Norton, Andre - Novel 15 (30 page)

 
          
 
Ritchie rolled a stone from hand to hand.
"Shall I try the artillery again?" He was glad to find his voice as
normal and level as usual. "That wind is coming up, and the sound may
cover climbers—"

 
          
 
"Take it careful when you do. I'll try to
cover you—"

 
          
 
Ritchie reached up and felt along with his
left hand for the edge of the slab. And it was well he had been so cautious,
for a shot chipped the stone only an inch from his questing fingers. He heaved
the rock he had been holding and hoped for the best. But the angle of that last
shot bothered him. Surely it had not come from the other pinnacle. Herndon
confirmed his suspicions.

 
          
 
"They seem to have discovered the back
door. We're between two fires now."

 
          
 
The Sergeant was tugging off his worn boot.
Ritchie, a nerve twitching under his eye, did the same. The loop of hide was
small, but he forced his toe into it. Tight but it would serve.

 
          
 
It was so gloomy now that it was difficult to
see the pinnacle of the snipers. And under cover of the storm all the Apaches
must be drawing in, a pack of wolves about a buffalo, still wary but ready for
the finish. Lightning flashed again, and by its searing beam Ritchie saw a
crawling shadow. He fired.

 
          
 
As if that shot of his had been a signal,
sound rose to fill the basin. It began as a low wailing moan that swelled into
what might have been a scream torn from a hundred tortured throats. About them
the very air curdled with that weird singing. Then, as suddenly, it was gone.
They crouched shoulder to shoulder waiting.

 
          
 
Again the moaning swept along the tower-topped
pinnacles, as if those who once dwelt there were raising their voices in a last
cry of misery and death. Ritchie could not still the shaking of his hands.
Nothing he had ever heard in his life had sounded so fearful.

 
          
 
When for the third time, that keening began to
sweep along the
ridges,
there was a chorus of sharp
cries from the basin. Herndon shook alertness into Ritchie.

 
          
 
"Out on the ledge—" The Sergeant had
to yell to be heard above the wailing. "Shoot to kill!"

 
          
 
They scrambled over the barrier and looked
down into the basin. A knot of red-turbaned men huddled there, facing outward
as if to front an invisible enemy. As they watched, two more Apaches fled
across the open ground to join their kin.

 
          
 
If Herndon fired, the sound was swallowed up
in the rousing crescendo of the storm. But one of the Apaches was falling. His
fellows stampeded away from him as if they believed he had been struck down by
supernatural forces.

 
          
 
Lightning made a burst of purple light to run
straight down the cliff opposite them, blinding them for the moment. When
Ritchie could see again, the Apaches were cowering flat on the ground.

           
 
Then the rain broke. It came, moving like a
curtain with the wind to drive it, a wind which set rocks rolling from the
walls of the ruined tower behind them. The Sergeant had risen to his elbows
and, shielding his eyes against the drive of the rain, was trying to sight the
Apaches when a large stone bounced once on the ledge between them and went
over. Ritchie simply lay still, letting the falling water beat down the length
of his body, licking at the streams of it which ran across his sunbaked face
and parched and broken lips.

 
          
 
"Can't stay here!"
To be heard, Herndon had to drop his head almost check to cheek with Ritchie.
"Be smashed flat by a slide—"

 
          
 
He pulled the carbine out of Ritchie's hands
and shoved it and the rifle to the back of the ledge.

 
          
 
"Take your knife— Climb down into the
open!" The words were torn away by the wind, but Ritchie had heard enough
to start him moving.

 
          
 
With his knife between his teeth he went over
the lip of the narrow passage. The stones cut his feet, but he reached the
ground speedily. Nature was now aiming rocks in an artillery barrage of her
own. Ritchie had barely time to move aside when Herndon came down the same way.

 
          
 
They were still concealed by the debris of
other rock-slides and the fury of the rain. But the Sergeant flattened himself
against a rock and began to move in the general direction of where the Apaches
had last been sighted.

 
          
 
Ritchie was about to follow when a snarling
white thing launched out of the shadows. Diego's dog! Instinctively he threw up
his arm, just in time to cover his throat. Fangs ripped his flesh before the
dog tried for another hold. Ritchie stabbed desperately with his knife and felt
the blade bite at least once. But the dog
crouched
snarling, lips curled back over viciously sharp teeth.

