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

I. Out of the Desert

The man was a professional gambler, which meant that it was difficult to read his thoughts. One who had ever been familiar with gamblers could never have mistaken him for anything else.

His eyes were alert but calm and steady. His face was utterly passive, and there was that hard, smooth polish about him which is more than a veneer. It’s a poise that seems to defy the entire universe to do anything which can jar it. It comes from having endured losses which wipe out everything at one swift swoop of ill fortune.

Never a professional gambler but who has won and lost fortunes. To-day they are millionaires and to-morrow paupers. Winnings are balanced by losses, losses by winnings. And the gamblers have to learn to be plunged from prosperity to poverty, and to carry on with the same suave urbanity which puts the loss of yesterday into the limbo of the past and lays the foundation for the winnings of to-morrow.

Out in the desert we get to classify men pretty quickly. We have to. Nature gets in the raw out in the desert. The veneer of civilization strips off, and the primitive emotions come to the front.

Perhaps that’s why the gamblers are so noticeable. They’re about the only class of men who can go out into the desert and keep that polish which serves to hide the inner soul from the glance of the curious.

Nevada is a strange State, and a little understood State.

It’s a State of big places, and it’s a breeder of men. Nevada has always been impatient of the shams and hypocrisies of civilization. Nevada has never tried to reform its citizens by laws. Gambling remains a legal vocation in the State of Nevada.

I looked at Nell Hastings, and then at the gambler. I wanted to see if Nell knew who he was. If she did, she gave no sign.

“What’ll it be, Bob?” she asked me.

“Get me something good,” I told her. “I’ll leave it to you.”

The gambler flashed me a swift glance, then his eyes went back to his plate.

Nell Hastings ran the little restaurant there, and did a rushing business with it, too. There wasn’t a table in the place, just a long counter that ran the length of the building, with a stove at one end, a cash register at the other. Both were kept busy.

The mining camp had sprung into a boom with the rush of interest in the gold bearing properties that lay round about. Talk about a shortage of gold! Nevada’s lousy with it. Let conditions get to a point where labor and raw materials are down in price, and it pays to work mines that have long lain dormant. The gold’s there, tons of it. It costs too much money to get it out the way conditions are ordinarily.

Now we were having a gold boom that was like the old days. The camp was running full blast. The pound of the stamps in the mills furnished an undertone of rhythmic noise which jarred the placid silence of the desert. The big mines were working full shifts, and prospectors outfitted to disappear in the desert, their places being taken by silent men who came shuffling in from the great spaces, a string of thin burros plodding behind them.

Nell brought me some roast beef.

“You can always count on that,” she said.

“And you,” I told her.

She grinned and got me some coffee.

“Business good, Nell?”

“And how! I’m so tired my feet ache.”

“That’s good. About the business, I mean — not the feet.”

She started to say something, and then held her breath as the door banged open. A man was weaving about on the threshold of the place.

He was covered with desert dust. His eyes were gray, seemed to be dust covered themselves. But the places which should have been white were all flecked with red. There was a growth of stubble all over his face and neck, a white, bristly stubble that was inches long and made his face look like two red-rimmed bloodshot eyes peering out of a white mop.

Back of the tangle of white bristle that masked his mouth I could get a glimpse of something that was swollen blackish purple. I knew it for the tip of his tongue. He’d been without water, and, if the bony frame was any indication, he’d been without food.

I took that one first, swift look at him, and knew the symptoms. I had sprung to his side by the time he started to fall. He tried to speak, and couldn’t. Then his eyes closed and he lay still in my arms, a little wisp of a man who was so frail it seemed a good breath of desert wind would blow him away.

And yet he’d been out in the desert, fighting it for days, perhaps weeks, and he’d won back to civilization.

“Quick, Nell,” I said, “some sort of fruit juice first. A little hot soup later. Some orange juice if you have it, and a can of tomatoes. We’ll drain off the juice.”

She didn’t say a word, but just went back of the counter, all swift motions, all flying hands and deft fingers. That was Nell. You could count on her to back you up in any sort of an emergency.

The gambler came over and stared curiously. Just from the way he looked I could tell that he was new to the desert.

“Been out of water and food,” I explained to the gambler. “Even if he’d had food, he couldn’t have eaten it without the water. You can see where he came from.”

And I nodded my head toward the country that was visible from the open door of the restaurant shack.

It was desert, a mountain desert that showed naked, stark and cruel. There wasn’t anything that even resembled a tree, not even the desert palms that grow in some of the more fertile stretches of desert. There was just the great expanse of glittering, eye-aching space, tumbled into cruel crags, twisting cañons, and sharp cliffs. There was sage and greasewood, little stunted plants that dotted the desert.

Here and there the steep slopes were scarred by mines, many of which were deserted. There were tumbledown shacks that had lain in crumbling decay ever since the gay nineties. And the nineties had been gay in this camp. Make no mistake about that!

Another man came through the door. Pedro Gonzales, sort of Man-Friday to Pete Blaine, the manager of the big mine that kept the town going.

He stared at the spectacle of the man who was stretched out, the gambler and myself bending over him.

I opened the man’s shirt at the neck, took a glass of water and a spoon, and trickled slow drops of water on the swollen, cracked lips, the big, blackish tongue.

Something fell out of the shirt, a something that thudded as it fell. A thong came loose, and the floor was cascaded with bits of yellow metal.

Men who live with gold a lot get so they can tell much from it.

Those chunks of gold were placer, and they’d come from a field that was rich, the sort of a strike that makes the desert quiver with excitement, and makes towns spring up like mushrooms. There were coarse grains and nuggets that were hardly rounded down.

It looked like gold that started at the surface of the sand and went down clear through to hardpan.

I made a dive for the dirt-glazed buckskin sack and put the gold back in it, fastened the thong around the neck of the sack, and stuffed it down the front of the shirt again.

Then I knew why it had fallen out so easily. There were other sacks in there, and there was a leather belt with pockets down next to the skin.

I tried to get the shirt back in place.

But, when I looked up, I saw the eyes of Pedro Gonzales, and the eyes of the gambler. Neither pair of eyes had missed anything.

“Where did he come from this hombre?” asked Pedro.

“Lord knows,” I said. “He staggered in out of the desert somewhere. And, look you, he was suffering, but he didn’t stop any passer-by and ask for help. He used the last bit of remaining strength he had to walk into a public restaurant. Then the smell of the food and the knowledge he had won out snapped the nerve tension, and he keeled over.”

Pedro nodded. His eyes were squinted and glittering.

The gambler said: “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s going to pull around all right after a while. He ain’t so far gone. I’ve seen ’em worse. He’s had a hard fight and it’s jarred him, but he’s a desert rat, and he’s got the constitution of an ox.”

