Norton, Andre - Novel 15

by Stand to Horse (v1. 0)

  Already the water of the newly born river was eating up the ground, carrying off huge bites closer and closer to the body. Ritchie was not satisfied until he got the Sergeant into what seemed a safe enough nook out of the path of the river.

  Herndon was shaking as if a fever chill racked his thin body, and he was no longer conscious of where he was or what had happened. Without fire or blankets there was little Ritchie could do except to hold him close and hope that the warmth of his own body would in time make some impression on the icy cold which seemed to encase the other.

  Ritchie peered out between two of the boulders behind which they sheltered. The storm, he decided, must be in its final phase. The driving wind was gone, and the rain was no longer so hard or steady. He trusted that the Apaches were thoroughly demoralized and that the hunt would not be up again tonight. All he had for defense was his knife.

  The slash which the dog's teeth had opened on his arm smarted. He held it out at a stiff angle for the rain to wash. The terrible shudders which had shaken the Sergeant were coming at longer intervals. Under Ritchie's fingers searching blindly in the dark, Herndon's skin did not feel so deadly cold. His own jaws cracked in a gigantic yawn. He could no longer force his tired brain and body into the work of lookout, scout, or guard. His head drooped forward until it rested upon Herndon's, and in a moment he was asleep.

  18

  “I Have Drunk of These Waters—''

  Ritchie was conscious of the heat even before he opened his eyes, of the heat and a weight which pressed his shoulder and side into numbness. He screwed his eyelids against the glare of the rising sun. He was empty and hungry.

  Still trying to shield his eyes from the sun, he attempted to move, and his struggle was answered by a protesting sigh. Herndon was curled up against him. The bones of his skull were sharply marked under the dirty skin, but even in sleep his jaw was still set stubbornly.

  Ritchie gasped as he straightened cramped muscles and edged out from under Herndon. The torrent that had filled the river bed the night before was now only an oily trickle. But some of it had been caught in depressions and held in cupped abundance. He crept down to the nearest of these and sloshed first hands and then face. Then he drank the precious stuff.

  Spitting sand, he sat on his hunkers. Save for the towers, stark, dead, and clear against the morning sky, the valley held no trace of man. If the Apaches had survived, they were gone.

  That thought made him remember the last struggle in the dark, and he padded along to the battleground. The body they had left there was gone, perhaps swept away by the flood. But from between two stones the Sergeant's knife winked out in the light. Rain had washed it clean. Ritchie picked it up and went back to where he had left its owner. But before he reached their shelter, he stopped short.

  A line of prints was cut in the sand, prints oddly smeared as if that which made them had fallen to drag itself on. Diego's dog!

  He followed that strange trail down past the battleground to the very edge of the shrunken stream. A harsh sound, half-snarl, half-bark, warned him off.

  Almost buried in the sand that the flood had loosened was a body. Ritchie did not try to uncover the hidden face. He could well guess who lay there because of the dog which still bared fangs in defense of the dead. So it had been Diego the Sergeant had fought, just as it had been Diego's voice raised in triumph as they had ridden into this nightmare venture days ago. And with the Mexican renegade dead, the men he had led so long might well abandon the hunt—

  "We can't leave that hurt dog!"

  The Sergeant had come up. Now that he was on his feet, his face had lost the fragility it had shown in sleep. It was true that he was not the same man who had ridden out of Santa Fe, but if he were only a shadow of his former self, it was a shadow fashioned of whipcord and steel. Now he picked up a small stone, balancing it in his hand a moment before he threw with the same expert precision that had served the tower artillery. The stone hit squarely and there was not even a yelp as the little white body fell across that of its master.

  "It's Diego-"

  "Yes, Diego. Now—we'd better be getting on."

  He took the knife Ritchie offered him without comment, putting it into his sheath. But neither of them were as strong as they had believed, and the climb back to retrieve their guns left them panting. Ritchie found his boot and pulled it on. Luckily it had been protected from the storm by the tower and was not too sodden to wear.