 
          
 
Ritchie kicked, trying to stop the third
attack. His heel sent the small beast spinning, to come up with deadening force
against a rock. Hoping it was stunned Ritchie got away as quick as he could.

 
          
 
The curtain of the rain still hung heavy, but
it did not entirely hide the bank of the ancient river which was deep-cut,
arroyo fashion, in the soil. And down this was now moving a murky wall of water
five feet or more in height.

 
          
 
There were men below scrambling to clear the
racing flood. The
majority were
clambering up the
opposite side of the stream; only two came toward Ritchie. One of these
appeared to be crippled; he crawled along on hands and one knee, dragging his
right leg as a dead weight. When he reached the slope up which he must win to
safety, he tried to pull himself up, twisting painfully to clutch the soil
which only crumbled under his frantic fingers. His companion paid him no heed
but threw himself at the rise and made up it in all haste.

 
          
 
The wall of water moved on, beating down sand
and gravel. Ritchie watched the crippled Apache turn to look. His hands dropped
to his sides, and he crouched, a snarl on his thick wide mouth, facing death.
The water swirled, and he was gone as the flood made a barrier between the
survivors. It had grown so dark that Ritchie had lost sight of the men across
the stream.

 
          
 
But there was the matter of the man who had
safely reached this side. Ritchie hunched his shoulders against the force of
the rain. The fellow hadn't carried a gun, but in this dark a knife would be
even more dangerous. And where was Herndon?

           
 
Ritchie moved along the riverbank, trying to
see in all directions at once. The roaring of the water was almost as hard on
the nerves as the moaning wind had been.

 
          
 
And it was this roaring which covered the
sounds of the
Against
the light-colored rock of one of
the pinnacles he saw a dark shape like a charging animal. And before he
fight
until Ritchie almost stumbled over the fighters, could
move, it threw itself forward to strike with a forceful impact against another
body. There was a flash, which might have been a knife, but when they tangled,
it was more flesh against flesh than steel against steel.

 
          
 
Who was friend or who was foe in that tangled
mass Ritchie could not tell. With his knife in his hand he could only wait and
hope for some sign to identify the wrestlers. One of them was on his back now,
and the other knelt upon him. This time the knife was in that hand which came
down in one hard, driving stroke. The man on the ground quivered, and his head
rolled limply back.

 
          
 
The victor hesitated a long moment as if
looking for further signs of life. Then he hurled his knife from him before he
rolled over convulsively to lie almost as still as the man he had just stabbed.
Ritchie's knife went back into the sheath; then he leaped across the trampled
ground. He linked his hands under the victor's armpits and tugged him farther
up the slope.

 
          
 
Already the water of the newly born river was
eating up the ground, carrying off huge bites closer and closer to the body.
Ritchie was not satisfied until he got the Sergeant into what seemed a safe
enough nook out of the path of the river.

 
          
 
Herndon was shaking as if a fever chill racked
his thin body, and he was no longer conscious of where he was or what had
happened. Without fire or blankets there was little Ritchie could do except to
hold him close and hope that the warmth of his own body would in time make some
impression on the icy cold which seemed to encase the other.

 
          
 
Ritchie peered out between two of the boulders
behind which they sheltered. The storm, he decided, must be in its final phase.
The driving wind was gone, and the rain was no longer so hard or steady. He
trusted that the Apaches were thoroughly demoralized and that the hunt would
not be up again tonight. All he had for defense was his knife.

 
          
 
The slash which the dog's teeth had opened on
his arm smarted. He held it out at a stiff angle for the rain to wash. The
terrible shudders which had shaken the Sergeant were coming at longer
intervals. Under Ritchie's fingers searching blindly in the dark, Herndon's
skin did not feel so deadly cold. His own jaws cracked in a gigantic yawn. He
could no longer force his tired brain and body into the work of lookout, scout,
or guard. His head drooped forward until it rested upon Herndon's, and in a
moment he was asleep.

 
          
 
Ritchie was conscious of the heat even before
he opened his eyes, of the heat and
a
weight which
pressed his shoulder and side into numbness. He screwed his eyelids against the
glare of the rising sun. He was empty and hungry.

 
          
 
Still trying to shield his eyes from the sun,
he attempted to move, and his struggle was answered by a protesting sigh.
Herndon was curled up against him. The bones of his skull were sharply marked
under the dirty skin, but even in sleep his jaw was still set stubbornly.

