Chapter 29
Prophet did his best to clean the blood out of his tunic at the spring.
There was a lot of blood, so it took a while. He got tired of hearing the others grumbling impatiently while they waited for him, so he told them to head on up the trail and he’d follow when he’d rid his duds of the Mexican brute’s bodily fluids.
Colter offered to wait for him, but Lou told him to ride on ahead. He was feeling owly and he was aching from the beating. One eye swelled up only a little, but he’d be surprised if by the next morning he wasn’t sporting two big shiners. Sundry cuts and abrasions on his cheeks and lips oozed blood. Not a lot but enough that he could feel the sting of each one. A loose tooth added to his laments.
“Sorry sons o’ Satan,” the bounty hunter grumbled as he scraped the soaked tunic on a rock beside the spring. “Bettin’ on the outcome, my ragged rebel behind . . .”
He donned the tunic, which felt refreshingly cool against his hot, sweaty, trail-grimed skin, and mounted Mean and Ugly. The horse had also been eyeing him and whickering impatiently, as though he too were saying, Stop bein’ such a sorehead, Lou. Stop bein’ so prissy about a little blood, fer cryin’ in Grant’s bourbon. Let’s haul our freight and get to our destination. I want a good roll in the dirt, a slow rubdown, and a hefty feed sack.
“Ah, shut up,” Prophet grunted out as he booted the horse up the trail.
After fifteen minutes, he caught up to the others just as they were descending into yet another boulder-choked canyon. This one was even harder to negotiate than the first, because by now it was around five-thirty in the afternoon, and the shadows were growing longer and darker.
The trail was narrow and winding as they descended still farther into the canyon, which was a dinosaur’s mouth of jagged rock outcroppings and boulder-choked arroyos. Ahead of Lou, he could see the others riding Indian file along the twisting, turning trail. He held back, riding drag, moving slowly now, for the canyon was a treacherous place to travel, given the fading light, all the rocks, and the trail pocked with deep holes his horse had to negotiate around or over.
He and Mean and Ugly traveled along the floor of the canyon for a good half hour before, as he followed a bend in the canyon’s high wall, he drew back abruptly on Mean’s reins. Ahead, the others had disappeared. He stared, squinting into the canyon’s deepening shadows.
Nothing. No sign of them. It was as though they’d vanished into thin air.
“Come on, boy.” Prophet nudged Mean forward, frowning, curious, growing more and more concerned.
He’d ridden another fifty yards before a soft whistle sounded on his right. “Lou! Over here, amigo!”
He turned to see Baja Jack poking his gremlin’s head out from behind a pillar of pale rock. The little man almost seemed to be embedded in the canyon wall, but of course that wasn’t the case. It was a trick of the dim light or the stone wall or a combination of both.
Grinning, that one eye crossed like that of an impish boy full of devilish secrets, Jack beckoned. “Come on, come on!”
Prophet swung Mean off the trail’s right side. As he approached Jack and the canyon wall, he saw that Jack was standing in a natural stone foyer of sorts, one that blended so well with the wall that you had to scrutinize it pretty closely before you recognized it . . . and saw the dark opening beyond it.
Again, Jack beckoned.
Prophet swung down from Mean’s back. He studied the natural portico of rock protruding from the face of the cliff wall and partially hiding the almost triangular-shaped opening in the wall flanking it. The ground dropped severely to what was apparently a cave opening. Down this decline Jack ambled in his bandy-legged fashion, teetering from side to side, little arms angling out from his sides like a penguin’s flippers.
Prophet looked at Mean. The horse looked back at him, laying one ear back flat against his head. Lou shrugged and stepped forward, leading the horse by the reins.
He and the mount dropped down the inclination paved with red and black gravel and passed through the opening, which was around ten feet high at its pointed apex and roughly that wide near the ground. Jack had disappeared from his view when the little man had entered the cave but now as Lou stepped into the darkness, which was refreshingly cool, he saw the little man again, lit by the light angling through the opening behind him and the horse.
Baja Jack smiled up at him, his crowlike eyes flashing.
Prophet looked beyond him, surprised to see the others standing so far away from him—a good twenty feet, at least. Jack’s men formed a ragged cluster. They dismounted and were unsaddling their horses. Old Pepe, the burro wrangler, was removing the panniers from the pack of one of his burros. Colter stood off to the left of Jack’s men. He was holding his horse’s reins and looking around in amazement. Prophet could see only the kid’s back from his vantage, but he knew Colter was looking around in amazement, because he was looking at what Prophet was looking at, and it was truly amazing.
What they were standing in was not a cave but a canyon. At least, it was technically a canyon from about fifty feet back away from the entrance, because that’s where the “roof” opened, showing the dimming light of the desert sky. The canyon was maybe a hundred yards wide by a hundred yards long. The ridges forming its walls were honeycombed with what appeared to be mud dwellings stacked atop one another halfway to the crest of the ridge. They looked like the nests of giant mud swallows.
The ridges were not sheer but sloped at maybe a thirty-five-degree angle, leaning back away from the canyon floor. Each level of the swallowlike homes was separated by a ledge of maybe ten or fifteen feet. Steps had been chiseled into the canyon walls, like the steps of an amphitheater, giving access to each level of the dwellings.
