We’d got pretty well down into the middle of the cañon, where the road twisted and turned and was all rutted and rough, covered with bowlders of varying sizes, and with occasional stretches of sand. The high walls of the cañon stretched up until they blotted out the steady stars with rims of black that were like ink.
I swung the wheel getting the car around a curve, and saw a man waving his arms frantically. I slammed on the brakes. The car skidded around some and stopped. The man came into the glare of the headlights. His coat was off, his arms semaphoring wildly.
I saw it was Pete Blaine.
And the gambler saw him, too. There were the three of us in the car, the gambler, who sat up in front with me, his wrists handcuffed, and Stan Walker who sat in back with his gun out. I was driving, up at the wheel.
I could see the gambler stiffen when Blaine walked into the headlights.
“That the man you knew?” I asked him.
The gambler said nothing.
Blaine walked up until he could see into the car.
“Hello, Zane,” he said. “And there’s Stan Walker. Hello, Walker. Gee, I’m glad to see you two. We had a bust-down, smashed into a rock and collapsed the front wheel. I’ve got to get down to the railroad. Can you give us a lift?”
Walker said importantly:
“We’re on official business, Blaine. But I guess we can give you a ride.”
Blaine snorted:
“You can’t leave us here. There ain’t a car a week over this road. I thought we were stranded for keeps. Gee, but I was glad to hear the sound of the motor in your car!”
He was dressed after the fashion of mining engineers, with corduroys and lace boots. He was going down for a consultation with the representatives of the mine, and he wanted to look important and well dressed. A real desert rat would have turned up his nose at the rig he wore, though.
And then his eyes lit on the gambler.
He stiffened, backed away, and said: “You!”
The gambler stared at him and said nothing.
Blaine said: “Is this man a prisoner, officer?”
Stan Walker liked the word “officer.” He swelled out his chest.
“He’s under arrest for murder,” he said. “You know him?”
“Know him!” said Blaine. “I’ll say I know him! I knew him when he was convicted of robbery in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and sentenced to seven years in the penitentiary!”
Walker said gloatingly: “A jailbird, eh?”
And the gambler said nothing. He sat very straight, very tense, and very silent.
“Well,” I told them, “this ain’t getting us any place. If we’re going to the county seat we’d better get started.”
Blaine got to the running board.
“The car’s down there a hundred yards or so. Pedro’s with it. He got hurt a little bit, a sprained ankle or something. I heard the sound of your car and came up here to make sure you didn’t smash into us when you came around the curve.”
I drove slowly until we rounded the sharp curve on a steep grade. There was Blaine’s car with the left front wheel caved in. The car was sitting down on the axle in front, and looked pretty much out of the running.
Pedro Gonzales came hobbling out.
He was glad to see us, and insisted on shaking hands all around like we’d been long lost brothers. He heard of the murder and was surprised. He said there wasn’t over five hundred dollars’ worth of gold in the sack. He evidently didn’t know about the other sacks I’d felt in the man’s shirt. I told him about them.
“How’d the accident happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I was asleep. Blaine was driving. All of a sudden, bang, down we went.”
“What time?” I asked.
“Must have been over two hours ago,” he said.
I went over to look at the car. It was hopeless without a new wheel and a lot of minor parts. Things on one side were smashed pretty much. I could see that there were suitcases in the car, and that Blaine had taken off his coat and folded it over the hood of the car. I put one hand on the coat and leaned over to take a look at the wheel. My bare arm slid along the top of the radiator, and I jerked it back as the metal burnt my flesh.
“You must not have any water in here,” I told him. “Your radiator’s pretty hot.”
Pedro answered: “Yes. We were speeding.”
It was a poor road to speed on. I turned to Walker.
“Well,” I told him, “you’re the boss. What are you going to do?”
“You can take me to the railroad,” said Blaine.
Walker shook his head. “We’re turning the other way. We won’t hit the railroad until we get to the county seat. We can take you there.”
Blaine was impatient.
“Look here,” he said, “this is important. It’s a matter of business that—”
“This,” said Walker, drawing himself up and swelling out his chest, “is murder. It’s my duty and it comes first.”
Pedro said: “He means it, chief. He’s just that kind of a guy. Better let me ride in to the county seat with them and bring back a repair car. We’ll get this fixed up. You can stay here. If some one else comes along that’s headed for the railroad you can go with them. If you can’t get a lift I’ll be back with the repair car.”
Blaine thought it over.
“Go ahead,” he snapped. “You’ll hear more from this, Walker.”
“I’m sorry,” said Walker, “but duty is duty.”
I had a sudden inspiration. I slid my hand around the hood of the car and dragged Blaine’s coat down to the place between the hood and the front fender. Then I turned and leaned my back against the fender, my right hand dropping down to the coat. I fumbled around in the pocket until I found the leather wallet which Blaine always carried in the coat pocket. I slipped it out and put it in my hip pocket as I walked away from the car.
Blaine was walking up and down and sputtering, but there wasn’t any use, as far as Walker was concerned. Walker was as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Pedro got in the car with us. I sent it on its way, leaving Blaine there.
Pedro was nursing his foot. Walker was keeping both eyes on the prisoner. Neither of them knew too much about this section of the desert. There was a place at the bottom of the grade where an old road turned off. If I could get their attention distracted when I came to the forks of the road, I had an idea I might put a plan of my own into operation.
IV. Lost
We hit the place where the old road tinned off. I jumped as though the gambler had made a sudden move, and Walker jabbed his gun into the gambler’s shoulder blades.
“None of that!” he said.
I swung the wheel and we were fighting our way along over the old road. If you know roads in the desert, you know why it takes so long to get places. This road was never repaired. It was cut up with channels cut by water from the cloudbursts. There were stretches of sand, long gullies of stone, steep hills.
Walker said after a while: “I had no idea the road was this bad. We’d have saved time by taking the long way around and forgetting the Jawbone Cañon road.”
“I believe we would, at that,” I said. “This is awful!”
I kept on fighting the road. It had turned now and was winding up a long draw where the sand was so heavy I had to keep down in the gears. Walker was getting nervous.
Pedro Gonzales said: “There’s something wrong here. I was over the road once before, and it wasn’t this bad.”
“Maybe the thing’ll get better when we top this grade,” I said.
I kept the car running.
An hour passed, another hour. The passengers were getting fidgety. We dropped down a steep slope, crossed a place that was all sand, and started another climb. The road had been cut into a grade, and there were lots of bowlders that had rolled down. Four or five times I had to get out and roll rocks away. Then we went down into the flat desert, broken only by rolling stretches. This was harder going than anything we’d struck. There was sand, lots of sand.