Steve came back down the trail leading the renegade horse. He was grinning broadly.
“Didn’t hurt you none, Johnny?” he asked.
“The damn thing tried to bite me,” John said petulantly.
“Hell, he was just a-playing. But you shouldn’t ought to dug them spurs into him. They’re just there so you can threaten him a little. He ain’t a bad pony, you treat him right. But don’t let him know that maybe he can get to be boss. Now get up on him and teach him some manners.”
“All horses are stupid.”
“They just like children, Johnny. Come on.”
He swung up into the saddle. The horse was very docile. John Logan grinned crookedly. He thought: Just waiting for another chance. The same as this damn country. Unfriendly. Evil. Deadly.
He sighed. Steve had started again. Fat chance of making anyone like Steve understand the cruelty and menace of the mountains. No imagination. Man was a soft animal. Man belonged down in the cities where he could protect himself. Anybody who trusted his flesh and bones to the mountains was kidding himself.
Burro and rabbit brush rubbed against the stirrups. As they climbed even higher toward the misted blue of the mountains, the air became aromatic with the thin, clear touch of sage.
Steve reined in and, when John Logan urged his horse up beside Steve’s, the leather-tough man said, “Them over there are Rocky Mountain Red Cedar. That stuff is juniper. The dark trees is pinon. Pine to you, Johnny. Smell how the air gets thinner. Pretty, ain’t it?”
Steve went on ahead after John had agreed grumpily. He thought: Might as well humor the man. He’s been reading too many Western stories. Thinks he likes this stuff. Makes me uneasy to look at a landscape and see no sign of man. Ought to be signs. Roads. Buildings. Ice-cold soft drinks.
A deep arroyo was marked by a line of huge cottonwoods, and in the foreground a stand of September squaw corn, the stalks stunted, the ears bulging. And ahead rose a towering wall of pines.
The dim trail wound into the cool blue shadows of the forest, out of the warm golden sunshine. A wild turkey disappeared into the red-bronze of the scrub oak underfoot. The shaggy pines stood tall and silent, squirrels chattering on the high limbs.
The horses began to heave as the trail narrowed and steepened. Steve stopped frequently to rest them and John Logan was glad of the chance to rest himself. The air in the pine forest was cool, and he seemed to sense an air of waiting, as though some grim spirit crouched back in the blue shadows and silently watched their progress with enigmatic smile. John Logan shivered and wondered why Steve Fowler seemed so untouched by the atmosphere of the place.
John Logan thought of Druid rites, of gnarled and evil wood spirits. His palms began to sweat in spite of the cool of the forest. He felt the spell of the ancient and the unknown.
They came to a cañon and, looking over the steep edge, saw the roaring stream dashing itself to snowlike whiteness against the rounded boulders. Steve dismounted and they led the horses cautiously down to an open glade where the stream made a perfect curve.
The sunlight shone in the glade, but it was a watered yellow, devoid of warmth. John shivered and when Steve built the fire he moved gratefully close to it.
“Tired, are you?” Steve asked. John nodded. “This ought to be far enough for today. I’ll get the saddles off the beasts and you fix spots for the bedrolls. Find hollows and fill them with pine boughs. Spread ‘em upside-down and get the fluffiest-lookin’ ones. No call to hopple the horses in this spot. They won’t climb out.”
John Logan’s body was filled with an aching weariness. Steve whistled as he worked. As dusk came, the tall pines at the top of the ledge seemed to grow even taller, and the blue shadows under them turned to velvet black.
Steve cooked and John was almost too weary to eat. They sat by the fire and it was night. The stream roared around them and something far back in the pine forest seemed to be laughing at them, slyly.
“You’ll get to like this country,” Steve said.
John smiled grimly in the darkness. “I hardly think so.”
“What brought you out here, anyhow?”
“Lungs. Had to come out here.”
“Bad?”
“Bad enough so I’ll have to stay out here the rest of my life.”
Steve clucked sympathetically. “Well, I couldn’t nohow stand seeing anybody sit around down there and look up at the mountains with that kind of sneering look you got. I feel like I own these mountains and like I got to show people what they’re like.”
“I appreciate your interest,” John said politely.
“Maybe I ought to do guiding.”
They were quiet for a little time. Steve tossed a chunk on the fire and the sparks fled upward.
“There’s something cruel about these mountains,” John said softly.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, they’re so big. Mankind hasn’t made a scratch on them. There are thousands of square miles that have never been seen by man. Actually they are the same as they were back in the dawn of history. Who knows what you might run across up in these hills.”
Steve chuckled. “The great stone lizard, maybe?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, foolish Indian talk. Their old men talk about some great stone lizard that lives up above the timberline. Been up here for centuries, the way they tell it.”
“It could be,” John said softly.
“Hell, man! You beginning to sound like the Indians. This here is rugged country, but it ain’t spooky.”
“It seems that way to me.”
“That’s like I was telling you. It seems that way to you because you don’t understand it.”
“I feel as though I understand things about it that you can’t see, Steve. You’ve been here all your life. Maybe you’ve been too close to it. It seems primeval to me. As though there was something in it that is full of implacable, stolid evil. Something that waits and watches and waits some more.”
“Man, you could almost give me the horrors with that talk. What did you used to do? Write ghost stories?”
“I worked in a stock and bond house in New York.”
“Maybe you should have writ ghost stories, Johnny. You let your mind run away with you. There’s bear up here, but they’re timid. Big cats sometimes, but they stay out of the way. Snakes in the rocks, but not up above timberline. ‘Course, the floods can get you if you get careless about the arroyos, and sometimes they’s a big rock slide, but nothing evil like you say.”
“It’s something in the atmosphere.”
“I was in New York once, Johnny. I stood on Times Square and got shoved around by a couple million people all hurrying off someplace. I didn’t know where they were going or what they were going so fast for. Raised hell with me, you know? Give me the shudders. They all had that tight look on their faces. Had to go back to the hotel and I felt like hiding under the bed. Same thing as you up here, Johnny. You ain’t used to it, that’s all.”
John Logan saw the native wisdom of his words. “Guess you’re right, Steve.” He yawned.
But a half hour later he looked up at the unwinking stars and the roar of the stream seemed to be whispering something to him in hoarse, damp words. Words he couldn’t quite understand. He huddled down deeper in the bedroll and licked dry lips. Far off in the pine forest something screamed in distant, futile horror. The sounds sent feathers of ice crawling up his spine. Deadly is the long night.
In his dreams he was pursued by the great stone lizard. He awoke bathed in icy sweat and it took a long time to go back to sleep.
In the morning his fears were nearly gone. They were tucked back in some cold chamber of his mind. The coffee had a wonderful smell and the water of the stream was an icy shock that awakened him completely. He was still stiff and sore, but not as much as he had expected. The horse didn’t seem as unfriendly and, when he mounted after leading it up the narrow cut in the face of the ledge, he even slapped it on the shoulder in a friendly fashion and said, “Good morning, you miserable beast.”