by Anya Seton
Like a goddam drill sergeant. Wish to God I’d gone into this thing on my own. I could have figured out the map. He always thinks he knows it all. You’d think he’d come off his high horse after the fool he made of himself at the mine, but he’s worse than ever.
So the three of them plodded along the easy, well-marked trail.
Dart had closed his disciplined mind to all resentments past or present. His faculties were concentrated on the task ahead. His nostrils sniffed the high pungent mountain air, and he fell into a long easy stride while his eyes instinctively noted old friends along the trail: the jojoba bush, rich with oil-bearing berries like olives; piñons, the delicious nuts not ripe enough yet for use; the algerita whose berries would yield an agreeable jelly. He was happy as he had not been in weeks. His soul breathed deep and felt at home. He was again master of his fate, freed from the turmoil of people and their inexplicable stupidities—except, of course, for the two who trailed along behind him. For them he felt a remote tolerance, and the responsibility of a leader to those in his charge. They were a nuisance, undoubtedly, greenhorns were always a nuisance to the mountain-wise, but they must be accepted as they were, in the frame in which they now all found themselves. Amanda had rejected him as a man, as a lover—so be it. He could look upon her without desire, repudiating all that they had been to each other, as she wished it repudiated.
He was no squaw man, to be dependent on her softness and her childish whims. The words “squaw man” came into his thoughts, not because they were Apache, but quite the opposite—as an echo from a sentimentalized play he had seen in Boston as a boy and thought very silly—but they also reminded him of Hugh’s use of the term “squaw” yesterday morning in Globe, and of the conversation with John Whitman.
This reminder held considerable pain. Did it also hold the threat of danger? He tried to remember the look in the Indian’s eyes, to remember the exact words they had both spoken, but his memory was clouded by the emotion he had felt. And he dismissed his uneasiness as ridiculous. What threat could there be from a young Indian cowpuncher bound on a Saturday outing with his family!
Dart shrugged his shoulders, pulled out his map and studied it. The trail down to Deadman’s Creek was clearly marked, then they should leave it where it turned west to the Verde. They must cross to the other side and branch northeast into uncharted country.
The next three days seemed interminable to Amanda. They blurred into a jumble of plodding climbs up, and stumbling, sliding descents, all additionally hazed by discomforts. Her feet swelled, and blisters rubbed off her heels despite Hugh’s grudging first aid. He was having trouble with his own feet, and was none too sympathetic.
While they were in the lower altitudes down in the canyons, the vicious cat’s-claw and wait-a-bit bushes scratched her groping hands and tore shreds from her levis. On the tops of mesas a biting wind rushed at them and she shivered miserably, being usually wet to the knees from splashing through whatever little creek had run through the bottom of the previous canyon. There was still plenty of water—too much, since each evening at sundown it showered, while Amanda sat huddled in the poncho under a brush shelter Dart would cut for them. The only moments of respite came after the rain stopped and they ate their supper while warming themselves by the campfire. But she was too tired to stay awake long, and the first nights she fell asleep as she chewed the last mouthful of rank bacon, or of half-cooked bloody rabbit Hugh had shot.
Hugh suffered, too, though not in silence. His slack muscles ached, his wind was bad, and he kept up a continuous sotto voce swearing while they were on the trail, occasionally taking a surreptitious pull from his flask when Dart was not looking. Neither Hugh nor Amanda was particularly useful with camp chores, though the girl made feeble efforts, but Dart had expected nothing better, and he let his charges pretty much alone to break themselves in. They’d toughen up all right. They’d have to, for they had not yet reached the base of the granite peaks they now saw to the north, and for which Dart was heading. He was sure that these were the mountains indicated on the Mimbreño’s copper map, for the two peaks seen from this angle tilted slightly together at the top, like an inverted V, and the Mimbreño had made an arrow beneath this symbol pointing upward to it.
He explained this to Hugh and Amanda on the fourth night, as they lay on their blankets around the campfire.
