Foxfire (44 page)

She shivered, and glanced quickly towards the black cave high on the cliff side, and she thought of the words in Professor Dartlands quotation from the Spanish, “...seems to have inspired both men with a great and strange fear...‘like an enchantment.'”

“I never heard such a bunch of crap,” said Hugh almost amiably. The hypo was beginning to work, and a clear, thrilling euphoria ran along his veins. “If all your metaphysical hashings mean you're no longer interested in your share of the gold mine, I assure you I couldn't be more charmed.”

She did not answer. She scarcely heard him.

The canyon walls pushed close around her. The valley grew murmurous with unquiet shadows, and she was afraid. Even when Dart came back, leading the stumbling burro and carrying the pack himself, she could not rouse herself from the numbing weight. She followed the familiar routine of making a proper camp at last, helping Dart boil water for the coffee, frying bacon, laying out the bedrolls on pine boughs beneath the pine shelter which he cut, and none of the homely chores seemed real. It was as though she performed them under water, struggling through dense resistance.

She showed Dart the crucifix and told him of her discovery, and wondered that he could take it so lightly, brushing it off, barely answering her or glancing at the crucifix. He needed no confirmatory evidence, not after the moment he had stood on the ledge and seen the lost pueblo of his ancestors. He was withdrawn from her, now as brusque as Hugh, the tentative closeness which had lately returned to them had gone again.

She tried to sleep that night, but she could not. The soughing of the great pines and the rippling of the little creek brought no comfort, for underneath their gentle music she heard a deeper note of warning, and of doom.

Turning and tossing in her blankets, she tried to reason with herself, tried to recapture the first mystic joy she had felt as she stood upon the ledge, telling herself that of course physical exhaustion gave one morbid fancies, that the valley was beautiful, and the little stone city. But she dared not open her eyes for fear of seeing the little city in the cavern. Earlier, before they went to bed, she had looked at it and seen it gleaming like a pearl against the black mountainside. There was no moon, and yet the cave glowed with an unearthly luminescence. She had finally pointed this out to the two men, and felt Dart stiffen beside her. Then he had laughed and said gruffly, “Phosphorescence from the old rotting beams. Nothing but foxfire!”

And Hugh had laughed, too. “Andy's positively oozing psychic whimsies tonight. Here, take this.” And he'd given her a sedative. But still she couldn't sleep.

Nor did Dart sleep, though he lay quiet. His gun lay cocked and near to his right hand. His senses all alert, he lay thinking. Downstream where he had led the exhausted burro, there was a narrow strip of sand. He had noted the flashing of a tiny puddle of wetness in that sand. The mark of some kind of footprint. It could have been made by mountain lion or bear, yet how could there be big game in this tiny rock-girdled valley? It could have been made by the ball of a man's foot.

Hugh did sleep, at least his body did, but his mind projected him into dreams as sharp and vivid as surrealist paintings. He saw Viola's face bent down to his in adoring welcome. He saw the separate hairs in her auburn curls as they sprang up from her white forehead. He saw the shining texture of her blood-red mouth, the down on her cheeks, the black mole beneath her left eye. He felt her warm breath on his face, and smelt her carnation perfume. She wore a crown of golden bay leaves, and as he kneeled before her she reached up to take the crown from her own head and place it on his.

“I knew you'd come, Hughie—” she said, bending closer, “because you're famous now—” And as she said this to him, her face changed, it grew sharp and sly as a fox, her lips drew back in a sneering grin. Her skin darkened and her eyes became muddy and full of hate—Maria's eyes, and Maria's voice burst into a mocking cackle of laughter....

He held a dagger in his hand and he plunged the dagger into the sneering, cackling mouth, but it met no resistance. The dagger fell impotently into space and faded away.—And yet someone was dead. He stood at the edge of a great chamber and watched a figure laid out on a bier, draped with black velvet. He could not see who the corpse was. But he heard the far-off sound of sobbing, and he knew that he, too, should mourn for the unknown dead upon the bier.

