Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

I. A Sample of Ore

Out to the west stretched the desert, silent, inscrutable, cruel. The town hung to the edge of the desert. It was a gold town; the place lived, breathed, ate and thought gold.

Men came to this town, stayed for a space, then were drawn out into the grim silence of the desert, just as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. Some came back. Some didn’t. Occasionally the desert would give up a part of its hoard to some favored one. Occasionally the buzzards would circle over a staggering figure that ran aimlessly, its swollen tongue turning black, its glassy eyes staring at the white expanse of glittering torture.

Such is the way of the desert.

There were hard-bitten men in that little desert town. They were the men who had learned much of the laws of the desert. They had been tempered in a furnace heat, and they had survived. There were also the bloated, soft parasites who fed upon those who work, and tenderfeet who were being tempered by the desert fires.

The man who came in on the stage from Las Vegas was new to the desert. That much could be seen in his sun-tortured visage. His skin was crimson, the bloodshot rims of the eyes had gazed too long upon white wastes. He had not stood the trip well.

There was a scar on his forehead, a jagged, irregular scar, and the blistering sun had made that scar stand out as a white star against the red of his forehead. Except for that scar he would have been considered handsome, judged by the standards of the ballroom. He had an erect figure, a certain self assurance, a jaunty set to his head which even the long stage trip hadn’t conquered — and the trip by auto-stage from Las Vegas was cruel beyond belief to those who had never been adopted by the desert.

He came in to the Pay Dirt Café as I was eating. He hitched himself aboard one of the high stools, planted an elbow on the imitation mahogany counter, and grinned familiarly at Bessie O’Day.

He was good looking and young, not over twenty-five at the most. His manner was that of one who is accustomed to having women fall all over themselves being nice to him. His voice was deep, richly resonant, the sort of a voice that stirs the romantic thoughts in a woman’s breast. There was just a little undertone of harsh selfishness in that voice, but that note was almost drowned out by the rich resonance.

“Roast beef, and a smile,” he said.

He got them both. The smile was only a lip smile, but he didn’t notice that.

“Know a man named Bloom?” he asked the girl as he picked up knife and fork.

“Harry Bloom? He’s dead,” said Bessie. “He was murdered. Somebody ambushed him and killed him with one shot from a rifle.”

The man with the scarred forehead shoved in another mouthful. “Yeah,” he said indifferently. “How’d it happen?”

Bessie’s eyes were troubled.

“Nobody knows. Harry Bloom had been out on a prospecting trip. He was coming back. From the way his packs were arranged, and the stuff that had been thrown away, the old timers figured he’d made a strike and was bringing in the gold. They don’t know. Somebody shot him, not ten miles from town. They found his body, lying just as it had been pitched down from the saddle. There was one bullet hole in the side of the head.”

The man nodded. “What happened to his stuff?” he asked.

“You mean the burros, the saddles and the canteens?”

“Yeah. I guess so, whatever it was he had.”

“The coroner took charge of it.”

The young man speared the last of the roast beef, scooped the mashed potatoes on it with a swipe of his knife, opened his mouth and shoved in the whole thing.

“Wasn’t there something else?” he asked. “Wasn’t there an ore sample?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

I joined the conversation.

“There was just one rock, and it wasn’t ore,” I said. “I saw them when they brought the body in. Harry Bloom had one jagged chunk of rock in his poke, and that was all.”

The youth looked at me. “What happened to that?” he asked, scraping his plate with his knife, sliding the knife along the edge of the fork and swooping down on the fork with eager mouth.

“A Mex got it,” I said. “Jose Diaz, the gambler. He thought there might be some charm in the thing, the only rock brought in by a murdered man.”

The man with the scarred forehead pushed back his stool, sized me up.

“Yeah?” he said.

Bessie O’Day asked him a question.

“You interested in Harry Bloom? — Know him, or related to him or something?”

“Nope. Just read about the case in the newspapers,” he said. “There was a paragraph. It mentioned the name of this place, and said it was one of the typical desert, wide-open mining towns. I thought I’d come on and see what a wide-open mining town looked like. I’m a curious cuss, myself.”

And he flipped a half dollar on the counter and strode to the door.

Bessie looked at me.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He’s good looking — if it wasn’t for that scar,” she said.

“He looks like a matinée idol,” I told her. “We’ll wait and see what the desert does to him. So far as I’m concerned, it’s character on a man’s face that makes him handsome.”

II. A Good Investment

I saw him again that evening. He was over in the Miner’s Retreat, talking with Jose Diaz. He was talking earnestly, as though he was trying to sell something, and Jose Diaz seemed reluctant.

The Miner’s Retreat was one of those places. There was a bar and a stack of bottles behind the bar. There were some round tables in the back, covered with green cloth, and with hanging lights dangling from the ceiling over the tables. Men sat at those tables and played poker, hour after hour, night after night. There were men with pale complexions, nervous hands and big eyes. They always won. There were just two ways of making a living in the camp. Either make it from the desert, or make it from those who made their livings in the desert.

Jose Diaz finally went out. The man with the scarred forehead sat at the table, waiting. Poker games were going on all around him.

Diaz came back, his pocket bulging. He passed something over under the table.

The man with the scarred forehead made little shoulder motions as he turned the object over and over in his hands. He talked. I could see that his lips were speaking in numbers. The eyes of the gambler glittered with greed, but he shook his head.

After a while the man with the scarred forehead passed the mysterious object back under the table. Jose Diaz took it, crammed it in his pocket, got up, flashed his teeth in a grin, and went to a poker game.

The man with the scarred forehead got up, started for the door. Seeing me, he came over.

“I talked with you in the restaurant,” he said.

“I remember,” I replied.

He thrust out his hand. “Trask is my name. Fred Trask.”

“Zane, Bob Zane,” I said, and shook hands.

His hand was firm and strong. The fingers wrapped around my hand, gave a firm pressure. He was looking me straight in the eyes, but his voice was not so richly resonant as it had been in the restaurant. It had an undertone of harsh, grasping greed.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“That Mex has got that bit of rock which came from the body of the murdered prospector. He won’t sell it for anything reasonable. I can’t get him to name a price, even. He’s turned down twenty dollars. I don’t want to arouse his suspicions, but I want that rock. I’ll pay a hundred dollars for it, if I have to go that high. He knows I’m a greenhorn, and he’s trying to hold me up. I want you to buy the rock for me.”

He pushed over a roll of bills.

“There’s the hundred. Get the rock, and you can keep the hundred. If you get it for any less, it’s your profit.”

“You offered him twenty?” I asked.

“That’s all. Five at first, then ten, and then twenty.”

“Where’ll I meet you when I get the rock?” I wanted to know.

“Over at the hotel,” he said. “And make it as snappy as you can.”

“It’s going to take a little while,” I warned him. “I’ve got to wait until Jose has a run of poor luck at cards, and then I’ll sit in the game and tear into him for all I can. I’ll tell him he’s having bad luck because the murdered man’s ghost is haunting the rock.”