  Meanwhile, the Sergeant was working with the buckskin thongs he had tied for a grimmer duty. Into the two loops he had twisted for the purpose Ritchie didn't care to remember he fitted small stones. Then he made an imperative gesture to warn Ritchie to remain where he was —quietly.

  He twirled the weighted thong around in the air and let it fly out across the rock behind the tower. A sort of frenzied cheeping broke out there, and they both rushed to see what luck they had had.

  Entangled in the cord were not one but two desert quail. A rain-pool basin had lured them to their undoing. Herndon scooped them up with one wild grab.

  Minutes later Ritchie licked his fingers regretfully. Raw meat without even salt to savor it, and yet it was the best he had ever chewed. He was a new man, ready to tramp across the hills from ridge to ridge should that feat be demanded of him. He glanced up to find the Sergeant regarding him with eyes that were certainly full of silent laughter.

  "Richard is himself again, eh?" quoted Herndon. "Maybe we have had the worst and can now hope for better luck. Feel strong enough to dig a little?"

  "Dig?"

  Herndon nodded at the ruined tower. "I'd like to get back my notebook. As long as I'm still alive and kicking, there is no use in leaving such a monument to our memory.'*

  The delving was real work, as they had to pull down a section of the still-standing stones to get to the hollow where the bag lay. And in doing so they uncovered a tragedy far older than their own—for the tower people had died by flame and arrow and their mummified bodies lay contorted within the home they had defended to the last.

  "Must have had a wooden roof on this, maybe several floors of wood, too. The enemy shot fire arrows and brought it all down on the heads of any still alive. Look, even the women fought—" Herndon touched a bow that still lay in the grasp of a contorted hand.

  "Do you suppose every tower is like this?"

  "I think so. If we had time to look, we'd find each had been gutted. They built these towers because they were afraid, and in the end what they feared did catch up with them."

  "Apaches?" wondered Ritchie.

  Herndon shrugged. "Maybe. We'd have to do more digging to find out. And that we haven't time for." He backed out of the crypt they had opened.

  "What made that horrible wailing?" Ritchie wanted to know when they were in the open again.

  "Weird wasn't it—and it came just in the nick of time for us. It must have been caused by the force of the storm wind over the tops of the towers. Did you ever blow over the top of a bottle when you were a kid? Something like that did it. And this is a good place to hear ghosts. All right, we're ready to go. Watch out for a pool to fill our canteens."

  They dropped down again into the basin and started along the bank of the dying river. Before they were out of sight of the tower that had sheltered them, Ritchie stumbled over an Apache bow. The cord trailed from it as a bit of frayed twist, but the bow itself was whole, and Herndon snatched it eagerly.

  "We'll have to turn archer anyway. And this rain should bring down some game. Keep an eye out."

  They took their second rest period that morning at the end of an outcrop that had been grooved and scored by the primitive tools of men long dead, so that it was a reservoir. From it they could still trace the faint line of the irrigation ditches which had once made farm land of the valley. Ritchie splashed in the water gratefully. But it was already evaporating. A dark stain just under the rim showed the high point the supply had reached, and the water was a foot below that now.

  Aroun
d that dark stain, wherever a piece of mud clung, were tracks. The prints of quail feet made a delicate pattern, and Ritchie tried to pick out others—but he was not trail-wise enough except for one slotted track.

  "Deer." The Sergeant confirmed his guess. "Suppose we take a bit of a rest behind those bushes and wait." He wet a finger tip and held it up to test the air, and then he loaded the rifle.

  Ritchie's eyelids drooped. His feet burned, and the dull, pounding ache that had been in his head when he awoke that morning was still there. But his mouth no longer felt as if someone had been storing cinders in it, and he would be ready to go on when Herndon gave the signal.

