I listened to the roar of the guns and the whining bullets as they passed overhead, and some ten or fifteen yards to my right. Then gradually I dropped off to sleep, knowing that we held all the trump cards in the game; but I didn’t want to play those cards. I wanted George Ringley to play them.
I dozed off and on during the night. Big Bill Ordway relieved the man who was doing the sniping shortly after midnight.
VII
The Hero
Along toward morning the night wind came up, and the desert commenced to whisper. I lay and dozed, keeping an eye on the place where Big Bill Ordway had fired his last shot, keeping my rifle ready and sleeping with my senses alert.
It was around four thirty in the morning when I heard the noise of crunching sand. A noise that wasn’t made by the night wind.
I cocked my rifle and nestled it up against my shoulder. The noise seemed to be coming from the direction of the fortress.
I sat silent and alert, my rifle ready.
A man came crawling along the desert, working his way by inches, stopping from time to time perfectly motionless and peering about him. He was dragging a rifle along the ground.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was George Ringley.
I let him pass.
The wind, which had been sending the sand in little drifting eddies, died away, and the desert became calm and still. The creeping man had passed beyond the scope of my vision. Once or twice I thought I could see him, but I wasn’t certain. There were too many shadows in the desert as the moon slid down toward the west, and it was difficult to pick out which blotch of darkness was cast by the figure of the crawling man.
Suddenly I heard a roar of rage and then the thud of a blow. Two men rose up, apparently out of the face of the desert, and started a terrific hand-to-hand struggle. They were perhaps sixty-five yards away.
I jumped up and ran toward them, my rifle at the ready.
I could see another man running from the place where the outlaws had made their camp. A man who ran with heavy, awkward strides, a gun in his hand.
I circled the combatants and headed toward this man. He was intent upon the struggling figures, apparently, trying to distinguish which was which. As I got within a few feet of him he raised his gun.
I flung my weapon to my shoulder.
“Hold everything,” I said in a low voice.
The man whirled toward me.
“Drop that gun,” I said, “or you’re a dead man.”
He fired, and at the same time I squeezed the trigger of my rifle. His bullet whizzed past my cheek, my bullet gave that unmistakable thunk which is made by a bullet when it impacts living tissue.
I saw the man jerk around as though he had been pulled by some invisible string. He staggered for two or three steps and then pitched forward on his face.
I looked back.
The two men were struggling. Apparently, they had been entirely unaware of the shooting.
Abruptly one of the men staggered backward.
I saw the smaller man swing a clubbed rifle, heard the smashing impact, and then the big man went down. I dropped to the desert.
George Ringley ran past me, going toward the place where the men had established headquarters. He was gone for perhaps three quarters of an hour. It was commencing to get light in the east when he came back.
I chuckled when I saw what he had done. He had loaded up all of the provisions on the burros, and was bringing them back with him. He picketed them near the fortress.
The stars began to recede to mere needle points of light, and once more a mysterious wind started the desert talking.
I relaxed. There was no necessity for me to enter into the picture — not just then.
I kept close to the ground, working with the caution of a man stalking a deer, taking advantage of every bit of shadow I could find, and gradually moved off to the east. By the time the rising sun cast its first rays over the peaks to the east, I was more than a mile from the fort.
After that there was nothing to it.
The men who had been sent by Bill Ordway to follow my trail had apparently followed it back to the place where I had fired my shots into the canteens.
By that time they knew what had happened. They came up to the camp where they had left their stuff. In the light of the early morning they could see their burros tied up back of the little fortress. Bill Ordway was staggering about, apparently still punch-groggy. Two of the men lay motionless on the desert, black blotches which were already commencing to attract the circling buzzards.
The men held a brief conference, then turned and started trudging through the sand, walking with the quick, anxious steps of men who are running a race with desert death.
After a moment Bill Ordway started running after them.
I waited until the figures had vanished into the heat waves of a distorted horizon, which, even so early in the morning, was commencing to dance a weird devil’s dance.
I started approaching the fort from the east. When I knew that they had seen me, I put my hat on my gun barrel and waved it. After they had recognized me, I walked on to the fort.
Sally Ehlers had a bloodstained handkerchief wrapped around her left arm. Her eyes were starry. George Ringley was grinning. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. There were powder stains on his face. His hair was tousled, there was dirt and grime all over him. His knuckles were bloody and there was a livid bruise on one cheek, but his grin had an expression of triumph.
“Where were you?” asked Sally Ehlers. “We kept shooting so that you’d know something had gone wrong.”
“I had quite a time getting here,” I said. “What happened?”
Sally Ehlers, her eyes gleaming with excitement, reached down into the loose sand at the base of the little fortress, scraped away the sand, and pulled out a rock which gave a yellow glistening gleam in the intense sunlight.
“Look!” she said, and held it out to me.
Her hand was trembling so that she could hardly hold the rock.
“You see what happened,” she said. “We started to locate this claim knowing that it was just a fake, and that you were using it as a blind to lure the claim jumpers—”
“I didn’t know that at the time,” said George Ringley.
“Of course you didn’t,” she told him, smiling. “That was a secret that Bob Zane and I had between us. But, of course, as soon as we found this rich gold, I had to tell him. Then, you see, we simply had to hold the claim.”
I nodded slowly. “I see,” I said.
I took the chunk of rock from her trembling hand. “More of it?” I asked.
“Lots of it,” she said in a voice that quavered with excitement. “There’s a ledge of it up there, and it is almost pure gold. It glitters in the sun.”
I turned the rock over and over in my hands.
“What’s the matter, Uncle Bob?” she asked. “You don’t seem very excited about it.”
I didn’t know whether I should break the news to her or not, but while I was hesitating my face told the story.
“Good heavens!” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s—”
I nodded.
“Yes, Sally,” I told her, “it’s what they call ‘fool’s gold.’ It’s a crystal formation that frequently occurs in gold-bearing rock. There may be some mineral content in here, but it’s a cinch it isn’t any bonanza of pure gold.”
She gave a little gasp of disappointment.
“Oh,” she said, and sat down on one of the rocks as though her knees had become too weak to support her.
George Ringley wanted to fight about it.
“Look here,” he said, “don’t be too sure about that. Sally Ehlers said it was gold. We’ve put up a big battle for that gold, and personally I’m going to require something more than your say-so before I figure it’s all a false alarm.”