Ashes to Ashes

Lou takes up position on the deck behind the four seat enclosed cab. We hang on to the roll bar and the Hummer rolls with Chris behind the wheel. Dr. Adams can be heard droning on about something before the sound of the engine drowns him out.

As we ride toward the main trail... I remember my thoughts from this spot on the map in 1881. Riding toward certain death, insurmountable odds, pain and anguish, the terror of the murder we had just committed and were charging towards. I shudder at the thought of it.

"Hard to shake the fact that we were just hear." Lou says, staring out at the low lying range in front of us. He points to a bare spot in the desert, one that holds secrets that have not been whispered for over a hundred years. We thundered toward their flank, those troops. They didn't see us coming until they had engaged the Warriors, and then it was too late.

We turn toward the Sacred Mountains on the main trail. It is still used, from the looks of it. There are hundreds of tire tracks, some hoof prints off the main trail. I am sure there are plenty of vehicles that explore out here. The trail that was soft, high desert sand and brush is now hard pan and stiff. As we drive, Lou, myself, and even Chris sense our location. Even before Lou taps the top of the truck Chris is letting off the gas and turning.

The Hummer peels off the trail and we ride out about fifty yards or so and he turns it back around and throws it in park. We jump from the back as Chris and Ollie step out of the cab.

"Gentlemen, we should press on." Dr. Adams is talking to himself at this point, we have all tuned him out.

"Yeah, yeah... stay in the car, rattlesnakes."
"What? Did you say... rattlesnakes?" He searches for the lock on the door.
"Pussy." Lou seems disgusted as he walks ahead of us.

We all stop near the same spot, each of us with their memories of the battle. The sun catches something ahead of me about ten feet, just a glint of gold nearly consumed by the desert sand. I step over and reach down, brushing the earth from around it until it pulls up. It is a brass button and what might have been uniform cloth. I turn it over and use my thumbnail to remove the rock hard sand. When I uncover the initials I nod. Lou's back is to me, but he knows.

"What did you find, Jake?"
I toss it to him as he turns. He smiles when he sees it, then grips it hard... like he is pressing a thought into the metal. In his eyes a soldier that dies in battle, no matter what he is fighting for, is a hero. I agree. I am sure that this carnage was hard for him to bare.

Ollie walks to a spot and takes a knee. He shouts something to Chris, who returns to the Hummer and comes back with a folding shovel. Ollie hacks at the soil and then starts in on a tug of war which ends with him on his ass and a rusted piece of metal in his lap. He takes it in both hands and holds it over his head as he stands. It is the remains of a rifle, the wood long gone, the metal slowly returning to nature.

We all look at it and remain silent in our rememberance. Then we all get back into the Hummer and Chris pulls back out onto the trail.
"Oooo, an artifact. May I see it please?" We can hear the good Doctor ogle over the rifle. He keeps going on and on and finally Ollie must have grabbed it out of his hands and it comes up to us from the side window. I grab it and set it back behind us.

What had taken an hour to ride back in the old west takes minutes cruising in the Hummer. We ride over a ditch that I can only thing was the brook where we partied with the Indians. The trail before us is larger and wider than it had been. Time and modern transportation had changed this landscape. I try to remember the ride, some type of landmark that might...

"HOLD IT." I hit the roof a couple of times and Chris lays on the brakes.
"What the FUCK." I hear him say. I am sure I startled him.
"Back up, Chris... I thought I saw something."

The Hummer whines as it backs up. He goes about fifty feet and I have him stop. I reach out and point at a round iron loop above a bit of a ledge in the canyon wall to our right. It is a good six feet above our trail and doesn't look like it would serve any purpose.

"What is that?" Lou asks, wiping the sweat from his eyes. Even though it is late afternoon it is hotter than hell and stagnant.
"Could that be where the little brave tied off Ole'Bess?"
"Hell no, it's too high to be... "
Lou stops himself mid sentence and thinks about it, "It just might be."

We jump out of the Hummer and stand on the trail looking up at the loop. Just before it on the trail there is a spot where the trail through the rock might have been, but it is now filled with earth and dotted with scrub sage.

I walk back down the trail a bit and shield my eyes from the brightness.
"Lou... "
He joins me, squinting in the direction I am looking. "What have you got, Nancy."
"Is that the look-out position that Chris and Mike were in?"
He takes a moment. "Now we're talking."

We pull the gear out of the Hummer; climbing rope, LED headlamps, and the shovel. Ollie puts the rope over his neck and shoulder. We each don a headlamp rather than carry it, and I take the shovel.

