by Hunter Shea
It was easy to see by the way her eyes shifted around the ruins of the town that she was spooked. Even if she turned around now, she’d be gone most of the day. Her father would surely give her hell. That spoke to her sincerity. And her courage.
“Look, Selma, as much as we’d like to leave—”
“I’d really like to leave,” Teta interrupted.
“We can’t just yet. You’ve done a courageous thing, coming out here all by yourself. For that, I’ll level with you. We’re here on orders of the President of the United States. Being the commander in chief, he doesn’t like it when his men go missing. It’s our job to find out what happened to them and scout Hecla for any potential hazards. And, of course, to see if the claims of gold are true. I’ll admit, this isn’t the most hospitable place I’ve ever been, but I haven’t seen anything to be afraid of.”
As long as I didn’t think long and hard about tommyknockers or those black-eyed kids.
“You have nothing to worry about. Believe me, we can handle ourselves. It’s best you head on home and tell your father I’ll personally apologize for worrying you so when I get back to Laramie.”
Selma pursed her lips and knit her brows. She wasn’t buying what I was selling. “If you’re not going back, I’m not,” she said.
“But you said yourself this place is evil,” Teta said. “Why stay here?”
“Because being here is better than being shuttered away on the ranch. I lost my husband to this place three years ago. If I can’t convince you to leave, I might as well find out what happened to him.”
Chapter Sixteen
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
There were no tears in her eyes, just cold determination. Now that the words had tumbled out of her, she finally stopped fidgeting and became very still. Teta gently put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Was he a good man?”
“He had his moments,” Selma answered, her head hung low.
“Was he one of the miners?” Teta asked.
She shook her head. “He and his brothers decided to try their hand at finding the gold. None of them knew a thing about mining. They just knew that Hecla was empty and gold was there to be found. I told him not to go, begged him. He had the fever. He wanted out of Laramie. Hank dreamed of a big house in a big city, as far from Wyoming as he could get. In the end, having me as a wife wasn’t enough for him.”
I couldn’t imagine any man leaving her behind. What was the sense of all that money if you didn’t have someone beautiful to spend it on?
“What about his brothers? Did they disappear too?” Teta asked.
“Yes. All seven of them. Gone. It broke their mother’s heart. When they didn’t come back, she just withered up and died a few months later. It was hard on all of us.”
I said, “Well, you’re a grown woman. We can’t force you to leave, even though I have my reservations. We were going to scout the perimeter of the Deep Rock Hills today. I’d prefer it if you came with us. I don’t cotton to the idea of leaving you here alone.”
“I’d like that.”
“And maybe you can tell us what you know about this place,” Teta said.
The man loved a good story, whether it was in a book or coming out of a pretty mouth. He’d cultivated a lazy, disinterested look that made a damn good smoke screen. While I was more about facing the moment, he was always trying to think one step ahead. Having Selma around could be to our benefit.
“Let’s saddle up, then. The day isn’t getting any younger.”
* * *
The Deep Rock Hills cut a sharp, irregular profile against the blue, cloudless sky. They weren’t high or wide. Plenty of evergreens, pines and conifers crowded around and up the hills as to camouflage them from the rest of the flat plain. I took the lead as we slowly plodded around them. From time to time, I dismounted to swipe away brush that at first appeared to have been placed intentionally to hide tracks. Each time I came up empty.
Teta did find a rusted crowbar not far from the entrance to one of the tunnels on the east end. We could just make out the shaft openings through the trees. It was like the miners were bees, entering the hive from as many shafts as they could make.
“What do you make of all these entry points?” I asked Teta.
“So far, the one we went into seems the largest. I’ll bet that was the initial entrance when they were going in for copper. They must have found gold somewhere down there and decided to come at the vein from all angles.”
“Seems that would make the whole works unstable. There’s not much to these hills.”
Selma’s horse nipped at my horse’s hide. She gave it a sharp, “Cut that out, you old crow bait.”
Her horse, a young, brown filly with a blonde mane, was anything but crow bait. I bet that horse would cost a pretty penny if one were to haggle with her old man for it. I laughed and caught her eye. She flashed me a smile and tilted her head away right quick.
“You know, maybe you’re on to something,” Teta said. “Maybe the miners were too anxious to find the gold. Maybe they did weaken the interior of the hills. Could be they caved the whole works in. For all we know, they’re all still in there.”
“What’s left of them anyway.”
I thought of Selma’s husband and winced.
I added, “But that doesn’t explain where their families went. Selma, is Laramie the nearest town?”
“Yes. Their families usually came into town once a month for supplies. Then one month, no one showed.”
“So you have half your mystery possibly solved,” I said.
“I wish we had Sherlock Holmes here for the second half,” Teta said.
Selma gave him a curious glance. “He’s a kind of detective in mystery books,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
It didn’t take long to circumnavigate the hills, even taking it as slowly as we did. By noon, it felt like the sun was sitting on the brim of my Stetson. We were about to call it a day when Selma pulled up her horse and barked, “Look over here! What is that?”
