Curse of Skull Canyon

by Peter Brandvold

  Lonnie glanced back at the girl and said, “Follow me!”

  Just then he swerved the General hard left. Casey followed. As they bulled through a stand of aspens, Lonnie glanced back the way they’d come. He couldn’t see their pursuers, as they were back behind a bend in the canyon wall. Lonnie steered the General through a corridor between cabin-sized boulders, across Ingrid Creek and up a steep, grassy incline along a belly of shouldering granite.

  Lonnie had recognized the gap in the boulders because he’d found a stray calf up this way only a year ago, mired in the creek. Hoping that their pursuers wouldn’t see their tracks swerving off the main canyon floor, Lonnie put his head down and pressed his thighs tight to the General’s back, to keep from being thrown off as the big buckskin lunged up the steep slope.

  He glanced behind, worried that Casey wouldn’t make it. But the girl had as much saddle savvy as Lonnie did. She wasn’t having any trouble staying seated on the sure-footed Miss Abigail who seemed to almost be racing the General up the steep incline.

  When the hill leveled off slightly, Lonnie turned the General to the right and onto the crest of the granite outcropping. He kept climbing into some pines, and then hauled back on the General’s reins. As Casey moved through the low-hanging pine boughs behind him, Lonnie dropped out of the saddle, tossed his reins over a cedar sapling, shucked his rifle from its scabbard, and moved back down to the top of the outcropping.

  He dropped to his knees and crawled to the edge of the cliff. He lay belly down and removed his hat, making less of him to see from below.

  From here he could see the canyon floor from over the tops of the aspens and boulders lining both sides of it. No sign of the riders, but Lonnie could hear the distance-muffled clacking of their galloping horses moving farther up canyon.

  Casey crawled up beside Lonnie and lay belly down. Taking his lead, she also removed her hat.

  “Did we lose ’em?”

  “For now.”

  “When they realize we’re no longer ahead of them, they’ll double back and likely see where we left the main trail.”

  “Maybe.” Lonnie sleeved sweat from his brow. “The canyon floor’s all rock, though. They’d have to be some mighty good trackers to see where we left it. They’d have to track as good as Injuns.”

  “What if they can?”

  Lonnie pushed himself to his feet. “That’s why we have to keep movin’.”

  “Why don’t we head back down and ride on out of the canyon before they double back?”

  Lonnie grabbed his reins off the cedar sapling and slid his rifle back into its boot. “And risk meetin’ up with ’em again when they double back?” He gave a wry laugh. “No, thanks. Some of that lead they were slingin’ was comin’ mighty close. Those fellas are used to shootin’ . . . and killin’.”

  Casey looked around, lines of apprehension cut deep across her forehead. “Where we gonna go?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been much deeper in the canyon than where we are now.” Lonnie looked up through the pines though he couldn’t see much for the trees. “I reckon we go higher, try to put as much distance between us and them curly wolves as we can.”

  “Yeah, it looks like they’re a bit proprietary about that loot.” Casey gained her feet and, looking around cautiously, walked up to grab Miss Abigail’s reins. “So . . . this is Skull Canyon.”

  Lonnie swung up into the saddle and glanced at her. “Yeah.” He paused as she toed a stirrup and stepped into her saddle. “You scared?”

  She looked at him, incredulous. “It’s Skull Canyon. Aren’t you?”

  Lonnie grumbled a reluctant “I reckon . . . a little,” and then gigged the General on up through the pines.

  CHAPTER 27

  Lonnie had no idea where he was leading Casey. All he knew was that he wanted to get as much separation between himself and the three gun-crazy riders as possible. Following a game path up higher into the forest, he kept swinging cautious looks behind him and occasionally stopping the General to look around and listen.

  When he and Casey had crossed a pass and dropped down into what Lonnie assumed was a separate arm of the canyon—separate from the one in which they’d left the shooters—he paused to let the General drink at a small spring gurgling over a bed of polished stones.

