Thing puzzles me,' I said, 'is why you came up here in the first place. You came with that Juan Morales?'
'He was my grandfather. He and my grandmother raised me, and when she died he began to worry about dying and leaving me with nothing. Grandfather had an old map that had been in our family for years, telling of gold in the San Juans, so he decided to find it for me. I insisted on coming with him.
'He was very strong, Tell. It seemed nothing was too much for him. But we couldn't follow the map, and we got lost in the mountains. We were short of ammunition. Some of it we lost in a rock slide that injured his shoulder.
'We found this place, and he was sure it was close by--the gold, I mean. He never told me why he believed it, but there was some position in relation to two mountain peaks. One was slightly west of north, the other due west.
'Grandfather must have been hurt worse in the slide than he let me know. He never got better. One of his shoulders was very bad, and he limped after that, and worried about me. He said we must forget the gold and get out as best we could.
'Then he became ill... that was when you came into the valley, and when I took some venison from you at night.'
'You should have awakened me.'
'I--I was afraid.'
'Then when you came back and found the venison I left for you . . . you knew I was all right then?
'I thought--oh, I don't know what I thought! When I came back here after getting that first piece of meat, that was when grandfather died. I told him about you.'
'He died then?'
'He told me to go to you, that you would take me out of here, and that most men were good to women.'
'When I saw the grave I thought he'd been dead longer than that.'
'I wasn't sure of the date. We lost track of time, up here.'
She must have had a rough time of it. I thought of that while I went to work and made some more broth, only this time with chunks of meat in it.
'How did you get into this place?'
'We came up a trail from the north--an ancient trail, very steep, or perhaps it was a game trail.'
From the north, again. What I wanted was a way down on the west The way I figured, we couldn't be much more than a mile from Cap right now, but the trouble was that mile was almost straight down.
Ange Kerry was in no shape to leave, and with all the men hunting me that had a figuring to fill me full up with lead, I wasn't planning to go down until I could take Ange along. Suppose I was killed before anybody knew where she was?
Just in case, I told her how things were. 'We got us a camp, Cap Rountree and me, down on the Vallecitos, west of here. If something happens to me, you get to him. He'll take you to my folks down to Mora.'
Seemed likely that with another few days of rest she might be ready to try coming down off that mountain. Mostly she was starved from eating poorly. I went out and went across the canyon. There I looked back, taking time to study that cliff. A man might climb that slope of talus and work his way to the top of the cliff through the crack that lay behind it. A man on foot might.
Chances were that right down the other side was camp. Studying it out, I decided to have a try at it. Down by the stream I had seen an outcropping of talc, so I broke off a piece and scratched out Back Soon on a slab of rock.
Taking my rifle, I rigged myself a sling from a rawhide strip, and headed for that slope. Climbing the steep talus slope was work, believe me. That rock slid under my feet and every time I took three steps I lost one, but soon I got up to that crack.
Standing there looking up, I was of a mind to quit, though quitting comes hard to me. That crack was like a three-sided chimney, narrow at the bottom, widening toward the top. The slope above the chimney looked like it was just hanging there waiting for a good reason to fall. Yet by holding to the right side a man might make it.
I hung my rifle over my back to have my hands free, and started up that chimney and made it out on the slope. Holding on to catch my breath, I looked down into the canyon.
It made a man catch his breath. I swear, I had no idea I'd climbed so high up. The creek was a thread, the cave mouth looked no bigger than the end of a fingernail, and I was a good two thousand feet above the floor of the valley. My horse, feeding in the meadow where I'd left him on a picket-rope, looked like an ant.
Clinging to the reasonably solid rock along the side of the rock slide, I worked my way to the top, and was wringing wet by the time I got there.
Nothing but sky and cloud above me, and around me bare, smooth granite, with a hollow where there was snow, but nowhere any trees or vegetation. I walked across the top of that ridge, scoured by wind and storm ... the air was fresher than a body could believe, and a light wind was blowing.
In a few minutes I was looking down into the valley of the Vallecitos.
A little way down the forest began, first scattered, stunted trees, then thick stands of timber. Our camp--I could see a thin trail of smoke rising --was down there among them.
From where I stood to the point where camp was, I figured it to be a half-mile, if it was level ground. But the mountain itself was over a mile high, which made the actual distance much greater. Here and there were sheer drops. And there would be no going straight down. One cliff I could see would take a man almost a mile north before he could find a place to get down.
Off where Cap and me had laid out the town site there was a stir of activity. There were several columns of smoke, and it looked like some building going on, but it was too far to make out, even in that clear air.
