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

Stamp of the Desert

Mile for mile the desert is the cruelest country in the world, and therefore the kindest. Desert rabbits are the swiftest; desert rattlesnakes are the deadliest; desert coyotes the most cunning. Even the plants have to be coated with a natural varnish, studded with thorns.

Life progresses through overcoming obstacles, and the desert is the greatest natural obstacle. Men who have lived long in the desert are clear of mind, keen of eye, swift of hand — otherwise they don’t live long in the desert.

Which is why we knew Fred Conway wasn’t of the desert.

He looked the part all right when he got off the stage. He was rigged out in clothes that were covered with desert dust. His boots were light, but sand proof and a good protection against the strike of a sidewinder. His shirt was of just the right color, sun faded, serviceable. His skin was bronzed by sunlight

But there was too much moisture in the man.

His eyes weren’t bright. His fat was too much like suet. He was too well nourished, and he moved with that careless, casual assurance which comes to man when he lives in protection.

Your true desert dweller is dried out to hard fiber muscles. He walks with an easy grace, but it’s unconscious, and he’s always poised, always gives the impression of being ready to strike from any position.

But lots of men came to Deuces. The mine brought in some of them. The free gold that was known to be in the sun-distorted hills brought more. And there was a type that came in because Deuces was a mining camp.

I’d seen them come, and I’d seen them go.

I looked at Fred Conway, catalogued him, and looked at the other passengers on the stage. A woman, dressed in city style, her features beautiful, her skin fresh, and in her eyes just the glint of a bit of panic. A college bred mining engineer, attired in corduroys and leather high boots that screamed of newness. He was too sure of himself, and the sun had been unkind to his skin as he traveled the long desert miles in the stage. Then there was a tough old desert rat, back from civilization, and there was Sam Wint, manager of the big mine on the hill.

Sam Wint was a power around Deuces. He hired and he fired. He expanded or he shut down. Maybe he got his general orders from the big bugs in the East, but he was the one who put those orders into effect. The town looked on Sam Wint as a despot.

With Sam was his foreman, Ned Monger.

Ned wouldn’t have made much noise if he’d had only his own two feet to stand on. But Ned Monger was close to Sam Wint, and Sam Wint was power, as far as the desert mining town recognized power.

I heard a little gasp from behind me, and I shifted around so I could get a glance out of the corner of my eye.

It was Catherine Lane who had done the gasping.

Catherine was sole owner and manager of the Treat ’Em Right Restaurant. She was a desert kid. I’d known her daddy before he and Bill Pierce had had the big fight over the mining claim. Lane had died subsequently from the bullet holes Pierce had put in him. But he’d kept possession of the claim so his daughter would have something to give her a start in the world. Pierce had gone out into the desert, nursed his own wounds and faded from sight.

Catherine had buried her dad and started working the claim with a hammer, drill and giant, a big gun strapped around her slim waist, and a thirty-thirty propped against the windlass hoist.

The claim was a frost. The vein faulted out within a week. Catherine started the Treat ’Em Right Restaurant. She asked no odds of any man. She looked eternity straight in the eyes and did her stuff. She was a desert girl.

“Know him, Catherine?” I asked her.

She resented the question until she saw who it was that had asked it. Then she nodded, a curt nod.

“I did, once,” she said, and walked into the restaurant.

I watched him.

He was a well-built chap, and he moved with the general air of a man who was going places and planning on doing things. But he had a little too much assurance, was a little too casual in his motions.

He got a pack outfit from Porcupine Withers and I saw him start out into the desert the next day. He hadn’t been near the Treat ’Em Right Restaurant.

It was hot when he got away. The skyline was dancing in the heat and a mirage distorted the base of the purple mountain range off to the east. I was heading out into the desert myself, but I let my outfit wait for a couple of hours. A man can travel farther and easier if he starts after the sun’s slid halfway down the west than if he starts when it’s overhead.

Toward dusk I crossed his trail twice. When it came dark I could see his camp fire up on the shoulder of Red Rock Butte. Probably he could look over and see mine. We were about three miles apart.

