Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,62
cavern, save that it lacked the accumulated litter of human usage. The air was cool and fresh enough to breathe, although each lungful carried the presence of a sunless place deep beneath the mountains.
“Wonder when the last time was anyone came down here?” Brandon said, casting his light along the uneven floor. The bottom was strewn with broken rock and detritus, with a spongy paste of bat guano and dust. Footprints would be hard to trace after any length of time.
“Hard to say,” Kenlaw answered, scooping up a handful of gravel and examining it under his light. “Sometimes the Confederates worked back into places like this after saltpetre. Maybe Bard Warner came down here, but I’m betting that morion was just something some dumb hillbilly found someplace else and got tossed onto the dump.”
“Are these bones human?” Brandon asked.
Kenlaw stuffed the gravel into a jacket pocket and scrambled over to where Brandon crouched. There was a fall of broken rock against the wall of the pit opposite their point of descent. Interspersed with the chunks of stone were fragments of moldering bone. The archeologist dug out a section of rib. It snapped easily in his hand, showing whiteness as it crumbled.
“Dead a long time,” Kenlaw muttered, pulling more of the rocks aside. “Maybe Indian.”
“Then it’s a human skeleton?”
“Stone burial cairn, at a guess. But it’s been dug up and the bones scattered about. These long bones are all smashed apart.”
“Maybe he was killed in a rock slide.”
Kenlaw shook his head. “Look how this femur is split apart. I’d say more likely something broke open the bones to eat the marrow.
“An animal?”
“What else would it have been?”
Kenlaw suddenly bent forward, clawed at the detritus. His thick fingers locked onto what looked to be the edge of a flat rock. Grunting, he hauled back and wrenched forth a battered sheet of rusted iron.
“Part of a breastplate! Damned if this isn’t the original skeleton in armor! Give me a hand with the rest of these rocks.”
Together they dragged away the cairn of rubble—Kenlaw puffing energetically as he flung aside the stones and fragments of bone. Brandon, caught up in the excitement of discovery himself, reflected with a twinge that this was hardly a careful piece of excavation. Nonetheless, Kenlaw’s anxious scrabbling continued until they had cleared a patch of bare rock.
The archeologist squatted on a stone and lit a cigarette. “Doesn’t tell me much,” he complained. “Just broken bones and chunks of rust. Why was he here? Were there others with him? Who were they? What were they seeking here?”
“Isn’t it enough that you’ve found the burial of a conquistador?”
“Can’t prove that until I’ve run some tests,” Kenlaw grumbled. “Could have been a Colonial—breastplates were still in use in European armies until this century. Or an Indian buried with some tribal heirlooms.”
“There’s another passage back of here,” Brandon called out.
He had been shining his light along the fall of rock, searching for further relics from the cairn. Behind where they had cleared away some of the loose rocks, a passageway pierced the wall of the pit. Brandon rolled aside more of the stone, and the mouth of the passage took shape behind the crest of the rock pile.
Kenlaw knelt and peered within. “Not much more than a crawl space,” he announced, “but it runs straight on for maybe twenty or thirty feet, then appears to open onto another chamber.”
Brandon played his flashlight around the sides of the pit, then back to where they stood. “I don’t think this is just a rock slide. I think someone piled all these rocks here to wall up the tunnel mouth.”
“If they didn’t want it found, then they must have found something worth hiding,” the archeologist concluded. “I’ll take a look. You wait here in case I get stuck.”
Brandon started to point out that his was the slimmer frame, but already Kenlaw had plunged headfirst into the tunnel—his thick buttocks blocking Brandon’s view as he squeezed his way through. Brandon thought of a fat old badger ducking down a burrow. He kept his light on the shaft. Wheezing and scuffling, the other man managed to force his bulk through the passage. He paused at the far end and called back something, but his words were too muffled for Brandon to catch.
A moment later Kenlaw’s legs disappeared from view, and then his flushed face bobbed into Brandon’s light. “I’m in another chamber about like the one you’re standing in,” he called back. “I’ll take a look around.”