Sackett (1961) (2 page)

Nature has a way that is simple, direct, and familiar. Animals accept nature pretty much as they find it. Although they build lairs and nests for themselves they disturb their surroundings mighty little. Only the beaver, who wants to make his home in water, and so builds his dams, will try to alter nature. If anything is disturbed the chances are a man did it.

This was lonesome country, and that quartz had not come there by accident. It had to be put there by hand.

The last settlement I'd seen was South Pass City, far away to the north, and the last human had been a greasy trapper who was mostly hair and wore-out buckskins. He and his pack asses went by me like a pay wagon passing a tramp. They simply paid me no mind.

That was two weeks ago. Since then I'd seen neither men nor the tracks of men, although I'd passed up lots of game, including one old silver-tip grizzly that was scooping honey out of a hollow tree.

That bear was minding his business so I minded mine. We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn't need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

However, this quartz, being where it was, struck me as an interesting thing. If it was to mark a trail of some land there was no indication of that trail on the ground, and some kinds of soil will hold trail marks for years.

Prying that sliver of quartz from its crack, I gave it study. It seemed to have been there for years and years.

I put it back where I'd found it and unlimbered my field glasses. These were war booty, taken from the body of a Rebel colonel down near Vicksburg, he being in no shape to object. Sure enough, some distance off I saw another gleam of white in the face of a rock.

Homesickness had started me south, but it was plain old-fashioned curiosity that led me to follow that white-quartz trail.

No doubt about it, I'd stumbled upon a trail the like of which I'd never seen before, and whoever conceived the idea must have been mighty knowing, for it was unlikely to be noticed. Yet it could easily be followed for, even in the almost dark, those white fragments would catch the light.

For more than an hour I followed the strange trail up the mountainside, through the trees. The pines thinned out and I rode around groves of aspen, and soon I was close to timberline in the wildest, loneliest country a man was likely to see.

Above me were gray granite shoulders of bare rock, streaked with occasional snow. There were stunted trees, more often than not lightning-blasted and dead, and many fallen ones. The air was so fresh it was like drinking cold water to breathe it, and there was a touch of chill. It was very clear, and a body could see for miles.

Nowhere did I see a track, nor horse-droppings, nor any sign of an old campfire or of wood cutting. From time to time, where there was no place to put the quartz, a cairn of stones had been set up.

It began to look as if I'd stumbled on an old, an awfully old trail, older than any I had followed or even heard tell of.

Pa had wintered south of here on the Dolores River, one time, with a party of trappers. Many a time he had told us boys about that, and over a campfire in Texas I'd been told of Father Escalante's trip through this region, hunting a trail to the California missions from Santa Fe. But he never would have come as high as this.

Only riches of some kind would have brought men this far into the back country, unless they were hiding. Nobody needed to tell me that the trail I had taken might lead to blood and death, for when gold comes into a man's thinking, common sense goes out.

It was getting close to sundown when I fetched through a keyhole pass into a high mountain valley without growth of any kind. Bleak and lonely under the sky, it was like a granite dish, streaked here and there with snow or ice that lay in the cracks.

Timberline was a thousand feet below me, and I was close under the night-coming sky, with a shivering wind, scarcely more than a breath for strength, blowing along the valley. All I could hear was the sound of my horses' hoofs and the creak of my saddle. There was a spooky feeling to the air, and my horse walked with ears pricked to the stillness.

Off to the left lay a sheet of ghost water, a high cold lake fed by melting snow, scarcely stirred by that breath of wind. It lay flat and still, and that lake worried me, for I had heard stories of ghost water lakes in the high-up mountains.

Then there came a sound, and my horses heard it first. Riding lonesome country a man does well to give heed to his horses, for they will often see or hear things a man will miss, and these appaloosas were mountain-born and -bred, captured wild and still wild at heart, and, like me, they had a love for the lost, the wild, and the lonely.

It was a far-off sound, like rushing wind in a great forest, or like the distant sound of steam cars running on rails. It grew as we moved nearer, and I knew it for the sound of falling water.

I came to another keyhole pass, even narrower than the first, and the trail led into it. Alongside the narrow trail rushed the outflow of that ghost lake, spilling down the chute in a tumble of white water.

I could see it falling away in a series of falls, steep slides, and rapids. The pass was no more than a crack, not a canyon or ravine, just a gash in the face of the mountain wall, a gloomy place, shadowed and spattered by spray. A thread of trail skirted the rushing stream, a trail that must, much of the time, be under water.

Believe me, I took a good long look down that dark, narrow crack, filled with the roar of the water. Yet on the wall, in a place dug out for the purpose, was a sliver of quartz, and now I had come too far to turn back.

My horses shied from that opening, liking it not at all, but I was less smart than my horses, and urged them on, starting gingerly down the slide.

That rail was narrow ... it was almighty narrow. If it played out there would be no way of turning back. No mustang was ever taught to back up, and I'd no way of controlling the pack horse, anyway.

Once I got him started, that appaloosa was as big a fool as I was. Ears pricked, he started down, sliding on his rump in spots, it was that steep. A body couldn't hear a thing beyond the roar of the water.

Rock walls towered hundreds of feet overhead, closing in places until there was scarcely a crack above us, and it was like riding through a cave. Ferns overhung the water in places, and there was more than thirty yards in one place and twice as far in another where a thin sheet of water actually ran over the trail.

In other places, where the stream fell away into a deep chasm beside the trail, I lost all sight of the water, and could only hear it. In two or three spots, near waterfalls, the mist and spray was thick enough to soak a man and blot out everything. It was a death trap, all right, and I felt it. A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.

