Desert Moon Read online

  Julia felt weak. What if the angry townspeople got to Oliver before he was proven innocent? She managed to stand, though her knees wobbled.

  “Why don’t you tell the deputy sheriff that Oliver’s innocent?”

  “Naw. Adam Scott wouldn’t listen to me, no more’n the bosses at the mine would.”

  Julia wondered about that. She had no idea how Clew was perceived in the community. She did know that Adam had made up his mind about the robber, and the old man might be right.

  “Thank you very much for bringing the message, Clew.”

  He nodded and patted his hat on. “Anytime. And I won’t tell anyone else.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  She walked with him to the door and bolted it behind him. She went shakily back to her chair and sat down to ponder the message. Her heart refused to slow down. Oliver was alive and in good health, but he was in danger—not from outlaws, but from his friends here in Ardell. She had in her hand the only way to save his life.

  For fifteen minutes she pored over the paper, trying to recall the code. She recognized the symbols they’d used for the desert and the trading post. Why hadn’t she kept a copy of their code?

  She jumped up and hurried up the stairs to her room. In the bottom of the wardrobe was a box of old letters and school papers. She carried it to the bed and rooted through it. Near the bottom she found a couple of coded messages from her brother. Half an hour later she had worked out the new message. She knew where Oliver was—or at least, where he was headed.

  Chapter 7

  Adam rose before dawn and ate a spare breakfast. He packed a few more supplies in his saddlebags and went out to the stable. He’d thought about the robbery half the night and asked himself, “If I were Oliver Newman, where would I go to hide?”

  At first he’d thought Oliver would go to Flagstaff and take a train out of Arizona. He’d go to some city—say, San Francisco or Denver—where he could live in style on the loot from the robbery. Then something else had occurred to him.

  The Newman family had lived at Canyon Diablo for a while when Ollie and Julia were kids. Ollie had talked about it a lot. He’d told Adam how fun it was and how he and his sister had grown close there and had secret places to play. They’d had Navajo friends, and they’d been to some places on the reservation that white people usually didn’t get to see.

  Why wouldn’t Oliver go into hiding for a while? He probably didn’t intend to kill the shotgun messenger. Now he wasn’t only a robber. He was a murderer. That would weigh heavy on him. He’d know Adam would be tracking him, and he’d be declared a wanted man. Lawmen and bounty hunters would go after him. The desert northeast of Canyon Diablo might be just the place for him to drop out of sight.

  Julia’s pleas to consider other suspects weren’t unreasonable—if she was being honest. But he found it hard to swallow that she returned home armed the very day her brother robbed the stagecoach and that she had no connection to the holdup. Inside the coach, with her pistol ready, she could have given Ollie support if he’d needed it. If one of the other passengers tried to shoot the robber, Julia could have dropped him and claimed it was an accident.

  Adam saddled his horse with grim determination. He’d love to prove someone else did this. But if he delayed in finding Oliver to investigate other people, his main suspect would get away. No, Ollie had a reason for not coming home yesterday. Whether it was a good reason or not—well, that was something he had to find out.

  When he rode past the livery, Sam Dennis was just rolling open the barn door.

  “Hey, Sheriff!”

  Adam turned Socks in and rode up to the barn. “Mornin’, Sam.”

  “I thought you slept out on the mountain.”

  “Had to come into town late last night after all.”

  Sam scratched his head. “Oh. Where you headed now?”

  “Same as before. Out to try and find the robber.”

  “Do you need men to ride with you again? We all want to see you bring that scoundrel in.”

  “I can handle it.” Adam turned his horse and rode out. Instead of picking his way over the mountain paths, he stuck to the road that went to the mine and then down the other side. He’d head as straight toward Canyon Diablo as he could and trust that he’d find some sign of Oliver’s presence when he got there.

  He pushed Socks as hard as he dared across the high desert. The trail had been a genuine road for a while, with stagecoach service to Canyon Diablo in its heyday. Lately it had been allowed to deteriorate. Not many people rode this way anymore.

