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

I. Whiskey — Neat

Every place a man lives leaves its stamp upon that man.

The city dweller differs from the desert man. It ain’t always easy to tell just where the difference comes in, but you can tell it. I knew that Harry Karg was from the city the minute I saw him, and I knew he was hard.

It wasn’t his body that was hard. It was his mind.

He was in a saloon in Mexicali, and he was drinking whisky. The more he drank the harder his eyes got, the more he watched himself.

Lots of people take a few drinks and relax. Their muscles slacken, their lips get loose, and they laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. But it wasn’t that way with Karg. Every time he hoisted his elbow he got more cautious, more wary in his glance, more tight about the lips.

I’ve seen a few desert men that way, but Karg was the first city man I’d ever seen that was like that.

I watched him, then I looked at the bartender.

The bartender was a Mexican lad that I’d known for some time. He made a motion with his right hand, then jerked his head toward the man I was watching.

I stiffened up a bit and got back into the shadows.

After a while, the bartender sidled over toward me.

“He’s looking for you, Señor Zane,” he said.

“What’s he want?”

“Señor, I do not know, but he wants to see you, and he is impatient.”

I get along with those Mexicans pretty well because I can speak their language well enough to savvy their psychology. I knew the bartender for a tough egg, but he professed to be my friend, and now he seemed to be proving it.

“If he is impatient,” I said, “let him wait until I come in again.”

And I sat back in the shadows of a corner and watched him.

He drank ten whiskies inside of twenty minutes, and he complained about the quality of the stuff. I watched him drink, and waited for him to get a little loose about the mouth, waited for the eyes to get watery.

Nothing happened.

His eyes were as hard as ever, and his mouth was a thin line over a bony jaw.

I tipped the bartender the wink and went out the back door.

Back doors in Mexicali open onto some funny places, and I walked through a cement courtyard that had little doors opening on either side, and then swung to the right, into a sun-swept street, turned the corner and walked in the front door.

“Here,” said the bartender, speaking English in a voice loud enough for me to hear, “is Señor Zane.”

The tall man with the brittle eyes dropped the elbow that was halfway to the mouth and looked me over. I walked up to the bar.

“Humph,” said the tall man.

I ordered a beer.

The tall man set his glass of whisky on the bar, turned to face me, and then walked over.

“Bob Zane?” he asked.

I nodded.

He shot out his hand.

“Karg’s my name, Harry Karg.”

I took his hand. He hunched his shoulder, tried to squeeze my bones flat, just to show me how hard he was. I knew then he was strong, awfully strong.

I arched my hand, sort of cupping the knuckles, and let him squeeze until he was tired. Let your knuckles stay straight, and pressure may get one of ’em in and another out and hurt like the devil. Arch your hand, and a man can squeeze until his muscles ache.

Karg squeezed.

When he got tired he let go of the hand, swung his left over to the whisky glass, raised it, downed the whisky, slid the wet glass across the top of the mahogany bar and snapped an order at the bartender.

“Fill it up again and fill up Mr. Zane’s glass. Then we’ll drink.”

I drank my beer.

The bartender filled the glass, then he filled Karg’s whisky glass, and he shot me a flickering glance out of his smoky eyes.

It was a warning glance.

Some of those bartenders get pretty wise at sizing up character quick.

“Finish this, and have another and we’ll talk,” said Karg.

“I don’t drink over two in succession, and I don’t talk,” I told him. “I listen.”

He tossed off the whisky.

Lord knows how many he’d had, and it was hot. But he didn’t show it. He looked cold sober, beyond just a faint flush of color that darkened his face with a sinister look.

“Come over here to a table,” he said. “Bartender, bring me the bottle and a glass. It’s rotten stuff, but it kills germs, and I had a drink of water a while ago. The water wasn’t boiled.”

I sat down at the table with him.

He tilted the bottle until the glass was full, and leaned toward me.

“I’m a hard man,” he said.

He wasn’t telling me anything. I’d known that as soon as I saw him.

“And I don’t like to be monkeyed with,” he went on.

I didn’t even nod. I was listening.

He waited for a minute, and then flashed his hard, gray eyes into mine.

“That’s why it didn’t make any hit with me to have the bartender tip you off I was looking for you,” he said.

He waited for me to color up, or deny it, or explain.

If he’d kept on waiting until I turned color he’d have been waiting yet. Harry Karg was nothing to me, and if he didn’t like my style he could go to hell.

When he saw it was falling flat, he let his eyes shift.

“I knew he tipped you off, and I knew you were studying me,” he said.

I kept right on listening. I didn’t say a thing.

And his eyes slithered away from my face, over the top of the table, and then stared at the floor for a minute.

Right then I had him classified.

He was from the city, and his hardness was the hardness of the city. If he could get another man on the defensive, he’d ride him to death. But when the other man didn’t squirm, Harry Karg felt uncomfortable inside.

“Well,” I said slowly. “You wanted to see me. Now you’re here, and I’m here.”

He laughed uneasily, took a big breath, and got hard again.

It had just been a minute that he’d squirmed around uncomfortably, but that had been enough to show me the weakness that was in him. I remembered it, and let it go at that.

“They tell me you know the desert,” he said.

“I’m listening,” I told him.

“Like no other man knows it, that you can get by in the desert where another man would starve to death and die of thirst,” he said, and his tones were insinuating.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“People will tell you lots of things, if you’ll listen,” I said.

He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a map.

