Chapter III
The Valley of the Cliff Dwellers
The older men went inside to Major Hinchman's big living room where, over some Mexican stogies, they discussed Neyani and his Black Panther and gossiped over old Army days. Sid and Scotty went out to help Big John with the horses and hounds and then explored the ranch patio. It was all as Spanish as old Mexico. Heavy and age-worn oak furniture—the real Mission—stone metates for grinding corn, great red ollas or porous jars for cooling water by evaporation, striped serapes and Navaho blankets, Apache and Pima baskets; saddles, raitas and ornamental embossed Mexican leather gear—the horse was King here! The place reeked of those old strenuous border days of the Southwest, and the ranch seemed to have imbibed equally of the customs and usages of the early Spanish and Indian possessors of the country. In turn, the boys peeped in the various doorways; the farriery with a smoking forge and laboring bellows; the bunk house with an interminable game of greasy cards going on; the saddlery, where a weazened old sinner of a Sonoran bent over his leather work; and the great kitchen, where dried beef and hams hung from the smoky rafters, and long braids of corn, peppers, desert onions and dried berries festooned the walls. There were bins of pinyon nuts, flour, metate-ground Indian meal, sugar, coffee and red beans—the ranch could stand a year's siege if you asked Lum Looke, the Chinese cook who presided!
After a time Major Hinchman sought them out at the stables in the patio, where Ruler and his progeny had been made comfortable in an empty stall.
"Say, boys," he grinned at them with a quizzically apologetic smile, "I'm mighty sorry—but thar ain't a derned thing to eat in the ranch! Nope, not a doggone thing!" he insisted whimsically. "You'll have to rustle your own grub. Now, Jake, thar, he was tellin' me of a couple of deer over the river in those cottonwoods," he confided, in an elaborate stage whisper. "Suppose you boys get you' rifles an' rustle us a little venison? You!—Jake!" he roared, seeing the delighted smiles on Sid's and Scotty's faces.
Jake came straddling out of the bunk house, the sunlight sheening on his glossy black fur chaps as he crossed the patio.
"Jake, you take these boys across the river and fetch us a deer," he roared, turning to go back to the Colonel to continue their plans for the trip to come.
A high-riding sun bathed the desert in floods of light and color as they rode out of the patio. The pink layer-cake mountains across the river rose high and near, now. Streaks of yellow and blue, in horizontal lines, crossed the uniform red of their bare and jagged conformation. From a bluff near Hinchman's they could survey a wide bend of the river (which was little more than a wide, fordable brook) and here was green grass land, with cattle dotted over it. Back of it was the corresponding bluff of the opposite bank, fringed with mesquite, oaks, cottonwoods, juniper and pinyons.
"Over the river!" whooped Jake, settling back on his horse to let it slide down the clay bluff. A thundering clatter of hoofs came up behind them as the boys prepared to follow. It was Big John, racing along on the white horse.
"Ain't goin' to leave me out, Jake, when it comes to the Colonel's cubs!" he snorted, easing his mount down the slope. "You don't know these pesky boys, Red. When I hed em, up Montana way, the minute they was out of my sight the dern pinheads would start somethin'! Now you take Scotty, here—he's another red-head like you, Jake,—an' I'll sort of ooze along with Sid. Thataway we'll keep the both of them out of trouble,—savvy?"
"Shore!—We'll pass a family of Apache Injuns, boys, on our way up to the notch in them buttes," said Jake as the ponies splashed into the ford. "I'm not denyin' Major Hinchman's got the right idee about the Injuns, at that. He lets a few families of them stay on his ranch all the time, livin' the way they is used ter, tendin' a small herd of cow-critters in return for a beef steer now an' then. Up yander is an ole San Carlos Apache chief, his squaw, an' their two childer,—a young buck which same rides fer us, and a gal. 'Snakes-in-his-leggins,' we calls the ole Injun; but he's a pow'rful dignified ole cuss at that."
