It's a tricksy world, that realm of intuitions.-For this is what befell Casey Ryan, and you may account for it as best pleases you.
He circled the rock as a wolf will circle a coiled rattler which it does not see.-Beyond the rock, built close against it so that the rear wall must have been the face of the ledge, a little rock cabin squatted secretively.-One small window, with two panes of glass was set high under the eaves on the side toward Casey.
Cleverly concealed it was, built to resemble the ledge.-Visible from one side only, and that was the side where Casey stood. At the back the sloping boulder, untouched, impregnable; at the north and west, a twist of the ledge that hid the cabin completely in a niche.-It was the window on the south side that betrayed it.
So here was what the boulder concealed,--and yet, Casey was not satisfied with the discovery.-Unconsciously he reached for his gun. This, he told himself, must be the secret habitation of the fiend who shot from rim-rocks with terrible precision at harmless prospectors and their burros.
Casey squinted up at the sun and turned his level gaze again upon the cabin.-Reason told him that the man with the rifle was still watching for a pot shot at him and Barney, and that there was nothing whatever to indicate the presence of only one man in the camp below. Had he been glimpsed once during the climb, he would have been fired upon; he would never have been given the chance to gain the top and find this cabin.
The place looked deserted.-His practical, everyday mind told him it was empty for the time being.-But he felt queer and uncomfortable, nevertheless.-He sneaked along the ledge to the cabin, flattened himself against the corner next the gray boulder and waited there for a minute.-He felt the flesh stiffening on his jaws as he crept up to the window to look in.-By standing on his toes, Casey's eyes came on a level with the lowest inch of glass,--the window was so high.
Just at first Casey could not see much.-Then, when his eyes had adjusted themselves to the half twilight within, his mind at first failed to grasp what he saw.-Gradually a dimly sensed dread took hold of him, and grew while he stood there peering in at commonplace things which should have given him no feeling save perhaps a faint surprise.
A fairly clean, tiny room he saw, with a rough, narrow bed in one corner and a box table at its head.-From the ceiling hung a lantern with the chimney smoked on one side and the warped, pole rafter above it slightly blackened to show how long the lantern had hung there lighted.-A door opposite the tiny window was closed, and there was no latch or fastening on the inner side.
An Indian blanket covered half the floor space, and in the corner opposite the bed was a queer, drumlike thing of sheet iron with a pipe running through the wall; some heating arrangement, Casey guessed.
In the center of the room, facing the window, a woman sat in a wooden rocking chair and rocked.-A pale old woman with dark hollows under her eyes that were fixed upon the pattern of the Indian rug. Her hair was white.-Her thin, white hands rested limply on the arms of the chair, and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth, steadily, quietly,--just rocking and staring at the Indian rug.
Casey has since told me that she was the creepiest thing he ever saw in his life.-Yet he could not explain why it was so. The woman's face was not so old, though it was lined and without color.-There was a terrible quiet in her features, but he felt, somehow, that her thoughts were not quiet.-It was as if her thoughts were reaching out to him, telling him things too awful for her thin, hushed lips to let pass.
But after all, Casey's main object was to locate the man with the rifle, and to do it before he himself was seen on the butte.-He watched a little longer the woman who rocked and rocked. Never once did her eyes move from that fixed point on the rug.-Never once did her fingers move on the arm of the chair.-Her mouth remained immobile as the lips of a dead woman.-He had to force himself to leave the window; and when he did, he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted some one helpless and needing him.-He sneaked back, lifted himself and took another long look.-The old woman was rocking back and forth, her face quiet with that terrible, pent placidity which Casey could not understand.
Away from the cabin a pebble's throw, he shook his shoulders and pulled his mind away from her, back to the man with the rifle-- and to Barney.-Rocking in a chair never hurt anybody that he ever heard of.-And shooting from rim-rocks did.-And Barney was down there, holed up and helpless, though he had grub and water.
Casey was up here in a mighty dangerous place without much grub or water but--he hoped--not quite helpless.-His immediate, pressing job was not to peek through a high-up window at an old woman rocking back and forth in a chair, but to round up the man who was interfering with Casey's peaceful quest for--well, he called it wealth; but I think that adventure meant more to him.
He picked his way carefully along the edge of the rim-rock, keeping under cover when he could and watching always the country ahead.-And without any artful description of his progress, I will simply say that Casey Ryan combed the edge of that rampart for two miles before dark, and found himself at last on the side farthest from Barney without having discovered the faintest trace of any living soul save the woman who rocked back and forth in the little, secret cabin.
Casey sat down on a rock, took a restrained drink from his canteen, and said everything he knew or could invent that was profane and condemnatory of his luck, of the unseen assassin, of the country and his present predicament.-He got up, looked all around him, sniffed unavailingly for some tang of smoke in the thin, crisp air, reseated himself and said everything all over again.
Presently he rose and made his way straight across the butte, going slowly to lessen his chance of making a noise for unfriendly ears to hear, and with the stars for guidance.