Suddenly I came to where the trail, if you could call it so, broke in two, with one way going on along the hogback, the other seeming to go out along the shoulder of an even higher ridge. That last looked a mighty bad place to go.
Here I must take a chance, for there was no time to search out both ways. The ridge would shield any light that showed from the land side, and as for the sea, I'd have to chance it. So, kneeling down, I struck a match, held it cupped in my hands, and checked the ground.
It was there, plain as a skunk on a log. The old man had dragged himself along here and taken that higher ridge trail.
Only it wasn't a trail. It was a thread of rock hung in space over several hundred feet of steep fall. Dark as it was, I couldn't see how far it was, but it was a-plenty.
So I started out along that shoulder. After a while the trail widened out, then narrowed down.
I'd walked a couple of hundred yards from my horse before I stopped to call out again. And this time I heard a faint stirring up ahead of me. Whether it was game animal or man, I couldn't tell, but I moved on, and suddenly there he lay in the trail ahead of me, face down on the rock and sparse grass where he'd been crawling.
His hands were skinned and chewed up from the rocks.
Beside him in the trail was a big sack full of something. I wished for the moon, which had gone from the sky a long while back. Well, there was mighty little time, so I scooped him up in my arms, and then reached down and got a hold of that sack, which was fearful heavy. Somehow, sweating and panting, I got them both back to our horses, and loaded up.
He came out of his faint when I was hoisting him up. "Can you hang on, or should I lash you up?"
"You start, boy, and you ride like hell. I'll stay with you."
He grabbed my wrist, and believe me, that old devil still had the power to hurt in that grip of his. "Boy," he said, "I've got to be stretched out in bed before there's anybody afoot at the ranch. Don't you worry about me. You just get me there."
I taken him at his word. Those horses were fixed up and a-raring to go, and we lit out of there fast, high-tailing it down off that mountain.
We hit that little village at a dead run, and a moment after we raced through, somebody ran into the trail and yelled after us, but we headed across the plains toward the ranch. And he stayed with me.
Old and weak he might seem, but there was grit in him, and we almost ran the legs off those horses until we were within a hundred yards or so of the ranch.
There was gray in the sky and a light was going in one of the vaquero shacks, but we slipped in, and I got him back through my window. Then I got him into his own bedroom, and he locked the heavy bag in a closet at the head of his bed.
Outside, I hurriedly stripped the gear from the horses and turned them into the corral.
Nobody was around, so I rubbed them down, and was working over them when a vaquero came out.
Well, he pulled up short when he saw me there working, but I just raised up and said, "Buenos dias, amigo." Then I added in English, "When do we eat around here?"
"Poco tiempo," he grunted, and went inside. So I kept on working over my horses, rubbing them down carefully, then forking hay into the corral, and going to the bin for a healthy bait of corn for each. They'd earned it.
When I walked to the house and stepped up on the veranda, Dorinda was standing there. She gave me a sharp glance and said, "You're up early."
"Now, ma'am," I said gently, "no such thing. You take any mountain boy ... he'd be apt to be up this early. Why, back to home we'd had the cows milked by this time, or if 'twas winter, we'd be out runnin' a trap line."
"I had no idea you were from the mountains," she said, and I don't know why, but suddenly I knew she lied.
"Have you seen Mr. Mandrin?" she asked.
"Me? Is he up and about?"
She came up close to me. "Tell," she put a hand on my sleeve, "please don't think me ungrateful. I've wanted to thank you for all you did and tried to do, but it wasn't possible. You see, those men would not have understood.
Someday I'll explain--was "Don't bother," I said. "Anybody who'd try to take an old man's ranch away from him doesn't owe me anything, least of all, explanations."
She stiffened up, her face went white, and those black eyes turned to poison, quick as that. "You are a stupid fool!" she said contemptuously.
"I shall explain nothing!"
She turned away from me, and I was just as pleased. I wanted no truck with that black-eyed woman, but the way I saw it, my troubles had only just begun.
About a half-hour later, when I was hungry enough to chew my own boots, they called us to breakfast, and about that time there were horses riding up outside.
One glance through the window sent me stepping back to my room to pick up a gun. It wasn't in me to wear a gun to any man's table, but this here was different. So I taken up a pistol and shoved it down behind my waistband within easy grasp.
Outside there I'd seen Dayton and Oliphant, that city man I'd first seen with Dayton and Dorinda. With them was Nolan Sackett. It was the first time I ever laid eyes on kinfolk of mine when I wasn't pleased.
There were some others, too, and one of them was a wiry, sallow-faced man with the snakiest black eyes you ever did see. He had a tied-down gun which some gunfighters favor, and a way about him that told me he figured himself a handy man with a gun.
When I walked into the dining room Old Ben Mandrin was already settin' up to table, and he looked at me just as perky as could be. "You're walking into trouble, boy," he said. "Are you with me?"
"I reckon we share enemies," I said.
Roderigo came in suddenly, and he glanced quickly at me--doubtfully, I thought, like maybe of a sudden I wasn't to be trusted.
The others showed up at the door.
"Come in! Come in!" Old Ben was smiling and easy, and it throwed them. I mean they didn't know what to make of him, for without doubt they had come to lay it on the line and tell him the ranch was theirs and he'd have to get off. You could see it in their eyes.
We all sat down to table, and me, I couldn't figure where I stood in all this. Seemed to me I wasn't getting any nearer the gold I'd lost, nor had I any clue as to where it was.
And Dorinda wasn't about to tell me, if she knew.
All my life I've been getting myself tangled up where it was none of my affair, and never could figure out why. Maybe it was just that I followed the easiest line, maybe I wanted too much to do things for folks, maybe I was just easily persuaded. Anyway, I was tangled up now.
Right from the start when I saw the black-eyed woman a-settin' there looking at me, a homely man, I knew I was shaping up for trouble. Yet no sooner am I shut of her than I get tangled up with this old man, and from what I'd seen of him he was fit to care for himself. ...
Well, maybe not that night up on the mountain.
If I hadn't carried him out of there he'd be waitin' for buzzards by now. But with a tough old man like that, you can't be sure.
This Dayton was a rugged man in his own way, but all polish and surface. I didn't take to him. But now he'd brought me face to face with my kin.
Nolan Sackett came in a step or two behind him, and we looked at each other across the room.
"You could be in better company," I said, right off.
He grinned at me. "Show's on you," he said. "You're one of those preachin' Sacketts."
He was as broad in the shoulders as I, and a right powerful man, maybe twenty pounds heavier, with a big chest and thick arms that swelled out his shirt sleeves until they were like to bust. His face was wider than mine, with a blunt jaw and a nose that had been broken sometime back, but he had the Sackett look to him, all right, and all we Sacketts favor, more or less.