Nell came with the tomato juice. We dropped little doses of it in the lips we’d pried apart, and saw the throat make convulsive gulps, having difficulty swallowing the liquid because the throat and tongue were so swollen.

“The last thing this man wanted,” I said, “was a crowd around him. He didn’t want any one to see the things that we’ve seen. How about it, boys? Shall we get him some place out of the way and agree to forget what we’ve seen?”

Pedro Gonzales was of the desert, and his answer was prompt.

“That,” he said, “is agreed. We can take him to my room.”

The gambler hesitated a moment, then he said:

“Of course, it’s not my business, and I’m not in the habit of speaking of those things which are not my business.”

Nell looked at me.

“Taking him anywhere, the way he is now, will attract too much attention. I’ve got my tent out here in back. Put him there. There’s a cot.”

We carried him around behind the counter, out through the little screen door in the back to the tent where Nell lived. It was a little affair with a board floor and sides, canvas above that and over the top. She’d fixed it up with those little touches of feminine skill which made the place seem comfortable and homelike, for all it was nothing but a tent house thrown up in a rough mining camp where there was nothing in the way of conveniences.

The man was dirty. He was covered with the grime of the desert, and no one knew the first thing about his past or who he was. But Nell unhesitatingly had us put him down on her bed, and said to me:

“Close up the restaurant, will you, Bob? This man needs some one to be with him. I’m going to stick here.”

That’s the way of the desert.

The gambler spoke to me as we were going back to the restaurant. “You live here?”

“No. I live in the desert. I come and I go. I don’t live any one particular place. Just so it’s the desert.”

“You know the people here?”

“Some of them.”

“Know any one named Blaine?”

“Pete Blaine?” I asked.

“That’s the one.”

“Sure,” I said. “He’s the big chief up at the mine here. He has charge of the whole thing for the Desert Rand Syndicate. Pedro here can tell you anything you want to know about him. Pedro works for him, sort of assistant, you know. He’s usually with Blaine on the job.”

The gambler whirled to stare at Pedro Gonzales.

“Oh,” he said, “I see.”

“What was it you wanted to know?” asked Pedro.

“I thought I knew this man, Blaine, back in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Was he ever there, do you know?”

“I’ve heard him speak of it.”

“Fine!” said the gambler. “He’s the man I want. I’m quite certain I knew him there. I’m going to hunt him up.”

“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” said Pedro.

“Don’t,” the gambler said. “I want to see about getting a job from him, and I’d rather tackle him right out of a clear sky.”

I flashed an amused glance at the gambler’s hands.

They were soft as silk, and the fingers were as smoothly efficient as the fingers of a trained surgeon. I knew that those hands and the dexterity of those fingers were a good part of the gambler’s stock in trade.

“He only has jobs in the mine,” I said. “I think the office staff comes here from the outside. It’s all hired in New York, and then sent on here. They don’t do much office work, anyway, just time-keeping, and the checking of a few records. Most of the book-keeping is done in the East, you know.”

The gambler didn’t say anything. His silence indicated that whether he wanted to work in a mine or not was none of my business. I grinned and let it go at that. He was new to the desert.

We filed out to the street and separated.

II. Murder

A desert camp is a peculiar place, no matter how you take it.

This camp had lots of things in common with the camps of the early days. There are dozens of those places in Nevada right to-day, running full blast.

There were electric lights, and part of the place had running water. Some of the old-time houses were still in service, and there were some new ones put up out of boards and canvas. It was wide open.

Over all were the stars, the great, silent, unwinking stars that stared steadily down as they do in the desert. The camp was a blaze of light in the darkness of the desert night, a single bright spot that flared out into prominence and could be seen for miles.

All around it was the dark silence of the desert, black and mysterious, grim and cruel, the desert that has waited for always, and will always wait.

It seemed to mock at the puny efforts of these men whom the desert had trapped, surrounded in this little inclosure of light and noise. Here was light, water and food. Outside in the desert was darkness, thirst and death. The desert waited, patient, cruel, remorseless.

And it’s that which makes the desert the kindest mother a man ever had. The desert doesn’t save her weaklings. She’s as remorseless as the ocean. A mistake, and the desert strikes. Those who have lived with her are the ones who have learned the ways of the desert. That’s her law. Learn her ways or die. But once you learn to get along with the desert, you realize that cruelty is, after all, the highest form of kindness.

Say what you want to about the desert. Say what you want to about ruthless cruelty which strikes with deadly aim and baffling speed. But you’ll have to admit one thing. Take desert trained men, men who have lived with the desert and know her ways, and you’ll find men who have thrown aside the cloak of mediocrity and have developed character.

That, too, is the law of the desert.

I strolled about the camp, looking at the types.

There were men from the Rand mine, typical laborers of the mining type, heavy muscled, good natured adventurers of the open places, broad-minded, tolerant, slow to anger, but, when once aroused, fiends incarnate.

There were girls, imported girls who had come in from the outside, trekking across miles of desert to taxi-dance with the miners, giving those rough men of the open a feminine companionship without which man sooner or later goes mad.

There were gamblers, men who sat at tables, green eye-shades on their foreheads, their faces pale with the pallor of skin that is exposed much to the artificial light of the night and but little to the sunlight of day. These men sat calmly expressionless, their hands flashing in swift motion as they dealt cards, pushing chips out to the center of the table without an instant’s hesitation, or else throwing down their cards when a bet was made.

They never paused to consider in that lather of anxiety which marks the indecision of the amateur. They either had good enough cards to take a chance with or else they didn’t. If they took a chance they received the verdict of the showdown with faces that didn’t change a muscle. If they won, they raked in the chips. If they lost, they remained utterly motionless. They won without triumph, and lost without despair.

I was staring at a game of draw poker when a hand touched my arm.

It was Pete Blaine.

“I understand there was a man looking for me,” he said.

I remembered that the gambler had said he preferred to speak to Pete Blaine himself, and had asked us not to mention his inquiry. But Pedro Gonzales didn’t have any will of his own so far as Blaine was concerned.

“Seems to me I heard some one mention you.”

“Can you describe him, Bob?”

“Not very well. He was tall and dark, looked like a professional gamber.”

“Did he have a little scar over his right eye?”

I thought for a moment.

“Yes,” I said. “I believe he did. You know him, then?”

“No,” said Blaine. “I don’t know him, but Pedro told me about him and about the scar. I wondered if he had been mistaken.”

“He’s around town, somewhere,” I told him. “You’ll run on to him probably.”

He shook his head.

