In the country outside the valley, Janna had spotted ancient trails in the past simply by standing on a ridge and allowing her eyes to go slightly unfocused. When she lost the finest edge of visual acuity, other patterns came to light, vague lines and odd shadows. Most often they were simply random lines in a wild land, but sometimes they were ghost trails no longer used by man.
Crisscrossing the area around the ruins, Janna searched for any trail, new or old. She found nothing on the ground but grass, brush, rocks, sunlight and signs of her own passage. She urged Zebra farther into the ruins. The angle of the sun made shadows spill out from crumbling stone rooms, as though darkness had breached stone dams and was welling up to fill the valley beyond.
A frisson of uneasiness ran through Janna. She had always avoided the ruins in the hours beyond midafternoon, when the descending sun played odd tricks with light and shadow and stone. All that drove her farther into the ruins now was the certainty that nothing a ghostly Indian had to offer could be worse than what waited beyond the cleft in the form of flesh-and-blood renegades.
No matter how Janna focused her eyes or didn't, tilted her head or held it straight, narrowed her eyelids or widened them until her eyes ached, she saw nothing on the ground to suggest an ancient, forgotten trail. Working out from the room in which Mad Jack had stored his gold, she quartered the open space. She found nothing she could be sure was Mad Jack's sign rather than her own or a random displacement of pebbles.
The farther back into the ruins Janna went, the narrower the canyon became. Stone rubble covered the ground. At first she assumed the rocky debris was the result of stones falling from the surrounding cliffs, but the farther back into the narrow throat of the canyon she went, the more she was struck by an odd thing-in some places the rubble looked as though it once had been level, as though broad steps or narrow terraces had once climbed up the throat of the valley.
With growing excitement Janna followed the frayed remnants of what might once have been a well-built path snaking back and up the broken ramparts of stone that surrounded the hidden valley. Behind Zebra a pebble rolled under Lucifer's feet. The mare snorted and shied at the sound, giving vent to her nervousness at being asked to take a trail that showed every evidence of getting more and more narrow while going nowhere at all.
"Easy, girl," Janna said soothingly, stroking the mare. "There's nothing around but you, me, Lucifer and a lot of rock. The shadows just look scary, that's all. There's nothing in them but air."
Under Janna's urging Zebra climbed the steepening path. The farther along she went, the more Janna's hopes sank.
What had once looked like a wide path was rapidly degenerating into a jumble of stone that resembled nothing so much as the debris that always built up at the foot of stone cliffs.
Janna's hopes sank when Zebra scrambled around a tight corner and was confronted by a rock wall. Nothing that in any way resembled a trail broke the sheer rise of stone. Apparently Janna had been following a random chute paved with fallen rocks rather than a ghost path left by an ancient people.
For a long time she simply sat, staring at the end of her carefully constructed and entirely false logic of hope. However Mad Jack might have come into the valley, it wasn't this way; and this had been by far the best hope of finding his path. The other possibilities-the random ravines and slender runoff gullies and crevices that opened into the narrowest end of the valley where Janna was-were much less likely to lead to the top of the plateau than the ground she had just covered.
But Janna had no choice except to try the other possibilities. No matter how small they were, they were better than the chance of sneaking past Cascabel and his renegades while they were camped outside the valley's only exit like a horde of hungry cats waiting at a mouse hole.
There was barely enough room for Zebra to turn around in order to head back where she had come from. Lucifer saw Zebra turning and followed suit. He led the retreat over the rough ground at a brisk trot, relieved to be free of the narrow passage between broken walls of stone. Zebra was equally relieved. She followed after the stallion eagerly.
They had retreated no more than a hundred feet when Janna noticed a small ravine that she hadn't seen before, for it joined at an oblique angle to the main passage and was walled off by a pediment of stone. Immediately she turned Zebra toward the side ravine. The mare tossed her head, not wanting to leave Lucifer and enter the narrow gulch.
"Come on, girl. There's nothing up this trail but stone and shadows and maybe, just maybe, a way out of here."
Zebra didn't budge.
Janna stopped using pressures of her hand to guide the mare. Instead, she pulled on the knotted hackamore reins Ty had insisted that Zebra be trained to wear. Reluctantly the mare turned away from Lucifer and walked into the gulch. Once past the rocky outcropping that guarded the ravine's narrow mouth, the passage opened out again, becoming wider than the slot where Ty waited for a renegade who was brave or foolish enough to show himself.
Janna didn't know if it were wishful thinking or truth, but it seemed to her that the new path had once been made more level by a series of broad steps composed of stony rubble, which followed the steep rise of the ravine farther and farther back into the body of the plateau. The steps, or ramps, had since largely crumbled and been washed away beneath torrential rains, but enough remained to give a mustang adequate footing.
To Janna's surprise, Lucifer followed, as though determined not to lose sight of Zebra in the midst of echoing stone ravines. The path snaked higher and higher, sometimes scrambling over stony ridges to follow a different runoff course up the broken walls that constituted the western side of the valley.
There were places where Janna was certain that rock must have been hammered away to make passage possible. In other places she was just as certain that nothing had touched the trail but wind and water, sun and storm. Then she would see gouge marks on the stone and wonder if they weren't the result of intelligence rather than past landslides.
The trail came to yet another narrowing of the branching network of runoff channels that covered the eroding face of the western ramparts of the valley. Without being urged, Zebra scrambled and lunged over the small rise, for there had been many such changes of direction in the past half mile.
There was sun shining on the rise, for they had climbed far enough to be beyond the reach of lengthening shadows. Janna shaded her eyes and looked ahead, confidently expecting to find an obvious way to proceed. She saw nothing except a lateral crack in the stone cliff, but the crack was too small to be called a passage. Turning slowly, she looked over her trail. Her breath came in with a sharp sound. She was nearly to the top of the stone ramparts that surrounded her hidden valley.
"There has to be a way to get out from here," Janna said aloud as she stroked Zebra absently.
For several minutes Janna looked at the dubious lateral crevice that angled up and across the remaining cliff. The narrow ledge she saw might or might not lead to the top of the plateau. If the ledge ended short of the top, she would be stuck; there was no place for a horse to turn around. If the mustangs entered the crack they would be committed to going up, not down.
Janna slid off Zebra, then pressed the mare's nose in a signal for her to stay behind. Ears pricked, nostrils flared, the mustang watched her mistress take the narrow trail. Janna looked back only once to assure herself that Zebra wasn't going to stray.