I got the start of him the next morning. I had the burros in and was swinging out on the trail when I caught the first glow of his camp fire. The east was commencing to color up. The stars were down to pin points. It was cold, with the dry numbing chill of dawn in the desert high places.

I made time.

By sun-up I was around the shoulder of the ridge. By the time it got hot, I was at Mesquite Wells. I gave the burros a rest and fought flies in the shade of the mesquite.

About two o’clock I heard the burros getting restless, and I went out for a look-see. Instead of four burros I had seven, and three of ’em were from Porcupine Wither’s outfit, the ones that he’d sold this chap.

I cussed every tenderfoot a blue streak.

He’d left the burros unhobbled. They’d heard my outfit starting out, and they’d crossed over and followed, taking their time. They were nice and chummy with my stock, and I had to back-track a day’s travel to return ’em to the pilgrim.

If he’d been a desert man he’d have known where to look for ’em, and I’d have tied ’em up. But, on the other hand, if he’d been a desert man, they wouldn’t have got away in the first place.

I cached my stuff so I wouldn’t have to pack it twice, threw a saddle on the best of the burros and headed on back to where I’d camped. I got there about sundown. Then I cut across to where the other camp fire had been. The man wasn’t there.

I was sore by that time. His stuff was on the floor of the desert, and I could see where he’d started out on foot to chase the burros.

I trailed him until it got dark, too dark to see the tracks. The more I trailed, the madder I got.

Here was this pilgrim within half a day’s walk of a fairly good-sized mining town, letting his burros get away from him, and starting out in the desert looking for ’em, without even having sense enough to track them. He was just looking.

That’s the way many a man has been swallowed into the maw of the desert.

I tied up the burro near a little feed, stretched out on the sand. It was going to be cold later on, and I decided to get a little sleep and then gather some sagebrush for a fire. I’d have to use it pretty sparingly unless I wanted to keep moving camp.

I guess I slept for an hour. Then I woke up and saw the glitter of a fire way over to the south. I got the burro into protesting action and rode through the night. I came up on the camp fire about midnight. The pilgrim was by it, shivering and frightened.

“Water!” he yelled at me when I came up. “Have you got water?”

I swung off of the saddle and unslung the canteen. He couldn’t have been very bad. A desert man wouldn’t have even begun to get thirsty. What he was suffering with was a mouth thirst and panic. He swigged the water. I took the canteen away from him when he had it tilted up at right angles. I hadn’t had a drink since I’d left Mesquite Wells.

Then I sat down on the desert and told him lots of things. I cussed him out good and proper, and I finished up by pointing to a shoulder of Bald Mountain.

“Right over the line of that mountain,” I said, “you can see the lights of Deuces. That’s the place for you. It’s a desert town. There’s enough of the desert about it to be interesting, and enough of the town about it to be safe for tenderfeet, providing their feet ain’t too tender. You’re going back there to-morrow.”

He squirmed around and finally blurted out that he didn’t want to go to the town. Then he told me why he was in the desert. It was the damndest reason I’d ever heard.

Most of the time it’s the lure of gold that brings them into the desert. But this man was prospecting, and yet wasn’t particularly interested in gold. No, what he wanted was to get self-reliant.

It had me cheated.

I quit being quite so sore when I found out that he had sense enough to realize that the desert was the best school in the world, and I tried to find out what particular brand of loco had made him want to get toughtened up in the desert.

He wouldn’t give any explanation.

After a while I went to sleep. When I woke up the sand was talking.

Sand talk in the desert is a funny thing. The wind blows the sand against the sage and cacti, and it gives little whispering noises. Then as the desert wind freshens, it gets the sand slithering along on the surface and you get the weirdest whisper of all, sand talking to sand.

And don’t think the sand whispers are imagination. Any of the old-timers can tell you how they’ve started out of a sound sleep thinking some one was whispering to them, only to find one of those sudden, mysterious desert winds had sprung up and the sand had started talking.

I looked over to where Fred Conway was huddled over what was left of the fire. He’d been working hard to keep it going.

“I’ll tend the fire for a while,” I said. “You get some rest.”

He shook his head.

“Why?” I asked. “You’ll need your strength to-morrow.”

He shook his head again, more emphatically.

