The moon seemed so close I could have chipped a piece from it with a rifle shot. The cool, breathless silence was utterly void of any sound. My ears rang from the stillness. The silvery basin of desolate desert was flooded with moonlight.
I closed my eyes, lay back and relaxed.
Something stirred — a bit of sage rustling in one of the sudden desert winds which spring up from nowhere, blow fiercely for a while and then die down just as suddenly.
I listened for the whispers.
Soon they came, desert whispers which are only for the ears of those who know and love the desert. Sand rustled against sage. Then, as the wind grew stronger, the sand rustled against sand, and the rustlings were as whispers, hissing, sibilant moonlit whispers of mystery.
I lay and listened to the whispers, and they lulled me to the threshold of sleep. Just as I was dropping off, the whispers suddenly ceased to be mere sibilants of drifting sand, but became a definite message.
I snapped wide awake, and the memory of that message slipped from my mind like a vanishing mirage. But it was somehow disquieting. The desert was whispering something that made my hair tingle, made little chills race along my spine. I settled back, shivered, pulled my blankets tighter about my chin and tried to sleep. Sleep was not for me. The moon beat down upon my face. The wind grew stronger, and the sand reached a hissing crescendo.
I kicked back the blankets and dressed — and the desert wind stopped blowing as though it had been scooped from the face of the earth. The desert was white and silent once more.
But I pulled on my boots and started walking, toward the northwest, toward the first slopes of the red and purple mountains.
I walked for a hundred yards, straight toward a clump of cacti. Then I saw something white in the middle of that clump, a rounded something that glittered in the moonlight as only one thing can glitter — a sun-bleached bone.
I hesitated, looked again.
There were more rounded streaks of white. These would be ribs, buzzard-picked ribs which loomed in the moonlight as gruesome reminders of the grim power of the desert.
I took a doubtful step, shook off the strange feeling which gripped me, took a deep breath and forged ahead. Ten steps and I knew the bones were not those of a human. Then I walked faster.
Moonlight in the desert is composed of glittering glare and inky shadows. There seems to be no halfway line. Where the sand reflects the brilliance of the moon it almost seems that there is a dazzling brilliance. Where the shadows of the desert fall there is jet-black darkness.
The skeleton was half in moonlight, half in shadow, and it took me a few moments to make it out. It was the skeleton of a burro, and he had died in harness. There was a packsaddle, and a rotted leather strap, baked stiff, and still offensive to the nostrils. Leather holds the odor of carrion for a long time, even in the hot, dry air of the desert.
I peered down into the blackness of the bone litter and caught a glimpse of cloth. It was too dark to try poking around. Out in the desert we get to read the sand like a printed page, and to mess around in the darkness would be to destroy clews.
I was back at the skeleton by the time daylight was gilding the tops of the red and purple mountains to the north. I had held myself back to make sure the light would be strong enough.
There wasn’t enough animal life in this section of the desert for a coyote to live on; but there were buzzards, and the buzzards had pulled the bones around some. Even so, I was able to tell that the burro had been headed to the westward, along the rolling base of the jagged mountains. And he had died almost in his tracks.
I found the long leg bones and checked each in turn, but the legs were all sound. I had rather expected to find a broken leg. Even so, his owner would have taken off the saddle.
I walked to the skull. There were three holes. Two where the eyes had been, one that was small and round.
The burro had been walking along the rounded slope. Some one had shot him with a high-powered rifle.
I delved into the bones and rescued the alforjas, twin bags of rawhide made to swing from either side of the packsaddle. Decay, sunlight and time had done things to the contents of those bags, but I spread them out carefully, an article at a time.
There were silken undergarments that came to bits in my hands, and had no recognizable laundry marks. There were feminine toilet articles. And there was a pair of snakeskin, high-heeled shoes. I thought of the woman who had stepped from the train at Mojave.
The sun leaped over the rise of ground to the east and burned into my back. Flies droned about the dark hide and stinking remnants. Tracks had been obliterated. Everything but hide, saddle, and bones had gone the way of all things perishable.
A shot, dead in the center of the skull, squarely between the eyes, meant accurate shooting. This, on a walking burro, probably meant a close range. There was a clump of cacti some sixty yards ahead when I faced in the direction the burro had been traveling.
I went to that clump. Any tracks that might have been there had long been blotted out, but I was searching for something that would remain, and I got to my hands and knees and searched the ground bit by bit.
The sun glittered on it and I raked it out of a lodgement in between the spines of a giant cactus. It was a thirty-thirty shell. I looked it over.
The firing pin had not hit exactly in the center. That frequently happens. But in the bottle neck, just where the shell tapered down to seat the bullet, there were two little cracks, forced by the explosion of the shell. The relation of those split marks to the firing pin impression might tell something.
I dropped the shell in my pocket.
Looking back toward the skeleton, I reconstructed the scene. The burro was walking slowly around the mountain slope, had just emerged over a little crest. Perhaps there was a woman walking beside him; perhaps a man was with her.
The single shot. The burro had collapsed.
What of the woman?
I went back to the skeleton and pretended that I had been walking up the little incline, that a rifle had barked from the cacti clump and the burro had thudded to the ground.
What would I do?
Two things. First and foremost, the water canteen. I would stoop for it. Then shelter.
I stooped to the skeleton and reached for the horn of the packsaddle. Then, while I was in that position, I looked around over my shoulder for a place of shelter.
There was a rock halfway down the little slope.
I went to it on the run, trying to do just what the woman, or the man and the woman, would have done. But I began to doubt the presence of a man. There were no empty shells near the burro bones.
I skidded around the rock.
There was a canteen, and in the bottom of the canteen was a double hole. I looked at it carefully. The double hole marked the course of a steel-jacketed bullet.
I figured just how I would stand to conceal myself from the clump of cacti where the first shot had been fired. Then I put the canteen over my shoulder and flattened myself against the rock. That gave me a direction at right angles as being the first place from which the canteen would be visible.
There was no cover in that direction.
I marked a line and walked along it very slowly. Fifty yards along that line I found another empty shell, a thirty-thirty with double split checks in the bottle neck and a firing pin that was just slightly off center.
I dropped it into my pocket, along with the other.
Then I looked around some more. I found nothing else. The sun-swept surface of the desert glinted mockingly in the sun’s light.
I returned to the rock and figured what I would do if I had been crouched there and some one had shot at me and bored a hole in my canteen. There was a rocky wash twenty yards down the slope. I ran toward it.