  Casey rode up beside him and let Miss Abigail lower her head and draw water from a small, dark pool glimmering as the sunlight filtered through breeze-jostled pine boughs. “Lonnie, if we keep riding blind like this, we’re going to get lost. This canyon will make slow, painful work of us.”

  “Better’n goin’ out so full of bullets we’ll rattle when we walk.”

  “I say we start back.”

  Lonnie was looking toward a rocky crag rising straight ahead of him, several thousand feet above the rolling, spruce-green forest. The crag resembled a giant pipe organ jutting its arrow-shaped pipes against the flawless cobalt blue of the sky.

  “I heard the canyon has two entrances,” he told Casey. “Or exits—however you want to look at it. The other way out is near the base of the crag that’s shaped like a skull. I think one of them peaks over yonder is the skull.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lonnie hiked a shoulder. “Workin’ with old punchers every spring and fall, you hear stuff.”

  “How far away do you think those cliffs are?”

  “Hard to say. Five, maybe six miles. Once we make it out, we can circle around the canyon and make our way back to Arapaho Creek. It’ll take some time, but I don’t see as we have much choice.”

  Casey gave him a skeptical glance. “Lonnie, if you get us hopelessly lost or eaten by a bear . . . like the one that almost ate us last year around this time . . . I’ll never forgive you.”

  Lonnie looked off. A pang of jealousy inspired him to mutter with sarcasm, “I suppose the counter jumper in the fancy suit will be expecting to see you this evenin’. Probably plans to buy you a fried-chicken supper at the Colorado House. Sorry about that.”

  Casey didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then: “Lonnie, you’re not takin’ me on a wild-goose chase on purpose, are you? Just to keep me away from that ‘counter jumper,’ as you so indelicately call Niles, who is no shopkeeper but a bookkeeper?”

  Lonnie turned his head to her, annoyed. “Heck, no! If you done made up your mind about Mister Fancy Dan, I got nothin’ more to say to you. Now, let’s ride. Maybe we can make them crags before sundown. I for one would not like to spend another night in this canyon . . . especially with a girl with such poor taste in suitors!”

  Lonnie urged the General across the creek and on up the game trail he was following. If he would have looked behind him, which he did not, he would have seen Casey smiling fondly at him as she put her horse across the creek and followed him.

  As they rode, the crags grew larger before them. The pines thinned out, the grass grew short and green, and ferns and evergreen shrubs grew shaggy along several creeks that now threaded this leg of the canyon. The air grew cool and the wind began making that eerie moaning sound as it blew around and over the tall, gray cliffs that stood at the canyon’s far end.

  Lonnie didn’t see that a lake lay at the base of the crags until he was only a hundred or so yards away from it, following the canyon’s grassy floor up a steep rise. The lake was pancake flat and the color of iron, with only a few breezy ripples marring its otherwise placid surface. The towering crags were reflected in it.

  It was on the surface of the lake that Lonnie first saw the skull grinning up at him. He jerked his gaze toward the cliffs with a slight gasp.

  “Hey . . . see it?” he said to Casey riding up behind him. He pointed. “You see the skull?”

  Casey stopped Miss Abigail and lifted her gaze toward the cliffs. “Oh, my . . . yeah.”

  The formation indeed looked like a human skull devoid of skin and hair. It sat between two arrow-shaped pinnacles, on its own towering precipice—light gray in color and bearing two roughly circular
indentations for the eye sockets, a long crooked crack for the nose, and a black crevice curved into the shape of a grinning mouth though one corner of the mouth was decidedly higher than the other.

  A leering, menacing smile.

  The wind whistled through the irregular gaps around the skull, sometimes making a high whistling sound while sometimes making what sounded like an elk’s mournful, bugling cry.

  Something sat atop the skull. A bird of some kind. Just then, as though to reveal itself to the newcomers, the bird flew up from the skull and vaulted in a long, smooth, downward arc toward Lonnie and Casey. It grew larger and larger. It looked like a large, brown rag with flapping wings. As it grew closer, Lonnie saw the curved talons and the hooked beak.

  When the raptor was maybe fifty feet above the lake it swooped upward and gave an eagle’s ratcheting, echoing shriek as it sailed off on the southerly wind down canyon, in the direction from which Lonnie and Casey had come.

