from the open flats. For the past few hundred yards his vision to the left had been blocked by dense pines.
Now the plains yawned wide again, and his glasses inched over the vastness in all directions, then stopped where a spur jutted out from the hillside ahead to cut his vision. The Indian women had vanished.
Hyde and Billy Guay sat their mounts next to Angsman, who, afoot, swept his glasses once more over the flat. Finally he lowered them and said, more to himself than to the others, 'Those Indian women aren't nowhere in sight. They could have moved out in the other direction, or they might be so close we can't see them.'
He nodded ahead to where the trail stopped at thick scrub brush and pine and then dipped abruptly to the right to drop to a bench that slanted toward the deepness of the valley. From where they stood, the men saw the trail disappear far below into a denseness of trees and rock.
'Pretty soon the country'll be hugging us tight; and we won't see anything,' Angsman said. 'I don't like it. Not with a hunting party in the neighborhood.'
Billy Guay laughed out. 'I'll be go to hell! Ed, this old woman's afraid of two squaws! Ed, you hear--'
Ed Hyde wasn't listening. He was staring off in the distance, past the treetops in the valley to a towering, sand-colored cliff with flying rock buttresses that walled the valley on the other side. He slid from his mount hurriedly, catching his coat on the saddle horn and ripping it where a button held fast. But now he was too excited to heed the ripped coat.
'Look! Yonder to that cliff.' His voice broke with excitement. 'See that gash near the top, like where there was a rock slide? And look past to the mountains behind!' Angsman and Billy Guay squinted at the distance, but remained silent.
'Dammit!' Hyde screamed. 'Don't you see it!' He grabbed his horse's reins and ran, stumbling, down the trail to where it leveled again at the bench. When the others reached him, the map was in his hand and he was laughing a high laugh that didn't seem to belong to the grizzled face. His extended hand held the dirty piece of paper . . . and he kept jabbing at it with a finger of the other hand. 'Right there, dammit!
Right there!' His pointing finger swept from the map. 'Now look at that gold-lovin' rock slide!' His laughter subsided to a self-confident chuckle.
From where they stood on the bench, the towering cliff was now above them and perhaps a mile away over the tops of the trees. A chunk of sandrock as large as a two-story building was gouged from along the smooth surface of the cliff top, with a gravel slide trailing into the valley below; but massive boulders along the cliff top lodged over the depression, forming a four-sided opening. It was a gigantic frame through which they could see sky and the flat surface of a mesa in the distance.
On both sides the mesa top fell away to shoulders cutting sharp right angles from the straight vertical lines, then to be cut off there, in their vision, by the rock border of the cliff frame. And before their eyes the mesa turned into a flat-topped Spanish sombrero.
Billy Guay's jaw dropped open. 'Damn! It's one of those hats like the Mex dancers wear! Ed, you see it?'
Ed Hyde was busy studying the map. He pointed to it again. 'Right on course, Angsman. The flats, the ridge, the valley, the hat.' His blackcrusted fingernail followed wavy lines and circles over the stained paper. 'Now we just drop to the valley and follow her up to the end.' He shoved the map into his coat pocket and reached up to the saddle horn to mount. 'Come on, boys, we're good as rich,' he called, and swung up into the saddle.
Angsman looked down the slant to the darkness of the trees. 'Ed, we got to go slow down there,' he tried to caution, but Hyde was urging his mount down the grade and Billy Guay's paint was kicking the loose rock after him. His face tightened as he turned quickly to his horse, and then he saw Ygenio Baca leaning against his lead mule vacantly smoking his cigarette. Angsman's face relaxed. 'Ygenio,' he said. 'Tell your mules to be very quiet.'
Ygenio Baca nodded and unhurriedly flicked the cigarette stub down the grade.
They caught up with Hyde and Billy Guay a little way into the timber. The trail had disappeared into a hazy gloom of tangled brush and tree trunks with the cliff on one side and the piney hill on the other to keep out the light.
