“I need somebody that knows the desert.”
I kept silent.
He looked up at me, his watery eyes blinking in the red light of the glowing embers.
“If a gent had been out in the desert to some sort of a secret place, could you track him to that place? If you got started within, say, twelve hours?”
I shook my head.
“I might, and again I mightn’t. Winds come up awful fast in the desert countries.”
He sighed and let his eyes blink out over the desert. “But suppose you got started a little sooner?”
“Well, how much sooner?”
“Three or four hours.”
“That sounds more like it.”
“What sort of a proposition could I make you — in money?”
“I don’t know. What could you?”
“I could offer you a thousand dollars for the job. But you’d want to be awfully certain you could do it. If you fell down it would lose me a lot of money.”
I ventured an innocent comment:
“We could track him some other time.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “he wouldn’t make any more tracks.”
I said nothing for a while, but listened to the sand whispers of the desert. The moon looked like a great pumpkin just over my head. The mountains were purple shadows against the golden glow of the night sky, and the sagebrush cast black shadows.
My visitor was looking at me now, staring straight and steady, but that was because I was looking out into the desert. As soon as I turned my eyes back to his face, he started looking at the coals again. The sand whispered little snatches of sound that were almost words but weren’t.
“Maybe we’d be crowding too close on this fellow, and he’d get wise,” I suggested.
“No. When we start there won’t be nothing to be afraid of along that line. It’ll be just a question of finding out where he went. There’ll be two sets of tracks, one going out, one coming back.”
I added to his words, sort of casual-like:
“And the man that made ’em will be dead?”
He jumped back from the fire and got to his feet.
“I didn’t say that!”
“No; so you didn’t! It must have been that the desert whispered it to me.”
He stood, teetering back and forth on his feet.
“Pshaw!” he said after a bit, and turned and strode away into the desert just like he’d come, his feet shuffling, the black shadow bobbing along over the silvery sand.
I drained the water off of the potatoes and spread my blankets.
I thought there was something else that moved out there in the desert. Coyote, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. Twice I got a glimpse of motion, and then there wasn’t anything except the moonlight, the warm night, the sighing wind and the sand whispers.
I got under a light blanket, saw that my burro was all jake, and pillowed my head on the saddle.
I started drifting off to sleep the way a man does in the open desert. And the sand whispered a lullaby. My muscles relaxed, and isolated thoughts flitted through my brain. The sand whispers became words and strung out into a whole sentence.
There was something startling in that sentence, something I should know. It snapped me wide awake, it was so important. I felt the sense of the whisper slipping as I woke up, and I tried to hang on to what it was. But it was no use. I snapped wide awake to the moon that was shining down in my face, and the whispers were nothing but sand rustling against sand.
I didn’t go back to sleep again right away. There was something I was trying to get, like reaching for a lost dream. Sometimes I almost knew what it was, but never well enough to get it fixed, just a hazy impression.
The wind went down as suddenly as it had come up. The moon shone steady and brilliant, and I went to sleep.
Daylight found me slicing the potatoes with onions. The bacon sizzled in the frying pan, and then I dumped in the onions and potatoes. When they were browned to a turn I washed them down with coffee.
But all the time, I was thinking of the man with the broad nose and the watery eyes, whose hands had seemed cold so he had to toast ’em over the embers of the desert fire. I remembered the flicker of motion I’d seen out in the moonlight. Somehow or other, the desert whispers seemed concerned with that flicker of motion.
The sun came up over the Chocolate Mountains, and the long shadows settled over the desert. Right away it commenced to get hot.
I got my camp stuff staked out in the shade of a mesquite clump and saddled my burro. Then I went out to where I d seen that flicker of motion. The tracks in the desert told the story.
The man with the watery eyes, who had given the name of Pete Lucas, had come floundering over the desert with shuffling feet. Some distance behind him had been a dainty-footed girl walking as lightly as a young doe. While Lucas had been talking with me, the girl had been lying down on the slope of a sand dune where she could watch him. I didn’t think it was close enough to enable her to hear what had been said.
When Lucas left, she left, too, following him.
I back-tracked the girl for a ways, trying to get a good imprint of her foot. It was dainty and small, but she handled her feet as though she knew what she was doing with ’em.
I got a track in a patch of silt soil that was a good one. It showed that the left heel had a little chip gouged out of it, probably by a rock. For the rest there wasn’t anything except tracks of a woman’s shoes.
I rode the burro into Mexicali. I like it south of the border, like to watch the types that come and go; besides, it’s all a desert country and the desert has got into my blood. When you first see the desert and get out in it, you’ll either like it or you’ll hate it. Most of the time, if you hate it, it’ll be because you’re afraid of it. Then, after a while, when the desert gets into your blood, you’ll find it motherly.
But it’s a jealous mother, and it only takes care of its own. Those that know the desert and respect its power get along in it. Those that get flippant are likely to be found some place with circling buzzards, swollen tongue, and fingers that have had the flesh ribboned from the bone through delirious digging for water.
The desert’s got me. I have to be out in it. It’s in my blood. I don’t stay long around the border ports. It’s an interesting sight to see — once in a while. After that you want to forget it.
But I did want to see if I could find a girl with the heel of her left shoe chipped.
I found the guy with the watery eyes, and I kept him from seeing me. The gambling tables were just opening up, and the big horseshoe bar in the old Owl, that’s now the A. B. W. Club, was swinging into action.
This chap, Lucas, was looking for somebody. After an hour or so he found him; I could tell by the expression in his eyes. The vague, watery look vanished, and the eyes snapped to hazel hardness. The flat nose expanded until the nostrils were two black, round holes, and Lucas wet his lips with his tongue.
I followed his eyes to the man he’d spotted. He was a big man, with a great dome of a forehead and eyes that were puckered in thought. He wasn’t accustomed to the desert places, and the sun hadn’t been kind to his skin. The eyes were red-rimmed from drink and sun, and he seemed a little bit shaky. He took a couple of cocktails, and then went to the gaming tables. He gambled until noon, and then he had some lunch. He played roulette and he was about a thousand dollars ahead. After lunch, he ran into a streak of bad luck. His pile melted, and as it melted he began to plunge, which is the wrong way to gamble. Any old gambler will tell you to crowd your luck when it’s coming your way, but to hold ’em close to your chest when you’re cold.
And Lucas kept watching the big chap with the dome forehead, keeping in the background, watching, watching, watching.