Chandler walked from his house to the village. He could have ridden, but he enjoyed walking. He had served as an Indian agent in many parts of the country; this time of year he liked the desert best. It was cooler and smelled of sage, which Chandler found invigorating.
He found Silver Fish sitting in the shade of his ramada, a flat roof that jutted out from the house and sheltered the rude table and benches around which the family ate. The mother of one of Silver Fish’s dead wives knelt beside the table, grinding dried corn into meal on her stone metate. Chandler liked to watch the women at their metates. He liked the smell of chili cooking on the slow fire. Indian life suited him. He had long ago tired of cities.
“Afternoon, Silver Fish.”
Silver Fish looked up and grunted.
“I’ve come to pay my respects in your time of grief.”
Silver Fish nodded. Chandler pulled out one of the benches and sat down across from Silver Fish. The old woman appeared not to notice. She moved back and forth rhythmically, grinding, brushing the ground corn aside, grinding again.
“What happened to your family?”
“White man disease. I know not the name.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Boston House Creek.”
Chandler had heard of the place. A white woman from the East had built a tall wooden house at the foot of a mountain.
“This Man With Bad Eyebrow…he still works for Mrs. Forrester?”
Silver Fish realized the Indian agent had another reason for coming to see him. “Silver Fish gone from there long time now. He may be gone or not,” he said, hedging.
“Crows Walking has a foster son…this wouldn’t happen to be the same man, would it?”
“Silver Fish not know.”
Chandler stood up. The Man With Bad Eyebrow sounded like Crows Walking’s white son, Steve Sheridan. It would be worth the ride to find out. He would have to think of something to tell Selena. She didn’t want him poking around in things. Leave it lie, Arden, please…Chandler could hear his wife’s sweet voice in his head, but it didn’t stop him. Nothing mattered except finding Sheridan and settling this once and for all.
Chapter Twenty
Wind whipped the sand so thickly in the cold air that Ramon knew he was lost.
Ian pulled his coat collar up around his ears. “I hate to think of that bairn out in this storm!” he said, his concern for the boy mounting by the minute.
As if in answer to Ramon’s prayer, the wind died down. He squinted into the red sky. For a second he thought he saw…
“Come, señor,” he said, nudging his horse.
They rode for a while, and what he’d seen was clearer now. The square outline of a house appeared before them. Ramon didn’t recognize it, but it looked familiar. He quickened his pace. In another lull, he recognized it as the Dart place. He felt trepidation about riding in there, especially if Ham Russell was around, but he could see no way around it.
At the house, Joe Dart and his mother stepped out onto the porch. “Get down and come in out of this wind!” Joe yelled.
“No time,” said Ian. “We’re looking for Nicholas Forrester. You haven’t seen the lad, have you?”
“No. The boy’s missing?” Joe Dart asked, cupping his hands to be heard over the whine of the wind.
“The señora thinks he ran away,” Ramon yelled.
“How long ago?” Joe asked.
“Last night sometime.”
“Ought to come in and warm up,” Joe said.
“Thank you, señor, but we must keep looking.”
They turned their horses west. Joe shivered as he watched them ride into the wind. He opened the door and motioned his mother inside. She shook her head. The skin around her mouth was white with strain.
“You go ahead,” she said, filled with sudden grief about Nicholas. “I gotta get something from the barn.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“No! I want to get it myself!”
“You’re not doing anything crazy out there, are you?”
“You better keep a civil tongue in your head, you hear!” And before Joe could stop her, she ran down the steps and toward the barn.
Chila knew they’d find Nicholas dead. There was no saving him now. She’d known that right off. They’d find him in a creek if there was one with any water in it. Samantha should have listened to her. She should have listened!
“That rotten bastard!” she yelled, kicking a saddle left on the ground. Thinking about what Denny had done to that sweet child filled her with such fury that she kicked everything within reach. Horses sensed her mood and snorted their fear.
