I glimpsed it winding around the base of a butte, then it vanished.
I pulled the roan in and looked around me. Mile on mile of empty space, aching with silence, a weird horizon of sharply serrated mountains that thrust knife-like edges up into the blue vault, a horizon that danced in the sunlight as the heat waves distorted the distant mountains.
I dropped the lead rope from the packhorse, swung one knee over the horn of the saddle, and rolled a cigarette while I scanned the base of the desert butte. The roan had seen the speck too.
Perhaps he knew what it was. His ears were cocked forward and his nostrils slightly dilated as he looked at the place where the speck had disappeared.
I made fire to the cigarette, inhaled an appreciative lungful of smoke and touched the roan lightly with my spur. He knew at once what I wanted, and started a shuffling lope through the white sand.
Distances are deceptive in the dry air of the desert, and at the end of ten minutes we seemed to be no nearer the butte than when we had started. The roan continued his pace-devouring stride, although we were climbing a slope and the footing was soft. We angled around the slope of the butte and came at length to the place where I had seen the moving object.
I looked down in the sand, reading the trail, and knew at once what it was that had gone around the base of that butte.
It was a burro, and a burro that had a pack on his back.
A burro, with a pack, which is loose in the desert, means a desert wayfarer in trouble, and the code of the desert is that one must always aid the wayfarer who is in trouble.
The horse knew as well as I did what I wanted. I left everything to the horse.
He drifted around the shoulder of the butte, went down a pitch on the other side, and I saw the burro nibbling at a bit of sage in a cup-like depression between the buttes. I rode up to him and looked at the pack.
A desert man can tell much from the way a pack is thrown. Men who have worked as forest rangers usually have a certain system. Professional packers throw their ropes in another way; and men who have gone in much for hunting use a distinctive method of balancing the pack and throwing the hitch. There are all kinds, from diamond hitches down to squaw hitches, with various modifications in between.
I concluded this pack had been thrown by an old desert man who had been out from his base of supplies for about two days. There was water in the canteen, a light bed roll, and a pair of alforjas filled with a miscellaneous assortment. The tarp which was thrown over the top was grimed with desert dust and sooted with straggling ashes from countless camp fires. I tossed a rope over the burro’s neck, made a half hitch around the horn of the saddle, and spoke to the roan.
We swung back around the shoulder of the mesa, down a long slope, around a short ridge of hills, through a little valley, and then I saw another speck. This speck was a black blotch which was lying motionless on a sandy slope between two clumps of stunted sage.
The sun was getting a bit toward the west now, and the shadows were lengthening. The shadow which was thrown by this object seemed as black as a pool of ink dropped on the white sand of the desert.
I knew what it was when I was more than a hundred and fifty yards away.
At first I thought perhaps the man might have collapsed with a sprained ankle or because of the heat. But as I rode up and took in the details of the grotesque pose, I knew that he was dead.
I dismounted when I was twenty or thirty yards away. The burro didn’t make any objections, but the roan was side-stepping around a bit and snorting. I knew then that the death had been violent, and the roan was smelling blood.
I moved forward cautiously and, as I walked, I pulled my six-gun from its holster and watched the surrounding country.
Ordinarily we don’t wear six-guns in the desert. The man who has one is usually a tenderfoot or a crook. But this trip was different. I was going into a section which remained wild.
It needed but a glance to tell what had happened. The man had been shot from some distance with a high-powered rifle, used by an expert. There had been but the one shot, and it had gone full into the heart.
The man had never known what hit him.
He was about fifty-five or fifty-six years of age, and had a gray stubble along the angle of his bronzed jaw. He was attired in an old pair of faded overalls, a jumper and a shirt. The hat was an old Stetson which had been soaked in desert dust and sunshine until it showed only as a nondescript gray. Everything about the man indicated an old desert rat who knew the moods of the desert.
Tracks showed that there had been two burros, and I spotted the second burro not over two hundred yards away. This was a saddle burro, and there was a scabbard on the side of the saddle, with a rifle in the scabbard. I went up to this burro and looked the saddle over.
I would have said that the man had been shot from some sort of an ambush. Certainly he never knew that he was in any danger. The rifle was in the scabbard, the reins were caught on the horn of the saddle.
Evidently the man had been riding along when suddenly he received that shot, full through the heart.
I unsaddled both of the burros and turned them loose. I knew that they could shift for themselves in the desert. I couldn’t be bothered carrying them along with me. I went back to the body and examined it once more. There was a six-gun thrust down the front of the man’s belt, and apparently he had made no attempt to reach it. It was stuck snugly in its holster. The left hand held a small glass jar, hermetically sealed, with a screw top. In that jar was a piece of paper.
I took the jar from the dead man’s hand. I could see that the paper had writing on it, but I couldn’t see exactly what that writing consisted of. I slipped the jar into my saddle bag, took the tarp and covered the body with it.
Tracking back the burros and getting the direction in which the man had been traveling, then looking at the path the bullet had taken through his body, I was able to get a general idea of the direction from which the shot had come.
I mounted the roan and started shuffling along in that direction. Pretty quick I came to a place where a body had lain in the sand. It was possible to see prints made by the elbows and by the buttons on the coat, also little holes where the toes of the boots had rested.
There were half a dozen cigarette stubs scattered around in the rocks, the ends of several burnt matches, and a single empty rifle shell. That rifle shell was from a .303 rifle.
I prowled around and found where the man had walked into his place of concealment. He wore high heeled cowboy boots. Backtracking, I found where his horse had been stationed, and figured that the horse was a big, fast cattle horse that had been trained to stand when the reins were dropped over his head.
I didn’t disturb the evidence any, but simply looked it over. Then I went back, picked up my packhorse, and started on.
Behind me stretched the flat desert, across which wound a road of sorts, a road that could have been traveled by automobile.
Ahead of me loomed mountains and the road which wound up the Box Cañon, a grade that was far too steep for any automobile to negotiate. In fact, it could hardly be dignified by being called a road at all. It was merely a wide back trail.
II
Desert Mystery
From here on, I left civilization behind. The hands of the clock turned back through two or three decades. I had heard of Greasewood before. In fact, I had been there once or twice in the earlier days. In those days it had been a prosperous mining community and the road had been such that supplies could be freighted in by wagon.