I recognized Bill Ordway’s voice.
“It’s the girl,” he said. “She’s got more sense than the fellow. She’s detoured out to the side to ambush us. She’s sneaked back to the fort now.”
A man’s voice said, “Don’t be too sure she’s gone back to the fort. She may be sticking around here somewhere. Whoever she is, she shoots like the devil. She got Bert in the leg and one of those bullets went through my Stetson.”
“Well, come on,” said Bill Ordway. “If she’s out of the fort there’s only one left. We can rush it before the moon comes up.”
“I’ve lost my bearings now,” one of the men said.
“You can see the outline of that peak against the sky. It’s up the slope just to the right of that.”
“Damn it!” said a man’s voice. “I wish they’d do a little shooting so we could tell just where they are. We’ve moved over here to the side and I don’t know just where the place is now. We don’t want to go floundering around there in the dark.”
The little knot of men gave a murmur of assent.
“This is no time to go blundering around if we don’t know where we’re going, and what we’re going after, Bill,” a man’s voice said. “We’d better go do something about Bert’s leg. The bullet went through the upper part of it.”
“Oh, the hell with Bert,” Ordway said. “Arc you fellows going to stand around here and talk until the moon comes up, or are you going to follow me?”
He pushed on ahead.
I waited until he was almost lost in the darkness, and then, when I could see just a vague indistinct blotch of shadow, I fired again, shooting by the feel of the weapon, and shooting low.
I heard a man yell, then once more the darkness was ripped by stabbing flashes of flame.
Two or three of the men came charging toward me. I heard Ordway shouting at them to let me go and to rush the claim. His orders, however, were not obeyed. The men didn’t relish the idea of having an enemy in the rear.
The two defenders in the fort held their fire. I figured they probably either sensed some friction in the attackers or else they realized that their strongest defense lay in keeping the location of their fortress sufficiently indefinite to prevent the attackers from making a direct charge.
I heard men crawling about me through the darkness, and sat tight. They worked on past me. One of them came so close that I could hear his labored breathing. They drew together some twenty yards on the other side of me, and I heard them whisper, but I wasn’t able to distinguish the words, but I could hear the hissing sibilance of the whispers.
I sat tight and didn’t move.
There was a glow of rosy light in the east. I heard Bill Ordway cursing his men for fools. Then the rim of the moon appeared over the eastern mountains. The first rays of the silvery moonlight gave some degree of weird visibility to the desert.
My own position was just a little dangerous. The enemy were all about me and the moon was coming up. However, I clung to my little depression in the sand with the rocks that I had flung about me, casting enough shadow so that I blended with the other shadows which were cast by the rays of the rising moon.
After a moment the men walked over to join Ordway, and as they walked they went within some ten feet of me, but they didn’t see me. Nor, on the other hand, did I open up on them. I figured that I was hopelessly outnumbered if they actually got me cornered, and that my best defense was to sit tight until they had found the punctured canteens.
The moon slid slowly and majestically into the heavens, illuminating the desert with its silvery rays. The attackers decided that there was nothing more they could do that night, and I heard Ordway instruct a couple of men to keep working up toward the fort, until they got as close as they dared, firing from time to time in order to keep the defenders from getting any sleep. Then Ordway and the balance of the crew went over toward the place where they had left their burros and supplies, in order to cook a meal.
I waited for four or five minutes and then heard a sudden hubbub from the place, and knew that the men had found what had happened to their water.
After that I heard a shrill whistle, then the sound of steps crunching the sand, and Bill Ordway’s hail.
It was answered by one of the men who had been detailed to work up on the fortress.
Bill Ordway called him over and said: “Somebody’s shot hell out of our canteens. The water’s all leaked out, there isn’t enough there to last us for more than half a day, not after the sun gets up.”
There was a moment of silence. Then one of the men said, “Well, that settles it. We’ve got to head back toward drinking water.”
Bill Ordway muttered a curse.
“Here’s where I fool you,” he said. “There’s plenty of drinking water in that fortress. I’m going to keep you fellows right here. If you want to get any water you’ve got to rush the fort.”
There was a moment of silence while the men digested that remark. Then one of the men started a low-voiced protest, but Bill Ordway turned on his heel and walked away. He crunched the sand with his feet, within less than five yards of the place where I lay concealed. After that there was an interval of silence and then the men turned and went back toward camp, muttering their protests. The fortress was left unmolested.
I saw the glow of a campfire. From where I was I could hear the rumble of voices. Voices that were raised in an argument, but evidently Bill Ordway had his way. The campfire continued to burn, and the men didn’t start back toward Blythe. If they had been faced with the necessity of making a forced march in the desert without water, they would, of course, have started while the moon was in the heavens, and while the desert was cool.
I moved on up closer to the fort, working my way to within about seventy-five or eighty yards, until the defenders saw me and a couple of bullets came pretty close to me. Naturally, they thought that I was one of the enemy, and I didn’t tell them anything to the contrary. I had a plan that I wanted to work out.
I burrowed my way down into a depression in the sand, and sat perfectly tight. After a while I heard the thud of running feet.
The charge toward the fort had commenced.
Rifles blazed. Two of the men dropped to the ground, the balance spread out and took to cover. There followed a period of isolated sniping, the men working around, trying to sneak on the fort under cover of the shadows cast by the moon.
But the moon was higher in the heavens now, and it was illuminating the desert with a species of silvery light that made objects almost as visible as under the noonday sun. The pair in the fort kept up a steady fire, and after a while the attackers were beaten off.
Once more they held a council of war. This time I wasn’t close enough to hear anything that was said, but I could hear the distant murmur of voices sounding like the indistinct roar of a waterfall, and once or twice I heard Big Bill Ordway’s voice as it boomed forth above the whining arguments of the men.
Two of the men had been wounded. I gathered that their wounds were serious. There was hardly enough water in the whole outfit to last them for a forced march to Blythe. In the end, apparently two of the men were dispatched for water and help. By this time, Ordway’s gang had been so seriously weakened that an attack was out of the question, but Ordway detailed one of the two remaining men to keep up a desultory fire on the fortress in order to keep the defenders from getting any sleep.
I sensed the strategy when the two men left, and the man who was chosen to keep firing on the fort took up a position within some fifty yards of where I lay concealed. I was, in fact, almost between the two fires.