“No. That’s why I was asking the questions. There’s a big deal pending, and I’ve got some information from the mine that they have to have at once. I’m leaving within ten minutes. I’m going to drive over the Jawbone Cañon road and try and make the railroad by daylight. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and if this man were really a friend of mine I’d like to have seen him before I leave.”

“I’ll tell him, if I see him,” I said.

“I wouldn’t bother,” he told me. “I’m satisfied it’s just another one of those drifters who want to make a pretense of former friendship in order to get some easy work.”

I nodded. I knew that the camp had its share of that type, men who were willing to work if the work wasn’t too hard, and the pay was plenty. The desert isn’t kind to men of that type. They drift, for the most part, around the cities.

Along about nine thirty, which is late for the desert, I decided that I’d stroll around and see how Nell was making it, and whether there was anything I could do to help her with her guest who had stumbled in out of the desert. I figured he’d have recovered enough to go to the ramshackle hotel and get a room by this time. Or he might have been one of those fellows who were hardy enough to pull out and make a camp in the open. For the most part the hotel housed the people from the outside. Your true desert dweller hates a roof over his head when he doesn’t need protection from rain — which is seldom in the desert.

Nell was closing up the place.

“How’s the patient?” I asked.

“Coming along,” she said. “I kept his head sopped in wet towels, and by the time the tomato juice had started his saliva trickling he was yelling for water. I didn’t give him too much, just a little bit at a time. He’d been in the desert before, and he knew enough to help me. I guess he’s gone by this time. I had to come back here for the supper trade, and he said he’d be all right.

“I sort of thought he’d come in and see me before he left, but he didn’t. Guess he’s over at the hotel by this time.”

“I’ll go take a look with you,” I told her.

She had an electric flash light. Together we walked out to the tent. I raised the flap. She flashed the torch into the interior of the tent.

Things have a way of being grim in the desert. The veneer gets stripped off of everything. That holds true for murders. I’ve seen a murder or two in my time, and always the murders that take place in the desert are killings that haven’t any sugar coating.

This one wasn’t any exception.

The man lay on his back on the cot. There was a cut in his throat, a thing of red horror that made a gap between his chin and his chest.

One glance and I knew that Nell would never be able to use the bedding again.

The white illumination of the flash light, boring into that dark interior of the tent house, caught the form on the bed, the head that was tilted back at such a grotesque angle, and made a shadow of horror on the canvas side of the house.

I caught Nell as she screamed and her hand became limp.

The flash light rolled to the floor, slipping from her numbed fingers. She clung to me in the darkness like a child clinging to its father. Then she shuddered, took a deep breath, and said:

“I’m sorry. I dropped the flash light. Do you want to go in and make an investigation, Bob?”

“Yes,” I told her, and picked up the flash light.

“I’ll stay out here,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I’d like to have a witness. The gold, you know.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” she said.

We went in. I opened the man’s shirt.

The gold was gone.

“That’s all I wanted to know.” I said. “Now we’ll get in touch with Stan Walker. He can take charge.”

Stan Walker was the resident deputy sheriff. He was an excitable sort of cuss, and I knew he’d resent it if he wasn’t told of the crime at once. Perhaps as a desert man who’s been accustomed to the reading of trail I might have discovered something if I’d looked around, but Walker would have resented that.

Nell was trembling as she put her hand on my arm, but she didn’t say anything, and she walked along with firm steps.

The desert was big and silent and dark over on the left. The lights of the town made the sky bright over on the right. A phonograph made music from a scratchy record. A girl laughed in the darkness; a low, seductive, throaty laugh.

“Walker was in a poker game about half an hour ago,” I told Nell. “I’ll see if I can round him up.”

But I didn’t need to take the trouble. We were coming to the lighted section of the town when I saw a figure come out of the dance hall. It looked like Stan Walker, and I whistled. He turned and I saw it was the man I was looking for.

He looked us over with that look of halfway hostility that he always had for me. Now that he was a deputy, Walker took himself seriously, and I wasn’t inclined to take him so seriously, remembering back to the time when he’d got drunk in Mojave and tried to steal a locomotive.

“What is it?” he asked.

Before his appointment he’d always worn a sensible Stetson with a color that matched the desert dust. Now he’d broken out in one of those dressy, wide-brimmed black hats that are worn by sheriffs out in the West.

“Stan,” I said, “there’s been a man murdered.”

He stared at me, then seemed to swell up with importance.

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know, a prospector who stumbled into Nell’s restaurant.”

“Who murdered him?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you happen to discover the crime?”

I told him, in a few words, telling about the man’s arrival, the gold, the gambler.

Stan Walker was a weatherbeaten cuss who’d seen fifty-five or fifty-six years go by in the course of his checkered lifetime. He had a bony face, a long, catfish mouth and eyes that he tried to make look penetrating now that he was a deputy.

“The motive,” he said, “was robbery.”

“Apparently,” I told him.

“Four people are under suspicion,” he said. “That is, there are four people who must explain their whereabouts. The murderer is certain to be one of the four.”

“Yes?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” I told him, “If you’re going to figure it that way, I can see where you can suspect the gambler, and Pedro Gonzales, and myself, but I don’t figure the fourth.”

He fastened his steely eyes on Nell Hastings.

“There’s Nell here,” he said. “She had equal knowledge, and probably a better opportunity.”

I could feel my face getting red, and my knuckles were pushing against the skin on the back of my hands. I kept myself in check, though.

“If you want some advice from a bystander,” I told him, “you’d better get the sheriff here just as fast as you can. You start handling this thing by yourself and you’re going to get hurt.”

He stared threateningly.

“Who’s going to hurt me?” he asked.

“You are,” I told him.

He clamped that catfish mouth of his into a grim line, and said:

“I want you to understand, Bob Zane, that this is murder, and the law doesn’t take cognizance of individuals. I don’t give a damn whether a man is friend or foe. I suspect him until he can prove his innocence.”

“All right,” I said. “As an efficient officer, would you rather visit the scene of the crime, or would you prefer to stand here and debate about your devotion to duty?”

He couldn’t answer that with words.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Nell’s tent.”

“Come on,” he said. “I want you both to remain with me until I release you.”

I was mad, but Nell laughed, and the sound of that laughter made Stan Walker’s back bristle up like an angry cat’s. He stalked with the imposing dignity of a man who takes himself very, very seriously.

We trailed along.

III. Who Is Guilty?

Stan Walker emerged from the tent with a look of professional gravity.

“It’s murder,” he said.

“What the hell did you think it was?” I snapped, my nerves rubbed raw by his unjust suspicion of Nell Hastings.

“That’ll do,” he said. “This is a serious matter. The motive was robbery. Now we’re going to round up Pedro Gonzales and this gambler. When we’ve done that we’ll have an investigation.”