“I’m listening to the sand,” he said.

I nodded. He had the makings of a desert man.

“Go to Sam Wint over at the mine and tell him Bob Zane said to put you to work,” I told him. “You stay with the mining job for a while, and then you can go out in the desert and get self-reliant without having to take a guardian along.” Then I went to sleep.

Three months I stayed in the desert. Once I got some supplies at a little jerkwater store. The rest of the time I lived on the country and what grub I’d burro-backed along with me. When I got back to Deuces I had a few samples of ore and not much else.

I found Fred Conway a little harder. He was walking with a spring in his stride. His eyes were clear and hard. But he wasn’t a desert man, not yet.

He was eating at the Treat ’Em Right Restaurant. He was being better than tolerated. But there was a tension between him and Catherine Lane, a peculiar sort of tension that told of lots of things.

But I didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t notice anything, not to let on.

The mine foreman was eating at the Treat ’Em Right, too. Ned Monger was a regular customer. He’d been making quite a campaign for Catherine.

I hoped she wouldn’t pay any attention to him, but that was just a hope. She seemed to like him pretty well.

Ned Monger looked over at Fred Conway a couple of times and frowned. I didn’t like that frown.

I shook hands with Conway, spoke to Monger, got a smile out of Catherine, and a piece of my favorite pie that the kid bakes special whenever she hears that I’m in from the desert.

Monger walked out. Conway shifted from one foot to the other as though he wanted to say something, and then he drifted out to the street. I gave Catherine a chance to talk. She didn’t take it. I wanted to ask a question or two, but figured I hadn’t better. Catherine was a desert girl.

So we sat in the silence which is born of the desert, and is more intimate than conversation.

“Like the pie, Bob?” she asked after a long while.

I set down the coffee cup.

“Fine, Kittens,” I told her.

She leaned forward. She might have said something else, but there was the roar of a heavy caliber revolver. It sounded from about fifty yards away, down the street.

Catherine jumped as though the bullet had struck her, and started for the door.

“No, no, no, no, no!” she screamed.

I grabbed her as she went through and got my body in front of hers as she crowded to the street.

Men were running. A figure was standing in front of the Okay Pool Room, emptying a heavy caliber Colt.

Somebody else was streaking it down the street. He was the target. I could see the spurts of dust. He was going some place in particular, and there was lead cutting the atmosphere around him.

The man that was doing the shooting was Ned Monger. The chap who was going places in a hurry was Fred Conway.

“Stop him!” yelled the girl.

I looked at her to see which one she meant she wanted stopped. It was Ned Monger. Her face was as white as a mountain of drift sand in the moonlight.

I lugged the forty-five from the holster and stepped out to the center of the street. I didn’t know much about the merits of the thing, but if Catherine Lane said she wanted somebody stopped, I was the guy to stop him.

But the foreman’s gun was empty. He was yelling something, something about hi-grading and he started to run. I got in his way. He grabbed me. His face was purple.

“Don’t be a damned fool! He’s the head of the hi-graders. I’ve got the dope on him, accused him. He’s trying to get away.”

Catherine was quivering like a bit of dry sage in a desert wind, and she didn’t say anything about letting Ned Monger go, so I kept a hold on him, and he stayed right there.

People poured out of various places. Everybody tried to talk at once. Monger was cussing me. It was language a lady shouldn’t have heard. But Catherine was a desert girl and Ned was excited.

By that time he had an audience, and he told them his story. There’d been hi-grading up at the mine where he and Conway both worked. The hi-grading wasn’t any secret. They’d been working through jewelry rock for several months, and lots of it had been disappearing. But they couldn’t find out where it had gone.

It’s hard to keep miners from hi-grading when a mine’s working in jewelry rock. But it’s not so easy to dispose of it after it’s hi-graded. A miner can pick out a particularly rich bit of ore and pry out the chunk that’s got the most value, with the gold all wire on the side that’s been pried loose. He simply sticks that high grade ore in a nice place of concealment and, later on, lifts it out to the surface. Maybe it’s worth twenty-five dollars, maybe a little more. Take half a hundred men and start a few of them hi-grading and it runs into money.