Prophet had seen such cliff dwellings before, for there were many all over the Southwest. An old prospector had guided him out to a vast one tucked away in southwestern Colorado, which was the only one he’d ever seen that was more extensive and elaborate than the one he was getting a neck ache gawking at now.
The floor of the canyon appeared to be the bed of an ancient river—likely the river that had carved the canyon, offering a well-hidden fortress home to some ancient people who’d likely lived and died thousands of years ago, even before the Aztecs and the Quill. They might have been dead, but their ghosts lingered here. Prophet could sense them. They were almost as real as they’d have been if he’d seen them. There was no imagining the flesh rippling between his shoulder blades and along the backs of his arms and legs, as though chilled by the ghostly breath of those long-lost souls who’d lived, loved, fought, mourned, and died right here.
“Pretty damn impressive—eh, amigo?” Jack ambled up to stand between where Prophet and Colter stood, turning their heads this way and that, scrutinizing the dwellings.
Colter whistled. “Right nice digs, Jack.”
“I wish I could take credit for it.” Jack chuckled. “I stop here on every run to Baluarte Santiago.”
“You ain’t worried about getting trapped in here?” Prophet asked. “Looks like there’s only two ways in or out.”
“Nope. Ain’t never been worried one iota about that. You see, I don’t think another soul knows about this place. At least, I’ve never seen sign of anyone living or even overnighting here in all the years I’ve known about it, and that’s been a long spell.”
“How’d you find it?” Colter asked, still admiring the ancient folks’ handiwork.
Birds flitted through the canyon, flashing golden up where the sunlight reached, flicking like shadows nearer the canyon floor.
“My pa and I found it on one of our gold-hunting excursions, don’t ya know! I was maybe ten years old. A little shaver. Even littler than I am now. Hah! A storm chased us and our pack burros into the main canyon. We needed shelter fast. Pa and I made camp just outside that entrance over there. We was lounging around the fire that night, roasting a pair of jacks under the overhang of a boulder, and Pa got to staring at the canyon wall while he smoked his pipe. He noticed something odd about how the light played across the side of the ridge. He got up and walked over to the wall and gave a yell. I jumped near afoot in the air. Pa—well, he damn near fell down that drop to the canyon’s front door!”
Jack croaked out a long, snorting laugh.
“The next day we explored this canyon. Whoever lived here long ago had ’em a good fortress hidden away from their enemies. The Injuns all over Baja was fierce folks, don’t ya know. Just like ole Baja Jack himself—fierce!” More laughter. “They’d fight each other at the drop of a hat . . . er, tomahawk. What have you. They knew what they were doin’, too, because in all the years I’ve known about this place, I’ve never seen a single sign that anyone else knows about it. I’ve talked to a lot of desert rats. No, sir—not one word about it. I never let the cat out of the bag my ownself, because I had a feelin’ someday I might need the hidey-hole, too. It makes a right fittin’ place for me and my guards to hole up, safe from banditos, on the trail to Baluarte Santiago.”
Jack whipped around and pointed toward the canyon’s far end, which was a small, gray-blue oval from this distance. “It lets out on another canyon. Beyond that canyon, another day’s ride, is Baluarte Santiago.”
And Ciaran Yeats, Prophet added silently to himself.
Prophet glanced at Jack’s men. “What about them? You sure they’re gonna keep your secret.”
“And what about you and El Rojo here?” Baja Jack looked cunningly up at Lou and Colter. “How can I be sure you two will keep the secret?”
“I reckon you can’t be sure,” Colter said.
“What good’s a secret canyon lessen you can’t use it when you need it most? Am I right?”
“I reckon you’re right, Jack,” Prophet allowed. “And for what it’s worth, your secret is safe with me.”
“Me, too,” Colter agreed.
“What’s that rumbling sound?” Prophet had been hearing it since he’d entered the canyon. It was so soft that he hadn’t realized he’d been hearing it until just now. He could feel a faint vibration in the ground beneath his boots, like the reverberation you feel with the passing of a train.
Baja Jack grinned up at him, delighted by another secret.
He lifted his thick little right hand and hooked his index finger. “Come on. I’ll show you something.” He started to turn away but then turned back toward the men who were tending their horses. He ordered one of his men, Tío, to unsaddle his horse then added with an afterthought to unsaddle “his guests’” mounts and tend them, too.
Tío, a long-haired Mexican with mare’s tail mustaches, gave Prophet and Colter the woolly eyeball through the smoke wafting up from the corn-husk cigarette he was smoking. That seemed to amuse Jack, who chuckled, gave a tolerant sigh, then glanced at Lou and Colter before turning away again, saying, “Right this way, mi amigos. Jack’ll give you the grand tour.”
He hitched his deerskin leggings up his broad hips then ambled off up the canyon between the looming dwellings that ever so vaguely resembled piled human skulls, their open doorways like empty eye sockets looking forbiddingly, maybe a little malevolently, down at the living intruders in their sanctuary.