Peering down, I saw a footprint of some kind. It was made by someone who had been barefoot because you could make out all the toes. Odd thing about it was that there were only four toes.
And it was big. Longer and wider than any foot I’d ever seen. “There’s another one over here,” Teta said.
About seven feet to the north of the first track was another. All told, we found six of them, though only two were deep enough to retain any kind of definition.
“Qué demonios!” Teta said, whistling as he walked around them. “I never saw a foot that damn big.”
I jumped off my horse and bent down to get a closer look. “Awfully wide,” I said.
“You can see there’s a right foot and a left foot,” Selma said, pointing to the nearest set. “And only four toes on each,” Teta added.
“Let me see something, try to gauge the size.” I put my boot next to the footprint. It was bigger than mine by a good five or six inches, and I wore a size twelve.
Selma said, “Maybe it’s an old footprint. Time in the elements just wore it away enough so it looks bigger than it is.”
Tracing my fingers in and around the best print, I shook my head. “Nope. This one’s fresh. Couple of days old at the most. The ground up here is too dry to keep a print for long, even one that’s as deep as this. Had to have been someone awfully heavy to make it.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“He did this for a living, long time ago, back before you were born,” Teta said with a wry smile.
“Then you think it’s real?”
“The print is,” I replied. “Can’t tell you about the person who made it. Hard to imagine a man big enough to leave a print like that. Maybe he was wearing some weird kind of boot. Could be ceremonial for one of the local tribes. Not every I
ndian is on a rez. I hear there are still Cheyenne and Crow about.”
I’d seen Apaches wear some peculiar stuff during their ceremonies. It wasn’t hard to imagine an Indian sporting something like this, though the depth of the impression bothered me. Could have been a man with someone on his shoulders.
“But why would someone do such a thing?”
“I’m just a white man. It’s hard for me to get into the head of an Indian. They have different dances and different ways of dressing for everything you can imagine. I’ve heard of some that believe in a wild man of the mountains. It’s kind of like some big, hairy bear that’s also part man. He’s said to be taller than any man, stronger than an angry bison and faster than a mountain lion.”
“Do you believe in it?”
Teta gave a quick laugh and I cut it off with a sharp look.
“No, I don’t. But they do. And when they believe hard in something, they do their damnedest to make themselves look like it. What this tells me is what I’ve thought all along. We have some rogue Indians out here keeping the white men away from their hills.”
The first cool breeze of the day whispered through the trees and shook the brittle leaves.
It sounded like small bones rattling in a jug.
Teta instinctively placed his palm on the handle of his Colt. “Suddenly, I don’t like being here with so much cover.”
“Me neither. Let’s get back to camp. I have to rethink things.”
Selma was quick to mount. Her head swiveled from side to side, anticipating danger everywhere. Poor girl had no experience with things like this. I had a good mind to bring her back to her father myself in the morning.
We had only gotten a few feet from the tracks when a piercing howl erupted behind us.
My insides went numb. All three horses reared.
I hoped to hell we didn’t get bucked.
Not with whatever was at our backs close enough to raise the hairs on our heads.
Chapter Seventeen
By some miracle, we all managed to stay saddled.
By another miracle, the howl was short and quick and not repeated. Our horses were spooked and all balled up. They snorted and whinnied some, but we managed to settle them down.
“What…what was that?” Selma said, stroking her horse’s neck and doing her best to calm the filly.
“Coyote?” Teta said.
“I ain’t never heard a coyote make a noise like that,” I said. “Wolf?”
“In the daytime? Highly unlikely.”
“Whatever it was, it sounded angry,” Selma said. We had our rifles in hand before she finished the sentence.
“I’m a curious man by nature, but I pick my spots. Let’s move out of here before the horses lose it again.”
We started at a trot and took it up to a hard and fast gallop. No more ungodly sounds followed us as we sped into the empty town.
* * *
“There’s never a dull moment here,” I said after we had hitched the horses and found a patch of shade to sit under.
“I wouldn’t mind one,” Teta said. He’d found a forearm-sized stick and was working away at it with his knife. He couldn’t whittle worth a damn, but he did know how to make a pretty pile of wood shavings.
Selma had regained her composure, but I noticed her stealing quick glances at the hills.
I asked her, “Any chance you’ll reconsider going back to your ranch? We’ll be happy to ride with you, make sure you get there safe.”
Her face screwed up and she said, “It’s going to take more than some Cheyenne boot prints to chase me off, Mr. Blackburn.”
“Please, call me Nat. I’m feeling old enough as it is.”
“And what about you, Mr. Delacruz?”
He put down his stick, removed his sombrero from his sweaty head and gave a small bow. “Everyone calls me Teta.”
Her cheeks bloomed. “I’d rather not,” she said.
He gave a short laugh. “Believe me, I could have been called worse things than a—” Teta struggled for the best way to put things. Most women we met didn’t know a lick of Spanish, so they didn’t think twice about the nickname that had all but replaced his God- given name. I enjoyed watching him squirm.
