“He’s running around in little circles, looking for a scent of some kind,” I said. “Now it looks as though he’s found it. He runs along straight for ten or fifteen yards, then stops and circles, and then starts going straight. Now, he’s found what he wants. He’s running close to the ground — and making time.”
“Hell,” said Pete drily, “you don’t need to tell me everything he’s doin’, I got eyes, even if they don’t magnify eight diameters.”
The police dog fascinated me. I couldn’t understand what he was doing out here in the desert. I kept the binoculars on him and watched him as he angled down the slope. He was running rapidly now, wagging his tail as he ran, and apparently following the scent without difficulty. He ran down around the edge of the slope, rounded an outcropping of rock, crossed the cañon, and vanished behind a ledge of the rim rock on our side of the cañon.
“Well,” said Pete, “the show’s over.”
“No,” I told him, “I’m going to find out what that dog’s doing out here.”
“That’s just the way with you,” he said. “Filled full of curiosity.”
But I could see from the light in his blue eyes that he was curious, and that he also favored giving the dog a break. A police dog can’t live long in the desert. A coyote can get by nicely, but not a dog, no matter how big or how strong he is. It’s a question of generations of training, and the coyote has something that no dog has: a certain toughness that enables him to get by.
We moved along the rim rock. I was holding the binoculars by the strap when we reached the next little peak from which we could look down in the cañon.
Pete’s exclamation at my elbow showed me that he had seen the camp. I raised the binoculars, and through them saw an automobile, rather battered and dilapidated; a white tent; a canteen; a cot; a box of provisions. Then I saw a woman’s bare arm reach out around the edge of the tent and pick something from the box.
“Looks like a woman down there,” I said.
“What the devil would anybody want to camp in that cañon for?” asked Pete.
“Prospector maybe,” I told him.
“A woman prospector?” he asked.
“Maybe. She had a white arm. Looked like she was city-bred.”
“Just the arm showed?” asked Pete.
“That was all,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “Keep the binoculars then.”
Suddenly the woman came out from around the edge of the tent. I could see at once that she was city-bred. The cut of her clothes, the delicacy of her complexion, the angry red sunburn on the backs of her forearms, all told the story. But the thing that interested me and held me breathlessly watching was the expression on her face. It was an expression of sheer terror.
The police dog had evidently been out with her and had lost her. He had been smelling along the dry sand of the desert, trying to pick up her trail; and now he was trotting along at her side, wagging his tail. Yet the woman’s face was twisted and distorted with terror.
She was carrying something in her hand, and she ran twenty or thirty yards back up the slope to the roots of a sage brush and started digging with her left hand. Her right hand pushed something into the little hole, and then she patted the sand over it, got to her feet, and walked back toward the camp.
I handed the binoculars to Pete, and as my eyes focused on the camp I saw two dots moving from around the slope of the cañon. I saw the police dog grow rigid, and after a few seconds I could hear the sound of his bark.
“Hell,” said Pete, “she looks scared.”
“She is,” I said. “Look at the two dots coming around the slope there, about half a mile down the cañon, Pete.”
He raised the glasses and grunted as his eyes took in the two dots. “Two men,” he said, “with rifles and six-guns. They’ve got cartridges in the belts of the six-guns, and they look as though they were getting ready to shoot.”
“Are they coming toward the camp?” I asked.
“Toward the camp,” he said. “Hell, Bob, after this I think I’m going to carry these tenderfoot contraptions all the time. In the meantime, I’m going down and cut in on that deal.”
“Count me in,” I told him.
He snapped the binoculars back into the case.
“Going back to get the burros?” I asked him.
“They’ll wait,” he told me. “Let’s go.”
The rim rock was a good ten feet in a straight drop. Then there was some loose sand, and the sheer slope of the side of the cañon.
Pete went over the rim rock without hesitation, lit in the sand, threw up a flurry of dust, made two jumps, and started sliding down the ridge. I didn’t make quite so clean a leap, and I felt the impact as I struck the sand. My feet went out from under me, I rolled over a couple of times, got to my feet, and started sprinting down the slope, digging my heels into the soil, grabbing at the little clumps of sagebrush and taking long jumps to avoid the patches of rock.
Pete kept gaining on me. I don’t know why he didn’t go down head over heels, but he managed to bound down as lightly as a mountain goat.
II
Manners in the Desert
Apparently the girl didn’t see or hear us. She was looking at two men who were approaching.
The police dog heard us, however, and whirled, starting to bark. With that the woman turned and saw us, of course. She called the dog back and stood staring at us, and once more I caught the expression of terror on her face.
Pete’s bronze hand went to his sombrero, swept it off in a bow, and he said, “Pardon me, ma’am, we just dropped in.”
There was a ghost of a smile on her face, but it still held that expression of terror.
“It was almost a drop,” she said, looking back up the slope where the dust clouds were still drifting about in the hot sun. “Who are you and what do you want?”
Pete jerked his head toward the direction of the approaching figures. “Just thought,” he said, “that we’d see if you needed any assistance.”
I saw her mouth tighten. “No,” she said, “you can’t be of any assistance to me.”
I didn’t beat about the bush at all. “Do you know the men who are coming?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said.
“What do they want?” I asked.
“Me,” she said.
I waited for an explanation, but there wasn’t any. The dog was growling in his throat, but he was lying on the ground where she had ordered him to stay, his yellow eyes glinting from us to the men who were coming up the dry wash.
The two men came up with the tense, watchful attitude of men who are expecting to engage in gun play at almost any minute. They looked us over and they looked the girl over. One of them stepped off to one side and said to the girl, “You’re Margaret Blake?”
She nodded her head.
“You know who we are and why we are here?” he said.
She said nothing.
He looked from her over to us. “Who are these men?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The man shifted his attention to Pete. “What’s your connection with this?” he asked.
Pete grinned at him, a cold, frosty grin. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked.
“No,” said the other man, his eyes narrowing, “who are you?”
“I’m the guy,” said Pete, “who is going to see that the young woman here gets a square deal.”
“This woman,” said the man, “is under arrest.”
“Arrest for what?” asked Pete.
“As an accessory,” said the man.
“To what?”
“Murder.”
Pete laughed. “She don’t look like she’d be good at murder,” he said.