His voice was impatient. “I don’t care how you get it. — I want it.”

I didn’t like him and I didn’t like his tone. But when a man comes to camp and offers to pay a hundred dollars for a chunk of rock that was the only thing which was found in the poke of a murdered prospector, I aim to get a look at that rock if it’s at all possible. And buying this particular rock seemed about the only way I could get a look at it.

I’d seen it before, when they brought Harry Bloom’s body in. The whole camp had seen it. But we hadn’t thought anything of it. It was just a chunk of plain rock, and it wasn’t even mineralized. It really wasn’t rock, but conglomerate, hard, and jagged.

I strolled over to the table to watch Jose’s luck at the cards. Jose grinned at me, scraped back his chair, flashed his teeth at me with a smile.

“He is a poor liar, that boy,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Yes,” he said. “And I saw him talking with you. He has asked you to buy the rock for him. No?”

I wasn’t going to lie to Jose. “What if he did?” I asked.

He rippled a laugh. “He offered me twenty, fifty, seventy-five dollars,” he boasted. “Am I a fool to sell a plain rock for that money? If the rock is worth that much it is worth more.”

I was mad. Jose had his faults, but he wouldn’t lie, not to me.

“So he offered you seventy-five dollars, eh?”

“Si, señor, he did that! And I told him that I would not sell for less than a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

I put my cards on the table.

“He told me he hadn’t offered you more than twenty,” I said. “He gave me a hundred to buy it with. I was to keep any difference.”

Jose chuckled. He was in fine humor.

“Do you know why he did that?” he asked me.

“He said he thought you were trying to hold him up,” I replied. “He said he thought I could buy it cheaper than he could.”

Jose nodded. “He did it because I told him I would not sell the rock at all unless some one who was very expert upon the value of stones told me it was not worth money for the ore that was in it. He asked me if I thought you knew stones, and I told him that your judgment was good anywhere in the desert. That is why he went to you, amigo.

“But this matter has become very peculiar,” he continued. “We will not trust to any one’s offhand judgment. We will go to an assayer. — The only difficulty is that the man refused to pay anything for the rock if it was broken. Can you imagine that? — He is crazy, and he is a liar. He has tried to deceive you; therefore we shall put all of our cards down together. Come, and we will see Señor Garland, the assayer.”

I nodded.

We hunted up Phil Garland, who is big, fat, good natured and honest.

“We’ve got to know what’s in a rock, without smashing it up,” I said.

Garland looked at us suspiciously, then led the way over to his little office, in a shack with a galvanized iron roof, where he did most of his work at night. The place was too hot, daytimes.

We went in. Jose Diaz produced the rock. Garland took it in his hands.

“It’s the rock they found in Harry Bloom’s saddle bag, ain’t it?” he asked.

I nodded. He sat down and looked at it.

“Funny,” he said. “You know, I thought there might be something of value in this thing, and I looked it over pretty carefully for metal at the time it was found. I’ll look it over again, though.”

He sat down at his bench, put the rock on scales to weigh it. Then he took a glass jar, filled the jar with water, weighed the jar and the water, then dropped in the rock. A lot of water overflowed. Garland weighed the water that was left and the rock. He scratched his head.

He took the wet rock, studied it, dried it, looked at it with a magnifying glass, and shook his head.

“The darn thing is just a chunk of conglomerate,” he said. “There’s miles and miles of it around here. From the texture of this, though, I’d make a guess that it came from around Hole-in-the-Rock Springs. But there isn’t any mineral in it, and there wouldn’t be anything worth while even if there had been any mineral in it. It’s nothing but a sort of natural cement, holding together a smear of round stones. — You can see the cement-like nature of the binding material, and these round pebbles are gripped here by a natural cement. They were picked up by the binding material a few million years ago; and the fact that one of the little rocks might be pure gold wouldn’t mean anything at all, so far as mining operations are concerned.”

Jose grinned at me.

“One hundred and twenty-five dollars, Señor Zane, and that is my limit. I am a gambler. The rock is worth nothing to me; but I know it is worth a hundred to the man with the scar on his forehead, and I think you are curious enough to invest twenty-five dollars of your own money.”

I knew Jose. He was bluffing his way through, figuring, just as he said, that I would put in twenty-five dollars of my own money. But he was a good gambler. If I refused, he’d sit tight and hold that rock until he died.

“You are a good judge of human nature, Jose,” I said, and handed him a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“I have to be,” he said, “in my profession.”

He handed me the rock, pocketed the money, and went back to the gambling games.

I walked directly over to the hotel. They called it a hotel; it was really a ramshackle structure put up over a stone store, and divided into little cubicles. There was a pitcher and a bowl in each room, a table, a chair and an iron bed. Sheets were unknown.

Fred Trask was registered. He sat on the straight backed chair in his room, waiting. He’d picked up an iron mortar and a pestle from some miner, and he had it on the floor at his feet all ready for me.

His eyes lit up when he saw me bring in the rock.

“You got it?” he said.

“I got it,” I told him. “But I found you’d offered more than twenty dollars for it.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, reaching for the rock.

“Jose Diaz did,” I said.

“He’s a liar,” said Trask, speaking easily, as though the words were of no particular import. He picked up the iron pestle and started mashing up the rock. It was pretty hard, and I noticed he struck light blows.

“Here,” I said, reaching for the pestle. “You can’t get anywhere that way. There’s nothing in the binder, anyhow. If there’s anything worth while, it’ll be in some of the small rocks that...”

He pushed me away, snarling.

“Who’s doing this?” he rasped, and his lips drew back from his teeth, his eyes glittered, and the deep timbre had entirely gone from his voice. The words were just barked out.

As he spoke, the pestle came down hard on the conglomerate and a piece broke off. That piece was a chunk that had a round pebble about the size of a very small potato in the center.

Something else rolled out, too: a chunk of pure gold. I’ve seen gold too much not to know it when I glimpse it. This was gold, all right; and it had a peculiar, rippled appearance. The nugget was as big around as a half dollar, and a little thicker. It was bent a trifle, and the top surface was all waves and ripples. The gold was all shiny and new looking on top. A strange looking nugget.

Fred Trask swooped for that bit of gold and scooped it into his hand. His eyes stared at me and were hostile.

“I knew that rock was mineralized,” he said. “Now get out of here!”

I got out of there. I’d invested twenty-five dollars, and it was a worth while investment.

I waited around the hotel. Fred Trask came out in about fifteen minutes. His feet were pounding the ground like those of a man who’s going places in a hurry. He went over to the Miner’s Rest and got hold of the bartender. They chatted for a while, and then the barkeep called over Dick Rose.

Rose was a man who hung around on the edges and snapped up anything that offered a long profit with no investment. He wasn’t scrupulous in his business dealings, and he’d had a couple of enemies who had been mysteriously shot from ambush. No one could prove anything on Dick Rose, and they didn’t try particularly hard; but we local men all knew him and gave him a more or less wide berth. Not that we were afraid of him. It was just the way we felt toward rattlesnakes. We didn’t like ’em.

