The Scorpion's Tail (Nora Kelly #2)(9)
Watts drove south toward a jagged line of mountains rising out of the tan desert. The Cherokee turned off on a Forest Service road. Corrie quickly lost track of the bewildering maze of dirt roads, one turn after another, with each more rutted and washed out than the last. The vehicle eventually slowed to about five miles an hour, bucking up and down, Corrie holding on to the ceiling grips to keep from getting thrown out of her seat. As they climbed higher into the mountains, the pi?ons gave way to ponderosa pines, which in turn gave way to Douglas firs and spruce trees. At the top of a pass, stupendous views opened up.
Watts halted the car for a moment and pointed.
“South of us, that’s the Jornada del Muerto desert and the San Andres Mountains. That’s all part of the White Sands Missile Range, where the army folks play with their weapons.”
Fountain said, “In Spanish, Jornada del Muerto means ‘journey of death.’ The old Spanish trail from Mexico City to Santa Fe crossed that desert, over a hundred miles. The trail was paved with bones and lined with crosses.”
Corrie looked in the direction he indicated, the tan desert, streaked with red and brown, stretching southward.
“Farther south and over the mountains,” said Watts, “are the White Sands. Ever been there?”
“No, I was only assigned to the Albuquerque office eight months ago. Have you?”
“Many times. I grew up in Socorro; Dad’s a rancher. When I was a kid I rode our horses all over the place. White Sands is one of the most amazing places on earth: dunes as white as snow, stretching for hundreds of thousands of acres.”
“You grew up here?”
Picking up on her tone of incredulity, Watts laughed.
Fountain said in a pleasant tone, “Some people do manage it.”
Corrie felt herself redden. “Are you from here, too?”
“Just north of Socorro,” Fountain replied. “Place called Lemitar.”
Corrie, not knowing where this was, simply nodded.
“It’s not as bad as it might seem,” the lawyer went on. “There’s a lot to explore. On our right is Chimney Mountain and over there is Oso Peak, where Black Jack Ketchum and his gang used to hide out. He terrorized Socorro in the old days, robbed the railroad many times. When they hanged him, they botched the job and he was decapitated. They say he landed on his feet and stood for a while before falling down.”
“Impressive sense of balance,” said Corrie.
Fountain laughed. “And to the southeast of us is the Mescalero reservation. Beautiful country. That rez is where the last of Geronimo’s Chiricahua Apache band finally settled. Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio—those great chiefs used to roam all through these mountains.”
Corrie could hear a strong love of the land in Fountain’s voice, and oddly, it made her envious. She had no love for her own hometown of Medicine Creek, Kansas, and never planned to go back. She’d rather go to hell.
Watts eased the Jeep forward and over the pass, the road dropping down through switchbacks to a series of desert mesas projecting from the southern end of the mountains. They lost most of the altitude they had gained, winding down one bad road after another, until they were back in a pi?on-juniper desert cut with arroyos and mesas. And then, suddenly, the ghost town appeared, perched on a low mesa above an immense plain, stupendously isolated. Watts drove down a few more eroded switchbacks, and in five minutes they were coming into town.
“Welcome to High Lonesome,” he said.
6
THIS PRONOUNCEMENT WAS greeted with a brief silence.
“It really lives up to its name,” Corrie murmured. “What a view.”
A single dirt street ran the length of the town, with ruined adobe and stone buildings on either side, some still roofed, others exposed to the elements. “That was the hotel,” said Fountain, pointing to a two-story structure of rough-cut stone with crooked wooden portals wrapping around its fa?ade. “Saloon, stores, miners’ houses, church—this was a bustling town after gold was discovered down in the basin, back in the early 1880s,” he continued. “At first it was a dangerous area, with Geronimo’s Apaches roaming around. When they finally surrendered, prospectors came in and followed an epithermal deposit. The mine is actually in the cliffs below. Single horizontal shaft, hard rock. With the Geronimo Campaign over, there were plenty of discharged soldiers willing to work as miners. They processed the ore at a stamp mill back in the mountains, near a stream.”
“How is it that a town like this could survive so long undisturbed?” she asked. “It could be a movie set.”
“You saw the road coming in,” the lawyer said. “And the town was built mostly with stone and adobe, instead of wood, so it isn’t likely to burn. The whole place was abandoned rather abruptly, which ironically also helped preserve it.”
Corrie saw the two men exchange a glance.
“What is it?” she asked.
Fountain cleared his throat. “Well, the history of the place ended up as ugly as its surroundings are attractive. When the gold mine started playing out, the owners pushed too hard to follow the dwindling vein. They didn’t shore up the shaft properly. You can probably guess the rest: the shaft collapsed, trapping a dozen miners.”
“Trapped alive, by all accounts,” Watts added. “It must have been a slow and horrible death.”