But Ty had heard Janna's words. For an instant he closed his eyes and felt the exquisite pain of having been given a gift he didn't deserve.

With automatic motions Ty propped his backpack against a stone, sat on his heels and loaded the carbine to full capacity once more. The angle of the shadows on the canyon walls told him that he had several hours to wait until sunset came, much less full dark.

Leaning against the wall, carbine at the ready, Ty tried to convince himself that when dawn came he and Janna would still be alive.

The meadow's sunlight seemed blinding after the cool, dim passage into the secret valley. Janna stood on the edge of the opening and sent a hawk's wild cry into the still air. A second call brought Zebra at a trot, her head high, her ears pricked. Lucifer followed after the mare, for the two horses had become inseparable during the weeks when the stallion was healing.

Janna mounted Zebra quickly and turned the mare toward the ancient ruins where Mad Jack had hidden his gold. She had never pried into the old prospector's secrets before-but then, she had never been trapped in a stone bottle before, either.

"Jack must have had a way in and out of this valley without coming through the slot," Janna said aloud to Zebra, "because I never saw a mark in that creek bed. If he had been coming and going from my end of the valley, I'd have heard him or you would have or Lucifer would have."

Zebra flicked her ears back and forth, enjoying the sound of Janna's voice.

"But you didn't hear Jack, and that old man was too weak to carry more than a few pounds of gold at a time, which means there was a lot of coming and going before those saddlebags were full. He had to have left some kind of trail, somewhere. He just had to."

And Janna had until dark to find it.

She urged Zebra into a canter, watching the rocky walls and lava flows, probing light and shadow for any sign of a faint trail. The valley narrowed in at the south end, where the ruins were. Beyond ascertaining that there was a clear spring welling up at the base of the ramparts that were just before the ruins, Janna had never really explored this part of the valley. The ruins were eerie by daylight and unsettling by night. She much preferred the clean reach of the stone overhang at the opposite end of the valley to the cramped and broken rooms of a people long dead.

But Janna wasn't looking for a campsite now, or even for temporary shelter. She was looking for the ancient trails that the vanished Indians must have left if they came and went from their home by any route other than the dark cleft. It was possible that the Indians might have built their fortress in a blind valley with only one exit, but Janna doubted it. A tribe that took so much trouble to hide its home was a cautious people, and cautious people knew that the only difference between a fortress and a trap was a bolt hole.

In the country outside the valley, Janna had spotted ancient trails in the past simply by standing on a ridge and allowing her eyes to go slightly unfocused. When she lost the finest edge of visual acuity, other patterns came to light, vague lines and odd shadows. Most often they were simply random lines in a wild land, but sometimes they were ghost trails no longer used by man.

Crisscrossing the area around the ruins, Janna searched for any trail, new or old. She found nothing on the ground but grass, brush, rocks, sunlight and signs of her own passage. She urged Zebra farther into the ruins. The angle of the sun made shadows spill out from crumbling stone rooms, as though darkness had breached stone dams and was welling up to fill the valley beyond.

A frisson of uneasiness ran through Janna. She had always avoided the ruins in the hours beyond midafternoon, when the descending sun played odd tricks with light and shadow and stone. All that drove her farther into the ruins now was the certainty that nothing a ghostly Indian had to offer could be worse than what waited beyond the cleft in the form of flesh-and-blood renegades.

No matter how Janna focused her eyes or didn't, tilted her head or held it straight, narrowed her eyelids or widened them until her eyes ached, she saw nothing on the ground to suggest an ancient, forgotten trail. Working out from the room in which Mad Jack had stored his gold, she quartered the open space. She found nothing she could be sure was Mad Jack's sign rather than her own or a random displacement of pebbles.

The farther back into the ruins Janna went, the narrower the canyon became. Stone rubble covered the ground. At first she assumed the rocky debris was the result of stones falling from the surrounding cliffs, but the farther back into the narrow throat of the canyon she went, the more she was struck by an odd thing-in some places the rubble looked as though it once had been level, as though broad steps or narrow terraces had once climbed up the throat of the valley.

With growing excitement Janna followed the frayed remnants of what might once have been a well-built path snaking back and up the broken ramparts of stone that surrounded the hidden valley. Behind Zebra a pebble rolled under Lucifer's feet. The mare snorted and shied at the sound, giving vent to her nervousness at being asked to take a trail that showed every evidence of getting more and more narrow while going nowhere at all.

"Easy, girl," Janna said soothingly, stroking the mare. "There's nothing around but you, me, Lucifer and a lot of rock. The shadows just look scary, that's all. There's nothing in them but air."

Under Janna's urging Zebra climbed the steepening path. The farther along she went, the more Janna's hopes sank.

What had once looked like a wide path was rapidly degenerating into a jumble of stone that resembled nothing so much as the debris that always built up at the foot of stone cliffs.

Janna's hopes sank when Zebra scrambled around a tight corner and was confronted by a rock wall. Nothing that in any way resembled a trail broke the sheer rise of stone. Apparently Janna had been following a random chute paved with fallen rocks rather than a ghost path left by an ancient people.

For a long time she simply sat, staring at the end of her carefully constructed and entirely false logic of hope. However Mad Jack might have come into the valley, it wasn't this way; and this had been by far the best hope of finding his path. The other possibilities-the random ravines and slender runoff gullies and crevices that opened into the narrowest end of the valley where Janna was-were much less likely to lead to the top of the plateau than the ground she had just covered.

But Janna had no choice except to try the other possibilities. No matter how small they were, they were better than the chance of sneaking past Cascabel and his renegades while they were camped outside the valley's only exit like a horde of hungry cats waiting at a mouse hole.

There was barely enough room for Zebra to turn around in order to head back where she had come from. Lucifer saw Zebra turning and followed suit. He led the retreat over the rough ground at a brisk trot, relieved to be free of the narrow passage between broken walls of stone. Zebra was equally relieved. She followed after the stallion eagerly.

They had retreated no more than a hundred feet when Janna noticed a small ravine that she hadn't seen before, for it joined at an oblique angle to the main passage and was walled off by a pediment of stone. Immediately she turned Zebra toward the side ravine. The mare tossed her head, not wanting to leave Lucifer and enter the narrow gulch.

"Come on, girl. There's nothing up this trail but stone and shadows and maybe, just maybe, a way out of here."

Zebra didn't budge.

Janna stopped using pressures of her hand to guide the mare. Instead, she pulled on the knotted hackamore reins Ty had insisted that Zebra be trained to wear. Reluctantly the mare turned away from Lucifer and walked into the gulch. Once past the rocky outcropping that guarded the ravine's narrow mouth, the passage opened out again, becoming wider than the slot where Ty waited for a renegade who was brave or foolish enough to show himself.