Kitabı oku: «The Treasure Trail: A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine», sayfa 8
CHAPTER X
A MEXICAN EAGLET
The silver wheel of the moon was rolling into the west when the Indian girl urged the mule forward, and caught the bridle of the burro.
“What is it, Tula?” asked Rhodes, “we are doing well on the trail to Mesa Blanca; why stop here?”
“Look,” she said. “See you anything? Know you this place in the road?”
He looked over the sand dunes and scrubby desert growths stretching far and misty under the moon, and, then to the rugged gray range of the mountain spur rising to the south. They were skirting the very edge of it where it rose abruptly from the plain; a very great gray upthrust of granite wall beside them was like a gray blade slanted out of the plain. He had noticed it as one of the landmarks on the road to Mesa Blanca, and on its face were a few curious scratchings or peckings, one a rude sun symbol, and others of stars and waves of water. He recalled remarking to Pike that it must have been a prayer place for some of the old tribes.
“Yes, I know the place, when we reach this big rock it means that we are nearing the border of the ranch, this rock wall tells me that. We can be at Palomitas before noon.”
“No,” she said, and got down from the mule, “not to Palomitas now. Here we carry the food, and here we hide the saddles, and the mule go free. The burro we take, nothing else.”
“Where is a place to hide saddles here?” and he made gesture toward the great granite plane glistening in the moonlight.
“A place is found,” she returned, “it is better we ride off the trail at this place.”
She did so, circling back the way they had come until they were opposite a more broken part of the mountain side, then she began deftly to help unsaddle.
“Break no brush and make all tracks like an Apache on the trail,” she said.
Miguel sat silent on the burro as if asleep. He had never once roused to give heed to the words or the trail through the long ride. At times where the way was rough he would mutter thanks at the help of Kit and sink again into stupor.
“I can’t spare that mule,” protested Kit, but she nodded her head as if that had been all thought out.
“He will maybe not go far, there is grass and a very little spring below. Come now, I show you that hidden trail.”
She picked up one of the packs and led the burro.
“But we can’t pack all this at once,” decided Kit, who was beginning to feel like the working partner in a nightmare.
“Two times,” said Tula, holding up her fingers, “I show you.”
She led the way, nervous, silent and in haste, as though in fear of unseen enemies. Rhodes looked after her irritably. He was fagged and worn out by one of the hardest trails he had ever covered, and was in no condition to solve the curious problems of the Indian mind, but the girl had proven a good soldier of the desert, and was, for the first time, betraying anxiety, so as the burro disappeared in the blue mist, and only the faint patter of his hoofs told the way he had gone, Kit picked up the saddle and followed.
The way was rough and there was no trail, simply stumbling between great jagged slabs hewn and tossed recklessly by some convulsion of nature. Occasionally dwarfed and stunted brush, odorous with the faint dew of night, reached out and touched his face as he followed up and up with ever the forbidding lances of granite sharp edged against the sky. From the plain below there was not even an indication that progress would be possible for any human being over the range of shattered rock, and he was surprised to turn a corner and find Tula helping Miguel from the saddle in a little nook where scant herbage grew.
“No, not in this place we camp,” she said. “It is good only to hide saddles and rest for my father. Dawn is on the trail, and the other packs must come.”
He would have remonstrated about a return trip, but she held up her hand.
“It must be, if you would live,” she said. “The eyes of you have not yet seen what they are to see, it is not to be told. All hiding must be with care, or–”
She made swift pantomime of sighting along a gun barrel at him, and even in the shadows he could fancy the deadly half closing of her ungirlish eyes. Tula did not play gaily.
Tired as he was, Kit grinned.
“You win,” he said. “Let’s hit what would be the breeze if this fried land could stir one up.”
They plodded back without further converse, secured the packs, and this time it was Rhodes who led, as there appeared no possible way but the one they had covered. Only once did he make a wrong turn and a sharp “s-st” from the girl warned him of the mistake.
They found Miguel asleep, and Kit Rhodes would willingly have sunk down beside him and achingly striven for the same forgetfulness, but Tula relentlessly shook Miguel awake, got him on the burro, unerringly designated the food bag in the dark, and started again in the lead.