There wasn’t any use arguing with him. He represented the law, and law should be respected, even when it picks funny agents.

“I’d suggest the gambler first,” I said.

“You get his name?” he asked.

“No. But we won’t have any great trouble finding him. He’s registered at the hotel, and they won’t mistake him for any one else. I say he’s a gambler. Of course I don’t know, but I’m betting he is. His hands, his eyes, the way he holds his face...”

Stan Walker interrupted.

“It has been my experience in detective work that it’s pretty hard to place a man simply from his appearance. You should have got his name and found out definitely what he was doing here.”

“Yes,” I said, with mock meekness, “I was under a disadvantage when I was talking with him.”

“How was that?” asked Walker.

“I forgot that there was a murder intended, and didn’t know you’d want all those facts. Otherwise I’d have had them.”

He clamped his mouth the more firmly. There wasn’t any use trying to reason with that hombre, or trying to be sarcastic either. He pursued the even tenor of his ways and figured he was the biggest man in town. Watching him that night, I was reminded of the description of him a mining engineer had given after he’d talked with the deputy.

“Ten inches taller than God,” he’d said.

And the description fit.

We went to the hotel. Walker routed out Bill Fincher, who ran the joint, and asked him if he’d rented a room to a man of about forty-five years of age with black eyes, dark hair, a scar over his right eye.

Fincher scowled thoughtfully.

“Fellow who looked like a gambler, Bill,” I said.

Fincher grunted and remarked:

“Oh, that guy! His name’s Madison, and he comes from El Paso.”

Walker said:

“Shut up, Zane, I’m asking the questions.”

I didn’t say anything.

Fincher went on:

“He’s a funny cuss. He sneaked out a couple of hours ago, and we haven’t seen him since. He acted as though he didn’t want anybody to ask any questions, and—”

“What’s his room?” asked Walker.

“Come on,” said Bill.

He took us down the corridor, paused in front of a door. He knocked. It was a typical mining camp hotel, a long barnlike structure with a single corridor and rooms on either side. It was made of boards thrown up on frames and strips of batten covering the spaces between the boards. In summer it was hot. In winter it was cold. And it was the best the town afforded.

There was no answer.

Bill tried the door. It was locked.

He took a pass key and we went in.

The gambler had unpacked his suitcase and had the contents scattered over the bed. There was the usual assortment of things that a man uses when he’s living out of a suitcase. There was a heavy cowhide telescope bag in the corner. It was strapped. Stan Walker unpacked it.

Halfway down in it he found three buckskin bags. They were glazed with dirt and empty. He opened them carefully. With a magnifying glass we could see the bits of gold that adhered to the seams.

Walker was excited now. He explored around and found a money belt that had also contained gold, and which was now empty. And then he gave an exclamation as his hand pulled something else from the tangle of stuff that he’d thrown out of the telescope bag.

Nell Hastings gave an exclamation of horror.

It was a sheath knife, and the red horror of it told only too well what it had been used for.

Walker straightened.

A key sounded in the door. The door opened. The gambler stood there on the threshold. He stared at us with an impassive countenance. Whatever his emotions were, we couldn’t read them. Walker dropped the knife and his hand streaked for his gun. He was quick with a gun.

But the gambler was just as quick, if not quicker.

I flung myself against him and grabbed the wrist.

“The law,” I said.

I held the gun where he couldn’t use it. Stan Walker came forward, the gun boring into the gambler’s middle.

“Drop that gun,” he said, “or I’ll blow your stomach out.”

The gun thudded to the floor. The gambler’s face remained impassive. I released my hold on his wrist.

“I arrest you, in the name of the law,” said Stan Walker, “for the murder of an unidentified man, and maybe there’ll be a charge of grand larceny, too. I ain’t sure how they handle that. But I’m warning you that anything you say will be used against you.”

“You’re crazy!” said the gambler.

“Maybe,” said Walker. “Put handcuffs on him, Bob, and keep out of the line of fire when you do it.”

He handed me handcuffs.

“Put out your wrists,” I told the gambler.

He held them out. His face was the color of chalk, but there wasn’t any expression on it. I felt him wince as the handcuffs went around his wrists and clicked home. I was willing to bet it wasn’t the first pair of handcuffs that had been on his wrists, but I wasn’t saying anything. It was Walker’s show. He could run it to suit himself.

“Where was you about an hour ago?” asked Walker.

The gambler smiled. His face was white as desert chalk, but his eyes were steady.

“I’m answering no questions,” he said.

Walker shrugged.

“I’m goin’ to take him down to the county seat,” he told me. “There’ll be a lynching sure if he’s left here.”

“Better look up Pedro Gonzales,” I told him. “You want to check up on all four of us, you know.”

He acted just a little embarrassed.

“No hard feelings,” he said. “But I had to be impartial. Now that we got the evidence on this hombre, I can treat you unofficial like. But I couldn’t play favorites.”

Bill Fincher spoke up and said:

“Pedro Gonzales left with Pete Blaine to take the trip through Jawbone Cañon. They left before dark.”

Walker turned to Nell.

“Was this murder done after dark, Nell?”

“Yes. I was talking with the old man after eight o’clock.”

Walker nodded.

“That lets Pedro out,” he said. “We got the guilty man, all right; and I’m going to get him down to the county seat. Bob Zane, I’m going to draft you to take us there. There’s only one way we can make it in time to get back here with the sheriff and take charge of the case, and that’s to drive through Jawbone Cañon. I want somebody that knows the desert to do the driving. You’re hereby appointed a special deputy to see that I get to the jail with this prisoner.”

I shrugged my shoulders. Not that I wanted the job, but I figured it’d be a lot better to get down and get the sheriff on the job than to let Walker mess around with it; and he was right when he said that there was some danger of lynch law.

“When do we start?” I asked.

“Now,” he said. “We’ll go in my car.”

The Jawbone Cañon road is a short-cut, all right. It saves over forty-one miles of desert road. It’s only a matter of sixty-four miles to the county seat over the Jawbone Cañon road. But it’s tough going.

There used to be some mines in Jawbone Cañon that kept the road up. The mines were abandoned, and the road got in bad repair. But it was a road, and a good driver could get over it with a light car. None of those shiny finished boulevard cars could make it, but a rough and ready desert rattletrap could.

Down below Jawbone Cañon where the road struck the flat desert was a place of shifting sand and hard pulling, but it was pretty much on the level. Jawbone Cañon was rough and twisting. At that a man could make time over the road if he was in enough of a hurry. But cars mostly went the long way around. It was easier.