They rode up the opposite bluff and along its brink for perhaps a mile, the boys agog with curiosity to see Apache Indians in their native state, so to speak. The thick growth of saw grass, clumps of yucca, agave, and sage increased as they rode along, while nearly every glade held a sparse growth of green deciduous trees. And then, on a point of the bluff jutting out toward the river, they came upon the Apache home. It was a mere sun shelter of potes and juniper, but the squaw and her daughter were at work on a grass hut near by, made of tall looped poles forming a system of arches and tied with yucca fiber at all crossings. The girl was binding on a thatch of bear grass in bundles. By the time the rains came it would be fairly waterproof.
Under the juniper shelter was the simplest of furniture. A few red and black blankets hung up on the leafy walls to be out of the dirt; a red pottery jar slicked over with pinyon gum varnish held fresh water; there were woven baskets in geometrical black and white figures holding pinyon nuts; strings of red peppers and onions, and braided spikes of blue and red corn ears hung from the rafters. Dried meat and fish swung under the eaves, while the old buck himself sat in the shade, straightening cane arrows with a grooved stone which he had heated in his fire. He grunted with imperturbable dignity as they rode up.
"Nothing to do till to-morrow, eh, Sid?" grinned Scotty as they reined in.
"It looks ideal to me!" responded Sid, enthusiastically, the wild blood surging up in him sympathetically at the fine simplicity of the old Indian's life. "He's making those arrows because they are far cheaper than cartridges, and just as effective for him. I suppose they sell those baskets—look at that one like a tall vase; isn't it a beauty?"
The old squaw looked up from her work and smiled at Sid's eager, pointing finger. Back of her, down on the river flat, the young buck had just ridden up, bare-backed on a pied pony. He had nothing on him but a breech clout, buckskin beaded moccasins of brilliant blue and white, and a red bandanna about his forehead. He grinned silently at the boys as his pony stopped.
"Gee, I'm goin' to be an Indian!" laughed Sid. "I'll build a whicki-up of my own and live here forever! I'm an adopted Blackfoot, anyhow."
"Why don't you be an ethnologist, Sid?" urged Scotty, inspired by his chum's enthusiasm.
"Gee-roo, I'd be more than that!" came back Sid. "Instead of just studying their songs and customs, I'd want to do something practical toward letting the Indian live in his own way. It's the only thing that will preserve the race contented and happy."
"How, Snakes!—You happy?" chuckled Jake, calling out to the old buck at Sid's words.
The Apache lifted his great head, and a coppery grin broke on his eagle features. "Plenty happy!" his deep bass voice replied. "Major Hinchm'n heap good to red man!"
"Yet this ole redskin and yore pappy and Major Hinchman, Sid, was on the war path after each other, red hot, only forty years ago! Waal; times hev changed! We must be oozin' along, now, or there won't be no deer on the saddle, boys."
"You see how 'tis," said Jake with obvious pride in his master's system as they rode off, "them Injuns is happy, clean through. 'Cause why? They've got their freedom, an' can live as they likes. Ef every ranch in Arizona would adopt a few, we'd have no need for reservations, whar they're always discontented. It don't take much to feed an Injun an' keep him happy. That young buck's as good a herdsman as we've got. The squaw makes baskits, an' the ole feller does a bit of huntin', mostly sage hens and jacks. They're wuth their keep; yit we kin sorter look after 'em if they gits into any trouble. That's what Hinchman's preachin', everywhar he goes.—Whoa, boys! We pickets the horses here, fellers, an' gits up this coulée afoot after them deer," he broke off, throwing a leg over his mount.
They picketed the ponies out in a bit of grass swale, and separated, going in pairs up different flanks of the red butte. The sparse mesquite and bear oak grew stunted and thick, up here, and it was all cut up with little ravines of dense clay soil and friable rock. Moisture and dew from the river, condensed at night, evidently kept it going, for even cottonwood grew in the depths of the gullies.
"Good deer country, son,—for these parts. They lies low up here and comes down at night to drink. Watch out for a track in the clay," cautioned Big John as he and Sid climbed along, rifles at ready.
