I have told you of the geography of Rattlesnake Gulch; I must now tell
you something of its immediate neighborhood. I never knew and I do not
know now, whether the name Rattlesnake Gulch pertains to the little wild
hollow where the cabin stood or to the larger gap of land in which it
lay. It was, as one might say, a gulch within a gulch. Only the larger
gulch is not so easy to present to the mind’s eye. I find myself writing
of these places in the past tense, for they seem to me now all as part
of a tale that is told. You must, somehow, be made to see this wild
section clearly, if you are to understand what happened there.
If some wide railroad cut were overgrown and cluttered with rock and
crazy trees and tangled brush for a couple of hundred feet or so, that
would be something like the immediate neighborhood of old Buck’s cabin.
Through this miniature jungle a stream had once flowed, and the old
stream bed was a very chaos of rock and tangled undergrowth; a chaotic
gully. On its damp bottom, underneath the rank growth, no ray of
sunlight ever penetrated. A strange kind of life thrived here, slugs and
little red lizards which hid under stones and scooted when such a refuge
was removed by some alien hand or foot from the world above. So much you
already know.
But this whole thicket where Conner’s ruin and the cabin lay was in a
close valley flanked by ranges of hills running east and west. These
ranges of hills were about a quarter of a mile apart, running more or
less parallel. The land between them was what I have called the valley;
it was long and deep, the flanking heights being in places almost
precipitous. For all I know, this whole wild vale was Rattlesnake Gulch.
No old inhabitant of the region ever visited our campers to tell them
otherwise. I learned the appalling name from old Buck and passed it on
to my young friends. It makes very little difference how much of that
forbidding section the name was supposed to include. I suppose the whole
region, as far as the flanking hills to either side, might properly have
been called a gulch.
In hot weather the heat in this whole section was terrific, as it
usually is in valleys. But it was more so, I think, than in a spacious,
open valley, because, when the sun was overhead, it poured its torrid
rays down into a sort of natural receptacle where the heat was confined
and retained. That, I suppose, is the reason why so much of the
vegetation there was dry; much of it dead or dying. One made as much
noise walking over dried twigs and leaves there (even in the height of
summer) as is usually made in walking on a pavement.
The whole place must have been frightful in times of storm. Dead and
broken trees, sticking their crazy, dislocated branches this way and
that, testified to the fury of the wind as it swept through the narrow
valley. Even in calm weather, such as our campers had enjoyed, the door
and little window of the cabin were always rattling at night because of
the draught through the long, deep, narrow valley. I often think of the
winters spent by old Buck and little June in that freezing channel
between the hills: winters of lashing wind and blinding snow--they must
have been terrible!
Well, a few days after recovering the treasure, Tom and Brent went
fishing again. It was laughable, but they took the money with them (Tom
carrying the wallet in his pocket) for fear of anything happening to it
in their absence. They had done this before and faithfully replaced it
in its romantic old container on returning, like a jewel replaced in its
casket.
They had fished as long as daylight and hunger would permit, and were
returning through the Gulch with a tempting string of trout. These they
would cook and then settle down to an evening at chess, at which game
Brent was something of an expert. They would lay the board on the dining
table (that is, an old barrel) sitting on either side of it on a couple
of old boxes. Four candles, one at each corner of the board, gave an
ecclesiastical look to their silent encounters.
As they passed through the Gulch Tom observed (so he told me later) that
if they hurried they could cook their fish by daylight, conserving their
candles for the evening’s pastime. He pointed to an area of brightness
to the west, that is, beyond the end of the valley, or where it widened
out into open country. “We’ll have light for an hour yet,” he said.
A little later, as Brent emerged from the cabin to get some water, he
noticed that the area of brightness, instead of being less, was of a
flaming red and that there was smoke above it.
“Come and look at this,” he called.
The immediate neighborhood of the cabin was now in shadow, the hard
outlines of trees and brush were dissolving in the softening light, but
the light in the distance gleamed red. And now this red was rendered the
more vivid in the pervading dusk. They saw now that it was not the
changing red of sunset, but something alien to the twilight scene, and
striking terror.
“It’s fire!” said Tom excitedly.