I got to my burro, said good night to the inspectors, and swung toward my camp. It was dark when I got there. I started the fire, spoke to the animals, went to the packs to get out a fresh can of coffee; and heard a scream.
It was a thin scream, sounding as though I’d heard it before. It was the scream of a woman locked in a struggle with some adversary, losing her strength, but fighting with sheer nerve.
I kicked out the fire. No use to be outlined against flame, a perfect target. Then I went toward that scream, on the run.
I saw them when I was within forty or fifty yards; the bulk of two figures against the grayish white of the sand, the slender form of the girl swaying and swinging, the bulky figure of the man.
As I came up, he got his hands to her throat.
Then I saw it was no mere struggle between man and woman, but that he was trying to murder her. He heard my steps, and his hand relaxed from her throat as he stiffened. His hand streaked for a gun, but I was on him before his fingers touched metal.
He was like a huge bear. The strength of his arms was enormous, but he was a flabby bear. Soft living had made the tremendous muscles soft. And the desert does one thing for a man. It whipcords his strength into tireless endurance.
When those hands grasped me I knew his strength was too great for an immediate victory. But I pried loose, sank a punch into the heavy stomach and began a dancing chase, flicking blows home when I had the opportunity. Then when he was panting and puffing, I walked in, let him grasp me, and showed him that bulk never makes for a long struggle.
I was reaching for his throat, not that I actually intended to throttle him, but just to give him a taste of what he had given the girl, when he went limp in my arms. The great weight jerked me forward, broke my grip and sent me stumbling over it. The flabby man rolled to all fours, got to his feet and ran into the darkness.
I turned to the limp bundle of femininity.
An automobile roared into speed. Lights sent twin shafts gleaming into the darkness, then swung in a half arc; a red taillight winked mockingly, then was swallowed in dust, and the sound of the motor became fainter.
The girl stirred in my arms.
“Get him!” she said.
It was the girl of the olive eyes.
I took her back to the camp fire. She sipped the tea I gave her, her face bitter, her lips clamped together.
“You’ll have to ride a burro to get where you want to go,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
I said nothing. The desert stretched about us, a great waste of tumbled rock hills, sage and sand. Off to the east the river lapped at the dry soil.
“I hate it!” she spat, and as she spoke the golden rim of a moon, just past the full, swung over the red mountain rim. “God, how I hate the desert! Of all the grim, remorseless, unjust places on earth, the desert is it.”
Never have I heard a woman speak with such hatred.
“The desert,” I told her, “is misunderstood. You must know its ways, which are as the ways of a woman. When you know it, it is a wise mother. It does justice after a fashion of its own, but it is always justice.”
I put some more sage on the fire. It flamed up into a warm circle of ruddy light.
“Bah!” she flung at me.
I said nothing. A desert wind came up with the moon, and the sand began its interminable whispers.
“How I hate it all! I hate the dry heat, the glittering sand! I hate the wind that makes everything whisper. Those whispers! They always seem to be promising something, and they lie! Sand lies, that’s what they are.”
“No,” I said gently; “the whispers don’t lie. Perhaps your ears lie.”
And then she began to talk, the words pouring from her mouth so fast they trod on each other’s heels.
“Listen. There were two men. Either of them could have given me the information that I wanted more than life itself. Either could have saved my husband from a living hell. Those two men disappeared into the desert in an old buggy. I was unconscious. By the time I came around enough to insist upon trackers following them, the damned desert had drifted sand and silt into the tracks until they couldn’t be followed.
“Then I heard that you could follow a track, sometimes when it was months old, and I tried to get you. You had gone, slipped through my fingers. I saw you again this afternoon, and was going to tell you my story when the one man for whom I have been waiting came in. I tried to get the information I wanted from him. He spotted me, somehow. I came to your camp to wait for you. The border men told me where it was. He followed me. You know the rest.
“That’s the justice of the desert you prate so much about! My husband was entrusted with a big shipment of gold. We had only been married three months. Three men took it from him, but under such circumstances that he was held responsible. Those three men came to the border and buried the gold. One sneaked out and changed the hiding place and rushed to Mexicali. The others followed him, found him, demanded an accounting. They went to the hiding place, but I couldn’t follow because they had spotted me — I was unconscious, knocked down with a blow, nearly killed with a bullet.
“Those men disappeared. Then the third started to follow the cold trail. He traced them to Mexicali. Then he traced them in this direction. He has some information I haven’t got. And he didn’t want me to see you.
“Now they have all slipped through my hands. I’ll never be able to establish John’s innocence. I’ve given everything, thrown all I had into the gamble, trying to save my husband from prison. He got a jolt of fifteen years! Think of it! Fifteen years!”
I looked at her eyes, rimmed with moisture, blazing with hatred. My mind went back to that night in Mexicali when the team had gone out into the night at a gallop, carrying the two men.
“It had been raining,” I muttered.
“What? When?”
“The night they took the buggy and went into the desert.”
“Yes!” she snapped. “It had been raining, but it cleared up and the wind came up, and the ground dried almost immediately, and drifted over the tracks. A week later the best tracker in the border country couldn’t follow the tracks.”
I looked at the moon, then I thought for a moment, not daring to raise her hopes too high.
“We’ll go to Yuma. We can get a car there. It’ll be an hour’s ride on the burro,” I said.
“Why should I go to Yuma?”
“Because the desert is getting ready to show you its justice,” I told her.
She rode to Yuma with me. The trip was mostly in silence. At Yuma I got a man to drive us to the place where the team had been found, northeast of Holtville. I knew a man that had a ranch near there. I got saddle stock from him. By midnight we were out on horseback, the moon blazing down with a light that turned midnight to day.
I searched for two hours before I found what I wanted. It was in a silty patch where the wind had stretched its legs and swept the ground down to bare crust.
There were two long lines of earth stretching out into the moonlight, some four or five inches high. In between these lines of raised earth were little mushrooms of baked dirt, flat on top, sticking up like flattened door knobs thrust into the ground.
“What are they?” she asked.
I stopped my horse. “You’ve seen ’dobe houses, made of brick that’s nothing but sun-dried mud pressed into shape?”
“Yes.”
“You know how well they endure?”
“Yes. They’re pretty substantial. Why?”
“Two or three months ago it rained in the desert. Two men started out with a buggy because an automobile couldn’t travel over the slippery ground. The wheels of the buggy, the feet of the horses, sank down into the silty mud, pushed it into ruts.”