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

I. Shots That Missed

Up north of mojave the desert goes crazy.

I was camped, up on the shoulder of the mountains where the Joshua trees start to spot the barren waste. Off to the east the mountains flung themselves up into a jagged tangle of bright reds. To the west was a plateau country. In between was everything.

Wind, sun, and an occasional cloudburst had eroded the cañons, carved miniature cities out of the varicolored strata. By day there were reds so bright they flamed in the sun; blues that were like the ocean, glittering expanses of eye-blistering white. Now it was all a golden monotone. The moon, but a little past the first quarter, was sinking down toward the western plateau region.

My camp fire was smoldering down to red embers. I yawned a couple of* times and stared upward at the stars blazing down with fixed intensity. I knew that there was a wind coming up.

Then the sand would start to talk, as it slithered along on the wings of the wind, rustling against minaret, cacti, Joshua-palm; rustling, finally, when the wind got strong enough, against the sand itself. Those are the sand whispers. Desert dwellers will swear they whisper words when one is just drifting off to sleep.

It’s just fancy, of course. Yet, if you’ve never heard those sand whispers you can’t appreciate how much they sound like mysterious night voices hissing soft words.

I kicked off my shoes, rolled into the blankets.

The first faint wings of the night wind caressed my cheek.

I snapped bolt upright.

It was a rifle shot, crackling, crisp, deadly.

I reached for my boots, pulled them on. My rifle was in the saddle scabbard. My six-gun was over the horn. I grabbed the belt, heavy with cartridges.

“Crack!”

A second shot disrupted the night. This time there was the long-drawn snarl of a whining bullet, glancing from a rock down the cañon, humming over my head.

I reached the fire in two swift strides and kicked sand over it. Three seconds and there wasn’t the faintest flow of light from it. But there remained the unavoidable stream of light smoke drifting off downwind.

The echoes of the second shot were still booming back from the different cliffs when a third shot rang out.

After that there was silence.

I moved off a little ways and sat with my rifle on my knees.

The desert wind whipped up into a series of hard gusts, then died down. The night was calm, warm, star-studded, mysterious.

The moon slid down the vault of the sky, bright enough to give some faint light, but not bright enough to dull the stars.

Somewhere down the slope I heard a rock rattle.

My burros were up the slope. The rock hadn’t been dislodged by the burros.

After a few minutes I heard the scrape of a boot heel over a bit of rock.

I cocked the rifle.

Steps. They were coming up the steep slope — toiling, hurrying, panic-stricken steps.

There is something uncanny about the desert night when stumbling steps sound through the oppressive silence which reaches down from the stars, a silence so intense that it makes the ears ring.

I could hear every step now.

The person was keeping to the east, would miss my camp by fifty yards.

I strained my eyes into the deceptive, golden glow of the weak moonlight. I thought I could see motion, rubbed my eyes, and the thing vanished. Ten yards farther up the slope my eyes snapped to a blur which seemed solid. They blinked and focused.

It was a figure, toiling upward.

I waited.

Twenty steps more, and I could hear the sobbing, anguished breath coming and going through laboring lungs. There was a slightness about the figure, a suggestion of small-boned physique which was puzzling.

It turned, walked a dozen steps toward where I sat motionless, hesitated, started back down the slope with staggering steps.

Then I knew.

It was a woman.

I continued to wait, trying to determine what had caused this mad rush up the slope, the zigzagging about.

She crossed down below where I was camped. The wisp of smoke blew down toward her, yet she did not pause. I spotted her then for a city dweller.

A desert woman would have checked instantly to rigid attention.

I listened to see if any one followed. I could hear no one.

She started up the slope again, now on the other side of me.

She was breathing a little more regularly now.

“I know it was here,” I heard her say, and the words were fraught with inner anguish.

I got to my feet.

“Was there something you wanted?” I asked.

The hissing of her breath sounded sharply, clearly audible against the background of desert silence.

For a moment she was rigid, then she started toward the sound of my voice.

“Yes, yes! I saw your fire. I want protection!”

I could see that she was unarmed.

“Come over here and sit down. You’re all in.”

Her lungs were laboring, but she was as gracefully alert as a deer. She came to my side.

“Sit down.”

She sat down, sprawled out along the slope, her bent elbows behind her, propping her back. She had on boots, whipcord breeches and a silk blouse, low in the neck.

The moonlight showed her face. It had been burnt an angry red. Evidently she was new to the desert.

“You want protection?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“From what?”

“From the awful silence of the desert. I tried to camp by myself. The silence drove me crazy. I started to run. Then I saw your camp fire.”

“You found the silence terrifying?”

“Yes.”

“It was broken a few moments ago,” I told her, “by several rifle shots.”

She sat up, stared at me with a surprise that was manifest in sagging jaw, in widened eyes, a surprise that was too ludicrously assumed to be convincing.

“No!” she exclaimed incredulously.

I said nothing.

We sat in silence for several minutes. She looked about at my outfit, packsaddle, riding saddle, canteens, blankets, grub.

“You know the desert, don’t you?”

I said nothing.

“It’s wonderful to think of a man who can go out all alone in the desert and be so calm, so in tune with nature!”

I motioned toward the stars.

“You’re not alone, ma’am, when you’ve got the stars.”

She glanced up. Her features turned toward the stars, studying them.

“I wonder...” she said softly, but her voice trailed off into silence and she didn’t say what it was she was wondering about. After a while she spoke again: “Men have been murdered under these stars,” she said ominously.

I shrugged my shoulders.

She made no further attempt at conversation. Her breath came back, and I could see she was nearly all in. She had evidently had a hard day and was close to the limit of exhaustion.

“You can prop your head against the saddle,” I told her. “That’ll take the strain off your arms.”

She thanked me as I dragged the saddle over to her.

That tilted her back, back so her eyes were staring upward at the stars. The moon slid down below the horizon. The wind freshened. Little wisps of sand started to scurry by. In a short time the desert would be whispering to itself. But the girl didn’t hear the sand.

Her breathing was more regular now. I glanced over at her. Her eyes were closed. She was asleep.

That was what I’d been waiting for.

I took my rifle and six-gun and slipped quietly down the slope. I didn’t know who had done the shooting, nor why. But I didn’t propose to have daylight find me as an animated target.

The shots had come to the east of me. The girl had been over on the east side of the slope. I figured the moonlight, the shadows, and doped it out that the only place a man could have seen the girl was from a little saddle over on the eastern ridge.

I angled along the slope, made a detour and started to climb. After half an hour I came to a place where the ridges joined.