Worn out suddenly, she stopped and sagged against the rough wood of a stall. Her heart ached so badly she wanted to fall down onto the ground and cry, but there was no time.
In the tack room she pawed through the boxes stacked in the corner. Furious when anything resisted her, she threw it across the small room. Finally she located the right box and lifted out the basket of plants she’d hidden from Joe.
Her hand accidentally touched one. “Ow! Ow! Dammit!” The shock reverberated through her system, but she was glad to know they were still potent.
Ever since she’d found her grandmother’s diary, Chila had been braiding nettles and puncture vines into long chains, the way it had told her to.
Now it was all coming to a head. And a good thing, too. These wouldn’t last forever. Apparently God was on her side. Even the timing was right. Except she didn’t know how she would ever find Denny in this storm.
Steve saw the fire first. “See that?”
Samantha urged her tired horse into a run and beat Steve to it. A tree that had fallen onto sandy ground had almost burned itself out. Samantha stopped her horse and dismounted to warm her hands. It was lucky it had fallen this way and not the other. A few feet away, a solid wall of thickets could have started a wildfire that might have burned for a week.
Near the blackened stump of a limb, a shoe caught her attention. With mounting dread, she recognized it as one of Nicholas’s.
“Help me!” Samantha screamed, kneeling to drag the blackened limb off her son. It was still smoldering and too hot to touch.
Steve leaped off Calico and kicked the heaviest part of the limb. It broke off and flew in all directions. Samantha kicked smaller limbs aside, looking for her son. Steve kicked the stump clear but there was nothing under it.
“He has to be here,” she said, moaning.
Steve walked to where Samantha stared at the blackened, brittle branches. “He isn’t here.”
“He has to be here!” she insisted.
Lightning struck a nearby tree with a loud crack. Thunder rolled and crashed overhead.
Steve glanced around the blackened, smoldering remains of the tree. He saw a few drops of blood, but didn’t point them out to Samantha. “We’d better get out of this,” he yelled over the heavy whine of the wind. “It’s almost dark. And it might rain.”
“He’s around here somewhere,” she said, resisting his attempt to pull her up.
“The cave is near here. Come on!” he yelled.
“No!”
“He might be in there!” Steve suggested.
Samantha started to cry. He lifted her into his arms, mounted, and urged Calico around the thickets and toward the cave where he’d taken Ramon when he was wounded. Fortunately they weren’t far from it. Steve grabbed the reins of Samantha’s horse and led it behind them.
Once inside, they were shielded from the roaring wind. Steve dismounted and carried Samantha into the cavern, where the air was still. The wind was a low howl around the mountain. The cave walls shone silver when the lightning flashed. Steve steadied her on the floor of the cave.
Samantha took a few steps. “Nicholas!”
“Nicholas!” echoed back to her.
“He isn’t here.”
“You wait here. I’m going to look for him.”
“I’m going with you.”
&nbs
p; “It won’t do any good for us to look in the same places. You stay here in case he comes this way.”
What he said made sense. And once Steve was gone, she could do as she pleased. “Okay.”
“Gather wood and build a fire in the front of the cave, so he can see it. Here,” he said, handing her his revolver, butt first.
“Why?” she asked, taking it.
“In case you run into a critter.”
Steve left; Samantha gathered dried, broken limbs from the thickets surrounding the cave. She built a fire with Steve’s matches. Hours passed slowly. The sky darkened and night fell. Everytime the wind died down, she went outside and yelled for Nicholas.
Finally exhausted, she lay down beside the fire and closed her eyes. A loud noise startled her. She sat up shaking. Looking all around in the dim light of the dying fire she saw nothing. Then it came again—a vibration under her back, as if the floor of the cave was trembling.