  The Sergeant was watching the water trough with concentration. Tuttle's rifle, several new scars added to those which laced its stock, was in firing position. The rain seemed to have killed off the black flies, or maybe both of them had been bitten so often that they were now immune. Ritchie drowsed.

  He jerked his head up as Herndon fired. A tawny brown animal fled away up the river.

  His companion was already on his feet, trotting up to where the deer had been. After a careful examination of the ground he went along, and within a few seconds Ritchie sighted the first warning trace, too, a splatter of pink-red, sticky and fresh. He remembered the hunting lore they had dinned into him. A deer struck in the vitals will seek water. It would keep to the river as long as the rain pools existed.

  Within the quarter hour they found it, lying on the edge of a muddy waterhole. Herndon's knife was out almost before he had squatted down beside the stiffening body.

  They dared to light a fire and sear the flesh before they bit into it. When they had taken the first edge off their hunger, Ritchie noticed that Herndon regarded the pool with narrowed eyes.

  ''Better fill the canteens now?" He could guess the meaning of the wide band of mud as well as the Sergeant could. The rain's abundance was evaporating fast.

  “Yes."

  Together they hunched over the water, waiting for the worst of the mud to settle before they scooped up what they could.

  ''How long—?" began Ritchie in as casual a tone as he could manage.

  "Who knows? We don't know anything about this country. Only, if this is the Gallina, it will bring us out on the Chama—"

  That "if" was a big one. But why think about it? If he only concentrated on food and drink and the patch of soil immediately under his broken boots at the moment, he could keep going.

  "This must have been a wonderful country once." Herndon had brought out his journal. His fingers were cramped about the stub of his pencil. "It could be again if there was water. Suppose one could control the water in the mountains, send it down through the right valleys—"

  "Using dams or something like that, you mean?"

  "Dams. But on a greater scale than anything we've tried. It was the disappearance of the water that killed this land. Bring it back again, and it would come alive. I'd like to walk through here fifty or a hundred years from now and see what it looks like when the engineers and the homesteaders have found and tamed it—"

  "If anyone tries to build a dam between Apache raids, he isn't going to find it easy."

  "The Apaches will go. That won't be easy either. It may take years of fighting to drive the last warrior out of these mountains. But the Apache will go and white men will come—because we are land hungry, greedy for our own holdings, and we spread out and take and take. Fifty years from now there will be trains running through such valleys as this one, settlements, cities, live land—"

  Ritchie, propping his chin on his hands, watched the heart of the fire dreamily. The smoke curled up into the night and vanished. Back in the towers hearth fires had once burned. Then came the killing fires, and the towers were left to the wind and the rains, to the desert sun and the lash of lightning bolts.

  The tower people had gone long ago. And now he and Herndon were fighting their own private war in the same setting, and they would pass on. But maybe later would come those who would not go, who would linger and with water as their tool would rise up to conquer the deserts and wastelands. And after them—?

  He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes for a moment. When he had cleared the glare of the fire out of his eyes, he could look up into the night and count the low hanging stars. They never seemed so bright or close in the skies back home—as if you could reach up and pick a cluster of them for the fun of it.

  "You going to try to build a dam?" he asked abruptly.

  “No, not dams. But this country gets into a man's blood. I don't think I shall ever leave it—willingly. I've four years to go on this hitch before I'm free to choose anyway."

  "There's all that secession talk—" Ritchie stopped. He remembered too vividly the one who had first suggested trouble to come.

  "Yes, a lot can happen in four years. But the land will wait. Once I heard a chieftain—he wasn't an important man, just the leader of a handful of fighters who had been starved and beaten out of their hold in the hills. But he knew how to talk—Indians do, you know. They put things into words very well. And he said to our commander when he came to make peace, 'I have drunk of these waters; I am a part of this land.' "

  Ritchie repeated those words softly. They did sound good and real.