Rose and Fred Trask had a drink. Then they went off into a corner and talked. Trask did most of the talking. He was voluble and convincing, but full of words. Dick Rose stared at him with eyes that were slitted and glistening. Eyes that glittered like diamonds through the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

After half an hour or so of talk, they had a couple more drinks. But Dick Rose kept his eyes half closed, and they still had that diamond hard glitter in them when the two men at length left the saloon.

III. Auto Versus Burro

The next morning they were gone. They’d pulled out in the early dawn. Dick Rose had gone to the hotel with a string of burros and he’d had Sam Pitch along. Sam was an old buzzard who’d have shot his own grandmother in the back for fifty cents cash and a drink of whisky.

I thought over the fact that they’d pulled out. Then I went to the hotel, on a hunch, and looked around under the window of the room that Trask has occupied.

I found what I wanted, a bunch of rounded rocks and some jagged binder. It was the last of the pounded up conglomerate. I also found the piece that had clung to the big rock, the one that was the size of a small potato and had masked the chunk of gold. I examined that piece. Looking at it from the back side and in the daylight, it seemed different. The side that had been on the outside of the chunk of conglomerate looked natural; but there was a peculiar, colorless something on the back of the rounded rock.

I pocketed it and hunted up Garland. He was asleep, after a night of work, and some drink. I shook him awake.

“Take a look at this,” I told him.

His eyes focused on the rock. “Banquo’s ghost!” he said.

“Go on,” I told him. “It may keep turning up, but there ain’t no banquet.”

“That’s right,” he said, and reached for his boots.

In his little office he looked the thing over more carefully.

“Well,” he said, at length, “it’s been doctored — salted and all that sort of stuff. But what the hell a man would want to salt conglomerate for is more than I know. Every once in a while you come on a piece where the sun or moisture has rotted the cement out of a round rock, so that that rock can be pulled out. That’s what happened to this rock. Then somebody evidently hollowed out the chunk, working through the hole left by the removal of this little rock. The gold was then inserted, and this rock cemented back into place. That’s what this stuff is that you see on the back of the round rock — cement.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

I handed him ten dollars, which gave me a thirty-five dollar investment in something that wasn’t even a salted mine.

Of course, the purchase of the rock had made news in the little town, sprawled in the sun on the edge of the desert. Everything that pertained to gold had the highest news value. If this rock had been anything but conglomerate, there would have been some action. But when the boys figured it out, they figured that it was just another case of a tenderfoot going goofy.

I yawned and shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t tell anybody about the gold, nor about the cemented rock. And I knew that Garland wouldn’t talk.

I didn’t want to leave too soon after Trask; so I waited until night, and then slipped out into the desert, taking advantage of a half moon.

The desert was cold and still, like the surface of some vast tombstone that stretched out cold in the moonlight. The utter silence, the lack of life, the big expanse of space gripped me. I always feel like that when I’m starting out into the desert. There’s the sense of being all alone, yet not being alone. A man comes to know himself when he’s in the desert. Lots of himself is a lot littler than he ever thought, and a lot of himself is a lot bigger. It’s the little part that shrivels away and the big part that grows and becomes company when a man gets out into the desert.

Unless, of course, a man’s just naturally a little man all the way through, and then the little part comes leering out through the cracks of the character, sees the naked desert, and gets out of control, like the fabled genie that came out of a bottle.

I made camp when the moon went down, and got a few hours of sleep before the first crack of cold dawn. Then I got up the burros, lashed on the packs and started. I was headed in the general direction of the Hole-in-the-Rock Spring, and for the surface of the desert which lay down below the level of the sea. I was traveling fast, too, and I had a pair of powerful binoculars on the horn of my saddle.

The sun grew hot and the desert seethed in the dazzling glare of day. The last of the Funeral Range topped the sky before me. I swung through a pass and looked down on Death Valley.

I don’t care how often a man sees Death Valley. When he looks down on it from the top of either the Funerals or the Panamints, something happens inside of him. It’s as though his insides looped the loop and left him without any breath.

There weren’t any tracks in the pass. I got the binoculars and looked down on the floor of the valley. Nothing moved. It lived up to its name, a valley of death. For many years now it had been luring men to destruction.

I swung the glasses in a survey of the passes, boring into the black shadows that seemed inky after the glittering flood of sand-reflected light.

Nothing moved.

Putting the glasses away, I went down into the valley. That night I slept beneath the blazing stars. When they had receded to pin points with the coming of dawn, I was once more on my way. I was headed toward the north.

The heat robbed the air of oxygen. The hot air, rushing upwards, was as devoid of life giving qualities as the air which rushes up the flue of a furnace. I took it pretty slowly, which is the real way to make haste in the desert.

There was a queer, droning sound. At first I thought it was the sound of the blood pounding through the arteries in my ears. I stopped and listened. The sound came and went, droning into a crescendo of pulsating noise, then dying away. I looked upward, but I couldn’t see any plane.

I paid no further heed to it, and plugged on. The burros wagged their ears, cast short shadows, inky black. I could feel the hot sand burning up through the soles of my shoes.

Then the sound came to me louder and louder. I knew it then for what it was, a motor toiling through the sand. The engine sounded pretty bad. There wasn’t any road within a matter of miles. I wondered what sort of fool would push a car through the floor of the valley in the heat.

I rounded a spur of drifting sand. The car was ahead, a black dot against the shimmering outlines of the sand hills. It was coming toward me, and not making very much headway.

Four times, while I pushed on toward it, the motor stopped. Whenever it did that a black figure would run out to the front of the car. I knew what was happening; a man was pouring fresh water into the boiling radiator.

At last the motor gave a series of backfires. Something harsh and metallic made clanging noises, far louder than the roaring pulsations of the hot motor. It was a bearing. There was a moment or two of that noise, and then a terrific bang.

A dense cloud of white steam and smoke puffed out from the hood of the car like a mushroom, and then there was silence.

The car was still some distance away. I dipped down into a wind ravine between two sand hills, and found firm footing. I followed the windings of that ravine.

After a while I figured I must be pretty close to the car. I angled up the slope of sand and found that it was less than two hundred yards away.

There were two figures out in front of that car, staring at it after the manner of stranded motorists the world over. It seemed as if they thought they could get the thing started just by staring at it, if they stared long enough and hard enough.

The sad truth dawned on them as I got within earshot.

“We’ve got to walk,” said one of the figures. And I could tell from the voice that this one was a young woman, although she was dressed in boots and breeches.

The man’s voice sounded frightened. “Walk back,” he said.

“We can’t be far now,” the woman told him.

“But we’re out of water, in the desert...”

Then the sound of slithering sand as my burro train pushed its way along the white hot sand hill carried to their ears. They turned and stared at me with big eyes.