Monger was dancing around.

“I caught old Charley, the breed, with some high grade. He was taking it some place. I’d put him to work at the mine knowing he was a hi-grader. The idea was, I wanted to find out who was getting it from him. Well, he went to Conway’s room. I collared old Charley and made him confess. Conway had been buying it.

“Then I started for the deputy sheriff, and Conway tried to make a get-away. I figured he’d been tipped off. Like a fool, I let Charley get away.

“So I yelled for Conway to stop, and he took to his heels. Then I tried to stop him with my gun, and this old desert rat” — he looked at me with hatred — “butted in.”

There was a murmur from the crowd. Hi-grading in a mining camp is something like rustling in a cattle camp. They started to mill about, then they started to move.

I know when a man’s played his hand. I didn’t try to stop ’em. I tried to lead ’em.

“That’s Monger’s story,” I said. “Now let’s go hear Conway’s.” And I kept in the lead.

There wasn’t much of a chance for Conway to get away. We found him in his room. He’d barricaded the door and was going to shoot it out. The man in the pool room downstairs said he’d heard stuff thudding out to the ground after Conway went into the room.

We got Conway out, after a while, without any shooting. It was a mean situation. The mob was ugly. Somebody got a flash light and started searching the desert, out back of Conway’s window. We found what had been thudding to the ground. High grade, lots of it. There was seven hundred dollars in jewelry rock.

“You threw it out!” yelled old Pete, the man that runs the pool room.

Conway didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything. He sat tight-lipped.

They were for getting rough right then, the mob. I’ll say this for Monger, he didn’t want a lynching, and he tried to get ’em to hold Conway where he’d have a trial. But mobs are funny things. They finally decided to get old Charley and hear his story.

Getting Charley was a different story. He was a breed, old and shifty. He never used much water. About half a pint a day for his insides, and not a damned drop for his outside. But he knew the desert, and when he was in trouble he went for the desert like a seal for water.

There was a desert all around Deuces. It would have trapped an ordinary man, held him to the town. To Charley it was just like a refuge. There were a few of us that knew the desert pretty well. We set out to trail Charley.

We might as well have spared ourselves the trouble. It was slow work, trailing by the light of electric flash lights. And old Charley headed for the shifting sand country. I couldn’t figure at first what was taking him there. There wasn’t any water and there wasn’t enough cover to hide a jack-rabbit. But about midnight I knew.

The stars were awfully clear that night. That’s sometimes a sign of wind. It was that night. Charley had smelled the wind. He got us into the shifting sand country just about the time the wind came like an evil spirit.

You could hear it whistling down the cañons of the barren mountains for fifteen minutes before it arrived. It’s a weird sound, wind coming down out of the mountains in the silence of a desert night.

The sound was a low roar at first, so low-pitched and indefinite that it wasn’t sound at all, but just an undertone of menace that made the hair bristle with little cold chills of fear that rippled up the spine. It’s the reaction of the man animal, unconscious, bred in the bone through thousands of years.

Then the rumble became specific sound. It grew into a roar. A curtain of white sand blotted out the stars, came sweeping down on us. You couldn’t hold your face against the wind. The sand would cut the skin right through. It was a case of drifting down wind and looking for shelter.

The wind blew for an hour. When it quit, it stopped as suddenly as it had started. Charley was gone as completely as though he’d been swallowed up. There wasn’t a track or anything that looked like a track.

Back to town we went, and we started sweating Conway.

He didn’t sweat. He kept his lips tight together. Once he said that he never explained, that his friends shouldn’t need an explanation. His enemies wouldn’t believe one. It’s old stuff with fellows who get in a position where they can’t explain. But, somehow or other, I believed it.

The crowd got to milling again. Monger was the one to remind them that, without old Charley, there was no chance of a conviction in court. And Charley was in the desert. He’d crawl in a hole and stay there until the thing blew over.

Some one suggested the tar and feathers.

I drifted across to the restaurant. “I can stop this,” I told Catherine, “if Fred Conway will just say enough to give me something to go on. It’ll take a little shooting, maybe, but I don’t think so. Anyhow, I can stop them, but I can’t play it blind. I’ve got to know what it’s all about.”

