Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

Fall Guy

Yes, sir, taken any way you’ve a mind to look at it, the desert’s a queer place. And the desert along the Mexican border is in a class by itself. Almost anything can happen down here. Not only can happen, but does. Most of it ain’t believed, though.

Why, just the other day I was mentioning about the wheel ruts sticking up in the air, and some dude pitched in and says, “You mean the ruts are indented in the soil, my good man.” Of course, I told him I wasn’t his good man an’ that I meant the ruts stuck up in the air, like I said.

Finally I’m hanged if I didn’t have to take him out and show him.

There they were, wheel tracks sticking up eight inches above the surface of the desert, and where the horse had walked in between the wheels, there was mushrooms of earth sticking almost a foot up in the air.

The dude rubbed his eyes, and then sat right down on the desert and swore he’d never come west of the Rockies again. He said it was bad enough to have all the people crazy without having the country go crazy, too.

He was so flabbergasted I didn’t tell him how it happened. Simple enough. You know the desert, you’ve probably seen ’em yourself. It happens in the Colorado Basin where the desert soil is mostly a fine silt. They make good ’dobe bricks out of that soil.

A light rain comes along once or twice a year. If somebody drives a wagon over the ground then, the wheels sink down into the soil and so do the horse’s hoofs. But it packs that light silt into a regular ’dobe. Then when the sun does its stuff and the wind blows the powdery silt around this way and that, the ’dobe stays put. After a year or so the tracks’ll be sticking right up in the air. I’ve seen ’em eighteen inches high with regular hills where the horse stepped.

That’s the way with the desert. Strange things happen down there. If you know how they happen they don’t seem so strange. If you just see ’em, and don’t know how they happened, you naturally think the country’s gone crazy.

Take the Desert Queen, for instance. Ever hear of her? No, I don’t mean a mine of that name, I mean a regular woman, the Desert Queen — and she’s a sure enough queen if there ever was one.

I’d heard whispers of her for a couple of years, but I’d never seen her. You know how the desert is, full of whispers. Why, even the sand whispers. You’ll hear it of nights when you’re laid out in your blankets, sand rustling against the cactus stalks and sounding like whispers. Then you’ll hear the sand rustling against the sand, making regular sand whispers. Sometimes it seems as though you can hear what the sand’s saying... just before you drop off to sleep, sort of.

But this here Desert Queen ain’t got nothing to do with sand whispers. She’s a real flesh and blood queen. But I thought for a long while she wasn’t anything but a Sand Whisper.

I heard of her first down in Los Algodones. The roulette table was out four thousand. The proprietor said it was an olive-skinned girl with smoky eyes and a cowboy hat who played a system. I listened to him and grinned. Those gamblers are always inventing stories of people who made big killings. It acts as a come-on for the suckers — their customers.

But six months later I heard of her in Tia Juana. Four thousand again. She seemed to play a system and quit when she got four thousand.

Well, I was sitting right here in this very cantina one night, a year or so later, when I noticed a commotion over at the roulette table. See how this big horseshoe bar winds around? And there’s the house-girls, asking you to dance and buy a drink, over on one side, and the roulette wheel on the other!

I was sitting right about here, and I saw something was happening over at the roulette table. So I got up and strolled over.

She was a slender kid with black hair and smoky eyes, and the eyes were the big part of her face. She was an American, all right, and a beauty. Her skin was a smooth olive, the lips were a dark red, and they weren’t colored up any, either. She was a regular daughter of the desert, the kind that can stay out in the blistering sun and still have a smooth skin and velvet complexion.

She had a cowboy hat and riding boots, a buckskin skirt and a big belt around the waist. There wasn’t any gun in the belt, but you could see where a holster was usually worn. The sun had tanned the rest of the belt a different color. The place where the holster was usually kept was darker.

She was playing a system all right. I don’t know much about roulette systems. Most of ’em are the bunk. But they tell me that if you’ll wait until a certain sequence of colors comes an’ then slide out your bets, you’ve got a better than two-to-one chance.

This girl sure knew her system, and she could control her play. There’s lots of good mathematical systems at roulette. The trouble is most people ain’t got the self-control necessary to stand up an’ play a system. They get to gambling on the side, and then they’re finished.

Personally, I got my own system with roulette. I leave it alone. That keeps me from losing, and that’s more than you can say about most systems.

