“Martha Stout went crooked,” she said. “She made a copy of the map, and she sold it to Bill Bruze. Bill’s here, and he’s got three other men who are camped up separate cañons so you can’t surprise them all at once. They’re planning to let you find the mine and then see that you don’t leave the desert. Martha had to copy the map from memory, and they figure that yours is the best map. They think you’ll be more likely to find it than they will.”
I knew my eyes were bulging. I couldn’t figure Martha Stout as a crook, no matter how I went about it.
“Pete?” I asked.
“He died the day after you left. He never regained consciousness.”
I looked her over.
“You came to warn us. How about getting back out?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I’ll take my fortune with yours... Hello, Ed.”
He twisted his broken nose as he grinned.
“Hello, Nell.”
I looked at the burros. We never would get out now. We had one more mouth to feed, one more person to divide drinking water with.
“Bet you were frightened when you climbed overboard from that plane,” I said.
She didn’t even hear me. She was looking at Ed Bocker.
I sighed and got the burros together. We were getting to where we could make a permanent camp, though we had little to make it with. Pete’s map had showed the location of a spring of water up at the head of one of the cañons, and I figured that cañon was the second over. If there were hostile people in the country the first thing was to get to drinking water.
We marched over the ridges. About dusk we came to the cañon that had the spring.
Two people were camped there. What was more they had monuments on the ground and a location notice.
“Howdy, folks,” I said when we came up.
They weren’t cordial about it.
“You can’t camp here,” one of them said. “This here is a located mineral claim.”
I tried to keep smiling. “I can get water here, anyway.”
He shook his head. “Nope. We can’t afford to take no chances on having the claim jumped.”
I started getting the canteens off the burros.
“Well,” I told him, “we’re not jumping any claims, but we’re almost out of water, and we’re filling up. What’s more, we’re goin’ to come back from time to time and fill up some more.”
He came toward me.
“I gotta stop you.”
“You and who else?”
“My partner.”
He was just a little uncertain, but his right hand was getting pretty close to the holstered gun that swung at his belt.
Living in the desert doesn’t give you much weight, but it gives you a lot of strength per pound and it makes a man plenty active. I got within reaching distance before the right hand could connect with the butt of the gun. My left cracked him on the jaw, staggered him back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other man reaching for a gun. Then I saw Ed Bocker get into action. After that my hands were full.
I finally got my man where I could take his gun away from him, and looked around to see what luck Ed was having. He wasn’t having much. His footwork was all the college professor on boxing could have asked for, but it wasn’t getting by in the soft sand with a clump of sagebrush to tangle his feet every once in a while. His broken nose had stopped another punch and it hadn’t done the general effect any good.
But he was swapping punches, and his blows had a little steam to them.
I rolled myself a cigarette.
“Now then, son,” I told him, “are you going to knock that gent out, of are you going to be a sissy all your life?”
He turned to look at me when I spoke, and the reception committee that had taken him on, slammed home a terrific wallop to the chin.
Ed was punch-groggy, but there was something that gleamed out from the back of his eyes I hadn’t seen before. He was forgetting some of his complexes and getting down to raw human nature.
He went in, and, for a second or two, he showed speed and strength. His boxing helped him time his punches, and something that had been dormant in him made him put snap in them.
The left measured the distance, the right crossed over, and a sprawling figure staggered backward, poised for a second and then went down with a thud that jarred the earth.
Ed Bocker stood over him, staring with a species of dazed incredulity.
“I knocked him out! I knocked him out! I knocked him out!” he kept repeating.
I didn’t pay any attention to him in particular. I left that for the girl. I was busy going through the camp and confiscating firearms. I got two six-guns and a rifle, and I took all the shells I could find.
The one that Bocker had knocked out stayed out. My man was sitting up, nursing a black eye and a bloody nose and gazing at me moodily. My lips were split, and one of my front teeth was wobbly. The sand was all dug up with man tracks. We were a great-looking outfit.
“Any guy that tries to corner water in the desert is a so-and-so,” I said. “And, what’s more, you guys ain’t to be trusted with firearms. You might get hurt.”
He didn’t say anything.
I filled the canteens, loaded on the captured arsenal, and led the way over the ridge, down a cañon, over another ridge and camped at the head of a little draw where the ridges would break the wind.
We were getting into the region of drifting sands.
No one said very much that night. Twice I caught Ed Bocker looking at his skinned knuckles with a sort of wide-eyed incredulity.
“I knocked him out,” he said once.
“Sure you did,” I told him. “That’s what your fists are for. You box for points in college, but when you get out in the world you fight for knock-outs. It ain’t a sociable pastime.”
Nell Thurmond didn’t say anything. Her eyes were starry.
I made a little camp fire because I wanted some tea, and we had to cook some rice.
But I kept every one but myself away from the circle of firelight, and when they made up their beds I had them bed down far from the fire.
Some one was watching us, it seemed to me. It was an uncomfortable feeling.
I’d just got the rice ready and the tea water boiling when the rifle started to talk.
“Bang!” it went.
I heard the crack of the bullet rushing through the air toward me, and I heard the “thunk” as it struck.
I grabbed a rifle and rolled over to one side. I caught the flash of a second shot and answered with a snap shot that must have given the hombre something to think about.
There were no more shots.
I remembered that second bullet had a tin-panny sound when it struck, but I couldn’t be bothered just then. I was streaking up the ridge, keeping just below the skyline, watching the skyline of the second ridge over. If I saw anything move against the stars I was going to throw lead. This had quit being a joke.
But I didn’t see a thing. Somehow or other, I got the idea I was up against some one who knew as much about the desert as I did, maybe a lot more — only I wouldn’t have missed those first two shots.
I went back to camp. They’d had sense enough to kick the fire out, but I could see the glow of an isolated ember here and there.
“Get those embers covered,” I said, and began kicking sand over all I could find.
“He hit the canteens,” said Nell.
“What?”
“Yes. A hole through each one.”
I whistled. “Any water left?”
“Yes,” said Ed Bocker. “I knew I couldn’t do any good with a gun, so I beat it out to some of the mesquite and whittled plugs. They help, but the water seeps out around them, no matter how tightly I push them in.”
I didn’t say anything. The water would leak out. With bullet holes in those two big canteens we could never make the long march back out of the desert. It would mean one of us would have to try it, and leave the other two. And I didn’t like the idea of leaving the girl with only Ed Bocker to protect her. That stretch of desert was getting mean.