 
          
 
Ritchie gasped as he straightened cramped
muscles and edged out from under Herndon. The torrent that had filled the river
bed the night before was now only an oily trickle. But some of it had been
caught in depressions and held in cupped abundance. He crept down to the
nearest of these and sloshed first hands and then face. Then he drank the
precious stuff.

 
          
 
Spitting sand, he sat on his hunkers. Save for
the towers, stark, dead, and clear against the morning sky, the valley held no
trace of man. If the Apaches had survived, they were gone.

 
          
 
That thought made him remember the last
struggle in the dark, and he padded along to the battleground. The body they
had left there was gone, perhaps swept away by the flood. But from between two
stones the Sergeant's knife winked out in the light. Rain had washed it clean.
Ritchie picked it up and went back to where he had left its owner. But before
he reached their shelter, he stopped short.

 
          
 
A line of prints was cut in the sand, prints
oddly smeared as if that which made them had fallen to drag
itself
on. Diego's dog!

 
          
 
He followed that strange trail down past the
battleground to the very edge of the shrunken stream. A harsh sound,
half-snarl, half-bark, warned him off.

 
          
 
Almost buried in the sand that the flood had
loosened was a body. Ritchie did not try to uncover the hidden face. He could
well guess who lay there because of the dog which still bared fangs in defense
of the dead. So it had been Diego the Sergeant had fought, just as it had been
Diego's voice raised in triumph as they had ridden into this nightmare venture
days ago. And with the Mexican renegade dead, the men he had led so long might
well abandon the hunt—

 
          
 
"We can't leave that hurt dog!"

 
          
 
The Sergeant had come up. Now that he was on
his feet, his face had lost the fragility it had shown in sleep. It was true
that he was not the same man who had ridden out of
Santa Fe
, but if he were only a shadow of his former
self, it was a shadow fashioned of whipcord and steel. Now he picked up a small
stone, balancing it in his hand a moment before he threw with the same expert
precision that had served the tower artillery. The stone hit squarely and there
was not even a yelp as the little white body fell across that of its master.

 
          
 
"It's Diego-"

           
 
"Yes, Diego.
Now—we'd better be getting on."

 
          
 
He took the knife Ritchie offered him without
comment, putting it into his sheath. But neither of them
were
as strong as they had believed, and the climb back to retrieve their guns left
them panting. Ritchie found his boot and pulled it on. Luckily it had been
protected from the storm by the tower and was not too sodden to wear.

 
          
 
Meanwhile, the Sergeant was working with the
buckskin thongs he had tied for a grimmer duty. Into the two loops he had
twisted for the purpose Ritchie didn't care to remember he fitted small stones.
Then he made an imperative gesture to warn Ritchie to remain where he was
—quietly.

 
          
 
He twirled the weighted thong around in the
air and let it fly out across the rock behind the tower. A sort of frenzied
cheeping broke out there, and they both rushed to see what luck they had had.

 
          
 
Entangled in the cord were not one but two
desert quail. A rain-pool basin had lured them to their undoing. Herndon
scooped them up with one wild grab.

 
          
 
Minutes later Ritchie licked his fingers
regretfully. Raw meat without even salt to savor it, and yet it was the best he
had ever chewed. He was a new man, ready to tramp across the hills from ridge
to ridge should that feat be demanded of him. He glanced up to find the
Sergeant regarding him with eyes that were certainly full of silent laughter.

 
          
 
"Richard is himself again, eh?" quoted
Herndon. "Maybe we have had the worst and can now hope for better luck.
Feel strong enough to dig a little?"

 
          
 
"Dig?"

 
          
 
Herndon nodded at the ruined tower. "I'd
like to get back my notebook. As long as I'm still alive and kicking, there is
no use in leaving such a monument to our memory.'*

 
          
 
The delving was real work, as they had to pull
down a section of the still-standing stones to get to the hollow where the bag
lay. And in doing so they uncovered a tragedy far older than their own—for the
tower people had died by flame and arrow and their mummified bodies lay
contorted within the home they had defended to the last.

 
          
 
"Must have had a wooden roof on this,
maybe several floors of wood, too. The enemy shot fire arrows and brought it
all down on the heads of any still alive. Look, even the women fought—"
Herndon touched a bow that still lay in the grasp of a contorted hand.

 
          
 
"Do you suppose every tower is like
this?"

 
          
 
"I think so. If we had time to look, we'd
find each had been gutted. They built these towers because they were afraid,
and in the end what they feared did catch up with them."