But this girl was playing as cool and calm as though everybody in the room wasn’t watching her. She’d watch the numbers fall for a few minutes, then make a bet. If she lost she’d double it the next time, and keep doubling. But she didn’t lose. She seemed to know just about where that little ball was goin’ to hop.

I watched her for a while, and then went back and sat down.

Phil Ryan came over and sat down next to me.

“ ’Lo, Sid.”

“ ’Lo, Phil. How’s tricks?”

“So-so.”

“Anything new?”

“I got a job for you, Sid.”

That sounded good to me. Phil and I were buddies for quite a while, and I wanted a chance to get goin’ with him again.

Phil’s another one of those things you wouldn’t believe. He’s a Western gunman. Thought there weren’t any more, didn’t you? Just like those wheel tracks in the desert. You don’t believe ’em until you have ’em explained.

Well, Phil’s like that. He’s what they call a guard. He learned to handle a gun in the Big Scrap. Me, I’m an old-timer, and I’ve packed a Colt over more desert than most people ever see. But Phil was a youngster, one of the new school.

Oh, the gunmen ain’t killers any more. They’re just fellows who can do some fancy shootin’ when the occasion calls for it. There’s lots of capital in the desert country now, and that capital has to keep moving in the form of cash. There’s the out-of-the-way mines with the big payroll, and there’s the tourist resorts on the border with their big stocks of cash, always coming and going.

The border’s still a tough place, for all the tinsel and all the tourist traps. And they employ us fellows to sort of chaperon the coin shipments. We don’t have nothing much to do except to ride along. Mostly just being on hand is all the protection we need to give to a shipment.

No highwayman is likely to tackle a job where he knows there’s a couple of men standing guard who can shoot with either hand and shoot fast.

I ain’t so fast as I used to be. In the old days when Tombstone was still running I could go for iron with the best of them, even if I do say it. But Tin no spring chicken any more. But this here Phil Ryan’s fast, awful fast. I’ve seen lots of fast fellows in the old days, and Phil’s as fast as any of ’em. You could have put him back with the Earps and the Clantons, and he’d have made history — maybe would have made it a lot different from what it was.

Anyhow, I was glad to get a job that Phil had dug up. I knew it’d be ridin’ with him, and I always liked Phil.

“What’s this here job?” I asked.

“Chaperonin’ a bunch of gold bars up to the border from the Dry Canteen Mine.”

“Why the reinforcements? You been holdin’ down that job by yourself for quite some time.”

“They got a tip. Pedro Gallivan’s got an eye on the shipment.”

I whistled a little bit.

Pedro was a border character just like all the rest that had gone before. He wasn’t Mex and he wasn’t American. Sort of a mixture, was Pedro, and he was too slick ever to get caught.

The border has done lots of things to civilization, and civilization has done lots of things to the border. Dope, booze, and Chinks get run across, and that business is all cash. Pedro specialized in finding out where the cash was. He was a hijacker of cash. He didn’t monkey with petty running of hooch or dope or Chinks, but he sure did swoop down on the money.

He lived in a big hacienda with palm trees and servants, and he had a shell of respectability about the place that made him seem like a retired banker. But there were plenty of whispers around about Pedro Gallivan. He didn’t ever pull much in person. He always had a “fall guy” to take the blame if anything went wrong, and he had plenty of people working for him.

It was whispered that he furnished some of the big imports for shipment. He had people with him who were polished, educated, and crooked. Pedro was the head of the system. God help a man, or woman, for that matter, that Pedro got into his clutches. He made ’em work for him and work hard until he needed a fall guy, and then-well, dead people don’t tell tales in the border country any more than they do anywheres else.

“What makes you think Pedro’s going after the mine gold?” I wanted to know.

Phil glanced around him. His lips got tight. “A tip.”

“He never has monkeyed with any of that sort of stuff. Always worked on the border runners.”

“This is a straight tip.”

We sat and looked at each other for a while.

“Count me in,” I said.

He nodded, happened to glance toward the roulette, and sat down his beer glass so hard the bottom bumped the table.

“What’s doing?” he asked.

“A smoky-eyed jane with a system.”

He was on his feet before I knew what he was going to do, and halfway over to the roulette table before I had a chance to say anything.

She looked up and saw him coming.

Her face changed color for an instant, then the smoky eyes bored straight into his and the lips came back from pearly teeth.

Phil swept off his sweat-stained sombrero, and the girl cashed in her chips. They went out together and the crowd gawked.

