Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

I The Human Juggernaut

Nobody knows all that happens, right at the finish, when the desert has her way with a man. It’s a grim secret that only the desert herself and the buzzards can tell.

But this much is certain. Right at the last, the victim tears off his shirt and starts digging with his hands. I’ve found my share of bodies in the desert, and I know others who have found their share. In every case shirts torn from backs, fingers shredded by the cruel sand-gravel of the desert.

That’s why we didn’t take so kindly to Harry Ortley’s story of what had happened — not after we found Grahame’s body.

I’d first seen Harry Ortley when he drove into Randsburg. It wasn’t any trouble to judge his character. He was one of those birds who played sure things. You couldn’t figure him taking a chance of any kind, or giving another fellow a break.

Stringy Martin was standing with me when Ortley drove into Randsburg. He had a sedan, and he parked it in front of the Palace Restaurant, locked the ignition, locked the transmission, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors.

Stringy’s lived nearly all of his life in the desert. He watched the performance, then turned to me with a grin.

“If that fellow ever raised a bet it’d be a cinch he held better than three of a kind,” he said.

And, somehow or other, it was the best description of the man’s character you could make. Stringy’s like that — always pulling some crack that hits a bull’s-eye.

Ortley walked into the restaurant.

He was fat, not paunchy fat, but the smooth, well-distributed sleek fat that comes to people who are accustomed to getting what they want. He was about forty, and his eye was as cold as the top of Telescope Peak in the winter. His cheeks were round, but his mouth was unusually small.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a thin, reedy voice, “good afternoon.”

Stringy nudged me.

“He’s speakin’ to you,” he said.

“Howdy,” I said.

The cold eyes turned from Stringy to me, me to Stringy, and back to me.

“I am to meet a man named Sidney Grahame,” he said.

I couldn’t see how the information meant anything in my young life, but the cold eyes kept boring into mine as though I was supposed to do something about it.

“Don’t know him,” I said.

The eyes continued steady.

“I was to meet him here in Randsburg. He was to have a string of burros. I’d like to get started to-night.”

There wasn’t any apology in his tone, and there wasn’t any request. He was the type that was accustomed to make his wishes known, and have men jump to do his bidding.

“Stranger,” I told him, “you ain’t accustomed to the desert.”

The eyes never wavered.

“No. That’s why I felt you might secure some information for me while I was eating. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast. You should be able to find him by locating the string of burros.”

And he ignored the lunch counter, sprawled his bulk in a chair at one of the tables, and picked up the bill of fare. As far as he was concerned, the incident was closed.

Stringy Martin snickered.

Mary Garland, who was running the Palace, chipped in with a bit of information. She’d heard the conversation.

“There’s a gent named Sid something-or-other that’s got his packs out in front of the hotel. I heard him mention he was waiting for some one.”

The man looked up.

“Was the name Ortley, the one he was waiting for?”

“I d’know. I didn’t hear any name.”

Ortley looked at Stringy Martin.

“If you should be going by the hotel,” he said, “you might tell this man that Mr. Ortley is here... I’ll try some of the spare ribs, and you can give me a side order of roast lamb. Are your vegetables canned?”

Stringy and I walked out before we heard what Mary had to tell him about the vegetables. There he was, plunked down in the middle of the Mojave Desert, damned lucky to be getting anything, and wondering if the vegetables were canned.

Some folks get like that.

We sort of stuck around to see what happened when Ortley met his man. There were five burros tied up in front of the hotel, all packed and ready to go. Four of ’em were pack animals, and one had a riding saddle. He was a big burro, and he looked to be a good one.

The chap who was crouched down on the porch of the hotel, hugging what little shade there was, was a lunger. You couldn’t miss that. But he was beating the game. There was a luster to the brown skin, and a strong set to the jaw. His eyes had lost the feverish glitter, and were steady.

Ortley came crunching down the road after a while.

“Mr. Grahame?” he asked.

The thin chap got to his feet, his face all crinkled with a cordial smile.

“You’re Harry Ortley. Mighty glad to meet you. I’ve got something that’ll sure interest you this trip. Been waiting since morning.”

“I was delayed. Did you get my message?”

“What message?”

“I sent a man to tell you I was here.”

“Nobody said anything to me.”

“Humph. Well, let’s start.”

“I ain’t eaten anything. Better have a snack before we get going. We’ll go pretty far to-night after it gets cool, and food will come in handy.”

Ortley let his cold eyes drift over the packed burros, then turned them on Grahame.

“I doubt if we can waste time eating. You should have had your lunch. Where can I leave my car, where it will be safe?”

Sid Grahame flushed a little, then pointed to the building that had a dirt floor and a galvanized iron roof.

“You can park it in there,” he said.

Ortley unlocked the door, unlocked the transmission, unlocked the ignition, drove the car into the garage, and locked it all up again. He took out a hand bag, and then strapped a big forty-five about his middle.

“We’ll have to take my personal belongings,” he said.

“Maybe we can put ’em in a roll. A hand bag’s hard to pack,” said Grahame.

Ortley’s cold eye held his gaze.

“I prefer my things in the bag. They are more convenient that way.”

Grahame took five minutes getting the bag tied on one of the packs. He didn’t say anything while he was doing it.

“Only one saddle burro?” asked Ortley.

“Yes. We can take turns riding.”

“I see,” said Ortley, and climbed into the saddle.

They shuffled out into the desert and I heard Stringy Martin’s chuckle in my ear as the last of the burros disappeared round the base of a sage covered hill.

“When,” he asked me, “do you suppose it’ll be the little guy’s turn to ride the burro?”

I didn’t answer the question. There wasn’t any use.

II One Man Returns

That was the first time we saw Harry Ortley.

The second was when he came back from the desert-alone.

The desert hadn’t been exactly kind to him. His eyes were swollen. His skin was red and angry. His boots had been dried and cracked by the desert dust, and his flesh hung in bags under his eyes. But the eyes were as cold as ever.