A blue-tailed, green lizard darted across their path. Sid was watching it disappear under some loose stones, when the sudden "Whew! Whew!" of a startled deer made him jump with rifle half to shoulder.
"Arter him!—up thet draw!" barked Big John, jumping for the ravine as the patter of quick hoofs died away over the ridge. Sid swarmed up the rocky talus while Big John leaped in giant strides along the flanks of the ravine. It seemed to Sid that a quick climb to a jutting shoulder above him would give him a shot, especially if the deer stopped to look back after his first fright was over. The loose soil rolled and slid under his feet; high above him towered the red wall of the butte, vertical and unscalable. When he at length turned to look around, he was high on the roof of the desert, its tumbled ridges stretching away to the south for limitless miles. Down below was the curving bend of the river and across it the low, square, 'dobe fort of Hinchman's. Then he turned his back to it all and began to reconnoiter cautiously over the ridge. As he raised his head, the wag of a white flag told him that the deer had seen him, too. He was a large buck, an eight-pointer at least, and he was galloping up a vast arroyo that cleft into the heart of the mountains. Sid raised his rifle and opened fire at long range.
"Spang! Spang! Spang!" whipped out the sharp reports, as fast as he could work the lever.
"Whoop-ee! Burn 'im! Set fire to 'im!" roared Big John's voice in the ravine, and then he burst out of the head of it, looking for the buck.
Sid saw his bullets strike rock in red spurts of dust. The ringing reports of Big John's rifle now added their clamor to the din. Far off up the canyon the buck stumbled and fell; got up and went on again, and then leaped high in the air with all four feet and came down on his side.
"That got him!" yelled Big John. "I don't know which one of us 'twas. Come on down, son,—'twon't be no pyjama party gittin' him out of thar, old settler!"
While Big John was paunching the buck, Sid climbed up to the head of the canyon, led on by an irresistible desire to see what might be on the other side of the top of the world. The ledges of broken and wind-scoured rock gradually gave place to shelves with vertical faces, up which he could find crevices or breaks which could be climbed. The blue margin of the sky was not far above him, now. Scaling the last bastions of the ridge, he found himself perched up on a sharp knife-edge, seemingly only a little below the white clouds overhead. The dry desert winds sang in the peaks around him and caressed him with soft, invisible fingers. He felt somehow brother to it all, as his eyes roved around the horizon. To the north stretched the flat plain of the desert, broken with sheer walled mesas and ragged outcroppings of rock ridges. To the east rose a high-walled plateau, covered with the dark green of arid-country evergreens,—cedar, pinyon and juniper. It ran for miles and miles northward, and in between him and it a purple void told of the chasm of some valley flowing north.
It was through that plateau of pine timber that their route north to the Canyon Cheyo would lie, and somewhere, cut deep in the plateau, would be that valley of the ancient cliff dwellers that they all wished to see. As Sid studied the huge panorama an overwhelming desire for solitude came over him. He wanted to be alone, to take for himself the Indian boy's three days of trial and to face life and his future for a time with wide open eyes, alone and uncounseled. Like them, he wanted to ask questions of life and learn what it all was going to mean for him. Here, in this empty land, he could face Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the raw essentials of life, and let his own soul choose his destiny.
The Indians, he knew, encouraged this impulse in boys of his age. Then it was that they went alone into the mountains, to fast and pray to the Great Mystery, and to come back to the tribe with the beginnings of wisdom deep planted in them. The whites stifled this desire for solitude, attempted to guide their boy's every step, and more than often hopelessly muddled his whole life in advance for him. Sid would have none of that! Never once had the old Colonel so much as hinted to him what he was to be and do, in this his life that stretched before him. His boy was free to face it in the only way it could be faced, alone. Sid wanted to think it out by himself, to be away from the very sight of people, to have these great solitudes for his counselors for at least a few days. He climbed back down the canyon and rejoined Big John, turning over the desire in his mind. He did not realize that the Desert had taken hold of his soul with its grip of the infinite,—as it has done to the mind of man since countless ages,—but, true to instinct, he was following its silent beckoning.