She shook her head. I was surprised. But her lips were pressed together so tight they were white. She was worse than Conway.

“Do nothing,” she said.

I did nothing. The mob put on the tar and the feathers, and they got a rail. Day was breaking when they put Conway out on the border of the desert, gave him a ragged outfit of clothes, a big canteen of water and some shoes. He looked like a bedraggled chicken.

I hunted up Catherine.

“I’ll trail him after the excitement gets over,” I told her, “and help him get the tar off. That won’t be hard to do with the sun that’ll be shining. Then I’ll see what can be done.”

She was mad.

“He could have stopped it if he wanted to!”

I smiled at her, trying to let her see my attitude was paternal.

“No, Catherine,” I said. “A man doesn’t get tarred and feathered just because he wants to. And he’s floated out to the desert. He can’t come back now.”

That’s the code of the desert. Sometimes they give the coat of tar and feathers, sometimes they don’t. But it’s the same in any event. When the committee gives a man a canteen, that’s his ticket out of the desert, and if he’s wise to desert customs he starts traveling right then.

Catherine lowered her voice and shifted her position. She was talking now almost in a whisper, a whisper that was like the desert whisper.

“Have you noticed how friendly old Charley has been with Louie Bann?”

I nodded and tried to prod her along.

“Louie’s a simple sort of a cuss,” I said. “He’s got a prospect way out on the other side of the Panamints, and he got in a fight with the storekeeper at Skidoo, and he packs all the way over here to buy his supplies. He comes in here once a month and loads up, and he’s got quite a string of burros. Takes him about half his time lugging in provisions.”

She let her eyes bore into mine.

“He trades at the company store,” she said.

I nodded again.

“He buys provisions in bunches,” she went on.

I nodded again, keeping my nods just about the same, sort of a nod of invitation.

She was silent for a while. Her eyes narrowed.

“I got a look at his purchase card the other day,” she said. “He doesn’t buy so much stuff. His bill the last time in was only twelve dollars and a half.”

That was funny. I told her so.

“What’s the angle?” I asked.

“There isn’t any,” she said, and laughed.

I kept after her. Finally she blurted out a story.

“Fred Conway didn’t hi-grade,” she said. “He don’t have to hi-grade. He’s got money. I met him down in Mojave. He’s the rich son of a rich dad. He thought he was falling for me, Fred did. So did his dad.

“I went to his dad like a little lady. I told him that Fred was just green, impressionable. He’d been used to society women that couldn’t do a thing except drive a golf ball or know the patter of auction bridge. I said he was attracted to me because of the novelty of meeting a woman who made her own way in the world.

“The father is impossible. He’s one of those cold jellyfish who thinks all his thoughts with a dollar sign around them. He thought I was trying to make a grand stand to get his son’s affections and win over the father. He asked me to go away and keep from letting the boy know where I was. He wanted to pay me. I wouldn’t touch his money. I left.

“Then the boy found me. I think he hired detectives. He came to me and wanted to marry me. I told him the truth. I wouldn’t marry a man who had been brought up in the atmosphere he had. I was afraid some of it might stick to him. I didn’t want him to get like his dad, only I didn’t say it that way.

“So he swore he was going to give up everything and come into the desert until he became the same sort of a man that I’d picked as a possible future husband.

“His dad raised a scene when he found it out. He did the usual stuff, disinherited the boy, and called me an adventuress. I came to Deuces and opened the restaurant. I thought that time I’d left a trail no detective could follow. But I guess he managed it some way.”

I began to see a lot now. I’d known that after Catherine’s mine had faulted out and after she’d gone to Mojave there’d been a spell when I didn’t know where she was at all. And I sort of figured lately that she’d been taking a little shine to Ned Monger and that there was, maybe, a jealousy between the two men.

I didn’t say anything about that. I shook hands with the girl, wished her luck, told her to quit worrying about Louie Bann’s grocery bill, said things would come out all right in the wash, and went over to the pool hall.

Over there I started a hell of an argument, until I’d dragged most of the men in as spectators or talkers, and then I slipped out the back way, got some stuff on my burros and started out over the desert, figuring I wouldn’t be noticed.

