“Things have a way of workin’ out all right, Phil, old-timer. Stay with it.”
He grunted and walked away.
I saw them start that night. The dude was sittin’ erect and straight, his jaw fairly oozin’ resolution an’ determination. That’s the way with people who know they ain’t goin’ to last. They put on twice as much determination as the situation calls for, just to fool themselves.
Phil sat slumped in the saddle takin’ it easy, the way a man does when he’s in for a long fight and knows he’s goin’ to come through somewheres near the top or know why.
Out where they were goin’ it was too hot to ride in the daytime. They had to make it at night. They had a packhorse, and there was a trickle of water at the place. It was an old abandoned prospect, baked by the sun, swept by the drifting sands. There was just sky, sun, cactus, and sand, nothing else, and it didn’t vary from day to day.
I figured I’d ride out that way after a week or so. I didn’t like the idea of those two men being cooped up in that loneliness, both of ’em in love with the same girl, one of ’em the successful one, and havin’ a streak of yellow, the other all man, and tryin’ to make a man outa the yellow one.
The desert does things to men. It’s the utter silence, the emptiness, the loneliness of the place. A man either hates it or loves it the first time he gets into it. But even if he loves it, he can’t stand too much of it.
Things began to happen out at the hacienda, however, that kept me busy. Pedro had riders comin’ in at nights, and there were times when the house was all dark as though people had gone to bed, but there’d be the tinkle of glasses and the hum of voices far into the night.
I cached a roll of blankets within hearing distance of the corral and got to sleeping out there under the stars.
Twice riders saddled up and left the place, and I couldn’t follow them on account of the darkness. The third time there was a moon, and the fellow who rode away into the desert was a wiry little Mexican. I knew him. He’d been a gambler in Mexicali until Pedro enlisted him. He was a resourceful little cuss.
I followed for a couple of hours before I realized he was takin’ a trail toward the Phillips prospect. Then I closed up the gap.
I was close to him when it happened.
A shadow rose up out of the ground.
“Is it you, amigo?” asked the rider.
“It is not the one you expect, but the one who expects you,” said the voice of Phil Ryan, speaking in Spanish. “You will leave what you bring here with me, and you will tell the one who sent you that there will be nothing more sent.”
The rider sat very still and straight for a few seconds.
I got the picture then. Pedro had been sending in dope to Walter Hedley, and Phil was breaking up his little game.
“Señor,” said the rider, speaking too softly, too smoothly, “you ask for that which I have. Take it then!”
He was fast, that bird.
I ain’t so speedy as I used to be in the old days, and my hand was still coming up from the holster, tugging at the hammer on my gun, when I saw the moonlight glisten on his leveled weapon.
But Phil Ryan’s gun crashed and I saw the Mexican’s right wrist wilt.
“Go back, and tell your master I want no more fall guys. Tell him to come in person the next time he has business with me,” said Phil’s voice.
Phil was fast on the draw, awfully fast.
I got back out of the way and let the rider pass. Then I rode in for a chat with Phil.
“She loves him,” said Phil. “She’s been out here twice. I can see how it is. She wants him to get well.”
“And him?”
Phil shrugged his shoulders.
“Is he a yellow one at heart, underneath all that smooth bearing?” I asked.
“I can’t tell,” said Phil.
Which was a lie. When a man’s spent that long in the desert with another chap, he can tell everything about him. But if Phil wanted to be generous about it, I wasn’t going to interfere. I have a hunch that things come out right in the desert if you just give ’em time enough.
I rode away and left Phil with his dude.
I saw Dixie Carson after that, and I took the risk of talking to her.
“If you want him, you’re going about it the wrong way. He’s from a good family. If he gets cured there’ll be some society bud coming to claim him,” I said.
It was none of my business, but I had to say it to hear with my own ears whether she really loved him. And I’d got to know her better since I’d been ridin’ with Phil.
The olive skin didn’t change color. The eyes still remained smoky, impassive.
“That,” she said slowly, “is my own business.”
I let it go at that because she was right.
Pedro was still lying low. Such riders as went from his place were going on border hijacking business. They never once went toward the trails that came in from the mines.
I rather guessed Pedro’s one experience with mine guards had sort of convinced him he’d better leave the outfits alone. But I just kept right on the job.
Then Phil showed up with the news his dude was cured.
He was, too. I saw Hedley when he rode in. The shoulders were back and the eyes were steady. He’d lost that look of too much determination that had gripped him when he went into the desert.
He had a long talk with Dixie Carson; and after that, he sent a telegram.
Then Phil told me a funny thing. It seemed there was a girl who came from a good family and who was engaged to this here dude. Now that Hedley had got full control of himself, he’d wired her, telling her the whole situation, offering to release her or to go through with it any way she wanted.
It was a couple of days before he got an answer.
He was around the border resorts, looking at the people swigging booze over the bar, looking at the gambling, sneering, and keeping straight.
Personally I didn’t like that sneer.
If he’d been a real thoroughbred and had been cured, he wouldn’t have been so sneery at the poor unfortunates who were hitting it up. That self-righteousness in a man who has been down in the gutter don’t impress me. But I didn’t say anything. I’d said too much already.
The second day the girl came, in person. She wanted to see Hedley before she answered one way or another.
To my eye she was a washout. She was one of those society blondes with a funny way of pronouncing her “a’s.”
Walter Hedley made quite a fuss over her. She held the reins and she showed it. With the Desert Queen she rubbed it in. Walter made the presentation with something of a flourish. A man always does take delight in presenting two women who love him, one to the other. He thinks they’d oughta get along well together! Seems like men would never learn.
“Miss Westing, may I present Miss Dixie Carson, the girl who helped me find myself.”
The Desert Queen held out her hand cordially enough.
The blonde looked her over from head to foot.
“I thought, Walter, you’d abandoned all your old associates,” she said. Then she walked away.
The Desert Queen’s face got a darkish color, but her eyes remained steady.
“Good-by, Walter,” she said, and turned.
The dude hesitated for ten or fifteen seconds, then went over to the blonde. I was glad Phil wasn’t there to see that.
After that things moved fast at the border. First came the stock crash. You wouldn’t think it’d affect the border, but it did, lots of ways. Mines shut down, for one thing. And the blonde did some telegraphing, for another. What her dad wired back evidently wasn’t so reassuring. She slit the telegram open, read it, then stamped her foot.
“I do wish fawther wouldn’t be so downright stupid,” she said.
Half a dozen people heard her, and the news traveled.