 

Daylight brought calm to the three who had spent the night in the lost valley, a tacit return to normal. The sun was shining, there was breakfast, and even water to bathe in. Dart and Amanda separately went up the canyon and refreshed themselves under the icy waterfall. On the way back from his trip to the fall Dart, hearing a fluttering amongst the bushes, had the luck to shoot a wild turkey, and bore it triumphantly back to camp. Fresh meat at last.

“We'll cook him for dinner when we get back from up there,” said Dart, nodding towards the cliff dwelling.

Amanda laughed. “When we get back from up there we'll all be rich, I guess.” Her fears and tremors of the night before seemed very silly in the sunlight.

“How much gold ore do you figure we can carry back on this trip?” asked Hugh. “Thank God that damn burro's leg seems better.” They all looked at Tonto, who was frisking clumsily on the grass. Hugh went on, “Of course, there'll be free gold, too, the account said so. We can get a hell of a lot of that in our knapsacks, and pack the rest on the burro.”

Dart glanced at him. Hugh's voice was faster than usual, louder and more clipped, the pupils of his eyes were contracted to black specks in a blinding green; but his ankle was certainly better, and excitement was natural under the circumstances. Dart turned his mind to practical considerations. He had not bothered to pan the gravel in the creek bed, for there seemed to be no sign of the black sand which meant gold; nor had he seen any evidence of float anywhere in the canyon. Still that did not prove much, and he could see that the cave which contained the cliff city was made of quartzite, which sometimes accompanied gold. He had no more doubt than the others that they were about to make a very lucky strike, and for the first time Dart allowed himself to wonder what he would do with his share. The logical thing would be to put it right back here to develop this mine into a going concern. The expenses of development in so remote a place would be enormous. Still, man had surmounted worse difficulties than this—why, even at Lodestone——His mouth tightened.

He hooked to his belt the carbide miner's lamp he had brought in the burro's pack, slung his pick over his shoulder and turned to the others. “All set?” He hesitated, then made the final practical decision. “We won't bother with the guns, Hugh. Nothing to shoot except maybe snakes, and you've got your Colt.”

Hugh nodded. Dart glanced at him keenly again. Hugh's face glistened with fine sweat, and he was lighting one cigarette from off the last. A circle of still smoking butts lay on the grass around him.

Dart walked over and stamped the butts out with his heel. “You'll cut your wind and we'll soon run out of cigarettes, too, if you smoke like that,” he observed mildly.

“You mind your own goddam business!” The green eyes were hard and blank as jade, the tremor of the freckled hands grew more pronounced.

I hope to God he doesn't crack up, thought Dart, this thing means too much to him, poor guy.... And did it mean so much to Andy, too? He usually avoided looking at the girl, but he did now.

She stood on the bank of the creek, breasting the gentle wind like a young Nike, waiting for him to give the signal to start. Her eyes were fastened on the cliff dwelling and he could not see their expression, but her cheeks were pink and her lips parted. She seemed very young and very eager. She'll have her chance, Dart thought. Chance to get away from me and all the things she hates.

 

It took them over an hour to zigzag through the talus of coarse, broken rock and up the tiny trail that clung to the edge of the cliff. A trail hewn eight hundred years ago from the living rock and worn by generations of patient feet plodding down to tire valley floor for water, and to cultivate the corn and pumpkin patches which had once fringed the creek.

Several times Dart and Amanda had to pause and wait for Hugh to get his breath. Dart offered to pull him up the steepest places, but Hugh stubbornly refused, as he shrugged off Amanda's concern about the ankle. He wanted no patronizing sympathy which might be held against him later. They might say he had np right to the gold, might say they'd dragged him along on sufferance, might try to cut his share. Though there was the document they'd drawn up with their signatures. Make that stick in a law court. But you need all your wits about you. Got to watch out.

The cliff city grew larger as they approached it. There were some fifty dwellings and squat towers all flung inside the giant cave like a tumbled pile of children's blocks. They were built of flat stones and mortared with adobe, and in full sunlight the soft, tawny hues alternated with black shadows.

It was the
hush
that Amanda felt as they pulled up the last stone steps and stood on the brink of the cavern before many low doorways. Not the quiet of the wilderness or the mountains, but an expectant hush, as though voices had but that minute stopped.

