Yet a heavy rain could make that narrow chute impassable for days. Allowing for rain spells and snow, there were probably not over fifty or sixty days a year when a man could get in or out of the valley. ... Unless there was another way in.
It left me with a worried, uneasy feeling to think I was in a jug that might be stoppered at any time.
Making coffee over my fire, I studied about my situation. Those Bigelows now, the brothers of the man I'd had to shoot . . . they might think I had run from them, and they might try to follow me.
During that ride south I'd taken no more than usual precautions with my trail, and it fretted me to think that they might follow me south, and bother Orrin and Tyrel. Our family had had enough of feuding, and I'd no right to bring trouble to their door.
That the Bigelows would follow me to this place I did not expect. From my first discovery of the strange trail, I had taken care to cover my tracks and leave nothing for anybody to find.
A wind scurried my fire, just a mite of wind, and my eyes strayed to that old breastplate against the wall. Did the ghosts of men really prowl in the night? Never a man to believe in ha'nts, I was willing to believe that if a place was to be ha'nted, this was a likely one.
Empty as this valley seemed, I had the feeling of somebody looking over my shoulder, and the horses were restless too. Come sleeping time, I brought them in off the grass where they had been picketed and kept them closer to the fire. A horse makes the best sentinel in many cases, and I had no other. However, I was a light sleeper.
At daylight I shagged it down to the stream and baited a hook for trout. They snagged onto my hook and put up a fight like they were sired by bulldogs, but I hauled them in, fried them out, and made a tasty breakfast.
Making a handle out of a stick I split the end and wedged in a rounded stone, then lashed it in place. Using that and a few blades of stone, I started to work on that ore in the end of the tunnel. By sundown I had broken my axe handle twice at the hammer end, but had knocked off about three hundredweight of ore.
Long after nightfall I sat beside my fire and broke up that quartz. It was rotten quartz, some of which I could almost pull apart with my fingers, but I hammered it down and got some of the gold out. It was free gold, regular jewelry store stuff, and I worked until after midnight.
The crackling of my fire in the pine-scented night was a thing to pleasure me, but I walked down to the bank of the stream in the darkness and bathed in the cold water of the creek. Then I went back to the cave where I was camped and went to work on a bow.
Growing up with Cherokees like we did, all of us boys hunted with bows and arrows, even more than with guns. Ammunition was hard to come by when Pa was off in the western lands, and sometimes the only meat we had was what we killed with a bow and arrow.
My fire was burning wood that held the gathered perfume of years, and it smelled right good, and time to time the flames would strike some pitch and flare up, changing color, pretty as all get-out. Suddenly the heads of my horses came up, then I was over in the deep shadows with my Winchester cocked.
Times like that a man raised to wild country doesn't think. He acts without thinking ... or he may never get a chance to think again.
For a long time I waited, not moving a muscle, listening into the night. Firelight reflected from the flanks of my horses. It could be a bear or a lion, but from the way the horses acted I did not think so.
After a while the horses went back to eating, so I took a stick and snaked the coffeepot to me and had some coffee and chewed some jerked beef.
Awakening in the gray morning light, I heard a patter of rain on the aspen leaves, and felt a chill of fear ... if it started to rain and that chute filled up with run-off water it might be days before I could get out.
So I sacked up my gold. The horses seemed happy to have me moving around. There was about three pounds of gold, enough and over for the outfit I'd need.
When I went outside I saw that the trout I'd cleaned and hung in a tree against breakfast were gone. The string with which I'd suspended the meat had been sawed through by a dull blade . . . or gnawed by teeth.
I stood looking at the ground. Under the tree there were several tracks. They were not cat tracks, they were the tracks of little human feet. They were the tracks of a child or a small woman.
My skin crawled . . . nothing human could be in a place like this; yet come to think of it, I couldn't recall ever hearing of a ha'nt with a taste for trout.
We Welsh, like the Irish and the Bretons, have our stories of the Little People, all of which we love to yarn about, but we do not really believe in such things. But in America a man heard other tales. Not often, for Indians did not like to talk of them, and never spoke of them except among themselves. But I'd talked to white men who took squaws to wife, and they lived among Indians, and heard the tales.
Up in Wyoming I rode by to look at the Medicine Wheel, a great wheel of stone with twenty-odd spokes, well over a hundred feet across. The Shoshones copied their medicine lodge from that wheel, but all they can say about who built the wheel is that it was done by 'the people who had no iron.'
A hundred miles away to the southwest there was a stone arrow pointing toward the wheel. It pointed a direction for someone--but who?
My gold was sacked to go, but I needed meat, and disliked to fire a gun in that valley. So I stalked a young buck and killed him with an arrow, butchered him, and carried the meat back to the cave, where I cut a fair lot of it into strips and hung them on a pole over a fire to smoke.
Then I broiled a steak of venison and ate it, decided that wasn't enough for a man my size, and broiled another.
Hours later the wind awakened me. The fire was down to red coals and I was squirming around to settle down for sleep again when my mustang blew.
Me, I came out of those blankets like an eel out of greased fingers, and was back in the shadows again with my rifle hammer eared back before you could say scat.
'All right, boy.' The horses would know I was awake and they were not alone. At first there was no sound but