Stan Walker appointed Bill Fincher as a deputy to take charge of the body and see that it wasn’t disturbed until we could get back with the sheriff. He got his car filled up with oil and gas, and we started.

I’m more at home with burros than with a car, but I guess I know every foot of the desert as well as the next man. I know it well enough to respect it without being afraid of it, to love it without taking chances with it.

We jolted along the plateau road until we topped the big barren ridge of colored mountains and started winding down Jawbone Cañon.

We’d got pretty well down into the middle of the cañon, where the road twisted and turned and was all rutted and rough, covered with bowlders of varying sizes, and with occasional stretches of sand. The high walls of the cañon stretched up until they blotted out the steady stars with rims of black that were like ink.

I swung the wheel getting the car around a curve, and saw a man waving his arms frantically. I slammed on the brakes. The car skidded around some and stopped. The man came into the glare of the headlights. His coat was off, his arms semaphoring wildly.

I saw it was Pete Blaine.

And the gambler saw him, too. There were the three of us in the car, the gambler, who sat up in front with me, his wrists handcuffed, and Stan Walker who sat in back with his gun out. I was driving, up at the wheel.

I could see the gambler stiffen when Blaine walked into the headlights.

“That the man you knew?” I asked him.

The gambler said nothing.

Blaine walked up until he could see into the car.

“Hello, Zane,” he said. “And there’s Stan Walker. Hello, Walker. Gee, I’m glad to see you two. We had a bust-down, smashed into a rock and collapsed the front wheel. I’ve got to get down to the railroad. Can you give us a lift?”

Walker said importantly:

“We’re on official business, Blaine. But I guess we can give you a ride.”

Blaine snorted:

“You can’t leave us here. There ain’t a car a week over this road. I thought we were stranded for keeps. Gee, but I was glad to hear the sound of the motor in your car!”

He was dressed after the fashion of mining engineers, with corduroys and lace boots. He was going down for a consultation with the representatives of the mine, and he wanted to look important and well dressed. A real desert rat would have turned up his nose at the rig he wore, though.

And then his eyes lit on the gambler.

He stiffened, backed away, and said: “You!”

The gambler stared at him and said nothing.

Blaine said: “Is this man a prisoner, officer?”

Stan Walker liked the word “officer.” He swelled out his chest.

“He’s under arrest for murder,” he said. “You know him?”

“Know him!” said Blaine. “I’ll say I know him! I knew him when he was convicted of robbery in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and sentenced to seven years in the penitentiary!”

Walker said gloatingly: “A jailbird, eh?”

And the gambler said nothing. He sat very straight, very tense, and very silent.

“Well,” I told them, “this ain’t getting us any place. If we’re going to the county seat we’d better get started.”

Blaine got to the running board.

“The car’s down there a hundred yards or so. Pedro’s with it. He got hurt a little bit, a sprained ankle or something. I heard the sound of your car and came up here to make sure you didn’t smash into us when you came around the curve.”

I drove slowly until we rounded the sharp curve on a steep grade. There was Blaine’s car with the left front wheel caved in. The car was sitting down on the axle in front, and looked pretty much out of the running.

Pedro Gonzales came hobbling out.

He was glad to see us, and insisted on shaking hands all around like we’d been long lost brothers. He heard of the murder and was surprised. He said there wasn’t over five hundred dollars’ worth of gold in the sack. He evidently didn’t know about the other sacks I’d felt in the man’s shirt. I told him about them.

“How’d the accident happen?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was asleep. Blaine was driving. All of a sudden, bang, down we went.”

“What time?” I asked.

“Must have been over two hours ago,” he said.

I went over to look at the car. It was hopeless without a new wheel and a lot of minor parts. Things on one side were smashed pretty much. I could see that there were suitcases in the car, and that Blaine had taken off his coat and folded it over the hood of the car. I put one hand on the coat and leaned over to take a look at the wheel. My bare arm slid along the top of the radiator, and I jerked it back as the metal burnt my flesh.

“You must not have any water in here,” I told him. “Your radiator’s pretty hot.”

Pedro answered: “Yes. We were speeding.”

It was a poor road to speed on. I turned to Walker.

“Well,” I told him, “you’re the boss. What are you going to do?”

“You can take me to the railroad,” said Blaine.

Walker shook his head. “We’re turning the other way. We won’t hit the railroad until we get to the county seat. We can take you there.”

Blaine was impatient.

“Look here,” he said, “this is important. It’s a matter of business that—”

“This,” said Walker, drawing himself up and swelling out his chest, “is murder. It’s my duty and it comes first.”

Pedro said: “He means it, chief. He’s just that kind of a guy. Better let me ride in to the county seat with them and bring back a repair car. We’ll get this fixed up. You can stay here. If some one else comes along that’s headed for the railroad you can go with them. If you can’t get a lift I’ll be back with the repair car.”

Blaine thought it over.

“Go ahead,” he snapped. “You’ll hear more from this, Walker.”

“I’m sorry,” said Walker, “but duty is duty.”

I had a sudden inspiration. I slid my hand around the hood of the car and dragged Blaine’s coat down to the place between the hood and the front fender. Then I turned and leaned my back against the fender, my right hand dropping down to the coat. I fumbled around in the pocket until I found the leather wallet which Blaine always carried in the coat pocket. I slipped it out and put it in my hip pocket as I walked away from the car.

Blaine was walking up and down and sputtering, but there wasn’t any use, as far as Walker was concerned. Walker was as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Pedro got in the car with us. I sent it on its way, leaving Blaine there.

Pedro was nursing his foot. Walker was keeping both eyes on the prisoner. Neither of them knew too much about this section of the desert. There was a place at the bottom of the grade where an old road turned off. If I could get their attention distracted when I came to the forks of the road, I had an idea I might put a plan of my own into operation.

IV. Lost

We hit the place where the old road tinned off. I jumped as though the gambler had made a sudden move, and Walker jabbed his gun into the gambler’s shoulder blades.

“None of that!” he said.

I swung the wheel and we were fighting our way along over the old road. If you know roads in the desert, you know why it takes so long to get places. This road was never repaired. It was cut up with channels cut by water from the cloudbursts. There were stretches of sand, long gullies of stone, steep hills.

Walker said after a while: “I had no idea the road was this bad. We’d have saved time by taking the long way around and forgetting the Jawbone Cañon road.”

“I believe we would, at that,” I said. “This is awful!”

I kept on fighting the road. It had turned now and was winding up a long draw where the sand was so heavy I had to keep down in the gears. Walker was getting nervous.

Pedro Gonzales said: “There’s something wrong here. I was over the road once before, and it wasn’t this bad.”

“Maybe the thing’ll get better when we top this grade,” I said.