"John, I'm thinking of doing a little pasear up into the mountains for a day or so,—by myself," he announced, as the cowman looked up from cleaning his gory hands with a few drops from his canteen.
Big John looked him over quizzically.
"How 'bout me, old-timer? Colonel Colvin'll skin me like a mule team ef I comes back without ye!"
"Dad'll understand—and I know you do. This country's got me, John! I'm just crazy to do a lone hike in it, for a while. Suppose you fellows pick me up in the Canyon on your way north? I'll be there, and ready for you 'bout that time."
Big John grinned, as he scratched the black locks under his sombrero. "You ain't, nohow, regular intimate with that region, is yer, Sid?" he inquired, blandly.
"No, but it's a canyon, like all the rest of them, with sheer walls and a lot of prehistoric cliff dwellers' places in it, isn't it?" said Sid, confidently.
It is to be presumed that some of the Arizona sense of humor was infecting that stanch Montanan, Big John, for all he said was, "All right, old-timer! Make it the mouth of the Monument Canyon, though, so we can find ye when we want ye. .. . I've hed that lonesome itch myself, son. You hev your blanket and tarp on the pinto's cantle, and here's a haunch of venison. Ef you only hed a bag of pinole, now, I'd be plumb willing to turn ye loose."
"I have," remarked Sid, turning around to show a buckskin bag at his belt. "Parched and ground corn. You eat a tablespoonful of it and wash down with a drink,—and you're fed for at least six hours to come. Scotty and I made a lot of it back east."
"Smart ez lightnin', you two!" chuckled Big John, shaking his head. "After them Montana days, though, I'd trust ye anywhar, Sid. Sho'—they ain't nawthin' to harm you, from here to the Canyon. Git along, son—don't I know jest what's eatin' ye! The Colonel kin take it out on me—I'll fix it with him! You help me down with this yere critter, and I'll start ye on the trail."
Between them they got the buck down the slope, and then led the horses up through the ravine to where the buck could be easily slung. Big John then shook Sid's canteen, looked over his saddle trappings, and cut off a haunch of the venison and they slung it to Sid's saddle bow opposite the canteen.
"See thet notch, up thar in them buttes to the east, Sid?" asked Big John, pointing with a horny finger. "This here trail goes up thar, over the divide. Folly it down 'til you comes into Red Valley. This time o' year thar ain't much water, but thar's plenty of tanks,—pools, like,—whar the water lays in rocky holes. Stick to the valley till you comes to the Canyon. We'll be along thar in about two days. So long, kid! Hev it out with yourself, son—'twill do ye good!"
He mounted his horse, with the buck tied across the saddle, and waved a farewell as Sid rode off up the steep trail from the river.
Up through a country of bear grass, sage and mesquite he rode, following a well-worn trail. Once over the divide, the way led all down hill. The junipers and pinyons thinned out; yuccas and century plants sprang up among the bear grass, and then, riding out from the last fringe of trees, a mighty red valley lay before him, stretching endlessly northward in yellow and blue and black parapets, with sage-strewn slopes of gravel slanting downwards from their walls. Sid let out a wild whoop of joy as his pony cantered down the winding trail. Free! He was as free as that eagle that soared high above him in the blue—so high as to be a mere wheeling speck in the sky! He was alone with himself and Nature.
The pony slowed down as he reached the hot depths of the valley. A dry scoured-out bed of a brook wandered below, here a scummy, shallow pool, yonder the glimpse of shining water where a deep hole in the rocks still held some. None of the thirst terrors of the desert would be his, reflected Sid, as he rode by them; nothing but this inspiring high horizon of a changeless land. Here was the seat of the Infinite, thought the boy, the same last year, the same last century,—the same since the great waters had left this basin bare back in geological time. Of what other place in our country could that be said? The forests and the Indians of the East were gone forever; the prairies and the buffalo of the West were gone. Millions of white men were toiling and struggling to make a living crowded in cities which dotted that land where once was the bounteous plenty of Nature. All the men he knew were fighting a grim battle with Life, just to keep fed and clothed and have a roof over their heads. All the boys he knew were training for that same battle. All of them were tired and weary, and none really enjoyed their lives. All of them would go to their graves with the bitter sense of not having lived at all. None of that for him!