He cupped his hands over his chest to finish his explanation and Selma’s blush grew a deeper red.
“I understand. I’m almost afraid to ask how you came by that name.”
I held up a warning hand. “Don’t ask and he won’t tell. You don’t want to know. Sometimes a little mystery is best.”
Selma got up and said, “I brought something for you. Let me get my saddlebags.”
She slipped into the house and came back with a bottle of bourbon and a burlap bag. “I figured you might want something good to drink and eat.”
The bag was filled with eggs, apples, cans of beans, a sack of flour, bacon, a slab of beef, onions and bottles of different spices. We each grabbed an apple.
“Seeing as I’m the intruder, I’ll prepare supper. In the morning, I can find some game to keep you both well fed.”
“Good luck with that,” Teta said with a mouth full of crispy apple. “Even animals steer clear of this place. Plus it’s better if you stay close. Best to leave any hunting to us.”
Tossing some kindling down in the fire ring, she said, “I’m not a child. I will have a rifle with me.”
“We’re not children either,” he said, pointing an apple slice at me, “and we were hightailing it out of the hills just as fast as you before.”
“Teta’s right. We see anything, we’ll bring it back to you. If you’re going to stay here, you have to play by our rules.” I looked her square in the eye to let her know there was no sense arguing. She huffed a bit but then left to find wood.
When she was out of earshot, Teta asked, “Nat, you have an idea what those footprints really are?”
“Something we need to keep an eye on.”
After the best supper I’d had in a while, I rolled a smoke for me and Teta.
“Care to make it three?” Selma asked, scrubbing the pan filled with water over the fire.
The water hissed as it spilled over the edges.
I paused lighting my smoke and raised an eyebrow.
She said, “Don’t think that a good after-dinner smoke is something only the boys can enjoy.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen someone—” I had to choose my next words carefully, “—like yourself take to tobacco before.”
She steadied the pan on a flat rock and dried her hands on the front of her jeans. “Should I take that as a compliment?”
“Most assuredly.”
I offered her mine and put the lit match to it. She took a deep drag and held the smoke for a bit. She blew it out in one long breath over my head. She rolled her neck and I could hear tiny bones crack. “That feels good.”
Teta lay flat on the ground with his head on his saddle. He smoked his cigarette with his face to the sky and eyes closed. It was getting near nightfall and the pinks and purples bled across the horizon.
My stomach was full to bursting. Everything about Hecla and the mine had me on edge, but Selma’s cooking couldn’t be denied.
“Care to talk a stroll down the empty streets of Hecla?” I asked. She surprised me with a quick smile and said, “That sounds nice.”
“We won’t go far,” I said to Teta. He raised a hand but didn’t open his eyes.
I made sure to keep myself heeled. The last thing I wanted was to be caught without my gun in this place. I was tempted to give one to Selma as well, so we were doubly armed, but thought that might ruin the nice mood we were all in.
We walked side by side, Selma’s arm occasionally bumping into mine. We finished our smokes early on and took to ambling down the main street and staring into the wreckage
that was once the town.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“You can ask me anything you want. I can’t guarantee I’ll give you an answer.”
I kept a straight face but she saw through it quicker than a jackrabbit. She gave my arm a playful slap.
“Do you really know the president?”
“I sure do.”
“How did you come to meet him? He must think highly of you and…Teta to send you both out on a special mission.”
“Depends how you look at it. From my vantage point, I’m beginning to think he’s not our biggest fan. I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to this place.”
We walked in silence until she said, “And you met Mr. Roosevelt when…”
“When we were fighting with the Spanish. I was looking for something to do. I knew a man who had signed up to be part of Roosevelt’s cavalry and he asked me if I wanted to come along for the ride. I’m pretty good on a horse and not shy with a gun. Seemed like a good fit to me. So we headed out to Tampa, down in Florida, trained for a spell and headed out to Cuba. What I remember most about both places was the heat. It was so hot and wet it was hard to breathe most days.”
“You were in Cuba with the Rough Riders?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Everyone knows the Rough Riders. We’re not living underground. So I’m walking with an actual Rough Rider. Did you kill anyone?”
I nodded.
“Were you wounded?”
“Not in Cuba.”
I could feel her looking up at me. I kept walking, watching the shadows grow amidst the rubble of the structures that dotted Hecla’s streets.
“How did you and Teta meet?”
“In Cuba. He was a mercenary employed by the locals to help fight the Spanish. He rode with us, fought with us, saved my life, and I saved his. When the battle was over, his prospects weren’t good. A lot of folks wanted to take a crack at him, put him toes up. I convinced Roosevelt, who was our colonel then, to informally adopt him and take him back to the States with the Rough Riders. Since then, we’ve been kind of stuck to one another. When you place your life in another man’s hands and he comes through, well, that’s a bond that’s hard to break. Plus, he gives me a chuckle from time to time.”