It wasn’t hard to pick up the trail of Fred Conway. There were still feathers clinging to the sagebrush.

I was doing something that’s against the code of the desert. When a man is handed a canteen he’s done. No one is supposed to go out and give him succor. He’s a pariah, floated out of the community. But I had faith in Fred.

And I couldn’t understand Catherine. She’d always seemed to be a pretty sensible kid to me. Why any one should pass up Fred Conway to moon around over Ned Monger was more than I knew. But I knew that there are some subjects that are sacred as far as the heart of a girl is concerned. Trouble with us oldsters is that we want to go busting in where we’ve no business.

Conway’s trail got fresher. He’d stopped to work off a ball of tar and feathers. Then he’d started on again. He was traveling fast, going out toward where he’d had his camp the night he lost the burros.

I got to where the camp had been. There was the black circle that marked the camp fire. And I could see where Conway had dug something up out of the sand. Then he’d headed off again at right angles. He was making mighty fast time. Guess the work in the mine had hardened him up. I started trailing him.

I stopped stock-still when the thought struck me. What a fool I’d been!

Louie Bann was a peculiar cuss, all right. Come to think of it, it was funny he’d come all the way into Deuces to buy provisions for a mine that was way over in the Panamint country. And, come to think of it, I didn’t know just exactly where that mine was.

But it was the girl that I was thinking about. She’d started to say something about Louie Bann, and then when I scoffed at her idea of getting concerned over Louie’s grocery bill, she’d dried up.

I was betting a hunk of pure quill against a chunk of porphyry that the girl was starting out to make some sort of an investigation of Louie Bann. And Louie Bann was the sort of a man that it wasn’t exactly safe to monkey with. Let him get the idea that Catherine was trailing him, and he’d get rough. And if Catherine’s surmises were correct, he’d shoot her down in cold blood.

I turned right around and headed for the Panamints. Fred Conway had been able to find that place where he’d made his old camp, and that made it seem as though he’d commenced to get onto the hang of the desert. If he had, he’d get out all right. If he hadn’t, he could just shift for himself. I was going to see Catherine through.

I dropped down the slope of the Funeral Range and hit Death Valley. It was night by that time. But the stars showed some clumps of sage and rocks clearly enough to keep me from getting tangled up with ’em.

Daylight found us well up in the Panamint district. We were slowed down a bit, but still moving. I topped the ridge in a pass that I’d prospected through ten years ago, and sat down and got out the binoculars. Way up to the north I could see moving specks that danced around in the heat.

The glasses gave me magnification, but they also magnified the heat waves, and I could only guess at what those specks were; but they looked like burros, a whole string of burros. I decided to head toward them. They were working toward the south.

I had a job of it. I was dog-weary, and it was so hot the tops of the rocks would have blistered a man’s hand. I topped a side ridge and saw the train of burros coming my way, not over half a mile off. And I saw something else.

I saw that there was somebody trailing that string of burros. That somebody was moving slow, but determined, and seemed to be keeping back, trying to keep the train in sight, but not catching up with it.

Under those circumstances it was up to me to join the procession until somebody made a move. I wasn’t going to butt in on something that was no concern of mine. On the other hand, if Catherine took cards in the game I was going to see that she had top hand when it came to the show-down.

The train went past me on the slope, not over three hundred yards down the hill. I let ’em pass. They were Louie’s burros, all right, and he was riding with the string, with two other men. One of those men was Charley.

I was doing some tall thinking. I looked back through the binoculars at the woman, for that’s who it was. I could see her plainly now, Catherine Lane. She looked tired, judging from the way she drooped over the saddle and swayed a little bit.

She should have been tired; she had ridden fast and hard.

I was wondering what I was going to do about getting a show-down before I got too sleepy, when I saw one of the riders below me swing back and around. Then they put the burro string in a little box cañon. One of the men stayed behind. The other went up and joined the man who was doubling back.

I slid my rifle out of the saddle holster, took a look at my six-gun, staked my burro, and started slipping down the ridge.