  The skull moaned. The moan echoed over and over only to be followed by another one.

  The echoes sounded like an angry giant bellowing through a bullhorn.

  Lonnie felt an eerie chill. To distract himself as well as Casey, he swung around, following the bird with his gaze, calling, “Hey, if you see those three tough nuts who tried cleaning our clocks, drop a load on ’em for me, Lonnie Gentry!”

  He grinned, satisfied with himself, at Casey.

  Casey had swung down from Miss Abigail’s back. She stood beside the mare, arms crossed on her chest, regarding Lonnie dubiously. “What if that bird was trying to tell us something?”

  “What could that have been?” Lonnie asked, though he thought he knew what Casey was going to say.

  “That we shouldn’t be here.”

  Lonnie ignored the cold fingers of apprehension again raking his spine, and hiked a shoulder with phony nonchalance. “I reckon it’s a little late for that.” He glanced at the western ridges. “Sun’s gonna set soon. We’d best find a place to camp for the night. We’ll get an early start in the morning.”

  As he began leading the General to a stand of shaggy pines to his left, he pointed across the lake. “Looks like there’s a break in the cliff wall there. I bet that’s the way out of the canyon.”

  “Why don’t we head for it now, Lonnie?”

  Lonnie kept walking. “We’d never make it before dark. It’s farther away than it looks.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know, Lonnie Gentry?”

  Lonnie stopped walking and tossed her a meaningful look. “Yeah, there’s a few things I don’t know about.”

  His look was direct enough, his tone level enough, that she didn’t have to guess what he’d meant.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lonnie found a place well back from the clearing at the point of the lake in which to camp. He found a dense stand of trees with a well-concealed open area inside them roughly as large around as an Indian tepee.

  The first job was to pull McLory down off the General’s back, which proved to be far easier than had getting him up there. Lonnie didn’t relish the idea of wrestling him back up there again in the morning.

  When he and Casey had picketed their horses to a line strung between two trees, they gathered wood and built a small fire. Knowing that when riding into the mountains you had to be prepared for anything, Casey had packed a bedroll, warm clothes, and a couple of ham sandwiches she hadn’t yet gotten around to eating.

  She and Lonnie arranged their bedrolls and other gear around the snapping flames of their fire. Lonnie hung a pot of coffee on his iron tripod.

  He found his food pouch and was happy to discover a bit of deer jerky and two stale biscuits inside. He knew there were likely fish in the lake, but it was getting too dark to make his way back out into the clearing. It no doubt got so dark up here before the moon rose that he wouldn’t be able to see his hand in front of his face.

  The upside of that was no one else was likely to see him, either.

  Still, the canyon gave him the willies. He decided to stay close to the fire as well as to Casey though he was still miffed at the girl, and his heart still ached, knowing she’d set her hat for another. He understood why she’d done it, but he didn’t know how he was ever going to stop thinking about it.

  He was glad she was with him now, though. At least they had what would probably be their last night together. He hoped it wouldn’t be their last night, period, on this side of the sod.

  As he gathered and deposited one more load of firewood, the low, windy moaning sounded again from out in the darkness. It sounded louder and more menacing now after night had come down and the last light had bled out of the sky.

  “Lonnie, good lord—is that the skull speaking to us again?” Casey asked, kneeling by the fire, a leather swatch for the coffeepot in her hand. She stared off beyond where the glimmering firelight reached.

  “If you look at it that way—or hear it that way,” Lonnie said, “you’re gonna get the fantods. Just hear it like it is—the wind blowing around that big rock up there. That’s all.”

  “Are we going to have contend with that all night long?”

  “I don’t know. You want to go on up there and have a chat with the rock, see if you can get it to pipe down a little?” Lonnie chuckled as he sat back against his bedroll and tipped his hat back off his forehead.

  “All right, Mister Smarty,” Casey said as she handed over a smoking cup to him, “have a cup of coffee. I don’t know why I feel so generous, but you can have one of my ham sandwiches, too. Made ’em both last night from the hog my neighbor butchered just last week.” She extended a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper.