I stuck around until midnight. That was when we were scheduled to start out. Phil showed on the dot. The border was closed and all the tourists had gone home. The place was quiet.

“The broncs are out front,” he said.

I followed him without saying anything.

My stirrups had to be lengthened, and I wanted to take a good look at the rifle that was in the saddle scabbard. I had my own guns, and I got ’em from the room where I was hanging out. We started about quarter past twelve.

The desert was silent, just crammed full of stars. The horses didn’t make much noise, plumping their feet down into the soft sand. We rode in silence for over an hour.

“What are the plans?” I asked.

“We intercept the shipment about ten miles farther south, and we escort it to the road. There they’ve got armed automobiles waiting. If there’s any trouble it’ll be on the trail.”

I rode along for another half hour.

We’d left the desert floor and were following a trail along the steep sides of the barren desert mountains that show soft and purple from the floor of the desert, but are very devils to ride over, being mostly straight up and down with all sorts of volcanic rock and what-not sticking out and playing thunder with a horse.

“Who was the girl?”

“Miss Dixie Carson.”

“She the one they call the Desert Queen?”

“Yes. Ever met her?”

“No. Never saw her before. Heard of her. Sort of whispers, nothing much definite.”

He didn’t say anything for a quarter of a mile. Then he half turned in his saddle.

“I love her,” he said.

“You should,” I told him. “I’m for you.”

He grunted and swung back into the saddle.

That was all there was to it. But he knew and I knew. Out there in the star-filled silence of a desert night a fellow doesn’t need to talk much to get an idea across. Phil knew I wasn’t going to babble anything, and that if he ever needed me to back his play I’d be there.

We finished our short cut and came to the main trail from the mine half an hour before the burro train got there. It showed up about daylight with a clatter of little bells and the sound of shuffling feet and soft, Mexican voices.

Phil hailed the leader, and then we rode on ahead. A couple of rurales were in the rear.

The east got brassy and the stars became little needle points. I could look back and see the burro train, twisting like some big serpent as it wound its way around the side of the hills, following a pass through the mountains.

I loosened up my rifle, looked up at the ridges of the mountains.

“Good place for an ambush, Phil.”

“Yeah. Let’s ride on ahead a ways.”

We touched the broncs with the spurs and went on ahead. After a while we couldn’t hear the little bells any more.

The sun touched the purple peaks of the high mountains.

“Phil,” I said, “my eyes ain’t as good as they used to be any more, but take a look at that bush up on the slope about two hundred yards, just below that outcropping of red rock.”

Phil swung his head up.

“Hm—” he began, and then it happened.

There was the cough of a high-powered rifle, and the bullet plunked into solid meat. I didn’t have time to see whether it was Phil or the bronc. I had the spurs into my own cayuse, and we were off the trail and going hell-for-leather down the side of the mountain.

There was a dry wash at the bottom, and some boulders in the bottom. I grabbed the gun as the horse scrambled into the boulders, and kicked my feet free from the stirrups when I felt air between me and the saddle.

Bullets were chipping bits of rock off of the boulders all around me. It was like a hailstorm on a lake. I could hear the pop of guns and the spatter of bullets. One of the horses was screaming with pain or terror or both.

I was glad we’d come on ahead of the pack train. It would have been plain hell to have the burros trapped in that cañon, each with a load of gold bars. As it was, there wasn’t anybody except Phil and myself, and Phil was able to take care of himself — or else it was all over with him.

I dropped back of a rock where there was plenty of shelter and cut loose at the bush up on the ridge. I couldn’t see anybody, but I wanted to let Phil know I was all right and, besides, to warn the rurales back with the pack train.

Then I heard Phil’s gun roar up above me, and knew we were sittin’ pretty. Phil would be almost sure to try for the ridge, and he’d count on me to cover him from down in the cañon. My legs ain’t much for runnin’ uphill any more, but I can still see between the sights.

I knew Phil was out and running from the way the bullets quit spatterin’ against my rock. I flung up over it. A man’s head and shoulders were outlined against the sky above the ridge. He was sighting a gun up on the slope where Phil was jumping for a bush.’

I cut loose and beat that guy to it.

He settled, slumped, rolled, and lay still.

Somebody clipped a hole through my sombrero. But then, it was gettin’ old, anyway. I slammed home a shell and took a snap shot at a bit of motion on top of the ridge. I didn’t hit him, but I threw enough dust in his eyes to put him out of the fight for a while — and the fight wasn’t goin’ to last long.