He was leading the string of burros, and the packing wasn’t anything to write home about. There were some sore backs in the train, but Ortley didn’t mind a little thing like a burro’s suffering.

He pulled up in front of the hotel and walked right to his hand bag that was tied on top of the pack. He seemed to be in a hurry because he didn’t monkey with any pack rope knots. He pulled out a knife and cut the ropes. I noticed the bag seemed mighty heavy as he pulled it from the pack.

He walked right across to the garage and took a bunch of keys from his pocket. He unlocked the door of the automobile, put the hand bag in the machine, then locked the door. Then he walked across the street to us. He was walking pretty stiff, and his feet hurt him.

“I have a tragedy to report,” he said.

His cold eyes were fastened on me, and I didn’t like the looks of them.

“Yes?” I said.

“Yes. The gentleman who accompanied me, Sid Grahame, has perished of thirst in the desert. Tie became lost while prospecting for gold. I haven’t seen him for three days.”

“How do you know he’s dead then?” I asked.

The cold eyes didn’t so much as flicker. He shrugged his shoulders and waved his hand toward the desert. The gesture was as eloquent as any words would have been.

“Why in heck didn’t you try to trail him and take water to him, instead of beating it back with all the water and supplies?” I said, and I could feel myself getting red in the face.

His voice was just the same steady tone I’d always heard. He didn’t raise it, and he didn’t apologize with it. He just spoke.

“I’m afraid I’m not adept at trailing, and it would have been dangerous for me to start out alone in the desert. I had a map showing me the way back, and I didn’t take any chances.”

I started to let him have it all, right then and there, but there wasn’t any use, and the desert has its own code. It was a case of where minutes might be precious. A man lost in the desert is like a man overboard at sea.

We got half a dozen of the old-timers around and went to work. Ortley told us no automobile could backtrack his route and he was right on that. It took us three days to find Grahame’s body, and then the buzzards led us to it. It wasn’t where Ortley thought it should have been — not by a long ways.

There wasn’t much we could do except bury him right there. We searched the clothes for addresses, and took his watch and a cigarette case and a knife. There wasn’t much else.

Stringy Martin’s voice was in my ear.

“That man didn’t die of thirst.”

I knew it, and I knew that a couple of other men in the crowd knew it.

“Ortley’s lying,” I admitted.

“Let’s shake him down.”

“After we get the body taken care of.”

We made a grave where we found him. It was the only thing to do. Then we got Ortley in the center of a ring of attentive ears and made him repeat the story.

Stringy Martin did the talking.

“Then he must have got lost thirty miles away from here.”

“I guess so. I’m not accustomed to the desert. I find it all seems strange to me.”

“And you didn’t get anywheres near this place?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“There’s the remains of a camp fire a couple of miles up this cañon, and marks where blankets were unrolled in the sand. And there’s a tomato tin that’s been opened, and some coffee grounds spilled on the desert, and there are some burro tracks — old, but burro tracks, just the same.”

Ortley’s eyes held Stringy’s with a disdainful sort of expression in them.

“Well?” he asked.

“And this man didn’t die of thirst. He was murdered by some means or other.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Because he didn’t dig with his hands, and his shirt’s on. A man who dies of thirst starts running, and he rips his shirt off, and he gets down and tries to dig out the sand with his hands. And he keeps on digging, until you can see the marks of the desert on what’s left of his hands. This man hadn’t done none of those things.”

Ortley shrugged his shoulders.

“As I said, I am not accustomed to the desert. But I have given you the facts as I remember them. Of course it is possible I was near here with the pack train. We may have camped here. I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I believe there are even cases of men traveling in a big circle in the desert and thinking they are going in a straight line, aren’t there?”

“How did you get back to Randsburg?”

“I trusted the burros for a while, and then I saw the outline of that peculiar peak off to the left, and got my bearings from that. I had made a map.”

“Where is that map?”

“I lost it. It blew out of my hands.”

Stringy Martin looked about him. What he saw in the faces of the rest of us apparently coincided with his own judgment. He started for the burros.

“Well, you’ll have a chance to clean this thing up a bit before you leave Randsburg. We’ll notify the sheriff when we get back to town.”

Ortley said nothing. His eyes were steady, and cold.

We got in to Randsburg, and notified the sheriff over the telephone. He came out and brought the coroner with him. They put Ortley on the grill.

Ortley had money, and he fought the way people with money do. He hired a doctor from Los Angeles who specialized in testifying in court cases. That doctor came in with a suitcase filled with books, and he convinced the sheriff and the coroner that people who died with thirst didn’t rip off their shirts and dig their fingers to the bone.

He laughed at the idea that any dying man would do such a thing. He quoted a lot of European doctors, and some statistics that had been compiled from Arabs in the Sahara desert or some place, and he made the sheriff think we were a bunch of boobs.

The sheriff told us that some of the circumstances were a little suspicious, but he didn’t think the district attorney would care to go any further into the matter, and then he left.

You look at a map and you’ll find Randsburg’s pretty well out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. As far as government goes, it’s more or less of an orphan. It’s in Kern County, but it’s only a mile or two over the border from San Bernardino County. Both counties are bigger than some states.

Randsburg is so much like what the old mining camps were like that the wise guys will tell you there can’t be such a place. It stretches along one twisting, unpaved street, a smear of sun-faded houses and rambling, false-fronted business structures.

It’s a place that does pretty much what it pleases. And there’s another place, not over three miles from it, that does exactly as it pleases. You understand that a mining town out in the middle of the Mojave Desert ain’t governed by exactly the same rules that govern a city that’s plunked down in the middle of the orange groves.

Ortley glowered at us with his cold eyes, walked to his automobile, unlocked the doors and the ignition and the transmission, and went away from there. There was nothing left behind except five burros and some desert whispers.

III Cold Trail

Now desert whispers are funny things. Maybe you’ve got to believe in the desert before you believe in desert whispers. At any rate, you’ve got to know what it’s like to spend the long desert nights bedded down in the drifting sand before you’ll know much about the desert, or the whispers, either.

