“Ain’t she something, though?” a man standing beside Longarm said with unconcealed admiration. “Too bad she’s a damned man-hater.”
“Yeah,” Longarm replied before he wheeled around and went up to his hotel room.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon,” Miranda said when he entered their room. “I had the impression that you would be gone all day.”
“I would have been,” he said, “but I met the people I wanted to see coming into town for supplies.”
“Did you learn anything new?”
“Not much,” he said. “But I expect that we’ll know quite a lot more after visiting Mesa Verde and talking to those two Harvard archaeologists.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Famished,” he said, “for you.”
Miranda giggled and came into his arms. Longarm carried her to their bed and they made love until sunset, then went out to get some food to eat.
They went to bed right after dinner, and the next morning they were up quite early. According to their arrangement with Matt Horn, they were simply to pack their clothes and come over to the livery where he would be waiting to take them up to Mesa Verde.
“It’s chilly out this morning,” Miranda said as they moved across the nearly deserted street toward the livery.
“Yes, and imagine what it will be like up on the mesa,” Longarm said. “I have a feeling that we should have made this trip a few months earlier.”
When they reached the livery, they were surprised to find that it was dark and seemingly empty.
“This is odd,” Longarm said. “I had expected Matt and his brother to be up and about. Matt said that it was a two-day ride up to the cliff dwellings, and I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t be here.”
“Me neither,” Miranda said. “So what shall we do?”
“I’ll find a lantern,” Longarm said, striking a match. “And then we’ll go ahead and saddle the horses and do whatever we can to ready ourselves for the trip. Maybe Matt and his brother just overslept.”
Longarm held the match up and entered the livery barn. He heard a horse nicker anxiously, and then he saw a lantern hanging from a nail affixed to a thick post. Lighting the lantern, he adjusted the wick and removed it from its place. He’d just turned around to tell Miranda to come inside when something out of the ordinary caught his eye.
“Custis?”
“Miranda, just stay where you are for a minute,” he called, moving forward toward a pair of boots that were barely sticking out from under the gate of a nearby stall. “I’ll be right with you.”
The boots were attached to the body of Matt Horn. The guide’s throat had been cut from ear to ear, and blood covered the straw upon which he rested.
“Holy Moses,” Longarm whispered before he knelt beside the body and did a quick inventory.
Horn’s pockets had been rifled, and there was nothing of value on his person.
“Custis! What’s the matter in there!”
Longarm backed out of the stall and closed the gate behind him. He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that Matt’s brother Joe was also dead. Miranda, meanwhile, had entered the livery, and when she saw Longarm’s expression, her hand flew to her mouth.
“I want you to wait over here,” Longarm said, leading the woman across the barn floor to a place near the door. Outside, the sky was turning a salmon color with sunrise.
Longarm made a quick search of the entire livery, and he found Joe’s body covered with hay, his throat also cut wide open. Like his brother’s, Joe’s body had been searched and robbed.
“Miranda,” Longarm said, “I’m afraid that Matt and his brother were both robbed and murdered sometime last night.”
“Oh, my God!”
“We’ll need to report this, of course, and get an undertaker out here as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t think that there is one in Cortez,” she told him. “And it’s probably too small to have its own marshal.”
“Then the nearest one will be in Durango,” Longarm said, thinking about Marshal Seth Palladin and wishing there were someone—anyone—else he could notify. The very last thing he wanted was to bring Palladin into this double murder.
“Let’s get out of here,” he decided aloud. “Let’s just take our horses and burro and ride on up to Mesa Verde.”
“And leave them here like this?” Miranda cried, her face reflecting horror. “Custis, we can’t do that!”
“We can’t do a thing for them now,” he said. “And while the murders appear to be robberies, that might not be the case at all.”
“You mean-“
“I mean that someone might not want us to reach Mesa Verde and is doing whatever they can to discourage us. That’s why I think we ought to just go on up while we still can. Someone will discover the bodies in an hour or two, and by then we will be well on our way.”
“All right,” she said, looking pale and shaken. “Let’s just go!”
They saddled their horses, found the gear that Matt had collected for their trip, and lashed it down on their burro.
“We’ll ride out the back way and then circle around south,” Longarm said, anxious to be out of Cortez and on his way to the cliff dwellings.
“I can’t believe that this happened,” Miranda said. “Matt was so young and strong!”
“I know,” Longarm said. “Whoever murdered him must have sneaked up behind him and killed him before he had a chance to fight back.”
“This is horrible!”
“It could get worse,” Longarm said. “Miranda, if you want, we could go back to Durango, I could put you on a stagecoach for Pueblo, and from there you could get to Denver.”
“No! I’m not going to run out on you now.”
“It would be the smart thing to do,” he told her.
“Smart thing or not, the answer is still no!”
“All right then,” Longarm said grimly as they pushed hard for the southern mesas. “We’ll just have to find our own way up to Mesa Verde and, once we arrive, take our chances.”
Chapter 13
The trail up to Mesa Verde was easy enough to follow, and two days later, Longarm and Miranda came upon their first Anasazi ruins.
“Would you just look at that!” Miranda cried with excitement. “It’s so big!”
These were mesa-top ruins, and Longarm had read enough about Mesa Verde to know that the Anasazi people had lived and farmed up on the flat mesa centuries before building their famed cliff dwellings.
When Longarm and Miranda reached what appeared to be an ancient village made entirely of rock, logs, and mud, they dismounted and stepped forward to investigate.
“How big was this?” Miranda asked, looking up at the high rock walls. “And how old?”
“I have no idea,” Longarm answered. “But it will be fun to have a look around.”
The ruins were silent and overgrown with grass and even some pinyon pines, yet they were substantial and still impressive with their stairways, round ceremonial pits, and sturdy rock walls. Longarm was greatly impressed by the industry of a people who must have labored for generations to create these silent stone edifices.
“Come this way,” he said, leading Miranda around a broken wall and then coming to the entrance of what appeared to be a corridor of small, dark rooms.
“I wonder how many people lived in this village,” Miranda said, ducking through a narrow doorway into the series of connecting compartments that were less than ten feet square.
“I would expect at least a hundred people once lived in this place,” Longarm said.
Miranda craned her head back. “Look how solidly they built their roofs. Why, I bet horses could have ridden over them and not fallen through.”
It was true, even if these people had lived in this place long before the Spanish conquistadors first brought horses to North America. The light was poor, but Longarm could see that the Anasazi had used logs to cover their rock-walled compartments, and then had filled in the roof cracks with mud mixed with leaves, grass, and bark, which had, in turn, been covered by a deep layer of rock and dirt. Most of the small rooms were connected by key-shaped doorways, which Longarm had trouble squeezing through because he was so much larger than the ancient ones who’d lived and raised their families there.