Angsman rode past them and they stopped and turned in the saddle. Hyde looked a little sheepish because he didn't know where the trail was, but Billy Guay stared back defiantly and tried to look hard.
'Ed, you saw some bones out there on the flats a while back,' Angsman said. 'Likely they were men who had gold fever.' That was all he said. He turned the head of the mare and continued on.
Angsman moved slowly, more cautiously now than before, and every so often he would rein in gently and sit in the saddle without moving, and listen. And there was something about the deep silence that made even Billy Guay strain his eyes into the dimness and not say anything. It was a loud quietness that rang in their ears and seemed unnatural. Moving at this pace, it was almost dusk when they reached the edge of the timber.
The pine hill was still on their left, but higher and steeper. To the right, two spurs reached out from the cliff wall that had gradually dropped until now it was just a hump, but with a confusion of rocky angles in the near distance beyond. And ahead was a canyon mouth, narrow at first, but then appearing to open into a wider area.
As they rode on, Angsman could see it in Ed Hyde's eyes. The map was in his hand and he kept glancing at it and then looking around.
When they passed through the canyon mouth into the open, Hyde called, 'Angsman, look! Just like it says!'
But Angsman wasn't looking at Ed Hyde. A hundred feet ahead, where a narrow side canyon cut into the arena, the two Indian women sat their ponies and watched the white men approach.
ANGSMAN REINED in and waited, looking at them the way you look at deer that you have come across unexpectedly in a forest, waiting for them to bolt. But the women made no move to run. Hyde and Billy Guay drew up next to Angsman, then continued on as Angsman nudged the mare into a walk. They stopped within a few feet of the women, who had still neither moved nor uttered a sound.
Angsman dismounted. Hyde stirred restlessly in his saddle before putting his hands on the horn to swing down, but stopped when Billy Guay's hand tightened on his arm.
'Damn, Ed, look at that young one!' His voice was loud and excited, but as impersonal as if he were making a comment at a girlie show.
'She'd even look good in town,' he added, and threw off to stand in front of her pony.
Angsman looked at Billy Guay and back to the girl, who was sliding easily from the bare back of her pony. He greeted her in English, pleasantly, and tipped his hat to the older woman, still mounted, who giggled in a high, thin voice. The girl said nothing, but looked at Angsman.
He said, ?Como se llama? and spoke a few more words in Spanish.
The girl's face relaxed slightly and she said, 'Sonkadeya,' pronouncing each syllable distinctly.
'What the hell's that mean?' Billy Guay said, walking up to her.
'That's her name,' Angsman told him, then spoke to the girl again in Spanish.
She replied with a few Spanish phrases, but most of her words were in a dialect of the Apache tongue. She was having trouble combining the two languages so that the white men could understand her. Her face would frown and she would wipe her hands nervously over the hips of her greasy deerskin dress as she groped for the right words. She was plump and her hair and dress had long gone unwashed, but her face was softly attractive, contrasting oddly with her primitive dress and speech. Her features might have belonged to a white woman--the coloring, too, for that matter--but the greased hair and smoke smell that clung to her were decidedly Apache.
When she finished speaking, Angsman looked back at Hyde. 'She's a Warm Springs Apache. A Mimbreno,' he said. 'She says they're on their way home.' Hyde said, 'Ask her if she knows about any gold hereabouts.'
Angsman looked at him and his eyes opened a little wider. 'Maybe you didn't hear, Ed. I said she's a Mimbre. She's going home from a hunting trip led by her father. And her father's Delgadito,' he added.
'Hell, the 'Paches are at peace, ain't they?' Hyde asked indifferently. 'What you worried about?'
'Cochise made peace,' Angsman answered. 'These are Mimbres, not Chiricahuas, and their chief is Victorio. He's never never made peace. I don't want to scare you, Ed,' he said looking back to the girl, 'but his war lieutenant's Delgadito.'
Billy Guay was standing in front of the girl, his thumbs in his gun belts, looking at her closely. 'I know how to stop a war,' he said, smiling.
'Who's talkin' about war?' Hyde asked. 'We're not startin' anything.'
