Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

Priestess of the Sun

The town of Mojave squats in the sunlight like a gigantic spider sitting in the center of a web of railroad lines, a main automobile highway, and little, single-tracked dirt roads that stretch out and out until they are lost in the heat waves which shimmer on the horizon.

Mojave is an outpost of civilization. Back of it lies the land of whispers.

My shadow was short and black as I walked across the main street of Mojave, headed toward the railroad tracks. That meant the sun was almost directly overhead, and that, in turn, meant that it was hot.

To the west, the Tehachapi Mountains rippled in a heat-tortured dance. To the east stretched the great barren waste that man has called the Mojave Desert — the land of whispers.

To the south, a long string of black dots emitted a spurt of white steam. Seconds later the hot silence of the desert parted long enough to let the sound of the train’s whistle seep through.

The string of black dots presently showed as dust-stained Pullmans. The glittering black monster that pulled the train up the grade from Lancaster hissed puffingly along steel rails that were so sun-heated they would blister an ungloved hand.

The train lurched to a creaking stop.

Passengers stared listlessly with tired eyes. The steel Pullmans were ovens. Perspiring skins caught and held the flour-fine desert dust that seeped through doors and windows.

I saw my package come from the express car, provisions shipped direct from Los Angeles, ready to be transferred to the back of my pack burros. I moved forward, and almost ran into her as she got off the train.

First I saw a pair of snakeskin shoes, a trim ankle, and the neat expanse of feminine leg which fashion then decreed as proper. Then I saw the hem of a blue suit, a flutter of feminine finery as she jumped, and she was on the ground, standing right in front of me, vivacious, slender, attractive — and tired.

Her eyes were tired. Her mouth drooped. But she was full of pep, the pep of civilization, the pep that comes from forcing oneself to appear full of life and spontaneity.

“You’re Pedro Madrone!” she said to me and I saw the flash of her teeth and the outstretched hand.

I took the hand, apologetically.

“I’m sorry—” I began.

Her voice interrupted me. It wasn’t a sweet voice. It was too rapid-fire to be sweet, and, like her eyes, it showed more than a trace of nerve strain.

“I’m Jean Stiles, the one that Ramsay wrote you about. Surely you got that letter?”

“But I’m not Pedro Madrone.”

Her face lost its smile. The eyes flashed a how-dare-you expression, and she jerked her hand from mine.

“Damn!” she said, and turned away.

Just that, no more, no less. Perhaps it was her nerves. Perhaps it was just her way. I walked on up to the express truck and didn’t bother about it one way or the other.

The next time I saw those snakeskin shoes was six months later and a hundred miles away. I saw them by moonlight and there were circumstances attending the seeing which robbed me of sleep.

It was full moon.

I lay rolled in my blankets far out in the Mojave Desert, in a place where few men have penetrated. There was no water, there were no roads. My water was almost gone. One more day and I would have to turn back to Randsburg, and even then I’d have to use all of my desert knowledge to make it.

The moon seemed so close I could have chipped a piece from it with a rifle shot. The cool, breathless silence was utterly void of any sound. My ears rang from the stillness. The silvery basin of desolate desert was flooded with moonlight.

I closed my eyes, lay back and relaxed.

Something stirred — a bit of sage rustling in one of the sudden desert winds which spring up from nowhere, blow fiercely for a while and then die down just as suddenly.

I listened for the whispers.

Soon they came, desert whispers which are only for the ears of those who know and love the desert. Sand rustled against sage. Then, as the wind grew stronger, the sand rustled against sand, and the rustlings were as whispers, hissing, sibilant moonlit whispers of mystery.

I lay and listened to the whispers, and they lulled me to the threshold of sleep. Just as I was dropping off, the whispers suddenly ceased to be mere sibilants of drifting sand, but became a definite message.

I snapped wide awake, and the memory of that message slipped from my mind like a vanishing mirage. But it was somehow disquieting. The desert was whispering something that made my hair tingle, made little chills race along my spine. I settled back, shivered, pulled my blankets tighter about my chin and tried to sleep. Sleep was not for me. The moon beat down upon my face. The wind grew stronger, and the sand reached a hissing crescendo.

I kicked back the blankets and dressed — and the desert wind stopped blowing as though it had been scooped from the face of the earth. The desert was white and silent once more.

But I pulled on my boots and started walking, toward the northwest, toward the first slopes of the red and purple mountains.

