The Ferguson Rifle (12 page)

CHAPTER 15
______________

A
LONE … THEY Were gone. But where? And for how long?

My own gear was gone too. Everything had been taken but the fire. Were they captives? Or hearing the shooting, had they simply fled, imagining me dead, or if not dead, able to survive and find them.

Survive … that was the first thing, and to survive I must move.

An instant I held perfectly still, listening. Every sense put out its feeler, the wind, the stirring of brush. Carefully I eased back from the fire's faint glow, into the deeper shadow of the spruce. I could see nothing there, but neither could they.

Where to go? Higher there was no cover. Downhill toward water and easier travel was almost instinctive and therefore to be avoided. Along the mountain's face then, toward the north.

The spruce trees stood so close their boughs touched. Crouching I went under some, between others. My mind held the thought
like a ghost … move like a ghost
… and I did just that.

The thin moccasins sensed every branch, every thing under my feet. I felt my way swiftly along. Get away first, far away, survive first, and then find my friends and help them if they needed help. A dead Ronan Chantry was of no use to anyone but buzzards and coyotes. Along the face of the mountain. It was steep, but not too steep for travel. Here and there it was suddenly steeper, and glancing up, I could see the still peaks and shoulders of the mountain, majestic in the moonlight. I moved again, ran lightly for thirty yards, then paused.

The night was without sound. I waited, stilling my breathing, listening. Nothing.

Again I moved, more carefully now, angling slightly upslope. I wanted to see what lay above me in the open. If they were traveling there, they could pass me, move ahead, then cut downslope and I would be surrounded.

I saw nothing. Living in the wilderness had tuned my ears, made my senses more keen. I was more like the boy I had been than the student of later years. Now I was back, and in every fiber of my being I knew, this was my home, this was where I belonged.

Stopping suddenly I crouched close to the trunk of a spruce, under the drooping boughs. In the slight hollow there, I waited. Had I heard something? Or were my senses deceiving me?

A faint stir, and then a low whisper, only a few feet away … a dozen feet? Possibly less.

“He can't have come this far. He's a Boston man, not no woodsman!”

“Mebbe, but he surely done vanished into nothin' yonder, just when we had him.”

“I tell you we've come too far. He's back yonder. If we let him get away, Rafe will kill us all. I tell you, that man
skeers
me!”

“So? You've et better, lived better, had more'n ever since you been with him. He scares other folks, too, and rightly. He'd kill you soon as look at you.”

My knife was in my hand. If there was to be close work, I wanted to be ready for it, and there's nothing better for close work than a blade. Mine was two-edged, razor-sharp, and with a weighted haft … a beautiful fighting knife made a thousand years before, in India where they had the finest steel.

I had inherited that knife. Chantrys had owned it for a good spell. It had been given to an ancestor of mine by a Frenchman named Talon who got it privateering in the Indian Ocean, given to him by a girl. A pretty one, I would guess.

My rifle was in my left hand now, the knife in my right. I waited, stifling my breathing. I was even tempted to move out and attack them. I might get one before they realized anyone was near, but the other might shout and then they'd all be upon me.

My feelings at the moment were very unscholarly. I felt like a savage, as some of my Irish forebears must have felt at such a time.

The night was cool. Now my eyes could see their legs. Their bodies were obscured by the thick, low-hanging boughs.

“We'd better get on with it.”

“What happened to the rest of them? That's what I'd like to know. They worry me. Solomon Talley was in that crowd.”

“Talley? The hell you say! Then this'll be a tougher lot than Rafen thought. Talley wouldn't go to the mountains with a lot of tenderfeet.”

They moved off, making only small sounds, and I waited, not wanting to lose all by too sudden a movement.

Evidently the others had escaped, or if captured, these two knew nothing of it. Well, where would they go? Down toward the creek I suspected.

Carefully, I eased from my dark shelter, and moving like a wraith along the pine-needled carpet beneath me, I worked my way upslope and along it. First, to escape. To get clear as the others had done. Then to find them.

A mile I covered. I was sure it was that, for I was skilled at judging distance. Then I found a place where rocks from off the rim had crashed into the trees, pushing some down, causing others to lean. The dark spruce boughs offered a shield and I crept into this place and sat down, suddenly desperately tired.