Phil was out in the open now, walkin’ toward the ridge, trustin’ to me to see that nobody got up to take a shot. One fellow tried it. I think I hit him in the leg, from the way he went down.

Then there wasn’t any more firing. I heard the drum of a horse’s hoofs, and then the whinny of another horse. Phil broke into a run, and I saw him bring his gun to his shoulder as he took a couple of long distance shots.

That was all there was to it.

We got the rurales, and the man who was dead was properly checked off. He was a guy we had seen a couple of times with Pedro Gallivan. But he didn’t have anything that showed he’d ever belonged to Pedro, except a bullet hole in the back of his head. My bullet had gone through his shoulder and down into his innards. It’d probably have been fatal. But he might have talked a little bit if it hadn’t been for that bullet hole in the back of his head.

That was one of Pedro’s little tricks. Dead men didn’t talk, any.

The fellow I’d wounded in the leg had evidently made his bronc all right. There was only one horse left behind. It had been stolen from north of the border the night before.

Pedro was a clever cuss when it came to covering his tracks, and if somebody had to take a tumble, he always left a fall guy.

After that Phil and I got a new job. The mine owners hadn’t paid much attention to Pedro as long as he only went after money paid for booze and Chinks. But when he started going after bars of gold, he was getting too close to home for the big lads to take any comfort, so they told Phil and me to take a couple of months, ride trail on Pedro, and wipe him out when we got a good excuse.

But Pedro knew when he’d bit off more than he could chew. He kept pretty close to first base, and Phil and I just sort of stuck around where we could keep tabs on what was going on at his hacienda.

I think Pedro had us spotted. It wasn’t that he said anything; but the Mex who tried to knife Phil one night, and the gent of undetermined nationality who took a shot at me from ambush one full moon, made it look as though somebody knew what we were there for.

But Pedro was respectably at home in the hacienda both times.

We rode up there to make sure. He welcomed us with oily eyes and suave comments. We answered him with polite remarks that didn’t fool anybody. And that was the way things stood.

Then Walter Hedley showed up.

Hedley was just a bit of human wreckage, nothing more. He was the sort of backwater flotsam that collects at the border. They’re always more or less the same. Drink is the big thing in their lives.

Hedley must have had some pretty good stock in him. He was a gentleman after he got drunk, and that’s about the best indication of breeding you can get — along the border, anyway.

Pedro looked Hedley over and invited him up to the hacienda.

Phil and I knew what that meant. Pedro was in need of some more fall guys. He liked the fellows who had breeding and education. He shifted ’em from booze to dope, got them so they could put up a good front when they were hopped up, and sent ’em out on border business that wouldn’t bear too much of a searchlight.

We didn’t want fall guys. We wanted Pedro. So we discussed how maybe we could get this guy Hedley to talkin’ with us before Pedro got him branded.

But it was the Desert Queen who dealt herself in on the hand. I don’t know how she found out what it was all about, but she called herself in on the play, and from then on things moved fast.

Through Phil, I’d found out more about this girl they called the Desert Queen, the one whose real name was Dixie Carson. She made a specialty of getting the human wreckage of the border, patching it up so it could sail once more, and starting it off on another voyage.

Mostly she dealt in the sort of women who are thrown into the border and left there. She had a secluded ranch way south and she built up the people she took in down there, gave ’em lots of fresh air, staked ’em with money, and gave ’em self-respect.

That was why she raided the roulette every once in a while. She was a genius on mathematics, had a college degree in it, and she’d figured out things about a roulette wheel. Phil said she called it the Calculus of Chance, or something like that.

Anyhow, the Queen got track of Walter Hedley, and he fell for her like a ton of brick. The Queen wanted Hedley to straighten him up. Pedro wanted Hedley to drag him down. It was a battle.

Pedro got Hedley to visit him at his hacienda. Dixie got Hedley one night, invited him to her place, and drove off with him the next morning. A week later Phil came to me.

“I’m quittin’,” he said.

“Quittin’ the job, Phil?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter, son?”

“Goin’ to work for the Queen.”

I looked him over. He didn’t ring true somehow.

“What’s the big idea, she won a lot of gold she wants guarded?”