She moved off quietly from the two men, and walking to one of the doorways she stooped and gazed into a low room, raftered with round cedar beams. A ray of sunlight slanted down through one tiny window and illumined the age-old dust on the earthen floor. The center fire pit still held the remnants of charred embers, and a rough brown corrugated cooking pot stood upright beside the dead fire. Next to the cooking pot a smaller, finer pot lay fallen on its side. The pot was a brilliant buff polychrome in tiny red and black geometric figures under high glaze, and from its gently flaring mouth a stream of spilled corn still trailed out on the ground.

Amanda stepped over the high sill and stood just within the quiet room. She saw a stone metate with the mano resting in it, like those she herself had used in the rancheria on the morning of Saba's death. In the corner beneath the window there had been a bed, with a woven turkey-feather blanket, rumpled a little—as though someone had lately lain there. Beside the bed on the ground there was a string of rough turquoises half buried in the dust, and near to them two little yucca straw sandals, shredded and crumbling, but waiting there as they had throughout the centuries for their owner to come back.

Pueblo Encantado, she thought. And her eyes filled with sudden tears.

She heard Dart's voice calling to her, and she stepped back over the sill into the bright light of the open cave.

He saw the tears in her eyes, and his brows raised in surprise. She gestured towards the room, “They must have gone so quickly—everything just as they left it—waiting for them—the woman's pots—her jewelry—the child's sandals....”

His astonishment grew and he stuck his head through the door. He straightened up slowly. “Yes, the Anasazi fled in fear, the legend says.” He spoke in a repressive, curt tone, but then he added as though against his will, “You didn't touch anything...?”

“Oh, no,” she said smiling a little, “they wouldn't like it.”

He bent down to her, looking into her face, questioning, “Andy...?”

The hush deepened around them. It was shattered by Hugh's shout from the top of a watch tower just above where they stood. “What the hell are you two doing? I've been crawling through this labyrinth, but I haven't found anything promising. Where in the name of God would they put their inner cave?”

Amanda and Dart moved apart. The softness left his eyes, and he answered Hugh dryly. “Well, they certainly wouldn't put it up there by the roof. Come down and we'll hunt.”

They joined forces again. Led by Dart they stooped and crawled through the high-silled doorways, up and down levels amongst the many still rooms, penetrating ever back and south into the cavern. Some of the chambers had served as middens, or granaries—desiccated corncobs and the tiny bones of small game lay shin-deep on the floor. In others where the Anasazi had lived, there were the same evidences of panic flight as in the first room Amanda had entered. Stone knives and hatchets lay strewn pell-mell amongst shreds of yucca-fiber clothing, feather blankets, and many exquisitely painted pots and bowls and dishes.

“I suppose all this trash'd make a field day for an archeologist,” said Hugh viciously, “but we're not getting anywhere.”

“Yes we are,” said Dart. “I've been looking for the great kiva, and I'm sure this is it.” He stopped at the edge of a circular pit at the southeastern corner of the cavern. This he recognized as probably the main ceremonial chamber of the Ancient Ones, a place of secret rites, for in the center of the pit floor six feet below there was a sipapu, the hole made for quick passage of the spirits between the underworld and Earth, and at the back of the kiva, interrupting the stone bench which encircled it, there was an opening into a cave behind, as Dart had expected.

He jumped down into the kiva, and Hugh and Amanda followed. He turned on his carbide lamp and said, “Flashlights!” to the others. They snapped them on. But they had not far to go. The cave behind the kiva opened into a great rock chamber so vast that margins were lost in shadowy ledges and boulders. The circles of their lights showed them many dim forms lying at measured intervals, some on the ground, some raised a little on piles of rubble. They saw the gleam of polished brown skulls shining through the feather and yucca shrouds which once had covered them. They all lay, the quiet dead, drawn up in the fetal position as they had once been born, and around each grave clustered jewelry and weapons and their most beautiful utensils for comfort on the journey.

Dart stopped, the beam of his lamp wavered.

But Hugh pushed forward. “They're nothing but a bunch of mummies—corpses are no treat to me—my God, look!” His shrill voice echoed through the cavern.