I walked for a hundred yards, straight toward a clump of cacti. Then I saw something white in the middle of that clump, a rounded something that glittered in the moonlight as only one thing can glitter — a sun-bleached bone.

I hesitated, looked again.

There were more rounded streaks of white. These would be ribs, buzzard-picked ribs which loomed in the moonlight as gruesome reminders of the grim power of the desert.

I took a doubtful step, shook off the strange feeling which gripped me, took a deep breath and forged ahead. Ten steps and I knew the bones were not those of a human. Then I walked faster.

Moonlight in the desert is composed of glittering glare and inky shadows. There seems to be no halfway line. Where the sand reflects the brilliance of the moon it almost seems that there is a dazzling brilliance. Where the shadows of the desert fall there is jet-black darkness.

The skeleton was half in moonlight, half in shadow, and it took me a few moments to make it out. It was the skeleton of a burro, and he had died in harness. There was a packsaddle, and a rotted leather strap, baked stiff, and still offensive to the nostrils. Leather holds the odor of carrion for a long time, even in the hot, dry air of the desert.

I peered down into the blackness of the bone litter and caught a glimpse of cloth. It was too dark to try poking around. Out in the desert we get to read the sand like a printed page, and to mess around in the darkness would be to destroy clews.

I was back at the skeleton by the time daylight was gilding the tops of the red and purple mountains to the north. I had held myself back to make sure the light would be strong enough.

There wasn’t enough animal life in this section of the desert for a coyote to live on; but there were buzzards, and the buzzards had pulled the bones around some. Even so, I was able to tell that the burro had been headed to the westward, along the rolling base of the jagged mountains. And he had died almost in his tracks.

I found the long leg bones and checked each in turn, but the legs were all sound. I had rather expected to find a broken leg. Even so, his owner would have taken off the saddle.

I walked to the skull. There were three holes. Two where the eyes had been, one that was small and round.

The burro had been walking along the rounded slope. Some one had shot him with a high-powered rifle.

I delved into the bones and rescued the alforjas, twin bags of rawhide made to swing from either side of the packsaddle. Decay, sunlight and time had done things to the contents of those bags, but I spread them out carefully, an article at a time.

There were silken undergarments that came to bits in my hands, and had no recognizable laundry marks. There were feminine toilet articles. And there was a pair of snakeskin, high-heeled shoes. I thought of the woman who had stepped from the train at Mojave.

The sun leaped over the rise of ground to the east and burned into my back. Flies droned about the dark hide and stinking remnants. Tracks had been obliterated. Everything but hide, saddle, and bones had gone the way of all things perishable.

A shot, dead in the center of the skull, squarely between the eyes, meant accurate shooting. This, on a walking burro, probably meant a close range. There was a clump of cacti some sixty yards ahead when I faced in the direction the burro had been traveling.

I went to that clump. Any tracks that might have been there had long been blotted out, but I was searching for something that would remain, and I got to my hands and knees and searched the ground bit by bit.

The sun glittered on it and I raked it out of a lodgement in between the spines of a giant cactus. It was a thirty-thirty shell. I looked it over.

The firing pin had not hit exactly in the center. That frequently happens. But in the bottle neck, just where the shell tapered down to seat the bullet, there were two little cracks, forced by the explosion of the shell. The relation of those split marks to the firing pin impression might tell something.

I dropped the shell in my pocket.

Looking back toward the skeleton, I reconstructed the scene. The burro was walking slowly around the mountain slope, had just emerged over a little crest. Perhaps there was a woman walking beside him; perhaps a man was with her.

The single shot. The burro had collapsed.

What of the woman?

I went back to the skeleton and pretended that I had been walking up the little incline, that a rifle had barked from the cacti clump and the burro had thudded to the ground.

What would I do?

Two things. First and foremost, the water canteen. I would stoop for it. Then shelter.

I stooped to the skeleton and reached for the horn of the packsaddle. Then, while I was in that position, I looked around over my shoulder for a place of shelter.

There was a rock halfway down the little slope.

I went to it on the run, trying to do just what the woman, or the man and the woman, would have done. But I began to doubt the presence of a man. There were no empty shells near the burro bones.

I skidded around the rock.

There was a canteen, and in the bottom of the canteen was a double hole. I looked at it carefully. The double hole marked the course of a steel-jacketed bullet.

I figured just how I would stand to conceal myself from the clump of cacti where the first shot had been fired. Then I put the canteen over my shoulder and flattened myself against the rock. That gave me a direction at right angles as being the first place from which the canteen would be visible.

