They all followed his pointing finger, to where the long poles of a horse corral up on the ridge back of the hogan showed. Nickering at them over the gate was Sid’s pinto! Ruler was right!
CHAPTER VI
RULER TAKES A HAND
WHEN the first realization burst upon Sid that he was a prisoner in Lost Canyon, his first reaction was a rebellious No! The thing was preposterous—there must be a way out! The cougar’s route, for one thing. With that idea in mind, Sid decided on a return to his cave lair on the pueblo ledge. He had a shivery repugnance for the haunted cliff dwelling, now, since he knew that he would very likely have to spend the night in the same valley with this abode of departed spirits. But Sid tossed aside such thoughts, for the present, and worked his way resolutely up to the cliff dwellers’ village again. The cougar’s trail leading out of his cave was well marked—as far as the edge of the ledge. From there his immense strength and activity, and his sharp, hooked claws made possible for him any number of different routes along the cliff wall. There were claw marks, here and there, plainly to be seen, places that the boy couldn’t think of reaching. No creature without hooked claws could remain there for a minute!
Sid marked a number of these spots and worked out a more or less nebulous route by them along the cliff walls. Going below, he could pick these up, he thought, and follow them up the canyon so as to locate the spot where the cougar came down the cliff. With this idea he descended again and stumbled hurriedly down the rock valley, searching the ledges above with his eyes. He could just discern the faint spoor marks, where certain small shrubs had been bent over, or certain patches of loose, rocky soil dislodged. They all trended north, toward the head of the canyon.
And there lay his fate! That vast, smooth slope, of utterly bare rock slanted up from the upper ledges to the top, here. It was smooth, of weathered gray granite, and it was so steep that no man without a rope to hang on to could attempt to climb it. A thin fissure, with tufts of weeds growing invitingly out of it, crossed it diagonally. A man might ascend, with that precarious foothold,—but it was utterly inaccessible from below.
The great cat had negotiated it with ease, however, his steel-hook claws gripping the granite without probably giving it so much as a thought. Over it, up and down, he had come, carrying his prey in his teeth, as patches of hair and dried blood on the granite showed. The route was as easy to him as to a cat going up a tree; to a man it was quite as impossible.
It was growing late when Sid finally came to the conclusion that impossible was the answer, so far as he was concerned. He spent an hour more in walking up and down the ravine, studying the cliff rim for some possible crevice or chimney up which he could climb by the aid of a manufactured rope. This, too, was hopeless, without at least a hundred feet of lariat—things were done on too huge a scale, here, to be at all complaisant with puny man and his inventions! To return to the high cleft in the wall that blocked Lost Canyon suggested itself. Sid could see nothing in that to allure! At the best he could only reach the ledge at the bottom of “Fat Man’s Misery,” there to sit and look below. His own people were not due in the Canyon until to-morrow; even then it would be a mere chance that could decide them to come up this side canyon which he had explored. He recollected some talk about their striking the canyon from its upper end,—seven miles away from him! With his small .32-20 revolver there was hardly a chance that they would hear him,—even if he sat on the ledge all next day and fired signals.
Sid decided that his present duty was to make himself comfortable for the night. Usually this was a most delectable occupation. Never in his life had Sid known fear of the forest. One thing which had always brought a disrespectful grin to his face on being urged to read the great poets had been their very evident distaste for a forest—at night. Even in the daytime they peopled it with fairies, dryads, monsters, witches—at the very least with wild beasts and all the terrors of the unknown and unseen. Not one of them, Sid felt, could have been left out all night in the forest without a feeling of uneasiness, without at least a stoppage of the Muse and an ardent desire for a return to the comforts and security of civilization! But to Sid the trees, the rocks, the birds, the forest animals all formed one vast brotherhood with him; it was always with a feeling of utter peace and security that he allowed himself to sink into the unconsciousness of sleep, confident of a joyous reawakening when dawn should steal through the forest aisles again and all its wild brotherhood burst into life and song.
But this evening, with the grisly proximity of the deserted pueblo and its unburied dead, with the certainty that his valley was shared by a night-prowling wild beast, he found that his usual serenity had left him and instead there was a nervousness and a disinclination for sleep—a tendency, even, to stop in the midst of some trivial action and watch and listen. And, that evening, Sid discovered also the presence of an Elder Brother within him,—that cowardly, brutish, superstitious and terror-ridden cave man that psychologists tell us occupies the left lobe of the brain. This part of ourselves is only held in subjection by the superior soul of man,—the result of ages of intellectual training and advancement,—that controls the right lobe of his brain and dominates the whole man. But this pre-Adamite self, this abject creature,—whose mildest manifestation is that peculiar fit of shyness known as “stage fright”—lurks always within each one of us, ready to drive into blind, unreasoning terror, the mad fury of murder, or the brutish outbursts of passion, the best of men, once he gains the ascendancy. He whispered now to Sid, counseling he knew not what madness, ghost-terrors, fetishes, superstitious fear of the dead.
For a time Sid held him in check, occupied with the practical business of making a bivouac,—a sort of bear’s den of spruce browse slanting over a horizontal pole beside his fire. After that came the preparation of a meal of bacon, coffee and pinole. But as night fell and it grew pitch black within the canyon, the whimpers of the terrified cave man within him grew louder and more insistent, urging him to fly, he knew not where,—to yell aloud for succor,—to build a huge fire for its imaginary protection—all the promptings of the arrant coward. Sid fought him off, partly amused over the childish suggestions that swirled through his brain, partly sympathetic over the lives of real terror that the actual cave man must have lived, and whose indelible recollections they have transmitted down to us, deep buried in the very core of our beings.