But somebody was beating me to it. He came up from a side cañon, toiling in the heat like an ant, crawling on all fours, running when he could, scrambling, slipping, stumbling.

One of the men opened fire on Catherine. It was just a desert warning, a shot that was intended to plump up a little dust.

But the chap coming up the slope didn’t know what that shot was for. He stopped and flung up a rifle. His first shot clipped a burro out from under old Charley as neat as you please. It was a good miss. He’d shot for the man.

That started hostilities. The two men figured they’d run into some sort of an ambush. They hadn’t seen the figure toiling up the slope. The two got to cover and started shooting to kill. Catherine was off her burro and behind a rock. The man was still coming up the slope. It was sheer suicide. I turned the glasses on him.

My first hunch had been right. It was Fred Conway. I wanted to yell at him to get under cover, but I knew he couldn’t hear me. There was one thing I could do, though.

I got a fine sight on old Charley’s shoulder as he settled his rifle down to a deliberate aim. I knew that he was the most dangerous of the pair. Charley was a shot. When he pulled trigger something was due to drop.

I squeezed the trigger first. It caught his shoulder, and his gun dropped. He didn’t know who had hit him. He rather fancied it was the girl. She was very much in the fight now, coming fast, slipping from rock to rock, firing whenever she got a chance.

There was only one man who was left in the battle, and he was between two of ’em. He didn’t seem to have much heart in it. He fired a few times, started to hold up his hands, then fired another magazine full, mostly at random.

His cover was getting unhealthy. The girl from one side, Conway from another. He threw down his rifle and put up his hands.

I settled back on my haunches and grinned. Nobody knew I was in the picture.

Then my eye caught a flicker of motion off toward the burros. I swung the glasses down and caught the glint of sunlight on blued steel.

It was Louie Bann, and he was playing his hand just like a man of his type would. He didn’t want to miss. He was going to get to a position where his fire would count, and count hard.

What he intended to do was to let Catherine and Fred Conway get together, and then smash home the lead from ambush. They hadn’t figured on him. He’d been left with the burros, but the shooting had brought him up.

So far no one had suspected that I had the drop on the whole bunch, being up the slope, and having a good rest for the rifle. I slid it over a bowlder and waited.

Catherine and Conway met. They were keeping the drop on the man that had surrendered. Old Charley was tying up his shoulder. Once or twice he looked back up the slope. I think he’d commenced to suspect the truth.

Then Louie got into action. He stepped out from behind a clump of sage, dropped to one knee, and flung up his rifle.

Conway sensed the danger. He whirled, took in the situation, and fired from the hip. It was a snap shot, a hip shot at a hundred yards, and there was not one chance in a thousand that a tenderfoot would connect.

But, at the crack of his rifle, Louie Bann had gone over as though he’d been knocked with a sledge hammer. And that was because I’d pulled the trigger myself, from sixty yards.

By the time I got the glasses on him I saw that I’d caught his right arm, just below the shoulder. Evidently the bullet had shattered the bone and then crashed the stock of the rifle he had been holding. The rifle stock was a mass of splinters.

Fred and the girl had a busy fifteen minutes. They tied up the man that had surrendered, helped old Charley with his bandage, and did what they could for Louie’s right arm. Louie was cussing. I could hear him up the slope, his words thin and rasping in the hot desert air.

Old Charley was saying nothing. He wouldn’t; he was too much Indian.

After a while the pair went down into the box cañon where the pack train had been cached when the hostilities commenced. I figured that was the signal for my exit. I got my burro out into the open and slid down the side ridge on an angle, then crept into the shadow of a big clump of juniper.

Out in the desert, shadow is a pretty good place of concealment, particularly if you’re up a mile or so above sea level. The air is so dry and rare that the sunlight is dazzling in its white hot brilliance, while the shadows seem black as ink and sharply defined.

I went to sleep for an hour. When I woke up they’d gone, pack train, captives and all. I coaxed my burro into motion and started back toward Death Valley. I rolled in and had a good sleep that night.

The next day I pushed forward and made good time. I was way over on the slope of the Funerals when I saw a camp fire. It was along toward eight or nine o’clock and I was about ready to make a camp. I pushed over to it.