Lightning illuminated the front half of the cave. Thunder crashed. Fire shadows leaped in the dim light. An earthquake? She’d lived in Arizona over three years and had never felt the Earth move. A grating sound started in the mountain somewhere; the Earth shook beneath her, harder this time. Then, as if the other tremors had only been preliminary, the Earth beneath her bucked once and began a terrifying rolling motion. It was an earthquake. Fear sent a chill down her spine.
The roar grew louder. Alarmed, Samantha struggled to her feet and started to run outside. Before she could make it, the floor beneath her heaved up and sent her flying toward the far wall of the cave. She struggled to her feet again, but the floor of the cave was undulating under her feet. Samantha staggered back against the wall, unable to recover her balance. A loud grating sound over her head made her look upward. The ceiling of the cave also seemed to be in motion.
Before she could pry herself away from the wall, tilted at an angle now, the ground beneath her feet quivered and seemed to go soft for a second. Then it began to collapse under her. Screaming and clawing at the dirt, she tried to pull herself up out of the hole opening under her, but the ground was falling away too fast. There was nothing to hang on to. She fell through the widening hole…and blackness closed in around her. She tasted dirt and knew that her mouth and eyes were full of it, but her hands were no use to her now. She didn’t even know where they were.
Steve searched the ground for signs, but the wind had scoured them away. He did find random hoofprints going off in a southerly direction, toward the Dart ranch.
If Nicholas had been injured by that falling tree he might have headed for the Dart ranch. Steve decided to go in that direction. He had no idea how long he’d been riding. Thunder still rolled and crashed around him. Darkness was falling fast. He followed the horse’s tracks and prayed that Nicholas didn’t miss the ranch house in the dimming light.
Calico shied at something. Steve tightened his grip on the reins, but Calico grabbed the bit in his teeth, reared, turned all the way around, and leapt into a hard gallop. Steve fought to regain control. It had happened so fast, he didn’t even know what had spooked the horse.
Calico pounded through the near darkness over sand and rocks.
“Whoa, boy! Whoa!” Steve called into his ear. Just as he thought Calico was going to respond, the big horse tripped. Steve lost his seat and flew through the air, cursing. He hit the ground and rolled. With Calico’s scream in his ears, he sensed his consciousness narrow down to a point and disappear.
He woke to the soft sound of Calico’s whinnying. He sat up and for a moment couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. He found Calico ten paces back, lying on his side, panting. His front leg was broken in two places. The bone protruded through the skin. Steve stroked his nose and hugged his silky neck. Calico whinnied softly.
Steve had never felt more powerless in his life. Short of trying to club Calico to death with a rock, he could do nothing to end his suffering. The thought of it sickened him.
“I’ll be back for you, boy. I won’t leave you like this.”
He cursed himself for leaving his gun with Samantha. And for losing his bearings in the dark. Then he stood up…and dizziness engulfed him. He felt himself falling; there was no way to stop it.
Ham Russell walked out onto the desert every morning to take a leak. This morning he walked toward something he hadn’t seen there before. And he hit pay dirt. Steve Sheridan out cold. He twiddled his braided beard and smiled.
Chila Dart would be one happy woman.
He hailed the house; Roy Bowles yelled back.
“Bring a horse!” Ham yelled.
Steve woke to find rough hands on his body and the tip of a scraggly beard in his face. Men cursed as they tried to lift him high enough to throw him across a saddle. “What the hell…?” Steve asked.
“Hey! He’s awake.”
“Good. Then he can climb aboard himself.”
“There’s no time for this now,” Steve said groggily. “Mrs. Forrester’s boy is hurt. He needs help.”
Russell patted Steve’s sides and stomach, feeling for a gun. “Where’d you hide your damn pistol? I know you wouldn’t be without one, a troublemaker like you.”
“I lost it.”
“Get Miz Dart,” Russell growled at Bowles. “She’ll be real surprised to see our visitor.”
