It was a .45 single-action Colt, and it had been carried around quite a bit in a holster.
I looked at the newspaper. It was an extra edition, hurriedly thrown together; one of those little hand-printed efforts put out in small desert towns, usually once a week or once every two weeks.
Ordinarily they contained nothing more exciting than a chronicle of the comings and goings of people who live in a small community.
But this paper was different. Across the top, in big blotchy headlines, black type announced:
Down below:
I sat down on my heels in the sand, and read everything that the paper contained. It was an account of the jail break, which didn’t interest me particularly, and an account of the crime, which interested me more.
Sam Blake charged that Bob Skinner had jumped a claim which Blake had staked, stripping the claim of the valuable gold that was in a pocket and then skipping out.
I knew Skinner. He was the sort of customer who would be likely to do that very thing. Blake asserted that Skinner had picked up more than five thousand dollars in gold from the pocket, and so Blake had taken his gun and gone down into Sidewinder Cañon.
A lunger by the name of Ernest Peterman had seen him going down toward Skinner’s cabin. Peterman had a little cabin up on the summit of a ridge on the east side of Sidewinder Cañon. He’d seen Blake coming along the trail which led to the cañon, and had recognized him. He’d watched him go down to Skinner’s cabin. It had been about two-thirty in the afternoon, and Peterman said he knew that Skinner was alive at the time because there was a lot of smoke coming out of the chimney of Skinner’s shack. He hadn’t paid any particular attention to it, however; he’d just given the scene a casual glance and then gone out to take his afternoon sun bath.
It happened that a ranger had dropped in to see Skinner sometime the next day. He’d found Skinner dead, with a bullet hole in his forehead and a knife wound in his heart. He’d found horse tracks in the trail, and had been able to mark them because of a broken shoe on the right hind foot. He’d trailed the horse into the little settlement, had found it, identified it as belonging to Blake, and had finally forced Blake to admit that he’d been to the cabin.
At first Blake denied it. Later on, he admitted that he’d gone down to have a settlement with Skinner, but he claimed that Skinner was dead when he got there. Things looked black for him because he hadn’t reported the murder, and because at first he’d denied that he’d gone down to see Skinner at all. But the thing that clinched the case against him was the testimony of the lunger. If smoke had been coming out of the chimney at the time Blake hit the shack, it was a cinch Skinner had been alive then. Nobody doubted the good faith of the lunger.
I read the paper and frowned. I could see that Pete Ayers had acted on impulse, and the impulse had led him into trouble. We were going to be hooked as accessories, along with the girl. The authorities didn’t like the idea of Blake sawing the bars of the jail window and slipping out into the night.
I led the burros over to a nearby spring, saw that they had water, and then started on the long journey over the mountains to Sidewinder Cañon. I didn’t dare to strike the main trails. On the other hand, with burros I could keep moving over the desert mountains, particularly after the moon came up.
IV
The Desert Whispers
It was well past daylight when I came out of the jagged mountain formation on the west and into Sidewinder Cañon. I could look down the twisting cañon and see the roof of the prospector’s shack. I staked out the burros, and went down on foot.
I could see where the officers and the curious ones had been tramping around the shack. It sat out on a little sandy plateau, and there had been a desert wind in the night which had wiped out most of the tracks; yet they showed as confused indentations in the sand.
It looked as though at least ten or a dozen people had milled around the shack, tracking down the ground.
I went into the cabin. The door was open, of course, as is customary in mountain or desert cabins. There was the damp, musty smell of places which are shaded from the purifying effect of direct sunlight. There was also another musty smell which was more ominous and unforgettable; the smell of death.
I found the bed where Skinner had been sleeping. I found red stains, dry and crusted, on the blankets; stains also on the floor. Lazy flies buzzed in circles over the red stains. It was not a pleasant place to be.
I made but a casual inspection. I knew that others had been there before, and that every inch of the cabin had been searched. Doubtless some of the searchers had been desert men.
I walked out into the sunlight and took a great breath of fresh air, looking up into the clear blue of the cloudless sky, then over at the glittering expanse of jagged, barren ranges which hemmed in the cañon. Everything was still and silent.
Far up in the heavens a black dot marked a circling buzzard.
I started to look around.
It was ten minutes later that I saw something I couldn’t explain. That was a fresh break in the little corral back of the house. It was a crazy structure of weatherbeaten lumber, held together by rusted nails and supported by posts set into the soft sand at various angles. It was the place where Bob Skinner had kept his prospecting burros; and I could see that a horse had been in the corral recently, and it looked to me as though the break in the corral had been done recently. In one place a board had been splintered, and the splinters hadn’t as yet become dulled by the desert sunlight. The clean board showed out from beneath its weatherbeaten veneer.
I looked over the stretch of sand around the corral. Useless to look for tracks there. The wind had leveled the sand out and made it into miniature drifts. It was right in line with the opening of a little cañon, down which the night wind would sweep with concentrated force.
I rolled a cigarette and sat looking at that break in the corral fence. After a while I started up the cañon. By the time I had gone a hundred yards I came to a little sheltered place, where there was some soft sand that hadn’t been blown by the wind. I saw the tracks of a horse, and to one side the print of a booted foot.
The sun was climbing higher now, and the walls of the little cañon began to radiate heat. I plugged my way along over the rocks, searching for the faintest sign of tracks. A little later on I found more tracks. Then I struck a little trail that ran along the side of the cañon, and in this trail it was easy to follow the tracks. They were the tracks of a horse, and behind the horse, the tracks of a man.
I worked along the little dry cañon, and struck a level place. The horse was running here, and the tracks of the man were heavy on the toes and lighter on the heels.
After a while I got into country that didn’t have much sand, but I could follow the tracks better because there hadn’t been anything to drift with the desert night wind. I saw the tracks of the horse climb up a ridge, and I followed them.
Near the top of the ridge I struck horse tracks again, and farther on I struck horse tracks and no man tracks. I followed the horse tracks off and on for three or four hundred yards, looking for man tracks. There weren’t any.
I went back and tried to pick up the man tracks. I couldn’t find them again. They had gone to the top of the ridge and then vanished.
I sat down on my heels, rolled another cigarette, and thought for awhile.
There was a spring down the ridge, and three or four miles over toward the head of Sidewinder Cañon. It wasn’t a particularly good spring — just a trickle of brackish water, thick with alkali — but it was a spring just the same. I started working down toward that spring.