Which meant that we had to run again. We got down behind the ridge and broke into a jog trot. We were pretty well up to the place where we’d left our blankets when they saw us, and by that time the distance was too great for accurate shooting. Bullets whizzed around us, striking the sand, humming overhead, but they weren’t very close.
I got out the dynamite and some of the concentrated food. We didn’t have time to salvage anything else, and we couldn’t be burdened with weight. We had to leave the packs and run for the spring.
We got there, filled the canteens, put in the dynamite.
The country around the spring was too open to enable us to hold the place. It would have been easy for them, with their rifles, to have held it against us, but it would have been suicide for us to try it.
I lit the fuse, and we started away on the run. When they saw the trickle of smoke going up from the fuse, they got the idea. They started to run toward the spring, and they quit shooting at us. But they saw they couldn’t make it. Then they tried to shoot out the fuse. They couldn’t shoot well enough for that, at the distance.
The blast went off. There was a lifting column of smoke, dust and crushed rock. The hot air of the desert expanded with the roar of the explosion, then settled back like a blanket.
I couldn’t see whether or not the shot had killed the spring, but I could see the four black figures. They’d reached the spot now, and the way they ran around and waved their hands told me all I needed to know.
Time was precious. I got out some of the concentrated rations. We sat down and ate, washing the food down with water. Our canteens were small. Unfortunately we’d left the big ones back in the car. The enemy had larger canteens, but in all probability they had little more water left than we had in our three small canteens.
Then the shooting started again. We retreated, and the four men followed us. But we could play that game as long as they could. They could hold us to the rocky country until it got dark. After that, they couldn’t hold us at all.
The sun beat down with merciless fury. Little mirages appeared here and there. The rimrock showed up in the mirages in weird, shimmering shapes.
The enemy kept pressing us. They were desperate now. If they’d only had more sense they’d have realized that killing us wouldn’t have helped matters any. They were fighting something far more menacing than any human enemy, but they didn’t realize that until the shadows began to lengthen. Then they huddled together in a conference.
I gathered that they were thirsty; I could see them passing around a large canteen. From the way they tilted it, I gathered that it was about half full. Then they struck out to the south.
“Well,” I said, “they’ve come down to earth now. They know what they’re up against. Here’s where we start.”
So we filed out of the rocky country and started to follow them. At first they fired a few long distance shots back at us. But they’d lost their enthusiasm. The bullets went wild, and they didn’t bother to correct their aim and try again.
They were murderers, these men, yet I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Nor was I any too certain that I shouldn’t start to feel sorry for ourselves. We knew the desert, but it was going to be a battle. We’d had a day and a night of exhausting toil and fighting. We’d been running over the sand in the hot sunlight. We’d been living on insufficient water and rations.
All around us shimmered the Painted Desert, beautiful as a tiger, and as cruel. We were in her grip now. She seemed to be leering at us, reminding us of the price of a mistake, the doom of failure.
There was a brief period of dusk, and then night blotted out everything except the outlines shown by the moon that was now riding higher in the heavens. We lost sight of the men with rifles.
We were walking slowly now, our legs swinging in the stride of the desert dweller, a stride that pushes through the sand without wasting too much energy. Sand is funny stuff. You can fight it, but it requires more than twice as much energy as is required by those who know how to take it easy. You can’t fight the desert; you’ve got to humor it.
The moon went down, and it was slow work feeling our way along, avoiding pitfalls and sagebrush. After an hour or two of it my nerves were on edge.
“Far enough,” I said. “We’re not gaining anything now. We’ve got to rest and save ourselves for to-morrow.”
Bess staggered as she came up to me, gave a little gasp, and sank on the sand.
Ed Kaplin was breathing hard. I could sense his taut nerves, his clenched fists, his quivering legs.
We dropped down to the sand. It was cool now, but not cold. We had a sip of water each, pillowed our heads on the sand, and dropped off to instant sleep.
I woke up an hour or so before the first streaks of light. The wind was blowing and out in the dark the desert was rustling to life. There were whispers, hissing sand whispers. It seemed as though the desert was trying to tell us something. Yet there was a menace about those rustling noises, too. It was a sound such as a rattlesnake makes when he starts to twist his body into a striking coil, when the dry scales slither along against the dry scales of writhing coils.
Nothing ever remains the same in the desert. The restless sand, the beating sun, all take their toll. Man does not remain the same in the desert. Bit by bit, the desert changes and hardens him.
Then I quit thinking about the desert and deliberately willed myself to sleep.
The desert was hushed when I again awoke. The first faint streaks of light in the east showed outlines of the mountains which were thrust up from the floor of the desert.
The other two were sleeping on the sand, mere lumps of dark shadow against the half-lighted gray of the desert. They heard the sound of my stirring. Wordlessly they rolled over, sat up, got to their feet, flexed their tortured muscles.
“All aboard,” said Bess, and laughed. It wasn’t a care-free laugh. It was a grim laugh, the laugh of one who goes out to face death — unafraid.
We had some water. There was a little powdered soup left, and one of the canteens had a bottom that slid over the canteen and could be used as a little cooking pot. I started a tiny fire of twigs of sage. We poured a little of the precious water into the pan, then added the powdered soup. We did not heat the liquid too much, because heating makes for evaporation; we merely warmed the soup enough so that it felt warm to our stomachs as we swallowed it.
Then we started.
We had been freshened by the few hours’ rest — and we had an automobile which would save us the last ten miles. The others didn’t have any machine cached. When we got to Cameron we could brand them as outlaws, and they would have to flee the desert. Yet every step of flight would take them into hostile country.
They had probably pressed on during the night, and continuous progress in the desert exacts a fearful toll.
We walked steadily. The east flared to crimson, then gold, then the sun leapt up over the rim of the desert and the weird colors became vividly apparent. The heat began to sway the outlines of objects.
Crossing a sandy stretch, Ed Kaplin paused to stare and to point. There were tracks crossing that bit of sand, and the tracks were single, those of a lone man.
“It may be one of the four,” he husked.
I nodded. We had nothing to fear from him now. We were three to one, and the country was open enough so that he couldn’t ambush us. We pushed on, following his tracks.
The tracks showed that the man was running at times, staggering at others. Twice I found where he had sat down, only to get up and start to run. That was a bad sign. Panic can strip a man of strength and vitality quicker than any known agency. Panic accounts for many deaths, even in the forest, where man has firewood and water, and usually a supply of game. In the desert panic is fatal.