They’d evidently been a day or two in the desert, and the sun had done things to their skins. The woman was of that brunette type that simply browns, and her face was as brown as a berry, her eyes big black pools. She had adapted herself naturally to the desert, but as far as her complexion was concerned, she’d soon come to look like an Indian.

The man wasn’t of that type. He’d peel and blister. His face was swollen, red and painful. His eyes were watering. The lips were beginning to crack. Neither one of them was over twenty-five.

“Did you use all the water you had in filling the radiator?” I asked them.

The woman answered me, “Yes,” she said. “The car took every drop. Then we ran out of water, and that’s when it burned out the bearings.”

I nodded.

“We’ve got to get out of the desert,” said the man.

I’d heard people talk like that before. His words were coming rapidly, and his eye shifted a little bit as he talked. He was afraid, and the fear was getting bigger as he tried to fight it down.

“It’s a long way to water,” I said.

“Why, we passed a watering station not over two hours ago!” the girl said.

“Two hours in an automobile, and two hours walking are two different things, ma’am.”

She thought that over, turned to look at the fellow who was with her. “Let me talk with you a minute, Ted.”

He joined her. They walked forty or fifty yards away and started whispering. They pulled out a paper, started pointing, then rubbering around at the mountains that rimmed the valley. There were the Panamints on one side, and the Funerals on the other, and both ranges were dancing about in the heat, the horizons twisting and writhing grotesquely.

The woman reached the decision. I could see her lips snap out the words. Then the man nodded, and the woman came striding over toward me.

“Do you know this section of the desert?” she asked.

“I’ve been through it a few times.”

“Do you know of a twisting cañon that makes a right-angled bend just beyond the shifting sand hills?”

I puckered my forehead. “I don’t remember anything like that offhand.”

She bit her lip. “How far are the drifting sand hills from here?”

“You’re getting into ’em now, ma’am. They’re off here to your right. I made a swing so as to avoid ’em.”

She batted those big eyes of hers swiftly, then peered into my eyes steadily, searchingly. After a second or two she nodded her head.

“I’m Lois Beachley,” she said. “The man with me is Ted Wayne. We want to find that cañon over beyond the drifting sand. Some one sold me a site for a homestead somewhere over in there.”

I kept my eyes on hers. “You mean a gold mine, don’t you?”

Her eyes were steady, unwavering. “Yes, I mean a gold mine.”

“It’d be a hard trip to get there. You’d have to travel light.”

“I can travel light.”

“I couldn’t very well guide you there, ma’am. I’m sorry, but I got some business of my own down here. People don’t come here this time of year unless they’ve got business.”

I could see her eyes wince.

“How can we get there?” she asked.

“You can’t. Not with that outfit you’ve got.”

She sighed. “Well, then,” she wanted to know, “how can we get back to water?” And that question showed me just where I stood.

“You can’t, ma’am, not with the outfit you’ve got,” I replied. “I guess I’ve got to take charge of you. My name’s Bob Zane. I’ll just let my own business go for a while.”

I did some internal cussing, kissed a thirty-five dollar investment good-by, and wished to thunder they’d passed a law keeping tenderfeet and fools out of Death Valley after it warms up. Seems like I’ve tried to prospect some during my life, but I’ve never done over a few hours of it. Most of the time has been spent getting to the place I wanted to prospect, running out of grub, chasing burros, getting back and ready for another start, chasing more burros, and rescuing fool tenderfeet that go busting into the desert without knowing what they’re there for.

“We’ll pay you,” she said.

I nodded. They could pay me, but never enough to make up for what I was missing. I had a hunch that the man with the scarred forehead had been pulling a fast one, another hunch that my thirty-five dollar investment, if played right, would have netted me a big return and given me the laugh on some of the wise guys at camp. But it was gone now. I had to chaperon these two tenderfeet to water; and by the time I’d done that, it’d be too late to do anything with the other. So I figured I might as well go whole hog as nothing, and guide ’em in to where they wanted to go.

They had the car loaded with the sort of provisions that weren’t much good in the desert; heavy canned stuff, fruits that were put up in a heavy, sickeningly sweet syrup. There were only two cans of tomatoes.

“You should have brought more tomatoes and not so much sweet stuff,” I said.

The girl stared.

Ted Wayne shook his head. “I like sweets,” he said, “and I don’t like tomatoes.”

I shrugged my shoulders, took my knife and opened the cans of tomatoes. The way we were traveling, we weren’t going to be able to load the burros with canned stuff.

The girl tackled the tomatoes without enthusiasm. Then, as she got a couple of swallows, her eyes brightened. She lowered the can.

“Why,” she said, “they’re delicious — the most wonderful things I ever tasted!” She passed the can over to Wayne.

He shook his head. “I’ll taste ’em,” he said. Then the aroma struck his nostrils. He took a gulp, looked surprised, and drained the can. We killed the other can in record time. Then I gave them their first lesson on the desert.

“When you get out in the desert you sweat a lot. That leaves a lot of acid stuff in the body. The only thing that’ll cut that is the right kind of fruit. Tomatoes are better than anything I know of. Orange juice’d be great, only you can’t carry it. Load up with canned tomatoes when you head for the desert. Now we’ll start.”

We started. I’d had to pack my saddle burro with the extra stuff I’d taken for the pair, and we were all walking. It wasn’t pleasant walking. If there’d been any shade, I’d have given them a rest; but I knew the chap was going to be pretty well all in, and I wanted to haze him along before he got to the point where he’d blow up.

Starting the way I did, they’d have the cool of the evening for the last part of the drag. They’d need it.

IV. Whispers

I hadn’t gone a mile before I saw what was happening. The desert was getting Wayne. He was afraid of it. Fear was in his eyes, in the too rapid steps which he took, in the frightened glances he gave over his shoulder, and in the way he kept trying to talk — not saying anything — just listening to the sound of his own voice.

The desert does that to people. The first time you see it, you’re either afraid of it or else you feel a strange fascination for it. And when I say “see it,” I mean get out in it. Anybody who whizzes through the desert on an improved road in an automobile, or rolling along in a shaded Pullman car, has never really seen it. The only way to see the desert is to get out on foot; out where the eternal silence grips you; out where the heat makes the horizons dance and the mirages glitter; where you get that feeling of being less than a needle point in the universe, and then feel that needle point shrivel away to nothing. A man has to fight to keep from feeling that he’s going to shrivel on himself until there’s nothing left. It’s a funny feeling. You can’t tell about it. You’ve got to experience it to know what it is.

But the girl looked at it the other way. She was one of those who sees the desert, likes it, and fits right into it.

The desert’s that way. Some she adopts and takes to her breast without a murmur. Some she fights and bums, and strips away the veneer until she’s got just the naked soul to deal with. Sometimes she rebuilds on the foundation of that naked soul, and sometimes the soul just shrivels and vanishes. The desert’s the kindest mother a man ever had, because she’s the crudest. Things seem sort of out of place to us when they’re cruel. That’s because we’re soft. But it’s cruelty that develops character. Man learns by fighting.

