Chapter 13
They rode out two hours before first light, while the bounty-hunting county still slept, three riders and a pack mule going west by starlight with the map folded against Nate’s heart.
Nate took them off the main track inside the first mile. A man with five hundred dollars on his head didn’t ride roads. So, they went by the cattle paths and the dry washes and the high, lonesome benches where no one watched.
Josh was in the lead because he had hunted this country for forty years and could find a back way through it blind. Lucy rode in the middle on her gray mare, Nate riding drag with the Winchester across the bow and his eyes on their back-trail.
The cold came up off the creek bottoms and worked through his coat, setting his cracked rib aching where it had nearly healed, and he welcomed it. A man wide awake from the cold was a man hard to ambush.
Dawn found them deep in the foothills with Denver fallen away behind them, the great wall of the Rockies going from black to gray to a hard rose-gold as the sun cleared the plains at their backs.
Nate had grown up among brick and harbor water and the gray Atlantic.
Nothing in twenty-one years had readied him for the size of this.
The mountains stood up out of the earth like a thing God had built to be looked at and not touched, and the canyon mouth ahead swallowed the creek whole into a slot of blue shadow. Somewhere up in that cold stone, his father had once kneeled in the dark and seen the gleam that killed him.
“Eldon brought me near here once,” Josh said quietly, reining up where the creek bent into the rock.
“Elk hunting, the year before. Wouldn’t take me the last miles.
Said the fewer men knew the way, the longer they’d live.
” His jaw worked under the white mustache.
“He was right about the most of it and dead wrong about the one thing that mattered. Telling no one didn’t save him.
It just meant nobody could prove who done it after. ”
“We’re proving it now,” Nate said.
“That we are.” Josh clucked to his bay and put it into the canyon. “Watch your footing from here, the both of you. This country don’t forgive a careless step.”
Lucy pulled her hat brim down and checked the cinch on her gray and said nothing, but Nate marked the set of her shoulders and the steadiness of her hands on the leather. A town girl would have balked at the canyon's mouth. A green hand would have chattered to cover the fear. Lucy did neither.
She looked the slot of blue shadow over, taking its measure, deciding what it would cost her, and then she put her mare to it without a word.
He had stopped being surprised by her somewhere on the ride east a week ago.
Now he only noted, again, that of all the people who might have ended up beside him on a trail like this one, the Lord had sent him the right one.
* * *
The walls closed in. The creek had cut this slot through a thousand years of stone, and the trail ran along beside it on a shelf that narrowed as they climbed.
The rock rose sheerly on the left hand and fell away on the right to where the water boiled white over boulders thirty, then fifty, then a hundred feet below.
The roar of it filled the canyon and threw itself back off the walls until a man had to lean and shout to be heard.
Spray drifted off the falls, slicked the rock, and beaded cold on Nate’s eyelashes.
Pines clung to ledges no wider than a hand.
The air smelled of cold water and pine resin and the deep mineral breath of the rock.
The sky shrank to a blue ribbon overhead, and the sun reached the trail only in slants and never for long; the cold of the stone coming up out of the depths like the breath of the mountain itself.
He checked the map at every fork the creek offered, hands shielding the soft old paper from the spray. His father’s pencil lines held true. The creek, the side-branch coming in from the north, the canyon’s hard left bend where the walls pinched to a throat scarcely wide enough for a loaded mule.
Fourteen years that paper had waited in a Boston drawer, now it laid the dead man’s footsteps down for his son to follow one by one, and Nate had the eerie sense of a hand reaching out of the grave to take his and lead him on.
They were three hours into the narrows when the shale gave way under Josh. It happened with no warning at all. A stretch of trail was buried in loose gray scree. The bay set its hoof, and the whole slope of it slid at once, a rattling hiss of stone pouring off the edge into the white water below.
His horse went down on its haunches, with its hind legs swinging out over nothing.
Josh hauled the reins, and the bay scrambled, iron shoes screaming on rock, and for one sick heartbeat, horse and man both tipped toward the drop.
Josh was half out of the saddle with the canyon yawning under his boot and a hundred feet of air between him and the rocks.
Nate was already off his gelding. He came up the trail at a dead scramble, low, both hands out, and caught the bay’s cheek strap and bridle where Josh’s own grip was failing and threw his whole weight back and inward toward the wall.
“Up!” he shouted into the horse’s rolling eye.