“Nope. She wants me to take Walt Hedley out into the desert an’ make a man of him. Pedro got him started using dope while he was at the hacienda. She can cure him of booze, but he keeps getting out and smuggling in dope. She says he wants to kill himself when he realizes what he’s done, but when the craving gets on him he can’t resist.”

I didn’t say anything. I ain’t never craved dope myself, and a man who hasn’t had any particular craving ain’t in any position to pass judgment on a guy that has it.

“When do you start?”

“To-night.”

“The mine people sending in anybody to work with me?”

“No. They figure Pedro’s lying low as long as somebody’s watchin’ him, and they figure one man can watch him just as well and twice as cheap as two men.”

I grunted. Mine people get that way. Some smart bookkeeper out in New York was auditing the books and telling the superintendent in Mexico how to handle a slick bandit like Pedro Gallivan. But I let it go. It was bread and butter for me, and that’s one thing I won’t fight with.

“Where you goin’?” I asked.

“Out to the Phillips prospect. If you get out that way, drop in.”

“You don’t seem cheerful, son.”

He looked down his nose.

“She loves him,” he said.

There wasn’t anything I could say, so I put one of my hands on his shoulder.

“Things have a way of workin’ out all right, Phil, old-timer. Stay with it.”

He grunted and walked away.

I saw them start that night. The dude was sittin’ erect and straight, his jaw fairly oozin’ resolution an’ determination. That’s the way with people who know they ain’t goin’ to last. They put on twice as much determination as the situation calls for, just to fool themselves.

Phil sat slumped in the saddle takin’ it easy, the way a man does when he’s in for a long fight and knows he’s goin’ to come through somewheres near the top or know why.

Out where they were goin’ it was too hot to ride in the daytime. They had to make it at night. They had a packhorse, and there was a trickle of water at the place. It was an old abandoned prospect, baked by the sun, swept by the drifting sands. There was just sky, sun, cactus, and sand, nothing else, and it didn’t vary from day to day.

I figured I’d ride out that way after a week or so. I didn’t like the idea of those two men being cooped up in that loneliness, both of ’em in love with the same girl, one of ’em the successful one, and havin’ a streak of yellow, the other all man, and tryin’ to make a man outa the yellow one.

The desert does things to men. It’s the utter silence, the emptiness, the loneliness of the place. A man either hates it or loves it the first time he gets into it. But even if he loves it, he can’t stand too much of it.

Things began to happen out at the hacienda, however, that kept me busy. Pedro had riders comin’ in at nights, and there were times when the house was all dark as though people had gone to bed, but there’d be the tinkle of glasses and the hum of voices far into the night.

I cached a roll of blankets within hearing distance of the corral and got to sleeping out there under the stars.

Twice riders saddled up and left the place, and I couldn’t follow them on account of the darkness. The third time there was a moon, and the fellow who rode away into the desert was a wiry little Mexican. I knew him. He’d been a gambler in Mexicali until Pedro enlisted him. He was a resourceful little cuss.

I followed for a couple of hours before I realized he was takin’ a trail toward the Phillips prospect. Then I closed up the gap.

I was close to him when it happened.

A shadow rose up out of the ground.

“Is it you, amigo?” asked the rider.

“It is not the one you expect, but the one who expects you,” said the voice of Phil Ryan, speaking in Spanish. “You will leave what you bring here with me, and you will tell the one who sent you that there will be nothing more sent.”

The rider sat very still and straight for a few seconds.

I got the picture then. Pedro had been sending in dope to Walter Hedley, and Phil was breaking up his little game.

“Señor,” said the rider, speaking too softly, too smoothly, “you ask for that which I have. Take it then!”

He was fast, that bird.

I ain’t so speedy as I used to be in the old days, and my hand was still coming up from the holster, tugging at the hammer on my gun, when I saw the moonlight glisten on his leveled weapon.

But Phil Ryan’s gun crashed and I saw the Mexican’s right wrist wilt.

“Go back, and tell your master I want no more fall guys. Tell him to come in person the next time he has business with me,” said Phil’s voice.

Phil was fast on the draw, awfully fast.

I got back out of the way and let the rider pass. Then I rode in for a chat with Phil.

“She loves him,” said Phil. “She’s been out here twice. I can see how it is. She wants him to get well.”

“And him?”

Phil shrugged his shoulders.

“Is he a yellow one at heart, underneath all that smooth bearing?” I asked.

“I can’t tell,” said Phil.

