Mountain Moonlight - By Jane Toombs Page 0,41

a trickster out there somewhere playing games. Strange what thoughts came into your head when you camped out in the wilderness. Probably because you had time to think rather than being constantly busy.

Tomorrow they'd reach the end of their journey. After that was the trip back. Then the return flight to New York. This time she couldn't stop the tears.

In the morning, Bram had barely crawled out of his sleeping bag before Davis, fully dressed, bounced from the tent. He gazed up at the sky, lightening toward dawn and said, "We're gonna find the treasure today."

"How can you tell?" Bram asked.

"We're almost there, aren't we?"

Bram nodded. "But, at the moment, we're here, not there." He examined the sky and frowned. Though not completely overcast, he didn't like the look of what clouds there were.

"Sometimes you sound like Pauline," Davis complained.

"Thank you for the compliment. She's a wise woman."

Davis looked momentarily confused and was silent for a bit. Finally he said, "I saw you and my mom kiss last night, so I asked her if she liked you and she said she did. You must like her, too. Otherwise you wouldn't kiss her."

"Good logic, kid. If I didn't like her I wouldn't want to kiss her."

Like wasn't the right word, but would have to do since he didn't have a substitute.

"I told my mom I liked you, too," Davis went on.

Bram grinned at him. "I never met a nine-year-old boy I liked better than you."

Davis grinned back at him.

"So now can we conclude the mutual admiration society and start making breakfast?" Bram asked.

Davis chattered away about the treasure as he helped. "If it's gold, I'm gonna buy Mom a house. Houses are bigger than apartments and you can have lots of pets if you want and a big yard."

"And if it isn't gold, then what?"

"I guess that depends on what else it is."

No disputing that logic. "Do you like living in New York?" Bram asked.

"It's okay. I never lived anywhere else. I think the desert's kind of neat, though." Vala was emerging from the tent and, spotting her, Davis called, "Do you like the desert, Mom?"

"I'd forgotten how wonderful it was," she said.

Davis exchanged a look with Bram.

"Your mother has this tendency to not quite answer a question," Bram told him. "The older you get, the more you'll discover most girls and women do the same thing. It's good you're getting a education in this early. You'll need it."

"Mostly you can understand if you think about it," Davis said.

"I agree. It's one of those things men just have to accept."

"I hope you two are through talking about me as though I wasn't even on the same planet," Vala put in. "If we didn't have to get an early start, I'd list the problems women have with men."

"So, okay, you do like the desert then, Mom?" Davis persisted.

"Yes. How's that for a right-to-the-point answer? Why do you ask, anyway?"

"I just wondered."

After breakfast, the three of them acted as a team in cleaning up, repacking and saddling the horses. Watching as Vala pitched in and did her share, Bram decided it wouldn't take much to make her a real outdoors-woman.

"So we're off to find the deer landmark," Vala said once they were mounted.

"The trail seems pretty clear," Bram commented, glancing up at the sky again. "Should be an easy trip if the rain holds off."

Vala looked up and frowned. "Those don't look like storm clouds."

"They're not. Rain clouds."

"No thunder and lightning?" Davis sounded disappointed.

"Can't have everything."

"Are we gonna have to stop and camp early if it rains a lot?" Davis asked.

"Let's hope not", Bram said. "A little rain won't melt us. Neither will a lot, but a downpour makes for heavy going. I don't think we'll get that kind of rain today."

"You know," Davis said, "I just remembered that Mokesh's eyes weren't all brown. His left eye had two chunks of sort of a golden-yellow in the brown. So he was named right."

"We'll hope his map is right, too," Bram said.

Then the trail narrowed and they had to go single file again.

After finding the deer marker without much difficulty, they took a rest break. Before they started up again, Bram discovered the pack horse was definitely going lame. He checked all four hoofs but found nothing to account for the problem. The supplies were fewer than when they started so the horse was carrying an increasingly lighter load. In any case, Bram never overloaded the horses he used.

"This'll slow us down," he said.

As