“I reckon you’re some sort of Indian devil,” decided Kit, shouldering the bag. “No mere mortal ever made this trail or kept it open.”
Several times the towering walls suggested the bottom of a well, and as another and another loomed up ahead, he gloomily prophesied an ultimate wall, and the need of wings.
Then, just as the first faint light began in the eastern heavens, he was aware that the uneven trail was going down and down, zig-zagging into a ravine like a great gray bowl, and the bottom of it filled with shadows of night.
The girl was staggering now with exhaustion though she would not confess it. Once she fell, and he lifted her thinking she was hurt, but she clung to him, shaking from weakness, but whispering, “Pronto, pronto!”
“Sure!” he agreed, “all the swiftness the outfit can muster.”
Curious odors came to him from the shadowy bowl, not exactly a pleasing fragrance, yet he knew it–But his mind refused to work. As the trail grew wider, and earth was under his feet instead of rock slivers and round boulders, he discovered that he was leading the burro, the grub sack over his shoulder, and with the other arm was supporting the girl, who was evidently walking with closed eyes, able to progress but not to guide herself.
Then there was the swish-swish of grasses about their feet and poor Bunting snatched mouthfuls as all three staggered downward. The light began to grow, and somewhere in the shadowy bowl there was the most blest sound known in the desert, the gurgle of running water!
“We hear it–but we can’t believe it–old Buntin’,” muttered Kit holding the burro from steady and stubborn attempts to break away, “and you are just loco enough to think you smell it.”
Then suddenly their feet struck rock again, not jagged or slippery fragments, but solid paving, and a whiff of faint mist drifted across his face in the gray of the first dawn, and the burro craned his neck forward at the very edge of a black rock basin where warm vapor struck the nostrils like a soporific.
The girl roused herself at a wordless exclamation from Rhodes, and began automatically helping Miguel from the saddle, and stripping him to the breechcloth.
Kit’s amazement startled him out of his lethargy of exhaustion. It was light enough now to see that her eyes were bloodshot, and her movements quick with a final desperation.
“There!” she said and motioned towards a shelving place in the rock, “there–medicine–all quick!”
She half lifted the staggering, unconscious Indian, and Kit, perceiving her intention, helped her with Miguel to the shallow edge of the basin where she rolled him over until he was submerged to the shoulder in the shallow bath, cupping her hands she scooped water and drenched his face.
“Why,–it’s warm!” muttered Kit.
“Medicine,” said Tula, and staggered away.
How Rhodes shed his own garments and slipped into the basin beside Miguel he never knew, only he knew he had found an early substitute for heaven. It was warm sulphur water,–tonic, refreshing and infinitely soothing to every sore muscle and every frazzled nerve. He ducked his head in it, tossed some more over the head and shoulders of the sleeping Indian, and then, submerged to his arms, he promptly drifted into slumber himself.
He wakened to the sound of Baby Bunting pawing around the grub pack. Hunger was his next conviction, for the heavenly rest in the medicine bath had taken every vestige of weariness away. He felt lethargic from the sulphur fumes, and more sleep was an enticing thought, yet he put it from him and got into his clothes after the use of a handkerchief as a bath towel. Miguel still slept and Kit bent over him in some concern, for the sleep appeared curiously deep and still, the breath coming lightly, yet he did not waken when lifted out of the water and covered with a poncho in the shade of a great yucca.
“I reckon it’s some dope in these hot springs,” decided Kit. “I feel top heavy myself, and won’t trouble him till I’ve rustled some grub and have something to offer. Well, Buntin’, we are all here but the daughter of the Glen,” he said, rescuing the grub sack, “and if she was a dream and you inveigled me here by your own diabolical powers, I’ve a hunch this is our graveyard; we’ll never see the world and its vanities again!”
A bit of the blue and scarlet on a bush above caught his eye. It was the belt of Tula, and he went upwards vaguely disturbed that he had drifted into ease without question of her welfare.
He found her emerging from a smaller rock basin, her one garment dripping a wet trail as she came towards him. There was no smile in her greeting, but a look of content, of achievement.