It was a page that had been torn from an atlas, and it showed the desert southwest of the United States and a part of Mexico. There was one little spot on it that was sort of greasy, as though somebody had been rubbing it with a moist finger.

He put his finger on the spot.

It was down over the border, in the Yaqui country of Mexico.

“Could you go there?” he asked.

I studied the spot.

“Yes,” I said. “Lots of men have gone to that section of the country.”

He looked surprised.

“Lots of men?” he asked.

I nodded. “Quite a few, anyway.”

“Then I wouldn’t need you to guide me to get there?”

“You’d need some one that knew the desert country.”

“But I could get there?”

“Yes, I think you could.”

“And back?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I told him, “I didn’t say anything about coming back. Lots of men have been there, but I only know of one who came back.”

“Who,” he asked, “was that?”

“Myself,” I said.

He spread the map on the sticky surface of the dirty table. Outside, the blare of drowsy music sounded through the sun-swept street. Inside it was darker and the flies buzzed around in circles. He tapped the spot on the map impressively.

“You’ve been there?”

I nodded.

“And back?”

I nodded again.

“What did you find?”

I leaned a little toward him.

“I found a section of the country that the Yaqui Indians want to keep people out of. I found thirst and suffering, and guns that popped off from concealed nests in the rocks, and sent silver bullets humming through the air.

“I found a man, dead. Some one had driven a sharp stake in the ground, leaving about four feet of it sticking up. Then they had sharpened the point and hardened it in fire. After they’d done that, they’d sat the man down on the stake. The sharpened point was sticking out, just back of his neck.

“And I found a rock slab with an iron chain, and the embers of a fire around it, an old fire, and there were bones, and the chain was wrapped around the bones, and the bones were blackened by fire, and bleached by sun. And I found a man who had had the soles of his feet peeled off with a skinning knife, and then been told to walk back over the hot sand.

“It’s a country where the Yaqui Indians don’t want any one to go. They say it’s where they get the gold that they do their trading with.”

“Trading?” he asked, and he had to wet his thin lips with the tip of his tongue before the word would come out.

“Yes,” I said. “They work up along the ridge of the Sierra Madre Mountains, come down into some of the Arizona towns and buy gunpowder.”

“Bullets?” he asked.

“They cast ’em out of silver. They don’t need to worry about lead.”

He was silent for several seconds.

Finally, he reached in a coat pocket and took out a little bag of buckskin. The buckskin was glazed with dirt and wear, all smooth, dark and shiny. He opened it up.

It was filled with gold.

There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was a coarse gold, about the size of wheat grains, and it looked good.

“That gold came from right here,” he said, and he tapped the greasy spot on the map with his forefinger. “If you’d go there with me you’d find all you wanted.”

His voice was smooth, seductive.

“Did you ever see a placer where the gold was like that?” he asked. “Just to be had for the taking?”

He was trying to arouse my greed.

I let my eyes lock with his.

“Did you ever see a man stuck on a pointed stake?” I asked.

Despite himself there was a little shudder that ran along his spine. I smiled to myself when I saw it. He was hard, but it was the hardness of the city. I didn’t think he’d be hard long in the desert.

“I can offer you much money,” he said, “a guarantee of success. You can be rich. You can go to the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants, take in the best shows, have the most beautiful women.”

I smiled at that. His idea of luxury was the city man’s idea.

“Did you ever see a man with the soles of his feet skinned off?” I asked him.

And then he got down to business.

“Listen,” he said, and he lowered his voice until it was almost a whisper, “I’ve got to go there. I’m administrator of an estate. The sole heir is a girl. That girl went there and didn’t come back. I’ve got to find her and bring her out.”

I was interested now.

“People who go there seldom come out,” I said.

“No,” he told me, “she’s alive. I’ve heard from her. She’s a prisoner there, and she’s inherited a fortune. I’ve got to find her to keep the fortune from going to another branch of the family that’s hostile.”

I knew, even then, that there was a chance he was lying, a big chance. But I kept thinking of a white woman, trapped in that country, held a prisoner.

I looked squarely into his gray eyes.

“I’ll go,” I said, “on one condition.”

“That is?”

“That you go along.”

He let his eyes turn watery. His lips drooped. His face blanched. He tried to look away from me, and couldn’t. I was holding his eyes with my own.

He heaved a deep sigh.

“I’ll go,” he said.

It wasn’t exactly the answer I had expected, and, perhaps, he read that in my eyes.

He laughed, and the laugh was hard.

“Don’t think I’m a fool,” he said. “I’ve got an ace up my sleeve you haven’t heard about, yet.”

He just let his laugh fade into a smile, then the smile was wiped out and his face was hard as rock, hard with a thin-lipped expression of cruelty.

“Yes,” he said. “We can go — and we can come back.”

And he looked at me.

“There will be four in the party,” he said.

“Four?”

“Yourself, myself, and two others.”

“The others?”

“A man named Pedro Murietta, and Phil Brennan.”

I stared at him. To get a Mexican to go into the Yaqui country was like getting a superstitious Negro to walk through a graveyard at midnight.

“Pedro Murietta?” I asked.

“A Yaqui Indian,” he said. “Pure blood.”

Then he laughed.

“I told you I had an ace up my sleeve,” he said.

I rolled a cigarette.

“When do we start?”

“How soon can we start?”

I flipped away the cigarette

“Right now,” I told him and got up from the table.

II. A Mystery Package

It was the third day that the desert gripped us with its full strength.

The desert is a wonderful place. It’s cruel, the crudest enemy man ever had. And it’s the kindest friend. Probably it’s kind because it’s so cruel. It’s the cruelty that makes a man — or breaks him.

