Presently I saw something gleam on the sand. We walked to it. It was a rifle. There were some cartridges in the magazine. I stooped and felt of the barrel. It was so hot that the hand couldn’t be held against the metal.
“Been here over an hour, anyhow,” I said.
I looked ahead. There were some brass shells, fully loaded, glittering where they had been flung into the desert.
“We won’t need it now, and we can’t carry any surplus weight,” I said.
We left the rifle, loaded, lying there in the sun, and pressed forward. The painted rocks rose on either side now, and seemed to dance some weird devil-dance against the blue of the sky. I could see where the man we followed was running again. He veered now to the east, then, after a while, his tracks crossed ours again, this time going west.
Farther on something white appeared on the surface of the sand. It was a shirt. I knew the meaning of that. When a man finally feels the last agony approaching in the desert, he starts to tear off his clothing and begins to run. Then, at the last, he stoops and starts to dig at the desert with his bare hands, shredding the flesh away from the bone. It is a horrible death — even for a murderer.
We pushed straight ahead. We did not try to follow the tracks that had wobbled across our path. Nor did we see them again.
The shadows lengthened. Our feet were tortured by the hot sands. There were blisters which had formed and broken, and every step was an agony. My mouth was dry and my stomach was clamoring for food.
Bess and Ed Kaplin trudged along, single file, saying nothing, chins up, eyes steady.
The sun set. The moon, riding constantly higher, gave more light. We dared not rest now. Our tortured feet would have stiffened. Yet we dared not hurry. Every step was made with a stride that would consume the least energy, yet keep us moving.
The canteens had long been empty, and we had thrown them away. Our mouths were dry. But worst of all was the constant quivering of the tortured muscles, the demand of our tortured, fatigued bodies for nourishment.
I saw a weird butte against the moonlit sky, and recognized it. Our car would be at the foot of that butte. It seemed to be a haven of refuge, that battered flivver. Yet we walked and walked, and the butte might have been a mirage. It retreated step for step, apparently.
Then the moon slid down and darkness blotted out even the outline of the butte. Still we dared not rest. We trudged on, stumbling and falling once in a while, when our fatigued muscles refused to coordinate in time to enable us to avoid pitfalls or rough places.
It seemed endless hours that we had been upon a treadmill of sand. Then something loomed directly ahead of us. It was the butte again, this time high against the stars. As we walked, it blotted out more and more stars. Then a shape showed slightly to one side. It was the battered flivver, covered with dust, but ready, waiting.
We fell upon it. I opened a door and rummaged in among the provisions. There were two cans of tomatoes, priceless in the desert. I found them, but I couldn’t wait to use a can opener or knife. I tugged out my six-gun and shot holes in both cans. We took turns passing them around, letting the cool liquid trickle down our parched throats. Then I cut the cans open and we ate the tomatoes.
We sat down on the sand, and almost at once my muscles began to stiffen into pain. I could hardly move when I crawled up, half an hour later, to drag provisions from the car and make a little fire.
We had coffee, canned beans, even some half-stale camp bread that had been left in the car, beneath the blankets. Then we slept, on the bare sand. I got up some time after midnight and dragged out some blankets. Every step was torture. I flung blankets over the others, wrapped myself up and dropped off to sleep again.
Wind came up before dawn, and the desert began to talk. I lay, half dozing, listening to the song of the drifting sand.
At last day dawned, and I lay there as the first rays of the sun brought out the varied colors of the rimrocks on the big butte. I looked about me. Everywhere was the riot of color which marks the Painted Desert. It well deserved its name. The rocks were painted, and they were cruel.
I let my bloodshot eyes stare out over the desert to the north, straining them to see if there should be moving specks — if any of the four men had survived that terrible ordeal. Nothing moved.
The desert is kind to its own, cruel to strangers. The painted rocks were placid in their calm indifference to what had happened out there in the waste spaces.
Bess stirred in her blankets, caught her breath as her aching muscles started to function. Sitting up, she stared out into the desert. Then Kaplin flung aside the blanket, groaned, grinned, got to his feet. He also stared out into the desert.
But still there was no sign of life. “It’s a judgment of the desert,” I said. “They have been tried and executed.”
Now that we had won to safety, those painted rocks above us seemed softer in their coloring, somehow seemed to tower over us protectingly, almost maternal.
The desert is cruel, but it protects those who love it.
Those four men out there had violated the laws of God and Man. They had been flung upon the mercy of the desert, and the voice of the painted rocks had spoken. At night the sand would scurry hither and thither, bearing the message of that which had happened in the hot silence of the Painted Desert, telling each bit of sage, each outcropping of wind-carved rock.
The Big Circle
I. Out of the Desert
The man was a professional gambler, which meant that it was difficult to read his thoughts. One who had ever been familiar with gamblers could never have mistaken him for anything else.
His eyes were alert but calm and steady. His face was utterly passive, and there was that hard, smooth polish about him which is more than a veneer. It’s a poise that seems to defy the entire universe to do anything which can jar it. It comes from having endured losses which wipe out everything at one swift swoop of ill fortune.
Never a professional gambler but who has won and lost fortunes. To-day they are millionaires and to-morrow paupers. Winnings are balanced by losses, losses by winnings. And the gamblers have to learn to be plunged from prosperity to poverty, and to carry on with the same suave urbanity which puts the loss of yesterday into the limbo of the past and lays the foundation for the winnings of to-morrow.
Out in the desert we get to classify men pretty quickly. We have to. Nature gets in the raw out in the desert. The veneer of civilization strips off, and the primitive emotions come to the front.
Perhaps that’s why the gamblers are so noticeable. They’re about the only class of men who can go out into the desert and keep that polish which serves to hide the inner soul from the glance of the curious.
Nevada is a strange State, and a little understood State.
It’s a State of big places, and it’s a breeder of men. Nevada has always been impatient of the shams and hypocrisies of civilization. Nevada has never tried to reform its citizens by laws. Gambling remains a legal vocation in the State of Nevada.
I looked at Nell Hastings, and then at the gambler. I wanted to see if Nell knew who he was. If she did, she gave no sign.
“What’ll it be, Bob?” she asked me.
“Get me something good,” I told her. “I’ll leave it to you.”
The gambler flashed me a swift glance, then his eyes went back to his plate.