The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 22

"Is that a rain cloud comin' up?"

Wayland glanced back. The heavy dust rose a red-black curtain above the flame-crested ridges of orange sand.

"You're a churchman, sir! You should know! Ever read in Scripture of the cloud by day and the pillar by night? Ever think what that might mean on the scorching Red Sea job when Moses led a personally conducted tour through the desert?"

"Dust?" queried the preacher.

"By Harry," cried Wayland, "that mule _does_ smell water."

The little beast had set off for the red rock at a canter. Wayland's horse followed at a long gallop. The broncho of the old clergyman with the heavier man lurched to a tired lope. They felt the eddies of dust as they tore ahead, saw the rainless clouds gathering low and gray far behind, saw the sun lurid through the whirls of red silt, saw the dust toss up among the lava beds like snow in a blizzard, then the sand storm broke, the dry storm of rainless clouds and choking dust flaying the air in rainless lightning. They gave the ponies blind rein and shot round the sheltered side of the great red rock into one of those hidden river beds that trench below the surface of the desert in cutways and canyons. It was dry.

"The shadow of a great rock in a weary land," quoted the old man sliding from his horse exhausted.

Foot prints of men and horses punctured the moist silt of the river bottom. The little mule was kicking and squealing where the red rock came through the clay bank. Down the terra cotta ledge trickled a tiny rill not so large as a pencil. Wayland was chopping a deep mud hole in the river-bottom up which slowly oozed a yellow pool.

"Don't drink that, sir," he ordered.

The old frontiersman was stooping to lave up a handful of the muddy fluid.

"Don't drink that if you want to get out alive! Wait, I have something in the pack!"

He threw the cinch ropes free from the mule, pulled out the sacks of flour and bacon and coffee. "Here we are." He drew out the only can of beans and punctured the end with his knife.

"If you will satisfy your thirst with that juice, I'll catch the trickle down the rock while we rest; but you must never drink this alkali sink stuff."

Leaving the horses nuzzling the muddy pool, the Ranger stuck his jack knife into a crevice of the ledge and hung the small kettle where it would catch the drip. Matthews was examining the tracks.

"Not more than an hour or two old, an' A'm thinking, Wayland, we've fooled them out of water!"

"They'll keep to the shelter of the cutway long as this dust storm lasts."

Wayland was following down the tracks.

The sun had sunk behind the silver strip of mountain reddening the heat lakes and the Desert air. Across the mesas, the silt dust and sand drift still whirled in fitful gusts; but the air no longer carried the scorch of burning oil. The sky that had blazed all day in fiery bra.s.s darkened and closed near to earth, a throbbing thing of the Desert night brooding over life: a oneness of s.p.a.ce rimmed round by the red sky line.

"Hullo," exclaimed Wayland, pointing to the bank. "We are not so far behind: there is the freshly opened cache."

Where the cutway caved to a hollow lay a hole littered with empty cans and canvas bags.

"Not much value left, eh? Hold on, Wayland, this might be useful."

Matthews had picked up a skin water bag. It was full of tepid water.

"They're harder pressed than I thought. They've had water stored here.

They'll rest somewhere in the cutway to-night. We'll likely run them down before morning if our horses can stand it."

Back at the rock, the Ranger was cooking their supper over a fire of withered moss and pinon chips, keeping the old man's mind off his fevered thirst by calling attention to the tricks of Desert growth to save water.

"You see the cactus turns its leaves into water vats with spikes to keep intruders off; and the greasewood stops evaporation by a varnish of gum. I'm sun-veneered all right. I don't sweat all my moisture out--"

"Better varnish me, then, before ye take me out again."

Less than a pint of water had seeped into the little kettle; and this they used for their tea, mixing the flour with the stale water from the mud pool. Then, they lighted pipes and lay back to rest.

Wayland had placed the kettle back under the drip of the ledge.

"A can understand Moses smitin' the rocks for a spring; and such a wind as we had to-day blowin' the Red Sea dry," observed the old man dreamily.

"I guess if you get any miracle down to close quarters, you'll sort it out all right without busting common sense," returned Wayland.

He wasn't thinking of the day's hards.h.i.+ps.