It was dark now, save for the starlight. The wind had freshened. It was a warm wind, and it blew in savage gusts, sending little wraiths of dry, whispering sand slithering along the surface of the slope.

I took advantage of the wind and kept well over to the side.

After a while I got a whiff of distant tobacco. I smelled along upwind, tracing that tobacco smell as though I’d been a hound. It was coming from the saddle in the other slope, and I wanted to be pretty sure of my ground before I did anything.

It took me fifteen minutes to cover fifty yards. Then the tobacco smell stopped. I sat down and waited. A man learns patience in the desert. I had all night before me.

The wind rose to a fierce frenzy of rushing air and then abruptly stopped. Night winds will do that in the desert.

I waited. It was calm, and still.

After a while, a match scraped. I saw the flicker of flame. Then the end of a cigarette glowed, waned, and glowed again.

I inched my way along, stalking over the sand and loose rock, through the scrub sage, as carefully as though I’d been coming up on a deer.

I could make out his outline against the lighter color of the light slope behind him. It wasn’t a clear outline, just a blob of black, punctuated with a glowing red cigarette tip.

I worked closer, my rifle cocked.

I estimated the distance at twenty yards.

He took the cigarette from his mouth. I saw it sweep downward, then raise in a half circle as he stretched his arms. I was close enough to him to hear him suck in a great lungful of air as he yawned. Then he put the cigarette back in his mouth.

I kept working closer, hugging along the side of the slope, but keeping close to the ground.

I figured the distance at ten yards.

He saw me.

The cigarette end drooped, then dropped, scattering a little shower of ruddy sparks. I could hear the scratching of feet on sand as he crouched over and made fast motions.

“If you don’t sit quite still, my friend, you’re going to get shot!” I told him.

II. Double Crossed

He was startled at my voice, so near to him. And then, perhaps, he had been waiting for a woman’s voice. He must be the type of man who would shoot at a woman, otherwise he’d never have fired those shots.

He sat quite still.

I strode up.

“Get those hands ’way up.”

He stretched them.

I unbuckled his belt and took the revolver and ammunition. The rifle was leaning against a sagebrush. I took that.

“You’re too careless with your guns,” I said.

He spoke then, for the first time. His voice was smooth and purring. He spoke with the easy glibness of one who relies much upon his tongue.

“You’re making a big mistake, my friend. I wasn’t shooting at you. I could see your camp fire, but I wasn’t shooting at it, or at you.”

“Shooting at a woman?” I asked, and he could sense my feelings in my voice.

“No,” he said. “I shot up in the air, to frighten her.”

“Frighten her out in the desert without blankets, food or water?”

“That,” he said, his tone suddenly changing, “is none of your damned business.”

In the darkness, my sweet smile was wasted on him.

“Which is exactly why you’re losing your hardware.”

I looked around me.

“Where’s your camp?”

“Don’t you wish you knew.”

“Hard boiled, ain’t you?”

“Yes!”

He snapped out that last answer, and I laughed at him.

“Listen, my talkative friend,” I told him. “You’re evidently from the city. You think you’re tough. But you’re out in the desert where everything is plunged into an acid bath that takes off the coating of bluff and leaves only the real stuff. Unless you assay a certain percentage of courage you won’t last.”

His laugh was a sneer, but it was uneasy.

“Now you started out by shooting at a woman. I’m warning you that the buzzards are going to make a meal out of you if you try it again. That plain?”

He was surly now.

“Maybe you better find out something about the woman you’re stickin’ up on a pedestal before you go shootin’ off your face too much,” he growled. “She’s an adventuress!”

I laughed at him.

“Therefore you should have the right to murder her, eh?”

He fidgeted around, sucked in his breath to say something, then thought better of it. There was a period of silence.

“That ain’t the point,” he said, after a while.

“What is the point?” I asked him.

“The point is that you’re buttin’ in on somethin’ that’s none of your business. The point is that woman’s a dirty crook, and you’ll find it out. She’s got a baby face and a cooing laugh, and her eyes are wide an’ innocent. But you stick around her and she’ll rob you of every damned thing you’ve got and leave you out in the desert for the buzzards to laugh at.

“I know. I trusted her. I fell for her line. She told me a great story about being robbed, about men who had followed her and tried to take away her rights. I fell for the line. She took every cent I had. I came back just as she was robbing the cache.

“Even then I only tried to scare her, but she lit out like the devil was after her. That was because she’d seen your camp fire, and figured you’d be another sucker. Now you come along and take away my guns, and give her refuge. That’s just the same thing as helping her steal the dough.”

“S’pose you come along with me,” I invited, “and face this woman.”

He laughed harshly.

“What a sucker you are! What a poor blind sucker. You think she’ll be there when you get back?”

“Of course she’ll be there,” I said.

For a full five seconds his mirthless laugh cackled, then he waved his hand.

“Go on, sucker. Go on back. You can talk it over with her. I don’t want to see her again.”

I looked up and down the slope.

“If she robbed you and you started shooting at her to frighten her, then your camp should be somewhere around here,” I said.

“Think so?” he asked, sarcastically. “I s’pose you’ve teamed up with the woman now, and you’ve come back to see if she might have left something you could grab.”

I turned on my heel.

“You’re as poor a liar as you are a marksman,” I said. “Shots that are fired up in the air don’t ricochet off of rocks and whine past my head!”

I left him with that. He snarled some retort, but I didn’t listen.

I waited after a few yards, listening, to see if he was going to try and follow me; but he was sitting perfectly still. Then the wind started again, a swift blast of warm air that came rushing up out of the darkness of the star-studded night, and I went back up the ridge.

He knew where I was camped, so there was no use in taking a roundabout way back. I angled along the contour lines, making the best progress I could in the dark.

It was slow work, particularly being burdened with the double set of hardware. In the middle of the wash between the two ridges there was a rock outcropping with a windswept cave. I put the captured guns in that cave, and climbed on around the slope to my own ridge.

The wind was blowing steadily now. Sand was drifting along, whispering as it passed, singing the age-old song of the desert.

I came to the place where my camp should have been.

It wasn’t there.

I was certain about the place. There was the smell of wood smoke, faint but distinctive, coming from my covered camp fire. I found the little pile of dried sage branches that I’d gathered for a quick breakfast in the morning.

Visibility was poor in the starlight, but I could make out what had happened. My camp had been packed up, the burros saddled, and the whole outfit moved. It was too dark to see tracks, and, if the wind didn’t go down, the tracks would be covered by morning.

