“There’s a turtle carved on a gray rock fifteen paces to the right of the mine,” Eve offered.

“A pace can be anywhere from two feet to three, depending on the height of the man doing the pacing. But if you want to look at every boulder for a turtle, I won’t get in your way.”

Eve grimaced. The little valley was carpeted with boulders of all sizes and shapes.

“A burn scar on the north side of—” she began.

“Burn scars heal,” Reno interrupted. “Little trees grow into big ones. Big ones die and get blown down. Lightning starts new fires. Downed trees rot or are overgrown with brush. Landslides change the shape of the mountain.”

“But—”

“Look up there,” Reno said, pointing.

Eve looked and saw a pale scar on the mountain where rock and thin soil had sheered away, scouring down a ravine and finally filling it, burying whatever might have been a landmark before.

“That could have happened twenty years ago or
two hundred and twenty years ago,” Reno said. “Without evergreens or aspen growing in the scar, it’s hard to tell. Fireweed and willow or alder can grow in a few seasons and regrow each season forever. Landmarks that rely on plants are damn near useless.”

“Then how are we going to find the mine?” Eve asked in dismay.

“The same way you found the
arrastra.
Look for something out of place, and keep on looking for it until it jumps up and slaps you in the face.”

For the rest of that day and all of the next, Reno and Eve quartered the valley like patient hounds, crossing and recrossing the area around the overgrown
arrastra.
They found a rectangle whose outline had once been logs and now was little more than a mulch in which various plants flourished. They found bits of leather nearly petrified by long exposure to the dry, cold mountain air.

They found no sign of the mine itself.

Eve scrambled up a rubble slope and found a shallow alcove tucked beneath a wall of rock, protected from all but the most violent storms. With an eye sharpened by hours of searching, she noted that the lines of rotting wood that came out from the alcove were too orderly to be accidental. Once there had been a lean-to or shed extending outward.

In the farthest recess of the alcove Eve found a pile of rubble and a crushed sack made of woven leather strips. Nearby were the charcoal remains of an ancient fire. Quickly she went to the ledge and called across the meadow.

“Reno! I’ve found signs of men up here!”

A few minutes later Reno came up the slope like a cat, fast and surefooted. He took in the alcove with a swift glance that missed nothing.

Bands of different rocks made faint patterns on the walls and ceiling and floor. He ran his fingertips over the surface of the ceiling, feeling the marks men had left when they used picks and hammer stones to widen and deepen the natural alcove.

The shelter could have been a mine head, a living space, or a storage area. Near the remains of the ancient fire were pieces of crude pottery and a rotted wooden shape that might have been a spoon. That suggested a cooking fire, which suggested that men had lived in the alcove rather than mined it.

Turning to the leather sack, Reno sat on his heels and poked at the stiff leather weave. Bits of white stone were caught between pieces of leather. Frowning, he looked again at the rock that made up the alcove’s walls and ceilings. No streaks of white caught his eye.

“Is it the mine head?” Eve asked when she could no longer stand the suspense.

“Could be, but it looks more like slave quarters.”

“Oh.”

“See this long strap attached to the
tenate?”

“Tenate?
What’s that?”

“A sack or basket for carrying ore. See this thick strap? The padded part rested on the slave’s forehead. The rest of the strap went back over his shoulders and attached to the sack.”

Eve frowned. “That’s an odd way to carry anything.”

“It works better than you’d think,” Reno said. “You lean forward and take the weight of the
tenate
on your forehead and back. That leaves your hands free for mining or climbing or balancing on the chicken ladders. You can carry a hundred pounds like that all day long.”

She looked dubious.

“In fact,” Reno continued, “I’ve carried more than that, back when I was young and foolish enough to try mining rich man’s gold with a poor man’s tools.”

“Maybe you could carry a hundred pounds all day,” Eve said wryly. “I’d be lucky to lug half that for a few hours.”

Reno’s mustache shifted over a quick smile, but he said no more. Instead, he sat on his heels again and began digging at the remains of the woven leather.

“What are you after?” she asked.

“Pieces of ore are still caught in the weave.”

Eagerly Eve bent forward. “Really? Let me see!”

He pried out a piece of the pale, opaque quartz. Whistling softly between his teeth, he turned the fragment of ore over and over on his palm. The jagged bit of quartz was no bigger than the ball of his thumb.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Reno murmured.

“It is?” Eve asked, unimpressed.

Smiling, Reno turned and held his palm closer to Eve’s eyes.

“See the bright specks mixed in with the white?” he asked.

She nodded.

“That’s gold,” he said.

“Oh.” Eve frowned. “Goodness, it couldn’t have been a very rich mine.”

The disappointment in her voice made Reno laugh out loud. He tugged lightly on a stray lock of her hair.

“Sugar girl, it’s a good thing you dealt a gold prospector that pat hand back in Canyon City. You could have walked right over the strike of a lifetime and not known it.”

“You mean this is worth mining?” Eve asked,
flicking her fingernail against the quartz.

“It’s one of the richest pieces of ore I’ve ever seen,” Reno said simply.

Eve gave him a startled look.

“If the vein was more than a few inches thick,” he said, “the Spanish priests had themselves one hell of a gold mine somewhere around here.”

“Somewhere. But where?”

Thoughtfully Reno tucked the ore into his pocket, went to his saddlebags, and pulled out an odd hammer. Shaped like a small pick at one end and a squared-off hammer on the other, the tool was handy for knocking off chunks of rock to see what lay beneath the weathered surface.