The desert is peculiar. It’s something that can’t be described. You either feel the spell of the desert or you don’t. You either hate it or you love it. In either event you’ll fear it.

There it lies, miles on miles of it, dry lake beds, twisted mountains of volcanic rock, sloping sage-covered hills, clumps of Joshua trees, thickets of mesquite, bunches of giant cactus. It has the moods of a woman, and the treachery of a big cat.

And always it’s vaguely restive. During the daytime the heat makes it do a devil’s dance. The horizons shimmer and shake. Mirages chase one another across the dry lake beds. The winds blow like the devil from one direction, and then they turn and blow like the devil from the other direction.

Sand marches on an endless journey, coming from Lord knows where, and going across the desert in a slithering procession of whispering noise that’s as dry as the sound made by a sidewinder when he crawls past your blankets.

It’s at night when the desert’s still and calm and the steady stars blaze down like torches that you can hear the whispers best. Then you’ll lie in your blankets with your head pillowed right on the surface of the desert, and you’ll hear the dry sagebrush swish in the wind. It sounds as though the leaves are whispering. Then you’ll hear the sand rattling against the cactus, and it’ll sound like a different kind of a whisper, a finer, more stealthy whisper.

And then, usually just before you’re getting to sleep, you’ll hear that finest whisper of all, the sand whispering to the sand. Of course, if you’d wake up and snap out of it, you’d know that it was just the sound made by windblown sand drifting across the sandy face of the desert.

But you don’t wake up like that. You just drift off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sand whispering to the sand.

I’ve never really figured it out, but I guess that’s why the desert is so full of whispers. Strange stories seep through the desert just the way the sounds of the drifting sand seep into your ears. Take a man who has lived a long time in the desert, and his voice gets a dry, husking whisper in it that’s like the sound of a lizard’s feet scratching along the surface of a sun-baked rock.

Everything whispers in the desert, and some of the whispers would sound reasonable anywhere. Some of ’em only sound reasonable when you’re half asleep in the middle of the desert.

Edith Eason first came to me as a whisper.

I was camped up north of Shoshone when I heard of her. And I swear I can’t tell who it was that first told me. It was just a whisper, a casual, seeping whisper. You’d probably laugh if I said so, but, somehow or other, I have an idea it was a sand whisper that first told me about her.

At any rate the name didn’t sound strange to my ears when Humpy Crane gave me the low-down on her. It’s the sort of a name that lends itself to a whisper. Sand drifting over sand or rustling against cactus would give forth a sound like that: “Eason — Eeeeason — Eeeassssssssson — Edith Eassssson!”

Humpy came in to my camp fire up north of Shoshone. I was camped on a slope of the Funeral Range, and it was a typical desert night. Humpy saw my supper fire, and came on over. I could hear him and his burro long before I could see them. Their feet shuffled through the dry sand with a sort of whispering noise that muffled the steps.

“Hello, Humpy,” I said, when the fire lit on his lined face and white hair. “Had anything to eat?”

“Nope. I’m short o’ grub, an’ I saw your fire. Didn’t know it was you, Bob Zane. Got any tea, or tomatoes?”

I opened the pack.

“I got a little of everything here, old-timer. Sit down while I get her ready.”

We ate under the stars. The burros moved around through the dwarf sage.

“Wasn’t you one of the fellows that went in after the lunger that got bumped off in the desert?”

“You mean Sid Grahame, the one that went out with Ortley?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh-huh, I was; why?”

“Nothin’ much. There’s a red-headed girl come out from Denver. Her name’s Eason. Edith Eason. She’s hanging around Randsburg, lookin’ for you, or for Stringy Martin, either one.”

“What’s she want?”

“Don’t know. It’s got something to do with this lunger that got croaked. She grubstaked him or something, and she thinks he found some quartz stuff and was taking Ortley in to show it to him.”

I sipped a graniteware cup of tea.

“That,” I told him, “is different.”

Even then, I began to put two and two together, the weight of the bag when Ortley had lifted it off the burro, the eager way he’d cut the pack ropes to get it loose.

“Eason, Edith Eason — I’ve heard the name somewhere.”

“Maybe. It’s a name that’s easy on the ears. You goin’ in to Randsburg?”

I hadn’t been headed that way, but I didn’t hesitate any when Humpy asked the question.

“I’m goin’ back,” I told him.

Edith Eason had bright red hair and eyes that were a calm gray. She looked like a woman who could manage her own way in the world.

“Sid was working in the office with me when he developed the sickness,” she told me. “The doctors said sunshine and fresh air would cure him, but he was cooped up in a stuffy office, and he wouldn’t quit because he didn’t have anything saved up and be didn’t want to be a burden on any one.

“So I pretended to get awfully interested in mining, and then I told him I didn’t want to be working for wages all of my life, and I was going out in the desert and prospect, or else grubstake some old desert rat. He warned me I’d get stung, and finally I worked the situation around so it seemed logical for me to offer to grubstake him in the desert and let him prospect.

“He was out six months in all, and he started to get well almost from the first. He wrote to me and mailed the letters whenever he came to a post office. Sometimes I’d get three or four of them in one mail. The last batch of letters said he had something that looked awfully good, that he had a capitalist coming in to look it over and that he’d let me know. Then the next I heard was when I read of his death. So I wrote to the sheriff for details, and he told me stuff that brought me out here.”

She let her calm gray eyes bore right into mine, and read my mind.

“You think I’m a fool for giving up my job and trying to come out here, don’t you?”

Out in the desert you get so you shoot straight from the shoulder on most things, or else you get crooked all over.

“Yes,” I told her.

She nodded.

“That’s the way I like men. You and I are going to get along.”

“You talk as though you were considering adopting me,” I said.

“I am,” she said, and her eyes didn’t even twinkle. “You and I are going into the desert together.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. I want to see where Sid’s buried, and I want to try and trail where they went on their expedition.”

