The kid adopted the correct boxing attitude.
“Very well,” he said.
Big Bill swung a right. The kid made the correct college block. But Bill’s fist ripped the blocking arm to one side and crashed the kid on the jaw.
Ed Bocker’s features bore that look of dazed incredulity that a mathematician would have if he saw the multiplication table go haywire.
He made a ladylike left lead.
It was technically correct. It landed squarely on the point of Bill’s jaw. But it might have been a mosquito buzzing for all the good it did. Bill walked right into it, planted himself and swung a right to the stomach.
The kid was out the minute that right crashed.
But Bill Bruze was a bully and a killer. He was six feet of whipcorded strength, and he was jealous. What was more, he hadn’t got the kid’s looks, and he was sore at the kid because of that profile.
Bill measured the distance.
His right smashed the beautiful nose to powder. His left took out a couple of front teeth. His right put a permanent scar over the left eye. Then the kid hit the cement like a sack of meal. The bystanders prevented Bill kicking in his face, after he’d swung his foot for the second time.
Ed Bocker was four weeks healing, and then he looked like something the cat had dragged in.
He went to Bakersfield and a doctor told him a plastic surgeon could fix him up. Pete wouldn’t let him have the money.
“You’re gettin’ over one handicap now,” he said. “That damned beauty of yours. If you could only forget your education and the way you dawdle along on your a’s when you talk, you might make a man.”
The kid cried, he was so mad. Pete said things about a bawl baby and walked away.
Women are funny. Both Martha Stout and Nell Thurmond stuck up for the kid. Nell gave Big Bill Bruze the gate. She kept all her smiles for Ed Bocker. But the beating seemed to have turned Bocker plumb yellow. Bruze threatened to beat him up again if he even looked at Nell, and Bocker kept away.
The way I figured it, any man who would let fear of a beating keep him away from a girl he liked wasn’t worth shooting.
Pete was worried about it. The summer was about over, and it looked like his whole plan was a fizzle. The kid was just a false alarm.
Pete asked me what I thought, and I told him.
“He ain’t worth bothering with,” I said. “Give him all his money and hope he drinks himself to death. Better yet, buy him the booze yourself. Or else pick a dark night and bump him with a club. Far as society’s concerned he’s a total loss.”
Pete clawed at his white stubble.
“That’s about the way I figure,” he admitted, “but Martha Stout knows a lot about animals an’ about men. She says he’s got pay dirt. That it’s his trainin’ that’s to blame. He’s just one of those kids that was born with a gold spoon in his mouth. He tells me his dad wouldn’t let him associate much with the kids at college, because they were common. It’s his trainin’.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You an’ me ain’t got no education to live down,” Pete went on. “We don’t know nothin’ about the handicap this kid’s got.”
I walked away. Pete’s adopted kids were nothing to me.
III. Yellow
Pete went out in the desert on a prospecting trip. He left the kid there without any money. The kid had hardened his muscles a bit by working in the mine. But he was yellow all the way through. His spirit was just as soft as it had been the day he landed.
He avoided Nell Thurmond because Bruze told him to. Nell wouldn’t notice Bill Bruze. And the kid’s face had healed up into a crooked mask that was a distortion of his former beauty.
I was worried about the whole thing. Seemed like Pete should have left this kid to live the only sort of a life he knew.
Then Pete came staggering into town with some gold that was enough to make a stampede. It was coarse gold, like wheat grains, and Pete was loaded with it. His coat had gold in all the pockets.
But Pete was in a bad way. He sent for old Doc Smith.
Doc Smith is sort of a father confessor to the town. He’s young in years, but old in knowledge. He came to the country that borders the desert because he thought he could do some good there. He writes philosophy, acts as judge, and patches up the sick.
Doc Smith treated Pete, and then he sent for me.
“Pete’s cashing in,” he said. “He’s located a bonanza, but his heart gave out on him. He wants you to take his kid and go back there.”
“His kid?”
“The adopted kid, Ed Bocker.”
“That kid couldn’t live in the desert.”
Doc Smith shrugged his shoulders. He gave me a pencil scrawl. “Here’s a map Pete made before he became unconscious. He gave it to Martha Stout, who’s acting as nurse. She gave it to me. Pete was unconscious when I got there. He won’t ever regain consciousness. You’ve got to start right now, before some one tries to trail you.”
I looked at the map and whistled.
It was a bum map, but I could tell where the main range was. It was down in the worst section of desert I’d ever been in. Pete had scrawled on the bottom. “It’s up one of these cañons marked with a circle. My heart went bad on me, and I walked for days without remembering where I was.”
That was all. It was a heck of a map.
“I want to see Pete,” I told Doc Smith.
“Walk on tiptoes,” he said.
I followed him into the room. Martha Stout was there, fat and efficient. Pete was stretched in bed, his face like wax, his eyes rolled up, his lips blue. He was motionless. I touched his flesh. It was like ice.
“He’ll die inside of two days at the latest. If he wakes up and finds you haven’t started the shock will kill him right then,” said Doc Smith.
“I’m startin’,” I told him.
I groped around until I found Pete’s limp, cold hand, shook it, and promised him. I thought the eyebrows might have moved a little. Then I groped for the door. My eyes were all swimmy. Pete had been a pal of mine for years.
I got the kid rounded up.
That beating had done things to his soul, more than it had to his face. He was like a frightened quail, and he’d cringe every time he saw a man look at him real hard. That tickled the boys. There were lots to look at him real hard.
The things we needed I threw into a car. We’d outfit at Needles. We made Needles by daylight the next morning. The kid was helpless when it came to doing anything. He couldn’t even drive the car.
We got our burros together and started out into the desert.
That’s real desert, down south of Needles. There are stretches of it that don’t see a human being once in five years. And there are stretches where the sand hills get up and walk around.
Down toward Yuma they couldn’t build an automobile road across those hills for years, until some slick engineer figured out a way to hold the road. For years they had a long road of planks fastened together so the road could be lifted and shifted. When the sand hills would march over the road they’d pull the road up and around. It would have broken a snake’s back to follow it. And it broke the motorists’ hearts.
They’ve solved the road problem, but the sand hills still walk around.
That’s the section of the desert where the whispers hang out. Every night the desert seeps with whispers. Of course they aren’t really whispers, just the sand slithering against the sand on the wings of the wind. But it makes lots of whispering noises, and, just when you’re dropping off to sleep, it sounds like whole words and sentences.
That’s the true desert. People who have lived in it for a long time get the same way the desert is, hard and gray, and with a whispering note in their speech.