Which was a lie. When a man’s spent that long in the desert with another chap, he can tell everything about him. But if Phil wanted to be generous about it, I wasn’t going to interfere. I have a hunch that things come out right in the desert if you just give ’em time enough.

I rode away and left Phil with his dude.

I saw Dixie Carson after that, and I took the risk of talking to her.

“If you want him, you’re going about it the wrong way. He’s from a good family. If he gets cured there’ll be some society bud coming to claim him,” I said.

It was none of my business, but I had to say it to hear with my own ears whether she really loved him. And I’d got to know her better since I’d been ridin’ with Phil.

The olive skin didn’t change color. The eyes still remained smoky, impassive.

“That,” she said slowly, “is my own business.”

I let it go at that because she was right.

Pedro was still lying low. Such riders as went from his place were going on border hijacking business. They never once went toward the trails that came in from the mines.

I rather guessed Pedro’s one experience with mine guards had sort of convinced him he’d better leave the outfits alone. But I just kept right on the job.

Then Phil showed up with the news his dude was cured.

He was, too. I saw Hedley when he rode in. The shoulders were back and the eyes were steady. He’d lost that look of too much determination that had gripped him when he went into the desert.

He had a long talk with Dixie Carson; and after that, he sent a telegram.

Then Phil told me a funny thing. It seemed there was a girl who came from a good family and who was engaged to this here dude. Now that Hedley had got full control of himself, he’d wired her, telling her the whole situation, offering to release her or to go through with it any way she wanted.

It was a couple of days before he got an answer.

He was around the border resorts, looking at the people swigging booze over the bar, looking at the gambling, sneering, and keeping straight.

Personally I didn’t like that sneer.

If he’d been a real thoroughbred and had been cured, he wouldn’t have been so sneery at the poor unfortunates who were hitting it up. That self-righteousness in a man who has been down in the gutter don’t impress me. But I didn’t say anything. I’d said too much already.

The second day the girl came, in person. She wanted to see Hedley before she answered one way or another.

To my eye she was a washout. She was one of those society blondes with a funny way of pronouncing her “a’s.”

Walter Hedley made quite a fuss over her. She held the reins and she showed it. With the Desert Queen she rubbed it in. Walter made the presentation with something of a flourish. A man always does take delight in presenting two women who love him, one to the other. He thinks they’d oughta get along well together! Seems like men would never learn.

“Miss Westing, may I present Miss Dixie Carson, the girl who helped me find myself.”

The Desert Queen held out her hand cordially enough.

The blonde looked her over from head to foot.

“I thought, Walter, you’d abandoned all your old associates,” she said. Then she walked away.

The Desert Queen’s face got a darkish color, but her eyes remained steady.

“Good-by, Walter,” she said, and turned.

The dude hesitated for ten or fifteen seconds, then went over to the blonde. I was glad Phil wasn’t there to see that.

After that things moved fast at the border. First came the stock crash. You wouldn’t think it’d affect the border, but it did, lots of ways. Mines shut down, for one thing. And the blonde did some telegraphing, for another. What her dad wired back evidently wasn’t so reassuring. She slit the telegram open, read it, then stamped her foot.

“I do wish fawther wouldn’t be so downright stupid,” she said.

Half a dozen people heard her, and the news traveled.

That night she bucked the roulette wheel and won about three hundred. The next day she met Pedro Gallivan. The next evening she and Walter were “visiting” at the Gallivan hacienda.

By that time I’d developed a fat Mexican cook to give me the lowdown on Pedro. She was working daytimes at the hacienda. She spent the nights with her family. It took lots of dinero to bribe her to cough up such information as she picked up, but she had a good memory.

She told me about the blonde and Walter.

The Westing girl, it seemed, was playing Pedro and Walter, one against the other. Walter didn’t want to stay out there, and he was sore. The girl had a talk with him about lots of things, and they stayed.

I pumped the Mex to find out if Pedro was riding.

She didn’t know. She only knew that Pedro was looking at the gringo girl with melting eyes and making protestations of affection.

I asked her where Walter had been.

She said Walter had been sent on an errand.

I thought over that being sent on an errand business. It didn’t sound so good. I looked around for Phil. He wasn’t in town. I lost ten dollars making fool bets on roulette and went to bed.

About two o’clock I heard shots and tumbled to the floor, reaching for my boots with one hand and my cartridge belt with the other.

There was the clatter of horses coming at a breakneck pace, and there was the tattoo of pistol shots, the rattle of rifle fire, and something dropped to the ground with a thud that jarred the pictures on my wall.

