“It doesn’t do any good to fight them,” Sally Ehlers said. “It just makes you nervous.”
“How do you stand them?” asked George Ringley, and this time there was no discounting the irritation in his voice.
“You simply learn to be patient,” she said. “It’s one of the lessons that the desert teaches you.”
“Oh, damn the desert!” he exclaimed irritably.
I shifted my eyes to his. His locked with mine for a moment, then dropped.
“We can get some sleep here in the shade,” I told them. “You two sleep and I’ll keep watch.”
“What are we keeping watch for?” George Ringley asked.
“To see if any one is riding on our trail.”
The two of them lay down in the shade of a patch of greasewood. The shade was scanty. The gnats were troublesome. Sally Ehlers put a handkerchief over her face and slept. George Ringley twisted and turned, moaned in fitful sleep. Occasionally he would give a convulsive start and sit up to stare groggily at me from bloodshot eyes.
About noon I saw a little cloud of dust on our back trail. Half an hour later I could make out moving dots, and then the dust settled and ceased. The moving dots became invisible as they blended with the shade of tall greasewood bushes.
I waited until I was certain they were not coming on, and then crawled into a clump of brush. Sally Ehlers heard me and sat up.
“See anything?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Eight burros. They’ve stopped a couple of miles back there. They spotted us, probably through binoculars. They’ll wait until we move on. There’s nothing more to be done.”
“I’ll watch,” she said.
“You don’t need to,” I told her. “They’re simply going to keep us in sight.”
I put a bandanna over my face, drove a little stick into the ground to hold the cloth away from my nostrils and dropped off at once into dreamless sleep.
The sun was low in the west when I awoke. Sally Ehlers had a little fire going and was teaching George Ringley some of the first rudiments of desert cooking. Ringley’s lips had commenced to crack; his face was an angry red; the eyes were bloodshot. His manner was the grim, dogged determination of a runner who finds himself commencing to weary in a race, but who is determined to hang on.
After our simple meal of plain desert fare, I sent George out to pick up some of the burros that were browsing about. Sally Ehlers moved over toward me and said in a low voice, “Just what are you planning to do, Bob?”
“What do you mean, Sally?” I asked.
“You’re not going to go out and locate that mine with Bill Ordway’s gang on your trail, are you? You know what would happen. We’d never get back to record the claim, in the first place, and in the second place, you could never hold possession against Ordway’s gang.”
“Perhaps I could,” I said.
“And perhaps you couldn’t,” she told me. “I never did understand why you came out here with just the three of us. Why didn’t you get two or three men that you could depend on?”
“Because,” I said, “I’m taking George Ringley to finishing school.”
“Finishing school?” she asked.
“Did you ever see wood that had been treated by a sand blast?” I asked her.
“What’s that got to do with it?” she wanted to know.
“A lot,” I said. “All of the roughness is stripped away. All of the glitter and veneer is gone. That which is left is just the true substantial wood, honest and rugged.”
“Well?” she asked.
“That,” I told her, “is what’s going to happen to George. He’s had too much civilization, too much moisture — not enough hardships. He needs a dose of the desert, needs to have the sand drift against his character, cut away all of this loose, flabby flesh and strip him down to his naked soul.”
“You certainly don’t intend to locate this mine with Big Bill Ordway and his gang on your trail, do you?” she asked.
I grinned at her, went to my saddle bag, took out a canvas sack and pulled out some ore.
She looked at it and gasped.
“Free milling ore!” she said. “Where did it come from? Have you struck a bonanza, Bob?”
“No,” I told her, “that high-grade ore came from a mine in Nevada. They struck a pocket in there that was so rich it had more gold than rock.”
She looked at the specimens with appreciative eyes.
“Aren’t those pretty?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told her. “I’m going to go to a place about two or three miles from the Chuckwalla claims. I’m going to stake it out. It’ll look like a regular claim. I’ll pretend that I don’t know Bill Ordway’s on my trail. Then I’ll leave you and the kid in possession of the claim, and I’ll start back to record the location notice. But I’ll start in the moonlight, so that I’ll run right into Big Bill Ordway’s gang. You know what’ll happen. They’ll hold me up, take the notice from me, tear it up, probably take my burro, leave me afoot and tell me to keep moving.”
“They’ll take your guns away from you,” she said.
“Sure,” I told her, “but I’ll cache some guns along the road. I’ve got some extra ones in the packs. Then Ordway will move on down and dispossess you two. It’ll be up to you to see that the kid doesn’t actually do any shooting. You can explain to him at the last that you’re overpowered by superior numbers and that you’ve got to get out.”
“Then what’ll happen?” she said.
“Then,” I said, “Bill Ordway will put some of his gang in to keep possession of the claim, and he’ll take the rest of them and make a run for the county seat, to record his location. After he’s done that we’ll move on to the Chuckwalla claims and locate them at our leisure. In fact, I’ll make our fake location a few miles south of the Chuckwalla claims, so that when we start back they’ll be right in our road. After Ordway turns me loose in the desert I’ll mosey on up to the Chuckwalla claims and locate them. I’ll pick up the guns on the way up there, so that I’ll be armed and ready to stand my ground in case anything should go wrong. But it won’t.”
She nodded slowly.
“You think that’s going to make a man out of George?” she asked.
“It’s all going to help,” I told her. “Were all going to get out in the desert and get right down to brass tacks. It’s a cinch Ordway will take some of our provisions and water. He’ll leave us stripped down just as close as he dares to.”
“You don’t think he’ll shoot?” she asked.
“Not if he gets possession of the claims without shooting,” I told her. “Ordway is smooth. He knows that if it comes to a lawsuit, his men can testify to one thing and we can testify to another; that if he’s got possession, that’s all that counts. If there’s any shooting, of course, Ordway will shoot back. That’s where you’ve got to come in. You’ve got to see that there isn’t any shooting.”
She nodded, and about that time George Ringley came back leading a sleepy-eyed burro, with a couple more following along behind.
We put the stuff on the burros and started out.
Ringley didn’t look quite so well. His face was slightly swollen from the sunburn. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. His lips were badly cracked. There wasn’t any grin on his face any more, but there was a dogged determination in his eyes.
We shuffled along through the late afternoon, through the twilight, and then through the calm moonlit night. The burros plodded patiently and steadily. There wasn’t any trace of Big Bill Ordway’s gang, but I knew that they were on my trail. I knew that they respected my knowledge of the desert and would do everything they could to keep us from finding out that we were being followed. The farther we got into the desert the more they’d drop behind, figuring that they could always follow our tracks.