“Christ,” said Hugh, staring across shadowed canyons and a stand of yellow pines towards the mountains Dart indicated. “D’you mean to say we’ve got to get over to those damn things? I should think we’d be someplace by now.” He rubbed his swollen feet gloomily.
Dart laughed. “You want to turn back?”
Hugh scowled, staring out to the far horizon. “No.”
“Well, I wouldn’t turn back if you wanted to,” said Dart, stretching and yawning. “I’m going to see what’s up there.”
“Gold...” said Amanda softly, as though to reassure herself, and she tried to visualize a glittering wall of gold somewhere beneath those tilted mountains.
“I’m pretty sure that’s the place.” Dart squinted his keen eyes and pointed. “See that darkish blur below the peaks? That’s volcanic—the malpais they all mentioned, the hatchings marked on the Mimbreño’s map too, I guess. We’ll have to cross it.”
The other two craned and peered through the swift-descending twilight, but they could not see what Dart saw.
They were silent, all smoking.
The campfire of pinons crackled aromatically, sending out little sparks. The western sky became streaked with mauve and ruby red, and the evening star sprang out in trembling yellow light.
Fifty feet beyond their camp site Tonto the burro cropped rhythmically, browsing on the dense prickly forage, and his bell tinkled from time to time. The night wind blew gently past their shelter, and Amanda was conscious of peace. Her young body had adjusted itself to discomfort, and she was aware of an entirely new sensation. For the first time she felt without resistance the insidious beauty and the mystery of the wilderness.
And then an owl hooted, a hollow eerie sound from the gathering darkness behind them. Dart jumped. Wheeling sharply around he leapt to his feet.
The other two gazed at him in astonishment. “What the hell!” said Hugh, sitting up. “What’s the matter?”
Dart stooped in one lightning motion and snatched his gun from the top of the bedroll. He stood holding the gun and staring into the darkness.
Then the owl hooted again from further off, and soared, flapping its great wings, into the sky.
Dart released his breath audibly. He put the gun down beside him and sat down again on the blanket. Then he laughed. “Atavistic reaction,” he said in apology to the two startled faces. “The Apaches consider owls very bad luck. It took me by surprise.”
Hugh made a disgusted noise and resumed rubbing his feet. “I’m glad something can take you by surprise, Superman. My God, I thought from the way you acted you expected a howling band of redskins to jump at us. Grade B Westerns, that’s the way you looked.”
“I suppose I did, at that,” said Dart laughing. He was annoyed with himself for that blind reaction, though it had not entirely sprung from childhood superstition and Saba’s fear of owls, which were supposed to be the spirits of the unquiet dead. There had been a further memory awakened by that owl’s hoot. Hoots like that had been one of the rallying cries of Apaches before a raid, and Tanosay, in telling tales of the old days, had often reproduced the sound for a listening grandson.
Dart glanced again at his gun, and then at the brilliant campfire. Its glow and the white smoke rising from it against the night sky could certainly be seen for miles. Wiser, after this, to camp in lower, more hidden spots—and yet, what nonsense! That was a real owl.
“We better turn in now,” he said, his voice harsh and peremptory. “There’s plenty tough going ahead.”
When Amanda lay rolled in her blankets, her head on her knapsack, she thought about the owl incident, and a warmer feelin
g for Dart came back to her heart. She had never before seen him discomfited or truly apologetic—except, said the sudden voice of truth, the morning she had lost the baby and he had sat by her bed. She had been frozen to him then, deaf to what he said, fathoms deep in her own resentment that he had failed her, and that he had not somehow divined that her frantic efforts to help him by visiting Big Ruby, by rushing to Calise, had been contributing factors to the baby’s loss.
“That’s not quite fair....I love you.” His words came back to her now, as she had not heard them then. She raised her head and looked across the ashes of the campfire to Dart’s long, dark form. It lay quiet, and she heard even breathing.
She nestled down into her cocoon, and lay awake for a little while staring up at the brilliant starlit sky.
