There I found a bit of white cloth, bleached and rotted by the sun. I had been a sack, and it had been dropped at the base of a stunted bush. I stooped to pick up the ragged fragment, and paused, arrested in mid-motion by the yellow glitter which my eyes beheld.
There was gold, a regular pile of it, virgin gold, alluvial. There were nuggets and there were grains of dust the size of wheat grains. It had evidently been in the cloth bag, which had rotted and spilled the gold.
So much the desert had to tell me, and no more.
I spent the morning in a search and found nothing else. Those were the elements of tragedy which the whispers had hissed in the moonlight. The story, I knew, was unfinished. But I could not find the closing chapter, the sun-bleached bones of a woman — or perhaps those of a man and a woman.
Somewhere out in that glittering expanse of hot sand those bones must be lying, but I couldn’t find them.
I rounded up my burros and started the march back to water. It would be an all-day trip. That was the nearest water. Impossible that a woman should have reached it on foot even now when there was a hint of a cool breath in the desert. Doubly impossible that a woman could have walked there six months ago when the desert was an inferno of heat.
A mile of the march slipped behind me. I was in the middle of the second mile when I found the ashes of a camp fire. I paused to look it over.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing save the blackened circle of camp fire embers. That meant that the one who had made that fire was an outdoor man, accustomed to woodcraft and the open. Otherwise there would have been a litter of empty tin cans, old papers, discarded odds and ends of various sorts.
I resumed my march. An hour’s travel and I caught the glint of sunlight on tin. I went to the place. It was an empty tomato can, cut open with a heavy steel hunting knife. And there was the blackened circle of embers from an old camp fire.
Tomatoes in cans are indispensable in the desert. They are one of the few canned things a man who knows the desert will carry. Taken once in a while they neutralize the burning acidity of a body that must continually give off perspiration. Even so, they are carried only on long trips by the men who have accustomed themselves to the desert.
The two camp fires were less than three miles apart.
I checked that fact for future reference and went on. Within the next mile I found three more camp fires. Each was made as the others had been made. They were the overnight camp fires of one who knew the desert.
Why had so many overnight camps been made on the one ridge?
There could only be one answer. That answer was in the gold which had been imprisoned in that cloth bag. Some one had hunted, not for that particular gold, but for the deposit from which it had been taken.
I got to water, filled my canteens, rested a day and went on to Randsburg.
At Randsburg I made discreet inquiries. The name of Pedro Madrone still stuck in my mind. But I found that Pedro Madrone was unknown in Randsburg. I asked men who came from Mojave, and from other sections of the desert; and always the name was the preface to a shake of the head.
I told of finding the skeleton of the pack burro in the desert. Then I waited around Randsburg for the news to travel.
Nothing happened.
As an experiment, I told of finding the sun-bleached bones of a woman far out in the trackless waste of the Mojave Desert. I waited a few days for that story to seep through the camp.
Still nothing happened. I must try another tack.
I was moved by an inspiration. I mentioned that near the bones of this woman I had found a folded paper, bleached and yellowed by the sun, but still bearing lines that could be traced.
After that, plenty happened — yet, hardly what I had expected.
The moon was half full again. I had made my camp half a mile outside of the town in a little valley where one could sleep under the stars. The wind blew and the desert whispered, and once more it seemed that the whispers were trying to convey a message. I became vaguely uneasy, with a desert man’s intuition of trouble. Sleep would not come. I dressed, and walked into the desert.
Behind me, my camp showed peaceful and serene in the moonlight. The desert was a white silence of mystery. Somewhere, I thought I heard the sound of a foot crunching over a wind-blown stretch of desert gravel. I listened.
A dry bit of sage snapped beneath the weight of a skulking object.
I turned and started toward the place.
A rifle roared and I heard the unmistakable thunk! of a striking bullet. My bed roll gave a peculiar twitch, then was still again.
I could hear running steps, but I was unarmed and the would-be murderer had a rifle and he knew how to use it too.
That was the reason I didn’t do any following, but squatted down in the shelter of a clump of greasewood and waited for the moon to set. After that I rescued my blankets and rolled in back of some rocks.
Daylight found me scouting around where the noise of the feet on gravel had first come to my ears. The cartridge was in plain sight, a thirty-thirty with two little checks on the bottle neck.
I was sure of my ground now. I packed my stuff on my burro back, took my rifle from its holster, and headed out into the desert, back toward the place where I had found the skeleton of the burro.
It wasn’t a case for the sheriff — not yet. But I had thrown out the bait that had brought to me the man I wanted. What was to follow could better happen out in the waste spaces where the arm of the law reaches but gropingly.
In one way it was not up to me, but I remembered the vital magnetism of the young woman who had stepped off the train. And then again, there is such a thing as justice. I didn’t lose sight of that.
We who live in the desert get pretty close to nature. We don’t ask for much. But we want a square deal, and we like to have other people get a square deal.
It was on the morning of the second day that I found a man camped by the side of the trail I was following. He was stooped a trifle, and the sun had been unkind to his skin. His face was an angry red and the nose was commencing to peel. The eyes were flecked with red streaks and his lips were cracked. He had city and tenderfoot written all over him.
That last crack of mine about finding a paper had brought results. Some one was very, very anxious to find the paper that had been beside the skeleton of the woman I was supposed to have found. But he was even more anxious to keep me from using it than to find the paper himself. That was the explanation of the rifle shot.
So the paper I should have had wasn’t simply a writing accusing him of murder. It was more. How much more I couldn’t tell.
My plan was to go directly into the desert. Then any man who insisted upon making camp with me would be the man who was following.
But this tenderfoot seemed hardly the man to have shot a burro squarely between the eyes at sixty yards with a single shot.
Still one can never tell — in the desert.
“Headed west?” I asked.
He gently patted the sunburned tip of his nose. “You’re going east, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going east.”
“I see. Camped rather early, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. I’m not accustomed to travel. It’s rather done me up. You see, I don’t know the desert very well.”
That much was self-evident. From the heavy, hot boots to the whipcord sport clothes he shrieked of newness to the desert.
He looked at me longingly, wistfully.
“Well, I’ll be headed on,” I said.
He gulped.
“Could I... er... join up with you?”
There it was, right like that. I had set a trap for the man who wanted to kill me, and this tenderfoot with his sunburned nose and heavy boots was walking into it.