The silver strip of the far mountains had faded; first, the purple base; then, the melting opal summit. At last, the restless wind had sunk. The red rocks of the mesa darkened to spectral shapes. The heat, the scorch, the torrid pain of the day had calmed to the soft velvet caress of the indigo Desert night. Twice, the Ranger dozed off to wake with a start, with a sense of her hand warning danger. Always before, the thought of her had come in an involuntary consciousness whelmed of happiness; but to-night, was it . . . fear?

He rose and looked about. Two of the horses lay at rest. The mule stood munching near. The old frontiersman slept heavily, his face troubled and upturned to the sky. Wayland noticed the livid tinge of the lips, the shadows round the eye sockets, the protuberance of veins on the backs of the old man's hands. The sky seemed to come down lower as the red twilight darkened; and he could hear not a sound but the crunch of the grazing mule and the slow drop, drop, drop of the water seeping from the terra cotta ledge. The stars were beginning to p.r.i.c.k through the indigo darkness. In another hour, it would be bright enough to travel by starlight; and the Ranger lay back to rest, slipping into a dusky realm as of half consciousness and sleep; but for the nervous ticking of his watch, and the slow drop, drop, drop; then sleep with a dream face wavering through the dark; then the watch tick scurrying on again; then a hand touched him! Wayland sprang to his feet half asleep. He could have sworn she was, standing there; but the form faded. The pack mule had flounced up with a cough. A white horse stood between the banks of the arroyo. There was a steel flash in the dark, the rip of a quick shot, and the kettle bounced from the ledge with a jangling spill.

"What's that?" yelled the old frontiersman, jumping for the horses.

Wayland was pumping his repeater into the darkness; but the clatter of hoof beats down the dry gravel bed answered the question.

"It's the signal for us to get up," answered the Ranger. "I don't mind the blackguard's bad aim so much as I do the upset of that kettle.

Every drop of water is spilled."

"A'm thinkin' 'twas the kettle they aimed at, and not us, my boy!"

CHAPTER XVI

BITTER WATERS

But for all that the outlaws seemed hard pressed, they succeeded in keeping ahead. The velvet dark of the night in the arroyo had given place to a sickly saffron dawn. Where the cut-way widened and lost itself in an alkali sink, the hoof prints of the fugitives' horses led out again to the open country of gray torrid earth dotted by sage brush and greasewood. The yellow sky met the ochre panting earth in a tremulous heat mist of wavering purple; and against that sky line, a swirl of dust marked the receding figures of the riders.

"There they go, Wayland! It's a case of who lasts out now! If we can only keep pus.h.i.+ng them ahead, this heat wull do the rest."

The old man shaded his eyes as he gazed across the desert dawn.

"Queer way y'r mountains here keep s.h.i.+ftin' an' m.u.f.flin' an' meltin'

their lines! They're here one minute about a mile away, then as you look, they've a trick of movin' back! That dust against the sky line is about ten miles off as A make it in this high rare air; an' they're goin' mighty slow! We've played 'em out."

"Yes; but they have played us out! Let us get off and have breakfast.

If that small wren coming out of the cactus could speak, it might tell us where to find water."

They had camped one noon hour at a Desert pool beneath a cottonwood, where the putrid carca.s.s of a dead ox polluted air and water. The Ranger whittled the cottonwood branches for a small chip fire, and he boiled enough water to fill the skin bag for the next day's travel; but a high wind was blowing, restless, nagging, gusty, pelting ash dust in their eyes, and not to lose the trail, they had pressed on through the sweltering heat of mid-day. Wayland's muscles had begun to feel hardened to the dryness of knotted whip cords. His skin had bronzed swarthy as an Indian's. He was beginning to rejoice in the vast s.p.a.cious relentless Desert with its fierce struggle of life against death; the cactus, the greasewood, the brittle sage brush, all matching themselves against the heat-death. Was there a thing, beast or bush, not armed with the fangs of protection and onslaught? Wayland looked at his leather coat. It had been jagged to tatters by thorn and spine.

Silent, too; the struggle was silent and insidious and crafty as death.

Who could guess where the water-pools lay beneath the dry gravel beds; or why the cactus fortified its storage of moisture in bristling spear points; the greasewood and pinon with thorns and resin; the sage brush with a dull gray varnish that imprisoned evaporation? The very crust above the earth of ash and silt conspired to hide the trail of wolf and cougar; and wolf and cougar, wren and condor, masked in colors that hid their presence. Twice Wayland had almost stumbled on a wolf sitting motionless, gray as the ash, watching the hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.s; pa.s.s where?