I’ve seen men stand on the edge of the Grand Cañon and say that it was a manifestation of the Eternal, a temple of nature and so forth. It’s all of that. It’s God, showing himself. But those same people turn away with a shudder when they see a cat torturing a mouse. If they only knew it, there’s just as much of God manifesting himself in that as there is in the Grand Cañon. It’s the law of life.

The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert.

We got into the drifting sand in about an hour. Those are the sand hills that drift on the wind, marching across the face of the desert, always shifting, never stopping, a ceaseless slithering march of hissing sand.

Lois Beachley was dead game. She would have gone on until she dropped; and she was almost ready to drop. She hadn’t accustomed her muscles to walking, and walking in sand isn’t the same as walking on pavements. Wayne was stronger physically, but it was his nerve that I was afraid of. There was a light in his eyes that I didn’t like. The girl was walking because she wanted to make good. The young man was walking because fear was spurring him on.

The sun was casting shadows from the big sand dunes. I dropped the outfit down into a little gully between the sand hills, where purple shadows broke the glare of the light.

“We camp here to-night,” I said. “If you’ll show me the map, I think I can take you to the place you want to go tomorrow.”

“Map?” said Lois Beachley.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Don’t think I’m a fool.”

She hesitated a minute, then took out the map. It had been drawn in pencil. I looked at it and didn’t say anything.

“How about water, for washing and drinking and washing dishes and all that?” asked Ted Wayne.

“Plenty of water for drinking, if you drink desert style. You can have a cupful to moisten a rag with, if you want to scrub off. Dishes won’t get washed because they won’t need it. We will scour ’em out with sand, give ’em a dry cleaning. Anyway, there won’t be many dishes.”

Wayne looked at me, and I could see the panic in his eyes. Lois dropped down into the sand, scooped out a little hollow and relaxed. I could see that her knees were pretty weak. I unsaddled the burros and looked around for firewood.

Firewood is a problem in those sand hills, though there are some places where sagebrush grows on stilts. Sounds funny, but that’s exactly what it does. It begins to grow like ordinary sage. Then the wind comes along and blows the sand away from the roots. The sage pushes the roots down deeper into the sand, and the wind blows away some more sand. It gets to be a race between the sagebrush and the wind; the old struggle between life and death that characterizes the desert life everywhere you find it; whether it’s human, animal or plant.

I got a little fire going. It wasn’t over eight inches in diameter, for we had to be careful of fuel there in the desert. We had a supper that was perhaps less than they expected; but I knew it would keep their strength up. Most people eat too much anyway, and their bodies can’t handle the poisons that are generated from the waste. But I can tell you when they’re camping with me in the desert they don’t eat too much.

The sun went down and the stars came out and silence gripped the desert. The girl dropped off to sleep. Ted Wayne tried to keep talking. It’s a way they have in the desert. When they make noises with their mouths they feel they’re entities. When they keep quiet and the silence grips them, they can feel their souls shrivelling.

After a while sheer fatigue had its way. I got Wayne to lie on his blanket and talk. He got his words twisted, the talk got thick, and then quit altogether. He snored.

Damn him! He couldn’t keep quiet even when he slept.

About midnight, just as the moon was getting pretty well down, the desert itself began to talk. The wind hissed the sand along, and the sand gave forth whispers. The desert always talks when the wind blows and the sand starts to drift along. Sometimes it’s just the sand rustling against the dry leaves of sage or the stalks of cacti. But out in the land of the drifting sand hills, it’s the sound of sand slithering along on sand, a hissing whisper that almost seems to make words and sentences.

Men that have lived long in the desert absorb its personality. They get gray of eye and their voices get that whispering undertone in them. Such men will swear to you that those sand whispers mean something. They’ll tell stories of hearing the sand say things they can understand, just when they’re dropping off to sleep.

I lay in my blanket and listened to the sand whispers as the moon slid down. I like to hear the soft sound of slithering sand rustling along on sand; a dry, hissing whisper that’s only heard in the desert.

I knew Wayne was awake because I could hear him move, and he’d quit snoring. Then I thought I heard a distant voice. It wasn’t a whisper. It sounded human. And there seemed to be steps sounding through the noises made by the sand.

I sat up. I’m not overly given to imagination, and I certainly thought I’d heard steps.

I rolled out of the blankets, pulled on my boots, and started slipping along the little ravine between the two big sand hills where I’d made camp. When I got a hundred yards from camp, I climbed up on top of the ridge. The desert stretched out, silent and desolate. The sand hills were like the waves of some great white ocean, lashed mountain high, and then suddenly frozen. The moon was just angling down the edge of the Panamints.

I thought I saw specks off to the southwest, specks that moved, black things that were just moving into the black rim of the surrounding night. Then the moon dropped out of sight, and there was a hushed blackness that gripped everything. I sat and listened, and the night got darker and darker. Then I heard steps again.

This time there could be no mistake. They were running steps, and they were close. They crunched in the sand, floundered down hills, toiled up hills, swung to the left, circled, came toward me.

I crouched. I could hear the running body, the thudding crunch of the feet, even catch the panting intake of the laboring breath. Then a shape loomed up against the glow of the sky.

“Ted Wayne,” I said, “come here.”

He gave a mighty bound. A wild deer couldn’t have been more startled, nor given a quicker reaction to fear.

Then he stopped, quivering, gasping.

“Come on over here,” I repeated, keeping my voice perfectly normal, not showing that I felt there was anything at all unusual about a man running around in the desert. “I’m afraid our outfit’s been stolen.”

The words brought him to me, panting, shivering; but the full significance of those last words, about the outfit having been taken, did not register.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Sit down,” I told him.

He sat down.

“Now just why,” I asked him, “should any one want to follow us and steal our outfit?”

He didn’t answer that question. He sat there, panting and quivering, like a horse that’s just begun to run a race and has then been pulled out of it.

He didn’t answer me, and I didn’t say anything more. He got his breath. The desert got blacker and blacker until only the very faintest tinge of gray marked the outlines of the sand hills, which were now illuminated only by the light of the stars. Then he burst out into speech, and his words were the words of panic.

“It’s got me! I’m a coward — I’m a failure! Lois sees that I’m a coward, and she’s scornful. I can’t help it. It’s too big. It’s too God-awful empty. The silence, the big spaces, the cruelty of it! Then, when the wind comes, the sand starts to mock me. It whispers threats to me, makes me feel that it’s lying in wait for me!”

He stopped his mad torrent of words, choked back a sob, and flung himself erect, poised, ready to start running again, seized by that blind panic which grips men when they find their entities slipping from their grasp, being absorbed in the Infinite.

I began to talk to him, to make soothing sounds, not caring particularly what I said, but knowing that the mere sound of my voice would hold him, just as a trainer talks to a highly strung race horse.

“Did you ever hear of the law of drifting sand?” I asked him. “The noises you heard when the wind blew were the noises of the marching sand hills. They keep moving — at the rate of half a mile a year. It’s all been figured out.

