Cow-Country by B. M. Bower (ink book reader TXT) 📕

“And I brought sandwiches,” Honey threw in as especial blessing. “Uncle Dave will be mad, I expect. But I've never seen the Sinks at night, with moonlight.”

She was quiet while the horses waded Sunk Creek and picked their way carefully over a particularly rocky stretch beyond. “But what I'd rather do,” she said, speaking from her thoughts which had evidently carried forward in the silence, “is explore Catrock Canyon.”

“Well, why not, if we have time?” Bud rode up alongside her. “Is it far?”

Honey looked at him searchingly. “You must be stranger to these parts,” she said disbelievingly. “Do you think you can make me swallow that?”

Bud looked at her inquiringly, which forced her to go on.

“You must know about Catrock Canyon, Bud Birnie. Don't try to make me believe you don't.”

“I don't. I never heard of it before that I remember. What is it makes you want to explore it?”

Honey studied him. “You're the queerest specimen I ever did see,” she exclaimed pettishly. “Why, it's not going to hurt you to admit you know Catrock Canyon is—unexplorable.”

“Oh. So you want to explore it because it's unexplorable. Well, why is it unexplorable?”

Honey looked around her at the dry sageland they were crossing. “Oh, you make me TIRED!” she said bluntly, with something of the range roughness in her voice. “Because it is, that's all.”

“Then I'd like to explore it myself,” Bud declared.

“For one thing,” Honey dilated, “there's no way to get in there. Up on the ridge this side, where the rock is that throws a shadow like a cat's head on the opposite wall, you can look down a ways. But the two sides come so close together at the top that you can't see the bottom of the canyon at all. I've been on the ridge where I could see the cat's head.”

Bud glanced speculatively up at the sun, and Honey, catching his meaning, shook her head and smiled.

“If we get into the Sinks and back to-day, they will do enough talking about it; or Uncle Dave will, and Marian. I—I thought perhaps you'd be able to tell me about—Catrock Canyon.”

“I'm able to say I don't know a thing about it. If no one can get into it, I should think that's about all, isn't it?”

“Yes—you'd think so,” Honey agreed enigmatically, and began to talk of the racing that day, and of the dance, and of other dances and other races yet to come. Bud discussed these subjects for a while and then asked boldly, “When's Lew coming back?”

“Lew?” Honey shot a swift glance at him. “Why?” She looked ahead at the forbidding, craggy hills toward which she had glanced when she spoke of Catrock. “Why, I don't know. How should I?”

Bud saw that he had spoken unwisely. “I was thinking he'd maybe hate to miss another running match like to-day,” he explained guilelessly. “Everybody and his dog seemed to be there to-day, and everybody had money up. All,” he modified, “except the Muleshoe boys. I didn't see any of them.”

“You won't,” Honey told him with some emphasis. “Uncle Dave and the Muleshoe are on the outs. They never come around except for mail and things from the store. And most always they send Hen. Uncle Dave and Dirk Tracy had an awful row last winter. It was next thing to a killing. So of course the outfits ain't on friendly terms.”

This was more than Pop had gossiped to Bud, and since the whole thing was of no concern to him, and Honey plainly objected to talking about Marian's husband, he was quite ready to fix his interest once more upon the Sinks. He was surprised when they emerged from a cluster of small, sage-covered knolls, directly upon the edge of what at first sight seemed to be another dry river bed—sprawled wider, perhaps, with irregular arms thrust back into the less sterile land. They rode down a steep, rocky trail and came out into the Sinks.

It was an odd, forbidding place, and the farther up the gravelly bottom they rode, the more forbidding it became. Bud thought that in the time when Indians were dangerous as she-bears the Sinks would not be a place where a man would want to ride. There were too many jutting crags, too many unsuspected, black holes that led back—no one knew just where.

Honey led the way to an irregular circle of waterwashed cobbles and Bud peered down fifty feet to another dry, gravelly bottom seemingly a duplicate of the upper surface. She rode on past other caves, and let him look down into other holes. There were faint rumblings in some of these, but in none was there any water showing save in stagnant pools in the rock where the rain had fallen.

“There's one cave I like to go into,” said Honey at last. “It's a little farther on, but we have time enough. There's a spring inside, and we can eat our sandwiches. It isn't dark-there are openings to the top, and lots of funny, winding passages. That,” she finished thrillingly, “is the place the Indians claim is haunted.”

Bud did not shudder convincingly, and they rode slowly forward, picking their way among the rocks. The cave yawned wide open to the sun, which hung on the top of Catrock Peak. They dismounted, anchored the reins with rocks and went inside.

When Bud had been investigative Buddy, he had explored more caves than he could count. He had filched candles from his mother and had crept back and back until the candle flame flickered warning that he was nearing the “damps” Indians always did believe caves were haunted, probably because they did not understand the “damps”, and thought evil spirits had taken those who went in and never returned. Buddy had once been lost in a cave for four harrowing hours, and had found his way out by sheer luck, passing the skeleton of an Indian and taking the tomahawk as a souvenir.

Wherefore this particular cave, with a spring back fifty feet from the entrance where a shaft of sunlight struck the rock through some obscure slit in the rock, had no thrill for him. But the floor was of fine, white sand, and the ceiling was knobby and grotesque, and he was quite willing to sit there beside the spring and eat two sandwiches and talk foolishness with Honey, using that part of his mind which was not busy with the complexities of winning money on the speed of his horses when three horses represented his entire business capital, and with wondering what was wrong with Burroback Valley, that three persons of widely different viewpoints had felt it necessary to caution him,—and had couched their admonitions in such general terms that he could not feel the force of their warning.

He was thinking back along his life to where false alarms of Indian outbreaks had played a very large part in the Tomahawk's affairs, and how little of the ranch work would ever have been done had they listened to every calamity howler that came along. Honey was talking, and he was answering partly at random, when she suddenly laughed and got up.