I waited.
The burros became dots, finally vanished. They were making almost no time at all. The afternoon breeze sprang up. The long shadows marched across the desert.
There was the sound of hoofs, and here they came, four burros, on the trot, eager for water.
I caught them as they drank, filled up the water canteens.
“Let’s go,” I told the girl. “He may not be far behind.”
As soon as the burros had plenty of water I took them off a couple of miles in the desert and let them feed a bit. Then I started them toward Randsburg.
We traveled until one o’clock. Then we made a short camp and were on our way again at daybreak.
“How about Ortley?”
“He’ll either get back to the springs, in which event he’ll be there, waiting for the sheriff — or I’ll find him somewhere else, when I come back with a posse.”
She didn’t get it all figured out, but she didn’t ask any questions, not after that.
We got to Randsburg, and I told my story. The packs of the burros were weighted down with gold. It was a blood-red gold, alluvial, in coarse chunks and colors that ran very thick and big. All the gold had the same reddish coating.
The sheriff came, and we started out.
We went to the water hole first, figuring Ortley would have found his way back there, and been trapped.
He wasn’t there. So we started looking through binoculars at the horizon. We spotted the circling dots of buzzards and went to the point under which they circled.
I was glad the girl wasn’t with me.
But I wished that expert doctor, who had testified that people dying of thirst didn’t dig the flesh away from their fingers, had been there. The doctor’s testimony had saved Ortley once. Now what was left of Ortley would have refuted the doctor.
He had been cruel. He had murdered. He had stolen the claim of a partner. But he had been punished. The desert is rather thorough in such matters, and it will be a long time before I forget the sight of those hands.
But sometimes I think the desert’s cruelty is one of its best features. There’s too much mercy in connection with man-made justice. After all, an immutable law that never varies is the one that gets the respect.
But that’s the desert. It’s a wonderful mother, and a cruel one. And the cruelty teaches self-reliance, and self-reliance is pretty nearly the object of life, after all.
But that’s what makes the desert whisper to itself at night when the sand begins to blow; it’s trying to pass on the stories of Ortley and his kind.
Every time I pillow my head on the sand, and listen to the little whispers that slither across the floor of the desert, I wonder how many more stories there are, stories like the story of the red gold, of Ortley, of the girl with the calm eyes, of the lunger who died of some mysterious cause.
There are lots of them, and the sand is trying to tell them, whispering the news to the cactus as it drifts by, telling the stories to the other sands. And then, finally, as the breeze freshens, the other sands stir to life and repeat the stories they have heard, until the desert becomes just a great bowl of whispers.
That’s what the sand has to tell the sand as it drifts by. That’s why the sand whispers seem more than sand whispers — just before you drop off to sleep of nights. The stars blaze steadily down, telling of faith, and of fair dealing, and of upright manhood. And the desert, by way of warning, whispers the stories of Ortley and his kind.
Carved in Sand
I
Tenderfoot Contraption
When a man lives a great deal in the open, little things sometimes stick in his mind. That was the way with the remark the college professor made to me.
“Everything in nature,” he said, “has two points of manifestation.”
“Meaning positive and negative?” I asked him, just to let him know that he wasn’t going to spring any theory on me that I couldn’t, at least, talk about.
“Not exactly that,” he said. “It’s something a little more subtle.”
I swept my hand in a half-circle, including in the gesture the sweep of sun-glittering sand and cacti-studded desert. “What would be the double manifestation of that?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not enough of a desert man to know its manifestations. But you know it. If you’ll only watch it, you’ll find that it does have a dual manifestation.”
It was only a little thing perhaps, but somehow it stuck in my mind; and it seemed that I’d found the answer in Pete Ayers. Pete was desert born and desert bred, and the shifting sands had got into his blood. He was as restless as a swirl of loose sand in the embrace of a desert wind. Of course the desert leaves its mark on everybody who lives in it. Most of the men who have lived in the desert have gray eyes, firm lips, a slow, deliberate way of moving about that is deceptive to a man who doesn’t know the breed. When occasion requires they are as fast as greased lightning, and as deadly as a cornered lion. Ayers was different. He was just a happy-go-lucky kid who was forever rolling into mischief and stumbling out. He was always in trouble, always getting out of it by some fluke.
Now he lay stretched out beside me on the edge of the rim rock, the hot desert sun beating down on our backs. He handed me the binoculars.
“Brother,” he said, “watch where the bullet strikes. I’m betting even money that I don’t miss him by more than two inches, and I’ll bet on a direct hit for reasonable odds.”
That was the way with Pete; always making a bet, always willing to wager his shirt on the outcome of whatever he happened to be doing.
“Wait a minute, Pete,” I said as he cocked the rifle. “Let’s make certain that it’s a coyote. He’s acting sort of funny for a coyote.”
“He’s going to act a lot funnier,” said Pete as he nestled his cheek against the stock of the rifle, “in just about one minute.”
I focused the binoculars on the slope across the long dry cañon. Ordinarily I don’t go in much for binoculars in the desert, because a desert man cannot afford to be cluttered up with a lot of weight. The tenderfoot always carries a camera, binoculars, hunting knife, and compass. They’re things that are all right in their way, but the real desert man starts out with a six-gun, a canteen, a pocket knife, a box of matches and a sack of tobacco. That’s about all he needs.
The binoculars were good ones that Pete had won from a tenderfoot in a poker game the night before. They brought up the opposite slope of the cañon with a clearness that made the black shadows transparent.
“Hold everything, Pete!” I said. “It’s a police dog!”
I heard Pete’s grunt of incredulity, but he lowered the rifle and turned startled blue eyes to me.
“Hell,” he said, “you’re crazy! There aren’t any police dogs out here. Them’s tenderfoot binoculars and there’s mebbe a sort of tenderfoot influence about ’em.”
“Take a look yourself,” I said.
Pete put down the rifle and reached for the binoculars. He focused them to his eyes, and then gave a low whistle.
“Hell!” he said. “And I’ll bet I’d have hit him!”
I said nothing. We watched the animal for several seconds.
“What the hell’s he doing here?” asked Pete.
I didn’t know any more than he did — not as much, in fact, so I couldn’t say anything. We lay there in silence, with the desert sun beating down on the glittering expanse of waste, making the black rim rock on the other side of the cañon twist and writhe in the heat waves.
After a while Pete passed the binoculars across to me. I found the dog again, steadied my elbows on the hot rock, and watched closely.