I was in the desert without grub, water or blankets.

I sat down and cursed under my breath.

The outfit had either gone up the ridge or down. I guessed up, and started feeling my way through the darkness of the desert. It was slow progress. By three o’clock, I’d reached the upper rim of the slope. I lay down, put my coat over my head and kept sand out of my hair and neck and caught a little sleep.

With daylight I sat up and scanned the desert.

It was a tumbled succession of washes, ridges, caves, wind-corroded slopes. Colors flung themselves at the eye in a vivid profusion. Off to the east, the level floor of the Mojave was glittering in the heat. To the west, there was a suggestion of cool air about the pine-clad ridges of the high and rocky mountains. A fleecy cloud even hung about one of the distant peaks.

I sat perfectly still, waiting and watching.

I knew every foot of this desert, and I could get to water. Also, I had an old mining claim up here that had about petered out. I had a few supplies cached there. But I didn’t propose to be euchred out of my outfit and not do something about it.

The wind was still blowing, making tracking almost impossible, sending the scurrying sand zipping along the upper ridges. But the air was clear. The sand hugged along the ground.

At last I saw something off to the north, a flicker of motion. I strained my eyes and caught it again. It was a wisp of smoke, whipped about by the wind.

I lined up two landmarks and started.

Within ten minutes the wind had gone down. It was flat calm and the sun beat down from the brassy bowl of the sky. My shadow grew shorter and the weird ridges commenced to dance in the heat.

It’s up here that the desert goes crazy.

Volcanic, sedimentary, conglomerate, ridges, washes, outcroppings, red rock, blue rock, white rock, black rock; all mingled into indescribable confusion.

I came up out of a little draw and saw a moving speck, a speck that could only be a human being, man or woman.

I sat down and watched.

It was moving backward and forward in a peculiar manner, as though searching for something.

I worked my way forward, cautiously, keeping every bit of cover between me and the speck that I could.

By nine thirty I was up to where I could see him plainly. It was a man and he had a shovel. From time to time he would select a spot and start to dig.

He didn’t dig deep, just scratched around at the sand. Then he’d move along. All the time he was walking he’d look back over his shoulder at an arched rock on a big ridge. This rock formed a natural arch with a hole in the center that might have been twenty feet high by fifty broad.

I eased down behind a clump of sage and waited for him to come toward me. I figured he’d be working up the slope, and he did. It took him half an hour or so to get where he was exactly where I wanted him. Then, when his back was turned, looking toward the arched rock, I got noiselessly to my feet, carelessly dropped the rifle in the hollow of my arm, and was yawning when he turned around.

“Hello.” I said. “Hot, ain’t it?”

III. Ambushed

He jumped as though he’d planted his foot down on a rattlesnake, and sprawled on the rocks. His hand started to streak toward his hip, and then paused, as he thought better of it. A slow grin spread over his face as he got up, a sickly sort of grin.

He was tall, raw-boned, and there was a look in his eye I didn’t like. He started to say something, then snapped his mouth shut and nodded instead.

“Camping here?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Looking for something, eh?”

He paused a moment, then nodded. And I started to laugh.

He stared at me, and dull rage came to his eyes. I waited for him to say something, but he wouldn’t speak, simply stood there, lips clamped, eyes glittering.

I was certain of my ground then, and I called the turn on him so we could get the agony over with.

“And you’re afraid to talk for fear I’ll recognize your voice as that of the man who shot at the woman last night. Well, I recognize you anyway, so go ahead and say something.”

That started him.

He said plenty, about men who sneaked up on other men who were going about their legitimate business in the desert, and a lot of other stuff along the same line, until I hitched the muzzle of my rifle around a little bit so that it was pointing squarely in the middle of his belt buckle, and slid my thumb gently back to the hammer.

That sapped the enthusiasm from his remarks.

When he had calmed down, not so much because of having shot off steam as because he didn’t know just how far he could go, I bored my gaze into his eyes.

“Where’s the girl?” I asked.

“What girl?”

“The one that you shot at last night, the one that came running up the slope to my camp.”

He laughed at that, and his laugh was the same mirthless cackle it had been the night before.

“So she took a sneak on you, did she? Haw, haw, haw! That’s good, that is! Mind what I told you? And I’ll bet she stole you blind when she left, didn’t she? Yeah, I can see it in your face, can see it in the fact that you ain’t got no camp equipment. I bet she’d cleaned you out by the time you got back to your camp, brother.

“And it serves you right! You wouldn’t listen to reason, an’ you went around throwin’ guns down on folks and takin’ away their artillery, just because they objected to havin’ a woman rob ’em.

“Well, sucker, I seen a pack train headin’ down the pass toward Inyokern about daylight this morning, and I bet that’s where your lady friend’s gone to. Maybe you can overtake her if you start humping, but it’s goin’ to be a dry trail without no water.”

I waited until the silence had furnished weight to my words, then I talked to him in low, level tones.

“All right. That’s your story. Stick by it if you want to. Now listen to mine. This girl came into my camp. You were shooting at her. She was a tenderfoot. Her face was all burned red by the sun. She was all in. She was so dead tired she dropped off to sleep before she’d been with me for ten minutes.

“My camp was a four burro affair. It took some skill to get those packs on so they wouldn’t slip, get the burros saddled up and on the trail. I wasted a lot of time working over toward you, but not enough for a woman tenderfoot to have got four burros in and saddled and packed.

“My best guess is that there were at least two men, both of them pretty wise old desert rats. They sneaked up the ridge, pounced on the woman, tied and gagged her, and then made off with the outfit.”

I could see that my words told.

“Ain’t you clever!” he sneered.

“I don’t have to be,” I said. “I’m right. Now where’s the girl, and where’s the camp equipment? You’ve got just ten seconds to come clean. I’ve got the whip hand here and...!”

And that was as far as I got.

It was a look in his eyes that warned me; that, and perhaps the instinct that comes to one who has lived long in the desert. I flung myself to one side.

The man who shot at me was about fifty yards away on the crest of a ridge, and he had intended the bullet for a hit. It hissed through the air right where my stomach had been but a split second before.

I fired the rifle without taking it off my arm.

And I hoped the bullet would find its mark as I pulled the trigger. It was a high velocity shell, and if the softnosed, steel-jacketed bullet caught him it would rip him to mincemeat.

But the bullet struck in the sand, just ahead and below of where he was crouched, elbow on the ground, gun in hand. The bullet sent up a shower of sand and gravel, a stinging geyser that caught him full in the face and blinded him for the moment.