“It’s a cold trail.”

“I know it. But I’ve heard a lot about you, Bob Zane. They say you can make the desert talk to you, that there’s nothing in the Mojave you can’t find out.”

I told her straight from the shoulder.

“Yes, ma’am, the desert talks all right. It talks in sand whispers that are easy to believe — in the desert. They don’t sound probable anywhere else. I’m afraid you’ve been listening to sand whispers.”

She shook her head and reached her hand inside the blouse of her suit. When it came out there was a little tissue paper parcel in the palm. She unfolded the paper parcel.

“Look,” she said.

I looked, and then I looked again, and then I rubbed my eyes and looked some more.

They were little nuggets of red metal. They were almost blood-red, but I knew what they were even before I scratched under the red with the point of my knife.

“Gold,” I told her. “It’s a gold that’s alluvial, and it’s been through some chemical or other that’s given it a red coating. You get all sorts of gold here in the desert. They even have a black gold, that’s dead black on the surface.”

She nodded.

“The garage man found these. When Ortley drove off something spilled from his pockets when he took out the money to pay his bill. The garage man found these on the dirt floor.”

I shook my head.

“No. This couldn’t be what Sid discovered. This is a placer deposit. If he found something that needed capital, it would have been quartz. A deposit of this sort of gold could be washed out without requiring enough capital to bother about. A man all by himself could make the claim pay its way.”

She stamped her foot.

“I tell you I know. I don’t know what the explanation is. That’s what I’m going in to find out. But I know that this is from Sid’s mine. And Ortley insisted on taking his clothes, his shaving things, and his tooth brush and paste in a leather hand bag.”

I nodded.

“Yeah. I saw that. I saw him bring the hand bag out, too, and put it in the car. That don’t prove anything.”

“The dickens it doesn’t!” she snapped. “When they unpacked the burros, they found all of his personal things wrapped in a canvas. So what was in that bag when he brought it out?”

I did some fast thinking and remembered how he’d cut that bag loose from the pack and put it in the car before he did any talking, and I remembered how heavy the bag seemed.

“You win,” I told the red-head. “Can you be ready to leave by to-morrow morning?”

The smile that twisted her lips was a funny one.

“Want to get drunk, Bob Zane?” she asked.

“No; why?”

“I wondered why you wanted to stay in town tonight.”

“Lord, I don’t want to stay. But we’ve got to get a couple more burros and some grub and some water cans.”

“I’ve got them all. How long will it take for you to put the packs on?”

“About forty-five minutes, for the first packing.”

“Then we can leave in an hour.”

It was settled, just like that. We left in exactly fifty-seven minutes. And I did something I haven’t done in the desert for a long time — I strapped my old forty-five onto my waist and got a box of fresh shells.

You get acquainted with people quick in the desert. They can’t fool themselves and they can’t fool you, out where there’s nothing but eternity and silence. I never found out why it is, but it’s so. Take a two-day trip in the desert with some one and you’ll know him like a book, no matter if he doesn’t say a thing.

We traveled late the first night, and we rolled our blankets under the stars. I made the girl as comfortable as I could, and then I went up the ridge a hundred yards or so, so she wouldn’t feel I was intruding. I’ve acted as guide, off and on, for lots of women parties, and the first night they usually sleep with a gun clenched in their fist.

Funny thing about people. They’ll sleep in a Pullman car with nothing between them and a lot of strangers but a little green cloth with some numbers on it; but when you get ’em out in God’s outdoors they’re likely to get self-conscious.

Not this girl.

She was one of the kind that was sure of herself, and of every move she made. She had the poise of a thoroughbred, and she took to the desert like a duck to water.

People are like that. They either take to the desert or they don’t. They either love it or they hate it, and if they hate it, the hatred is born of fear.

That night a faint breeze sprang up out of nowhere. The stars blazed steadily. The sage leaves commenced to rustle against each other, and then the sand began to whisper. I went to sleep with the sand making little whispering noises that sounded more and more like words.

In the morning she was up, waiting for me, which I hadn’t expected. It was early. The desert was cold with a dry cold that penetrated. There was just the faintest streak of dawn in the east. The stars hadn’t commenced to pinpoint out before the day. They were still blazing steadily.

She threw some sage branches on the fire and the red flared up over the desert.

“Go get the burros,” she said. “I can get the breakfast.”

She was like a great shadow, moving between me and the fire.

“No fancy stuff,” I warned. “Coffee and something we can handle quick. We’ve got to get started before it gets too hot.”

She clattered the pans about and I could hear the gurgle of water from a canteen. I rounded up the burros, put on the saddles, and heard the beat of a spoon against a pan.

It was a good breakfast, and it came up on the dot.

“One cup of water for dishwater,” I told her.

“No more than that?”

“No. You’ve got to get accustomed to the desert, and you might as well begin.”

She didn’t argue. She just measured out a cup of water and poured it in the frying pan. Fifteen minutes later we were throwing the last rope on the pack, and she knew a lot about the squaw hitch.

The east was a red gold now, the color of the gold that had fallen from Ortley’s pocket, the color of bloodstained gold. She watched it as the burros shuffled their way through the sage and greasewood clumps.

“I heard whispers last night,” she said.

“Sand,” I told her.

She said nothing.

IV Trail’s End

The red faded from the east. The golden light was so strong it hurt the eyes. Purple shadows began to form and long streamers of light tinged the high points. Then the sun fairly jumped over the horizon, and it was hot.

It was a typical desert day. By eight o’clock the mountains began to shimmer. By ten; there were mirages playing tag with us. By eleven, the place was a furnace with no shade. I knew of a clump of mesquite, and I made it a little before noon.

The girl’s face was red, her eyes were inflamed, and her lips were cracked, but she managed a grin. I slung off the packs and loosened the saddles. The shade was welcome, and there was a little breeze. Fierce desert flies came and nipped at us, danced in front of our eyes, buzzed in our ears, crawled on our moist skin.