  “You keep it,” Lonnie said. “You’ll need it for breakfast. You got a long trip back to Arapaho Creek, prob’ly take you half the day. Me—I can set some snares, and I might see if there’s any red-throated trout in the lake yonder.”

  Casey sat back against her own saddle, about four feet to Lonnie’s right, and looked at him through the firelit steam of her coffee. “What’re you saying, Lonnie? You’re not going to stay around here, are you?”

  “I might poke around a little.”

  “Poke around a little for the strongbox?”

  “Why not? There’s likely a sizeable reward on that much money.”

  “What about the curse on this place? What about McLory?”

  “He’ll keep another day. It’s cool up here. Then I’ll build a travois. I can throw one together right quick. As far as the curse goes . . .” Lonnie sipped his coffee and looked around, wary. “I reckon if we get through this night there’s no reason I won’t get through the next night. Besides, I heard there’s an old Mexican sheepherder’s stone hut around here somewhere. That might be the place where old Crawford Kinch hid the money.”

  “What about the men who shot at us?”

  “I’ll lay low. Now that I know they’re here, I’ll be extra cautious.” Lonnie shook his head slowly as he stared pensively out into the darkness. “I could sure use that reward money. What if it’s five hundred dollars?” He gave a soft whistle through his bottom teeth. “That’s a heckuva stake.”

  “A stake for what?”

  “A stake for getting out of here.” Lonnie dug a trench in the dirt with his right boot heel. “I think I done let too much grass grow under my feet up here in these mountains. Time to move on.”

  Casey slowly unwrapped her sandwich, staring at Lonnie and frowning. “Because of me?”

  Lonnie glanced at her, hiked a shoulder, and sipped his coffee. “Heck, I don’t blame you for takin’ up with that counter jumper.”

  “He’s a bookkeeper, Lonnie.”

  “I don’t blame you for takin’ up with that bookkeeper, then. What could I give you? Close quarters with my half-crazy ma and my screamin’ half brother—an outlaw’s son.”

  Lonnie gave a caustic chuff. “We’d struggle every day of our lives, just like Ma and I do now. That’s no way for you to live. You been through a lot in this life, losin’
both parents. You didn’t deserve any of that. You’re a purty girl, a good person. You deserve to have a happy life without worryin’ every day about puttin’ food on the table. I’d like to know a little of that myself. Heck, Ma will move to town and find a counter jumper of her own to support her and little Jeremiah. That’d be a better, more fittin’ life for her. I’m just in her way.”

  When Casey didn’t say anything, Lonnie glanced at her. He was surprised to see her staring at him through a veil of tears shimmering in her eyes. Then the veil broke. Tears spilled down her cheeks. They were honey-colored in the firelight.

  Casey started to scuttle over to him, extending her arms as if to hug him. Lonnie moved back away from her, and rose, tossing the dregs of his coffee into the brush.

  “I’m gonna check the horses, gather a little more wood,” he said, setting his cup down next to his saddlebags, grabbing his rifle, and walking away from the fire.

  There it was, he thought. In his mind he’d broken from her. His words had sealed the deal.

  He felt better now. Lighter. Freer. His heart didn’t hurt quite so much.

  It still hurt. Just not quite so much.

  He checked to make sure both horses were well tied to the picket rope. He didn’t want either wandering off in the night, frightened by the distant scent of a mountain lion or prowling grizzly. He and Casey had tethered them close to a freshet running through the trees and now winking in the starlight.

  Lonnie started to gather more blowdown branches, when he jerked his head up to stare out through the trees toward the lake. He’d heard something. It had to have been the wind because the bullhorn-like roar of the skull was nearly constant now though sometimes louder than at other times.

  Now he heard it again—what he’d heard before. It was different, separate from the moaning. It seemed to be coming from not too far away, in the direction of the lake.

  Lonnie picked up his rifle from where he’d leaned it against a tree. He took two heavy, faltering steps toward the sound then stopped abruptly, his blood running cold. He heard the sound again.