Perhaps it was the angle of the sun, perhaps it was just because my eyes happened to be looking in that direction, but I saw something I’d overlooked before. It was a little scratch on the side of the cliff, a place where a nailed boot had left two parallel scratches on the surface of the soft rock.
“Do you hear whispers?” she was asking. “When you’re out in the desert?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I heard whispers again last night.”
“Sand whispers.”
“No, these were words. Some one kept saying something about a letter. I’m very near a letter that was left for me.”
I looked at her sharply, but the calm eyes didn’t falter.
“Yes,” she said, “a letter.”
I looked at the scratches made by the boot heel once more.
“I think,” I said, “if you’ll take a look in the caves up along the face of that cliff, you might find it. I’ll take the high ones, you take the low ones. Watch out for snakes.”
She didn’t argue. She started searching.
I was the one to find the letter. It was up in a high cave. It was addressed to Miss Edith Eason, and the address was the business address in Los Angeles.
I scaled it down to her.
It was something of a shock to her as she saw the sealed envelope, written in the hand of the dead. Coming on top of the whispers she’d been hearing, it must have seemed like a voice from the dead.
Funny thing about those whispers. They’d seemed to be trying to tell me something during the night. But I was too drowsy to hear well. Once I thought I had a message, but it had slipped my mind when I woke up.
You can’t ever tell, though; maybe it was because of those whispers that I looked at those boot marks. Then again, maybe all of this whispering business was just imagination. I’m putting down the facts the way they happened. One’s guess is as good as that of another.
After a while she handed me the letter.
There was a lot of personal stuff in there that I hated to read. It seemed like violating a confidence, but I knew I had to read it to get the whole sketch. The thing was just the way I’d commenced to figure.
Sidney Grahame had located a big, low-grade quartz mine. He’d interested Harry Ortley into coming in and looking it over. While they were dickering over terms, Ortley wanting to take everything in sight and have a guarantee of ten per cent more, Sid wandered off into the desert and just stumbled onto a rich placer.
He staked it out, and told Ortley he didn’t need his finances, that Ortley could have the low-grade if he wanted, and welcome, and then he showed Ortley the placer.
That was where he made his mistake. He knew it before the day was done. They started back. Murder was in Ortley’s eyes. Sid knew it. He wrote the letter and hid it in the cave, figuring that if anything happened, desert-wise eyes would back-track Ortley. But he didn’t dare make the Hiding place of the letter too obvious for fear Ortley would see it.
There was a map showing the location of the placer.
I looked up from the letter to find the girl’s eyes on mine.
“Can we get there to-day?” she asked.
“No. It’s two days’ travel, and it’s twenty miles from the nearest water. It’s one of the worst bits of the desert. That’s why it’s never been prospected more thoroughly. I’d better go and get some witnesses before we go in there.”
I looked at her eyes and saw fire in them for the first time.
“That’s nonsense. You don’t want witnesses. You just want to get me out of the way where I won’t see what’s going to happen. We’ll travel hard and we’ll get there tomorrow.”
I tried to talk her out of it. As well argue with a granite mountainside. So we started to travel. And we traveled plenty.
The map located the mines with reference to Pilot Butte, and I didn’t have any trouble. There was the gleam of a tent in the afternoon sun as we approached the placer.
“You stay behind,” I told the girl.
She just shook her head.
We rode up on the tent. Fingers of shadows were stretching across the desert.
“Hello, in there!” I yelled.
There was no answer. I got off the burro and went in. My hand was parked around my forty-five as I pulled the tent flap.
The tent was deserted, and it had been vacated in a hurry. It looked as though Ortley had seen us coming in over the desert and taken a sneak to where he could ambush us.
It was a bad break. I hadn’t thought Ortley would be that wise, but he was. He’d had the breaks and played them. I went out of the tent knowing what the answer was going to be even before I heard the crack of the rifle.
Sand spurted up at my feet. The second shot gave me his line. He’d made a little fort out of rocks and sand, and had worked it over so it had all the color of the native country.
One man with a forty-five at his belt isn’t going to do any good wading into a fort where a man with a high-powered rifle is holding out.
I turned loose a couple of shots just so I wouldn’t be taking part in an argument where some one else was doing all the arguing, and I got the girl off her burro and down into a little swale.
By keeping down in the hollows, we managed to work off the property. At dusk I went back and rounded up the burros. I couldn’t tell whether he’d intended to kill us or whether he’d merely tried to throw a scare into us. I wished I’d brought a rifle, wished I didn’t have the girl along.
V
Desert Warfare
“What’s the next move?” she asked.
“Keep him from getting out of the country,” I said. “He’s probably made quite a stake of gold by this time, and he’ll either beat it or else try to bluff it out.”
“What will we do?”
“Do you think you could find your way back to the water alone — if you had to?”
She studied my face for a moment or two to find out what the question meant.
“You mean if anything should happen to you, and I’d have to try and get back alone?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid not. Let’s see if we can’t keep him where he is without taking the risk of losing your life. I know enough to know that a man with a revolver isn’t any match for a man with a high-powered rifle.”
“All right,” I told her. “Then the only thing to do is to wait him out.”
“How do you mean?”
“While he’s on that claim, and has a fort to wait in, and a tent that he’ll move on up to the fort under cover of darkness, we haven’t got a chance. But the nearest water is at that hole twenty miles away. He hasn’t got very much water left. He’ll have to go for water, and he’ll have to get out of the country.
“We can always follow him, keeping just out of range of his gun. We have the advantage of knowing the desert. And whenever he strikes civilization we’ll have him arrested. It ain’t the way I’d like to play it. I’d prefer a show-down and taking him in with his hands tied, or else letting him take me in with my feet off the ground, or plant me right here. But we are both witnesses to the finding of that letter, and if anything should happen to me and you couldn’t find the water hole, it’d be playing into his hands.”
She nodded.
“What do we do, camp?”
“Yes. We camp, and we keep a watch day and night. He’ll be up to some treachery when he finds out what we’re planning. And we go very, very sparing on the water. We’ve got to make him run out of water before we do.”
We camped that night just as though the desert was full of hostile Indians. What little fire we had was shielded behind blankets, and we put it out as soon as we had boiled the tea water and warmed up the frijoles.