“Up, you fool, come up!” The bay found a purchase with one flailing hind hoof, then the other, and Nate dragged its head around toward solid ground and hauled, his boots slipping in the scree.
The muscle the dock years had built in him straining till the world went red at the edges and the horse lunged and came up off the brink and stood trembling against the rock wall with its flanks heaving and its nostrils blown wide.
Josh slid off it on the safe side and sat down hard in the dirt.
He put his back to the stone and didn’t speak for a moment.
His face had gone the color of shale. “That’s twice a Ralston’s pulled my fool neck out of a hole,” he said at last, roughly.
“Your daddy got the first one. I’ll not forget either. ”
He looked up at Nate, and there was no folk wisdom in it, just an old man who had nearly died and a young one who hadn’t let him. “Obliged, boy.”
“Lead it across on foot,” Nate said, his own heart still slamming. “We all walk this stretch.”
They walked it, leading the horses one at a time over the slide with their backs pressed to the wall and the white water roaring below. Lucy’s hand found Nate’s sleeve once as she passed, gripped it hard and let go, and said nothing, and that was its own kind of speech.
* * *
They reached the steeple in the last of the afternoon light.
The canyon widened all at once into a high stone bowl, and there on the north slope above the creek stood the landmark his father had drawn, unmistakable.
A single great boulder, big as a barn, split clean down its middle by some ancient frost into two leaning halves that rose to points and threw a shadow exactly the shape of a church and its steeple across the talus below.
Nate sat on his horse and felt the fourteen years close up like a hand.
His father had stood in this same spot. Had seen this same broken rock catch the same late gold light.
Had drawn it, small but exact, on a sheet of paper and mailed it three thousand miles into the keeping of a man Nate had buried in Boston rain.
“That’s it,” he said, and his voice came out thick with fourteen years of dust. “That’s the last mark on the map. Right where he left it for me.”
“Then the gold’s near.” Lucy’s green eyes were bright with the climb and the height and the thing they were close to. “Where?”
“Map says behind it. The far side, away from the trail.” Nate swung down. “And we get the horses out of sight before we go a step farther. Anybody comes up that canyon trail, I don’t want a row of horses on the skyline telling them somebody’s home.”
They led the animals around the back of the great split boulder, onto the far slope where the rock hid them from the trail below and from any eye coming up the canyon. They tethered them there in a pocket of grass beside a trickle of snowmelt, picketed and out of sight.
Nate marked the spot in his mind the way Josh had taught him: the way out, the way to the horses, should a man ever need them in a hurry and in the dark. Then the three of them went looking on foot, and it was Lucy who found the cave.
“Here.” She was crouched at the base of the cliff behind the boulder, dragging at a curtain of dead brush and scrub oak that had grown up against the rock. “There’s air coming out of here. Cold air. Feel it.”
Behind the brush, under a lip of overhanging stone that would have turned any rain and hidden the place from above, a low black slot opened in the mountain, wide enough for a man to stoop through, breathing out the deep cold breath of the earth.
The cave. His father’s cave. The thing the map had promised, and a man had died holding.
Nate crouched and put his own hand into the cold breath pouring out of the slot. It smelled of limestone and old dark, a deep, closed earth smell no light had touched in years. A strange grief moved through him, slow and unlooked-for.
His father had been right here. Had dragged this same brush aside, had felt this same cold on his palm, alone in the high country with a secret already too heavy to carry.
Eldon Ralston had found the thing every man on the frontier dreamed of finding, and it had bought him nothing but a grave on his own doorstep, a wife dead beside him, and a boy shipped east to grow up among strangers.
The gold hadn’t made the Ralstons rich. It had made them prey. And here was the last of them, come fourteen years and three thousand miles to finish what it started, not for the gold at all but for the truth folded inside the rock with it.
“Stay close behind me,” he said. “And mind your heads.”
Nate cut a pine knot and bound it with rag and pitch from the pack and struck a match to it, the torch catching and flaring. It threw their three shadows, huge and leaping onto the rock.
He looked at Josh and then at Lucy, her jaw set, the same look she’d had at the canyon mouth and at the slide and at every hard place between. He hadn’t asked her to come this far. She had, and that was the whole of it. He ducked his head and stepped into the dark with the fire held ahead of him.
He had gone six steps into the cold and the black when the sound reached them from outside, faint under the mutter of the creek, rolling and multiplying off the canyon walls until there was no telling how many or how near.
Hoofbeats. Coming up the canyon behind them.