With a fire going I could see better, and I found another blanket to cover her over with. It was plain enough that two folks had been living here, though there was only one now. Likely there had been only one for quite a stretch.
The rifle had been cleaned, but the chamber was empty and there was no ammunition anywhere I looked. There was a flint knife with quite an edge to it--probably the knife used to cut my meat that first time.
Looked to me this girl had been living here quite some time, and by the look of her, not living too well. She was mighty slight, almighty slight.
When that water was boiling I fixed some coffee and, with my own jerked beef, made some broth.
Outside the thunder was rolling something awful and there were lightning flashes almost two or three a minute, seemed like, lighting up that gorge where the cave was. Rain was falling in great sheets, and when the lightning flashed I could see the rocks glistening with it.
Cap was down at our camp by himself, and the country would be filling up with mighty unpleasant folks. I was realizing that after a rain like this nobody could get back up that chute, and unless there was another way out, I was stuck And me with a sick girl on my bands.
When I had that broth hot, I held the girl in my arms and fed her some of it. She was out of her head, delirious-like. It seemed to me she had got back to the cave with her last strength, but she tasted that broth and liked it.
After a while she went back to sleep.
Back home on the Cumberland we did for ourselves when it came to trouble and sickness, but in a storm like this there was no chance to go out and get any herbs or suchlike. All I could do was keep her from getting chilled and build up her strength with broth.
Might be she only had a cold, and I was praying it wasn't pneumonia or anything like that. She was run down some, and probably hadn't been eating right. What she could get from her snares wouldn't amount to much, and she had no weapons to kill anything larger. What bothered me was how she got into this wild country in the first place.
While she slept I hunted around the cave and found a man's wore-out boots, and a coat hanging on the wall. I taken that down and used it for more cover over her.
Hours later, while the storm was still blowing and lightning jumped peak to peak, crashing like all get-out, she awakened and looked around, and called to somebody whose name I couldn't make out. All I could do was feed her some more of that broth, but she took to it like a baby to mother's milk.
All night long I sat by that fire, keeping it bright in case she awakened and was scared. Toward daylight the storm played itself out and went rumbling away far off down the mountains.
I rigged a line and went down to the creek. The chances of getting fish after the storm didn't look too good, with the water all riled. Nonetheless, I threw out a hook. After a while I hooked a trout and, about a half-hour later, another one.
Up at the cave the red-haired girl was sleeping quietly, so I went to work and cleaned those trout and fried them up. I started some coffee and then went outside.
Wandering around, I came on a grave. Actually, I could see it wasn't a dug grave, but a wide crack in the rock. Rocks had been rolled in at each end and the cracks tamped in with some kind of clay which had settled hard. Over the grave was scratched a name and a date.
JUAN MORALES 1790--1874
He had died last year, then.
And that meant this girl had been here in this canyon all alone for almost a year. No wonder she was run down.
Juan Morales had been eighty-four years old when he died. Too old a man to be traipsing around the mountains with a young girl. From his name he had been a Spanish man, but she did not look like any Spanish girl I'd ever seen. Yet I'd heard it said that some of them were blonde, so maybe they were red-headed, too.
I went back to the cave and looked at my patient. She was lying there looking at me, and the first thing she said was, "Thank you for the venison."
She had the bluest eyes.
"Ma'am," I said, 'I'm William Tell Sackett, Tell for short, and leaving the meat was little enough to do."
I'm Ange Kerry," she said, "and I'm most glad you found me."
Only thing I couldn't figure out was how a girl that pretty ever got lost.
Chapter IX
Ange had gone to sleep again so, after adding sticks to the fire, I went out and sat down in the mouth of the cave. It was the first good chance I'd had to look around me.
The valley where I found the gold was lonely but peaceful . . . this was wild. Sheer black cliffs surrounded it on nearly all sides, broken here and there as though cracked by some thunderous upheaval of the mountain. The foot of each crack ended in a slope of talus, with broken, barkless tree trunks, their branches thrown wide and white against the rock like skeleton arms.
The stream descended through the valley in a series of ripples and miniature cascades, gathering here and there in a pool, only to go tumbling off down into the wild gorge that seemed to end in space.
The trees that rimmed the canyon were dwarfed and twisted, leaning away from prevailing winds, trees that the years gave no stature, only girth and a more tenacious grip on the rock from which they grew.
Landslides had carried away stands of aspen and dumped them among the tumbled boulders along the bottom. Slabs and crags of rock had broken off from the cliff faces and lay cracked and riven upon the canyon floor. There was scarcely a stretch of level land anywhere, only here and there an arctic meadow or stretch of tundra. The rocks were colored with lichen--green, orange, reddish, black, or gray--crusting the rocks, forever working at them to create from their granite flanks the soil that would build other growth.
The matlike jungles of arctic willow hedged the stream in places, and streaks of snow and ice lay along cracks where the sun could not reach.
About an hour short of noon the sun came over the mountain and warmed the cave mouth. New streams melted from the snow banks, and I watched several mountain sheep go down a narrow thread of trail. A big old black bear showed on the mountain opposite. Had I shot him it would have taken me all day to get where he was. Anyway, he wasn't bothering me.
Despite the quiet of the place, there was something wild and terrible about it that wouldn't let me settle down. Besides that, I couldn't keep from worrying about Cap.
It was midafternoon when Ange Kerry woke up again, and I went back in and fixed her a cup of coffee.
She looked up at me. "You've no idea how good that tastes. I've had no coffee for a year."
Thing puzzles me," I said, "is why you came up here in the first place. You came with that Juan Morales?"
"He was my grandfather. He and my grandmother raised me, and when she died he began to worry about dying and leaving me with nothing. Grandfather had an old map that had been in our family for years, telling of gold in the San Juans, so he decided to find it for me. I insisted on coming with him.
"He was very strong, Tell. It seemed nothing was too much for him. But we couldn't follow the map, and we got lost in the mountains. We were short of ammunition. Some of it we lost in a rock slide that injured his shoulder.
"We found this place, and he was sure it was close by--the gold, I mean. He never told me why he believed it, but there was some position in relation to two mountain peaks. One was slightly west of north, the other due west.
"Grandfather must have been hurt worse in the slide than he let me know. He never got better. One of his shoulders was very bad, and he limped after that, and worried about me. He said we must forget the gold and get out as best we could.
"Then he became ill... that was when you came into the valley, and when I took some venison from you at night."
"You should have awakened me."
"I--I was afraid."
"Then when you came back and found the venison I left for you . . . you knew I was all right then?