There was no cover in that direction.

I marked a line and walked along it very slowly. Fifty yards along that line I found another empty shell, a thirty-thirty with double split checks in the bottle neck and a firing pin that was just slightly off center.

I dropped it into my pocket, along with the other.

Then I looked around some more. I found nothing else. The sun-swept surface of the desert glinted mockingly in the sun’s light.

I returned to the rock and figured what I would do if I had been crouched there and some one had shot at me and bored a hole in my canteen. There was a rocky wash twenty yards down the slope. I ran toward it.

There I found a bit of white cloth, bleached and rotted by the sun. I had been a sack, and it had been dropped at the base of a stunted bush. I stooped to pick up the ragged fragment, and paused, arrested in mid-motion by the yellow glitter which my eyes beheld.

There was gold, a regular pile of it, virgin gold, alluvial. There were nuggets and there were grains of dust the size of wheat grains. It had evidently been in the cloth bag, which had rotted and spilled the gold.

So much the desert had to tell me, and no more.

I spent the morning in a search and found nothing else. Those were the elements of tragedy which the whispers had hissed in the moonlight. The story, I knew, was unfinished. But I could not find the closing chapter, the sun-bleached bones of a woman — or perhaps those of a man and a woman.

Somewhere out in that glittering expanse of hot sand those bones must be lying, but I couldn’t find them.

I rounded up my burros and started the march back to water. It would be an all-day trip. That was the nearest water. Impossible that a woman should have reached it on foot even now when there was a hint of a cool breath in the desert. Doubly impossible that a woman could have walked there six months ago when the desert was an inferno of heat.

A mile of the march slipped behind me. I was in the middle of the second mile when I found the ashes of a camp fire. I paused to look it over.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing save the blackened circle of camp fire embers. That meant that the one who had made that fire was an outdoor man, accustomed to woodcraft and the open. Otherwise there would have been a litter of empty tin cans, old papers, discarded odds and ends of various sorts.

I resumed my march. An hour’s travel and I caught the glint of sunlight on tin. I went to the place. It was an empty tomato can, cut open with a heavy steel hunting knife. And there was the blackened circle of embers from an old camp fire.

Tomatoes in cans are indispensable in the desert. They are one of the few canned things a man who knows the desert will carry. Taken once in a while they neutralize the burning acidity of a body that must continually give off perspiration. Even so, they are carried only on long trips by the men who have accustomed themselves to the desert.

The two camp fires were less than three miles apart.

I checked that fact for future reference and went on. Within the next mile I found three more camp fires. Each was made as the others had been made. They were the overnight camp fires of one who knew the desert.

Why had so many overnight camps been made on the one ridge?

There could only be one answer. That answer was in the gold which had been imprisoned in that cloth bag. Some one had hunted, not for that particular gold, but for the deposit from which it had been taken.

I got to water, filled my canteens, rested a day and went on to Randsburg.

At Randsburg I made discreet inquiries. The name of Pedro Madrone still stuck in my mind. But I found that Pedro Madrone was unknown in Randsburg. I asked men who came from Mojave, and from other sections of the desert; and always the name was the preface to a shake of the head.

I told of finding the skeleton of the pack burro in the desert. Then I waited around Randsburg for the news to travel.

Nothing happened.

As an experiment, I told of finding the sun-bleached bones of a woman far out in the trackless waste of the Mojave Desert. I waited a few days for that story to seep through the camp.

Still nothing happened. I must try another tack.

I was moved by an inspiration. I mentioned that near the bones of this woman I had found a folded paper, bleached and yellowed by the sun, but still bearing lines that could be traced.

After that, plenty happened — yet, hardly what I had expected.

The moon was half full again. I had made my camp half a mile outside of the town in a little valley where one could sleep under the stars. The wind blew and the desert whispered, and once more it seemed that the whispers were trying to convey a message. I became vaguely uneasy, with a desert man’s intuition of trouble. Sleep would not come. I dressed, and walked into the desert.

Behind me, my camp showed peaceful and serene in the moonlight. The desert was a white silence of mystery. Somewhere, I thought I heard the sound of a foot crunching over a wind-blown stretch of desert gravel. I listened.

A dry bit of sage snapped beneath the weight of a skulking object.

I turned and started toward the place.