“The railroads wanted to run through the desert, and the drifting sand worried them. They got a young engineer who loved the desert, a man who had something of the Arab temperament in his nature. His name was Randall, and he didn’t know what failure or fear meant. — They sent him into the desert to stay until he found out how to conquer the drifting sand. He lived among the sand hills, and he developed the greatest gift the desert can give to any man, the gift of patience. He lived with the sand, and he worked out a law, the law of drifting sand.

“He found that the hills were whisked about by the wind, that they drifted half a mile a year, until they piled up to a certain height. After they reached that height they didn’t drift any more. They absorbed the other drifting sand hills that were pushed up against them. And from the data he got while he lived in the desert, he found the law of the drifting sand; that the big ones don’t move. It’s only the little ones who drift. That law which he discovered has been the basis of road construction in the desert.

“Now you ought to sit down and take stock of yourself. You’ve never done it before. You’ve been drifting through life, making motions because everybody else around you was making the same sort of motions. When you get out in the desert and find that there aren’t a lot of people all around you who are doing the same things you are, you get frightened. — But always remember that the desert is the best mother a man ever had. Remember that she’s cruel, and that cruelty is the essence of kindness. It’s the law of nature that only the fittest survive.

“Man gets to be the fittest by fighting. That’s what the desert does to you. It makes you fight for existence. That’s why she’s so kind. You stay here, and quit trying to avoid the desert. Get right down on the surface of the desert and talk to it. Remember what I said to you about cruelty being kindness, and remember that it’s only the little ones who drift around with every passing wind.”

I got up and walked away. It was a cruel thing to do, all right, but I was practicing a little of what I preached. It is true that the desert is kind just because it’s cruel, and I was handling him the same way the desert would. I knew that we were up against something, that it was going to be a hard fight if we were going to win out. Some one had been following us, keeping us spotted, and that some one had swooped down and lifted our stock. That was serious. It was certain to mean suffering, and it might mean death. I owed it to the girl and I owed it to myself not to complicate things any by having a desert-frightened tenderfoot running around in circles, screaming with fear. That’s what the desert will do to a tenderfoot such as this one, if he tries to get away from it. It’s only human nature for a man to react that way. When he becomes afraid of something, he wants to get away from that something. When he starts to get away, he wants to run. When he starts to run from the desert and finds that it’s all around him, he goes clean batty.

V. A Shot for Each Burro

I walked back to camp. By that time the girl was sitting up. I could see her form blotched against the slithering sand.

“What is it?” she asked in a low voice.

I sat down beside her. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because there’s so much about you that I don’t know.”

“Yes?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “When I met up with you, I figured that your business was your business, and mine was mine. You could mind yours and I’d attend to mine. I didn’t ask you how come you happened to be running around the desert with a young man. I didn’t ask whether you were engaged, or brother and sister, or husband and wife. I didn’t even ask what you were doing here.

“When you pulled that story on me about the homestead, I didn’t ask any questions, although I wanted to make certain it was a mine you was looking for, because there wouldn’t have been any use going on if it had been a homestead. No one could live in this country; it would be impossible to raise enough to feed a hungry grasshopper.

“But now things are different. Some one’s snooped around here and nosed us out and swiped my burros. Maybe I can trail ’em in the morning when it gets light. Maybe I can’t. I’ve got a six-gun, and that’s all. Maybe I’m running up against rifles. — Furthermore, we’ve got precious little water here in camp, and we don’t stand a very good chance of walking out to where there’s water. If we make it, it’ll be because we travel light and go without food. We can’t carry any weight and make it.

“I’ve got to reach a decision. If we’re going back for water, we should start right away and take advantage of the cool night. If we’re going to try and get our stock, I want to swing out to a spot where they won’t be looking for me, and I’ll have to do it before daybreak.”

I said that much and then I quit talking. The silence of the desert weighted down the darkness, made it seem like a black velvet blanket.

She sighed, “You wouldn’t be helped any by what I know. It’s nothing that concerns the present situation.”

“No?” I said, and my tone was sarcastic.

“No,” she said.

I kept still for a time, and the desert, too, was still.

That silence started things. The girl drew in her breath as though she was going to start talking, then waited a minute, then made another start. At last she got out the words.

“I’ll tell you the whole truth,” she said. “I think I can trust you, and I don’t usually make a mistake in judging men. I’m a stenographer. I worked in a big office. I knew a man named Bloom — Harry Bloom. He was a friend of my father’s.”

I straightened up. “Huh?” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing. Go on.”

She went on, talking in a level monotone, her knees crossed, her hands holding them with interlocked fingers. She seemed to take to the desert, to be a part of it.

“Harry Bloom wrote to me and asked me to finance him on a trip. He called it ‘grubstaking’ him. He didn’t need much money, and he seemed sort of hopeless, inclined to quit. I had a little money, and I sent it to him. — Then I got a letter from him, a long while later. That letter had been carried around by some man who wasn’t very clean. The envelope was all grimed with dirt and smeared up with smudges from the penciled address. In it he said that he’d struck it rich, that he’d started back with a whole burroload of gold, and that his heart had commenced to go bad on him. He’d fainted twice, and he was afraid he’d die in the desert, and that some one would find his body and the gold, and that I’d never get my share.

“So he’d buried the gold, and had written me the letter to tell me about it. He was going to leave that letter near a cross-trail which he was coming to, and he knew that some teamster or prospector would come along within a day or two and pick it up.

“But in that letter he didn’t dare to tell me the secret of where he’d buried the gold, for fear some person might open it. He said he’d communicate with me again and let me know where the gold was buried. He said the second letter would just be a brief line that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else if they should open it. It’d take the two letters put together to make sense.

“Of course I was all excited when I got that letter, and I could hardly wait. I figured there wasn’t much chance he’d die from his heart, not if he took it easy. I waited, expecting to get a wire from him when he reached a town. Then I got another letter. This time it was in a cleaner envelope, and it looked as though it had been purchased in a store, then dropped in a post office without having been carried around any.

“That letter just had a scrawl which read: ‘Here it is.’ That was all the letter said; but there was map in it, and this is the map.”

She took out the map that she’d shown me before, the one that had been scrawled in pencil.

I struck a match and studied the map by the light of that match, and when it burnt down lit another one.

The more I saw of the map the funnier it looked.

“I don’t know any cañons that look like those,” I said, “and I don’t like the way they drain. They don’t look natural. That right-angled turn in the cañon, where the mine’s supposed to be or where the gold’s supposed to be buried, doesn’t mean a thing, except a double-cross...”

I broke off and looked over toward her. Her face was startled, the eyes wide. Then the match went out.

“Do you know a good looking fellow who’s built for dancing?” I asked suddenly. “He’s a man who has a deep, thrilling voice, a well-shaped mouth, and on his forehead a scar shaped like a star. Maybe he got it when he was pitched through a windshield.”