  The temperatures were cooling, now that autumn was approaching. At night it would be downright cold out here. Adam had been up this way with the Rangers once, and he knew the terrain for the first couple of hours. At the last watering place he knew, he made sure Socks got a good drink. Adam filled his canteen. Even though the air was fairly cool, he didn’t want to go too long without water. He wasn’t sure how much longer it would take him to get to Canyon Diablo.

  He met no one and began to feel a little spooked. He might regret riding into the wilderness with nobody to watch his back. But the hoofprints in the trail told him this stretch wasn’t always deserted. In places, sand had blown across the way. In others, he rode on bedrock, between towering cliffs. He always watched the rim for lookouts, but saw no one. Maybe the tales about how the Navajo resented intruders were exaggerated.

  Sometime past noon, he trotted up to the trading post. Several Indians lounged outside, smoking in the slim shadow of the wall. Several bundles that looked like raw wool lay nearby. The Navajo eyed Adam closely and turned away. Adam tied Socks to the hitching rail, even though the horse was trained to ground tie. He went inside and squinted in the dim interior. The place smelled of leather, tobacco, and gunpowder.

  “Howdy.” The trader behind the counter was a big, bearded man. “Help you, mister?”

  Adam walked over to the counter. “Howdy. I’m Deputy Sheriff Scott, from Ardell. Do you know a fellow by the name of Oliver Newman?”

  “Newman?” The trader frowned.

  “His father used to be the Indian agent here some time back,” Adam said.

  “Oh, sure. Everyone knows about Ben Newman. That was before my time, though. I don’t think he’s been in these parts a good many years.”

  “No, he hasn’t. Ben Newman passed on a few years back, but I thought maybe his son had been around.”

  The trader stroked his beard. “There was a man rode past here last night. I didn’t know who he was, but he seemed to know where he was headed, and he didn’t stop in to jaw with me. We don’t get many strangers coming through here—not white men, anyways.”

  “So he rode right past the trading post?”

  The trader nodded. “I was banking the fire, getting ready for bed, and I heard hoofbeats. Figured whoever it was needed something. The Diné know I’ll open up for them if it’s an emergency, but mostly they come during my regular hours. But this fella wasn’t an Injun. And he rode right on by, toward the desert. I figured he was familiar with these parts—that or off his nut.”

  “How do you know he was white? You said it was dark.”

  “Not that dark. I saw his profile and his outfit. He was traveling light, but he was definitely not Diné.”

  “All right,” Adam said. “Can you tell me where the Newman family lived when they were here?”

  “It’s southeast of here. Go past where the old town was.”

  “Right out front here, you mean?”

  “Yep. You’ll see a few chimneys and such. Not much left, but you can tell where the town was.”

  Adam nodded.

  “Just keep going along the rim of the canyon, past the bridge. You’ll see where the trail goes away from the river. Their place was a couple of miles out. Last time I was out that way, the cabin was still standing.”

  “Thank you.”

  Adam went outside. Only two of the Navajo were left, and they were hefting the bundles of wool. They walke
d toward the door of the trading post. One of them nodded to Adam.

  “Howdy,” Adam said. He mounted and rode along the canyon rim until he got to the railroad tracks. He left Socks beside the rails and walked a few yards out on the trestle. So this was what had brought the short-lived town into existence. Looking down made him a little wobbly. Clear at the bottom, he could see a streambed, but only a thin ribbon of water lay in it now. He wondered if the Indians had a trail that led down into the deep canyon. The trestle was the highest he’d ever seen, and he marveled at the engineering it took. He turned and walked back to his horse—no use putting this off any longer.

  He rode two miles to the southeast. He could easily read tracks on the trail now. Unshod horses, all. That didn’t bother him. Oliver had a tough little mustang with hooves as hard as granite, or so Ollie said. He never had that horse shod. Adam wished it were otherwise—that would have made Oliver a lot easier to follow in the Navajo territory. The land was pretty near empty, once you left the railroad tracks and the trading post behind. A few bushes, a few rocks, sparsely vegetated slopes.