A rifle roared and I heard the unmistakable thunk! of a striking bullet. My bed roll gave a peculiar twitch, then was still again.

I could hear running steps, but I was unarmed and the would-be murderer had a rifle and he knew how to use it too.

That was the reason I didn’t do any following, but squatted down in the shelter of a clump of greasewood and waited for the moon to set. After that I rescued my blankets and rolled in back of some rocks.

Daylight found me scouting around where the noise of the feet on gravel had first come to my ears. The cartridge was in plain sight, a thirty-thirty with two little checks on the bottle neck.

I was sure of my ground now. I packed my stuff on my burro back, took my rifle from its holster, and headed out into the desert, back toward the place where I had found the skeleton of the burro.

It wasn’t a case for the sheriff — not yet. But I had thrown out the bait that had brought to me the man I wanted. What was to follow could better happen out in the waste spaces where the arm of the law reaches but gropingly.

In one way it was not up to me, but I remembered the vital magnetism of the young woman who had stepped off the train. And then again, there is such a thing as justice. I didn’t lose sight of that.

We who live in the desert get pretty close to nature. We don’t ask for much. But we want a square deal, and we like to have other people get a square deal.

It was on the morning of the second day that I found a man camped by the side of the trail I was following. He was stooped a trifle, and the sun had been unkind to his skin. His face was an angry red and the nose was commencing to peel. The eyes were flecked with red streaks and his lips were cracked. He had city and tenderfoot written all over him.

That last crack of mine about finding a paper had brought results. Some one was very, very anxious to find the paper that had been beside the skeleton of the woman I was supposed to have found. But he was even more anxious to keep me from using it than to find the paper himself. That was the explanation of the rifle shot.

So the paper I should have had wasn’t simply a writing accusing him of murder. It was more. How much more I couldn’t tell.

My plan was to go directly into the desert. Then any man who insisted upon making camp with me would be the man who was following.

But this tenderfoot seemed hardly the man to have shot a burro squarely between the eyes at sixty yards with a single shot.

Still one can never tell — in the desert.

“Headed west?” I asked.

He gently patted the sunburned tip of his nose. “You’re going east, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going east.”

“I see. Camped rather early, didn’t you?”

“I guess so. I’m not accustomed to travel. It’s rather done me up. You see, I don’t know the desert very well.”

That much was self-evident. From the heavy, hot boots to the whipcord sport clothes he shrieked of newness to the desert.

He looked at me longingly, wistfully.

“Well, I’ll be headed on,” I said.

He gulped.

“Could I... er... join up with you?”

There it was, right like that. I had set a trap for the man who wanted to kill me, and this tenderfoot with his sunburned nose and heavy boots was walking into it.

Was he the man I must guard against? Was he a tool? Or had he merely happened along?

“You couldn’t keep up,” I told him. “I’m traveling fast and far.”

“I’ll keep up,” he promised.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll camp here to-night with you, and we’ll start early in the morning. Guess I’d better shoot a jackrabbit. Got a rifle handy? Mine’s got some trouble in the lock.”

“Thirty-thirty in my saddle scabbard,” he told me, pointing with his long arm.

I went to the scabbard and took out the rifle, sighted it.

It was a gun that had seen use, lots of it, and desert use at that.

“I’ll throw the packs and then take a turn out through the sage,” I told him.

“I ain’t seen a rabbit,” he said.

I just nodded. I knew what I was looking for and where to find it. He was watching me, so I wanted to have a mark when I fired.

Jackrabbits work their way into the middle of a sage clump and get down into a ball. Along in the afternoon, by making a noise and keeping on the east side of the bush you’re looking at you can generally make them raise their ears. The sun shines through the thin cartilage of a rabbit’s ears with a reddish color. There’s no red naturally in the sage, so all you have to do is to make plenty of noise and watch for a pinkish glow from the sage.

I spotted one inside of the first hundred yards.

I walked up toward the sagebrush, looking just below the pink bit of color for something solid. He broke cover before I found the mark I wanted. I flung down on him and he bowled over at the crack of the rifle.

He was a young one and all right for eating.

I picked up the rabbit and moved back along my back trail. When I came to the place where I’d been standing when I shot, I dropped the rabbit, stooped and picked him up, and picked up the empty cartridge as well.

It was half an hour later that I had a chance to study that cartridge. It had an impression of the firing pin that was just a bit off center, and had two little split marks in the bottle neck.