"Uh... gentlemen? I was hoping we could drive to the site of this cavern. You mentioned a trail." Dr. Adams is out of the Hummer and straightening his suit coat.
"Yeah, this is the trail." Chris points to the steep grade above us.

We leave him behind as we carefully make our way up to the ledge and then over the rubble that has now become part of the canyon wall. He is still talking when as we climb up out of sight.
"Can't we just hit him with the shovel and leave him out here?" I mutter. The boys have a chuckle and we move on.

When we reach the top, Ollie drops the rope to the ground, unties it, and then anchors one end to an outcropping of rock. He tugs hard on the anchor to test its strength and then heaves the remaining line over the grade back down to the Hummer. We hear acknowledgement from Dr. Adams. I am sure he expects some assistance.

The spot where we are standing is the plateau. Lou looks to the left at the trailhead. It still holds pain. This is where he was shot so many times. I turn and walk toward a spot on the ridge and look over. I climb down and look back at what was once the trail that led up to the cavern. Then I turn my eyes to the ground at my feet and look for it. Even after one hundred and twenty some odd years this part of the desert remains the same. Choked in the beargrass and half covered in earth is the Spencer... right where I dropped it after my lucky fifth shot covered the trail. I pull it up from the shallow grave and bring it back up to the plateau.

"No shit... " Lou takes it from me and looks at it. It even has part of the walnut stock intact. He forces the lever action and with a couple of tries he gets it to move. There is a moment of silence and Lou gets a tear in his eye. We say nothing, no jokes. This is hallowed ground for all of us. Lou lays the rifle at his feet and we move on.

The entrance to the cavern is gone. In its place a flow of rock and rubble that would take weeks to clear.
"Well hell... what do we do now?" Chris bends down and picks up one of the ham sized boulders and tosses it aside.
"Well, that sucks." He rubs his back as he stands straight again.

Ollie looks up and over the entrance, stepping back and shielding his eyes for a better look. He moves twenty or thirty feet down from the entrance and is still looking.
"What are you looking for, big guy?" Lou asks him.
"La otra entrada."
"That's right," Lou remembers, "there's another entrance." Lou walks the line of the mountain down to where Ollie is standing, looking up at the face for any spot we can climb. In the mean time we can hear Dr. Adams pleading for help on the rope. He must be on his way up here. We ignore him and find a spot where we can top the rise and begin to look for Seedling's escape hole.

It takes five minutes of each of us scrambling around above the plateau before Chris finds something.
"OVER HERE."
Chris is twenty yards away looking down at his feet. We join him and see a rectangular hole at his feet about the size of a couple of phone books layed end to end.

"Is that it?" I ask... as if they know.
"One way to find out." Lou drops down, sitting on the edge of the hole long enough to flip his headlamp on. He lays flat on his belly.
"Hold my legs."

He lowers himself into the hole, inching his way down until he is consumed from the waist up.

"Hey, I found a rifle." It is Adams. He must have made it up to the plateau and found the Spencer we had left there. "Boys? Gentlemen?"

"WE ARE UP HERE." Chris shouts down to him. "Putz."

Lou drops down into the hole and we don't see him for a minute, but we can hear him. Finally he calls up to come on down. I look at Chris and he shrugs.
"I'm not going to fit in that hole."
I look up at Ollie and he shakes his head.
"Well, here I go."

I shimmy through the hole and make my way down into pitch blackness.
"Come on, just another ten feet or so."
Lou's voice is a cushioned echo in the tunnel below. I keep making my way down until I feel his hand on my foot, guiding me down. When I am standing next to him he turns on his headlamp.
"Not a lot of air in here."

I begin to question this but then realize that we are both breathing fast, like a panting dog. I switch my headlamp on and look down the tunnel. It is a sharp angle and heads in the opposite direction that we want to go.
"What do you think?"
Lou looks at me for a second and then turns his light away from my eyes, "Sorry."
He turns the beam down the damp darkness of the tunnel, "Whatever we are going to do, we better hurry up. I don't think we can breath down here too long."

Down the tunnel we go. We have to stoop as the opening begins to narrow. Pretty soon we are turned sideways and crawling/stepping our way along.
"This can't be it." I am ready to turn around and try something else.
"No, I think this is it." Lou stops and we are both motionless, as though he is listening for something. He reaches up and turns off his headlamp.
"Turn yours off, Jake."

With a click we are in darkness... for a moment. Then ahead in the tunnel there is a slight illumination.
"Keep going." Lou says as he starts the crawl once again and I follow, lamps off with only the glow ahead to guide us. As we go, the luminescence grows. Lou emerges from the fissure in the rock and I follow. I straighten up just as my muscles are about to cramp up.