I was accustomed to it, and I slept. The girl couldn’t sleep. I knew she was tossing on her blanket, fighting flies, trying to shut the torture of the sun out from her eyes.

By three o’clock I slung on the saddles and we started again. The horizons were still dancing. Then the purple shadows crept stealthily out from the high ranges. The sage cast long shadows. The horizons quit jumping about, the mirages vanished, and cool fingers of soothing wind reached out over the sandy wastes.

“Here is where he’s buried,” I said.

She got off her burro. I showed her the grave, and then I went on for a hundred yards or so with the burros and left her there. She came up in about fifteen minutes.

“Do we camp here?”

I shook my head. “I found where they spent a night. I think it was the last night they had together. We’ll camp there. We can make it by dark.”

I crowded the burros, and we made it by dark. It had been a long, hard day. Most women would have had hysterics, but this red-headed campaigner wanted to cook the supper.

I parked her off to one side and made lots of hot tea and opened some of the canned delicacies I’d brought.

She drank the canned tomatoes eagerly and smiled at me with tired eyes. She ate some of the canned vegetables, nibbled at the toast, nodded her head, stiffened, took some more tea, nodded again, and fell asleep.

I took the plate from her nerveless fingers and eased her back on the blanket, put another blanket under her head for a pillow. She never stirred.

I took a flashlight and looked around.

I’d seen it all before. There was a cliff that stretched up from the desert, hollowed by wind and drifting sand into a million little caves. There was a dry wash, and then the blackened ashes of an old camp fire.

I got the camp made and went to bed.

The girl slept late in the morning, and I let her sleep. It was sunup before I called her to coffee and bacon. She grinned apologetically, and toyed with the food. The sun was commencing to do its stuff and the sand radiated the dazzling light.

Perhaps it was the angle of the sun, perhaps it was just because my eyes happened to be looking in that direction, but I saw something I’d overlooked before. It was a little scratch on the side of the cliff, a place where a nailed boot had left two parallel scratches on the surface of the soft rock.

“Do you hear whispers?” she was asking. “When you’re out in the desert?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I heard whispers again last night.”

“Sand whispers.”

“No, these were words. Some one kept saying something about a letter. I’m very near a letter that was left for me.”

I looked at her sharply, but the calm eyes didn’t falter.

“Yes,” she said, “a letter.”

I looked at the scratches made by the boot heel once more.

“I think,” I said, “if you’ll take a look in the caves up along the face of that cliff, you might find it. I’ll take the high ones, you take the low ones. Watch out for snakes.”

She didn’t argue. She started searching.

I was the one to find the letter. It was up in a high cave. It was addressed to Miss Edith Eason, and the address was the business address in Los Angeles.

I scaled it down to her.

It was something of a shock to her as she saw the sealed envelope, written in the hand of the dead. Coming on top of the whispers she’d been hearing, it must have seemed like a voice from the dead.

Funny thing about those whispers. They’d seemed to be trying to tell me something during the night. But I was too drowsy to hear well. Once I thought I had a message, but it had slipped my mind when I woke up.

You can’t ever tell, though; maybe it was because of those whispers that I looked at those boot marks. Then again, maybe all of this whispering business was just imagination. I’m putting down the facts the way they happened. One’s guess is as good as that of another.

After a while she handed me the letter.

There was a lot of personal stuff in there that I hated to read. It seemed like violating a confidence, but I knew I had to read it to get the whole sketch. The thing was just the way I’d commenced to figure.

Sidney Grahame had located a big, low-grade quartz mine. He’d interested Harry Ortley into coming in and looking it over. While they were dickering over terms, Ortley wanting to take everything in sight and have a guarantee of ten per cent more, Sid wandered off into the desert and just stumbled onto a rich placer.

He staked it out, and told Ortley he didn’t need his finances, that Ortley could have the low-grade if he wanted, and welcome, and then he showed Ortley the placer.

That was where he made his mistake. He knew it before the day was done. They started back. Murder was in Ortley’s eyes. Sid knew it. He wrote the letter and hid it in the cave, figuring that if anything happened, desert-wise eyes would back-track Ortley. But he didn’t dare make the Hiding place of the letter too obvious for fear Ortley would see it.

There was a map showing the location of the placer.

I looked up from the letter to find the girl’s eyes on mine.

“Can we get there to-day?” she asked.

“No. It’s two days’ travel, and it’s twenty miles from the nearest water. It’s one of the worst bits of the desert. That’s why it’s never been prospected more thoroughly. I’d better go and get some witnesses before we go in there.”

I looked at her eyes and saw fire in them for the first time.

“That’s nonsense. You don’t want witnesses. You just want to get me out of the way where I won’t see what’s going to happen. We’ll travel hard and we’ll get there tomorrow.”

I tried to talk her out of it. As well argue with a granite mountainside. So we started to travel. And we traveled plenty.

The map located the mines with reference to Pilot Butte, and I didn’t have any trouble. There was the gleam of a tent in the afternoon sun as we approached the placer.

“You stay behind,” I told the girl.

She just shook her head.

We rode up on the tent. Fingers of shadows were stretching across the desert.

“Hello, in there!” I yelled.

There was no answer. I got off the burro and went in. My hand was parked around my forty-five as I pulled the tent flap.

The tent was deserted, and it had been vacated in a hurry. It looked as though Ortley had seen us coming in over the desert and taken a sneak to where he could ambush us.

It was a bad break. I hadn’t thought Ortley would be that wise, but he was. He’d had the breaks and played them. I went out of the tent knowing what the answer was going to be even before I heard the crack of the rifle.

Sand spurted up at my feet. The second shot gave me his line. He’d made a little fort out of rocks and sand, and had worked it over so it had all the color of the native country.

One man with a forty-five at his belt isn’t going to do any good wading into a fort where a man with a high-powered rifle is holding out.