The rurales were there about the time I was.

The dead man was Walter Hedley.

The rurales told of a boldly planned holdup to clean out the cash that was held over in the casino. It was one of those wildly foolish affairs that seemed to be foredoomed to failure, but it had almost worked. A chance alarm had brought the rurales. Maybe that alarm hadn’t been so much of a chance after all.

Walter Hedley was pretty well riddled with lead. There was a look of puzzled bewilderment on his face. The rurales must have been shooting exceptionally well that night. Or maybe they’d had a little help.

The posse swept on after the rest of the gang. They came back inside of half an hour. The Mexes had one dead bandit, and a fall guy is all they look for. The robbery hadn’t been a success, the “ringleader” was dead, what more could one ask for?

They consumed much tequila, and assumed a great deal of credit for straight shooting.

Pedro had a perfect alibi. I investigated it.

The little Mex gambler that had been taking the dope into the Phillips prospect, the one Phil Ryan had shot in the wrist, didn’t have any alibi. But you can’t hang anything on a man just because he hasn’t an alibi.

The blond girl wept vigorously over her “fallen hero.” The Desert Queen took the news in silence. After that she sat for a long while, looking at the horizon with unmoist eyes.

Two nights later my spy tipped me off that Pedro was riding, and she had heard some mention of bars of gold.

Another shipment was due from the Dry Canteen Mine, and I got in touch with Phil and asked him if he wanted to ride, just for old times’ sake.

I didn’t like the expression on his face when he said he did.

“Don’t try to ride into no bullets, son, and get killed on the field of duty,” I ventured to suggest.

He snorted. “Nobody’d care if I did.”

“That’s a coward’s game,” I said shortly.

“I ain’t a coward.”

“Don’t think coward thoughts, then, and you won’t get to be one.”

I had to let it go at that.

We lay in wait where we could see the corral back of Pedro’s hacienda. We moved in after dark, and there was a wind blowing, a wind that whipped the fine silt in little whirlwinds, sent them dancing off over the face of the desert.

About midnight we saw shadowy figures about the corral. Horses got saddled. Then we could hear riders.

“No fall guys this time,” muttered Phil.

I grunted assent. We were between the riders and the hacienda, and we intended to keep between them.

It was tough work, trailing the party ahead, yet keeping out of sight and hearing. There was a moon, and the little band rode fast.

They took a short-cut trail. I hadn’t known of it before. Once I thought we had lost sight of them. The wind was bad up along the ridges, and there was a cloud scud forming over the moon.

But we caught up to them in a box cañon below, almost ran onto them before we knew it. They’d evidently stopped for a palaver. We trailed them easy from there until they staked out their broncs in a clump of trees just below a spring.

The men climbed up a ridge and settled themselves. It was getting gray dawn now, and Phil and I had to work pretty carefully to keep from being discovered.

There were six horses in the party. Two of ’em were packhorses with empty alforjas — empty saddle bags. The other four were prime saddle stock.

Below the ridge ran the automobile road.

“S’pose they’re going to tackle the armed cars?”

Phil shrugged his shoulders.

We waited. It was all there was to do.

An automobile showed up. Behind it came another. The tops were down, men sat in the cars, and the men had rifles. The top of the ridge spouted fire.

One of the cars swerved drunkenly.

The driver of the other car ran it to a stop, turned, and spoke to the men with him.

The crackle of rifles still sounded on the ridge.

We could see it all, then. Pedro had bought over some of the guards. They were throwing in with him. I glanced at Phil.

He nodded.

I took a fine sight at a huddled figure and cut loose. Phil’s gun roared in my ear. That cross fire smoked ’em out. They tried to get us, but we were well covered, and we had lots of time. They were fighting against time.

The guards below came to life and began to do some shooting. Pedro’s gang started for their broncs. So we made for ours.

I could hear the sweep of hoofs ahead of me and the sound of shooting. Phil was riding stirrup to stirrup with me and we were holding our fire until we could see something to shoot at.

The sun was just making thin purple lines of reddish color along the tops of the ridges. The wind was blowing and it was cold. We were between the riders and the hacienda.

“You double back and keep ’em from getting to the hacienda. I can haze ’em along the trail,” yelled Phil.

I didn’t like the idea, but he pointed out, “It’s our best chance. We can’t catch ’em, and they’ll double around on a secret trail somewhere. They know the mountains.”