And why? puzzled Sid. Well, their lives were all too complex, for one thing. A thousand distractions pressed in on everybody's time. There was no margin to their lives; no time for ease, for reflection, for communing through books with the great spirits of the past. None at all for those revitalizing periods when man returns to Nature and is born anew. These people spent so much of their time trying to live that they did not live at all! Only worked.
What, then, was happiness? The happiest man Sid knew was a young fellow he had met out in Montana, who worked among the homesteaders out in the new red wheat lands, where there was not a school or a church in forty thousand square miles. Among those brave and cheerful folk he was giving his life with a rich enthusiasm, that their sons might have something of an education. And his idealism was so infectious, too, that he had persuaded a young medical student to go out there with him, so, that there might be at least one doctor in all that territory.
Another fellow that he knew, quite as happy, was an outdoor artist who sought out and painted the wild beauty of this beautiful world in which we live. This fellow lived up in a log cabin on a Wisconsin reservation, painting the life of the forest. He knew animals, fish, game, birds, canoes, Indians, woodsmen; and he knew how to paint them so that one looked and was transported to his scene in the very spirit of it. In the fall he would shoot game and cure it, collect wild rice and Indian potato, and stay right there, painting the forest in winter when it was more beautiful than ever. One exhibition of his pictures a year was all he needed to provide for his simple wants. Thoreau loved to study; he was happiest when he had the leisure to read the Scriptures of the ancients in their original tongues, to search for great truths and sound philosophies and pass them on to his fellow men. To get the freedom to do this he had lived alone in the forest and raised from the soil what he needed to eat.
These men were not complex. They did not want a million things that people think are necessary to happiness. So long as they were free to keep on, they had all that they asked of life. It struck Sid that the master key of all this was for a man to find the work that he loved and then be free to do it. If the work itself was such that it set a high ideal before him, then that man would be happy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else should matter. It was essential to bar out the distractions, the meaningless nothings that frittered away one's time, money and energy. The men of the desert came out here to get away from all that, to devote their lives to some large, simple business, like raising cattle or making the desert bloom by systems of irrigation. And they found the grand peace of the desert good for the soul. Good enough to stay here forever—in what looked to a city man a hideous, iron-bound land—and never have a wish to go back where men spoiled everything in their mad scramble to stay alive.
Sid decided three things for himself during the miles that Pinto laid behind them with that tireless gait of the plains mustang. Happiness, for him, lay close to Nature. She was by far the grandest thing in the world, the one thing of which he never tired and of whose wonders there was no end. Others might prefer the intellectual life of cities, where the body was forever weary, forever crying for good, healthy, sweating exercise, even if the mind was kept occupied. To satisfy them both and be a whole man, happy all over with the thrill of good health of mind and body, a life in the open was the only surety. That other life would be surely a misery for his body, caged like a setter dog in a city flat—there would be absolutely no escaping it. For his mind it would mean simply an exchange of interests working with live things as the raw material instead of with machinery or in spending his days dictating letters, which was the bulk of the "work" done by most of the men he knew. He shrank from such a life as from a plague. Far better to be just reasonably well off, or even poor, than exchange for a heaping measure of dollars everything that gave one joy in living. Life in the open, for him, could be agriculture or mining or ethnology. The human interest of the latter inclined him strongly toward it. It combined idealism with practical, useful work. To make others happy, to help the misunderstood and protect the unjustly treated—that would be a life that could appeal to Sid's generous, open-handed nature!
He had arrived at that point in his reflections and his pony had rounded perhaps the fiftieth of the great red parapets and promontories that crisscrossed ahead of him in the winding valley, when two enormous red walls, flat as masonry and hundreds of feet high came to view across the dry bed of the stream.
Sid reined up his pony, looking up at them in wonder, and then at the dim distances beyond with a feeling of utter bewilderment. Surely this was a grim joke that Big John had played on him,—the merciless Arizona humor as practiced on the abysmal tenderfoot!
