“Don’t be so sure of that,” Longarm told her.
Miranda sighed, and they held each other tight as the storm continued to intensify and he wondered what tomorrow would bring for them all.
Chapter 15
There was a foot of snow on the ground the following morning when Longarm and Miranda finally burrowed out from under the rocks and gazed up at a cold and cloudy sky.
Longarm shivered, then glanced over toward the archaeologists’ camp and exclaimed, “The sonofabitches are all gone!”
“Well, what time is it?” Miranda asked.
Longarm dug into his bags and finally located his pocket watch. “Damn,” he swore, “I forgot to wind it before we went to bed.”
“Can’t you tell by the sun?”
“What sun?” he asked, peering up at the dark and ominous storm clouds. “Miranda, let’s get dressed, break camp, and get down off this high mesa before it starts snowing again.”
Miranda didn’t have to be told twice. She and Longarm started pulling on every bit of dry clothing that they had available, and then Longarm went to saddle the horses. But the horses were gone! Only the little burro stood shivering in the pines where Longarm had left their animals.
“Sonofabitch!” Longarm swore with a mixture of anger and frustration.
He hurried over to where the archaeologists had been camped and quickly read the tracks. Sure enough, two of them, probably the packers, had taken his rented saddle horses. No doubt they’d have taken the burro as well except that it had broken free and they hadn’t been able to catch it. With the snow on the ground, it was easy to see that the packers and the archaeologists had headed down the Mountainside, probably less than two hours earlier. It might as well have been two days earlier because Longarm knew that, on foot and in this weather, there was no chance of overtaking them.
Discouraged and more than a bit anxious, he managed to catch and halter their burro, then lead the animal back to their camp. When he saw Miranda, he said, “I’m afraid that we are going to have to hike down from Mesa Verde. They’ve taken our horses, but at least-“
“They’ve what!”
“Now take it easy,” he said, trying to put the best face possible on this disaster. “We’ve got the burro and his pack, so we can carry most all of the supplies we brought up here. We may get cold, wet, and damned tired, but we’ll make it.”
“Custis, how could they do such a low-down thing!”
“My guess is that the whole bunch of ‘em are just bad, and maybe they were suspicious of us coming up here so late in the season,” he said, finding it damned hard to keep the discouragement and bitterness out of his voice. “And they probably figure that they’ll be on their way east with their precious artifacts long before we get around to feeling like asking any more questions.”
“We’re in big trouble, aren’t we?”
“I don’t think so,” Longarm told her. “Not unless it starts snowing again.”
“The sky looks pretty bad,” Miranda said, gazing upward.
“Then we’d better stop talking and get to packing,” he told her. “We need to eat and then be gone within the hour.”
Longarm packed everything he could, while Miranda somehow found enough dry limbs and twigs to get their fire blazing. And despite the fact that neither of them had much of an appetite, they forced themselves to eat well, knowing that the long walk down to Cortez was going to require all of their energy.
“Okay,” Longarm said when they were finished and the burro was packed to its limit. “Let’s get off this high mesa.”
They took off, following the tracks of the archaeologists and their packers. The snow was well tramped down, and it made the going a lot easier than if they had to break a fresh trail. Longarm took the lead dragging the burro, and Miranda brought up the rear. They hiked steadily all through the morning and stopped to eat at noon, then pushed on until darkness.
“We’re real lucky that the weather is holding for us,” Longarm said that night when, completely exhausted, they made their camp in the shelter of a stand of juniper pines. “But it just might storm again tonight.”
“It doesn’t look good, that’s for certain,” Miranda said, gazing up at a night sky without a trace of the moon or stars.
Even the burro was discouraged, and was inclined to bray forlornly into the frosty air.
“Just one more day,” Longarm said after they had eaten a cold supper and climbed into their bedrolls, hugging each other tightly for warmth. “One more day of clear weather and we’re out of this mess.”
It snowed again that night, and the wind was blowing hard when the first gray light of a frozen dawn appeared. By then, Longarm and Miranda had been awake for quite some time, but there was no sense in climbing out of their bedrolls and freezing in the darkness.
“Let’s skip breakfast and eat some cold biscuits and beef,” Longarm said. “I sure don’t like the look of that sky to the north.”
“Me neither,” Miranda said. “And I expect that the tracks we are following will vanish in the blowing snow.”
“Yeah,” Longarm said, “but we know that they’re either headed for Durango or that museum in Cortez. Either way, we’ll catch them tomorrow.”