We are standing in a small chamber, dully lit by light from an adjoining chamber. Lou flips his light on and looks around the small cavern. The walls are crossed with veins of quarts, many of them intersected by deep cuts through the rock where gold might have been harvested.

"Do you think this is... " Lou stops when he trips and falls to the ground. Something he kicked on the way down clatters off into the shadows.
"Motherfucker." He rubs his knee and we both shine our lights down on the ground. There on the floor of the chamber are several saddlebags on top of a pile of sticks and what looks like firewood.

"What the hell is this?" I pick up what I am sure is a piece of wood. Lou's expression says otherwise.
"That is a rib bone."
I drop it like third period French and look down at my feet. It isn't wood under those old leather bags, it is a skeleton.
"Is that Ole' Bess?"

"It ain't a German Shepard." Lou looks for the skull and sees it laying about ten feet away.

We walk the short distance to the glowing adjacent cavern. There in the ceiling, just as we had left it yesterday, are the crystals that make up the roof of the sacred chamber. Directly below is the pedestal we had created, laying on its side. The late afternoon sun gives a faint florescent light to the inside of this chamber, lighting a grim scene.

At the what was the entrance to the cavern is a wall of boulders. At the base of the pile emerge the remains of at least ten men, crushed when Seedling brought down the opening to defend what was his. In the light of the headlamps we see the amber bones of the fallen, the barrels of rifles poking out of the rock. We turn and search the rest of the area. To the side of the avalanche are more bones and the remains of weapons, leather belts and bandoleers. Lou drops to a knee and from beneath one of the skeletons he pulls at a piece of leather. It breaks in his hands.

"What are you looking for?"
He reaches under the bones and pulls a gun holster from beneath the remains. It is stiff, like a piece of wood, but from inside it he pulls Orlis Keene's pistol.
"Holy shit." Lou holds it up and examines it in the beam of his headlamp.

We stare in silence at the weapon. It puts it all into perspective. We were here, this did happen. It makes me wonder about the time line... the effects of all we had done.
Lou tucks the pistol in the back of his belt and we look to the remainder of the cavern. The crystals were damaged in the blast. They are darker, fractured... almost smokey. There are skeletal remains at the pedestal as well, fragments of uniform cloth, buckles and buttons. Our lights cast over the floor of the cavern, scorched from a blast over a century ago. On the far side of the crystals there is a shape on floor.

"Is that... ?"
"Seedling."
Lou points to an old piece of leather, "You can still see that little pouch he had the crystal in. The femurs are broken, the bones in his arms are broken..." He scoots the head around, "even the skull is fractured."

I can only assume the blast bounced him off the wall.
"That explains what happened to Ole' Bess."

We can hear shouting outside on the plateau, it's Dr. Adams whining about not having a flashlight and that the sun was going down. His voice was too clear, as though there was an opening somewhere here in the main chamber.

"Turn off your light, Lou." I switch mine off and he does the same. The waning light of day still illuminates the crystals, but there is something else. On the wall across from us is an irregular pattern of faint light about the size of a garbage can lid. I go over and look at it, putting my hand in the light's path, then my head. Above the fall of boulders and cavern rock I see the hole. It is only after we make sure it is safe to climb that we emerge from the hole.

We call the boys down from the top of the mountain and tell them what we have found. Orlis' pistol is passed from hand to hand. They boys treat it with reverence. Dr. Adams treats it like it's the Holy Grail.

"Oh my, oh my God. This is going to a museum, wait until I... "
Lou snatches from his hands and tucks it back in his belt. "It's not going anywhere, Doc."
"See here, Louis, you were on an expedition funded by Mrs. Antonelli and the corporate branch of... "
For the final time Dr. Adams falls silent, this time with Lou's hand around his throat, "You're gettin' on my nerves, Doc. This gun, that gold, it is ours, not yours or hers or some fucking corporations. You get it?"

"Come on, Lou, put him down. That's my mom's cousin."
"I don't give a fuck if he is father time. We killed for that gold. They got their precious gold for the Clarok. We fulfilled our commitment to your mom, Chris."

After cooler heads prevail, we agree to allow the "corporation" to exact any claim to the geographical area. We, on the other hand, will take and divide up between us any and all gold that Seedling has stashed in the adjoining caverns.

By nightfall we have summoned the Skycrane and have the Hummer ready for transport. We retrieved sixteen bags of gold from the caverns, Ole' Bess and Seedling's remains for a proper burial.
It would take some doing, but we think we can find the Indian's place in the Spirit Mountains to set them to rest.