I kept the car running.

An hour passed, another hour. The passengers were getting fidgety. We dropped down a steep slope, crossed a place that was all sand, and started another climb. The road had been cut into a grade, and there were lots of bowlders that had rolled down. Four or five times I had to get out and roll rocks away. Then we went down into the flat desert, broken only by rolling stretches. This was harder going than anything we’d struck. There was sand, lots of sand.

Walker pulled out his watch.

“You’ve got us on the wrong road, Zane,” he snapped.

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

I was watching for landmarks. At last I saw them. I knew right where I was.

There was a dry wash with bowlders, and the road dropped right off into it, a drop of two feet at least.

I put it in low and stepped on it.

“Look out!” yelled Walker.

I grabbed for the emergency brake, but I stepped on the throttle. The front of the car took the drop. There was a terrific jar. Then a stone went through the transmission. A front wheel gave way, and there we were. Water was hissing and boiling, streaming out of the radiator.

“You clumsy fool!” yelled Walker.

I turned around.

“Anybody hurt?” I asked.

Nobody was much the worse for the shock. Pedro’s ankle was pretty bad. It was bothering him. Walker was sore. The gambler had cut his wrist with the side of one of the handcuffs as the car had made the plunge. Aside from that, they were all right.

“I told you, Walker, I was more at home with a burro than an automobile.”

He got out and surveyed the mess.

“All due to clumsy incompetence!” he stormed. “For years I’ve had you pointed out, Bob Zane, as the man who knew the desert, the old timer who knew every single inch of the desert as far as there was any desert. And here you go and get us on the wrong road, and then put your foot on the gasoline instead of the brake pedal!”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

Pedro and Walker took turns in cussing me.

The gambler said nothing.

“Well,” I told them, “we’ll have to wait for daylight now, and try to see where we are.”

Walker stormed around and threatened to file charges against me for interfering with an officer in the discharge of his duty, and a lot more stuff.

Pedro was having trouble with his ankle. He cursed in a low, sullen undertone. The gambler was very suave, very much of a gentleman. He asked Walker to take off the handcuffs. Walker finally unlocked one and locked the other around the robe rail.

It wasn’t a comfortable night, what was left of it.

Morning showed us just what I knew it would show us, the most desolate, God-forsaken stretch of barren country that one could imagine.

There were rolling hills that seemed to stretch in an unbroken sea of glittering desolation. We were down in a sort of cañon.

The car was hopeless. The water had even drained out of the radiator and made a moist place in the thirsty sand.

The sun sent its rays beating down fiercely.

There was no shade.

The men took stock of the situation. Walker was going to remain with his prisoner, come what might. Pedro’s ankle prevented him from walking.

“You’ve got to go and get help,” said Walker, “and don’t bungle it like you did in getting us out here.”

“Okay,” I said, “providing you remember to stay with the car. That’s where trouble starts on the desert. The car gets wrecked, one man goes for help. The others get impatient and start out to search for him. When help comes the men are scattered all over the desert. By the time they find ’em it’s too late. You can sit still in the shade of the car and conserve your strength better than you can by bucking the heat of the desert.”

“Get started,” Walker snarled. “You’d think you was putting on a talk for tenderfeet. Get started.”

I headed east.

Walker yelled at me: “Don’t tackle that road. It leads back to Jawbone Cañon eventually, and there’s no traffic over that. Head to the north. You should strike the main highway by midnight!”

I kept on walking due east.

Walker came running up alongside of me. I could hear the crunch of his feet in the sand and the rattle of his voice in angry expostulation; but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I just kept plugging along.

After a while I said:

“How about your prisoner? I thought your duty was to look after him.”

Walker whirled, looked back at the car, cursed me some more, and then jog trotted back. I didn’t look at him. I just kept on going due east.

After an hour I’d lost sight of the car and the road. There was nothing around me but desert, a vast furnace of heat. The hot sand burned through the soles of my shoes. The sun beat down mercilessly.

The white-hot glare of the light on the sand made the eye muscles ache until the whole brain throbbed with a dreadful weariness from which there was no relief.

I swung down a wash between two hills, heading toward the south.

I walked until afternoon, making a big circle, taking great care not to leave prints within a long distance of the car. It was three o’clock when I topped a little hill ’way over on the west of the car and looked at it.

The car cast a splotch of shadow, and that splotch of shadow showed jet black on the glittering sand. The men were sprawled in that area of shadow, motionless, lifeless in appearance.

I was tired. I lay down and slept.

Toward sunset I looked at them again.

They were stirring around a little. I knew I was practically invisible with the sun in the heavens back of me, but I had only the very top of my head sticking up, and I was cautious.

When the sun started to slide behind the mountains in the west I ducked down into my cañon and picked out a place to spend the night. I gathered a lot of scrub sage and piled it in a sheltered place against a ledge. By the time it was dark I took a last look.

The men had a fire going. It would be cold there in the desert at night, and they’d gone out and picked up some sage and piled it around. They’d conserve their fuel.

I went back to my bed of sage and went to sleep.

When morning came I kept in the bed. I was a little chilled, but the sun started stoking up the surface heat of the desert, and the horizons started to shimmy.

I kept under cover all morning. Not until the sun started down in the west did I dare to risk looking out at them.

They weren’t keeping so quiet now. They were standing out, staring over the desert, straining their eyes for some sign of help.

They figured I’d have hit the Jawbone Cañon road by night and should have been showing up with help.

I knew how they felt, listening for the sound of a motor, every time a breath of wind made a noise as it rustled past the sage their hopeful ears would interpret it as sound made by a motor.

It was dry work, and it was hungry work. I hadn’t eaten, and I hadn’t had anything to drink. I’m an old desert man, and a man who’s lived a long time in the desert doesn’t sweat as much as a man who hasn’t dried out any. Even at that, I felt the heat and had to carry a pebble in my mouth to keep any saliva on my tongue.

I watched the men.

They got impatient. Once or twice Walker would move out a ways and climb to a little hill where he’d look all around. I could see Pedro when he moved. The foot was bothering him.

The desert was silent, vast, unchanging, patient.

The men moved about; little, aimless motions that relieved the tension of the mind, and yet built up more nervousness. I watched them until almost sundown. Then I went back and lay down.

There was a restlessness, a feeling of fear. Well as I knew the desert, well as I knew my own plans, I had that peculiar feeling. It comes from experiencing the pangs of hunger and the suffering of thirst when one’s out in the desert.

No matter where the place in the desert, there’s that sinister silence that comes thundering to the consciousness, the vast, aching space that’s a breeder of panic in those who don’t know the desert and love it.

