Chapter 4: The Lost Village

Charles descended the bluff to his camp. He had not built a fire, and he had no apprehensions on that point. The horse and the mule would not leave the wide space in which they were now grazing, and there was nothing to hold him back from the expedition that he had planned. He took one of the rifles, a beautiful weapon of high range and power, from his pack and filled his belt with cartridges. Then he started.

He reascended the cliff, and struck off across the broken country toward the blue smoke, which yet lay like a line across the bluer sky. His feeling of jealousy, even rage, against the strangers increased, yet he intended no violence, unless in his own defense, and the necessity of the latter was never improbable in so wild a country. It might be either Professor Longworth or Professor Cruikshank, but he did not consider it likely, as he had thought they would turn much farther to the eastward.

The way was slow, broken by hills, ravines and cliffs, and the sun shone down like fire, but the boy with the rifle and the resolute eyes would not turn back. The wisp of smoke grew larger, and, at last, from the crest of a low hill he looked down upon a camp, and those who had made it.

When Charles gazed into that camp he drew a breath deep and long. Never before in his life had he felt so much surprise. On some pine boughs sat the handsome boy, Herbert Carleton, whom he had seen at Jefferson, and again at Phoenix. He was in a khaki suit as before, but he was much tanned, and the suit showed many signs of wear and travel. He seemed tired and anxious, and Charles felt a thrill of sympathy. The throb of envy did not come now.

Not far away stood Mr. Carleton, sour of countenance. Three or four men, guides or servants, were engaged in various tasks, and animals for riding or the pack, grazed on the thin grass.

Charles’ amazement abated when he remembered the story of the copper mines that he had read in the Phoenix newspaper. Doubtless they were prospecting.

He spent a half hour on the hill, and, when he turned away, he was very thoughtful. As he went back to his own ravine, he began to have a fear that not nature alone, but man, too, was in the way.

The animals were still grazing and as Charles prepared for the start, intending to camp further on, he noticed an impression near the edge of the tiny rivulet, where the earth was fairly soft. He was not trailer enough to say decisively, but it seemed to him that it was the outline of a human foot. He stared at it and tried to persuade himself that a mountain lion had made it—which, indeed, seemed likely—but he could not do so. The obsession that man had passed there was upon him, and he was not able to shake it off.

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when he resumed his march, and he resolved, if the character of the ravine continued the same, to push on far into the night. He did not doubt, as he pondered the last words of Ananias Brown, that he had come to the first part of the trail, but the next steps puzzled him. The words “behind the veil” were mystic, cabalistic; they seemed to bear no relation to the others, yet he was confident that the relation existed. But how was he to connect so meaningless a statement with the surface of a country? He saw nothing to do but to keep on, and to recognize the phenomenon whatever it might be, when he came to it.

The floor of the ravine smoothed out considerably, and also widened, making his travel easier. Down the center of this cut flowed the stream, shallow but clear, and of a coldness that indicated its source far up among the snows on some soaring peak.

The scene now became one of the most solemn loneliness and grandeur. Looking down the gorge he saw range on range of mountains, guarded here and there by mighty peaks like bastions. Often the ranges were bare, vast walls of stone, shot in the sunlight with red and purple and blue turquoise, that shifted and changed as the rays fell. Again, the pines hung in fringes of green on the slopes, and now and then through them came that most grateful of all sights in a dry country, the flash of running water.

Once he heard a quiver among the bushes on the slope of a ravine, and he saw the tawny form of a mountain lion scurrying away. His sporting blood leaped up, and he longed to follow, but his search forbade it. An hour later his animals raised their heads and the horse whinnied uneasily. “Another mountain lion,” thought Charles, though he saw nothing, and gave the matter no further attention. Soon darkness came down thicker and heavier than usual, and changing his mind about further travel in the night, he decided to camp where he was beside the stream.

A feeling of uneasiness due, he thought, to the knowledge of the presence of others, in the vast domain that he had taken for his own, kept him from building a fire. He sought to dismiss this foreboding, but it refused to go and lay heavy upon him.

He ate but little, and, tethering the animals, he wrapped himself in a blanket under a pine tree. The night had voices, the moan of the wind among the pines, the rustling of some small animal in the bushes, and the chirp of an insect, but Charles paid small heed to these things. It was his own littleness in the immensity of all this space that made him lonely.

He fell asleep, and then awoke, oppressed by en extraordinary sense of coming evil. He lay with his ear to the earth and, either in reality or in fancy, he heard cautious footsteps. That some one was near he felt with all the power of intuition, and, in that tremendous desolation, he who came at night, treading softly, must be an enemy. Charles always slept with a rifle by his side, and reaching out his hand he grasped it. The feel of the cold steel barrel was to him as the touch of a friend. He heard the animals moving restlessly, and his belief that it was time for him to be wary was confirmed.

It was very dark in the gorge. A good moon rose high in the heavens, but its pale rays did not reach him where he lay, and the trees, the earth and the stream were blended into a black blur. He still listened with his ear to the earth and he was confident that he heard again the soft crush of cautious footsteps.