The tension that had kept me up was easing off, and the sleep I had missed was demanding repayment. Crawling back into my natural shelter, I carefully made sure I left no signs at the opening, and then with my knife gripped in one hand, my rifle beside me, I slept.

Daylight found an opening in the boughs and touched my eyes. At once I was awake, but for a moment lay perfectly still, trying to remember where I was. The spot where I had taken shelter was one of those accidentally created places of which a number may always be found in the forest. Actually, it could have sheltered our whole party, exclusive of the horses, and the only trouble lay in the fact that while I could see a bit downslope, my view toward the crest of the mountain was completely blocked.

Sitting up, I looked down the slope but could see nothing, my view obstructed by the thick stand of spruce. I took up my Ferguson and carefully wiped it dry, slipped my knife into its scabbard, and moved to the opening.

There I waited, listening. Meanwhile, my mind searched for a solution to the situation. Lucinda knew, as did the others, that we were in the near vicinity of the treasure's location, so even if they had moved, I did not believe they would move far.

The difficulty lay in the fact that Rafen Falvey knew this also.

For the moment I was secure and it was a temptation to remain right where I was. After all, what did I owe to any of them? Why go out there and get killed or wounded and left to die when I was not involved?

Yet I was involved. Lucinda Falvey had put her trust in me and in my companions. I did owe them a debt, and surprisingly enough, I did not want to stay out of it.

It irritated me that Rafen Falvey should take me lightly, and there was something in the man that made me bristle. I did not think of myself as good, but I was quite sure he was evil.

On cat feet, I eased through my brief shelter of spruce boughs and looked about … nothing. Regretfully, I glanced down at my moccasins. I would have to repair or replace them, for this running over the hills was doing them no good, and moccasins had a short life in this kind of country.

Moving from tree to tree, I worked myself along and down the slope. Before me there was another, younger stand of aspen. When I moved toward the trees, I heard water running. The spruce scattered out, and in a slight hollow above where the aspen began I saw a trickle of water, not more than six or eight inches wide. Grass grew along it, and it seemed to have its beginning under the frost-shattered rocks above.

After a long look around, I lay down and drank my fill, then splashed the cold water on my face and in my eyes. Nor did I delay at the water, but stepped quickly over it and went swiftly down the hill to the edge of the aspen. From there I had a clean sweep on the talus slope that led to the crest of the mountain, and it was bare … empty of life.

No shooting … nothing.

Often as a child in the eastern woods I had played at Indian while hunting for meat, and now I moved much as I had then. Using the best cover, I moved along and down the slope, switching back suddenly to change direction, and then again. There was cover enough.

My view of the bottom was suddenly excellent. A long meadow through which the stream ran, aspens and willow at the stream's edge, a few cottonwoods, and some low brush I could not make out at the distance, and on the meadow a half dozen marmots were feeding.

It was a pleasure to watch them, for shy as they were, they would scuttle into their holes in the rocks at the slightest movement.

Seated perfectly still, I let my eyes range over the bottom where they were, trying to see any disturbance in the grass to indicate tracks. I found nothing. The trees along the creek were few and scattered, and except for an occasional cottonwood, not large.

Where would my friends be likely to be? And where was Rafen Falvey?

Concentrating on these questions and studying the creek timber below and the scarp opposite, I scarcely noticed the piping whistle of the marmots. It touched my consciousness but made no impression until suddenly the lack of movement did. The marmots were gone!

Both hands gripped my rifle and I rolled into deeper cover and wound up lying prone, propped on my elbows, my rifle in position.

They came quickly, two men riding point, one of whom I'd seen before, and a dozen yards behind them, Rafen Falvey, then the others. It was as tough a lot of men as I'd seen. They rode on by, and then suddenly, Falvey shouted.

Instantly the two files faced in opposite directions and slipped the spurs to their horses, and each file charged into the trees. It was a move calculated to scare anybody in their path, and it worked.

One rider was charging directly toward me, and I shot him through the chest. He threw up his arms and fell, hitting the earth not twenty feet from me, dead before he reached the grass. For a wild, flashing instant I thought of grabbing his loose horse, but then I was running, charging into a thick stand of spruce, vaulting over a deadfall, and ducking among the rocks.