I slept that night, but not in my blankets and not until late. But the city chap seemed to hit it off regular all night. He’d given his name as Jack Melford. I was puzzled in the morning.

“How long have you had that rifle?” I asked him.

“Just about half a day,” he said. “A dark fellow named Madrone was through here, and he sold it to me.”

I nodded. Maybe — and again maybe not. I couldn’t be sure.

The third night I knew there was some one ahead of us. There were tracks, and the burros wiggled their ears at each other. We caught up to him just before making camp. We traveled in the evening moonlight. It was easier on the stock and easier on us. He had a camp fire going and he was standing back out of the circle of light.

“Hello,” he called, and his voice was the voice of a man who doesn’t welcome company.

He came in out of the darkness, a soft shadow of gliding caution, and tried to urge us onward by some excuse about the spring being muddied.

“We’re stopping,” I told the man.

“I’ll put on some tea,” was all he said, and flung some fresh wood on the fire, sage roots that flare up in crackling flames and make solid coals for cooking.

I got a look at him then. Part Mexican he was, and his eyes had that smoky tinge of dark mystery which comes from the Indian side of the Mexican blood.

“Pablo Sandoval,” he said and flashed his teeth in a smile as he thrust out a brown hand.

We unpacked, had tea and tortillas. I managed to get a look at the rifle in Sandoval’s scabbard. It was a thirty-thirty, and it was old, but it hadn’t been carried much in a saddle scabbard. The stock showed it.

I managed to work Melford off to one side.

“Melford, did you ever see this man before?”

“No, why?”

“Sure he wasn’t the man that sold you your rifle?”

“Heavens, no! It was Madrone who sold me the rifle, a black Mexican with a big stomach, fat, greasy.”

I nodded and let it go at that, but there was something in the wind, and this tenderfoot was mixed in it, either as a tool or not. City gangsters have been known to come to the desert.

I didn’t sleep until after the moon went down. That was late. Then I slept, but not in my blanket roll. Dawn found me tired, but ready to go.

I could strike the ridge where I’d found the bones of the dead burro by cutting across with a long march.

“I’m leaving you two,” I said. “You’ll be company for each other.”

“But,” said Sandoval, “I am traveling alone.”

“And I’m going east,” said Melford. “Why can’t I stay on with you?”

“Because,” I said, “I am not going east from here. I am going to the northeast.”

“Oh,” said Melford.

Sandoval said nothing.

We got on the packs. I noticed Melford studying a folded paper he surreptitiously took from his pocket. “Perhaps,” he said dubiously, “I could get where I’m going by heading northeast from here — but I’m supposed to go east for one more day, and then north. There’s a water hole east of here?”

“Yes,” I said curtly, and swung my burros to the northeast.

From back of a rock outcropping on the top of a rise I watched them go. They went east. I pushed the burros fast and far. It was ten o’clock at night when I got to the ridge of the skeleton.

In the morning I started a systematic search.

Fifty yards from camp I found a track. It was made with a moccasined foot, but not the foot of an Indian. It was a small foot, and it didn’t come down exactly in the line of travel. A line drawn through the heel and toe missed the next footprint by an inch and a half.

Some one had been over that ridge in the moonlight, after I’d made camp. It was impossible that that person hadn’t seen my camp. It was also impossible for any one to exist in that stretch of the desert without a base of supplies, a burro loaded with provisions and water.

I lost the tracks in a rocky wash. I spent the day in fruitless search, and I was worried. The desert has a code of its own, and I had deliberately flung down a challenge to a murderer. It was up to me to notice trifles.

That afternoon I watched to the south. If Jack Mel-ford found some excuse to join me again it would be almost a declaration of guilt. Paths do not cross in the desert without some reason.

Just before dusk I saw a cloud of dust. Then I made out burros and packs. I got out my rifle and saw that it was loaded with fresh shells, thoroughly oiled, and that the sights hadn’t been jiggled any.

It got as dark as it could get with the big moon hanging in the eastern heavens. I made a small camp fire, and then waited in the shadow of a cactus.

It took the burros an hour and a half to reach my camp. Melford’s voice boomed out across the desert.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Howdy,” I remarked, and slipped the rifle forward.

Then I saw there was another with him.

“Howdy,” said the voice of Pablo Sandoval, and this time the voice was placating.

“Thought you fellows were going east,” I said.

“And north,” remarked Melford.

“And north,” echoed Pablo Sandoval.