For just a half second I felt the urge of that blind panic, the fear of the very bigness of the desert, the contagion of the void which seemed to creep into my soul and suck the very life out of me.

Then I took a deep breath and the feeling left me.

The desert had stamped its mark upon me, and branded me for its own. Gone was that feeling of panic. In its place was one of calm peace. The desert had ceased to terrify me with its waiting patience, and had inspired me, instead, with its tranquillity.

I slept.

I awoke at night and heard the desert talking.

It’s a strange experience, lying out in the desert and listening to the sand slither along on the wings of those mysterious night winds which spring up from nowhere, blow violently, then die down again.

The sand scurries along on the wings of the wind, and rustles against the sage and the cacti. Then, as the wind freshens, sand rustles along on the surface of the sand itself. The whole desert seethes into life, and every grain rubs against the other grains, giving forth a faint suggestion of inaudible sound which, multiplied a thousandfold, comes to the ears as an intangible whisper.

You try to pin it down to some definite sound, and it’s just a peculiar undertone of faint noise underlying the desert wind. Relax and immediately it becomes a whisper, slitheringly insistent, hissing and mysterious.

I’ve known men to go almost crazy when they were alone out in the desert and the sand started to whisper.

I crawled up on the ridge and looked over at the men around the machine. They were keeping the fire going, and they were huddled around the flame. They wanted companionship more than warmth. That’s the way with men who are plunged out into the middle of the desert.

They find themselves alone with their own souls. They strive to keep from facing themselves, clutching at every vestige of human companionship, yet always being swept into the silence.

These men were clutching at each other as a drowning man clutches at straws. And the attempt to avoid the inevitable was as futile. They were facing their own souls, stripped stark naked of the artificial standards of a civilization that’s coated with gilt.

Back amongst their kind they’d have standards of success in life that would be measured by gold, by power, by an ability to wrest from their fellow men.

Out here in the desert, standing face to face with themselves, with the grim specter of death jeering at their elbows, there was only one standard of life. The great whispering desert, and the steady silent stars, knew what that standard was. Remorselessly, inexorably, the desert was holding her mirror to these three men.

I nodded my satisfaction, and stumbled my way down to my bed of sage. I lay and listened to the desert talk to me.

Morning. The golden rays of the sun touched the tops of the mountains. The purple shadows shrank into little pools which hugged the face of the desert, then disappeared. The heat beat down like a smothering blanket. The skyline of the mountains wavered, tilted, wavered, and broke into a devil dance of its own, a thing of heat distortion and mirage.

I risked peering over the ridge.

The last semblance of self-control had vanished. The men were moving about. That is, Pedro and one other man were moving. I could tell Pedro by the limp. The other man might have been either the deputy or the gambler. I couldn’t tell at the distance.

They made frequent journeys to the tops of the knolls, and they broke into running steps at times, running steps which their panic-sticken minds finally controlled, beat into a walk. But, ever and anon, the control of the mind would slip. The sight of death, jeering at their elbows, would send them into a run again.

I waited until it was noon, until the tongue in my mouth felt like a great ball of dry blotting paper that was sucking the soul stuff from my blood. Then I topped the ridge and came stumblingly down the slope.

I’d gone two hundred yards before they saw me.

Then they paused in their restless motions to stare at me, little sticks of black standing grotesquely against the white glare of the desert.

Then they ran toward me.

I had a pinch of tobacco in either hand. I put a bit in my eyes. The eyes streamed water, then flamed into red anger. I stumbled on and stared with those red eyes at the two men who came weaving their heavy-footed way across the hot sands.

Walker tried to speak, and could not.

Pedro Gonzales limped after him. He stared at me with incredulous eyes.

“You didn’t find it?”

I pretended to be delirious.

“Help,” I said thickly. “Three men in an automobile in the desert. I came east. They’re west!”

I pointed a wavering finger at the horizon which shimmered in hot mockery.

“Go to them. Give me water. Water! Water!”

Pedro Gonzales cursed.

“Walked in a big circle like a damned tenderfoot! This is the end!”

Walker mumbled. “Too late for us to try now. We’re dying!”

They stumbled their way back to the car. I staggered after them.

The gambler looked up. His face was calm as the desert, utterly expressionless. He smiled a greeting.

“Hello,” he said. “You got back?”

“It’s the end, you fool,” said Pedro Gonzales. “He walked in a circle...”

“Sure, I know,” observed the gambler. “We have to face it some time.”

They stared at him with their reddened, feverish eyes.

I flopped over on the sand and kept mumbling for water.

The sun beat down on the dazzling sand which shifted and swayed in the heat waves. The eyes ached with the white glare. The heat seemed to have started the blood boiling.

“It’s the end,” said Pedro Gonzales, mouthing the words in toneless, foolish repetition.

I sat up on the sand and stared at him with my bloodshot eyes.

“Why don’t you die clean?” I asked him.

V. The Confession

Walker said: “Don’t mind him. It’s the delirium. They get the strength of ten men, run up and down and tear their clothes off and talk crazy things. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

I got to my feet and let my eyes get big and staring.

“Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about!” I said. “I was crazy when I came here, but I know now what I’m doing. I found Pete Blaine out there on the desert. He had tried to walk for water, and he was dying when I came on him.

“He’d gone on ahead in the dark, and fallen over the edge of the cañon and broken his leg. He knew he was dying. I was there with him when he died.

“He couldn’t die with murder on his soul. He told me all about it. Pete and Pedro killed that old prospector. Not for the gold, but because they wanted this gambler out of the way.

“They were going to frame an alibi. They left town and pretended they were going on down the Jawbone Cañon road. But they didn’t. They sneaked back and killed the old prospector and took the gold, to make it look like robbery.

“Then they went down the Jawbone Cañon road, but they were only about twenty minutes ahead of us. They smashed the car on purpose, so that they’d have an alibi. They said the car had been broken down for about two hours. It wasn’t anything of the sort. The car had only been broken down about twenty minutes. That’s why the radiator burned my arm when I touched it.”

I stopped and stared around at the men with my reddened eyes.

The gambler sat quiet, almost detached, his face absolutely expressionless. Pedro Gonzales’s face had twisted into a spasm of expression. His eyes were staring.

Walker looked at me with his jaw sagging open. It was pathetic to see this man, face to face with death, realizing that he might have made the mistake that had caused all this.

“Blaine confessed,” I went on. “He told me all about it, and he scribbled a confession in his notebook and gave me the notebook and wallet, so that I could turn in his confession and make what restitution he could.”

Pedro Gonzales husked: “That’s a damned lie!”

I shook my head and pulled the wallet from my pocket.