  When he came to the cabin, he marveled that Mrs. Newman had agreed to live out here for three years. It seemed to Adam an awful place to raise children, yet Ollie spoke of it with fondness.

  Adam swung down from the saddle and examined the ground in front of the cabin. The hoofprints were clear. One horse. One man. Boot prints led to the door and back out. The horse’s tracks rejoined the desert trail. They could have been made this morning…or a month ago.

  Adam couldn’t resist taking another minute to look inside the cabin. It was as bare and bleak inside as out. Mrs. Newman had brightened it up, no doubt. Seemed she’d always been sewing or cooking when Adam knew her. Their house in Ardell was cozy, and he loved to visit his friends there. It was comfortable and warm. It wasn’t at all like the house he’d grown up in, yet it never failed to remind him of his own mother and home.

  The cabin’s one large room had a loft over half of it. A hole in the wall told him where the stovepipe had been. The two small windows were long broken, and a few shards of glass lay on the floor. A rude bunk was built against one wall, a mere shelf a man could sleep on. An empty wooden crate stood near it, and dust coated everything.

  Adam went back to his horse and headed out into the desert. After an hour’s riding, they came to a dribble of a stream. Barely enough water ran over the stone in its bed to let him fill his canteen. Socks sucked up a little water, and they went on.

  There was no longer any way to distinguish the prints left by the horse at the cabin from the others. That was the thing that bothered Adam above all else. Because the tracks he’d found near the robbery site were those of a shod horse. That horse had waited in the scrub pines and nibbled at the nearby shrubbery and tufts of dry grass. The shoes had left a few distinct impressions.

  Still, he reasoned, Oliver could have used another horse for the robbery and then switched to his own. Maybe he rode back to where he’d left his distinctive pinto gelding—the mine, for instance—and no one else saw him trade mounts in the stable there. It made sense to Adam. He wouldn’t wear a mask to disguise himself during the robbery and risk having someone see his one-of-a-kind pinto.

  The only logical alternative was that Oliver didn’t commit the robbery. But if so, why did he run?

  Julia neared Canyon Diablo late in the afternoon. She’d taken her time and not pushed the dun. There was no need to rush.

  Her memories flowed freely as she came near the ruined town that perched along the top of a ravine cradling the Little Colorado River. The railroad crew had built the tracks as far as the edge of the canyon long before Julia was born—1882, if she remembered correctly. But the materials for the trestle were held up for months. The town had popped up almost overnight and reveled loud and hard while the track crew waited. The following year the supplies came in and the bridge and that section of the railroad were completed.

  The excitement of having the railroad come through had lasted only until the building materials arrived, and with the trestle completed, the town had died as quickly as it had appeared.

  Julia had bypassed the trading post, instead turning her horse off the trail a quarter mile to the south, so that she wouldn’t be seen by anyone near the post. She wasn’t sure what to expect at their old home—was the cabin even still standing? The wood might very well have been carried off for other purposes. And if the little house remained, someone else might be living in it now.

  She took her time, comparing her surroundings to her memories. After a half hour, she rode up to her old home, the weather-beaten cabin southeast of town. To all appearances, the place was deserted.

  She dismounted and dropped the dun’s reins. He wasn’t much to look at, but he’d proven himself a wiry, persistent mount. She hoped he was an easy keeper, because she hadn’t been able to carry much feed.

  In the dirt were hoofprints—not surprising. Oliver would have been here. But so had someone else. The shod horse had come recently, its prints superimposed on the barefoot one’s. She walked up to the door of the cabin and smiled for the first time all day.

  Oliver had left her another message. The lizard sign for her name was freshly scratched on the doorjamb, along with three more signs. Having refreshed her memory on the code, it took her only a glance to read them. Her brother was telling her that he would be at the cave on the full moon—tomorrow night, September the eighth.