Samantha woke up with the sensation of being in a strange place and wondering where she was. The lost feeling lasted only a moment. The inky darkness told her nothing. Except that she was alive. Barely. And trapped at the bottom of the hole that had opened up beneath her feet. She had no idea how long she’d been there. At least she could still breathe. The air felt warm and dusty, but it was plentiful, for the moment anyway.
She held her hand up in front of her face and couldn’t see it. Then she remembered. She was in the middle of the mountain into which she had gone for shelter. A very dark mountain.
Nicholas! Oh, God, Nicholas…She had no idea where he might be or how to get back to him. Grief filled her.
A rumbling started overhead. Samantha closed her eyes and put her hands over her head. The rumbling grew louder. It sounded as if the whole mountain were going to crash down on her.
Please God, don’t let Nicholas be in this mountain.
She huddled there, knowing she was going to die. No one could find her. But Nicholas—would Steve find him? Would he live? She had to survive. She had to find Nicholas. She wouldn’t give up the way her mother had.
Samantha struggled to her feet and started climbing the pile of dirt that had fallen around her. If she had fallen from above, there must be an opening where she could climb back up.
Clawing her way a few feet up the mound of rocks and dirt, she realized she could do it. It wasn’t impossible. She climbed steadily upward in the darkness, straining to see anything at all. She wanted to scream at the darkness, Let me see something! But she saved her energy for climbing.
The dirt kept slipping under her feet. Every step upward was accompanied by a half step backward, but she slogged on until she reached what seemed to be the ceiling of the cave. Panting, she groped around for the opening, felt only rock, but she knew that couldn’t be. She had fallen through something.
Dirt sifted down on her arm. With trembling hands, she traced the small streams of dirt falling all around her. The dirt was cool and dry on her arms. Apparently a rock bigger than the hole she’d fallen through had plugged the opening, leaving only enough space for a little dirt to sift through.
The mountain rattled again. Dread gripped her. She wanted Nicholas and Steve. Terrified and frustrated, she sagged down onto the dirt. She was trapped. There was no way back to Nicholas. She felt suffocated by so much darkness.
Samantha doubled forward. Sobs racked her body. “Nicholas!” she sobbed. “Please…” Please let me get back to him…
She remembered Aunt Elizabeth holding her and crying, Reggie couldn’t swim! She always feared and hated water. For her to die in that horrible way! It isn’t fair!
Finally her sobs slowed; she realized she felt strong enough to look for another way out. She eased down the pile of rocks and dirt, wondering how she had ever survived the fall.
The wind still howled. It seemed odd that she could hear it, shut off from the outside as she was. Maybe that was a good sign. On hands and knees, she felt along the dirt floor of the cavern. Without light, her search seemed pointless. She might be feeling the same places over and over.
Finally she realized the low roar she heard was coming from below. She crawled slowly forward until she felt what might be an edge of some sort, perhaps a cliff. The air was damper, wetter. It had the earthy smell of a river marsh.
She picked up a rock, threw it, and waited. Finally, far below, it splashed into water. The roar she’d been hearing was water, not wind at all.
It might be a way out, but she needed to know how deep it was. Groping in darkness, she found a nearby boulder and rolled it over the side, listening for the splash and any accompanying sound. When it hit the water she began to count slowly to herself: One, two, three, four, five…She thought she heard it clank against something. The sound of it hitting bottom, if that’s what it had been, was barely audible and made her wonder if she’d imagined it.
She threw another rock as far as she could and slowly counted: One, two, three, fo—The rock hit and clattered against other rocks on the floor. She didn’t consider herself an expert on distances, but it sounded about fifty feet away.
Samantha rolled a third boulder over the edge and counted while it dropped, then again when it hit water. She guessed the depth of the chasm at twenty feet and the depth of the water at maybe fifteen or twenty feet. That was a long drop. Still, the water might be deep enough to fall into and survive.
But she had no idea where the stream went. If it were an underground river, it might go down instead of up. It might not be a way out at all. Just a quicker way to die.
Adobe Palace Page 47