It took them three more days to creep up and down the savagely indented country to the base of the tilted peaks, and many were their vicissitudes. Earlier they had seen dried sheep dung and fragments of wool caught on bushes, and had known that at least some solitary sheepherder had once passed this way. But now they entered a desolate land where it seemed no man had ever been or would wish to go. Even Dart quailed before the precipitous box canyons that they must cross, and they lost hours while he reconnoitered back and forth on the rims seeking the easiest way. They pushed and hauled the burro over slide rock and up boulder-strewn creek beds, for Dart did not dare leave their pack carrier behind unless they were forced to.
Dart during the first days had had no trouble finding springs or filling their five-gallon can from the creeks they forded, but after they entered the waste of dead lava, they found no more water. Bare and gray as the mountains of the moon, the malpais stretched ahead of them in massive crenelations and rounded pits that looked as soft as the ashes they had once been but were actually as hard and sharp as knives. The human beings’~tough leather soles and the burro’s unshod hoofs were soon crisscrossed with myriad tiny cuts.
The night they were forced to camp on the lava w’aste was a night of dismal foreboding, and there was no firewood to warm them or cook their supper. They huddled down into a partial shelter formed by a semicircle of black rocks as silent and sinister as the druidic circle Amanda had seen at Stonehenge. She ate cold beans from a can and chewed the tough salt jerky, shivering in her blankets, for they had reached an altitude of seven thousand feet. She thought with growing amazement of the date. It was Saturday night again, it must be September 9, and a year ago she and Dart were on the Bremen. In a kaleidoscope of swirling lights, she saw the dance floor and the balloons and champagne and the German orchestra playing selections from Fledermaus, tara dum da da, tara dum da da, she heard Peggy Gordon singing, and the creaking of the ship and the waves swishing by. The kaleidoscope twirled again, its colored pieces flashing, and then it fell apart, splintering into darkness and the deathly quiet of the black volcanic rocks.
How is it that I’m here? So far from all I know—dislocated into a world where none of the emotions I have ever had return to give me guidance?
She looked at Dart, and thought for a second of leaping hope that he met her eyes in answer. But she wasn’t sure, there was not enough light to see for sure. Still held in the dream-like suspension she might have spoken to him, she might have said, not in appeal but with grave confidence, “Do you remember—?” But Hugh shattered the weird silence.
“Jesus, what swill!” he cried, flinging his empty bean can far into the darkness where it clattered and cannonaded over the naked rocks. “Where do we go from here, dear Captain, or do we just sit here for eternity, moldering on the malapie?...That’s good”—he said viciously—“moldering on the malapie. I like that.” He raised his flask and took a long gurgling pull.
“I trust there’s water in that flask,” said Dart grimly.
“Well, you trust wrong, my lad.... Here, have a swig,” he said to Amanda, “it’ll warm you up.” He thrust the flask at her.
She sniffed it and pushed it back. “Oh, Hugh, I can’t drink straight alcohol, and I wish you wouldn’t.”
Hugh shrugged and took another pull.
“Cut it out, Hugh,” said Dart. “We’ve got to get out of here soon as it’s light, and I can’t haul any drunks along.”
That they were in a situation of considerable danger tonight Dart knew very well, though he had not impressed it on the others. Everything depended on their finding the lost valley soon, and its water and game to supplement the provisions the burro carried. Prudence demanded that he ration these for,the trip back, at least as far as the lower country where they might hunt again, and where there was water. But they must get over this wilderness of dead lava. Already they had finished their canteens, and one could not count on rain, which never came when it was needed. The emergency can would not go far amongst three humans and an animal. And worse than that, the burro had gone lame today after his hind leg had slipped between two boulders. Fortunately, burros were the toughest little beasts in the world. They could exist on any kind of browse, but here on the malpais there was nothing. As if in affirmation Tonto that moment stuck his head around the rocks and brayed mournfully.
“Hee-haw!” said Hugh. “Hee-haw. That’s what I think too. Now Dart, dear, I've been a very good boy on this jaunt, but there’re limits. I don’t like this God-blasted place we’re in, an’ I’m going to get drunk.” He had finished the flask, and forgetting concealment he began to fumble in his knapsack for the spare bottle.
