CHAPTER VII.
The moonlight sent a slowly widening belt of silver along the top of the western wall of the gorge when they entered it. The stream was still high from recent rains, and it was so dark on the floor of the ravine that they were forced to pick their way along the narrow beach at what seemed to Strong's alarm and impatience a snail's pace, though the wise ponies did their best, with eyes far better than their masters' in the night.
Josefa had not been able to tell him more about the nature, of the back way that led out from the mesa and through which Lobo convoyed his Chinese in from beyond the Mexican line. It was no wonder he could fling his gold across the cantina bars and gaming tables with such an inexhaustible supply of the smuggled Orientals willing to pay high so that, in the forbidden country, they could make in a few years' effort the fortune denied them in their own land after the toil of a lifetime.
Once safely in the mesa's recesses, they would be taken after dark to Ramon's, when Lobo had bought the cantina out for the night, thence to be passed on as occasion offered, dispatched by the “underground” throughout the country, relayed through Chinese laundries in the settlements, helped and hidden out by the Chinese cooks on various ranches until they drifted at last into the great cities, merged in the web of Chinatown until the time came when they were ready to go back home without hindrance under false papers, easily enough obtained.
The Exclusion Act was a farce while holes like these were kept open. It was small wonder that the government was keen to plug them when they were found and to punish the principals.
But the Chinese did not cause Strong any concern, save that it had been his finding of the brass button that had once fastened the blouse loop of a coolie that had tipped off the source of Lobo's wealth and led to the assembling of forces that would ultimately eliminate Lobo's rascally pack and bring law and order to Laguna. He cared only to make his way through the cliff before the posse had broken down the fence and forced their entrance.
Strong rode in an agony of mind whenever he thought of what might be happening—what might have happened—to the girl, an agony that dulled his brain while it flooded it with hot, swift-moving blood and brought a red mist before his eyes. The sweat broke out on his forehead, and he clenched his fists until his nails dug into his horny palms. To have seen the one girl in all the world, alighting from the coach, filled with gayety and animation, looking at him with the blush that told of the mysterious affinity that had been established on sight between them, even as the electric spark bridges the gap between the nodes.
To have seen her thus, to imagine her getting into the buckboard with the hypocritical Rudd, chosen by Lobo because he was not likely to be known to driver or passengers, seated beside that killer, thief and criminal, asking questions about the ranch, her sister's welfare. And then the agony of entering the gloomy cañon—only to find that she was trapped—with Lobo's leering face appraising her as he stroked his black beard and his amber eyes.
Such things capped at his reason and his manhood. They threatened to unnerve him so that he could not even shoot straight—once they got through.
For the first time a doubt assailed him of that possibility. He gazed at the wall across the rushing creek, with the web of moonlight, slowly—all too slowly—widening, reaching down in tardy certainty, while he strove to recall how it had appeared opposite to where he had lost the hoof prints, had waded the stream. There was hardly any verdure on those steep heights, only a few shrubs here and there.
He remembered the face of the rock as he had examined it, looking for some ledge up which horses might travel. It revived itself now before his mind's eye, ribbed and seamed here and there, plain as the side of a building and almost as sheer, visible to his insight as an actual photograph. The course of the whole ravine was imaged in his brain. He knew the landmarks as they passed them though this was night and he had surveyed it by day.
They had passed the pool and the cataract. Ahead the ravine curved, narrowed, widened out again and curved once more to where they would see the ghostly wisp of the waterfall streaming down. Then, on their left, masked by projecting juts of rock, the stony trail he had come down. He would not miss that. How about the way in to the mesa?
They had dynamite with them, and pine which, steeped in kerosene, would act as flares to enable them to examine the face of the mesa wall or to start a ramping fire for the same purpose. They had passed plenty of driftwood, logs brought plunging down from the heights in the winter storms, stripped of bark, bleached, showing in the dark like the flayed bodies of dead beasts. Use of the explosive must be a last resort for fear it might warn those within.
He figured that he should have a good hour before the posse could reach the cañon. That would take Lobo's forces to the front at the first alarm. They would leave the girl—she might yet be unharmed.
The beach widened, the horses quickened their pace automatically. They sensed well enough the urge that communicated itself to them through the sympathy between them and their masters. Hurley brought his mount up even with the roan. Next came Maria's two boys with Juan, the cook, bringing up the rear. A forlorn hope it might have seemed, five only, but the same spirit animated all of them, save that it burned more strongly within Strong, lighted by the flame of the love that had come to him so suddenly and so imperiously.