 
          
 
"Apaches?" wondered Ritchie.

 
          
 
Herndon shrugged.
"Maybe.
We'd have to do more digging to find out. And that we haven't time for."
He backed out of the crypt they had opened.

 
          
 
"What made that horrible wailing?"
Ritchie wanted to know when they were in the open again.

 
          
 
"Weird wasn't it—and it came just in the
nick of time for us. It must have been caused by the force of the storm wind
over the tops of the towers. Did you ever blow over the top of a bottle when
you were a kid? Something like that did it. And this is a good place to hear
ghosts. All right, we're ready to go. Watch out for a pool to fill our canteens."

 
          
 
They dropped down again into the basin and
started along the bank of the dying river. Before they were out of sight of the
tower that had sheltered them, Ritchie stumbled over an Apache bow. The cord
trailed from it as a bit of frayed twist, but the bow itself was whole, and
Herndon snatched it eagerly.

 
          
 
"We'll have to turn archer anyway. And
this rain should bring down some game. Keep an eye out."

 
          
 
They took their second rest period that
morning at the end of an outcrop that had been grooved and scored by the
primitive tools of men long dead, so that it was a reservoir. From it they
could still trace the faint line of the irrigation ditches which had once made
farm land of the valley. Ritchie splashed in the water gratefully. But it was
already evaporating. A dark stain just under the rim showed the
high point
the supply had reached, and the water was a
foot below that now.

 
          
 
Around that dark stain, wherever a piece of
mud clung, were tracks. The prints of quail feet made a delicate pattern, and
Ritchie tried to pick out others—but he was not trail-wise enough except for
one slotted track.

 
          
 
"Deer."
The
Sergeant confirmed his guess. "Suppose we take a bit of a rest behind
those bushes and wait." He wet a finger tip and held it up to test the
air, and then he loaded the rifle.

 
          
 
Ritchie's eyelids drooped. His feet burned,
and the dull, pounding ache that had been in his head when he awoke that
morning was still there. But his mouth no longer felt as if someone had been
storing cinders in it, and he would be ready to go on when Herndon gave the
signal.

 
          
 
The Sergeant was watching the water trough with
concentration. Tuttle's rifle, several new scars added to those which laced its
stock, was in firing position. The rain seemed to have killed off the black
flies, or maybe both of them had been bitten so often that they were now
immune. Ritchie drowsed.

 
          
 
He jerked his head up as Herndon fired. A
tawny brown animal fled away up the river.

 
          
 
His companion was already on his feet,
trotting up to where the deer had been. After a careful examination of the
ground he went along, and within a few seconds Ritchie sighted the first
warning trace, too, a splatter of pink-red, sticky and fresh. He remembered the
hunting lore they had dinned into him. A deer struck in the vitals will seek
water. It would keep to the river as long as the rain pools existed.

 
          
 
Within the quarter hour they found it, lying
on the edge of a muddy waterhole. Herndon's knife was out almost before he had
squatted down beside the stiffening body.

 
          
 
They dared to light a fire and sear the flesh
before they bit into it. When they had taken the first edge off their hunger,
Ritchie noticed that Herndon regarded the pool with narrowed eyes.

 
          
 
''Better fill the canteens now?" He could
guess the meaning of the wide band of mud as well as the Sergeant could. The
rain's abundance was evaporating fast.

 
          
 
“Yes."

 
          
 
Together they hunched over the water, waiting
for the worst of the mud to settle before they scooped up what they could.

 
          
 
''How long—?" began Ritchie in as casual
a tone as he could manage.

 
          
 
"Who knows? We don't know anything about
this country. Only, if this is the Gallina, it will bring us out on the
Chama—"

 
          
 
That "if" was a big one. But why
think about it? If he only concentrated on food and drink and the patch of soil
immediately under his broken boots at the moment, he could keep going.

 
          
 
"This must have been a wonderful country
once." Herndon had brought out his journal. His fingers were cramped about
the stub of his pencil. "It could be again if there was water. Suppose one
could control the water in the mountains, send it down through the right
valleys—"

 
          
 
"Using dams or something like that, you
mean?"

 
          
 
"Dams.
But on a
greater scale than anything we've tried. It was the disappearance of the water
that killed this land. Bring it back again, and it would come alive. I'd like
to walk through here fifty or a hundred years from now and see what it looks
like when the engineers and the homesteaders have found and tamed it—"