"This must be the Canyon Cheyo, and those huge walls are 'Los Capitanos del Canyon,' as the Spanish named them—but where is the entrance?" he asked himself, perplexedly. Then the truth burst upon him. That line of dim gray cliffs, apparently five miles down the valley was the other wall of the Canyon! The whole thing was its mighty gate!
"Gee-roo! Things are done on a big scale out here!" exclaimed Sid as he surveyed it, dismayed. "You could drop a whole eastern state in the mouth of this canyon and it would never be missed! No wonder there are whole ruined cities on the floor as well as the walls of Cheyo!" he cried, ruefully, as he began to wonder how his party would ever find him in all this vast expanse of cliff and valley.
But it would narrow further up, he reassured himself. If he could find the mouth of Monument Canyon and hang around there they would surely pick him up. For miles he rode up a flat level floor, green and watered with a brook, while on both sides frowned parapets like the Palisades of the Hudson, about the same height, yet narrowed in closer, so that their grandeur and majesty hemmed him in. Up under the sheer cliffs he could see great hollowed-out caves, with stone ruins peeping out under them, walls shattered and torn, square stone watch towers with their upper stories thrown down, and a detritus of destroyed masonry scattered down the steep, tree-grown slopes.
Then a narrow side canyon attracted him. It would be fun to ride up to it and camp there for the night, thought Sid, besides being out of the main canyon and away from possible visits of passing Navahos who might take into their heads to rob a lonely boy camping out. He turned up it, winding his pony through great spruces and firs that rose out of its moist bottom, watered by a little runnel. The stratified stone ledges of the cliffs were moss-covered at their bases. High up through the cleft he could see the blue sky, with yellow sunlight striking the spires of western yellow pines that seemed like pygmy Japanese trees up there from where he was. It was already dim down in here.
Swiftly the twilight grew, while the pony slowed to a walk, his feet not making a sound in the soft duff. It was growing eerie and mysterious in here, thought Sid, as a slight shiver ran through him, and he now wished he had stayed out in the open valley. But he fought back that wish as cowardly and foolish. Men did not turn back from what they had once set their hand to!
Then a stick cracked, somewhere behind him. Sid reined up and listened. All was still as death; even the birds had gone to roost in the dim twilight of the chasm. But Pinto's actions told him that that noise was not imagination. His pony's ears lay flat back and he was shivering all over with fear!
Sid watched, intently, down the chasm. He thought he saw a bush move. A second's concentration on it told him it had moved, for the tips of its lower branches still vibrated. He reached down and drew his army carbine out of its scabbard. For some minutes Sid watched the bush, his heart beating with excitement. A more experienced man than he would have hummed a shot into it to smoke out whatever might be lurking there.
But after a time he turned away and urged the pony slowly ahead. The horse jumped as the spurs touched him, and Sid had a wrangle to quiet him at all. They paced on, slowly, both listening behind them, for Pinto's ears had not pricked forward at all. An uncanny sense that they were being followed,—by something—in the chasm, persisted. Several times Sid looked back, rifle at ready, urged by some half-heard noise.
A likely camping spot, a little dent in the chasm walls showed up ahead, and, as it was getting dark, Sid decided to stop here and make camp for the night, still keeping a wary eye out for whatever beast it was that was stalking them.
He dismounted and picketed Pinto in a little grass swale. Then he cleared away a space for his fire in the needles that lay under the clump of silver spruces in the dent. He was gathering sticks for it when Pinto gave a snort of terror and tugged frantically at his halter. Sid yelled at him, for his eyeballs showed white with fright. He snatched up his rifle to peer down the chasm. Then a shock of alarm went through him, as his eye fastened on a motionless head—looking at them from over a ledge that jutted out from the canyon walls high up. Big, round, and coal-black it was! No ears showed—they must have been laid back flat—but a green and phosphorescent flash came from the two eyes in it that glared at them.
Sid's rifle sprang to shoulder and the red spurt of flame from its muzzle split the semidarkness.