His eyes met mine with a calm, steady glitter.
“I’m not going to be afraid of it,” he said.
“You’re going to like it, then,” I told him.
“Well,” he said, “no matter whether I like it or whether I don’t, you don’t need to wait around to get me toughened up. If we want to start, let’s go.”
“You stick around here and talk to Sally Ehlers,” I told him, “and I’ll browse around a bit and see what I can find out.”
I left them, with George Ringley bending over her with just a slight stamp of patronizing tolerance in his manner. Sally’s eyes were enigmatical, but she was tense as a poised cat getting ready to pounce.
My prowling around consisted of rounding up the string of burros I had left in a river-bottom pasture and getting a bunch of provisions and canteens together. I did it unostentatiously. The stuff was packed in an automobile, taken down to the river bottom and dumped out. I put on the packs down there.
About dusk I hunted up Sally Ehlers.
“Where’s the golfer?” I asked.
“Over at the hotel,” she said.
I found him in his room. He had changed to the clothes I’d picked up for him to wear — a pair of overalls, boots, a light-blue shirt and a straw hat.
“Looks like the devil!” he said.
“Never mind what it looks like,” I told him. “We’re leaving about ten o’clock to-night. You’d better get some sleep. I’m going to give you a caddy you won’t tire out on this trip.”
He grinned at me.
“Has the caddy got long ears?” he asked.
I liked his grin. Now that some of the booze was sweating out of his system, he reminded me more and more of his dad when I’d first known him.
“The caddy,” I told him, “has long ears.”
IV
Into the Desert
The desert has as many moods as a woman and the desert at night is as different from the desert at day as is winter from summer.
The night was moonlit. Our burros filed out in a long shuffling file, the sound of their feet in the sand and the creak of the saddle leather being the only noises which marred the tranquillity of the calm desert night.
The moon was almost full. It rode in the heavens like a vast ball of silver, and the white sand of the desert caught the moonlight and flung it back until the whole surface of the desert seemed to be bathed in some mystic shimmering pool of white light through which we plunged in shuffling Indian file, casting grotesque shadows which were like splotches of ink on the glistening sand.
George Ringley had enough of his father in him so that the desert thrilled him with its vast mystery. But he had been bred in the ways of the city, and the tranquil silence, which seemed to blot out noise as a blotting paper absorbs ink, made him nervous. He started to whistle in a low key.
“Silence!” I called to him.
We shuffled on in absolute silence.
The calm tranquillity of interstellar space stretched unbroken down from the high places and rested like a mantle upon the surface of the desert.
We shuffled along until the moon set, which was about an hour or an hour and a half before daylight.
As the moon dropped down behind the western horizon, I called a halt. We huddled together, a little compact group of figures.
“Can we make a fire?” George Ringley asked, and shivered slightly with nervousness, fatigue and the chill which comes before morning.
“No,” I told him; “it isn’t safe. We’d make too easy a target against the light of a campfire. We’ll wait until to-morrow and see if we’re followed. You’ll be warm enough in a couple of hours.”
The burros took the opportunity to rest, standing dejectedly, their ears flopping forward, pulled by their own weight. The three of us sat in a little huddle. The moon dropped down below the rim of the western desert and swift darkness marched silently across the cold surface of the desert. The stars blazed with steady brilliance.
“It’s lonesome,” said George Ringley suddenly.
I said nothing. Sally Ehlers laughed lightly.
“You’ll get used to it after a while,” she said. “But there’s always the mystery.”
The stars seemed gradually to draw farther back into the heavens, until they became mere needle points of light. One of those swift desert breezes sprung up which come from nowhere and blow the sand in scurrying clouds, sending it hissing against the cacti, rattling through the greasewood, and at times, when the wind becomes stronger, making that most peculiar and subtle sound of all — the whispering, slithering noises of sand scurrying over sand.
George Ringley spoke, and now the spell of the desert had impressed itself upon him sufficiently so that his voice was a whisper.
“It seems as though the sand is talking,” he said.
“Yes,” I told him. “Those are the sand whispers. You hear them in the desert when you’re camped out on the sand. The desert seems to talk.”
We sat and listened to it in silence. The whole desert seemed to be stirring. The little sand wraiths swirled and streamed about us in the darkness, each giving its little mysterious hissing whisper, until it seemed that the desert had a thousand tongues whispering warnings to us.
Then the east turned to gold. The gold showed a splash of vivid crimson where a few little clouds nestled over the eastern mountains. The stars were absorbed in a steely blue as the light grew stronger, and abruptly the sun plunged over the rim of the mountains and sent long, level rays flooding the desert.
George Ringley’s laugh was nervous.
“Say,” he said, “there was something spooky about those sand whispers, wasn’t there? It almost got my goat for a minute.”
The wind had died away as the rays of sunlight searched out the glistening sand of the desert. The mystery of the desert dawn, the peculiar thrill of the desert whispers, were but memories. The glaring light of common day transformed the desert into a vast waste of sand, cacti, greasewood and sage.
“The desert is a law unto itself,” said Sally Ehlers, glancing at me to see if I intended to make any statement.
I swung into my saddle without a word.
“Were going on?” asked George Ringley, and I thought there was a trace of weariness in his voice.
“Going on,” I said, “during the cool of the morning.”
“How about coffee?” he asked.
“After it gets too hot to travel,” I told him.
We shuffled along for an hour. The sun started burning the desert with a fiery heat. The horizons began to dance and shimmer. Mirages chased their way about the distances, giving the effect of shimmering pools of water in which were reflected the heat-tortured outlines of the mountains.
About eight o’clock I called a halt. It was hot by that time, a dry heat which seemed to drain the very life from one’s body. Little gnats buzzed about in front of the eyes or stung through the skin.
George Ringley’s eyes were a trifle bloodshot. His lips were commencing to crack. His laugh was nervous.
“I’m not so certain that I can keep this up day after day,” he said, and looked quickly at Sally Ehlers.
“You should,” I told him, “be able to do as much as a girl, shouldn’t you?”
I tried to make the question without scorn, merely as a matter of casual inquiry.
He flushed and stiffened.
“I was only kidding,” he said. “I’ll do as much as any of you.”
We unpacked the burros. I built a little fire, made coffee, and we had some eggs and bacon. Then we had a can of that desert luxury, pure watery tomato juice drained from a can of tomatoes. After that, we ate the tomatoes on bread. I kept looking at the back trail. Sally Ehlers watched me anxiously. George Ringley ate in silence, his eyes on his food. Occasionally he made irritable swipes with his hand at the little gnats which got in front of his eyes and buzzed about steadily or crawled in his ears.