Every one of them knew that leather wallet. It was Blaine’s, and one that he was proud of, one that had the edges laced together with a leather thong, and had his monogram embossed on the leather front. I took out the notebook that was inside of it, and thumbed through the pages.

Pedro Gonzales pushed forward.

“It’s a lie!” he said again.

I looked at Gonzales and then let my face settle into a cunning leer.

“Oh, no, it ain’t a lie,” I said. “I’ve got the confession right here, but you aren’t going to get your hands on it. You’d destroy it!”

And I pushed the notebook back in the wallet, put the wallet in my pocket.

Stan Walker said: “Bob Zane, that’s evidence. I command you to deliver it into the custody of the law!”

I laughed at him mockingly.

“There isn’t any law,” I said. “As far as you’re concerned, the law is finished. As far as I’m concerned, the law is finished. As far as Pedro Gonzales is concerned, the law is finished. The law can’t do anything to any of us. We’re going to a higher court! We’re dying!”

Pedro Gonzales stared at us with his bloodshot eyes.

“Blaine wasn’t the one that did it,” I said. “Gonzales was the one who did the real killing. Blaine only helped.”

Gonzales said nothing.

Walker turned to him and said: “Gonzales, is that right?”

Gonzales still kept quiet.

I said: “Of course it’s right, you fool! Don’t you see? How could the motor of that car have been so hot that I burned my arm on it if it had been standing there in Jawbone Cañon for two hours? They smashed the car just to make an alibi.”

Nobody said anything for a while. There was silence. Then I got up and said: “You can do what you want to, but I’m not going to die with a murderer.”

I got to my feet and started to walk away, but I only went about twenty yards, and then staggered, stumbled, and fell down on my face.

I heard some one running toward me, and knew that it was Pedro Gonzales, from the way he limped when he ran. I could hear the sound of his feet crunching in the sand, one foot coming down harder than the other.

He flung himself on me and started clawing and scratching at my pocket, trying to get hold of the wallet that I had there.

Stan Walker was running after him, yelling for him to stop.

Gonzales got his hands on the wallet, but couldn’t drag it from my pocket because I flung my arm across my body so that I held the wallet close to my body.

Walker shouted something inarticulate and flung himself at Gonzales, knocking Gonzales back into the desert.

I sat up and stared at them. My eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and my voice was husky.

“There’s no use fighting about it,” I said. “It wouldn’t make any difference. There’s no escape. We’re going to die. We can’t reach water, and no help will come to us here. All that I ask is, don’t let me die with that murderer!

“Blaine died, but he died with a clean soul. He confessed.”

The strain was too much for Gonzales. He got to his hands and knees there in the desert and stared at us with his red-rimmed eyes glittering malevolently, his lips working and twisting. He was like some wild animal there, with the fierce sun beating down on his face, showing the ravages of thirst and hunger, the oily scum which had collected on his skin, the growth of stubble which was pushing out from his chin.

“He didn’t die clean, damn him!” he snarled. “I didn’t kill him; Blaine killed him! I only helped Blaine with his getaway. The dirty double crosser! He came to me and told me that this gambler had something on him, and that he had to kill him. I don’t know what it was, but the man had been following Pete for years. So Pete killed the prospector, and took the gold. He wanted to make it look as though the gambler had done the killing. Then he figured that the boys would string up the gambler. All I did was help Pete plant the gold in the gambler’s room and plan the alibi so that Pete would have a chance to alibi himself if anybody made any accusation.”

Walker said: “Gonzales, I arrest you in the name of the law.”

Gonzales jibbered at him with a face that was like the face of some great ape.

“You damn fool!” he said. “You can’t arrest anybody. We’re dying. All of us are dying. It’s the end! There’s no escape! Blaine’s dead. The gambler’s going to die. You’re going to die. Bob Zane’s going to die. I’m going to die. All here together, we’re going to die!”

The gambler said calmly:

“Well, at least let’s be men about it.”

I rolled over and got to my hands and knees. I sat up and stared at one of the mountains, and then pointed to the outline of a saddleback.

“I know that mountain!” I yelled. “There’s a prospector got a camp on the other side. The road’s only a little ways from his place, the main road that has travel on it.”

“Delirium,” said Walker, trying to calm me.

“Anyhow,” said the gambler, “we can see if he’s right. Personally, I’m tired of this place. I’d like a change of scenery for my death. I don’t want to die by the side of this automobile. It lacks distinction.”

I staggered away toward the mountain.

“Come on,” said the gambler.

Pedro tried to keep up, but his ankle was bad. He was limping and staggering.

I led the procession.

It was hard going in the hot sun, toiling up the little slope. We topped it. There, not half a mile away, was a little shack with a road running in to it, and a flivver standing in the sun, covered over with burlap. There was a trailer with a big water tank on it.

The men broke into a run.

The prospector came out when he heard us shuffling through the sand. He gave us water and made us some soup. We went out and got Pedro Gonzales.

The water brought us around all right. The fever left our blood.

Walker came over to me. His manner was more changed. It was deferential and somehow apologetic.

“Zane,” he said, “I had better take that confession as evidence.”

“You don’t need it now,” I told him, “not after having heard Gonzales’ confession.”

“I know it,” he said, “but nevertheless it’s evidence and I should have it.”

I grinned at him and said: “Well, you won’t get it.”

He stiffened.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I told him, “there isn’t any confession.”

He stared at me with his eyes getting bigger all the time.

“I knew you were making a mistake right from the start,” I told him, “and when I touched the radiator on that car down there in the cañon and it was red-hot, I knew that the car hadn’t been standing there for any particular length of time.

“Then I looked it over a little bit and saw that they must have driven into that rock on purpose in order to smash the wheel. I put two and two together, and figured that they wanted an alibi. So I slipped Blaine’s wallet out of his coat pocket, figuring that I might be able to fake a story about a confession if I ever had the opportunity.”

But I didn’t tell him that I had deliberately driven the car off the road in order to make the opportunity. He might not have appreciated that.

“Then Blaine really wasn’t dead?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t see Blaine. I just wandered around on the desert, and didn’t see anybody.”

Walker didn’t like it, but there wasn’t very much he could do about it.

By midnight we could travel, and the prospector put us all in his flivver and headed for the main road to the county seat. It wasn’t over five miles from his shack, that main road, and we were at the county seat by daylight.

The sheriff heard the story.

Then he organized a posse and rounded up Blaine.

There was only once when the sheriff threatened to give me away. That was when Walker was telling about how I got lost in the desert and walked in a big circle.

The sheriff was seized with a fit of coughing.

He’d known me for ten years, been in the desert with me. Many’s the night we’d lain and listened to the tale of the whispering sand as it slithered along on the wings of the wind.