Phil Brennan was one of these delicate, retiring individuals. He was always in the background. Pedro Murietta had something wrong with him. I couldn’t find out what. He was thin, and he was nervous, and his eyes were like those of a hunted animal.

Harry Karg was hard. He was cruel.

And on the third day the desert blazed into our faces, white hot with reflected sunlight, glaring, dazzling, shimmering, shifting. The horizons did a devil dance in the heat. The air writhed under the torture of the sun. All about us was a white furnace.

I’d had the two white men keep their skins oiled and covered with a red preparation that kept out some of the sunlight, letting them get accustomed to it by degrees.

But the sun was broiling their skins right through all the protective coverings.

A hot wind blew the stinging sand into little blistering pellets.

“How much longer?” asked Karg.

“Of what?” I inquired.

“Of this awful heat?”

It was the query I’d been waiting for. I faced him.

“You’ll have it so long that you’ll get accustomed to it,” I told him. “Until your body dries out like a mummy; until you get so you know it’s there but don’t mind it; until you get so you quit sweating, and can go all day on a cup of water.”

He cursed.

“Do you know what I heard?” he demanded.

“What did you hear?” I asked.

“That we could have come this far, and fifty miles farther by automobile, and started from there, gaining over five days in time and sparing us all this agony.”

“You could,” I said.

“Well, you’re a hell of a guide,” he stormed. “What’s the idea in taking us through this hell hole?”

His face was writhing with rage, and his eyes, that had kept so clear all through his whisky drinking, were red now, so red it was hard to see any white in them.

The other two gathered around, made a little ring.

I wanted them to hear my answer, so I waited to make it impressive.

“The object in taking you on this trip was to toughen you up,” I said. “If we’d taken the first lap by automobile, you’d have had to drink water on the last lap just like you’re drinking it now. You’re going to walk through the heat of this desert until you get so you can have one drink in the morning and one drink at night — and no more.

“You’re going to walk through this desert until you quit thinking it’s a hell hole and think it’s one of the most beautiful places a man ever lived in.

“Then you’ll be ready to start on the real part of the trip.”

And I pushed him to one side and started on.

He was hard, and he was strong, and the heat had frazzled his nerves, and he was accustomed to all sorts of little tricks of domination. It was inevitable that we should clash sooner or later. We clashed then.

He grabbed for me.

I swung my right to his jaw in a blow that was a full-arm swing, timed perfectly. It lifted him off his feet. He flung back his hands and then stretched his length on the sand that was so hot it would have cooled an egg.

The Yaqui said nothing.

Phil Brennan muttered an exclamation of disgust — for me.

I didn’t care. I sat down on my heels and rolled a cigarette, waiting for Harry Karg to get back to consciousness.

We have to do things in the desert so that they’re done with the least waste of time.

The sand burned into the man’s back. The sun tortured his eyelids. He groaned and twisted like an ant on a hot rock. I waited until he had opened his red eyes and realization dawned in them. Then I talked to him.

“You’ve been hard,” I told him, “with men you could dominate. You’ve avoided those you couldn’t. That’s been all right in the city. You’re in a different place now. You’re in the desert. You can’t bluff the desert, and you can’t four-flush. You’re going to tackle a real fight. I’m getting you ready for it.

“Now do you want to go on, or do you want to turn back? Do you want to take that one punch as settling things, or do you want to try a little more of the same?”

He squirmed about like a fresh trout in a hot frying pan. He tried to avoid meeting my eyes. But I held my gaze on him until he had to look at me.

We stared at each other for a full five seconds.

I read hatred and futility in his eyes.

But I knew the desert. I was doing things the only way possible for our own good. His eyes turned away.

“All right,” he said. “I guess you know best.”

I got up and walked to the burros then, and left him to plod along after he’d got up and scraped the hot sand out of his sweaty hair.

That night I cut down on their water supply. We had plenty, and we were coming to a country where there were springs. But I was giving them a taste of what was to come.

They had about half a pint of water apiece. It was warm water, flat and insipid, and it tasted of tin from the canteen, but they’d have to get used to it.

Pedro Murietta, the Yaqui, took his water.

He didn’t seem to care what happened. His devotion to Harry Karg was absolute, and yet it seemed to me to be founded on a hatred. He seemed constantly trying to break away from Karg’s dominating influence, yet he couldn’t.

Phil Brennan took his water, and he started to protest. Then he averted his eyes.

He wanted to fight, but he hated to oppose his will against that of another man. It wasn’t that he was submitting. It was simply that he wasn’t fighting. I didn’t like it.

Harry Karg started to throw his water in my face.

I guess he’d have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for the showdown we’d had earlier in the day.

He finally took the water, gulped it down in two big swallows and held out the empty cup for more.

I turned on my heel and walked away, leaving him with the empty cup. He had to learn his lesson sooner or later. It might as well be sooner.

That night the desert started to talk.

Deserts will do that. They’ll be hot and silent, sometimes for days at a time. Then, at night, they’ll begin to whisper.

Of course, it’s just the sand that comes slithering along on the wings of the night winds that spring up from nowhere with great force, and die down as suddenly and mysteriously as they come up. But it sounds as though the sand is whispering as it slides along, hissing against the rocks, against the stems of the sage, the big barrels of the cacti, and finally, when the wind gets just right, against the sand itself.

But all the desert dwellers know those sand whispers, and, just before they drop off to sleep, they get the idea the desert is whispering to them, trying to tell them some age-old secret.