“My father,” she said, “he is–”
“Sleeping beyond belief! good medicine sleep, I hope.”
She nodded her head comprehendingly, for she had done the impossible and had triumphed. She looked at the sack of food he held.
“There is one place for fire, and other water is there. Come, it is to you.”
She struck off across the sun-bathed little grass plot to a jumble of rock where a cool spring emerged, ran only a few rods, and sank again out of sight. The shattered rock was as a sponge, so completely was the water sucked downward again. Marks of burro’s hoofs were there.
“Baby Buntin’ been prospecting while we wallowed in the dope bath,” said Kit.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” uttered the Indian child, if such she could be called after the super-woman initiative of that forbidding trail. She was down on her knees peering at the tracks in the one little wet spot below the spring.
“Two,” she said enigmatically. “That is good, much good. It will be meat.”
Then she saw him pulling dry grasses and breaking branches of scrub growth for a fire, and she stood up and motioned him to follow. They were in a narrow, deep ravine separated from the main one by the miniature plain of lush grass, a green cradle of rest in the heart of the gray hills. She went as directly upward as the broken rock would permit, and suddenly he followed her into a blackened cave formed by a great granite slab thrusting itself upwards and enduring through the ages when the broken rock had shattered down to form an opposite wall. And the cloud bursts of the desert had swept through, and washed the sands clear, leaving a high black roof slanting upwards to the summit.
Tula moved ahead into the far shadows. He could see that beyond her somewhere a ray of light filtered blue, but he halted at the entrance, puzzled at the black roof where all the rock of the mountain was gray and white except where mineral streaks were of reds and russets and moldy greens. Then he put his hand up and touched the roof and understood. Soot from ancient fires was discernible on his hand, flakes of it fell to the floor, dry and black, scaling off under pressure. The scales were thick and very old, like blackened moss. He had seen blackened rock like that in other volcanic regions, but this was different.
“It is here,” said Tula, and he followed the voice through a darker shadowed bit of the way, then through the ray of light, and then–
The first thing he saw was the raised hearth of a rather pretentious fireplace, or place of fire, for it resembled not at all the tiny little cooking hearth of desert Indians. A stone hatchet lay beside it, and, what was much more surprising, two iron instruments of white man’s manufacturing, a wedge and a long chisel.
He picked up the chisel, weighed it in his hand, and looked at the girl. He was now becoming accustomed to the dim light and could see her eyes following his every movement with curious questioning. There was a tiny frowning wrinkle between her brows as if serious matters were being decided there.
“It is here,” she said again. “Maybe someone dies when a white friend is shown the way–maybe I die, who knows?–but it is here–El Alisal of the gold of the rose!”
She made a little gesture and moved aside, and the chisel fell to the stone floor with a clang as Kit shouted and dropped on his knees before an incredible thing in the gray wall.
That upthrust of the rock wall had strange variety of color, and between the granite and the gray limestone there was a ragged rusty band of iron as a note of contrast to the sprinkling of glittering quartz catching the ray of light, but the quartz was sprinkled on a six inch band of yellow–not the usual quartz formation with dots of color, but a deep definite yellow held together by white crystals.
“The red gold! it’s the red gold!” he said feeling the yellow surface instinctively.
“Yes, señor, it is the red gold of El Alisal, and it is to you,” but her eyes were watching him hungrily as she spoke. And something of that pathetic fear penetrated his amazed mind, and he remembered.
“No, Tula, only my share to me. I do the work, but the great share is to you, that it may buy back your mother from the slavers of the south.”
“Also my sister,” said the girl, and for the first time she wept.
“Come, come! This is the time for joy. The danger is gone, and we are at rest beside this–why, it’s a dream come true, the golden dream! Come, help me cook that we may be strong for the work.”
She helped silently, fetching water and more sticks for the fire.
There were many things to ask, but he asked no questions, only gazed between bites and sups at the amazing facts facing him.
“I’ve seen ores and ores in my time, but nothing like this!” he exulted. “Why, I can ‘high grade’ mule loads of this and take it out without smelting,” and then he grinned at his little partner. “We just struck it in time,–meat is mighty near done.”
“Plenty meat!” she said nodding her head wisely. “Burro, big burro, wild burro! I see track.”