“I’ll make you tea,” I said, and walked in toward the camp fire. My rifle I left concealed back of the cactus. My six-shooter was on my hip, in plain sight, and my right hand was never far from the holster.

I made them tea, as is the code of the desert when a weary traveler comes to the camp of one who has already eaten.

Pablo Sandoval caught my eye and flickered a glance toward the desert. There was just the slightest inclination of the head, a gesture of beckoning.

“We’ve got to get some more wood,” he said, and was on his feet like a cat, melting into the shadows.

“I’ll help him. Sit still, Melford,” I said, after a second or two, and went in the opposite direction.

I circled warily. Sandoval stood, outlined in the moonlight, motionless, his hands clasped back of his head. The gesture showed that he knew of my suspicions.

I approached him, and my right hand was on the butt of my six-shooter.

“Well?”

He came toward me so that I could hear his lowered voice.

“You’re wondering why I came.”

I remained silent.

“It is to save your life,” he blurted.

“My life,” I told him, “has always been able to save itself before. Perhaps, if you had not come, you might have saved a life.”

I didn’t tell him whose. I left that to soak in.

“Señor,” he hissed, and leaned toward me, “he plans to murder you. I found that out, and I came to warn you.”

“The tenderfoot?”

“Yes, the tenderfoot! He is a killer of the city, but dangerous even in the desert. He was here six months ago, and he killed then. I have heard admissions from his own lips!”

He was speaking in the Spanish language, this offspring of three races, and he was talking rapidly.

“You’re sure?”

“Señor, I am Pablo Sandoval, and I come of an old and honored family. I have warned. That is enough!” And he turned on his heel and strode away.

They are proud, these Mexicans, even when their blood has been well thinned with racial mixtures. I saw him stooping to gather wood, and I made no attempt to follow, but swung well to the left, gathering wood and waiting by my rifle until I saw him return to the camp fire.

I brought in my load of wood. We piled up the fire, then I dragged my blankets back of a clump of greasewood. Melford yawned, nodded, smiled sheepishly.

“Last two days have used me up,” he said.

He dragged his own blankets from the place where he had spread them to a place from which he could command a view of my own bed. That action might have been accidental, but it drew me a meaning glance from Pablo Sandoval.

Sandoval took his blankets far out into the desert.

“The light of the camp fire keeps me awake, and sometimes sparks blow,” he said, by way of apology.

I kicked off my shoes and crawled under the blankets.

The moon was a ball of white fire, blazing steadily. The desert showed dazzlingly brilliant under the flooding moonlight, the sagebrush and greasewood casting black shadows, motionless sentinels guarding the silent sand.

I squirmed my blankets deeper into the clump of brush, and slipped from them on the dark side when Melford had his back turned to me. I wadded the clothes up so the blankets seemed to outline the form of a sleeper. I was tired of this stalling about. It was time for a showdown.

My hand was on my six-gun as I waited, watching Melford, waiting for a glint of moonlight on metal.

It did not come. Melford was sleeping. The regular breathing, the rhythmic snores all told their own story. And I was tired. The prospect of another sleepless night did not appeal to me.

I slipped forward over the sand, cautiously, noiselessly. Melford stirred when I was within a few feet of him. His eyes snapped open and saw the business end of my six-shooter boring into his chest.

“What... huh?”

“I’m taking no chances to-night,” I whispered. “Get your hands up, out of the covers, over your head!”

“But—”

I jabbed him with the gun.

He took a deep breath. I knew what he intended to do, to shout to Sandoval. I punched him in the solar plexus with the butt of the gun, and the air whooshed from him. His jaw sagged and he gasped.

I knotted a pack rope around his wrists. Then I thrust a gag into his mouth and tied his wrists.

“Move and you’ll stop lead,” I warned, and glided into the shadows. My rifle was where I had left it. I holstered the six-gun and squatted, hugging the rifle.

Half an hour passed. The shadows shifted. There was a faint stirring of breeze. Soon the sand would commence to drift, and, as it drifted, would utter those desert whispers which mean nothing, yet which mean everything.

I wondered if I owed Pablo Sandoval an apology.

And then, even as I wondered, he came, a soft furtive shadow, stalking as skillfully as a cat, wary, ominous, deadly. And he was stalking my blankets. In his hand was a rifle.

I determined that I had been sufficiently long-suffering. When Pablo Sandoval raised his rifle I would call to him and step from behind the bush. Then we would shoot it out.

