Ed Bocker and I headed into that desert with three pack burros and two saddle burros.
Misfortune dogged us from the start.
One of the saddle burros was gone the second night. The third night the other saddle burro followed suit. I’d hobbled him, but he gnawed through the hobbles.
It was funny. I’d never had anything quite like that before. I wouldn’t have believed a burro could have gnawed those hobbles, but I found ’em in the desert in his tracks.
Seemed like the first burro had followed him up and enticed him away. I found the tracks.
After that Ed and I had to walk.
His feet blistered and his face peeled. He sobbed and wanted to go back. I threatened him with a beating if he even looked back over his shoulder, and he stumbled on.
It was Pete’s dying request, and I was going to see it through, but it sure was a trial. That kid was a thorn in the flesh, and I don’t mean maybe.
We had to limit our water. Virtually none for washing, just enough for drinking to keep us going. It was awfully hard at first, particularly on Ed. After a while we toughened to it. I naturally got used to it first.
The work in the mine had toughened him up some, but his trouble was lack of grit. The desert toughened him more, walking every day through soft and shifting sand, scrambling over hard ridges of rock outcropping, working along valleys of rough float.
I kept wondering how those saddle burros had got loose. Then one night I heard a rifle shot. I rolled out of my blankets and got away from the light of the camp fire, jerked my Winchester from its scabbard and waited.
There was nothing more.
In the morning one of our pack burros was dead, shot through the heart. I worked for an hour before I picked up the tracks of the man who had fired that shot. He had been two hundred yards from the burro, with only moonlight to see with. It had been real shooting.
I tried to follow the tracks, but the man was too wise to leave a trail. He hit a rocky ledge and followed it.
I went back to the kid. I was worried now.
The desert is nothing to fool with. We were way out of the beaten track, in a wilderness of sand that was almost unexplored. Maps weren’t much good because the sand would get up and walk around overnight. Big mountain ranges were the only things that stayed fixed in that country.
The kid was whimpering. He was frightened. It was too strong for him.
I figured we could carry the lighter packs on the two remaining burros. But how about getting back? And who was following us?
It looked as though some one had been wise to that map and was using us to lead him to the place where the gold was.
Finally we reached the shoulder of the ridge of mountains that Pete had marked with a circle. And I ran on man tracks in the soft sand, tracks that were fresh.
He was a man and he was a big man, and he had two burros with him. I figured he’d be the one who had shot our other burro, and I got the rifle ready as I swung in along his trail.
There was enough of a moon to follow it after the sun set. By midnight I came on his camp. I didn’t let the kid know. The camp was just over the ridge. With the first gray of dawn I kicked the kid out.
“Buckle on your six-gun,” I told him, “and come along.”
“Game?” he asked.
“Game,” I said.
He followed me over the ridge. We caught our man just as he was making his breakfast fire.
I thought there was something familiar in his motions the way he reached for his gun when he heard us coming.
“Little late, ain’t you?” I asked him, looking down the sights of the Winchester.
He looked up so I could see his face, all twisted with hatred.
It was Big Bill Bruze.
“Gone into the hold-up business?” he asked.
I kept the rifle ready.
“You’re not dealing with any college kids now,” I told him. “You’ve called for chips in a man’s game and you want to be prepared to play your hand.”
He squirmed a bit, looked at the kid.
“Got a chaperon to fight his battles now, eh?”
“Maybe. What are you doing here?”
“Prospectin’. It’s government land.”
I jerked my head toward my camp.
“They weren’t government burros you shot and ran off,” I told him.
I could see his face twist with surprise and thought at the time he was doing some good acting. And that made me mad, madder than if he’d denied it with a wink or a grin.
“Never mind opening your trap,” I said. “You might bite off a soft-nosed bullet. Just open your ears and do some listening. You’ve followed us down here, thinking we’d lead the way to a mine you could steal. Well, we’re not playing Santa Claus with any mines, but I’ve got lots of ammunition. If we have any more trouble there’s likely to be some careless shooting and you might get hurt. I’ve forgotten more about this desert than you ever knew.”
And I stopped to let the words soak in.
He was a great big bulk of a man, hairy-chested, big-jawed, broad-shouldered. His shirt was open at the neck and the big muscles of his neck and chest stood out in cords of strength.
“Put down your gun and come ahead,” he invited.
I laughed at him.
“My gun’s my advantage,” I told him. “It’s my ace in the hole, and I ain’t aiming to lay it down. There’s nothing about your face that looks good to me, and the only way I can even bear to look at it is over the sights of a gun.”
“Huh!” he retorted. “Speakin’ of faces, what’s that you’ve got with you? His face looks like it had been through a sausage grinder. What happened to it?”
“A coward kicked it,” I said.
He flushed at that.
“If there’s any more trouble I’m going to take your guns away,” I promised him, and then I motioned to the kid and we went back over the ridge to our camp.
I kept an eye out for ambushes.
IV. A Visitor
That afternoon there was a droning noise from the sky. I looked up and made out a plane swinging in wide circles. It’s a funny sensation, being out in the desert and seeing a plane snarling through the blue sky like some great bird. That plane had left Needles maybe less than three hours. We’d been toilsome days in coming.
The plane spotted us. The circles got more and more narrow. I looked up at it. Something dark was coming out of the middle of the thing. That something dark hung poised for a minute, and then separated from the plane. I turned sick.
A man was being thrown overboard. Even as I looked, he broke loose and came down, a hurtling black speck, arms and legs spread out, spinning, turning, twisting.
I looked, my mouth warm with a rush of saliva, my stomach weak with horror. Then there was a puff of white. Almost at once a great mushroom of glittering white came out against the blue-black of the sky. It was a parachute.
The plane sailed off.
The black speck dangled and swung against the big mushroom of white. Slowly it drifted to the earth. I could see it was coming down almost on top of us.
It slid down back of a ridge some two hundred yards away. We walked over there, the kid’s face white and drawn, my own rifle ready.
I could see it was a girl, untangling herself from the harness of the parachute. She came toward us.
“Nell Thurmond!” I yelled.
She smiled. Her face was a bit pale, and her knees were a little wobbly. It takes nerve for a girl to make her first parachute jump.
“I came to warn you,” she said.
Ed Bocker’s face was getting red and white by turns.
The girl didn’t seem to even notice him.