He shot twice more, but the bullets were as wild as though he’d been shooting in the dark.

But I had other things to think about. Off on the other side, some one had opened up on me with a rifle. The first bullet was a little to my right and low. I saw it shiver a rock outcropping into flying bits of rock dust as it smacked into the ledge, then went whining off into the blue air.

The man I’d been talking to had his gun out, and was firing as he ducked for cover. They were three against one, and they had me from different angles.

And it was murder they meant, too!

I flung down behind the outcropping of rock, took a chance on the man I’d blinded with the sand from my rifle bullet, and swung around on the man who had fired with the rifle.

My shot hit him.

He flung his arms in the air and the rifle swung up in a glittering arc of sunlight on blued steel. Then he howled with agony and rolled over behind his ridge.

The man who had been talking with me had vanished — down the slope, apparently. I could hear his feet, scudding “clumpety-clump, clumpety, clump,” like the hoofs of a big buck deer going places in a hurry.

I turned around to where the man had been who had been shooting blind. He was gone, down over the slope.

I figured my quick shooting had disconcerted them a bit. I couldn’t tell how seriously the man with the rifle had been hit, and I wanted to find out about that.

I worked back down my ridge, watching the ground like a hawk, rifle ready. The sun beat down with such terrific heat that I could almost feel the impact of the rays as a weight, pressing me down. The sand sent up little drifting clouds of dust under my feet, and the odor of gunpowder was in my nostrils.

I was mad clean through, and I was just a little bit alarmed. I was out in the desert without any water or food, and there were three men, temporarily routed, but bound to try and see that I didn’t leave the desert alive.

They wouldn’t have dared go so far unless they had determined to go farther.

I finally gained the ridge where the man had been located who had shot at me with the rifle. It was empty. I worked my way along on my stomach, taking care to keep out of sight of the other ridges.

A brass shell gleamed in the sun, the empty cartridge ejected from the rifle when he had flung that first shot at me. I wormed my way to it. The imprint of the place where the body had lain in the sand was plain.

There was a red spot about which a few desert flies buzzed in angry circles, and there were some big splinters of walnut.

I knew what had happened then. I’d shot him in the hand, and the bullet had ripped off a part of the rifle stock. The shot had put him out of commission as a rifle shot, but he’d been able to grab his weapon and run down the slope.

I could see where his tracks showed great running strides.

He’d joined the lanky one at the bottom of the draw then, and they’d managed to signal the third.

I crawled up on the ridge.

I could see them, five hundred yards away, three specks that worked their way along, keeping close to the shadow of the ridge. One of them seemed to be supporting the second. The third had the rifle and was covering the back trail.

I could have smoked them up a bit from where I was perched, but I preferred to let them think I’d either been hit or had left the country. I figured they’d go to their camp. And I wanted to see their camp, the worst way.

But there were gusts of wind blowing, and I knew there was a big blow somewhere in the offing. Drifting sand covers tracks pretty rapidly in the desert country.

I worked down the blind side of the slope, took up the trail. I’d gone two hundred yards when a bullet zinged through the air and clipped off a few twigs of sage within a couple of feet of me.

I ducked for cover and tried to locate the man who had shot.

I didn’t have any luck. He would not shoot again until I had come out and given him a fair mark. And he was probably up on a ridge somewhere, just below the skyline, barricaded behind a rock fort that would give him all the advantage.

Round one had gone for me, but I couldn’t follow up the advantage.

I inched down into a coulee and followed the dry wash back. I made up my mind I’d find out what they had been searching for — if I could. Perhaps there was an advantage to be gained in doing that, particularly now that I was in sole possession of the ground they’d been searching.

I found the little holes he’d shoveled out, but couldn’t make any sense out of them.

I looked back at the arched rock, and made a discovery.

Every one of the excavations was in line with the tip of a peak that showed through the hole of the arched rock.

But there were three peaks visible through the arch, from different angles, and the three men had evidently separated, to line down those peaks. That showed that they were looking for something buried at no great depth in the sandy slope of the hill opposite the arched rock at a point where the top of the arch lined up with the top of a peak in the range beyond.

I wasn’t kidding myself any.

These three men were desperate.

They’d gone back to their camp to get treatment for the man who had been wounded. But they were coming back. I was alone in the desert, with neither food nor water. They’d be back after me, and before very long.

IV. The Skeleton

There was one ace in the hole that I held that they didn’t know about. That was the mining claim I had a mile or so farther up the cañon, on a ridge. I’d cached an emergency ration there when I’d gone out, and there were some canned tomatoes in the cache.

Canned tomatoes!

Those are a godsend to the man in the desert. They neutralize the acids that are left in the body as the result of fatigue and perspiration. They are cooling, refreshing, and they give more quick strength and ease than any amount of water.

But I had to have something more than that one ace in the hole to get me what I wanted. I was virtually certain they held the girl a prisoner. Probably there were four in the party. One had been guarding the girl. Now they would leave the wounded man as guard, pick up rifles and start after me again, reënforced by the man who had been guarding the captive.

I looked at the arched rock.

It was peculiar, distinctive, yet not individual. I knew of another arched rock a half a mile down the cañon, on little ridge. It wasn’t so high as this one, and it wasn’t so big. I figured it might be possible to line up the tip of a peak through the hole of that arch, and not have over three or four places to search.

Of course, it was only a chance, yet it wasn’t such a wild guess at that. They’d been digging around here in almost every likely place, and it was only too apparent that they hadn’t had any results — otherwise they wouldn’t have kept on with the search. Therefore they might have picked the wrong arched rock.

I kept to the wind-swept side hills as much as possible so my tracks would not show.

The wind was whipping sand along like fog wraiths now, and tracks did not last very long without filling in.

The particles of sand stung the skin across my cheeks, and the sunlight seemed a little weaker now that the sand diluted the desert air. It was the big wind that the little gusts had presaged, and it would last for two or three hours at least.

I came to the side hill opposite the ridge, looked up, and could see the opening of the arched rock. Then I started angling around until I could get the skyline of the high ridge in view through this arched opening.

It was slow work. There wasn’t a great section of ridge, in the first place, and the slope wasn’t one that lent itself to the running of contour lines.

More than that, I had to watch the upper cañon, to make certain that my attackers weren’t spotting me. After what had happened already, I fancied they’d try to ambush me again if they could.

Finally I struck a place where a saw-toothed peak showed through the opening in the arch. The saw-tooth just filled the arch, and I felt reasonably certain that if anybody had picked a landmark, that would be the one.

