rose against the sky like a sail hewn from a single piece of stone. High up on the side of the cliff, rock had weathered away more quickly than in other parts of the formation. The result was a window set like a gem in the solid rock wall. A shaft of light from the setting sun speared through the opening, gliding everything it touched with deepest gold.
Yet even more astonishing than a window in stone was the muted murmur of fresh water nearby. They had climbed out of the stone maze and were riding once more through a landscape where mountains were close enough to make out individual peaks. The camp they made was between a series of sunny river bends.
Reno had been right about Eve’s reaction to water after having ridden through a rock desert. The first time she saw a trickle of water twisting through the center of an arid valley, she talked excitedly about riding next to a «river» again. Reno had teased her about it, but he hadn’t objected when she asked to camp at the point where the small stream spread out into a series of sunwarmed pools bordered by whispering cottonwood trees.
At sunset and dawn, the land looked like an illustration for a mythic tale from a book men had forgotten how to read. It made Eve wonder if she had stumbled into an enchanted land where time stood still.
«It looks like it’s been here forever,» Eve said.
Reno followed her glance to the golden window time had carved from stone.
«Nothing lasts forever,» he said. «Not even rock.»
Eve looked at Reno, then back to the sail of stone rising improbably against the endless sky.
«It looks like it does,» she said softly.
«Looks don’t count for much. That window gets a bit bigger each day as grain after grain of the sandstone is chiseled out by the wind,» Reno said.
Eve listened, and sensed what lay beneath the words, change coming whether it was wanted or not.
«Someday that little window could be a full-blown arch,» Reno said. «Then the arch will get worn thin over time until it collapses, leaving a notch behind in the rock wall. Then the notch will be cut deeper and wider by wind and rain, until finally nothing is left but red rubble and blue sky.»
Eve shivered again. «I can’t imagine this land worn down like that.»
«That’s where the sandstone came from in the first place,» Reno said, looking at the soaring red wall. «Mountains that were worn down a grain at a time and piled by the wind into ancient dunes or washed down to seas so old even God has forgotten them.»
The quality of Reno’s voice drew Eve’s eyes from the fantastic rock formations. Motionless, she watched him as he watched the land and spoke calmly of unimaginable eons passing into eternity.
«Then the sand became stone again,» he said, «and the earth shifted and new mountains were lifted to the sky to be worn down by new winds, new storms, new rivers running down to new seas.»
«‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’» Eve whispered.
«It’s the way of the world, sugar girl. Beginnings and endings all tangled together, like the pictographs on a canyon wall, Indian and Spanish and us, different symbols, different people, different times.»
Slowly Eve looked back to the red stone that seemed so massive and enduring. Then she faced the man who refused to acknowledge that anything endured, even stone.
Or love.
AS Reno and Eve followed the old Spanish trail, each valley or basin they rode through had more water and less rock than the previous one. The climb was so gradual that it was understood only at rare vistas where men could look back down toward the stone maze.
Slowly sagebrush gave way to pinon forests, and pinon gave way to pine. Red cliffs sank back down below the surface of the earth as sandstone gave way to different layers of rock that had come from deep beneath the surface of the earth, where heat transformed sandstone into quartzite, and limestone into marble.
Only one thing didn’t change. Each time Reno looked out over the back trail, there was a thin veil of dust miles and miles behind them.
«Somebody is still dogging us,» Reno said, putting away the spyglass.
«Slater?» Eve asked unhappily.
«They’re raising a lot of dust, so it’s either Slater’s men or an Indian raiding party.»
«Some choice,» Eve muttered.
Reno shrugged. «On the whole, I’m thinking it’s Slater. We don’t have anything Indians want enough to spend two days following us to get.»
«Are we going to try to lose him?»
«No time,» Reno said bluntly. «See those yellow patches high on the mountainsides?»
Eve nodded.
«Aspens are turning,» he said. «I’ll bet those clouds we’re looking at will leave a dusting of snow in the high country tonight.»
«How long do we have before everything gets snowed in?»
«Only God knows. Some years the high country closes the first week in September.»
A startled sound escaped Eve. «But it’s that late now!»
«And other years it can be open clear up to Thanksgiving, or even later,» Reno added.
Eve made a relieved sound. «Then we’re all right.»
«Don’t count on it. A storm can blow up and drop snow chest-high to a Montana horse in one night.»
Silently Eve remembered the warnings in the journal about the short summers and long, brutal winters in the country around the mine. Don Lyon had speculated that if the Indians hadn’t killed his ancestors, the mountains had.
«Those mountains won’t give up their gold easily,» Reno continued, as though following Eve’s thoughts.
«If mining gold were easy, someone else would have cleaned out the Lyons’ mine long ago,» she pointed out.
Reno stood in the stirrups, looking out across their back trail again.
«Why is Slater hanging back?» Eve asked.
«I suspect old Jericho’s greed finally got the better of his lust for vengeance,» Reno said dryly.
«What do you mean?»
«He didn’t think much of the notion that the journal led to a real gold mine.»
«Raleigh King did.»
«Raleigh King was a braggart, a bully, and a fool. Whatever he believed wouldn’t mean spit to Jericho. But about the time we cut Spanish sign along the trail, Jericho must have begun thinking.»
«About gold,» Eve said glumly.
Reno nodded. «But he can’t read the signs. We can. He can’t find the mine. We can.»
She looked unhappily over their back trail.
«And even if his Comancheros can read the sign,» Reno continued, «I’ll bet Jericho got to thinking about how much plain hard work gold mining is.»
«It didn’t make him give up.»
«No. He’s just going to wait for us to find the mine and get a bunch of gold together,» Reno said. «Then he’s going to come down on us like a blue norther’.»
Silence followed Reno’s calm words.
Finally Eve asked faintly, «What are we going to do?»
«Find the mine and the gold and hope to God above that Cal or Wolfe or Rafe gets wind of Slater before he gets impatient and kills us, and to hell with the gold.»
«What good would Caleb or one of the others be? It would still be three of us against however many Slater has.»
«He’s got at least two men scouting us, and the rest are raising enough dust for an even dozen. And the longer he’s on the trail, the more the word goes out. But he’s replaced the men he lost in that ambush three times over.»
«Do you think there’s much chance of Caleb following us?»
«More chance than there is of us finding Spanish gold,» Reno said succinctly.
«How will he know where we are?» Eve asked.
«News travels fast in a wild land, and Cal is a listening kind of man.»
«Then Slater could know about other people following us, too.»
