The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Supposedly, planting had caused hunting to fade into the background, but the Cheyennes had given up agriculture and returned to hunting. Without a doubt this had been due in part to a population explosion among the buffalo, providing a stable diet to a people to whom hunting was a sport as well as subsistence.

  He poured his coffee and looked over his shoulder. It was dark. In the distance beyond No Man’s there were stars, but were they the same stars?

  He shook his head to shake off the disturbing thoughts. He was creating ghosts where none existed. Kawasi had said the mesa looked familiar, like something from the Other Side. Could something exist in two worlds at the same time?

  Suddenly he realized he was hearing footsteps, approaching footsteps.

  A figure loomed at the edge of the firelight. It was Gallagher.

  “I figured you needed company,” he said.

  And what, Raglan asked himself, did he know about Gallagher?

  CHAPTER 18

  Gallagher took a campstool and sat down. “Got worried about you,” he said, pushing his cap back on his head, “and I figured we should talk some more.

  “I’m not much on talk, usually, but sometimes something comes of just bringing out all aspects of a problem and just mulling over it.”

  Raglan offered no comment. He was thinking about Gallagher and how he had arrived. Had Mike been so preoccupied that he had not heard the sound of a car arriving? Or had Gallagher’s car simply not made that much noise? Or could he have used some other means of arrival?

  Despite his suspicions he trusted Gallagher. He liked the man, believed he wanted to cope with the situation, but understood that, although he acted friendly, he was on the whole impersonal in his attitude—as he should be.

  “We’ve got two ways to look at this,” Gallagher said. “We can look at it logically like it was a kidnapping or murder, and investigate it from that standpoint. Or we can accept this idea of another world and see where that leaves us.”

  “Which we’ve both been doing.”

  “Right.”

  Gallagher poked a stick into the fire. “Had a couple of queries about Hokart. From back East. Seems he usually calls his office and they’ve not heard from him.”

  They sat listening, and Raglan looked at Chief. The big dog had not lifted his head from his paws but his ears were up.

  “If he doesn’t show up soon we’ll have a lot of inquiries. Hokart’s a mighty important man, seems like, and yesterday, while I was gone, somebody from the governor’s office called. He said the governor wished to consult with Erik Hokart and would he call back as soon as possible?

  “We’ve got to find him, Mike, and right away. This is going to blow the lid off.”

  “Does Eden Foster know?”

  “I made a point of talking about it. I was over there today, just sort of dropped in. She always wants to know what I am doing, so I told her I was hunting a missing man, and that if I didn’t find him there’d be people all over the country around here, looking into everything.

  “I also mentioned that one of the places they would immediately check would be Hokart’s camp, and the kiva.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “Not much, but I could see she was bothered. She was kind of impatient, wanted to know what was so important about him, and I just told her any citizen was important, as she should know, but Erik had worked with some important people and was considered very special by many of them. Then I told her they’d never stop looking until every possibility was exhausted.”

  “Did she say anything about me?”

  “I was coming to that.” He chuckled. “First time I ever saw Eden pay much mind to anybody in other than a business or social way. She asked me if you were married.”

  “Probably wondering if anybody would miss me if I disappeared.”

  “Oh, no. Not this time. Sounded like she had a personal interest.”

  Raglan was skeptical. Eden Foster was an attractive woman who might be expected to have an interest in men, but he doubted if she had anything other than a business interest in him. He said as much.

  Gallagher refused to accept it. “If I know anything at all about women, she’s interested in you.”

  Raglan looked out of the door and across the mesa toward No Man’s. “If I know anything about women,” he said, “Eden Foster is nobody to mess with. She’s got a mind, but she also has a will and she doesn’t like being thwarted. I could see that in her. I have a hunch that intellectually and personally she’s a defector.”

  “A defector?”

  “Suppose what we surmise is true? That she’s an agent, a lookout station for the Other Side? My hunch is that she has come to like it over here, and although she could never be one of us, she likes the life here better than where she comes from.

  “I don’t mean she’d betray them. She’s like some of the Soviets sent here or to Europe. They begin to enjoy the life and they don’t want to go back. Here they have access to things they cannot get over there, and they are free of many of the pressures.”

  Gallagher was silent, mulling it over. The air was cool and the night was still. Chief arose and walked outside, stretching.

  “What worries me,” Raglan said, “is that we don’t know their capabilities, nor do they know ours.”

  “They know a damned sight more about us than we do of them,” Gallagher said. “Eden Foster is here. She’s been making contacts, listening, reading, learning. We don’t have any communication with her side of things, nor do we actually know there is another side. I still can’t escape the feeling we’re being had.”

  Raglan was uneasy. The kiva was there and its opening into another world, or whatever it was, an unpleasant fact. Erik Hokart was over there somewhere, and it was a fact that those who held him must know something of this world.

  Yet how much did they know? How accurately had Eden Foster judged this world, and how accurately had they read her messages, if such there were?