Phil sounded right, so I swung back.

They did just what he’d predicted, took a cut-off trail, and swung back into the hacienda trail. I was there waiting for ’em. Phil was behind ’em.

They dropped behind boulders and got real deadly.

They were fighting for their lives and knew it, this time. And the time element didn’t bother ’em so much now. They were four against two.

We had ’em pocketed, and they had us boxed. It was a question of making every shot count and waiting for developments. I built a little fire behind a rock and sent up a smoke signal. The fight got warmer after that.

But the bandits couldn’t get out. The wind did things to my smoke signal, but I figured there’d be keen eyes searching the trails.

The rurales rode up in an hour.

They called on the little group to surrender. The bandits just laughed and started to sell their lives as dearly as possible. The Mexican government ain’t gentle with bandits. When they get trapped, they might as well see it through.

These did.

I surveyed the wreckage afterward. The little gambler was there, and a couple of others, but there wasn’t any sign of Pedro.

I looked at Phil and he looked at me.

“Suppose he could have laid low on that ridge and started the others with the horses?” I asked.

Phil thought things over, then he nodded.

We rode back, and the trail told us what we wanted to know. One of the horsemen hadn’t started with the others. He’d kept up on the ridge, probably playing dead. Then, after the galloping horses had decoyed us into pursuit he’d come to life, gone down, got his own bronc, and rode away by himself.

But he hadn’t ridden toward the hacienda.

Pedro must have known the game was up at last. He was headed into the hills, straight for the border desert country. A man could live a long time in that country.

Phil and I looked at the ridges. The trail followed the cañon. There was no use following it, while there was one chance in ten on the ridges.

“You take the left, me the right,” I said.

Phil nodded, filled up his cartridge belt from his saddle bags and took the ridge. I took the other.

I didn’t see anything. Once I thought I heard shooting.

When it got dark I gave it up and made a camp. The next day I backtracked into the hacienda. The rurales were in charge.

“Got clean away,” I reported.

Phil was there. He didn’t say anything.

I noticed a bullet had splintered the horn of his saddle and there were two shells missing from his belt.

“Any action, Phil?”

He shook his head.

“No. And I’m glad, too.”

“Why glad?”

“Oh, under the circumstances, I wouldn’t want to go through a lot of red tape. I wasn’t a regular officer, you know, just a special guard, and I was off duty.”

His words sounded sort of casual. I took a good look at the splintered saddle horn again. Then I climbed a peak and got out my binoculars.

Far off toward the east I could see a little bunch of circling dots, swinging, twisting, spiraling, settling. It was along the ridge Phil had taken, and they were turkey buzzards.

I put up my glasses, rode back to the hacienda, took another look at Phil’s saddle, scratched my head. He saw me, and came out.

“Close call,” I said.

He nodded.

“Guess the New York office will want a report on what’s happened,” I said. “Would you like to write it?”

He shook his head.

“Saw some buzzards over the east ridge,” I hinted.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah”

“Ever see the president of this company?” asked Phil.

“No. Why?”

“He’s a pot-bellied cuss that’s awful cold-blooded. Know what’d happen if you’d bumped off Pedro and reported it?”

“Reward?” I asked.

“Naw. He’d fire you to cut down the overhead. He’d figure that with the bandit dead there was no need of a guard.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“I’m quittin’ the guardin’ business. Dixie and I are gettin’ married.”

I got to thinking about those buzzards some more. Then I got to thinking about what Phil had said. He’d met the president, and he knew. After all, there was that time they’d deliberately cut the force in two and left me without any reinforcements. I decided I wouldn’t ride over toward the east ridge.

That’s why I’m still chaperonin’ the gold shipments for the Dry Canteen Mine. It’s been a year since the Big Scrap, but they’re afraid Pedro may show up again, and they keep me on the payroll.

There’s strange things happen down here in the border country.

The girl? You mean the blonde? Her father went through bankruptcy, lost everything in the crash.

Where is she now?

Oh. See the third one from the end there, the house girl that’s solicitin’ dances for a cut on the drinks, the washy-eyed blonde? That’s her. She and Pedro decoyed Walter Hedley into the holdup, then tipped off the rurales. That got rid of Walter. Pedro was to marry the girl — or said he was.

She was Pedro’s last fall guy. That’s why I started to tell you about this border country. It’s a queer place.