Some of the old timers will admit it, and claim they can understand the desert. Some of them don’t admit feeling that way. But they all have heard the song of the sand.

We lay in our blankets. The stars blazed down, and the sand talked. The spell of the desert gripped us.

I saw a shadow lurch against the stars, and some one came over toward my blankets. I stuck my hand on the butt of my six-gun, and slid back the trigger.

But it was only Phil Brennan.

He paused, then when I sat up, he came over toward me.

“I wasn’t sure you were awake,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I knew he had something he wanted to talk about.

“The sand seems to be hissing little whispers,” he said.

I nodded. He hadn’t come over to me to tell me the sand was whispering.

“Of course,” he said, “it’s nothing but the wind.”

I just sat there, listening.

“You said the desert was a beautiful place,” he said.

I nodded.

“You meant the sunsets and the colors, the sunrises and the purple shadows?” he asked uneasily.

“No,” I said. “That’s not real beauty. That’s just an illusion. I meant the desert was beautiful because it strips a man’s soul stark naked, because it rips off the veneer and blasts right down to the real soul. I meant it was beautiful because it’s so cruel. It makes a man fight. It constantly threatens him. It’ll kill you if you make a mistake. It’ll kill off four-flushers and cowards and make a man find himself.

“Man learns the lesson of life from fighting. Some men are afraid to fight. The desert lures them into itself with its soft colors and its beautiful sunsets and lights and shadows, and then, before they know it, they’re fighting, fighting for their lives.

“That’s been your trouble. You’ve been too damned sensitive to fight. Now wait and see what the desert does.”

And I dropped back in my light blanket, pillowed my head on the saddle, and let him see I’d talked all I was going to.

I heard him tossing in his blankets. And I heard the desert whispering to him. The sand whispers were soft and furtive that night, sand whispering to sand, mostly, and there was something as full of promise about them as a woman crooning whispers to the man she loves.

Some time after midnight the wind died away, all at once, and the desert became calm and silent, a great big aching void, empty of noise, menacing.

The desert knows the true philosophy of life. Man lives and suffers, and he learns through his suffering.

We plodded on.

The second day found us at the base of a big butte.

I rubbed it in a little.

“Here is where we could have come by machine,” I said.

The party was silent. The Yaqui because he was always silent. Phil Brennan, because he was thinking. Harry Karg, because he was afraid to trust himself to speech. He was fighting something now that he couldn’t dominate, and it bothered him.

“We’d have reached it in a half a day by auto,” I said.

That made Karg’s heat-tortured face writhe.

But he kept silent.

I turned, and led the way into the desert that could only be traveled on foot, and my three companions were almost hard enough to stand a chance — if nothing went wrong. They weren’t tough enough yet but what a dry water hole would have spelled disaster — but that’s part of the game one plays in the desert.

We marched into the shimmering heat until the shadows closed about us. Then we had a little tea, and pushed on until it got too dark to see where we were going.

We made camp. The desert was silent, ominously silent.

The next day was an inferno with mountains that grimaced at us from the distance, rocky, hot mountains that writhed and wriggled all over the horizon.

That was the Yaqui country.

That afternoon I noticed the Yaqui.

After we’d spread our blankets and unsaddled the burros, I went to Harry Karg.

“I don’t know what sort of a hold you’ve got on that Indian,” I said, “but watch him.”

He laughed at me.

“Leave that Indian to me,” he said.

He seemed confident, sure of himself.

I shrugged my shoulders and turned away. I’d told him.

About midnight I woke up. Some one was crawling over the sand, and the sand made little crunching noises under his weight. I got my hand around the butt of my six-gun and rolled over

The shadow was working its way toward Karg’s blankets, and it was filled with menace.

I slid my six-gun around into a good position and thumbed back the hammer.

The shadow raised an arm. The starlight glinted on steel.

I let the hammer down on the shell.

I’d sort of pointed in the general direction of the knife, but I hadn’t expected to hit it. It was too close shooting, to blaze away by the feel of the weapon alone. But I guess I didn’t miss very far.

The shadow rolled over with a howl.

Karg jumped up out of his blankets, and he screamed as he came awake, which showed how taut his nerves were, and what the country had done to him.

I ran forward, keeping my gun on the squirming shadow.

It was the Indian. I’d missed the knife, but the bullet had ripped off the end of his thumb, right at the first joint.

I kicked the knife into the sand, searched the Indian for a gun, and then made a fire. It was a hard thing to do, but I limited the water for dressing the wound. One cup and no more.

Karg let it boil.

I knew as I watched him that he was a doctor. He took out a little chest of instruments, a folding leather affair of glittering instruments, and sterilized the tips in the water. Then he cleaned out the wound, did something to an artery that was giving little spurts of blood, and bandaged it up.

The Indian said nothing.

Karg took me to one side.

“What do we do with him?”

“Take the guns away, and watch him as best we can. We can’t call a cop and have him arrested, and we can’t turn him out in the desert, not unless he tries it again.”

“Why did he use a knife instead of a gun?”

“Because he wanted all three of us. A gun would have only been good for one.”

“How’d you happen to wake up?” he asked next.

I grunted.

“By the time you’ve lived as long as I have in the desert, you’ll wake up when any one crawls around near your bed, or else you’ll be asleep permanently.”

He nodded.

“All right, then,” he said, “you take it.”

“Take what?” I asked.