A passage like a hallway opened before me and I ran down it, then ducked right toward the mountainside. Behind me I could hear shots and yells and somebody was racing a horse opposite me, then on past. Behind the rocks and brush, I was unseen, but it would be a minute only until they closed in all around me.

A space too narrow for a horse opened on my right, and gasping for breath, I went into it, turned sidewise and edged through. A brush-choked hollow lay before me, but I thought I saw a place where animals had gone through, and dropping to my knees, I crawled in, and fortunately had the presence of mind to scatter some leaves behind me, and to pull down a branch so no opening was visible.

On elbows and knees, I wormed my way along the passage, if such it could be called. All around me was thick brush, much of it blackberry brush with thorns like needles. But wild animals had used this opening, and I made my way through.

At the end it opened on a sheet of bluish rock scattered with pebbles fallen off the mountain. There were slender aspens here, and I stood up and faced into them, loading the Ferguson as I went.

They were no more than a hundred yards away, and it would be only a matter of time until they found me. What I needed now was a place to hide. Or a place in which to make a stand.

Falvey was shouting angrily. Suddenly I heard a shot, then a burst of firing … and silence.

A moment I listened, but they would be searching for me, knowing me trapped against the face of the mountain. I went down the dry watercourse through the aspen, their leaves dancing overhead, and then turned and found myself with a sheer wall of rock on my right hand, a wall at least thirty feet high, and without a break!

The place was shadowed and still, dappled by sunlight falling through the leaves. I walked on, careful to make no sound. My enemies were close beyond the scattered boulders, brush, and trees on my left, and on my right a rock wall not even a squirrel could climb.

Soon they would discover it was not thick brush and boulders to the rock wall. They would find there was this ancient watercourse…. Suddenly it ended.

The rock bed along which I had been walking suddenly turned right, dipped slightly down, and came to an abrupt end.

From around that corner, back up the way, came a shout. They had discovered my hidden path. In a moment I would be fighting for my life.

Glancing quickly around I saw what I had not seen before, a black slit at the foot of the rock wall into which the water had evidently poured. It was narrow, but there was just a chance. Suppose it dropped off fifty or a hundred feet into blackness? I'd wind up in a cave with a broken leg and no way to get out. The thought was not pleasant.

Nevertheless, there might be a foothold, something to which I could cling—

Dropping to my knees, I lay flat, then backed my feet into the hole. Squirming back, only my shoulders, arms, head, and rifle still outside, I felt for a foothold.

And something grabbed me!

Before I could yell, I was jerked bodily back into the hole and tumbled in a heap on the sand at the foot of it.

There was a moment when I saw a grizzled old man in ragged, dirty buckskins, and then he was fitting a stone into the slit.

“Shush now!” he whispered. “They're a-comin' on the run.”

I heard their boots pounding on the rock outside, shouts, then swearing as they found nothing.

We could hear them threshing in the bushes, hear boots scraping on rock. “Hell,” somebody said, “I'll bet he never came this way at all!”

The old man whispered. “We got to set awhile, let 'em work off their mad. They won't stay long.”

I was too astonished to speak, and sat, clutching my rifle … only I wasn't. My hands should have been gripping my rifle and they were not. It was gone!

Faint light came from a crack around the rock that blocked my point of entry. The Ferguson rifle was in his hands, the muzzle pointed right at me!

CHAPTER 16
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T
HE HANDS THAT gripped the Ferguson were gnarled and old, but they were also thick and powerful. “You jest set quiet, boy. I ain't about to let them find you. Or me,” he added, with a faint chuckle.

Surprisingly, we could hear well. Their boots grated on the rock, they threshed in the brush, and then somebody spoke again, farther away, the voice coming faintly. “Nobody come this way. He's hidin' in the bresh somewheres.”

Their footsteps receded, and I looked slowly around. The cave in which I sat was about twenty feet across, but longer, and growing narrower as it led away from the basin. Evidently the water had spilled through the crack, swirled around in here, then found its way out by a passage widened by years of erosion.

The floor of the cave was sandy with rock underneath. There was a little driftwood lying about, and on a shelf an old pack rat's nest.

The old man stood up. In his day he must have been a man of enormous strength. Even now his wrists were thick and strong. His shoulders were slightly stooped, like those of a gorilla. He turned from me and picked up his rifle, which he had leaned against a wall. At the same time he extended mine to me. “I was afeared you might be skeered an' take a shot at me, grabbin' you like I done.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You probably saved my life.”