For about three miles I followed that trail. I went down it more than a thousand feet, judging by the vegetation in the valley that I found. It opened on my right, narrow at first, and then widening. The creek tumbled off and disappeared into a narrow, deep canyon shrouded by ferns and trees growing from the rock walk. But the trail turned into the valley.

At that point the valley was no more than twenty yards wide, with steep walls rising on either side. A man on foot might have climbed them; a horse couldn't have gone six feet. The last of the sunlight was tinting the canyon wall on the east, but for maybe a hundred and fifty yards I rode in deep shadows.

Then the valley broadened. It looked to be a couple of miles long, and from a quarter to a half-mile wide. A stream ran along the bottom and emptied into that run-off stream beside which I had been riding.

The bottom was as pretty a high mountain meadow as a body would care to see, and along the stream there were clumps of aspen, some dwarf willows, and other trees whose names I couldn't call to mind. A few elk were feeding not far off and they looked up at me. It was likely there was another way into the valley, but a body wouldn't know it from their actions. When I rode nearer they moved off, but seemed in no way frightened.

The pack horse was pulling back on the lead rope, not at all sure he wanted to go into that valley. My mount was going, all right, but he hadn't decided whether he liked it or not. Me, I was feeling spooky as an eight-year-old at a graveyard picnic in the evening.

So I shucked my Winchester, expecting I've no idea what.

We walked it slow. Horse, he was stepping high, ears up and spooky as all get out, but you never saw a prettier little valley than this one, caught as now with the late shadows on it, and a shading of pink and rose along that rocky rim, high above us.

And then I saw the cave.

Actually, it was only a place hollowed out by wind and water from the face of the cliff, but it cut back maybe eight or ten feet at its deepest, and there were some trees, mostly aspen, growing in front, masking the entrance.

Getting down, I tied my horses to a tree, not risking them taking off and leaving me afoot.

No tracks , . . nobody had been around here for a long time.

Part of the opening had been walled up with stone the way cliff dwellers sometimes do, and the inside was all black with the smoke of forgotten fires. There was nothing much there but broken stone where part of the wall had fallen, and in back, at the deepest part, a polished log that had been cut off at both ends with an axe.

That big old log was polished smooth from folks a-setting on it, but at one end there were several rows of small notches. Counting them, they added up to groups of thirty and thirty-one and, figuring each notch as a day, they came out to about five months. In a place like this, that's a long time.

Sand had blown into the cave, and my toe stubbed against something on the floor at the back. Digging around it with my hand, I pulled out one of those old breastplates like the Spanish men wore. It was rusted, but it had been made of good steel, tempered to take the force of a blow.

All I knew about the Spanish men I'd heard from

Pa when he used to yarn with us about his old days as a mountain man. He told us much of Santa Fe, where he had lived for a spell, and I knew that Santa Fe was ten, eleven years old before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Hock.

Those Spanish men had done a sight of exploring, and much of it was only a matter of record away over in Spain. How many expeditions had gone exploring, nobody rightly knew, and this might have been the tag end of one of them.

The trail I'd been hunting as I rode south was one Pa had told me about, and of which I heard more from miners in Montana. Spanish men had used that trail for trading expeditions to the Ute country. Traders had traveled that route to the north before Father Escalante, even before Captain John Smith sighted the Virginia shore, but they left little record. Rivera had scouted through here in 1765, but he was a late-comer.

Studying around in the little time I had before it got dark, I figured that no more than three or four men had reached this valley, and two of them had never left it, because I found their graves. One of them had a stone marker, and the date of death was 1544.

Maybe I was the first to see that grave in three hundred years.

That shelter might have slept four in a pinch, certainly no more. Yet at least one man had to get out of here to leave the trail I'd found, and I had a hunch it was two men. The only puzzle was how they had come upon this valley in the first place.

On the wall, half concealed by aspen leaves, was carved a Spanish word: Oro. Beside it an arrow pointed up the valley.

Oro is a word that most men recognize, even those who know no other Spanish. Serving in the army with a couple of men who spoke the Spanish tongue, I'd learned a bit of the language, and much more while in Texas.

The shadows were long now, but there was still light, and I had that word to lead me on. Stepping into the saddle, I walked my horses up the valley. Sure enough, a half-mile up I found a. tunnel dug into the side of the hill, and broken rock around it.

Picking up a chunk from a pile stacked against the wall of the tunnel, I found it heavy--heavy with gold. It was real gen-u-ine high-grade, the kind a body hears tell of, but rarely sees.

Those Spanish men had found gold all right. No matter how they came to be here, they had found it, and now it was mine.

All I had to do was get it out.

Chapter
III.

So there I was, up to my ears in a strange country, with gold on my hands.

We Sacketts never had much. Mostly we wanted land that we could crop and graze, land where we could rear a family. We set store by kinfolk, and when trouble showed we usually stood against it as a family.

The Higgins feud, which had cost our family lives, had ended while I was away. Tyrel ended that feud on the day when Orrin was facing up to marriage. Long Higgins had come laying for Orrin, figuring Orrin's mind would be all upset with marrying. Long Higgins missed Orrin when his bride pushed Orrin out of the way, but she took the lead meant for a Sackett.

Trouble was, Long never figured on Tyrel, and you always had to figure on Tyrel.

He was a man who could look right along the barrel of your gun at you just like you'd look across a plate of supper. He would look right down your gun barrel and shoot you dead. Only Tyrel never hunted trouble.