  It was never easy for one people to understand another when their cultural backgrounds differed drastically. If he only knew more of how the Anasazi had lived and thought. Many of the outward evidences of their living were obvious. Their buildings, from pit houses to cliff apartments, were easily seen. Some of their pottery, their tools and weapons remained. Yet as they ground their corn with mano and metate, what were they thinking? What was it that ordered their existence?

  “Have you got a knife?” Gallagher asked. “Sometimes one can be mighty handy.”

  “I have one.”

  Gallagher glanced at Raglan, a wry look on his face. “Sometimes I think I should pull you in just to see what you’re carrying.”

  “You’d make me mighty unhappy,” Raglan commented. “I might just move out and leave you with your friends from over the line. Then you could handle it all by your lonesome.”

  Chief had returned and was lying across the doorway, his head on his paws.

  “Anything you’re carrying,” Gallagher said, “you’re likely to need. You might have a chance if you could tie up with that old cowboy you told me about. The one called Johnny.

  “The trouble is a man wouldn’t know how to act over yonder. In this country there’s so many foreigners and strangers we don’t pay them much attention, but in a place like that…

  “How would you get food, for instance? Do they have eating places? Or do they eat at home? What would you ask for? If you went over there you wouldn’t even know the names for things or where to go to find out anything.”

  Raglan agreed, then added, “The cliff dwellers lived by farming. The Hopi are very skillful dry farmers, and the Hohokam had extensive irrigation projects. So, unless there was some drastic change, the Anasazi probably continued to develop as an irrigation civilization, and most such develop very rigid governments. Somebody has to control the
water so it can be evenly distributed, and that calls for authority.”

  “What about this evil they talk about? They say the Third World was evil.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. What is evil? Our conceptions of evil are a result of Judeo-Christian ethic, but their conceptions of evil may be entirely different. The Maya and the Aztec, who were probably kin to these people, indulged in human sacrifice on a grand scale. If you go over there you might find yourself stretched out on an altar.”

  “That’s for you, Raglan, not me. I’ve my own work to do.”

  Long after they slipped into their sleeping bags, Mike Raglan lay awake, listening.

  Listening and thinking. The night was very still and cold, and although he heard nothing outside, he heard Chief growl deep in his chest. Yet the big dog did not rise, so the danger, if anywhere except in his dreams, was not close.

  At dawn he was out of his sleeping bag and making coffee when Gallagher came in from outside. “Been looking around,” he commented. “Took a look at that kiva.”

  “It’s more than I’ve done. I’ve been shying away from it.”

  “Can’t see anything through that window,” Gallagher said. “Might be anything in there, and it’s right on the edge of the cliff thataway—”

  “The dog went through. I suppose Erik did, too, but I don’t know.” Raglan paused. “Gallagher? Do you know this country right close around here? A canyon with a lot of trees?”

  “Are you kidding? This isn’t tree country except for some cedar and an occasional cottonwood in the bottom of a wash.”

  “If that kiva offers an opening to the Other Side, it is an opening right into their hands, but according to what I’ve heard there are other openings, and one of them is a canyon with trees. I’m going to have a look.”

  “I got to get back to town.” Gallagher reached for the pot. “For heaven’s sake, take care of yourself. All I need is another guy disappearing around here.”

  They drank coffee and talked; then Gallagher got up and started back to his Jeep. When he reached it he turned and looked back, hesitating as if reluctant to drive away. Then he got in, swung his car around and headed back toward the highway.

  Raglan stood listening to the sound of the motor until it died away, then turned back to the ruin. He put together a small pack, checked his gun, and called Chief. “Come on, boy, we’re going for a walk.”

  On the old canvas map, No Man’s had pointed like a gigantic finger. Pointing at what?

  The way was rough, but he took his time, glad he had hiking boots rather than the western boots he usually wore. He walked around one of the red rock domes and then down into the gully beyond. He had to pick his way with care, for there was much loose rock and the solid rock was uneven. A “hole” in western lingo might be any basin, hollow, or even a canyon, and over here somewhere was something of the kind. Several times he paused to look around, to choose his way but also to see if there was anyone following him.

  He saw nothing—only an eagle high against the sky, only a lizard that darted into the shade of some brush. It was a world of silence, with no sound but those made by his own passage.

  Across the river and stretching off to the south was No Man’s Mesa, huge, ominous, mysterious. He worked his way down a precarious sandstone slope. Any misstep might send him pitching down a hundred feet or more. A broken leg out here alone could be the end of him. He paused near a juniper and crushed a leaf in his fingers, liking the faintly pungent smell, listening to the song of a canyon wren. There was no other sound.

  He worked his way, Chief sometimes following, often leading, down a steep canyon wall. He glimpsed the bright-green of foliage that indicated the presence of water, but it needed another hour of hard clambering and climbing before he was within sight of the trees.

