“I’ll help him. Sit still, Melford,” I said, after a second or two, and went in the opposite direction.
I circled warily. Sandoval stood, outlined in the moonlight, motionless, his hands clasped back of his head. The gesture showed that he knew of my suspicions.
I approached him, and my right hand was on the butt of my six-shooter.
“Well?”
He came toward me so that I could hear his lowered voice.
“You’re wondering why I came.”
I remained silent.
“It is to save your life,” he blurted.
“My life,” I told him, “has always been able to save itself before. Perhaps, if you had not come, you might have saved a life.”
I didn’t tell him whose. I left that to soak in.
“Señor,” he hissed, and leaned toward me, “he plans to murder you. I found that out, and I came to warn you.”
“The tenderfoot?”
“Yes, the tenderfoot! He is a killer of the city, but dangerous even in the desert. He was here six months ago, and he killed then. I have heard admissions from his own lips!”
He was speaking in the Spanish language, this offspring of three races, and he was talking rapidly.
“You’re sure?”
“Señor, I am Pablo Sandoval, and I come of an old and honored family. I have warned. That is enough!” And he turned on his heel and strode away.
They are proud, these Mexicans, even when their blood has been well thinned with racial mixtures. I saw him stooping to gather wood, and I made no attempt to follow, but swung well to the left, gathering wood and waiting by my rifle until I saw him return to the camp fire.
I brought in my load of wood. We piled up the fire, then I dragged my blankets back of a clump of greasewood. Melford yawned, nodded, smiled sheepishly.
“Last two days have used me up,” he said.
He dragged his own blankets from the place where he had spread them to a place from which he could command a view of my own bed. That action might have been accidental, but it drew me a meaning glance from Pablo Sandoval.
Sandoval took his blankets far out into the desert.
“The light of the camp fire keeps me awake, and sometimes sparks blow,” he said, by way of apology.
I kicked off my shoes and crawled under the blankets.
The moon was a ball of white fire, blazing steadily. The desert showed dazzlingly brilliant under the flooding moonlight, the sagebrush and greasewood casting black shadows, motionless sentinels guarding the silent sand.
I squirmed my blankets deeper into the clump of brush, and slipped from them on the dark side when Melford had his back turned to me. I wadded the clothes up so the blankets seemed to outline the form of a sleeper. I was tired of this stalling about. It was time for a showdown.
My hand was on my six-gun as I waited, watching Melford, waiting for a glint of moonlight on metal.
It did not come. Melford was sleeping. The regular breathing, the rhythmic snores all told their own story. And I was tired. The prospect of another sleepless night did not appeal to me.
I slipped forward over the sand, cautiously, noiselessly. Melford stirred when I was within a few feet of him. His eyes snapped open and saw the business end of my six-shooter boring into his chest.
“What... huh?”
“I’m taking no chances to-night,” I whispered. “Get your hands up, out of the covers, over your head!”
“But—”
I jabbed him with the gun.
He took a deep breath. I knew what he intended to do, to shout to Sandoval. I punched him in the solar plexus with the butt of the gun, and the air whooshed from him. His jaw sagged and he gasped.
I knotted a pack rope around his wrists. Then I thrust a gag into his mouth and tied his wrists.
“Move and you’ll stop lead,” I warned, and glided into the shadows. My rifle was where I had left it. I holstered the six-gun and squatted, hugging the rifle.
Half an hour passed. The shadows shifted. There was a faint stirring of breeze. Soon the sand would commence to drift, and, as it drifted, would utter those desert whispers which mean nothing, yet which mean everything.
I wondered if I owed Pablo Sandoval an apology.
And then, even as I wondered, he came, a soft furtive shadow, stalking as skillfully as a cat, wary, ominous, deadly. And he was stalking my blankets. In his hand was a rifle.
I determined that I had been sufficiently long-suffering. When Pablo Sandoval raised his rifle I would call to him and step from behind the bush. Then we would shoot it out.
He inched his way around the concealment of a mesquite and raised the rifle. I raised my own rifle, got to one knee, prepared to call. And a moving shadow stopped me.
It was a shadow that came around the side of a clump of cacti, paused for a moment, then came forward. It was the shadow of a human being who walked on noiseless feet.
The moonlight flooded the desert as she emerged from behind the cacti, and I caught my breath.
She was almost naked, yet the nude body gave no hint of impropriety. It was the type of nudity which fits in with its surroundings, just as one would expect a rare marble to be nude, or a painting of a nymph at a pool.
She wore a little fragment of animal skin about her hips and there were moccasins on her feet. Her hair was around her shoulders, and there was a short bow with a pointed arrow in her hand.
She walked with that perfect muscular coordination which makes for grace in a deer, for noiseless power in a stalking mountain lion.
She was almost on Sandoval when she stopped and raised the bow.
Sandoval squinted down the barrel of the gun and pulled the trigger.
A spurt of flame, the roar of a rifle shattering the unechoing silence of the desert, and the thunk of the bullet. I knew there would be another bullet hole in my blanket roll, and I intended it to be the last. I cocked my rifle.
Then I realized there would be no need. The girl was drawing back the powerful bow, and her body was a song of grace.
Something warned him.
He glanced over his shoulder. He yelled, gave one startled leap. The bowstring twanged a deeply resonant hum. The arrow flashed like a streak of death-dealing shadow, but his leap saved him.
He flung around the rifle, and I pressed my own weapon to my shoulder.
Then he saw her face.
The rifle wavered in his grasp, dropped from nerveless fingers. He made the sign of the cross, mechanically, dazedly. The girl flicked a hand to the little quiver which was at her waist, tied to the fragment of skin which covered the contour of her hips. Another arrow was on the string.
But Pablo Sandoval seemed not to heed the menace of that arrow. It was the face that held his attention. One staring look he gave it, and then screamed. He whirled and took to his heels.
I heard him scream for the second time as he tore past me. I heard his third scream as he dashed blindly through a clump of spiny cactus. Then there were no more screams for an interval, while he rattled the gravel of the dry wash with panic-driven feet.
He came out on the other side, running blindly, and he screamed again. This time his scream contained a new note. It was a note of desert madness, that peculiar knifelike something that is always present in the hysterical yapping of a coyote, that fiendish undertone of malice which is in the voice of a mountain lion.
I knew then that he would never come back. I have heard men give screams before, screams that held that same note, and run madly into the desert. None ever came back.
A woman’s voice was in my ear.
“You may put away the rifle.”
Was it a threat or merely a statement? I turned to her. She was closer now and the moonlight was on her face. But I had no need of the moonlight. I had known who she would be as soon as I had seen the look of mad terror on the features of Pablo Sandoval.