He found his wrists held in a vise-like grip, and the knapsack was taken away from him. “I’m sorry,” said Dart. He extracted the bottle, pulled the cork, and the fumes of grain alcohol floated through the chill air.
It took a moment for Hugh to understand, then he stumbled to his feet and lunged across the lava hollow. “God damn you”—he whispered—“God damn you!” His wavering fist crashed past Dart’s head in the darkness.
“Oh, sit down, Hugh,” said Dart impatiently, giving him a ^slight push. Hugh collapsed back on his bedroll breathing hard.
Amanda shrank away from him until she felt the harsh pitted lava pressing through her blankets against her back, but she watched Hugh unconsciously, still frightened by the ugly moment, and then she thought she saw his hand gleaming white against the darkness of his clothes, and moving slowly. She watched uncomprehending, and then gasped,
“Hugh! What are you doing?”
The white spot stopped moving.
“What is it, Andy?” asked Dart from across the hollow.
“Nothing, I guess,” she answered, trying to laugh. “This place is spooky. I’m seeing things.” Hugh was half drunk and full of the violent temper he often showed, but he was Dart’s friend. It had been her own foolishness or a trick of the dim light that had given her the impression that his hand was creeping stealthily back towards his revolver. I’m nuts, she thought, but the two rough little words did not reassure her. This witches’ sabbath of amorphous black rocks and echoing space had little to do with sanity.
“Dart,” she said very low, half hoping that he wouldn’t hear, “I’m frightened. I thought I’d got over my fear of the mountains, but this...”
He did hear her, and across the darkness he said, “Don’t be frightened, Andy. You’ve done magnificently, better than I ever thought possible.”
A warm pleasure suffused her. He had never praised her like that before, never treated her with the dignity of an equal.
“Dart,” she said softly, “do you think we’ll find it soon, the lost valley? It seems further away here than it did in Lodestone.”
“Well, I hope it isn’t,” said Dart laughing a little.
“It’s queer,” she went on, emboldened by the greater ease between them, “I don’t seem to care about it the way I did in Lodestone. I can’t seem to remember the gold. I don’t mean I want to turn back, of course——”
Hugh stirred suddenly, and his voice, harsh and thickened, exploded between them. “You’ve got to remember the gold! It’s the only thing. The only thing. V
iola knew that, didn’t you, darling!”
The two Dartlands started and turned. Amanda’s heart began to pound. That sudden coarse voice exploding the silence frightened her nearly as much as the motion she thought she had seen.
“He’s just pie-eyed,” said Dart quietly. “God knows how much straight alcohol he’s had. Better come over here, Andy.”
Amanda obeyed thankfully, picking up her blankets and settling near Dart away from that lumpish, heavy-breathing figure. It went on muttering, and then the voice broke out again on a shriller key. “The Russian Empress wants her gold. Waiting at the St. Regis for her gold. Hughie’ll bring the gold, darling—this time he’ll bring it and you’ll be stretching out your white arms and smiling like the night we—we——”
The voice trailed off into incoherence.
Amanda drew nearer to Dart. “How horrible,” she whispered, appalled by that shrill, unfamiliar voice. “What can he be talking about, or is he—he completely off?”
For a time Dart did not answer, then he broke through his first instinct of reticence. “I think he’s talking about his wife, poor guy.”
“His wife—” she repeated in astonishment, but she did not question Dart as she once would have; neither feminine curiosity nor the old annoyance that Dart told her so little seemed important here in the lost primeval world of rocks and silence.
The muttering figure across the lava pit subsided after a while and they all slept a little until the shadows beneath the cliffs turned gray, and a blood-red glow tipped the wall of granite peaks ahead of them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DART left their encampment in the lava pit as soon as there was light enough for him to pick his way amongst the pitted jumble of rocks. He told Amanda not to worry if he were delayed in returning. It was imperative that he find some clue to their proper direction before starting out with a partially crippled burro. Not to speak of Hugh, who was still snoring, huddled in his blankets.