I studied the spot. It was just an ordinary slope, without even an outcropping. It was simply sand, cacti, a little sage and sunshine, and the dry sand was sifting across it on the wings of the desert wind until it seemed as though a fine curtain of white mist were being dragged over the ground.

The particular spot wasn’t one that would seem to be mineralized, but, in the desert, gold’s where you find it. I stood there on that slope, let my eyes range about me, and was reasonably certain that half a dozen fortunes existed within the sweep of country that was visible. It was only a question of finding those places, and...

I started.

The wind was shipping sand against something I had thought was a dead sage, white, sand-blasted, dry. But it wasn’t sage. It was bone.

I looked again. It was a part of an arm bone, and there were finger bones scattered about on the sand.

I dropped to my knees and started to scoop out the sand with my fingers.

I found what was left of the skeleton. Originally the grave had been deeper, but the wind had whipped away the loose sand on top until the skeleton was all but exposed. There were two round holes in the forehead, small in front, but jagged cavities in the arch of the skull out behind. I knew them for what they were — bullet holes.

The man had been murdered, buried in a shallow grave.

I started poking around. There had been clothes, but they were reduced to rags of stiffened fragments that even the clean sand of the desert and years of time hadn’t fully purified.

I found a little glass container that seemed to be stuffed with cloth; opened it, after some difficulty, and found what had been a handkerchief wrapped around a piece of paper.

The paper was yellowed with age, brittle, spotted. But it had a rude diagram drawn on it with a heavy pencil, and the penciled lines had remained firm and visible.

I spread it out as well as I could, entirely engrossed in what I had found.

It was a map, and the principal peaks were marked on that map. It was a section of the desert that I knew like a book, and I could identify the place that was marked with a cross without much trouble. It was shown as being on a ridge about three miles away, and the place marked with the cross had a three way bearing; a peak, an outcropping of red rock and the North Star.

The bearings had been taken with a compass and the readings, in degrees, had been noted at the end of the lines.

I sat there and did a lot of thinking.

A man who had been murdered years before, a map that had been carefully preserved in a glass jar, a shallow grave, and three men who came and searched, evidently having some knowledge of the place where the body had been buried.

I looked again at the sheet of paper, and thought I knew the answer.

The map took up a little more than half of the sheet.

I took out my knife, folded the brittle, dehydrated paper, and hardly needed the knife to separate the map portion from the blank portion. Then I took a pencil from my pocket, a stub that I carried for notes on core samples and locations.

I traced a map on a bit of paper that remained, and the map that I traced, making lines so faint that they were barely visible, was a map of the ridge where I had my mining location, the one that was about petered out.

If I was going to deal with murderers and camp-outfit stealers, I was going to be prepared for anything that might happen.

The exact location of my mine I marked with a cross. I didn’t have compass bearings, but I tied the thing up with certain land-marks that were easily identified.

Then I returned the jar, scooped sand over the skeleton, leaving it half exposed, smoothed everything over, and eased my way back up the ridge. The wind was whipping up a gale and the hissing sand, scurrying along the surface of the ground, was like fog wraiths.

Half an hour, and my tracks would be obliterated.

I waited for that half hour. Then I started back to the south. When I had gone a good mile. I worked my way up the ridge to the mine where I had cached a few provisions against an emergency.

I had a location notice, and a recordation on that mine. I’d called it “The Sand Ghost” because of the way the sand always whipped over the ridge when there was a wind. It came up in spirals of white; hissing, slithering, whispering. It was a place where the desert always talked when a wind blew.

The wind was blowing when I arrived, but it went down by the time I had uncovered the cache. I was satisfied that would be the last of the wind until night.

I didn’t have any water handy, but I had two full cans of tomatoes against emergency, and canned tomatoes are a luxury in the desert, also a necessity. I drank one of the cans of tomatoes, had some cold canned beans, and felt a little better.

It was hot, the sun broiling down with a sizzling heat, sending dazzling rays beating against the sensitive retina of the eye.

But my eyes had become accustomed to desert glare long since, and I could stand the sun. There was shade in the little drift I’d started to bore in on the outcropping, but I wanted to keep outside where I could watch the slope.

The sun crept overhead. The shadows were almost absent. The horizon did a devil dance of heat torture, but the slope was free of motion.

The shadows started to lengthen once more.

I got a little worried over my stores, but had another can of food and waited.

It was three o’clock when I saw them, three shapes that toiled up the slope, coming fast.

I didn’t have any too much ammunition, and only a few provisions. If they decided to wait me out I’d have a hard time of it. But I thought I could force their hand.

I sighted along the rifle barrel, figured the range and the wind and pulled the trigger.

I’d done some pretty fair shooting that day, and this shot just about capped the climax. It hit almost exactly where I’d planned that it should, within four yards of the leader.

The bullet slapped up a cloud of hot, dry dust, skipped off on a glance, and droned away into the hot afternoon, singing a song of death.

If the bullet had been shrapnel from a field gun it couldn’t have caused any more consternation. They scattered like a bunch of quail, scurrying for cover, too much upset to think about returning the fire.

My position was almost impregnable, up on the slope above them. Given food and water, I could have held them off as long as I could see. Darkness was their ally, but, even so, a man doesn’t want to come marching up a ridge with sand crunching beneath his feet, and an armed man waiting at the top, ready to shoot at the first form that silhouettes itself against the stars.

I gave them that first shot as a warning. It had been close enough so that they didn’t want to take any chances on coming closer.

After a while they started to creep out from cover a bit, but they didn’t get out to where they’d make a real target, and didn’t move around any.

The silence of the desert weighed down heavily on the slope, and I could hear the sound of their voices as they called comments back and forth, the noise coming up the slope with startling clarity. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could tell they were discussing a situation that had suddenly assumed complications they didn’t like.

Finally I saw one of the men pull off his shirt and undershirt. The undershirt was supposed to be white. Even in the distance, it had a drab, grayish color about it that showed it had absorbed a lot of the desert.

He tied it on the end of his rifle and waved it back and forth.

I grinned then, and heaved a sigh of relief. It had been touch and go, and I hadn’t been certain that I could save the girl. Now I stood a chance.

I took out a white handkerchief and waved it in an arc.

They took in their own white flag, had some more discussion, and finally one of the figures started toiling up the slope. He had left the rifle behind him, but I had an idea there was a six-gun stuffed in the front of his waistband, underneath the blue shirt.

It was a game of bluff now, and I was prepared to play it.