Yet he knew that Hurley could hold no more of determination, and he did not doubt that the loyalty of the boys and the doughty little cook would prove valiant enough. For Miguel, there was his Josefa, for his brother, the pride or scorn of Maria, for Juan, his already established reputation in the fight against the raiders. And, in Hurley, there was the memory of years of steady friendship from Bramley to him, a cripple, barely able to earn his keep.
Hurley wore a grin in the darkness that was more happy than grim. He was going gleefully to help discharge the debt he had set against himself, going once more into the action that had been so long denied him, reviving once more the old turbulent times when Bill Hurley had been the cock of all the ranchos, an old cock, whose crow was rusty from disuse but whose spurs were ready for action.
He rode without ache or pain. What the mud had not purged away, excitement did. His right hand rested on the butt of his six-gun and occasionally he patted it. Old fire eater that he was, he loved the thrill of the encounter, the chance of the draw, the prize of penalty of the aim, the game for life and death with bullets for dice. He could still shoot and he was well satisfied with this adventure, even if it turned out to be his last, even if he went down with the smoke fading from his gun muzzles as the last breath went up out of his body. He would not lie there alone, he told himself.
“I reckon that mesa is reg'lar honey-combed,” he said to Strong in a low voice that the place seemed to call for. “Some of 'em is. I've gone through a heap of caves, mostly washouts, in the Mogollon. Some places they was open to the sky, rifts from earthquake, likely, reg'lar little valleys. I'll bet, now, thet Lobo found some sech openin' through thet cave they say the crick comes out of. Mebbe cliff dwellings. Them Pueblos knowed the inside of the mesa like a rat knows the run of a Swiss cheese.”
“They claim thar was a hull tribe massacred in Doom Cañon one time. Thet's how it got its name. I've been thinkin' about thet,” said Strong. “Looks like as if thar was any back way out, them Injuns would have escaped.”
“Not necessary,” returned Hurley and his words brought comfort to Strong. Doubt, assailing him, had brought up the position they would be in if they failed to find a way after all, if Rudd's drunken talk had been only babble and brag or if Josefa had misunderstood his thickening speech. By the time they had exhausted all their efforts in vain and, giving it up, had reached the Doom Cañon entrance again, the issue would be over,
“They might have got massacred all right an' then the water opened up a rift workin' through the soft soil between the rock. Mesas air built thet a way, like so much plum puddin', with the rocks fo' plums.
“It's thet way in the Mogollon. Lots of caves, you see, thet get gradually connected up by the water. Suthin' happened thet a way, likely, between the time them Injuns was massacred an' the time Lobo goes round lookin' for a likely place to run his chinks. With a back door, thet would be perfect, an' the big fence an' gate an' all across the entrance to Doom Cañon would make you think sure thet was the only way in or out.
“We're likely to meet them backin' up if we don't work our passage quick. If Uncle Sam once gits goin', them cavalry sojers'll stay with the job till it's ended. Likely they'll tote a field piece along. I wish thet moon would rise a li'le earlier. Sure moves slow, don't it, when you're watchin'?”
Strong did not answer. He was watching for landmarks in the dark, wondering what they should look for in the cliff. It might be a door of wood or steel, painted and perhaps sanded over so as to look like the native rock. That seemed like a romance of fiction. Let such an entrance fit ever so closely, he did not believe that he would have missed it on his previous inspection.
But there must be some way
The water actually washed against the northern cliff. The Chinese coolies might be brought on foot through the mountains but he doubted it. And this meant that the entrance must either be close to normal creek level for the horses to cross its threshold, or there must be some landing ledge, some practical trail leading to it. And he was quite sure there was nothing of that sort.
If there was a door it would open from within. There would have to be some one on hand to open it on call, some means of communication from the ravine that would summon the doorkeeper and, perhaps, a guard.
The problem grew as he neared the twisting way by which he had descended into the gorge. At last they came to the bend where they could see the filmy scarf of the waterfall and hear its rush above the chatter of the creek. Presently Strong stopped, held up a hand. The four gathered round him.
“Here was where I came down,” he said to Hurley. “It don't look much like a trail, does it? But here she was, with the sign leadin' into the crick. I rode across to see if thar was any way out on the other side but thar ain't. Now we'll go look fo' some sign of a door. Might be made some queer shape so's to fit in a natural fissure, or they may have squared the natural openin' off. It might be a man-made tunnel, but I doubt it. One thing's a sure cinch: if it ain't close to the water's edge, thar's got to be a trail leadin' to it. Git them torches goin' an' each grab one. Anything you see looks like it might be the place, holler out.”