“This,” he said, and slid something into my hand. “I’ll want it every day, sometimes twice a day. When I do, I’ll come to you and get it. Guard it with your life. Don’t let any one know you’ve got it. And don’t ever try to look inside of it. It’s locked.”

I laughed at him; he was mixing in insults and compliments.

“Afraid to keep it yourself?” I asked him.

And there was a look of futility and of fear in his eyes, which showed what the desert was doing to him.

“Yes,” he said, “I am afraid to keep it.”

So I took it.

The next day the Yaqui was running a fever from the wound, and I took it easy. We didn’t dare to stop. We had to keep on toward the next water hole. That’s the desert; it’s hard.

We came to bones that day. That was when we knew we were in Yaqui country.

The bones were bleached and white, and the skull grinned at us with the eye sockets looming startlingly black against the white brilliance of the sun-whitened bones.

I looked around the bones for signs of clothes. There should have been a few shreds of fiber, but there weren’t any.

“Died of thirst,” I told Karg. “They always rip their clothes off in the last frenzied run they make. Then they shred the flesh of their fingers into bloody ribbons digging into the sand. Then they die.”

Phil Brennan turned sick at the stomach and walked away. Karg’s face winced.

The Yaqui glanced at the bones with his smoky, desert-wise eyes, and said nothing.

“And you said the desert was beautiful!” snapped Brennan.

I looked him over.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s beautiful.”

III. A Traitor Returns

We started our march again, leaving the white bones out in the clean sunlight, the skull grinning at us. The party was silent. I noticed something gleaming off in the distance, and swung around so the sun glinted from it, then I headed toward the glint.

It turned out to be a burro packsaddle with the cinches cut through, and there were two canteens on the saddle.

I lifted one of them; it was empty. I lifted the other, and grunted my surprise.

It was full.

“Belonged to that dead man, I guess,” I told them; “but he died of thirst, and this canteen is full.”

It had been there in the sun for a long time, and the top was screwed on tight. The blanket covering was ripped and worn away, and the sun glinted from the metal that was so hot it would have blistered ungloved hands.

I unscrewed the cap and tilted the canteen.

Sand flowed out. It was sand that was so fine and dry that it flowed out just like water.

I laughed.

“What is it?” asked Karg.

“A pleasant little Yaqui trick,” I said. “A man comes to a water hole, fills his canteen. The Yaquis follow him and find out what canteen he is using. Then they sneak into camp and pour the water out of the other canteen and fill it with sand.

“That’s all they need to do. No rough stuff, nothing violent. The man simply goes out into the desert, not knowing anything’s wrong. He travels until he’s used up one canteen of water, then he starts on the other canteen — and nothing flows out but sand.

“He’s one canteen’s distance from his last water hole, usually one canteen’s distance from the next. The Yaquis haven’t had to follow him out into the desert. They’ve simply left him and the desert together.

“And the answer is a pile of bones, such as we see every once in a while on the desert.”

Brennan stared at me, soul sick, his eyes horror-stricken.

Hard Harry Karg was shivering as with the ague.

“Want to go back?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, all at once, blurting out the word.

I nodded.

“Thought you would. Well, you can’t. You may be in this thing for gold, or for a big fee for closing an estate, or because of some other reason. But there’s a white woman held captive at the other end of the trail, and we’re going to her. You might as well know it now as later.”

I don’t know what he would have said just then. I was hoping the shock of it all, and the surprise of my words, would force the truth out of him. The man wasn’t a lawyer at all; he was a doctor. And he was a liar.

But the Yaqui had wandered off while I was examining the canteen. I looked up as I finished with my ultimatum to Karg, and saw the Yaqui silhouetted against the blue of the hot sky, on a hill, and he had a pile of green sage in front of him and some dry wood.

It was too far for a revolver shot. I ran for my rifle, and got there too late.

“What is it? What’s he doing?” yelled Karg.

He got his answer as I flung the rifle around.

The Indian struck a match to the tinder dry wood. It crackled into flame. Then he flung himself over the crest of the hill as my bullet zinged through the hot air.

The dry wood sent flames into the oily leaves of the desert plants and a white smoke went up. I smashed bullets into the pile, knocking it into fragments of burning embers, but the damage was done.

The pillar of smoke went swirling up into the air, and ascended high into the blue before little wisps of wind scattered it.

I put fresh shells into the rifle.

Ten minutes later there were answering columns of smoke coming up from the mountains ahead of us.

Karg’s face was chalky.

“Yes,” he said, “I want to turn back.”

Phil Brennan clamped his lips.

“No,” he said. “We’re going forward.”

His face was as white as Karg’s, but he was standing straight and his head was back.

The desert was commencing to leave its mark on Phil Brennan.

“Brennan wins. We go forward,” I said.

I let them believe that it was because Brennan had made the decision. As a matter of fact, it was too late to go back.

“No, no!” rasped Karg. “I’m paying for this little expedition, and what I say goes. We’re going back. Turn back, Zane.”

I shrugged my shoulders and pointed back.

“If you want the back trail, there it is, shimmering in the heat. We’re pushing forward.”

And the thought of being alone in the desert sent Karg huddling close to us.

We marched on.

“The Yaqui?” asked Karg.

“Should be killed, but we can’t waste time on him. He’s burrowed into a shelter somewhere, and we’d be all day locating him.”

“No,” said Karg; “he’ll be back, and he’ll come asking for friendship.” He spoke with calm confidence.

“You don’t know the first damned thing about Indian character,” I told him.

“Wait and see,” he said.

I let it go at that.

But he was right.

