“What?” She popped up to a sitting position right beside him just in time to see a lizard crawling onto their quilt. “What is that ugly thing?”
“That would be a Texas toad, or what folks around these parts call a horny toad. I haven’t ever done a drawing of one of those,” he said as the round thing that looked like it popped out of a sci-fi comic book made its way across the quilt.
Emma giggled. “If Sophie was painting that thing, it would be purple.”
“What if I draw it with a cactus off to the side of the canvas and put just a tiny bit of purple in the cactus flower?” Josh finished the rough sketch and laid his notebook back down.
“I can’t wait to see it. I think I’ll do one of it all stylized with purple horns and maybe blue eyes.” She made notes until the reptile scurried away.
“Now the day hasn’t been totally shot.” Josh grinned. “If I get even one idea when I come out here, I feel like it’s profitable.” Mentally, he was making notes about his next drawing of Emma’s face with the sunlight filtering through the oak leaves onto it.
Josh loved the peace of this place, with the birds singing, crickets chirping, and the occasional coyote adding his voice to the mixture. But he had never liked it nearly as well as he did when he shared it with Emma.
“Is that thunder?” she asked when a low rumble sounded on the other side of the mountain.
“It’s not supposed to be stormy today.” He stood up and walked out past the four-wheeler. Sure enough, dark clouds were gathering and moving toward them from the southwest, pushing all those puffs of white to the side as if they were nothing but marshmallows. “But I guess it is. We’d better cut our trip short or else we’ll be dodging lightning bolts here in a little while.”
Dammit! he thought as he put everything back into the backpacks. He’d looked forward to a whole day with Emma, and a damned storm had ruined it.
She grabbed one corner of the quilt, and he got the other end. Together, they folded it and loaded their backpacks into the saddlebags. Then Josh hopped onto the four-wheeler and tried to start the engine, but it only made a grating sound. The noise when lightning struck a nearby tree deafened them. The thunder that followed compounded the racket, and Josh jumped off the vehicle.
“What’s the matter with it?” Emma’s eyes had gone wide with fear.
“We’re going to be fine,” Josh tried to reassure her. “I’ve had to spend some time out here before. Remember me telling you that I discovered a cave just a little way up the mountain? Well, we should be heading that way if we don’t want to get soaked.”
“I’ve never been inside one, but it sounds better than this. How far is it?” she asked.
“About a quarter mile up that mountain.” He tossed her backpack to her.
She caught it and slung it over her shoulder while he strapped his on and tucked the quilt under his arm. “I already smell rain, and it’s a steep climb, so we should hurry.”
“Lead the way,” Emma said.
The path that he’d used to go from the base of the mountain to the cave had grown over and gotten tangled since the previous fall, but it was still passable, even if they did have to sidestep a few cacti. “I found this place the year I bought the trailer park,” he said. “I was following a rare kit fox up here and happened upon the cave. I was kind of scared to go inside it at first—bats scare the bejesus out of me—but I forced myself to face my fears and go inside. There were no bats or animals of any kind, thank goodness, but I did find where my fox had probably had a litter of babies. I guess I tainted the cave, because I’ve never seen any other foxes or animals up here.”
Lightning zigzagged out of the sky and seemed to land only a hundred feet off to the side of the pathway. Thunder followed so low over their heads that Emma stopped and covered her ears.
“Just a little farther,” Josh yelled over the din just as the first drops of rain splattered on his glasses. “See that big cedar tree? It’s a few steps beyond that. Take my hand. It’s steeper from here to there.”
She grabbed for his hand without hesitation. “What happens when it all ends? We don’t have phone service to call for help. Will Filly and Arty come looking for us?”
“Not until morning,” Josh said as he pulled her inside the opening to the cave. “I told them we might not be back in time for supper, but when we aren’t there in the morning, Arty will come this way.” He went straight to a lantern and lit it.
“Oh, my!” Her eyes grew wide again as she took in the cave.
“After the first time I got stuck up here, I got prepared. There’s dry wood back there for a fire.” He pointed to the circular pit outlined with rocks. “Over there on that big rock are a few cans of beans and a couple of flashlights. Even if I don’t have to stay here, I check on the place a few times a year and make sure firewood is ready if I need it.”
“Well, thank you once again,” she told him just as the wind picked up and the rain fell outside the entrance in gray sheets. “We sure wouldn’t want to be huddled up under that tree with this much lightning.”
Josh dropped his backpack and spread the quilt out near the firepit he’d circled with rocks a few visits ago. “I’ll build us a little fire to warm this place up.”
Emma shivered. “What can I do to help? Is that hail?”
He turned and looked at the cave entrance. “Yep, and that would be why it’s gotten so cold. If you’ll sit down right here in the middle of the quilt, I can wrap the edges up around you. That will keep you warm until the fire gets going.” She sat down, and he pulled the edges up over her shoulders to make a shawl. “The fire will take the damp off the cave in a hurry.”
“I didn’t even think about a jacket,” she told him.
“These storms come up fast out here in the desert,” he said as he laid kindling in the firepit. Once that was burning, he put a few small logs on top of the embers. “First time I did this I was afraid the smoke would run me out of here, but this place has a natural vent up there to get rid of the smoke. I’d love to know the story of why that’s even there.”
“I’ll make up a story for you.” She smiled.
“I’d love to hear it,” he said as he got a good blaze going.
“Once upon a time, a princess lived in this area in an adobe castle with her parents, the king and queen of Hummingbird Lane. She fell in love with a young man, but he was a lowly blacksmith,” Emma said, “and the king would never consent to her marrying the man. Jeremiah, the blacksmith, found this cave when he was running away from the princess’s brothers late one night. He pulled some brush over the opening, and they never found him, so it became the place where he and the princess could meet.”
Josh pulled back the quilt on one side and sat down. “You should have been a novelist as well as an artist.”
“When I was a little girl, I spent lots of hours entertaining myself with made-up stories. Mother fussed at me for spending more time with my stories and pictures than I did with math and history. Truth is, I never wanted to do anything but paint anyway, and I would much rather have cleaned houses like Rebel did than run a big oil company like Mother. Rebel was my hero,” Emma said.