She gasped. “Why that description fits Fred Trask!” she said.

“I thought it would,” I told her, “and I take it that Fred Trask works in the same office you do, and that your mail came to the office. Maybe Fred had been trying to make love to you, and was jealous?”

She was leaning forward now, and I could hear the quick breathing as she stared into the darkness, trying to see my face. “Yes,” she said. And then, after a moment, “Why?”

I laughed. “Because,” I told her, “Fred Trask was jealous. He saw how excited you got when you received that grimed-up letter in a man’s handwriting, and he decided that he’d see who the letter was from. You probably put the letter in your purse, and Fred had a chance to steal a look at the purse.

“Knowing what to expect, he watched your mail; and when the second letter came, he simply kept it from you. He got it first and kept it.”

She spoke slowly. “But I received the second letter. That was how I got the map.”

“No,” I explained, “that second letter was pocketed by Trask. He knew you’d be expecting a second letter, and so he doped up this letter with the phony map. That lulled your suspicions. Then, I presume, you heard of Bloom’s murder.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I read of it in the paper. — And Ted Wayne had been a very good friend of mine. He liked me, and I liked him. He wouldn’t listen to my coming out here alone. He had the car, and he said he was going to drive me and see that nothing happened to me. — Fred Trask laid off from work because he was sick. How did you know that I knew him, or that he’d mixed into this thing?”

“Because of certain information,” I told her, “for which I paid thirty-five dollars. And now it looks as though the investment had been increased slightly.”

I stopped talking. For a few minutes we both kept silence. Then I heard four shots, muffled by the distance — powieee, powieee, powieee, powieee!

She jumped to her feet. “Shots!” she said.

“Yes,” I told her. “Four shots — one for each burro. My thirty-five dollar investment has been increased by the price of four burros!” I went over to my bed roll and buckled on my six-gun.

A quavering voice sounded from the darkness. A moment after there came another call, louder, stronger. I answered with a “Hulloa!”

“Who is it? — Ted?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you like him as much as you did?”

I could see the outline of her shoulders against the gray background of fine sand as she shrugged.

“I don’t like cowards!” she said.

“Sometimes people get branded as cowards when they’re only sensitive,” I said. “I’ve seen people like that before. Some of them are real cowards, but some of them are just so sensitive that some sudden new experience jars them. It isn’t that they’re afraid. It’s just that their systems are more highly strung.”

She turned away and didn’t answer.

Ted Wayne called again, this time closer. I answered again. I could hear his feet then, and a minute later he showed up against the blank gray of the sand.

“I heard shots,” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “Somebody was celebrating the Fourth of July. Sit down and take a load off your feet. I’m going out to explore. You can’t come with me, because you’d get lost.”

He didn’t sit down. “Why can’t I come, and what’s it all about?”

“You’re entitled to know,” I said. “You’re probably going to be shot in order to keep your lips from giving damaging testimony. Or else you’re going to be left out in the desert to die of thirst. — You may as well know what it’s all about.” Then I told them the whole story.

Neither one of them interrupted me. I told them all about meeting the man with the scarred forehead, the attempts to buy the chunk of conglomerate from Jose Diaz, the gambler; and the finding of the disk of gold concealed inside that chunk of rock.

“So you think that disk of gold held the key to the location of the buried gold?” asked Lois Beachley, when I had finished.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you think that Fred Trask stole our burros?” Ted Wayne wanted to know.

“Not exactly,” I said, “but Fred Trask is behind it, and he’s taken the other two into his confidence. They’re Sam Pitch and Dick Rose, who stole the burros. They’ve been sitting up here on some of these points, looking through glasses at us. They saw us make camp, knew just where to come to make their raid. Now they’ve left us in the desert, where we can’t carry any grub or blankets. We’ll have to fight for life.”

“Then,” said Lois, “we’d better start going for water right away, and let the mine go.”

“That’s the wise tiling,” I told her. “Only I think I’d better go and look the ground over first.”

“You’re the doctor,” she said. “But I thought you yourself said that if we were going to have to go for water it’d be better to start while it was cool.”

“I’ve sort of changed my mind,” I said.

She sighed. “Go ahead then, and look around.”

“I want to go, too,” said Ted Wayne.

His voice was quiet, controlled, seemed to have something of power in it.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind on that, too. I want you to come.”

The girl pulled her blanket over her shoulders. “Well, I’ll be here when you get back. Don’t take chances.”

VI. Battle

We started out, climbing over the sand hills.

Ted Wayne tugged at my sleeve. “Thanks for what you said about the desert,” he said. “I was all worked up, nervous — frightened, I guess. Then I sat down in the silence, and I thought over what you said. All of a sudden things seemed to change. It was just like being turned around, and then suddenly seeing something that puts you straight on your directions. Everything seemed to whirl for a minute, and the desert didn’t seem to be anything to be afraid of any longer.”

“Attaboy!” I encouraged him.

He was going to need all his nerve before we got out of there.

“Wait a minute!” he went on. “I want to tell you. I know what you’re holding back.”

I stopped in my tracks. “You know what?”

“What you’re holding back. There was a murder done, remember. Harry Bloom didn’t die from his heart. He was shot because somebody thought he had the gold with him. It was probably one of those two men who are guiding Fred Trask. They don’t want us to testify afterwards. If we don’t die of thirst, leaving the desert, they’ll see that we die some other way. That’s why you’re trying to go to them instead of trying to get to water.”

I saw that he knew so much that I let him have the real truth.

“You’re only partly right, Ted.” I told him. “If we weren’t interfering with those men, they’d have let us alone. Now that map the girl has was forged before Fred Trask got the gold disk and knew where he wanted to search. It was drawn by a desert man, so Trask probably had Sam Pitch in with him all the time, after he got that first letter.

“They steered you folks out to these drifting sand hills so they could get you on a false trail, out of the way. Then they got that gold disk, and we find that they’ve gone into the desert, that we’re crowding right on their trail. We make a camp, and they come along and run off our burros, shoot them, and try to stampede us. What’s the reason?

“The reason is,” I went on, not waiting for an answer, “that we’re camped right near the locality they want to search. If we don’t start moving, they’ll try to attack. If we do, they may kill us or they may not. — Now, I figure they’re coming into camp here in order to see what’s happened. I’m going to sort of look around. I want you to go and get Lois and take her out some place where you can sit tight until you hear from me. There’s no use alarming her. — Will you do that?”

“Can I do more good doing that than helping you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He gripped my hand.

“Then that’s what I’ll do. Good-by, until I see you again.”

“So long,” I said.

I listened to him trudge back. Then I sneaked along behind him. He didn’t know that I was anywhere around. I followed him in to the camp, hid behind the ridge of a sand hill while he talked with the girl, heard them move away.

After that I began to do something that was difficult and a little dangerous. I began to bury myself in the sand, just as kids do at the beach. Only this time, I was worming my way into the slope of a dry sand hill, with sand pouring down over me every time I made a move.