It was the next afternoon, late. I could see that some one was running toward us, stumbling, holding his right hand up with the palm out, a gesture of peace.

I got out the gun.

The figure grew in size. It was the Yaqui.

He was haggard. His face was pale underneath its dusky color. His eyes were all red, and his lips were twitching. Little spasms seemed to ripple his skin.

I thought he wanted water, which was strange, because he had undoubtedly seen those answering smoke signals and been able to join his friends.

But it wasn’t water he wanted.

And he’d met up with his friends, and deserted them again. For he had a canteen over his shoulder, and a gun at his hip. He’d left us empty handed.

I strode toward him.

But he avoided me. He dodged past and ran straight to Karg, and he was like a dog finding its master.

Karg motioned me to keep back, and then he walked out in the desert for fifty or sixty yards and had quite a little talk with the Yaqui.

The Indian was fawning on him, slavering for something, begging. Karg was hard. That was the way Karg could be his hardest, when some one was coming to him for something.

After a while Karg got up and came toward me.

The Indian remained on the desert, hunched over in a huddled heap.

“Give me the black package,” said Karg.

I took it out from under my shirt.

He fitted a key to the lock, snapped it open, walked back toward the Yaqui. They went together down a little depression, walking along slowly.

They just walked through the depression, taking but little more time to it than they would have taken if they’d been walking steadily; but, somehow or other, I had an idea they had stopped for a few seconds.

They came back into sight, and the Indian had stopped talking. Karg motioned to him, and the Indian surrendered the gun. Karg came toward me.

“The Yaquis have got behind us, and they’re closing in,” he said.

“Don’t think you’re telling me any news.” I said.

“You knew it?”

“Of course. After that smoke signal, there was nothing to it.”

“Murietta betrayed us,” said Karg. I laughed.

“That ain’t news. It’s history.”

“And was to lead the attack,” he said.

I nodded. “He led you here to lead you into a trap,” I told him. “He’d been intending to betray you all along. You’ve got some hold on him, but he hates you.”

He made an impatient gesture with his hand, as though he was brushing something aside, something that was unimportant.

“All men that I have a hold on hate me,” he said.

“But Pedro’s going to lead us through their lines. There’s just a chance we can get through. There’s a water hole to the south that Pedro knows about. No one else knows of it. If we can win our way through then we won’t be surrounded.”

“They’ll trail us,” I told him.

“Of course. But we’ll have the advantage of them. We get into a rocky country.”

“And Murietta’s probably betraying you again.”

He shook his head positively

“No,” he said, “never again. Murietta knows he has to save me now. He wants to save my life.”

I laughed at him, but he was right. I found it out when I got to talking with the Indian. He was frantically, hysterically anxious to see that we won through, and then he wanted us to go back. He wanted to leave.

I knew that if he’d double-crossed his own people and come over to us to get us through, he’d never dare to be caught alive. They reserve their most fiendish tortures for those who ton traitors, those Yaquis.

But I couldn’t figure out just what it was that was holding Murietta to Karg.

IV. Into Ambush

We started out after night, on a course at right angles, and we pushed through little passes, down little coulees, along dry stream beds, over little rocky ridges. The Indian seemed to know every foot of the way.

Then a dog barked.

Someone muttered something in a hoarse voice and the rocks began to spit little tongues of fire.

The bullets rained around us. Karg wanted to return the shots, but I held his hand. They outnumbered us about ten to one, and the flashes of our guns would have shown them exactly where we were. But, pushing forward in the darkness, keeping under cover, we had them shooting with only a general idea of what they were shooting at.

We lost one of the burros, and, as we were winning clear, I felt something slam into my side with a force that spun me around, jerked me off my feet.

I figured it was the end, but I dropped and didn’t say anything. I wanted the others to win through if they could. No use waiting for me.

It was Phil Brennan who came running back.

I tried to send him on, but I couldn’t get my breath, couldn’t manage to say a word. I made motions with my hands, but he stuck to me, lifted me to my feet.

Then I began to get so I could breathe. I put my hand to my side to see how badly I was hit. I could feel moisture trickling down my side, and my hand came away all sticky. I felt that my side was ripped wide open.

But, when I finally located the place, I found that it wasn’t a wound at all. The bullet had ripped into the black leather case that Karg had given me to keep for him, and had slammed it into my side with the force of a mule’s kick.

I could talk then, and explained to Brennan, but I couldn’t walk, and the Indians were milling around over the country, calling to each other, lighting torches, trying to pick up our trail.

I persuaded Brennan to run on ahead and join the others and tell them I was waiting behind to act as sort of a rear guard, that I was all right, and would join them as soon as I found out just what the Indians would do.

He went on.

After a while I forced my legs into action, and forged ahead as best I could, but I’d lost the others. There was no moon, and the starlight was deceptive. I plugged along in the direction the Indian had said to take, but I couldn’t find any trace of the others.

The Indians had the trail by this time, but a trail in rocky country by torchlight isn’t easy to follow, and there were mountains off to the left that were great slabs of rock and timber. I figured they’d have to ditch the burros, but they stood some chance of getting through.

I could tell from the noise and the flicker of the red torchlight that I was off to the left of the trail the others had left.

I didn’t have any burros, and I was taking time, so I wasn’t leaving any trail. On the other hand, I only had a light canteen of water, a little salt, and a small packet of flour.

I got up on a rocky pinnacle, saw the east beginning to turn color, found a place where I could burrow in out of the heat of the sun, and decided to hole up a while.