I took all of my cached provisions and stacked them in a pile that was visible from behind a little rock shelf. They were carefully arranged so that they looked like one end of a large pile.

There was a two-quart canteen with a hole in it. I’d thrown it away after the burro had punched a hole in it, coming around a quartz outcropping on a narrow trail. Now I plugged the hole with a wisp of cloth and started to pour dry sand into the canteen. When I had enough in it so the canteen was heavy, I screwed the top back on and sat the canteen in the shade.

The figure was toiling up the slope, coming face on in spite of the heat. I figured they were anxious.

It happened that I had the recorded location notice with me, showing on its back the official stamp of the County Recorder of Kern County, in Bakersfield. I got that in my pocket where it could be reached easily, and waited. The cards were all set.

The man came on up.

V. “Even Murder”

“That’s far enough,” I said, and stuck my rifle barrel around a bit of float. “We can talk from here.”

He stopped dead in his tracks, kept his hands up, level with his shoulders.

“We want to reach an understanding,” he said.

He was a man I hadn’t seen before, a chunky, mahogany-skinned chap who looked tough. There was a scar down one side of his cheek, and he’d evidently spent a lot of his time in the open. Somehow or other, he looked like a mountain prospector and adventurer to me, rather than a desert men.

I kept the gun on him.

“What do you want to understand?”

“We went off at half cock,” he said. “You riled Sid Grame and he started to swap lead with you when you jumped on him this morning.”

“I see,” I said, “and I s’pose you came all the way up here to apologize!”

“We don’t want no trouble,” he said.

There was a silence for a moment. I could see that he was turning about, surreptitiously lining up the landmarks that I’d put on the map, and I felt a delicious relief oozing through me. I had him taking the bait now, hook, line and sinker. They’d found the skeleton, and the map.

“We’re in a position to make you a lot of trouble,” he went on, “and you could make us a lot o’ trouble. You might mention that we was shootin’ at you, and that’d make the sheriff come out here and we wouldn’t like that.”

“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “you got the right idea there. I can make you a lot of trouble, but what I don’t see is how you figure you can make me a lot of trouble.”

He twisted his lips.

“We could keep you from talkin’ to the sheriff,” he said, grimly.

I laughed.

“Boloney! You’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work. I hold all the winning cards now.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Well, brother, get this straight. If we don’t let you go, you ain’t never goin’ to get out of here, and you can’t stay here. You ain’t got food nor water. You can’t walk out without provisions. Now we’re willin’ to let bygones be bygones, and you can leave, if you’ll agree that you won’t say anything to anybody about what’s happened... an’ that means you’d get your outfit back.”

He paused.

I let my eyes get wide.

“Shucks,” I said, “don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I got enough provisions to last me for a month. That I got enough water to let me hike out clean to Bakersfield if I want to. And when it gets dark you can’t stop me from leaving. I can slip past you any old time.”

“You got provisions?” he sneered. “Got ’em out of thin air I s’pose!”

“No,” I told him. “I had ’em cached.”

“Cached.”

I nodded. “Stick your hands way up, and come in and look.”

He hesitated for a moment, then his curiosity got him; he put his hands up and came up the slope, around the bowlder. He took one look and his eyes were like marbles.

“You got a claim here!”

“Sure,” I told him.

His eyes got hard.

“That changes things,” he said; then added after a moment, “changes ’em all around.”

I pretended ignorance.

“How d’yuh mean?”

He stared at me and puckered the corners of his eyes. He had resolved that I should die, but even then he didn’t want to give me any information, even though he wanted to get a lot.

“How come you sneaked up here and located this claim to-day?” he asked.

That gave me my opening.

“I didn’t locate it to-day, you chump. I had it located for over sixty days. I stumbled onto the ruins of an old shack here, and some old mortars and pestles. It looked as though some one had opened up a prospect and then closed it again. I poked around and found some high-grade, regular jewelry ore that had been taken out.

“So I located, came in and cached some provisions, and was coming back to work the claim when you birds grabbed my outfit.”

I could have hit him on the chin without jarring him as much as did that wad of information.

He walked around, his hands high, looking at the prospect. He took occasion to kick the canteen with his foot, a pretended accident, but really to see how full it was. The sand had the canteen anchored, and made it seem chock full of water.

He sighed.

“That there changes the situation all around,” he said.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re goin’ to locate this here claim.”

“Oh, is that so?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s so.”

“And a little thing like murder won’t stand in your way?”

He was cold, grim.

“A little thing like murder won’t bother us at all,” he said. “You can either quit now and walk out with your life, or you can stick around and stop lead.”

“What’d you do if I walked out?” I asked.

“Locate it, of course.”

I grinned at him.

“Take a look at that,” I said, and tossed over the recorded notice of location.

He read it and his hand quivered. I could see his face twist as thoughts raced through his mind. If they killed me they couldn’t get title to the claim. They might take possession, but as soon as the claim proved up there’d be a stampede and questions. You can’t hush those things up in the desert.

“Maybe you’d sell,” he said. “I don’t think she’s worth much, but I want it. It’s sorta in my family. My dad located this for me years ago, an’ wrote me to come out an’ work it. I kept puttin’ it off until after the old man died. He cashed in last week, an’ his dyin’ wish was that I’d come back here an’ work this claim. He gave me a map showin’ where it was.”

He looked at me, and, as I didn’t seem too doubting, he rushed on with his story. His voice had a smooth, rapid purr to it, a glib ease of enunciation that showed him for a ready liar.

“I’m Bill Kelley,” he said. “Sid Grame’s my partner. Also Indian Pete. They all can vouch for what I’m sayin’. It was sentiment with the old man, but I promised him on his deathbed, and you know how those deathbed promises are.”

I nodded.

“Well, now,” I said, “since you put it that way, I’ll walk down a ways with you and see if we can’t talk it over. I think she might be rich, but I’ll always sell a claim.”

I got to my feet, motioned him on down the slope.

“Now,” said Bill Kelley, in that purring voice of his, “you’re commencin’ to talk sense!”

We started down the slope. I couldn’t see either one of the others, but as we walked, one of the men came into sight, then a bulge of clothing over the top of a rock showed where the other was crouched.

“Tell the men to lay down their guns,” I told Bill Kelley.

He pursed his lips.

“You lay yours down, and we’ll all meet unarmed an’ friendly.”

I shook my head. “No. Not yet. I want to know how much you’ll give me for the claim...”

It was the rattle of a rock that gave me warning.

I jumped, and I was too late.