I not only wanted to get in out of sight, but I wanted to leave the slope of the sand hill so that it wouldn’t show that it had been disturbed. The sand was dry and fine. It ran like water. I worked my way back into the side of the hill, cascading sand down on my body until only my arms were free. I had my six-gun in my right hand, and I worked with my left.

By the time I finished, I was fairly well concealed, but I couldn’t make any sudden moves, except with my right hand and the six-gun.

I waited. The sky became gray in the east, and the silhouettes of the mountains stood out against the flare of color that followed the gray. The desert was whispering again, the wind whipping the sand, wiping out trails, smoothing over the tracks that I’d left when I wormed my way into the sand. It was a break for me — but the desert always gives me the breaks.

The light became stronger. Then I could feel little jarring noises that thudded along through the sand. They seemed to come as impulses along my spine before they reached my ears as sound. They were footsteps. I got ready.

I’d holed in where I could see the camp. It looked pitifully meager, the saddles and blankets, the few dishes and the little sacks of provisions.

Then a man walked down the little wind ravine between the sand hills.

“I told you I saw ’em walking away. Caught a glimpse of ’em against the sky.”

It was Dick Rose who spoke.

“Well, they’ll start for water — and they won’t make it.”

That would be Sam Pitch.

There was a laugh, and I knew who would give that scornful, sneering, reverberant laugh. It would be Fred Trask.

“What gets me,” said Rose, “is that they had to make their camp right where we figured the gold had been cached. It ain’t a hundred yards from here — not the way I dope it out.”

“Well, it ain’t luck,” said Pitch. “That damned Zane has some way of getting what he wants in the desert. They say the sand whispers secrets to him, and tells him what to do. I’ve about come to the conclusion that that’s about what happens.”

Dick Rose rasped out a single word.

“Baloney!” he said. “You’re gettin’ superstitious. Get these burros ready to pack up that camp equipment. No use leaving it here. Somebody might stumble on it and ask embarrassing questions.”

I could see the string of burros now, plodding along not far behind, on the end of a lead rope. I drew in my breath, ready to play my final card. But I wanted a little more information first, if I could get it before that fateful command of “hands up” would start the action.

However, I didn’t get the information — not directly — and I never shouted the command. There was a whirling cloud of sand, then a black figure plunged down over the crest of one of the sand hills. Ted Wayne had found a stick of wood and a stone, and he’d tied the stone to the end of the wood, Indian fashion, making a very effective war club.

The sudden attack, the very unexpectedness of it, carried his first objective. Fred Trask yelled, leapt to one side, and the rock crashed a blow on his forehead.

He went down like a sack of sugar being dumped on the scales.

Ted charged, swung his club. A revolver roared. Then they were too close for shooting. It was a case of clubbed guns against stone war club, of man against man. Nor could I shoot. The three were mixed in a whirling gyration of flying arms and legs, of faces that were distorted with effort.

It was Sam Pitch who got him pinioned, but the kid had inflicted a lot of damage in the meantime. There were some casualties on the other side, too.

Dick Rose raised his revolver. “You damned whelp!” he observed.

Ted Wayne stood there smiling. I heard the girl scream. She had been watching it all over the crest of the sand hill.

Dick Rose snapped a command to his lieutenant. “Grab the girl,” he said, “as soon as I kill this swine. Bob Zane’s around here somewhere. Get to one side, so the bullet doesn’t go through and hit you...”

Then I spoke, keeping my tone low, so it would be the more difficult to locate me.

“Drop that gun, or you’re a dead man!”

He hesitated, pursed his lips, whirled. “Drop it!” I snapped.

But he had located me, perhaps because of some flicker of sunlight on the barrel of the gun which I held. Perhaps it was just the sound of my voice.

He fired, and the bullet thunked in the sand within a matter of inches from where my head was held imprisoned by the burden of the sand.

He fired again and ducked to one side for shelter. Matters had gone far enough. I squeezed the trigger of my gun — I heard the bullet strike, saw Dick Rose spin to one side, stagger, slump to his knees. For a moment his graying face, twisted with hatred, stared at me. He tried to raise the gun for a third shot, and failed. He pitched forward, on his face.

Sam Pitch flung Ted Wayne to one side, took a snap shot at me, then swung his gun toward the lad. I fired. The bullet clipped Pitch on the shoulder. I was ready to fire again, when Ted Wayne swung his club. The stone hit Pitch a glancing blow on the ribs, knocking the wind out of him.

The next moment Ted was on him like a tiger. He flung the war club to one side, using his fists.

I floundered out from the sand slope, and it was slow work, for the sand held me like silken bonds.

Ted was sitting astride of Sam Pitch when I reached him. The girl was laughing and crying all at once. I took some rope from the packsaddle and tied up Pitch. Then I went over to Fred Trask and tied him up. There wasn’t any need to tie up Dick Rose.

I went back to Trask, searched his pockets, found what I wanted. Sam Pitch stared with sullen eyes while I studied what I had found. It was a map, a map made from a button of hammered gold. The surface had been carved into a relief map, and there were three bearings scratched on it, with the point of intersection marked.

That point of intersection was in the slope of a sand hill, one of the big ones that wouldn’t move.

I looked down at Sam Pitch. “You’ll hang for the murder of Harry Bloom,” I said.

His lips twisted. “I didn’t kill him. It was Dick Rose who did that. He was on the trail of the gold that Bloom was supposed to have had. Then he found he’d been tricked out of it. — Along comes this boob, to play into our hands. We were going to get the gold, and then kill the boob.”

I nodded. It had happened just the way I had figured the play.

I looked at Ted Wayne. He had a cut on the side of his head. His lips were puffed out, and one eye was swelling shut. But there was something proud and self-reliant in his bearing.

“You were going to keep the girl safe,” I told him.

He stared at me, unflinchingly. “We knew you were coming back to face danger. We knew they didn’t intend to let any of us get away. So we decided to come back and see it through with you, shoulder to shoulder.”

I sighed. “You had the breaks. You should have done what I told you to do. If those crooks had used any sense, and deployed, you’d have been shot down like a jackrabbit.”

He grinned. “Anyway, we got away with it! And I guess, from the looks of your face when you inspected that gold button, we’re as good as sitting on the gold right now!”

I looked at him. He was grinning, battle scarred, and I thought of the change that had come over him. The desert had adopted him, and the law of drifting sand had impressed itself upon him. The big ones stay put. Only the little ones are whisked this way and that by the changing winds of adversity.

My eyes drifted to the girl. I saw that she, too, was cognizant of the change that had taken place in her companion. Her lips made no sound. They didn’t need to. The story was in her eyes.

I knew that the desert had done its work well. When you bum off the veneer of convention in the tempering fires of the desert you find what’s underneath. When that engineer named Randall discovered the law of drifting sand for the railroad companies he discovered a law that relates to other things than sand hills. It’s a law that applies to character as well as to sand. Little characters are whipped about by winds of adversity. The big ones stay firm.