“Figured on it.” He turned toward the passage. “Let's mosey out'n here. Ain't no place to talk, this here. When a sudden rain comes, this place fills up mighty rapid. Seen it a time or two.”

He led the way into the passage. It was completely dark there and I had no liking for it, but he walked along fearlessly so I judged he not only knew the place well but also that there were no obstacles.

“Weren't always like this. I cleaned it up. Never know when a body might have to git out an' git, an' when I take to runnin', I don't want nothin' in the way.” After sixty counted steps, I saw light ahead, and then another twenty steps and we emerged in a much wider room where a little light filtered in from some crack above. Several openings left the cave.

“Seen you from above.” He indicated with a lift of his head the mountain above us. “Seen them folks a-huntin' you. Seen you turn down the crick bed yonder, figured to help.”

“Thanks again. That's a bad lot.”

“I seen him before. Two, three years ago he came up here, poked around all over the country. I seen a Injun he got holt of…. That's a mighty mean man yonder.”

His buckskins were worn and dirty, and his hands showed him to be old, but there was no age in his eyes.

“Are you a trapper?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Time to time. I'm a hunter, too, time to time. I'm whatever it needs to get what I want.”

“My name is Ronan Chantry. I joined up with some others to trap the western mountains but we ran into a girl in trouble, and we've been helping her.”

“Girl?” He snorted. “They're mostly in trouble, an' when they ain't, they're gettin' other folks into it.” He loaded his pipe. “Who's with you?”

“Solomon Talley, Degory Kemble, Davy Shanagan—”

“Huh! I know Talley. Good man. An' that crazy Irishman … I know him, too. The others?”

“Bob Sandy, Cusbe Ebitt, Isaac Heath, and there's a Mexican lad with us named Ulibarri.”

“I knowed some Ulibarris down Sonora way. Good folks. Sandy, he's that Injun hunter. I never cottoned to him much. I always get along with the Injuns. The Blackfeet … well, they're hard folks to get to like, although I expect a body could. The Sioux … they're huntin' me all the while.

“Take pleasure in it, I reckon, but they can't find me.” His eyes glinted with humor. “Good folks, them Sioux! I wouldn't be without 'em. They come a-huntin' for my hair an' they keep me on my toes.

“Can't find me, nohow. This here mountain is limestone. Don't look it, because she's topped off with other rock, but this here”—he waved a hand about—“is limestone. This whole mountain is caves … must be hundreds of miles of them. I got me a hideout here with twenty-five or thirty entrances.

“I don't hunt trouble with no Injun, but when they hunt me, I give 'em a-plenty. Ever' time I kill a Sioux I post a stick alongside the body with another notch in it … nine, last count.”

“And you?”

“They got lead into me oncet, arrers a couple of times, but I got more holes'n a passel o' prairie dogs, an' I always crawl into one of them an' get away. One time I ducked into a hole I didn't know an' it taken me three days to find my way to caves I knowed.

“Got 'em downright puzzled. They got no idea what to make of me. Last winter after an' almighty awful blizzard I found the ol' chief's squaw, his daughter, an' her two young uns down an' nigh froze to death.

“Well, sir, I got a f'ar a-goin', built a wickiup, an' fetched 'em meat. I fed 'em broth and cared for them until the weather tapered off some. I fetched fuel an' meat to keep 'em alive, an' then when I spotted some Injuns comin', I cut a stick with nine notches, then a space, an' I added four crosses to stand for them I took care of. Then I taken to the hills.”

“You're a strange man, my friend, but an interesting one. Mind telling me your name?”

“Van Runkle. Ripley Van Runkle. You jest set tight, now, an' in awhile I'll show you a way out of here. Your folks are holed up yonder. You say you got womenfolk along?”

“A girl … Lucinda Falvey.”

“Kin to Rafen?”

“She's his niece, but he's a thoroughly bad one, and trying to get what rightly belongs to her.”

“Hmm, now what might that be?” His blue eyes were shrewd. “What's this country have for a young girl?”

At that point, I hesitated. Dare I tell him anything? He knew this country better than any of us would ever know it, and given the proper clues could find such a treasure much sooner than we could. Yet if we were to find it, we must stay around and search … sooner or later he must know.

