So I sat down on the rock and took time to study the country. Unless I was mistaken, that party was somewhere not too far off, a-looking me over. What I wished was for them to see I meant no harm.
After a while, I went back to my horse, which had been feeding on the good meadow grass. I rode across a trickle of water and up a long gouge in the mountainside until I topped out where there was nothing but a few bristle-cone pines, a land of gray gravel, and some scattered, lightning-struck trees.
Off to my right, and some distance ahead, I could see a stream running down the mountain to the northeast. It looked like here was another way out of this jumble of ridges and mountain meadows.
Starting the appaloosa ahead, I saw his ears come up. Following his look, I saw a movement, far off, at the edge of a clump of aspen on a slope. But before I could get out my glasses, whatever it was had gone. Riding on, I came to a place where somebody had been kneeling beside a snow-stream, evidently for a drink. If my guessing was right that was the third drink in the last couple of hours. Possibly it was less time than that... and in this high country, with moisture in the air, it seemed too much drinking. Nor was the weather that warm.
Puzzled, I started on again. All of a sudden the tracks weren't hard to follow. Whoever it was had headed straight for some place, and was too busy getting there to think of covering trail ... or else I was believed to be lost down below somewhere.
A moment later I saw where the person I followed had fallen down, then got up, and gone on. Sick... that drinking could mean fever. Sick and, unless I missed my guess, all alone. The tracks disappeared. It took me several minutes of circling and scouting to find the likely spot. From here on it was judgment more than tracks, for the person had taken to rock, and there was a-plenty of it.
The appaloosa made work of scrambling over that rock, so I got down and walked.
It was coming up to night, and there was no way I knew of to get down off the mountain at night.
Time to time I stopped, trying the air for smoke or sound, but there was none.
Whatever I was hunting had taken off in a wild area of boulders and lightning-struck trees, where the gray ridges had been lashed and whipped by storm.
Off on the horizon I could see great black thunderheads piling up, and I knew this place would be hell during an electrical storm. Somehow I had to get down from there, and fast. Time or two before, I'd been caught in high peaks by a storm, although never so high as this. I'd seen lightning leaping from peak to peak, and sometimes in sheets of blue flame.
The boulders were a maze. Great slabs of rock stood on knife edges, looking like rows of broken molars, split and rotten. Without warning, a canyon dropped away in front of me for maybe five hundred feet of almost sheer fall. Off to the left I could see an eyebrow of trail.
Anywhere off that bald granite ridge would look like heaven to me, and I hurried to the trail. Once I heard rocks fall behind my horse, but we kept going down, with me walking and leading.
When I reached the meadow at the foot of the trail, I looked up. It was like standing on the bottom of a narrow trough with only the dark sky above me.
The trail led out of the meadow, and on it were those same tracks. Hurried by the storm, I followed them.
Thunder rumbled like great bowling balls in an empty hall of rock. Suddenly, an opening appeared in the wall ahead of me and I drew up, calling out
There was no answer.
Leaving the appaloosa, I shucked my gun. In front of the opening there was a ledge, maybe thirty yards along the face of the cliff, and a dozen yards deep. A body could see folks had lived and worked there for some time. I called out again, and my voice echoed down the canyon.
There was only the fading echo, only the silence, and emptiness. A few large drops of rain fell I went slowly across to the mouth of the cave.
A sort of wall had been fixed up, closing off part of the opening. It was made of rocks, fitted together without mortar. Stepping around it, I looked inside.
On the wall hung an old bridle. In a corner was a dried-up saddle and a rifle. Dead coals were in a fireplace that had seen much use. Over against the wall was a pallet, and on the pallet a girl was lying.
I struck a match, and got the shock of my life. She was a young girl, a little thing, and she was mighty pretty. A great mass of red-gold hair spilled over the worn blankets and bearskins on which she was lying. She wore a patched-up dress, and moccasins. Her cheeks were flushed red.
I spoke to her, but she made no sound. Bending over, I touched her brow. She was burning up with fever.
And then the storm broke.
It took me only a couple of minutes to rush outside and get my horse. There was an adjoining cave--actually part of the one the girl was in--that had a crude manger. At one time a horse or mule had been kept there.
When I had tied my horse I went back and, taking wood from a stack by the entrance, I kindled a fire and put some water on to heat.
With a fire going I could see better, and I found another blanket to cover her over with. It was plain enough that two folks had been living here, though there was only one now. Likely there had been only one for quite a stretch.
The rifle had been cleaned, but the chamber was empty and there was no ammunition anywhere I looked. There was a flint knife with quite an edge to it--probably the knife used to cut my meat that first time.
Looked to me this girl had been living here quite some time, and by the look of her, not living too well. She was mighty slight, almighty slight.
When that water was boiling I fixed some coffee and, with my own jerked beef, made some broth.
Outside the thunder was rolling something awful and there were lightning flashes almost two or three a minute, seemed like, lighting up that gorge where the cave was. Rain was falling in great sheets, and when the lightning flashed I could see the rocks glistening with it.
