There was a commotion in the courtroom. The officers conferred together in whispers, and one of them started toward the door. I quit talking for a little while and watched the officer who was pushing his way through the swirling group of men.
Outside the building a horse whinnied, and the whinny sounded remarkably significant, upon the hot, still air and the sudden silence of that room — a silence broken only by the irregular breathing of men who are packed into the narrow quarters, and who must breathe through their mouths.
“Well?” rasped the judge. “Go on. What happened?”
“I found the saddle,” I said, “and I found the horse. I brought the horse back and I brought the saddle balk.”
“What does all that prove?” asked the judge, curiously.
“It proves,” I said, “that the murderer of Bob Skinner wasn’t Sam Blake. It proves that Sam Blake came down to call for a showdown with Bob Skinner, but Skinner was dead when he got there. Somebody had murdered Skinner in order to take the gold from his cabin, and the horse had balked at the odor of blood. The murderer had chased the horse for a while, but he couldn’t continue to chase him, because he was carrying enough gold to make it difficult for him to keep going after the horse. So he went down to the spring and cached the gold; then he went out to get another horse, and later came back after the gold.”
The judge’s glittering eyes swung as unerringly as those of a vulture spotting a dead rabbit to the bronzed face of Ernest Peterman, the tenderfoot.
“That man,” he said, “swears that he saw smoke coming out of Bob Skinner’s cabin just before Sam Blake went in there.”
“He thought he saw smoke, your honor,” I said. “He’s a tenderfoot, and new to the desert. He didn’t go up on the ridge very often, and he wasn’t familiar with Bob Skinner’s cabin. Particularly when the afternoon sunlight throws a black shadow from the western ridge.”
“What’s the shadow got to do with it?” asked the judge.
“It furnishes a black background for the tree that’s growing just back of the house, right in line with the chimney on Skinner’s cabin.”
“A tree?” piped the judge. “What’s a tree got to do with it?”
“The tree,” I said slowly, “is a blue Palo Verde tree.”
“What’s a blue Palo Verde tree?” the judge inquired petulantly.
“One that you’ve seen many times, your honor,” I said, “in certain sections of the desert. It only grows in a very few places in the desert. It requires a certain type of soil and a certain type of climate. It isn’t referred to as a Palo Verde tree in these parts. Your honor has probably heard it called a smoke tree.”
I sat back and let that shot crash home.
The blue Palo Verde grows in the desert. The Indians called it the smoke tree because it sends up long, lacy branches that are of a bluish-green; and when the sun is just right, seen against a black shadow, the smoke tree looks for all the world like a cloud of smoke rising up out of the desert.
Peterman was a tenderfoot, and he’d climbed up on the ridge just when the western shadows had furnished a black background for the smoke tree behind Skinner’s cabin. He had taken a look at the scene and decided that smoke was coming out of the chimney. No one had ever thought to have him go back and take a look at the cabin under similar circumstances. They had been so certain that Sam Blake was guilty of the murder that they hadn’t bothered to check the evidence closely.
The judge was staring at me as though I had destroyed some pet hobby of his. “Do you mean to say that a man mistook a smoke tree for smoke coming from a chimney?” he asked.
I nodded. “Keener eyes than Ins have made the same mistake, your honor,” I said, “which is the reason the Indians called the tree the smoke tree.”
“Then who owned the horse?” asked the judge. “Who was it that went in there before Sam Blake called at the cabin?”
I pointed my finger dramatically at the place where the officers had been standing.
“I had hoped,” I said, “that the guilty man would betray himself by his actions. I notice that one of the men has left the courtroom hurriedly.”
As I spoke, there was the sound of a terrific commotion from outside. A shot was fired, a man screamed, a horse gave a shrill squeal of agony; then there was the sound of a heavy, thudding impact, and the stamping of many feet.
Men turned and started pushing toward the narrow exit which led from the place where the hearing was being conducted. They were men who were accustomed to the freedom of the outdoors. When they started to go through a door, they all started at once.
It was a struggling rush of bodies that pulled and jostled. Some men made for the windows, some climbed on the shoulders and heads of others and fought their way over the struggling mass of humanity. Futilely, the judge pounded his gavel again and again. Margaret Blake screamed, and I saw Pete Ayers slip a circling arm around her shoulder and draw her close to him.
I thought it was a good time to explain to the judge.
“That horse I found, your honor,” I said, pushing close to him so that I could make my voice heard above the bedlam of sound, “was a nervous bronco. He made up to me all right because he was thirsty and hungry, but he was a high-strung, high-spirited horse. I left him tied to the rack out in front. I thought perhaps the owner of the horse might try to climb on his back and escape, hoping to take that bit of four-legged evidence with him. But horses have long memories. The last time the horse had seen that man, he had smelled the odor of human blood and had gone crazy with fright.”
The crowd thinned out of the courtroom. Here and there a man who had been pushed against a wall or trampled underfoot, cursed and ran, doubled over with pain, or limping upon a bad leg; but the courtroom had emptied with startling speed.
I crossed to the window as the judge laid down his gavel. Impelled by curiosity, he crowded to my side. Outside, we saw, the men were circling about a huddled figure on the sidewalk. The horse, his ears laid back, his nostrils showing red, his eyes rolled in his head until the whites were visible, was tugging and pulling against the rope that held him to the hitching rack. I noticed that there were red stains on one forehoof, and a bullet wound in his side.
Lying on the sidewalk, a rude affair of worn boards, was the crumpled body of the deputy who had helped to make the arrest of Margaret Blake that first time we had seen her. The whole top of his head seemed to have been beaten in by an iron hoof.
The judge looked and gasped. He started for the door, then caught himself with an appreciation of the dignity which he, as a magistrate, owed to himself. He walked gravely back to the raised desk which sat on the wooden platform, raised the gavel and banged it down hard on the desk.
“Court,” he said, “is adjourned!”
It wasn’t until after Pete Ayers and Margaret Blake had started out in the desert on their honeymoon that I got to thinking of the words of the college professor.
The desert is a funny place. It’s hard to know it long without thinking that there’s something alive about it. You get to thinking those sand whispers are not just a hissing of dry sand particles against rock or sagebrush, but real whispers from the heart of the desert.
The desert shows itself in two ways. There’s the grim cruelty which is really a kindness, because it trains men to rely upon themselves and never to make mistakes. Then there’s the other side of the desert, the care-free dust clouds that drift here and there. They’re as free as the air itself.
Pete Ayers was a part of the desert. The desert had branded him with the brand of care-free sunlight and the scurrying dust cloud.