“What changed you?”
“You’d laugh if I told you,” he said.
I looked at him, at the bronzed skin, the clear eye, the steady poise of the head, and I smiled. “Perhaps,” I said, “I wouldn’t laugh.”
“It was the whispers,” he said. “The whispers at night.”
“You mean the sand whispers?” I asked.
He nodded. “There was something reassuring about them,” he said. “At first they frightened me. It seemed as though voices were whispering at me; and then, gradually, I began to see that this was the desert, trying to talk; that it was whispering words of reassurance.”
I nodded, and we didn’t say anything more until we got to the summit of the ridge. I looked over the ridge, and checked Peterman as he started to look over.
“Not yet,” I said. “Wait about fifteen minutes.”
He sat and looked at me as though he thought I might be a little bit off in my upper story. But already the desert had begun to put its mark upon him; and so he didn’t say anything, merely watched me as I smoked a cigarette.
When I had finished two cigarettes, I nodded my head.
“All right,” I said. “Now look over.”
He got up and looked over the top of the ridge. He looked around for a moment and said, “I don’t see anything.”
“Look down at Skinner’s cabin.”
He looked down, and all of a sudden I heard him give an exclamation, his eyes widening in surprise.
I unstrapped the binoculars and handed them to him. “All right,” I said, “take another look.”
V
Make Way for a Witness
Sun beat down upon the little desert town with its dusty main street and its unpainted board structures squatting in the gray desert which lined either side of the road. A big pile of tin cans marked the two ends of the main street, and these piled-up tin cans were bordered by a nondescript collection of junk which spread out over the desert, interspersed with clumps of sagebrush.
There were occasional automobiles on the street; automobiles, for the most part, of an ancient vintage, innocent of finish and as weatherbeaten and dust-covered as the board structures themselves. There were also horses tied to the hitching rack in front of the general merchandise store, and a couple of sleepy burros rested on three legs at a time, casting black shadows on a dusty street.
We rode toward the building where the preliminary hearing was being held. A crowd of people were jammed into the little structure, despite the intense sunlight which beat down upon the roof. Other people crowded around the outside of the building, blocking the windows, craning their necks to listen. Out in the street little groups, recognizing the futility of trying to hear what was going on inside, formed gabbing centers of gossip to discuss the case.
I climbed from the saddle burro and dropped the rope reins over his head. “Make way for a witness,” I said.
Men looked around at men. “Hell! It’s Bob Zane,” someone said. “Make way, you fellows, here comes Bob Zane.”
I pushed my way into the courtroom. The tenderfoot clung to my blue shirt. He was sort of frightened and subdued. The atmosphere of the place reeked with the odor of packed bodies and many breaths. People stared at us with cold, curious eyes.
Abruptly, the little space around the judge’s desk opened ahead of us, and the two officers stared with startled eyes into my face. One of them went for his gun.
“There he is now!” shouted Charlie, the deputy.
“Order in the courtroom!” yelled a wizened justice of the peace, whose white goatee quavered with indignation.
The officer pulled out the gun and swung it in my direction. “The man who was the accomplice of Pete Ayers, one of the defendants in this case,” he shouted.
The judge banged on the desk. “Order in the court! Order in the court! Order in the court!” he screamed in a high piping voice.
I squared myself and planted my feet, conscious of the business end of the gun that was trained at my middle.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I came to surrender myself and demand an immediate hearing. I’m charged with being an accessory in a murder case. I can’t be an accessory unless there’s been a murder, and unless the person I aided is guilty. I’ve got a witness with me who wants to change his testimony.”
I half turned, and pushed forward the tenderfoot.
Peterman looked about him, gulped and nodded.
“You can’t interrupt proceedings this way!” piped the judge.
“Don’t you want to hear the evidence?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, “but you aren’t a witness.”
I held up my right hand and moved a step forward, holding him with my eyes. “All right,” I said, “swear me in.”
He hesitated a moment, then his head nodded approvingly as his shrill, falsetto voice intoned the formal oath of a witness.
I moved abruptly toward the witness chair. One of the officers started toward me with handcuffs, but I turned to face the judge. I began to speak rapidly, without waiting to be questioned by anybody.
“The man who killed Bob Skinner,” I said, “put a horse in Skinner’s corral. When he had finished killing Skinner, there was blood on his hands, and when he tried to catch the horse, the horse smelled the blood, and lunged away from him. The man chased after the horse in a frenzy of haste, and the horse broke through the corral fence and started up the cañon, back of the house. The man followed along behind him, trying to catch the horse.
“A wind storm obliterated the tracks in the sand in front of the corral and around the house, so that the tracks couldn’t have been seen unless the officers had appreciated the significance of that break in the corral fence and had gone on up the cañon looking for tracks. I took the course that a horse would naturally have taken, and I picked up the tracks again, up the cañon. And also, the tracks of the man who was following.”
Having gone that far, I could see that I wasn’t going to be interrupted. I looked out over the courtroom and saw eyes that were trained upon me, sparkling with curiosity. I saw that the judge was leaning forward on the edge of his chair. The two officers had ceased their advance and were standing rooted to the spot.
Pete Ayers, who had stared at me with consternation when I pushed my way into the courtroom, was now grinning happily. Damn him! I don’t suppose he ever knows what it is to worry over anything. He is as happy-go-lucky as a cloud of drifting sand in the desert. The girl was staring at me with a white face and bloodless lips. She didn’t yet appreciate what my coming meant; but Pete knew me, and his face was twisted into that gleeful grin which characterizes him when he is getting out of a tight place.
“All right,” snapped the judge in that high, piping voice of his, “go on. What did you find?”
“I followed the horse tracks to the top of the ridge,” I said, “and I found where the man had quit chasing the horse. Then I followed the man tracks a way, and lost them. But I figured what a man would do who was out in the desert and hot from chasing a horse he couldn’t catch. So I worked on down the ridge to a spring, and once more found the tracks, this time at the spring. I looked around and found where the man had dug a hole and had buried something near the spring. Then I found where he had walked out, secured another horse, ridden back to the spring, pulled whatever had been in the hole out of its place of concealment, and ridden away. He hadn’t bothered to look after the horse that had been left in the mountains, figuring that it would die in the desert from lack of water and food.
“I then went back to the place where I had left the horse tracks, and started following the horse. Eventually I found the saddle, and then I found the horse.”