He inched his way around the concealment of a mesquite and raised the rifle. I raised my own rifle, got to one knee, prepared to call. And a moving shadow stopped me.

It was a shadow that came around the side of a clump of cacti, paused for a moment, then came forward. It was the shadow of a human being who walked on noiseless feet.

The moonlight flooded the desert as she emerged from behind the cacti, and I caught my breath.

She was almost naked, yet the nude body gave no hint of impropriety. It was the type of nudity which fits in with its surroundings, just as one would expect a rare marble to be nude, or a painting of a nymph at a pool.

She wore a little fragment of animal skin about her hips and there were moccasins on her feet. Her hair was around her shoulders, and there was a short bow with a pointed arrow in her hand.

She walked with that perfect muscular coordination which makes for grace in a deer, for noiseless power in a stalking mountain lion.

She was almost on Sandoval when she stopped and raised the bow.

Sandoval squinted down the barrel of the gun and pulled the trigger.

A spurt of flame, the roar of a rifle shattering the unechoing silence of the desert, and the thunk of the bullet. I knew there would be another bullet hole in my blanket roll, and I intended it to be the last. I cocked my rifle.

Then I realized there would be no need. The girl was drawing back the powerful bow, and her body was a song of grace.

Something warned him.

He glanced over his shoulder. He yelled, gave one startled leap. The bowstring twanged a deeply resonant hum. The arrow flashed like a streak of death-dealing shadow, but his leap saved him.

He flung around the rifle, and I pressed my own weapon to my shoulder.

Then he saw her face.

The rifle wavered in his grasp, dropped from nerveless fingers. He made the sign of the cross, mechanically, dazedly. The girl flicked a hand to the little quiver which was at her waist, tied to the fragment of skin which covered the contour of her hips. Another arrow was on the string.

But Pablo Sandoval seemed not to heed the menace of that arrow. It was the face that held his attention. One staring look he gave it, and then screamed. He whirled and took to his heels.

I heard him scream for the second time as he tore past me. I heard his third scream as he dashed blindly through a clump of spiny cactus. Then there were no more screams for an interval, while he rattled the gravel of the dry wash with panic-driven feet.

He came out on the other side, running blindly, and he screamed again. This time his scream contained a new note. It was a note of desert madness, that peculiar knifelike something that is always present in the hysterical yapping of a coyote, that fiendish undertone of malice which is in the voice of a mountain lion.

I knew then that he would never come back. I have heard men give screams before, screams that held that same note, and run madly into the desert. None ever came back.

A woman’s voice was in my ear.

“You may put away the rifle.”

Was it a threat or merely a statement? I turned to her. She was closer now and the moonlight was on her face. But I had no need of the moonlight. I had known who she would be as soon as I had seen the look of mad terror on the features of Pablo Sandoval.

She was the woman of the snakeskin shoes, the woman who had descended from the train at Mojave.

But she had changed.

Her face held none of the eye-puffs, none of the sagging lines, none of the tired droop. Her features were bronzed and they were as firm as the features of a fifteen-year-old child. Her eyes were clear and steady, and the magnificently beautiful lines of her rounded body were hardened to graceful strength.

I lowered the rifle.

“Did you bring Jack?” she asked; and then I saw a great light.

“I tied and gagged him,” I said.

She followed the direction of my pointing finger. I saw her stoop over the form in the blankets. There was the sound of a knife cutting rope, and then two arms came around her.

I walked away, sat down and waited.

It was some time before they came to me, arm in arm. He had given her some of his extra clothes, and she looked uncomfortable. She did the talking.

“I am Jean Stiles,” she said. “It all started with a map an Indian drew for my father years ago. We all took it for a joke, but when I got fed up with civilization and parties and all that, I decided to hunt up the place. I wrote to an acquaintance, and I guess I told him too much. He referred me to ‘Pedro Madrone.’

“There never was any such person. But Sandoval posed as Madrone to me. It was an accomplice who met Jack, sent him out into the desert, and even sold him Sandoval’s rifle, either as a passport to Sandoval or to get rid of a piece of evidence.”

That was a fine bit of Mexican irony!

“Sandoval told me you were the guide,” Melford said to me, “who led Jean into the desert. We were to spy on you, force you to confess.”

The girl went on:

“Sandoval guided me into the desert and kept trying to get the map. I’d only given him a copy of a part of it. I knew he was a dangerous man, and when I got near the gold I left him one night, packed the burro and went on by myself.