So I told him the story from the beginning, of our own meeting, of the death of Conway, and all that had transpired since. He listened, chewing on his old pipe.

“Figured as much,” he said at last. He knocked out his pipe, tucking it away in his pocket. “Won't surprise you to know that's why I come here.

“I had the story from a Shoshoni. I heard it again from a Kansa. Never paid it much mind until I found myself a clue, an' that set me to huntin'.”

“A clue?”

“Uh-huh. I found a strange cross cut into a rock. Looked like nothin' any Injun would make, so I set to figurin' on it.”

“You've
found
the treasure?”

“No, sir. I surely ain't. Same time I figure I'm almighty close. It was huntin' about here that set me to findin' caves, an' I surely figured it would be hid away in one o' them. I found nothing no white man left. Bones, an' sech. I found enough of them.”

“If we find it, it's for the girl. You understand?”

“That there gold belongs to who finds it, mister. It might be me. I hunted nigh onto ten year … off an' on.”

“If you found it,” I said, “you couldn't use it here. That would mean leaving all this. Leaving it behind forever.”

He grunted, but said no more. More than an hour had passed while we talked, and I was wondering if my pursuers had moved along, but I said nothing.

We had been seated on rocks, talking. Restlessness was on me. While I sat here in relative comfort, my friends might be fighting for their lives.

“All right,” he said, when I mentioned them, “we'll go see.”

He led the way into a branch cave that inclined steeply up. He had cut crude steps into the limestone to make the climb easier. Suddenly the cave split and he led the way into the narrower passage of the two. We were climbing in a rough circle now, climbing what had evidently been a place where water had found a crack or weakness in the rock and had run almost straight down.

Above us there was light filtering down and we emerged on a steep hillside among several spruce trees that grew where there was scarce room for a man to stand. But just outside the entrance, which was under a shelf of rock and no more than three by four feet, was a flat rock.

Van Runkle seated himself. “A body can set here an' see whatever's in the bottom yonder. We're almost directly above the crack where you came into the cave, an' that there's the only blind spot for more'n a mile except for under the trees yonder.”

I looked, and although I saw nothing of my friends, the first thing I did see was a jagged streak of white quartz on the rock wall opposite, just across the bottom and beyond the creek. From here I could see that creek, sunlight on its ripples. Hastily, I averted my eyes, not to seem too curious.

The wall along which I had run while following the dry watercourse that led to this cave had been of bluish stone, the jagged streak of quartz was opposite, and somewhere nearby Van Runkle had found a Maltese cross on the rock.

Somewhere here, perhaps within a few yards, the treasure was buried or hidden.

“Nobody in sight,” Van Runkle said, “and I surely can't hear anything. She's quiet as can be.”

Suddenly something stirred up the valley, and then a deer appeared. Behind it were two others. Tentatively they walked out on the grass and began to nibble.

Nothing happened; nothing disturbed them.

Down the valley I could see the bustling brown bodies of the marmots.

Across the way the slim white trunks of the aspen, under golden clouds of leaves, caught the sunlight. The grass of the meadow was green with patches of golden coneflower, the reds and pinks of wild rose and geranium.

“I'd like to own five thousand acres of this,” I told him.

“What would you do with it?”

“Keep it. Keep it just as it is. I would not change it for anything under the sun. But it wouldn't have to be five thousand acres, just a piece of it that I could keep as it is now, fresh, clean, beautiful.

“There's no finer land than this before man puts a hand on it.”

“You against men?”

“Of course not. Only men must
do
. It's in their nature to do, and much of what they've done is for the best, only sometimes they start doing before they understand that what they'll get won't be nearly as wonderful as what they had.”

He grabbed my arm. “Look! An' be quiet!”

The marmots were scuttling. The deer turned their behinds to us and vanished into the brush, and there was for a moment stillness.

And into that stillness rode Rafen Falvey, and beside him was Lucinda. Behind them rode four men, armed and ready, and behind them Davy Shanagan and Jorge Ulibarri, hands and feet tied.

“Looks like he done taken the pot,” Van Runkle said.

“No,” I replied, “he has not. Not by a damned sight. I'm still holding cards in this game. Show me how to get down there, will you?”