  They were there, all right. At first only a clump was visible, but when he reached the edge of the canyon he could find no way down. The canyon wall bulged outward and there was no edge. To walk farther out was to fall off. For an hour he worked his way along, seeking for some break in the wall down which he might work his way. There was none.

  Occasionally he glimpsed trees down below, and once he thought he caught the gleam of water. Finally, he made camp under a rocky overhang, gathered wood for his fire, and prepared a camp for the night. A good-sized cedar shielded his fire from observation, although the reflection against the back wall might be seen.

  There was considerable deadwood lying about and he gathered enough for the night, most of it cedar washed down the canyon from higher up.

  As the crow flies, he doubted he was more than two miles from the ruin and its kiva, but even with the flashlight he carried he had no desire to try to cross that rough country in the dark.

  A coyote spoke inquiringly into the night, and somewhere out in the darkness, a rock loosened by one of the many natural causes, fell into the canyon, bounding from ledge to ledge. Only a small rock, but one more item in the continual change wrought by frost, rain, sun, and wind.

  He had only a small fire, and he did not lie down but leaned against the backwall, a blanket around his shoulders. He dozed, added fuel to the fire, and dozed again.

  The night waned, the moon arose, flooding the canyon with ghostly radiance. The towering spires above the canyon wall took on shadows, and he let the fire die down to red coals, adding just enough fuel to keep them alive, with an occasional bright-yellow flame as the new fuel was attacked. The wood from the cedar smoke smelled good, and he thought how often cedar had been used, in many countries, for sacred ceremonies. He himself had watched a medicine man waft smoke over tribal elders with an eagle’s wing to purify them before an important conference.

  He took cedar bark and added it to the fire, and then, suddenly, as his hand reached out to the fire, it stopped, arrested in movement by some small sound, a sound not normal to the night. Chief also sensed its presence.

  Something, far up the narrow canyon, had moved in the night.

  Something that was not a rock falling or a wind stirring the junipers. It was something alive.

  Alive? At least something that moved, alive or not. Something that came nearer in the night, something carefully moving, something approaching, something that tried to make no sound.

  He was seated well back in a corner of the rock, not easily visible, his fire a few feet away, the shadow of the cedar looming large before the cave, but with openings on either side. He could see a star over the rim of the rocks opposite.

  The coyotes had ceased their chatter. The night was still, waiting, and now he heard no sound.

  Under his blanket his fist gripped a gun butt, but what use was a gun against a ghost? Yet, did ghosts make small whispers in the night? Something brushed against brush; something ceased to move, something that was looking, peering, trying to make him out, the small light from the fire making the finding of him more difficult.

  His shoulders were against the rock. One hand held the blanket edge, the other the gun.

  CHAPTER 19

  “May I speak?” The voice was low, not unpleasant.

  Raglan waited for several seconds, then said, “Come forward, into the firelight. Come very carefully.”

  The man was tall, with high, thin shoulders and a scholar’s face. He wore a turban, small and tight-fitting, and a sort of robe gathered at the waist by a broad leather belt. On his feet he wore hard-soled moccasins. He carried no weapon that Raglan could see.

  “Be seated,” Raglan said, and when the man looked puzzled, he repeated, “Sit!” and gestured at a place near the fire but directly in front of Raglan.

  The man seated himself, cross-legged, and looked over at him. His costume did not surprise Mike Raglan, who had lived through the hippie period of the sixties and was astonished by nothing.

  “Speak, then,” Raglan suggested.

  “You l
ook for something?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  The man smiled suddenly, revealing white, marvelously even teeth. “I think yes. It is our way, to seek.” His smile vanished. “It is the way for some of us, but a dangerous way.”

  He paused a minute and then, speaking slowly as if groping for words, he said, “I think somewhere you live in a nice place. I think it is better you go there.”

  Raglan still held the pistol, but it was hidden by the blanket and he did not know whether the man guessed that he held a weapon.

  “I have lost a friend. I search for him.”

  “He is gone. You will not find him, and if you try to look you will go where he has gone.” The man paused. “I try be friend to you.”

  “If you are a friend, bring Erik Hokart to me and then I shall know you are a friend.” He spoke slowly, seeing that the stranger had difficulty with the words. “If he does not come, I shall continue to search. If I do not find him soon, many will come. They will find him and they will also find whatever else can be found. There will be no secrets then.”

  “It must not be.”

  “Sorry, friend, it will be. They will come first to the kiva on the mesa. They will go through the window. They will find Erik Hokart.”

  “There will be fight then.”

  Raglan shrugged. “They will expect it. Many will come. First, there will be policemen, and after that, the army. Many, many men, with weapons and machines. Nothing will stop them.”

  The man shook his head and smiled again. This time he smiled less warmly. “Do not say untrue thing. You are few. You are not strong.”

  “Who told you that? If that is what you have been told, you cannot trust those who speak. We are many, and we are strong, and where my people come, nothing is ever the same again, which is often a mistake they do not recognize.”