“He let me get the gold, then demanded the map and the gold. I’d hidden the map. He shot the burro and left me on foot without provisions, then he shot a hole in the water canteen. He figured thirst would force me into submission.

“He tried to trail me, carrying a canteen of water, figuring to trade me water for gold when my thirst became desperate. But I had four bags of gold. I ran and dropped the gold, and he spent so much time looking for the sacks I’d dropped that it got dark.

“Then a windstorm came up. I guess it blotted out my trail. He never followed me. He had the rest of the burros hidden somewhere. I tried to find them, couldn’t and went back to the place of the gold. There was a spring there, and some food, and the place can’t be found without a map. It’s in a hidden cañon.

“It took all of my strength to get back. And I couldn’t leave the place. There was a store of corn there, and an Indian, an old, old man who taught me to shoot the bow. There was game, there was corn. There were no burros, no means of reaching civilization. I think the Indian could have made it on foot, but he wouldn’t go. He said I had been sent as a Priestess of the Sun.

“I grew to like it. I’ve never felt so well in my life. And I knew, sooner or later, Jack would come... Ugh, these clothes are scratchy. I feel as though my skin were suffocating!”

“You’ll have to get accustomed to them again, Jean,” Melford warned.

She met his eyes.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why... er... why, because! You can’t go back to the city as you were!”

She nodded slowly, raised her face to the moon, and then looked out over the desert, over past the red and purple mountains.

“Listen,” she said dreamily, “and I’ll sing you the Song of the Sun. It’s a whispered song, and it’s to be sung only at sunrise.”

And she laughed nervously. Then, when no one said anything, she started chanting the Song of the Sun. It was pure Indian all right.

When she had finished, the silence of the desert settled on us. Then she began to whisper, after a while.

“There’s life there, health, sunshine, fresh air; gold, lots of gold, all the gold one would want. Back in the city I’d go mad again; and your lungs, Jack...”

Her voice trailed off in a whisper.

I went to my blankets.

“You youngsters sit up and talk all night if you want to. I’ve been dodging sleep for the last three weeks, and having holes shot in my bed roll. I’m going to sleep. In the morning we’ll try and trail Sandoval.”

And I kicked off my boots.

“He thought he was seeing my ghost,” said the girl. Then she added dreamily: “If he hadn’t jumped, I’d have killed him with the arrow.”

“Jean!” exclaimed the tenderfoot in a shocked voice.

She looked at him speculatively. Then she touched his face with the tips of her fingers, and laughed, a low, crooning laugh. It was the laugh I’ve heard an Indian girl give to her lover; I never heard a white woman laugh that way before.

I doubled my coat under my head and dropped off to sleep. When I awoke the east was a long streamer of vermilion with banners of gold. The tops of the red and purple hills were catching enough light to show in color instead of a black outline.

I looked for Melford. His blankets were empty. He had gone. And the girl had gone.

Then I found a pile of clothes. The extra clothes he had given to the girl. They lay in a pile where she had dropped them. They had been too “scratchy.”

Over near my blankets was a sack of skin, filled with gold. There was enough gold in that sack to make a neat little nest egg.

There wasn’t any note. And they hadn’t taken anything with them. I knew that the Priestess of the Sun had gone back to the desert she had learned to love and had taken her mate with her.

I tried to trail Sandoval. He was running the last I saw of his tracks. He hit the slope of the red and purple mountains, and the rocks didn’t show any more tracks.

I waited two nights, waiting for them to come back, the Priestess of the Sun and her man. They didn’t come back. I wanted to give them a chance to change their minds, but they didn’t change ’em.

Daytimes it all seemed like a dream. It seemed that I should go and bring them back. It seemed that a girl had no right to throw herself away from civilization.

Then would come the moonlight, the velvety night, and the sand whispers, and it would seem the most natural thing in the world that the girl should want to stay with the desert. I thought of her as I had seen her get off the train, soft, flabby, tired of mouth, puffs under her eyes.

Then I remembered her as she had drifted into camp, bronzed, graceful, moving with the easy stride of perfect health. And Melford’s lungs needed the desert sunshine.

Often I’ve wondered how they’re making out, the Priestess of the Sun and her mate. Sometimes, just before I drop off to sleep, I think the sand has a message to me, a message directly from them; and there’s always a smile on my lips at what the sand seems to whisper.

Out in the desert we get closer to fundamental truths than you do in the cities.