His blood chilled. A danger that comes in the darkness, and without a name, a danger that may be one part reality and one part fancy, can awe the bravest man, and Charles, who had acute sensibilities, now felt all this mysterious dread. Yet it was not fear, because he was alert and ready to encounter it, if he must. He slipped from the blanket, and, holding the rifle, rolled noiselessly to one side. He had listened to the lore of the frontiersman, and he felt sure that if an enemy were near, the spot where he lay had been marked already by the one who sought him. So he left the blanket there in a dark, long shape, like that of a man, and, when he had gained a few feet by rolling, he rose to his hands and knees and crept cautiously into the bushes. But even his sense of impending evil could not make him forget the indignity of such a position, and he felt a great mental relief when, a rod or two away, he sank on his knees in a clump of bushes, the rifle held firmly in his hands.

Charles was now higher up the slope of the gorge, and, looking down on the place where his blanket lay, he could still see its dark and huddled outline. But nothing stirred. The animals had ceased their uneasy movements. The moonlight filtered in wan rays down the cleft, and the boy, with his hand upon a deadly weapon, ready to use it, began to believe that he had been a prey to the darkness and loneliness, and to nothing else. Yet, with the instinct of caution, he did not move, but crouched lower and lower among the bushes, blending completely with the dark.

The moonlight shifted, and the wan rays fell in a circle about the place where he had slept. Then he thanked God for his premonition of fear, and his quickness to act upon it. Out of the darkness came a face, hideous with the passions of the brute, a face blackened by generations of a burning sun and distorted by equal generations of cruelty, the face of an Apache warrior, the most pitiless of all the Indians. Even at the distance and in the dusk the boy could see the savage gleam in the yellowish eyes.

There was no talk of an Indian uprising, no trouble with the Apaches, but here in these wild mountains who would ever know? Charles again thanked God for his intuition. The hideous face came farther into the moonlight, and after it the creeping body, naked to the waist. The boy knew perfectly well that he was the intended victim, and that the dim shape of his blanket was taken for himself. He filled with horror and repulsion at the sight of the midnight assassin, and his finger crept nervously to the trigger of his rifle. But prudence told him to withhold the bullet, and he waited in silence.

The Apache crawled forward, not making the faintest noise, until he was within a yard of the blanket. Then he evidently saw the fraud, and, swiftly turning about, disappeared in the bushes. Charles could read the savage mind, which at that moment feared an ambush, and he was sure that he was in no farther danger at present. But the hideousness of the dark face remained with him, and the chill was yet in his blood. Factors of a varying nature and of which he had never dreamed were entering into his search, and he must take account of them.

He must warn the Carletons of this danger, and he never hestitated. Careless of his own risk, he hastened down into the ravine and secured his animals which were able to clamber out of the cleft at the most gradual slope.

Charles, as he scaled the cliff, felt a quiver now and then, as if the bullet of the Apache were coming, but he was not attacked. There was no noise, save that made by himself and his two beasts. But when he stood on the crest he felt deep and intense relief. He paused only a moment or two to draw a deep breath, and then, mounting the horse, the mule following, he rode back in the direction in which he believed the Carleton camp to lie. In the distance rose the white dome of Old Thundergust, and, with its guidance, he believed that he would not go astray.

He came out upon what may roughly be called a plain, much broken, however, by swells and corresponding depressions. Here it was lighter, the moon’s rays finding no obstruction, and he could see across the sweep of low country to the mountain ranges, with Old Thundergust towering among them like a frosty-headed king.

His was a good and faithful horse, but the way was rough, and he stumbled more than once, until Charles, doing as he had often done before, dismounted and led him. The mule trotted loyally behind, and, if there was any pursuit, the boy knew nothing of it.

The night waned, and he yet saw no sign of the valley in which the Carletons had camped. The day came, and peak and ridge swam in the glittering light. Afar rose the thin blue spire of smoke, and his heart beat joyously.

The spire of smoke broadened, and Charles saw that he was now coming very near. For the first time since the appearance of the Apache he felt embarrassment; in what manner should he approach the Carletons, how tell of his presence and why he had come? He was almost at the crest of the last ridge, enclosing the valley in which the Carleton camp lay, and he paused there a moment to gather his thoughts and consider what was before him. The sun poured down fiery rays and, in their luminous glare, Charles was silhouetted against the rocks, a brown, dusty figure, but instinct with strength and vitality. Far above a wide-winged vulture wheeled in the vault of blue.

The brown and dusty figure suddenly straightened up, as if quickened into new life, stood a moment at deep and surprised attention, and then seized a rifle from his saddle bow. Charles had heard something that turned his blood cold, the sound of a shot, then of another, and then a cry. Weapon in hand he sprang to the edge of the valley.

It was a trim little valley, with pine trees, good grass and running water, the best of places for a camp, but now it was filled with terror and confusion. One man had fallen face downward in the grass, another was clasping his shoulder where the bullet had struck, and even as Charles looked he fell shot through the heart this time. Brown, hideous faces issued from the undergrowth, and Herbert Carleton, impelled by this sudden and awful terror that had come upon them, was fleeing, certainly the wisest thing for him to do. He came straight toward that point in the rim of hills where Charles stood, although he neither saw Charles nor dreamed that he was there.