After this, it would be a case of travel at night.

I was tired, and my side was sore and bruised. I dropped off to sleep.

When I woke up the sun was up.

I was careful to keep from getting so much as the tip of my head against the sky line. I made a survey of the country. It was rocky, a tumbled mass of blistering hot rocks piled in twisted confusion, and stretching from foothills up to high mountains that had timber.

I knew the general run of the country.

There’d be water in those mountains.

But I couldn’t see a sign of life, either Indian or white.

I knew the Indians would be perched up on the rocky crests, waiting and watching. And I hoped Murietta would be true enough to keep the others from moving around in daylight. To move was to invite sure death.

I made sure my hiding place was pretty safe, and crawled back in the shade of the overhanging rock. The sun crept up, and the heat began to turn my little hiding place into an oven.

I thought of the leather packet that had saved my life.

I took it out from underneath my shirt. The bullet was of the type I knew it would be, almost pure silver. It had ripped into the leather and smashed some bottles, and it was the liquid from those bottles that I had felt trickling down my side.

I looked at the bottles, and then I knew the truth — knew the reason the Yaqui had been such a slave to Harry Karg. Karg had made him a dope fiend, and the leather case contained lots of little vials of dope, ready mixed for hypodermic use. And then, in case that wasn’t enough, there were some bottles of morphia, heroin, cocaine, all in little powders and tablets.

Most of the mixed stuff had broken under the impact of the bullet and had soaked through the case, but the upper end of the case that had the tablets in it was uninjured.

There was a letter wadded in there, a letter written in a feminine hand.

I saw Brennan’s name scrawled on a margin.

Some people may be hesitant about reading letters that are written to other people. I’m not — not when the other person has got me out in the Yaqui country with an Indian that he’s made a dope fiend out of, and it’s beginning to look as though he lied to get me there.

I spread out the letter.

The bullet had torn off one corner, but the writing was intact. It started out: “Harry,” not “Dear Harry” or “Friend Harry” or any of that mushy stuff, just “Harry.”

The message was the kind that showed just how the woman felt. She didn’t mince words.

I read the note and knew a lot more than I had before.

Evidently Harry Karg had used some sort of pressure to get a promise from the woman, but he had to come to her to get her to keep that promise. He was now at almost the exact spot on the map the woman had marked, the spot from which the mark she had made had been obliterated by the oil of many fingers smearing over the colored surface of the paper as they pressed down on it. I wondered how many guides Karg had tried to engage before he had hit on me, had thought of making a dope fiend out of the Indian messenger.

I wondered what the Indian would do when he realized Karg had no more dope for him. Apparently he had been a slave to Karg until he got within striking distance of an Indian doctor. Then he had gone to the Indian medicine man, told the story, been treated.

But the herbs of the Yaquis had been of no avail against the gnawing of the drug hunger. And the Yaqui had realized, too late, that he had only one chance for satisfying that terrible craving — to find the man he had betrayed.

But now...

It was just the faintest suggestion of sound, the bare hint of a pebble rattling down a rock, but I grasped my weapon and rolled swiftly to the little rim of rock.

I determined I was going to make them buy my life at a dear price.

But it wasn’t an Indian.

Down below me, toiling along, carrying a rifle and a heavy canteen, was Phil Brennan, working his way with what he thought was great caution.

I couldn’t imagine how the Indians could have passed him up. He hadn’t even figured out the advantage of areas of low visibility sufficiently to keep in the patches of shade. He was trying to walk quietly, but the keen senses of the Yaquis would hear sounds that I couldn’t, and I had heard him from seventy yards up the slope.

I was afraid to signal to him, afraid he would give a shout or betray himself still further through a scramble up the slope. I slid the rifle forward and concentrated on his back trail, ready to pick off any one who followed.

But no one seemed to be following, which was a mystery to me.

Then I caught a flicker of motion and the sights of my rifle snapped into line. I had the hot stock pressed to my cheek, and was ready to squeeze the trigger, when the person stepped out from between two bowlders, and I got a brief glimpse.

It was a woman, slender, graceful as a deer, clad in a garment made out of tanned skins, and the flesh which was disclosed over the top of the skins, and down below the hem of the short skirt, was as sun-tanned and bronzed as old ivory.

She was following him, and she was moving with the lithe grace of a wild animal.

Phil Brennan sat down on a hot rock. He mopped his forehead, gazed apprehensively about him. But he didn’t see the girl. For that matter, I couldn’t see her any longer. There had been just that one brief, flashing glimpse. She was as intangible as a deer slipping up a brush-covered slope.

Brennan unscrewed the cap of the canteen, raised it.

I frowned, considered flinging him a low word of caution. This was no time to be wasting water.

But I held my speech. After all, there were more important things than water.

I saw Brennan fling back his head, throw the canteen from him. His fingers clawed at his mouth. He looked as though the water from the canteen had been some deadly acid that burned its way into his flesh.

For a second I couldn’t understand, and my eye flashed to the canteen.

Then I understood.

A white stream was slipping silently from the mouth of the canteen, a stream, not of water, but of sand.

V. “Isn’t It Beautiful?”

I thought panic was going to grip the man when he realized that he was in the midst of a hostile desert without water, that there were enemies surrounding him.

He got to his feet, swung around, took a running step or two, and came to a dead stop as he heard my voice raised in a low command.

It took him a little while to locate me, and, in that interval, I knew he was getting himself under control.

“Here I am, up here. That’s it. Now work up here towards me, and take it slow. Keep to the shadows. Don’t get impatient and try to come too fast. Take it easy.”

