Timberline was a thousand feet below me, and I was close under the night-coming sky, with a shivering wind, scarcely more than a breath for strength, blowing along the valley. All I could hear was the sound of my horses' hoofs and the creak of my saddle. There was a spooky feeling to the air, and my horse walked with ears pricked to the stillness.
Off to the left lay a sheet of ghost water, a high cold lake fed by melting snow, scarcely stirred by that breath of wind. It lay flat and still, and that lake worried me, for I had heard stories of ghost water lakes in the high-up mountains.
Then there came a sound, and my horses heard it first. Riding lonesome country a man does well to give heed to his horses, for they will often see or hear things a man will miss, and these appaloosas were mountain-born and -bred, captured wild and still wild at heart, and, like me, they had a love for the lost, the wild, and the lonely.
It was a far-off sound, like rushing wind in a great forest, or like the distant sound of steam cars running on rails. It grew as we moved nearer, and I knew it for the sound of falling water.
I came to another keyhole pass, even narrower than the first, and the trail led into it. Alongside the narrow trail rushed the outflow of that ghost lake, spilling down the chute in a tumble of white water.
I could see it falling away in a series of falls, steep slides, and rapids. The pass was no more than a crack, not a canyon or ravine, just a gash in the face of the mountain wall, a gloomy place, shadowed and spattered by spray. A thread of trail skirted the rushing stream, a trail that must, much of the time, be under water.
Believe me, I took a good long look down that dark, narrow crack, filled with the roar of the water. Yet on the wall, in a place dug out for the purpose, was a sliver of quartz, and now I had come too far to turn back.
My horses shied from that opening, liking it not at all, but I was less smart than my horses, and urged them on, starting gingerly down the slide.
That rail was narrow ... it was almighty narrow. If it played out there would be no way of turning back. No mustang was ever taught to back up, and I'd no way of controlling the pack horse, anyway.
Once I got him started, that appaloosa was as big a fool as I was. Ears pricked, he started down, sliding on his rump in spots, it was that steep. A body couldn't hear a thing beyond the roar of the water.
Rock walls towered hundreds of feet overhead, closing in places until there was scarcely a crack above us, and it was like riding through a cave. Ferns overhung the water in places, and there was more than thirty yards in one place and twice as far in another where a thin sheet of water actually ran over the trail.
In other places, where the stream fell away into a deep chasm beside the trail, I lost all sight of the water, and could only hear it. In two or three spots, near waterfalls, the mist and spray was thick enough to soak a man and blot out everything. It was a death trap, all right, and I felt it. A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.
For about three miles I followed that trail. I went down it more than a thousand feet, judging by the vegetation in the valley that I found. It opened on my right, narrow at first, and then widening. The creek tumbled off and disappeared into a narrow, deep canyon shrouded by ferns and trees growing from the rock walk. But the trail turned into the valley.
At that point the valley was no more than twenty yards wide, with steep walls rising on either side. A man on foot might have climbed them; a horse couldn't have gone six feet. The last of the sunlight was tinting the canyon wall on the east, but for maybe a hundred and fifty yards I rode in deep shadows.
Then the valley broadened. It looked to be a couple of miles long, and from a quarter to a half-mile wide. A stream ran along the bottom and emptied into that run-off stream beside which I had been riding.
The bottom was as pretty a high mountain meadow as a body would care to see, and along the stream there were clumps of aspen, some dwarf willows, and other trees whose names I couldn't call to mind. A few elk were feeding not far off and they looked up at me. It was likely there was another way into the valley, but a body wouldn't know it from their actions. When I rode nearer they moved off, but seemed in no way frightened.
The pack horse was pulling back on the lead rope, not at all sure he wanted to go into that valley. My mount was going, all right, but he hadn't decided whether he liked it or not. Me, I was feeling spooky as an eight-year-old at a graveyard picnic in the evening.
So I shucked my Winchester, expecting I've no idea what.
We walked it slow. Horse, he was stepping high, ears up and spooky as all get out, but you never saw a prettier little valley than this one, caught as now with the late shadows on it, and a shading of pink and rose along that rocky rim, high above us.
And then I saw the cave.
Actually, it was only a place hollowed out by wind and water from the face of the cliff, but it cut back maybe eight or ten feet at its deepest, and there were some trees, mostly aspen, growing in front, masking the entrance.
Getting down, I tied my horses to a tree, not risking them taking off and leaving me afoot.
No tracks , . . nobody had been around here for a long time.
Part of the opening had been walled up with stone the way cliff dwellers sometimes do, and the inside was all black with the smoke of forgotten fires. There was nothing much there but broken stone where part of the wall had fallen, and in back, at the deepest part, a polished log that had been cut off at both ends with an axe.
That big old log was polished smooth from folks a-setting on it, but at one end there were several rows of small notches. Counting them, they added up to groups of thirty and thirty-one and, figuring each notch as a day, they came out to about five months. In a place like this, that's a long time.
Sand had blown into the cave, and my toe stubbed against something on the floor at the back. Digging around it with my hand, I pulled out one of those old breastplates like the Spanish men wore. It was rusted, but it had been made of good steel, tempered to take the force of a blow.
All I knew about the Spanish men I'd heard from
Pa when he used to yarn with us about his old days as a mountain man. He told us much of Santa Fe, where he had lived for a spell, and I knew that Santa Fe was ten, eleven years old before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Hock.