“Wild burro? Sure, that makes it simple till we rest up. You are one great little commissary sergeant.”
He noted that the pitch of the roof towards the face of the mountain carried the smoke in a sort of funnel to be sifted through high unseen crannies of shattered rock above. All was dark in the end of the gallery, but a perceptible draught from the portal bore the smoke upward.
“It’s too good to be true,” he decided, looking it over. “I’m chewing bacon and it tastes natural, but I’m betting with myself that this is a dream, and I’ll wake up in the dope pond with my mouth full of sulphur water.”
The girl watched him gravely, and ate sparingly, though parched corn had been her only sustenance through the trail of the dreadful night. Her poor sandals were almost cut from her feet, and even while jesting at the unreality of it all, Kit was making mental note of her needs–the wild burro would at least provide green hide sandals for her until better could be found, and she had earned the best.
He was amazed at her keenness. She did not seem to think, but instinctively to feel her way to required knowledge, caring for herself in the desert as a fledgling bird tossed by some storm from the home nest. He remembered there were wild burros in the Sonora hills, but that she should have already located one on this most barren of mountains was but another unbelievable touch to the trail of enchantment, and after a century of lost lives and treasure in the search for the Indian mine, to think that this Indian stray, picked up on a desolate trail, should have been the one to know that secret and lead him to it!
“Other times you have been here?” he asked as he poured coffee in a tin for Miguel, and dug out the last box of crackers from the grub pack.
“Once I come, one time, and it was to make prayer here. It is mine to know, but not my mother, not other peoples, only the father of me and me. If I die then he show the trail to other one, not if I live. That is how.”
“He surely picked the right member of his honorable family,” decided Kit. “Only once over the trail, once?”
“I knowing it long before I see it,” she explained gravely. “The father of me make that trail in the sand for my eyes when I am only little. I make the same for him in a game to play. When I make every turn right, and name the place, and never forget–then he bring me, for it is mine to know.”
“Sufferin’ cats!” muttered Rhodes, eyeing her in wonder. “The next time I see an Indian kid playing in the sand, I’ll linger on the trail and absorb wisdom!”
“Come,” she said, “you not seeing the one enchant look, the–how you say?–the not believe look.”
“Well, take it from me, Cinderella, I’m seeing not believe things this very now,” announced Kit, giving a fond look towards that comforting gleam of yellow metal bedding flecks of quartz. “I see it, but will have to sleep, and wake up to find it in the same place before I can believe what I think I see.”
With the food and drink for Miguel in his hands he had followed the girl through the shadowed gallery of the slanting smoke-stained roof. His eyes were mainly directed to the rock floor lest he stumble and spill the precious coffee; thus he gave slight thought to the little ravine up which she had led him to the cave which was also a mine.
But as he stepped out into the sunlight she stood looking up into his face with almost a smile, the first he had seen in her wistful tragic eyes. Then she lifted her hand and pointed straight out, and the “enchant look,” the “not believe” look was there! He stared as at a mirage for an incredulous moment, and then whispered, “Great God of the Desert!”
For a little space, a few rods only, the mountain dipped steeply, and trickling water from above fell in little cascades to lower levels, where a great jagged wall of impregnable granite arose as a barrier along the foot of the mountain.
But he was above the sharp outline of the huge saw with the jagged granite teeth, and between the serrated edges he could look far across the yellow-gray reaches of sand and desert growths. Far and wide was the “not believe” look, to the blue phantom-like peaks on the horizon, but between the two ranges was a white line with curious dots drifting and whirling like flies along it, and smoke curling up, and–
Then it was he uttered the incredulous cry, for he was indeed viewing the thing scarce to be believed.
He was looking across the great Rancho Soledad, and the white line against the sand was the wall of the old mission where the vaqueros were herding a band of horses into the great quadrangle of the one-time patio turned into a corral since the buildings on three sides had melted down again into mother earth.
He remembered riding around these lines of the old arches seeking trace of that door of the legend,–the door from which the aliso tree of the mine could be seen,–and there was nowhere a trace of a door.