The Indian, naked as the day he was born, had jumped up from behind a rock, and his rifle was leveled at my head. Its muzzle looked as big as the entrance to a drift, and there was red murder in his eyes.

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. I dropped my rifle as though it had been red hot and hoisted my arms high over my head.

The Indian had played a smooth trick. He’d left his clothes where I could see them, and had sneaked on up the slope, moving as only an Indian can.

Bill Kelley held up his hand.

“For God’s sake, Pete, don’t shoot! He’s located on it an’ recorded his location notice!”

The words didn’t mean too much to the old Indian, but evidently Bill Kelley was the boss.

“Here’s the location notice, all recorded,” he went on. “This man’s Bob Zane, and the notice shows he’s got legal title to this claim.”

The other man, the one he’d called Sid Grame, the one who had shot at the woman the night before, was running up the slope. He arrived, triumphant, breathless.

Kelley broke the news to him. He didn’t get the full significance at first.

“All right,” he said, “kill him. What the hell do we care? We want the claim!”

I laughed at them. “Try and get it!”

The Indian moved suggestively.

“We’ve got it,” said Sid Grame. I kept smiling.

“No, you haven’t. Remember that it’s registered in my name, duly located and recorded. Nothing you can do out here is going to help.”

That was a disconcerting thought for them.

Bill Kelley shuffled his feet. “You see,” he explained, “we sort of feel that we’re entitled to this claim. It’s a family matter. Maybe there’s something here, maybe there ain’t, but my father located it and willed it to me. You blundered onto it. Now we’ve got the whip hand here.”

He paused significantly.

I could tell he was getting ready to run a bluff.

“You mean you think you have.” He shook his head.

“No, Zane. It’s hard luck for you, but we’re going to have this claim. If we can get a legal title to it, so much the better. If we can’t, we aim to have it anyway.”

“And a little thing like murder won’t stop you?”

He shuffled his feet.

“I told you that already,” he said — “a little thing like murder won’t stop us.”

There was silence for a minute, then he cleared his throat.

“If you’d take five hundred dollars and get out, we might raise that much money,” he said.

I laughed, but the laugh wasn’t quite as care-free as it might have been.

“What,” asked Kelley, “do you want?”

I let him have it straight from the shoulder.

“There was a woman. She came to me for refuge. I went out hunting Grame, and while I was doing that you two were sneaking up on the camp. By the time I got back you’d gone on in, gagged the girl, packed up my things, and dusted.

“I’ll sell you this claim for five hundred dollars. But I want the girl, and I want my outfit. When I have them, you get a bill of sale.”

The men looked at one another.

“Okay,” said Kelley; “we’ll take you up. Make out the bill of sale.”

I laughed in his face.

“And get a bullet in my head as soon as it’s signed.”

His shifting eyes showed that that was exactly what they had planned.

“Well,” he said at length, “how’re you going to plan it?”

“Produce the girl and the outfit, all ready to travel. Hand me the five hundred dollars, give me my guns and a mile head start. Then I’ll sign the bill of sale and leave it.”

Sid Grame raised his voice.

“Haw, haw, haw!” he jeered. “And then just keep on going!”

I kept looking at Kelley.

“I’m a man of my word,” I said. He fidgeted.

“You give me your word, Zane, that if we do as you say you’ll sign the bill of sale and leave it?”

“Exactly one mile down the trail,” I said.

VI. The Whip Hand

Kelley looked at Grame. “That is the only way, Sid. One side has got to trust the other. He’s got the whip hand. He won’t give it up until he gets what he wants.”

“Let him trust us, then,” growled Sid Grame.

“He don’t have to, and he won’t.”

“We’ve got the drop.”

“He’s got the claim.”

“Guns talk!”

“Shut up. The damned claim is recorded; that does the trick. You can’t seem to understand what that means!”

Bill Kelley looked at me.

“I’ll take your word on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That no matter what the girl says, you won’t back out of the deal. We’ll make that deal here and now. Then neither side will back out of it.”

I nodded.

He sighed, and his face showed relief.

“Pete, you stay here and watch this man. Keep the drop on him. Don’t let him escape. If he tries anything, shoot to smash a leg or the left shoulder, but don’t hurt his right arm. We need his signature.”

The Indian didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything during the discussion.

I knew that he wouldn’t say anything in the wait that was to follow. And he didn’t.

He squatted there in the sunlight, the rifle aimed on my left shoulder, and he kept it there.

The shadows lengthened rapidly. The cool tang of late afternoon was in the air.

I could hear steps, voices, the clink of shod hoofs.

My outfit came up the hill, plodding along, the burros wriggling their ears sleepily, inching their way along the hot slope.

After a while they stood on the rim of the level place where we were sitting.

Kelley handed me a bill of sale, duly filled out, ready for signing.

“Stick your name on that when you’re a mile down the trail,” he said.

The girl was with them. By daylight she was beautiful, but her face showed the angry red of the sun’s punishment and her eyes were swollen.

“Is it true you’re getting five hundred dollars for this claim?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Shut up, Elizabeth,” said Sid Grame.

The girl glared at him. “I won’t shut up,” she snapped. “I’m going to talk. I’ve nothing left to live for, anyway. Don’t be a fool, mister, whoever you are; that claim’s worth a million. My grandfather located that claim, took out a small fortune by crude hand methods. He started for town to file his location notice and get supplies. He was carrying the gold. Indians murdered him. Pete’s father was one of the crowd.

“Grandpa had gone into partnership with another prospector. They agreed to separate and work different sections. Later on the prospector got a letter from grandpa saying that he’d struck a bonanza and had taken out a small fortune in high grade jewelry ore. He said in the letter he was starting out with the rock, but that if anything should happen and he’d die of thirst on the way he’d have a map of the location of the mine in a little glass jar inside his shirt.

“In those days they hadn’t located any water holes in this section of the desert, and people shunned it. But it wasn’t the desert that killed granddad. It was three Indian murderers who found out that the burros were loaded with high-grade.

“Pete’s father was one of those murderers. They buried grandpa near where they shot him, not so the buzzards wouldn’t get him, but so their circling wouldn’t attract the attention of some prospector and lead to a discovery of the murder.

“They didn’t search his clothes, and didn’t know anything about the sealed jar. Nobody did until I happened to uncover the story in some old letters on file in the Los Angeles Museum. Granddad’s letter to his old partner was in there, as showing some of the risks the prospectors took in the early days.

“I got this man, Kelley, to help me. We started a search. Finally he located Pete. Pete had heard his father tell of killing the white man and mentioned that the murderers had buried him up on this ridge where the top of a high mountain showed through an arched rock.

