“I don’t know what sort of a hold you’ve got on that Indian,” I said, “but watch him.”
He laughed at me.
“Leave that Indian to me,” he said.
He seemed confident, sure of himself.
I shrugged my shoulders and turned away. I’d told him.
About midnight I woke up. Some one was crawling over the sand, and the sand made little crunching noises under his weight. I got my hand around the butt of my six-gun and rolled over
The shadow was working its way toward Karg’s blankets, and it was filled with menace.
I slid my six-gun around into a good position and thumbed back the hammer.
The shadow raised an arm. The starlight glinted on steel.
I let the hammer down on the shell.
I’d sort of pointed in the general direction of the knife, but I hadn’t expected to hit it. It was too close shooting, to blaze away by the feel of the weapon alone. But I guess I didn’t miss very far.
The shadow rolled over with a howl.
Karg jumped up out of his blankets, and he screamed as he came awake, which showed how taut his nerves were, and what the country had done to him.
I ran forward, keeping my gun on the squirming shadow.
It was the Indian. I’d missed the knife, but the bullet had ripped off the end of his thumb, right at the first joint.
I kicked the knife into the sand, searched the Indian for a gun, and then made a fire. It was a hard thing to do, but I limited the water for dressing the wound. One cup and no more.
Karg let it boil.
I knew as I watched him that he was a doctor. He took out a little chest of instruments, a folding leather affair of glittering instruments, and sterilized the tips in the water. Then he cleaned out the wound, did something to an artery that was giving little spurts of blood, and bandaged it up.
The Indian said nothing.
Karg took me to one side.
“What do we do with him?”
“Take the guns away, and watch him as best we can. We can’t call a cop and have him arrested, and we can’t turn him out in the desert, not unless he tries it again.”
“Why did he use a knife instead of a gun?”
“Because he wanted all three of us. A gun would have only been good for one.”
“How’d you happen to wake up?” he asked next.
I grunted.
“By the time you’ve lived as long as I have in the desert, you’ll wake up when any one crawls around near your bed, or else you’ll be asleep permanently.”
He nodded.
“All right, then,” he said, “you take it.”
“Take what?” I asked.
“This,” he said, and slid something into my hand. “I’ll want it every day, sometimes twice a day. When I do, I’ll come to you and get it. Guard it with your life. Don’t let any one know you’ve got it. And don’t ever try to look inside of it. It’s locked.”
I laughed at him; he was mixing in insults and compliments.
“Afraid to keep it yourself?” I asked him.
And there was a look of futility and of fear in his eyes, which showed what the desert was doing to him.
“Yes,” he said, “I am afraid to keep it.”
So I took it.
The next day the Yaqui was running a fever from the wound, and I took it easy. We didn’t dare to stop. We had to keep on toward the next water hole. That’s the desert; it’s hard.
We came to bones that day. That was when we knew we were in Yaqui country.
The bones were bleached and white, and the skull grinned at us with the eye sockets looming startlingly black against the white brilliance of the sun-whitened bones.
I looked around the bones for signs of clothes. There should have been a few shreds of fiber, but there weren’t any.
“Died of thirst,” I told Karg. “They always rip their clothes off in the last frenzied run they make. Then they shred the flesh of their fingers into bloody ribbons digging into the sand. Then they die.”
Phil Brennan turned sick at the stomach and walked away. Karg’s face winced.
The Yaqui glanced at the bones with his smoky, desert-wise eyes, and said nothing.
“And you said the desert was beautiful!” snapped Brennan.
I looked him over.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s beautiful.”
III. A Traitor Returns
We started our march again, leaving the white bones out in the clean sunlight, the skull grinning at us. The party was silent. I noticed something gleaming off in the distance, and swung around so the sun glinted from it, then I headed toward the glint.
It turned out to be a burro packsaddle with the cinches cut through, and there were two canteens on the saddle.
I lifted one of them; it was empty. I lifted the other, and grunted my surprise.
It was full.
“Belonged to that dead man, I guess,” I told them; “but he died of thirst, and this canteen is full.”
It had been there in the sun for a long time, and the top was screwed on tight. The blanket covering was ripped and worn away, and the sun glinted from the metal that was so hot it would have blistered ungloved hands.
I unscrewed the cap and tilted the canteen.
Sand flowed out. It was sand that was so fine and dry that it flowed out just like water.
I laughed.
“What is it?” asked Karg.
“A pleasant little Yaqui trick,” I said. “A man comes to a water hole, fills his canteen. The Yaquis follow him and find out what canteen he is using. Then they sneak into camp and pour the water out of the other canteen and fill it with sand.
“That’s all they need to do. No rough stuff, nothing violent. The man simply goes out into the desert, not knowing anything’s wrong. He travels until he’s used up one canteen of water, then he starts on the other canteen — and nothing flows out but sand.
“He’s one canteen’s distance from his last water hole, usually one canteen’s distance from the next. The Yaquis haven’t had to follow him out into the desert. They’ve simply left him and the desert together.
“And the answer is a pile of bones, such as we see every once in a while on the desert.”
Brennan stared at me, soul sick, his eyes horror-stricken.
Hard Harry Karg was shivering as with the ague.
“Want to go back?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, all at once, blurting out the word.
I nodded.
“Thought you would. Well, you can’t. You may be in this thing for gold, or for a big fee for closing an estate, or because of some other reason. But there’s a white woman held captive at the other end of the trail, and we’re going to her. You might as well know it now as later.”
I don’t know what he would have said just then. I was hoping the shock of it all, and the surprise of my words, would force the truth out of him. The man wasn’t a lawyer at all; he was a doctor. And he was a liar.
But the Yaqui had wandered off while I was examining the canteen. I looked up as I finished with my ultimatum to Karg, and saw the Yaqui silhouetted against the blue of the hot sky, on a hill, and he had a pile of green sage in front of him and some dry wood.
It was too far for a revolver shot. I ran for my rifle, and got there too late.
“What is it? What’s he doing?” yelled Karg.
He got his answer as I flung the rifle around.
The Indian struck a match to the tinder dry wood. It crackled into flame. Then he flung himself over the crest of the hill as my bullet zinged through the hot air.
The dry wood sent flames into the oily leaves of the desert plants and a white smoke went up. I smashed bullets into the pile, knocking it into fragments of burning embers, but the damage was done.