He walked right across to the garage and took a bunch of keys from his pocket. He unlocked the door of the automobile, put the hand bag in the machine, then locked the door. Then he walked across the street to us. He was walking pretty stiff, and his feet hurt him.
“I have a tragedy to report,” he said.
His cold eyes were fastened on me, and I didn’t like the looks of them.
“Yes?” I said.
“Yes. The gentleman who accompanied me, Sid Grahame, has perished of thirst in the desert. Tie became lost while prospecting for gold. I haven’t seen him for three days.”
“How do you know he’s dead then?” I asked.
The cold eyes didn’t so much as flicker. He shrugged his shoulders and waved his hand toward the desert. The gesture was as eloquent as any words would have been.
“Why in heck didn’t you try to trail him and take water to him, instead of beating it back with all the water and supplies?” I said, and I could feel myself getting red in the face.
His voice was just the same steady tone I’d always heard. He didn’t raise it, and he didn’t apologize with it. He just spoke.
“I’m afraid I’m not adept at trailing, and it would have been dangerous for me to start out alone in the desert. I had a map showing me the way back, and I didn’t take any chances.”
I started to let him have it all, right then and there, but there wasn’t any use, and the desert has its own code. It was a case of where minutes might be precious. A man lost in the desert is like a man overboard at sea.
We got half a dozen of the old-timers around and went to work. Ortley told us no automobile could backtrack his route and he was right on that. It took us three days to find Grahame’s body, and then the buzzards led us to it. It wasn’t where Ortley thought it should have been — not by a long ways.
There wasn’t much we could do except bury him right there. We searched the clothes for addresses, and took his watch and a cigarette case and a knife. There wasn’t much else.
Stringy Martin’s voice was in my ear.
“That man didn’t die of thirst.”
I knew it, and I knew that a couple of other men in the crowd knew it.
“Ortley’s lying,” I admitted.
“Let’s shake him down.”
“After we get the body taken care of.”
We made a grave where we found him. It was the only thing to do. Then we got Ortley in the center of a ring of attentive ears and made him repeat the story.
Stringy Martin did the talking.
“Then he must have got lost thirty miles away from here.”
“I guess so. I’m not accustomed to the desert. I find it all seems strange to me.”
“And you didn’t get anywheres near this place?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“There’s the remains of a camp fire a couple of miles up this cañon, and marks where blankets were unrolled in the sand. And there’s a tomato tin that’s been opened, and some coffee grounds spilled on the desert, and there are some burro tracks — old, but burro tracks, just the same.”
Ortley’s eyes held Stringy’s with a disdainful sort of expression in them.
“Well?” he asked.
“And this man didn’t die of thirst. He was murdered by some means or other.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Because he didn’t dig with his hands, and his shirt’s on. A man who dies of thirst starts running, and he rips his shirt off, and he gets down and tries to dig out the sand with his hands. And he keeps on digging, until you can see the marks of the desert on what’s left of his hands. This man hadn’t done none of those things.”
Ortley shrugged his shoulders.
“As I said, I am not accustomed to the desert. But I have given you the facts as I remember them. Of course it is possible I was near here with the pack train. We may have camped here. I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I believe there are even cases of men traveling in a big circle in the desert and thinking they are going in a straight line, aren’t there?”
“How did you get back to Randsburg?”
“I trusted the burros for a while, and then I saw the outline of that peculiar peak off to the left, and got my bearings from that. I had made a map.”
“Where is that map?”
“I lost it. It blew out of my hands.”
Stringy Martin looked about him. What he saw in the faces of the rest of us apparently coincided with his own judgment. He started for the burros.
“Well, you’ll have a chance to clean this thing up a bit before you leave Randsburg. We’ll notify the sheriff when we get back to town.”
Ortley said nothing. His eyes were steady, and cold.
We got in to Randsburg, and notified the sheriff over the telephone. He came out and brought the coroner with him. They put Ortley on the grill.
Ortley had money, and he fought the way people with money do. He hired a doctor from Los Angeles who specialized in testifying in court cases. That doctor came in with a suitcase filled with books, and he convinced the sheriff and the coroner that people who died with thirst didn’t rip off their shirts and dig their fingers to the bone.
He laughed at the idea that any dying man would do such a thing. He quoted a lot of European doctors, and some statistics that had been compiled from Arabs in the Sahara desert or some place, and he made the sheriff think we were a bunch of boobs.
The sheriff told us that some of the circumstances were a little suspicious, but he didn’t think the district attorney would care to go any further into the matter, and then he left.
You look at a map and you’ll find Randsburg’s pretty well out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. As far as government goes, it’s more or less of an orphan. It’s in Kern County, but it’s only a mile or two over the border from San Bernardino County. Both counties are bigger than some states.
Randsburg is so much like what the old mining camps were like that the wise guys will tell you there can’t be such a place. It stretches along one twisting, unpaved street, a smear of sun-faded houses and rambling, false-fronted business structures.
It’s a place that does pretty much what it pleases. And there’s another place, not over three miles from it, that does exactly as it pleases. You understand that a mining town out in the middle of the Mojave Desert ain’t governed by exactly the same rules that govern a city that’s plunked down in the middle of the orange groves.
Ortley glowered at us with his cold eyes, walked to his automobile, unlocked the doors and the ignition and the transmission, and went away from there. There was nothing left behind except five burros and some desert whispers.
III
Cold Trail
Now desert whispers are funny things. Maybe you’ve got to believe in the desert before you believe in desert whispers. At any rate, you’ve got to know what it’s like to spend the long desert nights bedded down in the drifting sand before you’ll know much about the desert, or the whispers, either.
The desert is peculiar. It’s something that can’t be described. You either feel the spell of the desert or you don’t. You either hate it or you love it. In either event you’ll fear it.
There it lies, miles on miles of it, dry lake beds, twisted mountains of volcanic rock, sloping sage-covered hills, clumps of Joshua trees, thickets of mesquite, bunches of giant cactus. It has the moods of a woman, and the treachery of a big cat.
And always it’s vaguely restive. During the daytime the heat makes it do a devil’s dance. The horizons shimmer and shake. Mirages chase one another across the dry lake beds. The winds blow like the devil from one direction, and then they turn and blow like the devil from the other direction.