Surra? Hosteen’s head turned ever so slightly; he linked to the cat in mental contact. Yes—Surra. There was an answering thrust of eagerness that met his wordless question. Surra—Baku—Hing had her maternal duties here, and there would be no need for her particular talents as a saboteur. With Baku and Surra, maybe no chance became a small chance. Their senses, so much keener than any human’s or Norbie’s, might locate those needful wells in the outback.
Now Quade broke the short silence with a question, deferring to his stepson with the respect for the other’s training and ability he had always shown. “A chance?”
“I don’t know—” Storm refused to be hurried. “Seasoned mounts, concentrates, water transport—”
“Supplies can be flown in by ’copter!” Widders pounced at the hint of possible victory.
“You’ll have to have an experienced pilot, a fine machine, and even then you dare not go too far into those heights,” Quade declared. “The air currents are crazy back there—”
“Dumps stationed along the line of march.” Kelson’s voice held a note almost as eager as Widders’. “We could plant those by ’copter—water, supplies—all the way through the foothills.”
The idea became less impossible as each man visualized the possibilities of using off-world transportation in part. Yes, supply dumps could nurse an expedition along to the last barrier walling off the Blue, providing there was no hostile reaction from the Norbies. But beyond that barrier, much would depend upon the nature of the territory the heights guarded.
“How soon can you start?” Widders demanded. “I can have supplies, an expert pilot, a ’copter ready to go in a day.”
Again the antagonism Hosteen had felt at their first meeting awoke in the younger man.
“I have not yet decided whether I shall go,” he replied coldly. “ ’Asizi,” he said, giving Quade the title of Navajo chieftainship and slipping into the common tongue of the Amerindian Tribal Council, “do you think this thing can be done?”
“With the favor of the Above Ones and the fortune of good medicine, there is a chance of success for a warrior. That is my true word—over the pipe,” Quade answered in the same language.
“There is this.” In basic, Storm again addressed both Widders and Kelson. “Let it be understood that I am undertaking this expecting trouble. On the trail, the decision is mine when there comes a time to say go forward or retreat.”
Widders frowned and plucked at a pouted lower lip with thumb and forefinger. “You mean, you are to be in absolute command—to have all the right of judgment?”
“That is correct. It is my life I risk, and those of my team. Long ago I learned the folly of charging against too high odds. The decisions must be mine.”
A hot glance from those coals that lay banked behind Widders’ eyes told him of the civ’s resentment.
“How many men do you want?” Kelson asked. “I can spare you two, maybe three from the Corps.”
Storm shook his head. “Me alone, with Surra and Baku. I shall strike up the First Finger and try to locate Krotag’s clan. With Logan—and Gorgol, if I am able to persuade him to join us—there will be enough. A small party, traveling light, that is the only way.”
“But I am going!” Widders flared.
Hosteen answered that crisply. “You are off-world, not only off-world but not even trail-trained. I go my way or not at all!”
For a second or so it seemed that Widders would hold stubbornly to his determination to make one of the party. Then he shrugged when glances at Kelson and Quade told him they believed Hosteen was right.
“Well—how soon?”
“I must select range stock, make other preparations—two days—”
“Two days!” Widders snorted. “Very well. I am forced to accept your decision.”
But Storm was no longer aware of him. Surra had flowed past the men to the door, and the urgency she broadcast brought the Beast Master after her. Dawn was just firing the sky but had not lit the mountains to a point where man and cat could not see that burst. Very far away, just on the rim of the world, a jaffered sword thrust up into the heavens. Lightning—but it was out of season for lightning, and those flashes descended and did not pierce skyward as these had done. They were gone before Storm could be certain he had seen anything of consequence.
Surra snarled, spat. Then Hosteen caught it, too, not truly sound but a vibration in the air, so distant and faint as to puzzle a man as to its actual existence. Back in the Peaks something had happened.
The scream of an aroused and belligerent eagle deadened the small sounds of early morning. From her perch by the corral, Baku gave forth another war cry that was answered by the trumpeting of Rain, the squeals of other herd stallions, the neighing of mares. Whatever the vibration had been, it had reached the animals, aroused in them quick and violent reaction.
“What is it?” Quade came out behind Storm, followed by Kelson, less speedily by Widders.
“I think ’anna ’Hwii’iidzii,” Storm found himself saying in Navajo without really knowing why, “a declaration of war, ’Asizi.”
“And Logan’s back there!” Quade stared at the Peaks. “That settles it—I ride with you.”
“Not so, ’Asizi. It is as you have said before. This country is ripe for trouble. You alone perhaps can hold the peace. I take with me Baku. If there is a need, she can come back for you and others. Logan, more than any of us, is friend to the clans. And the blood-drink bond is binding past even a green-arrow feud.”
He watched Quade anxiously. It was not in him to boast of his own qualifications, but he knew that his training and the control of the team gave him an advantage no other man now in the river valley had. Quade knew Arzor, he had hunted in the Peaks, but Quade and Quade alone could keep the settlers in line. To be caught between whatever danger lay in the Blue and a punitive posse headed by Dumaroy was an additional peril Storm had no mind to face. He had had a taste of Dumaroy’s hotheaded bungling of a similar situation months earlier when the Xik holdout post had been the object of the settlers’ attack.
Somehow Brad Quade summoned a ghost of a smile. “There is that in you which I trust, at least in this matter. Also—perhaps Logan will listen to hanaai, the elder brother, where he closes his ears to hataa, his father. Why this should be—” He was talking to himself now.
The horses were quieting, and the men went back to the house, where they consulted maps, located dump sites. At last Kelson and Widders bedded down for the day heat before flying back to Gal-wadi to set up the supply lift. Hosteen lay down wearily on his own bed only to discover that he could not sleep, tired as he was.
That flash in the Peaks, the ghost of sound or air disturbance that had followed it—he could not believe they were signs of some phenomenal weather disturbance. Yet what else could they be?
“ ’Anaasazi”—the ancient enemy ones,” he whispered.
Half a year ago, he, Gorgol, and Logan had found the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens, where the botanical treasures of as many different worlds grew luxuriantly and unwithered, untouched by time, just as the unknown aliens had left them in the hollow shell of a mountain ages earlier. There had been nothing horrible or repelling about those remains of the unknown civilization of space rovers. In fact, the gardens had been welcoming, enchanting, giving men healing and peace. And because of the gardens, the aliens had since been considered benevolent, though no further such finds had been made.