“Queer that every other part of the prospect developed according to specifications and not the door,” he grumbled whimsically. “Cinderella, why have you hid the door in the wall from me?”
She looked around uncertainly, not understanding.
“No portal but it,” she said with a movement of her head towards the great slab forming a pointed arch against the mountain and shielding the unbelievable richness there, “also El Alisal, the great tree, is gone. This was the place of it; the old ones tell my father it was as chief of the trees and stand high to be seen. The sky fire took it, and took the padres that time they make an altar in this place.”
“Um,” assented Kit, noting traces of ancient charcoal where the aliso tree had grown great in the moisture of the spring before lightning had decided its tragic finish, “a great storm it must have been to send sky fire enough to kill them all.”
“Yes,” said Tula quietly,–“also there was already another shrine at this place, and the gods near.”
He glanced at her quickly and away.
“Sure,” he agreed, “sure, that’s how it must have been. They destroyed the aliso and there was no other landmark to steer by. White men might find a thousand other dimples in the range but never this one, the saw-tooth range below us has the best of them buffaloed. Come along, Señorita Aladdin, and help me with the guardian of the treasure. We’ve got to look after Miguel, and then start in where the padres left off. And you might do a prayer stunt or two at the shrine you mentioned. We need all the good medicine help you can evoke.”
As they approached the pool where the faintest mist drifted above the water warm from hidden fires of the mountain, Kit halted before he quite reached the still form beside the yucca, and, handing the food and drink to the girl, he went forward alone.
He was puzzled afterward as to why he had done that, for no fold of the garment was disturbed, nothing visible to occasion doubt, yet he bent over and lifted the cover very gently. The face of Miguel was strangely gray and there was no longer sign of breath. The medicine of the sacred pool had given him rest, but not life.
He replaced the blanket and turned to the girl;–the last of the guardians of the shrine of the red gold.
“Little sister,” he said, “Miguel grew tired of the trails of a hard land. He has made his choice to go asleep here in the place where you tell me the gods are near. He does not want us to have sad hearts, for he was very sad and very tired, and he will not need food, Tula.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she made no reply, only unbound her hair as she had seen mourning women do, and seated herself apart, her face hidden in her arms.
“No one is left to mourn but me, and I mourn!” she half chanted. “I say it for the mother of me, and for my sister, that the ghosts may listen. Happily he is going now from hard trails! He has chosen at this place! Happily he has chosen, and only we are sad. No debt is ours to pay at this place; he has chosen–and a life is paid at El Alisal! Happily he will find the trail of the birds from this place, and the trail of the clouds over the high mountain. No one is left to mourn but me; and I mourn!”
Rhodes understood no word of her lamentations, chanted now loudly, now lowly, at intervals hour after hour that day. He set grimly to work digging a grave in the lower part of the ravine, gathering dry grass for lining as best he could to make clear to the girl that no lack of care or honor was shown the last man of Cajame’s stock.
The work took most of the day, for he carried stone and built a wall around the grave and covered it with slatelike slabs gathered from a shattered upheaval of long ago.
Tula watched all this gravely, and with approval, for she drew with her finger the mark of the sun symbol on one of the slabs.
“It is well to make that mark,” she said, “for the sons of Cajame were priests of the sun. The sign is on the great rock of the trail, and it is theirs.”
With the chisel he carved the symbol as she suggested, glad to do anything for the one mourner for the dead man who had offered the treasure of the desert to him.
“That is how he made choice,” she said when it was marked plainly. “Me, I think he was leading us on the night trail to this place–I think so. He is here to guard the gold of El Alisal for you. That is how it will be. He has made choice.”
Kit got away by himself to think over the unexpected situation. The girl climbed to a higher point, seated herself, and continued her chant of mourning. He knew she was following, as best she knew, the traditional formalities of a woman for the death of a chief. He found himself more affected by that brave fatalistic recital, now loud and brave, now weirdly slow and tender, than if she had given way to tempests of tears. A man could comfort and console a weeping stray of the desert, but not a girl who sat with unbound hair under the yucca and called messages to the ghosts until the sun,–a flaming ball of fire,–sank beyond the far purple hills.
And that was the first day of many days at the hidden treasure place of the red gold.
