'He's a good man.'
'Si... he is,'
We talked a mite, and then a slender whip of a Mexican with high cheek bones and very black eyes came in. He was not tall, and he wouldn't have weighed any more than Cap, but it took only a glance to see he was mucho hombre.
'It is my hoosband, Esteban Mendoza.' She spoke quickly to him in Spanish, explaining who we were.
His eyes warmed and he held out his hand.
We had dinner that night with Tina and Esteban, a quiet dinner, in a little adobe house with a string of red peppers hanging on the porch. Inside there was a black-eyed baby with round cheeks and a quick smile.
Esteban was a vaquero, or had been. He had also driven a freight team over the road to Del Norte.
'Be careful,' he warned. 'There is much trouble in the San Juans and Uncomphagre. Glint Stockton is there, with his outlaws.'
'Any drifters riding through?' Cap asked.
Esteban glanced at him shrewdly.
'Si. Six men were here last night. One was a square man with a beard. Another'--Esteban permitted himself a slight smile, revealing beautiful teeth and a sly amusement--'another had two pistols.'
'Six, you said?'
'There were six. Two of them were larger than you, Senior Tell, very broad, powerful. Big blond men with small eyes and big jaws. One of them, I think, was the leader.'
'Know them?' Cap asked me.
'No, Cap, I don't.' Yet even as I said it, I began to wonder. What did the Bigelows look like?
I asked Esteban, 'Did you hear any names?'
'No, Senor. They talked very little. Only to ask about travelers.'
They must know that either we were behind them, or had taken another trail. Why were they following us, if they were?
The way west after leaving Del Norte lay through the mountains, over Wolf Creek Pass. This was a high, narrow, twisting pass that was most difficult to travel, a very bad place to run into trouble.
It was a pleasant evening, and it did me good to see the nice home the Mendozas had here, the baby, and their pleasure in being together. But the thought of those six men and why they were riding after us worried me, and I could see Cap had it in mind.
We saddled up and got moving. During the ride west Cap Rountree, who had lived among Indians for years, told me more about them than I'd ever expected to know. This was Ute country, though the Comanches had intruded into some of it. A warlike tribe, they had been pushed out of the Black Hills by the Sioux and had come south, tying up with the still more warlike and bloody Kiowa. Cap said that the Kiowa had killed more whites than any other tribe.
At first the Utes and the Comanches, both of Shoshone ancestry, had got along all right. Later they split and were often at war. Before the white man came the Indians were continually at war with one another, except for the Iroquois in the East, who conquered an area bigger than the Roman empire and then made a peace that lasted more than a hundred years.
Cap and I rode through some of the wildest and most beautiful country under the sun, following the Rio Grande up higher and still higher into the mountains. It was hard to believe this was the same river along which I'd fought Comanches and outlaws in Texas--that we camped of a night beside water that would run into the Gulf one day.
Night after night our smoke lifted to the stars from country where we found no tracks. Still, cold, and aloof, the snow-capped peaks lifted above us. Cap, he was a changed man, gentler, somehow, and of a night he talked like he'd never done down below. And sometimes I opened up my Blackstone and read, smelling the smoke of aspen and cedar, smelling the pines, feeling the cold wind off the high snow.
It was like that until we came down Bear Creek into the canyon of the Vallecitos.
West of us rose up the high peaks of the Grenadier and Needle Mountains of the San Juan range. We pulled up by a stream that ran cold and swift from the mountains. Looking up at the peaks I wondered again: what was it up there that got the meat I left hanging in that tree?
Cap, he taken a pan and went down to the creek. In the late evening he washed it out and came back to the fire.
There were flecks of gold in the pan . . . we'd found color. Here we would stake our claim.
Chapter VII
We forted up for trouble.
Men most likely had been following us. Sooner or later they would find us, and we could not be sure of their intentions. Moreover, the temper of the Utes was never too certain a thing.
Riding up there, I'd had time for thinking. Where gold was found, men would come.
There would be trouble--we expected that--but there would be business too. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that the man who had something to sell would be better off than a man who searched for gold.
We had made camp alongside a spring not far from the plunging stream that came down the mountainside and emptied into the Vallecitos. I was sure this was the stream I had followed into the high valley where my gold was. Our camp was on a long bench above the Vallecitos, with the mountainside rising steeply behind it and to the east. We were in a clump of scattered ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.