  In the morning the water had shrunk away to a few stinking, muddy pools far apart. And there was no more hunting. Herndon had restrung the Apache bow, but with that weapon he proved to be a poor marksman. To their mutual surprise Ritchie had the hand and eye for the more primitive weapon and was able to knock over a jack rabbit and pick up a ring-tailed cat, limp after a last despairing kick.

  For a day or two Ritchie clung to the hope that they might find some trace of Bess or the camel. But neither animal had left any tracks. Either the storming waters had engulfed them or they had taken some side canyon in search of grazing.

  In spite of the drying up of the water, they kept to the river for a guide. It was the one hope left of getting through the maze to the Chama. Now the few bright hours that had followed their victory in the valley of the Torreones were only a dim memory. They only dared wet their mouths with the muddy water sloshing in the bottoms of their canteens, and they ate lizard and once snake. But they went on.

  Strips from their shirts were bound turban-wise about their heads for sunshields, taking the place of hats lost long ago. Their skins were thorn-torn and so burned that they were as dark as Apaches. They seldom spoke after they cached the useless carbine in a niche. There was still a load of ammunition for the rifle, so Herndon trailed it. And they kept on.

  They drank from a chemical-infused spring because their thirsty bodies had grown stronger than their dulled minds. And then they were sick, so sick that the following day's journey was the few yards between the spring and a clump of cacti beneath which they lay at nightfall. But after hours of racking cramps they crawled on.

  Ritchie didn't know which day it was that they followed the bird—time had no meaning any more. The bird had been brown—rather like a chicken—and it had run along the ground instead of flying. Herndon had given a strange, cracked cry when he saw it and had tried to run—not that he managed to catch it. It had fluttered very easily out of their clutching hands.

  But it was the bird which brought them to water, good water. And the grassy green stuff growing around it, which they crammed into their mouths, allayed the tearing pain of the cramps. A trickle of the water seeped away downhill. Ritchie watched that for a long time. Then he made a great effort and dropped his scarred hand into it, feeling the soft caress across his skin.

  ''The—Chama—" A hand, which was all bones under a tight stretch of skin, caught at his shoulder and tried to pull him up. He stared up at the brown face of a mummy. There were red-rimmed eyes in it, oozing tears which dribbled down into a mat of sun-rusted beard. "Chama," the thin voice repeated.

  Chama! Once that must have meant something. But he couldn't remember what. It was of no importance. He tried to free himself from that bony gr
ip.

  ''Chama!" Broken nails bit into him; the weak tug grew stronger.

  He raised his head. There was more water below—much more water. But all the water in the world couldn't save them now. Ritchie knew that deep inside. And he didn't care. It was no longer important to get up on the torn feet —from which the last scrap of boots had sloughed days ago —to keep wavering toward a goal beyond the next ridge. He couldn't go on.

  He lay back again and felt blindly for the cool water. But the skeleton hadn't given up. It was on its knees, and with fumbling, pitiful movements it was loading the rifle.

  The bullet slipped through trembling fingers and must be searched for on the ground, with a whimper of relief to mark its recovery. Then it was done, and Herndon fired into the air. As the sound echoed and re-echoed, the rifle slipped out of his hands and he pitched forward, striking hard across Ritchie's legs. Ritchie moaned. It was growing dark, and he could no longer feel the water trickling through his cramped fingers.

  A strip of bright yellow made a pattern on a white expanse. And it moved. Then there was another light, brighter, which came and went. Sometimes it bothered his eyes. If he watched either long enough, he slipped back into the cool, waiting darkness where there were no dreams.

  Then he became aware of the table. It was smooth, but he could see the grain of the wood. All lines, something-something like other lines he had seen, lines drawn by the stub of a battered pencil, rivers and mountains and tangled canyons. But to remember the pencil and the lines always made his head ache.

  The man came next. He stood beside the table, and he had a glass in his hand. He made booming sounds which meant nothing, and he pushed aside the dark in spite of Ritchie's effort to hold it. Sometimes he brought the light with him, and then he did things to Ritchie's body that hurt.