I turned loose a couple of shots just so I wouldn’t be taking part in an argument where some one else was doing all the arguing, and I got the girl off her burro and down into a little swale.

By keeping down in the hollows, we managed to work off the property. At dusk I went back and rounded up the burros. I couldn’t tell whether he’d intended to kill us or whether he’d merely tried to throw a scare into us. I wished I’d brought a rifle, wished I didn’t have the girl along.

V Desert Warfare

“What’s the next move?” she asked.

“Keep him from getting out of the country,” I said. “He’s probably made quite a stake of gold by this time, and he’ll either beat it or else try to bluff it out.”

“What will we do?”

“Do you think you could find your way back to the water alone — if you had to?”

She studied my face for a moment or two to find out what the question meant.

“You mean if anything should happen to you, and I’d have to try and get back alone?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid not. Let’s see if we can’t keep him where he is without taking the risk of losing your life. I know enough to know that a man with a revolver isn’t any match for a man with a high-powered rifle.”

“All right,” I told her. “Then the only thing to do is to wait him out.”

“How do you mean?”

“While he’s on that claim, and has a fort to wait in, and a tent that he’ll move on up to the fort under cover of darkness, we haven’t got a chance. But the nearest water is at that hole twenty miles away. He hasn’t got very much water left. He’ll have to go for water, and he’ll have to get out of the country.

“We can always follow him, keeping just out of range of his gun. We have the advantage of knowing the desert. And whenever he strikes civilization we’ll have him arrested. It ain’t the way I’d like to play it. I’d prefer a show-down and taking him in with his hands tied, or else letting him take me in with my feet off the ground, or plant me right here. But we are both witnesses to the finding of that letter, and if anything should happen to me and you couldn’t find the water hole, it’d be playing into his hands.”

She nodded.

“What do we do, camp?”

“Yes. We camp, and we keep a watch day and night. He’ll be up to some treachery when he finds out what we’re planning. And we go very, very sparing on the water. We’ve got to make him run out of water before we do.”

We camped that night just as though the desert was full of hostile Indians. What little fire we had was shielded behind blankets, and we put it out as soon as we had boiled the tea water and warmed up the frijoles.

I kept watch that night while the girl slept. Once or twice I thought I heard him, trying to find our camp, but I got down on my stomach where I could sweep my eyes along the sky line, and couldn’t see anything moving.

Morning showed he’d moved the tent, just as I’d figured he would. If the girl had been able to find her way out alone, I’d have waited for him by the tent, but we couldn’t afford to take any chances. Dying of thirst was too horrible a death to consider for that girl.

I’d made the camp pretty well out of rifle range of the mining claim, and all we had to do was to keep watch during the day. By night I’d make another camp.

He stuck in his fort all morning. After breakfast I put my head in the shade of a big sage and tried to get caught up on sleep.

It was hot, and the sun beat down on the sand like an oven. The flies came and crawled and nipped, but I managed to get some sleep. I was sore, and my dreams weren’t pleasant. I’d underestimated this fellow Ortley with his cold eyes and his efficiency of selfishness. I hadn’t figured he’d have left the empty tent to lure me into an ambush; and I didn’t figure on his having a fort, or knowing the desert well enough to play a lone hand and get by.

Evidently he was one of those mathematical thinkers who figure out every move in the games they play. He must have studied the desert, and had some one show him most of the simple tricks of packing.

The girl was keeping guard, and she must be getting a full dose of desert. I’d rigged up a little shade for her. And I’d dug a trench we could get into at sign of any danger.

It was about four o’clock when she called me.

“He’s coming,” she said.

I snapped wide awake, saw the black blob of motion that was moving slowly over the glittering sand. He had both hands up in the air, and he was carrying a white rag, waving it wildly.

I didn’t trust him somehow or other.

“Get down in the ditch and flatten out,” I told the girl. I waited, standing in plain sight, but my hands were pretty well placed for sudden action.

It was when he was within about a hundred yards, nice rifle range, but a little uncertain revolver range, that he dropped the white flag. I saw then how damned clever he was. He’d tied his rifle between his shoulders so it hung down behind his back. And he only had to whirl around, catch the muzzle, jerk the weapon around, and there he was, ready for action.

It was a clever trick, even for an old desert fighter. For a city dweller to think it out showed the type of mind that had thought of the fort, of the ambush. If it hadn’t been for the ditch I had dug, it would have been almost certain death for us.

I jerked the revolver from its holster, and showed him some speed. That was one place where I could claim the advantage. He might have a coldly efficient mind, but he didn’t know how quickly a man in the desert could get his gun from its holster.

My first shot was just a trifle high and to the right. It actually nicked through the top of his shoulder. I saw the dust fly from the shirt, and I heard the little tick that the bullet gave.

Then the rifle cracked spitefully, and a high-velocity bullet fanned my cheek.

I dropped down into the trench I had dug, and Ortley flattened on the desert.

I tried waving my hat on a stick.

He didn’t even fire. His coldly efficient mind had told him that I wouldn’t wear my hat after I dropped into the ditch.

I stuffed some sand in a handkerchief, and made it look a little like the top of a man’s head. I moved that slowly along the top of the little trench, and he fired.

I jumped up with the sound of the shot. He was reloading his gun, a mere jerking of a lever; but it gave me time for a snap shot.

The shot missed — for the simple reason that there wasn’t enough target to shoot at the distance. He’d carried a short-handled trowel with him, and he’d thrown up a little embankment of sand, and hollowed out a ditch.

I knew then I was up against a man who overlooked nothing. Those cold, scornful eyes, utterly emotionless, were windows for a brain that moved with ball-bearing efficiency.

I dropped back into the trench and looked for the handkerchief. It was filled with little holes. I knew that those holes had been made by spattering sand. The high-velocity bullet had hit close enough to its mark to send little gravel particles spattering up in a stinging shower.

It was good shooting. Probably Ortley, with that damned efficiency of his, had been practicing on his rifle shooting, waiting for the time which he felt might possibly come.