Now the night was lighted by the flaring torches flinging a ruddy light on the cliff, reflected in the swift water like streaks of blood. They crossed the stream in the saddle, holding the kerosene-soaked wood high, examining every foot of wall from water line to as high as they could throw the glare. They searched for sign of ledge or trail, downstream as far as the creek bed could be waded and then up, where the boulders were not so large and the going easier. And they searched in a silence, save for the creek, the fall, the crackle of the torches, that momentarily seemed to close in about them in the lonely gorge.
“It sure beats me,” said Hurley at last. “I reckon thet fella Rudd must have been stringin' yore gal, Miguel. If they git beyond thet cliff I figger they've got to fly or else they're like the chap in the story I read when I was a kid, who come to the robber's cave an' says 'sesame,' or somethin' like thet, an' the rock rolled open an' in he goes to pick di'monds off the trees. Hell!”
He summoned the last note of exasperated invective into the exclamation of acknowledged defeat. Strong was still in the water, riding upstream. If there was a way in, there was just one place left to look for it, though so far it had not occurred to him as a logical one. Desperation suggested it but, as he splashed through against the current, finding the going quite easy until at last the roan was actually walking on sand, it seemed more possible and hope, that had nearly failed him, began to filter back again.
He had, in the beginning, supposed, quite naturally, that the raiders, once they entered the gorge, would follow the creek down and then swing north along the mesa wall to the home cañon. He now realized that he might well have been obsessed by that idea, contradicted though it seemed to be by the nature of the lower waters and the lack of sign on the sand. He had gone as far up the gorge as the beach permitted, and he had ridden up the bed of the creek, examining the opposite cliff, almost as far as he had come to-night.
Just ahead was the basin into which the fall emptied, foaming and bubbling, undoubtedly deep with the age-long pounding of the high cascade, its sides sheer rock about which the eddies circled darkly, untouched by the gleam of his torch. To examine it would have seemed folly at any other time save this crisis when it looked as if his hunch was to be a lamentable failure, as if his impetuosity had defeated itself.
The pool was roughly circular. At its head was the cliff down which rushed the fall from mysterious sources that only the eagle and the buzzard knew—a never failing supply.
At its foot was a smooth-lipped outlet between low ledges where the creek commenced, coming out with oily smoothness in one surging wave. It was all streaked with foam and dark with suggestion of slippery sides tunneling down to the bottom. Man and horse, or man alone, once in that whirling pool, would be, one could imagine, like a rat in a bucket. But there were places where the surface was fairly smooth, where the flow seemed, by reason of some inaquality of the lining, to lack force. So to the right of the pool, Strong fancied.
The roan did not like the place. It was like a pit, damp and smelling of water and lichens, of decay and things primeval. If a horse has memory, something might well have stirred there to revive ancient days when its ancestor came to that pool to drink and some frightful monster arose and dragged it down. At last it refused to go closer to the margin, to the break where the black water slipped through. Yet its footing was still good—surprisingly so.
Strong rode back to the end of the beach where the rest stood about a fire they had kindled which flung their shadows grotesquely about. He took a fresh torch and kindled it, dismounted, selecting a long branch from the drift they had brought together for their fire.
“Have you found somethin'?” asked Hurley half-heartedly.
“Not yet. But thar's sure one funny thing. The bottom of thet crick is all-fired level up thar close to the pool. My hawss don't like it, but it's mostly on account of all thet water tumblin' down in front of him an' the pool looks bad. I ain't so dead sure it is. I'm goin' to find out.”
They watched him as he waded the icy water—thigh-deep, waist-deep, up around his ribs. He had taken off cartridge belt and guns, and he went on, slowly emerging again as he neared the pool. It looked as if he was mounting a ramp and, beneath his feet, the rock felt foreign to the surrounding formations—almost artificial. Then he was on the edge, less than ankle-deep beside the smooth-lipped notch where the main flow came through.
They saw him holding the torch at various angles, probing with his pole. Then, gingerly stepping down into the pool itself, proceeding more boldly, close to the right-hand wall and with the water no higher than his calves at any time, he went partly through and barely behind the showering spray of the fall itself and disappeared!