  The cave was a favorite haunt for her and Oliver when they were children. They’d discovered it while out roaming on their ponies a few months after they’d moved here with their folks. Their mother forbade them to go to the trading post alone, so they spent their free time playing in the desert. Chores first, then schoolwork, and then long, bright days of riding and stalking and make-believe raiding together.

  They’d found the petroglyphs their first summer at Canyon Diablo and had puzzled over them. They’d begun to work out their code weeks before they decided to ask one of the young Diné men to tell them what the pictures meant. Kai came often to the trading post with his father, and all the Newmans liked him. He’d shown Oliver how to make arrows that flew true to their mark, and he’d helped Julia make a quiver from leather scraps.

  Some of the signs meant just what they portrayed, and some they had assigned arbitrary meanings. The sun could represent the sun itself or a day. In combination with other signs, it might designate a person’s name. Kai and other Diné children taught them dozens of other signs. One of these was the spiral, which symbolized a journey. Oliver had used it in the message Clew brought. He was making a journey to their old place of play. For the cave they used a wide V with a line across it just above the peak. They pretended it was a bat, though they weren’t sure. There were no bats in their cave, but it had seemed appropriate when they were constructing the code.

  The circle of the moon, with a cross for a star on either side, told her their meeting would take place on the night of the full moon. Oliver had allowed her plenty of time to prepare and travel here—more than she had needed, as it turned out, but he couldn’t have foreseen that. She wasn’t even sure whether he knew she’d arrived in Ardell when he wrote the first message and left town for Canyon Diablo.

  But he was alive, and probably in good health. He was nearby, and he’d stood in this spot within the last two days. That was enough to satisfy her for now.

  She went to her horse and untied the bundles she’d brought. Food, water, a sack of grain for her mount, and a bedroll. Tied up in the blankets were a few extra clothes for herself and fresh socks and a shirt for Oliver. She’d also brought a sack containing small pieces of firewood and kindling. Afraid to burden the horse too much, she’d kept that to a minimum, but she hadn’t known what to expect at their old home.

  Inside the empty cabin, she spread her blankets on the bunk. Her parents had shared the narrow bed when the family lived here. She and Oliver had slept on straw ticks in the loft.

  Having no
broom to sweep out the place and no stove to light a fire in, she decided to make do with things as they were, disturbing the place as little as possible. She didn’t want to draw unwanted attention. It was warm enough that she thought her wool blankets and her jacket would be enough tonight—she didn’t need a fire. And she could get by without cooking. In the morning, maybe she would have a fire outside. And maybe she would visit the trader. She’d have to decide whether or not that was risky. If Adam had already been there and inquired for her brother, would showing herself matter?

  As darkness gathered, she curled up on the bunk and prayed silently for Oliver. He was taking a chance that she would come on time. He wouldn’t ask her to make the arduous journey unless he felt it was necessary. To Julia, that said he feared his life was at stake.

  Lord, I don’t know what to ask. Keep Adam from finding him, unless You have a better way that I can’t see.

  She thought about Adam, in pursuit of Oliver. Had he stopped at the trading post? Did he know he was in Diné territory now? White men entered the tribal lands at their own risk. She didn’t fear that the Diné would mistreat Oliver. He had old friends in the tribe. But what if they found Adam sniffing around on their reservation? He wouldn’t get a welcoming party—at least not in a good sense.

  Lord, if either one of them needs protecting, I guess it’s up to You. I certainly can’t help them tonight.

  In the distance, coyotes yipped, but Julia was so tired she soon sank into sleep.

  The scenery was breathtaking. In the treeless valleys, Socks trotted among the sagebrush and short, dry grass, while above them loomed sculpted rock towers. A mile away, a mesa stood up like an island out of the land. The dark smear on top represented treetops, but Adam couldn’t see a way to get up there.

  He had never been this deep into Diné territory. He wished he had someone to share it with. Julia came to mind, but he rejected that thought immediately. He would probably never have a chance to share anything with Julia again. Not after he tracked down her brother and brought him to justice.