My respect for the man mounted as my hatred increased.

The rifle cracked again. I flattened in the trench. There sounded the unmistakable thunk! of a bullet plowing into solid meat. I looked at the girl anxiously. She was well down, and there was no sign of a hit.

The rifle cracked again. Once more there sounded the impact of a high-powered bullet on something solid.

At the third crack I flung myself up from the trench, revolver ready for a snap shot. As before, I found my man was well covered. But I saw what he was doing. He was shooting our burros!

I dropped down and reloaded my revolver. There was only one thing left to do — charge and fight it out, gun against gun.

But the rifle didn’t crack any more — not just then. The damned, efficient devil had figured out what I would do next, and was waiting for me, long-barreled rifle ready to claim an easy victim as I scrambled from the trench. After that, the girl would be easy.

“If anything happens to me,” I warned her, “don’t waste time being sentimental. Grab my gun and wait. Get him if you get a chance. If you don’t get the chance — well, don’t let him get you.”

She nodded.

I didn’t go into details. I knew the man by this time. A death of thirst in the desert is a horrible thing.

Minutes passed and there was no sound. Then there came the crack of the rifle. This time it was far to the right. I jumped up. I might as well have stayed where I was. He was out of revolver shot, anyway. And he was killing our burros with a methodical calmness, an unhurried efficiency that was like the man.

The girl didn’t appreciate the situation for a minute.

“We’ve driven him off!” she said, and her voice was triumphant.

I started rolling up some food in a shoulder pack.

“Yes,” I told her, “he’s moved.”

My words were punctuated by another shot. The last shot came a few minutes later. Every one of our burros was buzzard bait. And the desert seemed to reach out clutching fingers for us.

Ortley walked back toward his fort. He didn’t even look our way. That’s how sure of himself and his strategy he was.

And he had good reason to be. Out there in the desert we were going to have to get the breaks if we won through. Ortley had burros and he had a high-powered rifle to protect the burros. We had nothing except provisions and water. Neither of those would last.

The desert became purple with a short twilight, and then darkness came like a cool mantle.

“How good are you at walking?” I asked the girl.

“Do we walk?”

“We do.”

I rolled the shoulder pack as tight as I could get it, and took all the water I dared to carry. I made the woman travel light. We started out before it had been dark an hour.

Twenty miles is only a hop, skip, and a jump in an automobile. It’s a fair ride on horseback. It’s a good ride on a burro. On foot it isn’t so bad if a man’s accustomed to walking. But twenty miles in a burning desert with loose sand underfoot and a woman...

VI The Weapon of Desert Knowledge

We made the first five miles fairly easily. The girl was getting tired then. I was sweating under my shoulder pack. I gave her a little water and a ten-minute rest, and then we plugged on.

About one o’clock she asked me the question I’d been expecting to hear long before.

“Why are we running away?”

“Because Ortley holds all the trump cards. He’s got a killing radius with a rifle that beats what we have with a revolver. He’s got shade and shelter. He’s got transportation. There’s only one chance we’ve got. That’s to beat him to water and then be able to wait him out.”

“What do you mean by ‘wait him out’?”

“I’ll show you, when we get to water.”

We plugged along for another hour. The girl stumbled once or twice. I made her take off her boots and looked at her feet. They were getting in bad shape. I had a little adhesive tape, and I bound them up as best I could. She lay flat on her back for fifteen minutes. I didn’t dare to let her rest long. It was going to be a struggle.

I got her to her feet, and we plugged on. The shoulder pack was rubbing pretty badly. I’d had to take stuff that would carry and didn’t have the chance to arrange it so it’d ride best. There were too many bulky objects, too little blanket.

Daylight saw us two miles from the water and the girl looked pretty white in the morning light. I began to drive her unmercifully. I taunted her with being a weakling. I told her Ortley was too smart for her, that she was too soft for the desert, that she was a drag. I told her lots of things that made me squirm as I said them, but it was the only way.

She didn’t have spirit enough to reply. Her white face remained expressionless. Her calm eyes were paled with fatigue. Her feet moved as though her boots were made of lead.

And it began to get hot.

I’d gone strong on the water with her when I saw we could probably make it. We didn’t really run out until the last mile.

A mile doesn’t seem very far. But let me tell you that last mile was a torture, every step of it. The sun was beating down on us. The girl’s feet were gone. I was carrying an awkward pack. We’d made twenty honest miles of sand and fine rock, twenty desert miles of up and down, and we’d crossed one ridge that went up two thousand feet above the rest of the desert, and it went up straight. The climb up that slope had been heartbreaking.

The girl’s boots were typical department store boots of the type that are manufactured for women who want to look well in hiking clothes. They’re all right for riding, but for walking they’re a different thing. And a woman’s feet aren’t built for heavy boots.

I tried to do some more taping. But the skin had gone completely soft. It was like wet tissue paper. She was staggering and wincing, moaning, biting her lip, gasping irregular breaths.

We got to the water hole. She was all in.

I got some wet mud around the fevered feet. I soaked her wrists in cold water and I sopped her forehead. She rolled over and went to sleep. I took the things from the pack and buried the stuff that the sun would hurt. Then I sat there to fight flies and wait.

There was a little shade, some mesquite that wasn’t very high or very thick. We had to keep moving around to follow that shade. The flies were bad, and it was one hot day.

She woke up around noon, so stiff she could hardly move. I fed her.

“I can never walk out of this desert,” she said. “I’m not a quitter, but I just can’t do it.”

“I know it. I’m not asking you to — yet.”

“How else could we get out?”

“Wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For about four or five days.”

“Here?”

“Here.”

“Why so long?”

“If it happens sooner we’re licked.”

“What happens?”

“Wait and see.”

Five days passed, and I was afraid I’d guessed this Ortley wrong. But on the sixth day, just a little after sunup, I saw the dots come straggling across the desert. Four burros and a man.