He came up to me, then, listening for my commands.

I kept him well under cover, as well as I could. The sunlight was beating pitilessly down on the rocky slope of the hill, but that made the darkness of the shadows the more intense, and I hoped there was a chance, perhaps one in ten, that he could make it without betraying himself to watching eyes.

I couldn’t understand why those eyes hadn’t seen him before this, didn’t understand it until the sound of a rifle shot, thin and thready in the hot air, came to my ears. Then there was another shot and another, a rattle of swift fire and then silence.

Then I knew, knew even before I heard words of confirmation from Brennan. He and Karg had separated. Karg had been thinking over the Yaqui trick of putting sand in a canteen and getting a man trapped into going into the desert country. It had been just the sort of scheme he liked. He had tried it on Brennan.

They had separated, Brennan tricked into taking the canteen of sand, and Karg had forged ahead with the water. But his cleverness had been his undoing; the Yaquis had spotted him. They had signaled their discovery, concentrated on Karg, and then — torture.

I greeted Brennan. He was mouthing curses against Karg and his trickery.

I interrupted them.

“We stand a chance,” I told him. “The mountains. The Yaquis have been spread out, doing scout work, searching for us. But when they found Karg they all swung in together for an attack. That leaves us unguarded, and if we can get to the mountains there’s a chance.”

He was interested, looking up at the white-hot slopes of the rocky mountains, then back at the tumbled mass of foothills.

“How about Karg?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders.

He sighed, got to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said.

I said nothing about the form of the girl I had seen on his back trail, nor did I say anything about the letter in the bullet-ripped leather packet.

We gained the mountains, kept to the hot rocks, leaving but little trail. From time to time, I paused to search the back trail, but I could see no one. And yet I had the feeling that we were being followed. I wondered if it was the girl, or something more sinister.

The afternoon shadows lengthened. I proposed a rest. We’d have to travel long into the night.

“In which direction?” asked Brennan.

“Back of course.”

He shook his head.

“No; I haven’t got what I came here for, yet.”

I said nothing.

We waited. I watched the back trail. We could hear the distant barking of a dog, an hour or so after sunset.

“How about Karg?” asked Brennan.

“That’s the second time you’ve asked about him,” I said.

“It’s the hundredth time I’ve thought about him.”

“Don’t worry about not being revenged. The Indians will take care of that.”

He shuddered.

“That’s exactly it. Think of the stake in the ground... Ugh!”

I looked at the stars, steady, bright, giving lots of light.

“There’s perhaps a village out where that dog is barking,” I told him.

“They’d take him there?”

“Yes.”

He got to his feet uncertainly.

“Okay. Let’s go back. I’ve got to save him. I hate the sight of him. After I rescue him I’ll beat him to a pulp. But I can’t run away and leave him.”

I warned him.

“You don’t stand any chance. They will hear us. They will simply capture us, too.”

“Us?” he said. “You’re going?”

“Of course, if you go.”

He wet his lips.

“I’m going,” he said, and took a stride forward.

I’ve lived in the desert for a long time. I think I know something about woodcraft and the way men stalk in the open. I’d have sworn no one could have crawled up within listening distance without my hearing. But I’d have been wrong.

A slender shape rose from the rocks like a wraith.

Brennan recoiled.

“Phil!” she said.

“Sally!” was torn from his throat, and the word, as he said it, was an exclamation, a prayer, a benediction, and a great longing.

I dropped back, down behind the rocks.

I heard her voice.

“It’s too late,” she was saying. “He dug his own pitfail. The Yaqui murdered him when he found there was no more of the drug. It was the sound of that shot that brought the others.”

They came to me later on.

The woman had established herself with the natives. They considered her as something of a priestess. The desert had done something to her, brought out something of the lithe grace which is inherent in youth and beauty. She had become as a wild thing, perfect in strength, poise, figure.

The Indians considered her a goddess and the priestess of the godhead. She came and she went as she saw fit. And she was promised to a man she didn’t love; wanted the love of a man who loved her, but who would not speak.

So she had brought them into the crucible of the desert.

“If Harry had come,” she told me privately, “openly and fairly, the Indians would have given him safe passage. But he came by trickery and deception. He tried to enslave to the dope habit the guide I sent, so there could be no question of treachery, and, by that treachery of his own, he brought about his own destruction.”

“If he was to have come in safety,” I asked, “why did you make him come at all? What was to be gained?”

She looked at the stars.

“Perhaps it was just to postpone things,” she said softly; “perhaps it was a woman’s intuition. But I have come to know the desert places. I thought that if I could get those two men together out into the desert...”

And I thought of what the desert had done, of how the man who had thought he was hard had had the surface hardness cut away by the hissing sand and the melting heat, until the craven soul beneath that surface had stood forth for all to see.

And I thought of how the tempering fire of the desert heat had fused the character of the other, melted away the surface weakness, and brought to light the inner strength of character.

And I continued to think, long after the two had left me, long after the desert had begun to talk, a wind hissing the sand against the rocks of the mountainside.

They were off to one side, sitting close, talking in low tones, and the desert whispers were sending an undercurrent of whispering sand against the crooning tones of their voices.

I was lulled into a doze.

I awakened with Phil Brennan’s hand on my shoulder.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked softly.

I looked at the grayish white of the desert sand, at the inverted bowl of golden stars, blazing steadily.

“Isn’t what beautiful?” I asked.

“The desert, of course!” he said.