There was a string of burros, and the silhouettes of two figures that were sitting against the ruddy glow of the flames, figures that were sitting so close together they seemed just a single blob of black shadow.

When I spoke they jumped apart as though some one had exploded some dynamite in the camp fire. The man reached for his gun.

“Not so hasty, Fred,” I said.

He stepped back.

“Oh,” he muttered, “you!”

“Yes,” I said.

The girl laughed, nervously.

“I want to tell you the news,” she said. “It’s all right. Louie Bann didn’t have a mine at all. He just had a string of burros. He’d come into Deuces, claiming he was after provisions, and he’d shop around and only really buy enough to load up one or two burros. Then he’d meet the head of the hi-grading outfit and load up the rest of the string with high grade ore.

“He’d start his string over the Panamints, and then work down into Randsburg and sell the ore as having come from his mine up north in the Panamints. Then he’d start back again for another trip to Deuces.”

I expressed proper surprise.

“And Fred,” she went on, “had it figured out, but he didn’t dare to say anything when they tarred and feathered him because he knew Louie would get tipped off and ditch the stuff from the pack train.

“That’s why Ned Monger framed the hi-grading on him and got old Charley to skip out. Monger knew Fred was getting pretty close to the real solution. So he decided to beat him to it. He planted a lot of high grade stuff in Fred’s room, then started a shooting. Fred got to his room, found the planted ore, and didn’t know what to do.

“But when he’d lost his burros in the desert, he’d buried his stuff, including a rifle and some shells. And, what do you think? He got in a gun fight with Louie Bann and cleaned him up. He made a shot from the hip at over a hundred yards that was a Lulu!”

I nodded again.

Fred was sitting back, his chest out.

“Yeah,” he said, and his tone had the casual drawl of a desert man, “we had a little argument with ’em when we caught up with ’em. The real credit goes to Catherine. She doped the whole thing out and trailed Louie.”

I expressed proper surprise.

“How about the prisoners?” I asked.

“The sheriff’s got ’em, and the ore, and they’ve got Ned Monger. We’re going back and see the finish. After that I’m going back to work in the mine. Then we’re going to build a house right there in Deuces.”

I shook hands.

“Congratulations,” I said.

We sat around the fire after that. He was quiet now, self-contained, sure of himself. The desert had set its mark on him. He’d graduated from the finest finishing school man ever knows, a school that doesn’t give a fellow a parrot-like smattering of book knowledge, but a school that builds character.

After a while I went off a ways, rolled into my blankets and went to sleep.

The desert was crawling in the wind when I woke up, and the sand was whispering its ceaseless song of age-old mystery. Lying awake, I listened to it. I thought it was saying words. Then I became sure of it.

“—he doesn’t know, but I know. I was so proud when you didn’t say a word—”

I rolled over in my blankets. It was Catherine. She’d crawled out of her bed roll, and was whispering to me, knowing that I’d waked up.

“I back-tracked you,” she said. “I thought it was funny you hadn’t found Fred, and when I looked at the bullet holes I saw the direction was wrong. Old Charley kept looking up the slope, besides. So after a while, when Fred was busy with the ore, I crept up. You were lying asleep under a juniper. I saw the empty shells where you’d fired twice.

“But Fred thinks he did it, and that thought has done wonders to make him self-reliant. I’m so proud of you!”

And she kissed me. I squeezed her hand there in the midst of the whispering sand.

“He’s a different man,” I said to her. “He’s a real man now.”

She nodded. I could see her eyes above me, illuminated by an orange peel moon and the stars. Those eyes were the same as the stars above them.

“The desert’s set its mark on him,” she agreed.

Then she patted my hand and crawled back to her own blankets. The wind freshened and the whispering sand seeped through the sage, hissing its sibilants of sound as it went. And more delicate than all was the subtle whisper that began to permeate the night, the sound of sand slithering along sand, the pure sand whisper.

I lay and listened to it, and, finally, I dropped off to sleep, lulled by the lullaby of the whispering sand.

Catherine was right. The desert had set its mark on Fred Conway... and they’d be happy, a desert woman and her desert man, their characters tempered in the cruel fires which, after all, are the kindest.