“We got Pete and started up here. Last night Kelley demanded I surrender three-fourths of the half of the claim that was to be my share. I knew then they intended to get my signature and then kill me. I pretended to be willing, until I’d got them to relax their vigilance, then I ran away.

“I’d seen your camp fire, and I figured you’d help me, but I wanted to wait until morning to see your face better before I talked. Then I was so tired I drifted off to sleep, and while I was asleep you went away and Pete and Bill Kelley trailed me to your camp, pounced on me, choked me, and made off with your outfit.

“And now you’re going to part with this claim for five hundred dollars!”

She stopped, panting, out of breath.

Bill Kelley grinned at me.

“You promised,” he said.

“I promised,” I told him, my face showing intense gloom, “but you lied to me.”

“You’ve got the whip hand,” she stormed. “I heard them say so! Don’t be a fool!”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “They lied to me, but my word’s good. Come on.”

Kelley handed me the five hundred dollars. It ranged through all sizes and sorts of money probably the joint wealth of the three men. I started down the trail. The girl followed along. She was too mad to ride the burro. She was walking, letting off steam at every step.

“Of all the fools! You’ve played this whole thing like a dumb egg. And I’m swindled out of my rights. Because you sold them the claim, they dare to let me loose. Otherwise, if the title had been in me, they’d probably have had to kill me to keep me from going to court. I’d never have signed over a thing to the murdering crew!

“And you, you desert rat! Bah! What a fool you were! Why, I heard them say you had the whip hand with your recorded notice. You may have had the whip hand but you let them take the whip away. Now I suppose you’re going to sign that bill of sale. Then I’m finished. It’s your mine. They’ve bought it. You sell it. I’m just out of luck!”

She was sobbing as she talked, the bitter sobs of defeat.

I said nothing.

The afternoon sun had slid down over the ridge when I signed the bill of sale and dropped it. They were watching me through glasses. I saw the murderous crew come boiling over the run of level space and start rushing down the trail.

I pushed the burros to speed. I wanted a good start before dark.

They reached the paper, picked it up, paused and looked at me, then back at the western sky. They’d cut the distance down in their mad, downhill rush, and they’d probably planned on coming on and murdering me. I had five hundred dollars, and they’d have murdered me for half of that. But I’d figured the light and the desert and the distance.

They were three against one; but they’d have to make an attack on ground of my own choosing, and I had my outfit. Tackling me in the desert wouldn’t be an easy murder.

They paused in a huddled knot while they talked it all over. Then they slowly turned back up the slope. We kept on, and dusk turned to darkness. The darkness was illuminated by the golden moonlight.

The woman had quit her storm of words now. She was sobbing.

I worked down the ridge shown on the true map.

I managed to line up the peaks and then get a bearing on the North Star. I made a camp right where the cross was shown on the map, but the girl didn’t know it.

“We won’t show a fire,” I said.

We had a cold snack in silence. I spread out blankets.

“Think you can sleep?”

She almost spat at me, like a cat.

“I hate you,” she said, “and I hate this damned desert with its stars and its sand that hisses and slithers along the ground and makes little whispers.

“Do you know what that sand seems to me to say? Know what it seemed to say all morning when I was lying bound and gagged in a cave?

“Well, it seemed to say, ‘Jus-s-stice! J-u-s-s-s-s-t-i-c-e! J-u-s-t-i-c-e!’ ”

She paused and her silence was more eloquent than words.

After a few minutes she started to sob. Then she spoke again.

“Justice! All morning I kept thinking of you. You’d seemed so steady and calm! I made up my mind the sand was telling me the truth, that out here in the big, open spaces God would have a chance, that these men would be outwitted. It wasn’t only myself that mattered but my crippled niece. This money would have been a godsend to her...”

Sobs choked her throat.

I got up and walked away, leaving her there sobbing.

There was a flash light in my saddlebags. I shielded it with my coat so the rays wouldn’t be seen and started to walk around a little bit.

I came across some old iron, a few real old signs of human occupancy. Then I came to a rock outcropping with a little hole in it. I thrust the flash against the side of this hole. It was simply alive with gold. Gold speckled it like an exhibit in a jewelry store. The hole wasn’t big enough to bury a horse in, but a man had evidently taken out all the gold he could carry from it.

I came back to the girl. She had quit sobbing now, was lying back staring hard-eyed up at the stars.

The wind began to blow, suddenly.

I waited until nature asserted itself and the girl drifted off to sleep. Then I put the saddle under her head, a blanket over her. The sand was drifting rapidly, hissing its subtle whispers.

She spoke drowsily, her mind far, far distant.

“Hear it... Jusssssss-s-s-stice!”

Then she slept again.

I located the claim in her name, put up the notice, took samples of rock. About the time the moon was down, I shook her awake.

The sand was talking.

“What is it?” She sat up.

She saw me standing over her. I could see a sneer on her lips.

“Damned brute,” she said.

“We’ve got to go,” I told her.

“Where to?”

“Bakersfield. We go to Kernville over the mountains. Then we get an automobile and go to Bakersfield.”

“What for?”

“To register ‘The Whip Hand.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“Your claim.”

“What claim?”

“The one your grandpa left you.”

Her breath came in a hissing gasp, just as it had done the night before when she had first discovered I was watching her.

“What are you talking about?”

I took her hand, led her to the rock, switched on the flash light.

She looked at what was disclosed in the ancient diggings, the crumbling quartz, rotten with gold. Her eyes bulged. She tried to talk, but no sounds came.

“Come,” I told her, and then I showed her the location notice.

She read it. By that time she had her speech.

“You tricked them after all! Beat them at their own game!” she said.

I nodded.

“It’s half yours!” she exclaimed impulsively. “You get the share they were to have.”

I shook my head.

“No. I’ve got five hundred dollars for a claim I was going to abandon. That’s enough for one day’s work. And I’ll make those desert slickers the laughing stock of every camp between here and Needles.”

Her lips were firm.

“I’ll sign over a half of it to you. You can’t stop me.”

“You can sleep on that,” I told her. “In the meantime, we’d better see that we get the claim registered. Otherwise you might not have anything after all.”

We traveled the ridges in a short-cut I knew of. By daylight we could look down on the Kernville road. The sand was still whispering, wiping out our tracks.

“Does the sand seem to talk to you?” she asked.

I nodded my head.

She looked to the east. The sun was getting over the rim of the desert. The sky was a vivid red, shot with gold.

“I guess there’s a God after all,” she said softly.