It was about time. The grub I’d taken hadn’t been any more than enough. The flies and the heat and the continued inactivity had been awful. The girl had had plenty of water to drink and sop on her skin. I’d been afraid to get myself accustomed to too much water, so I’d kept on my regular desert ration, which was plenty short.

The burros speeded up as they neared the water.

“What now?” she asked. “He’s still got the rifle.”

I indicated the little trenches I’d dug.

“We can keep out of the line of his fire, no matter where he tries to shoot from.”

“But he won’t bother with us. He’ll keep on going.”

“Maybe.”

“And our provisions are almost gone.”

“It’s a show-down now. Either we win or we lose. If we lose you’ve got to wait here while I walk to Randsburg and get some help. Those provisions will have to last you.”

“How about you?”

“I won’t bother with provisions. I’ll carry water — if I have to go.”

The black spots got nearer. We could see the long, dancing shadows cast by the early sun. I got up close to the little embankment I’d thrown up and got the girl placed where she’d be safe.

Ten minutes more and I could hear the crunch of their feet in the sand. When they were within about forty yards I slipped my forty-five forward and took a peek.

It was as I’d thought. Ortley had figured out what the embankments meant. He was behind a burro, his rifle ready. At the flicker of motion I made when I raised up, he fired.

I dropped back and called to him.

“Better surrender, Ortley. You were so confident we’d left, and so damned greedy, that you waited until you’d milked the last ounce of gold from the claim, and that means you’re short of water. We can hold the water hole.”

His language was worse than strong. And I could hear the thick tone of his voice which told me what I’d surmised. He was out of water — had been for a few miles at least. Ortley was gold-mad, and he’d stayed on to work as much out of the claim as he could. The burros were weighted down with his plunder. He’d postponed the trip for water until the very last minute that he dared, knowing he wouldn’t dare to return to the claim — not until he heard what had happened to us.

He walked around the water hole, shooting from time to time, trying to find a weak point in our defense. There wasn’t any.

The burros got restive and tried to walk in. He tied them together and kept herding them out of range. I’d have shot his burros and left him in a trap, only we’d have been caught in the same trap.

Ortley had been a thinking machine, but he hadn’t known the desert long enough. The desert gives its hoard to those who know her. In the desert, knowledge counts. Ortley didn’t realize his position even now.

It was nearly noon before he knew what he was up against. He went almost delirious with rage. He would have charged the spring, only he knew it would be sure death. I’d have shown him no mercy, none whatever.

Finally he knew the alternative.

“Damn you! I’ll win my way out. You can stay here and starve!”

I looked up after a while. He was plugging his way toward the next water, Bitter Springs. I sighed and smiled at the girl.

“Well, that’s that.”

“But he’s gone with all the gold, and he has the burros and the grub — and everything.”

I nodded.

“That’s true. But he’s cruel, this Ortley, and He’s undoubtedly been cutting down on the water he’s given his animals. You wait — and see what happens.”

His first trouble came when he was less than a mile away. The thirsty burros, knowing they were being taken away from water, balked. He was cruel, this Ortley, and he got the train to moving again. It took work, and blows, and spurs, and cruelty.

I waited.

The burros became dots, finally vanished. They were making almost no time at all. The afternoon breeze sprang up. The long shadows marched across the desert.

There was the sound of hoofs, and here they came, four burros, on the trot, eager for water.

I caught them as they drank, filled up the water canteens.

“Let’s go,” I told the girl. “He may not be far behind.”

As soon as the burros had plenty of water I took them off a couple of miles in the desert and let them feed a bit. Then I started them toward Randsburg.

We traveled until one o’clock. Then we made a short camp and were on our way again at daybreak.

“How about Ortley?”

“He’ll either get back to the springs, in which event he’ll be there, waiting for the sheriff — or I’ll find him somewhere else, when I come back with a posse.”

She didn’t get it all figured out, but she didn’t ask any questions, not after that.

We got to Randsburg, and I told my story. The packs of the burros were weighted down with gold. It was a blood-red gold, alluvial, in coarse chunks and colors that ran very thick and big. All the gold had the same reddish coating.

The sheriff came, and we started out.

We went to the water hole first, figuring Ortley would have found his way back there, and been trapped.

He wasn’t there. So we started looking through binoculars at the horizon. We spotted the circling dots of buzzards and went to the point under which they circled.

I was glad the girl wasn’t with me.

But I wished that expert doctor, who had testified that people dying of thirst didn’t dig the flesh away from their fingers, had been there. The doctor’s testimony had saved Ortley once. Now what was left of Ortley would have refuted the doctor.

He had been cruel. He had murdered. He had stolen the claim of a partner. But he had been punished. The desert is rather thorough in such matters, and it will be a long time before I forget the sight of those hands.

But sometimes I think the desert’s cruelty is one of its best features. There’s too much mercy in connection with man-made justice. After all, an immutable law that never varies is the one that gets the respect.

But that’s the desert. It’s a wonderful mother, and a cruel one. And the cruelty teaches self-reliance, and self-reliance is pretty nearly the object of life, after all.

But that’s what makes the desert whisper to itself at night when the sand begins to blow; it’s trying to pass on the stories of Ortley and his kind.

Every time I pillow my head on the sand, and listen to the little whispers that slither across the floor of the desert, I wonder how many more stories there are, stories like the story of the red gold, of Ortley, of the girl with the calm eyes, of the lunger who died of some mysterious cause.

There are lots of them, and the sand is trying to tell them, whispering the news to the cactus as it drifts by, telling the stories to the other sands. And then, finally, as the breeze freshens, the other sands stir to life and repeat the stories they have heard, until the desert becomes just a great bowl of whispers.

That’s what the sand has to tell the sand as it drifts by. That’s why the sand whispers seem more than sand whispers — just before you drop off to sleep of nights. The stars blaze steadily down, telling of faith, and of fair dealing, and of upright manhood. And the desert, by way of warning, whispers the stories of Ortley and his kind.