The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 23

Was it down the Long Trail where the tracks all point one way? Yet the fierceness, the craft, the relentless cruelty of the silent struggle matched his own mood. He felt the stimulus of the high dry sun-fused tireless air. He began to understand why the Desert prophets of the East, who camped on sand plains rimmed round and round by an unbroken sky line, had been the first of the human race to grasp the idea of the Oneness of G.o.d. And was it not the Desert prophets, who had preached a G.o.d relentless as he was merciful; and the retribution that was fire?

Well, Wayland ruminated, who should say that they were wrong? If the G.o.d who created the Desert, was the G.o.d of life; but there, his thought had been broken by coming on the withered carca.s.s beside the yellow pool.

"They can't keep going on in this heat! We'll run 'em down if we can only keep going," Wayland had said; as they set out again in the blistering wind; but to his dying day, he will never forget the traverse of the Desert in that mid-day sun. To his dying day he will never see the spectrum colors of white light split by a prism, or the spectrum colors of a child's soap bubble, without living over the tortures of that afternoon, for the air, whipped to dust by the hurricane wind, acted as a prism splitting the white flame of light to lurid reds and oranges and yellows and violets.

Now, on this second morning before the stars had faded to the orange sunrise coming up through the lavender air in a half fan, the heat had thrown riders and horses in a sweltering sweat; and the nagging wind had begun driving ash dust in eyes and skin like pepper on a raw sore.

Matthews' ruddy face had turned livid; his blood-shot eyes were dark ringed. The horses travelled with heads hung low. Spite of the sun, it was a cloudy sky, but whether rain clouds or dust clouds, they could not tell. Towards noon, they could see against the purple mountains the red tinged clouds fraying out to a fringe that swept the sky.

"A thought it never rained in the Desert in summer, Wayland?"

"It doesn't."

"What's that ahead?"

"Rain; but if you look again, you'll see it doesn't reach the sky line!

It's sucked up and evaporated before it hits the dust. . . ."

Towards the middle of the afternoon, the horses were resting in the shade of a reddish b.u.t.te. Both men had dismounted. Wayland did not notice what was happening till he glanced where the blue shadow of the rock met the wavering glare of the sand. The old man had stooped to one knee and had twice laved his hand down to the wavering margin of blue light and bluer shadows.

"Fooled you again, did it?' asked the Ranger, throwing the saddle from his own pony, strapping the cased rifle to his shoulder and carrying the hatchet in the crook of his elbow.

"Better let me give you a drink from the water bag; it's hot and stale; but it will keep you from seeing water at your feet till we find another spring."

The old man drank from the neck of the water bag and wiped his mouth with his hand.

"Queer effect y'r heat has on a North man, Wayland! D' y' know what A'd be doing if A let myself?"

"Drinking those blue shadows again?"

"No, sir, A'd be babbling and babbling about the sea! A fall asleep as we ride; an' when A wake from a doze, 'tisn't the sea of sand, 'tis the sea o' water that's about me! The yellow sea o' York Fort up Hudson Bay way where A took the boats from Saskatchewan."

Wayland helped him to mount.

"Aren't y' goin' to ride y'rself?"

"No," answered Wayland. "I'm going to keep one horse fresh. Best this one to-day: then we'll change off and rest yours to-morrow. Those fellows can't go any faster than we do. This heat will beat them out if we can't. I'll make those blackguards glad to drink horse-blood."

Then, they moved forward again, Wayland leading on foot, the little pack mule to the rear, both horses stumbling clumsily, raising clouds of dust; breathing hard, with heaving flanks.

That night, they halted in broken country . . . more red b.u.t.tes; hummocks of red; silt crust trenched by the crumbly cutways of spring freshets; sand hills billowing to a brick red sky, where the sun hung a dull blaze. There were tracks of the fleeing drovers having paused for a rest in the same place. It was a pebble bottom hot and dry. Wayland scooped under with his Service axe and an ooze of clay water seeped slowly up forming a brackish pool. He had to hold the little mule back from fighting the horses for that water. When the animals had drunk, he filled the water bag with the settlings. Towards three in the morning, the soft velvet pansy blue Desert dark broke to a sulphur mist. Wayland saddled horses and mule and wakened the old frontiersman.

"Eh, where's this?" He came to himself heavily. "Wayland, is this h.e.l.l-broth of a sulphur stew doin' me? Has y'r Desert got me, Wayland?"

"No, sir, when the Desert gets you, it gets you raving mad with fever.

Chains won't hold you! This soggy sleep is all right. Long as you sleep, you'll keep your head!"

All the same, the Ranger noticed that the old man ate scarcely any breakfast. For those people who think that the Ranger's life consists of an easy all day jog-trot, it would be well to set down exactly of what that breakfast consisted. It consisted of slap jacks made with water sediment. Both men were afraid to draw on the water from the skin bag for tea.

They pa.s.sed dead pools that day, places where Desert travellers had stuck up posts to mark a spring; but where the Service axe failed to find water below the saline crust. Then, Wayland knew why the sulphur dust drift moved so slowly against the horizon. The outlaws _had not_ found water. Horses and men were f.a.gging. A velveteen coat had been thrown aside to lighten weight; from the dust markings one horse seemed to have fallen; and the load had been lightened still more by casting off half sacks of flour and some canvas tenting; but the tracks of the lame horse picking the soft places along the trail showed drops of blood. Had it cut itself on the gla.s.sy lava rocks; or was it the hoof?

A little farther ahead, the same horse had fallen again to its knees, rolling over headlong; and the other tracks doubled back confusedly where the riders had come to help.

The Ranger smiled, though the yellow heat danced in blood clots before his blistered vision. He had had to put the old frontiersman back on his horse three times. The stirrup was wrong; or the saddle was slipping; or . . . what alarmed Wayland was each time he had stopped, the old man was stooping as if to follow the wavering outline of invisible water. Then, when the Ranger tried to count how many days they had been out, he found he couldn't. He had lost track: the days had slipped into nights and the nights into days; and he suddenly realized that his head pounded like a steel derrick; that the crackling of the dry sage brush leaves snapped something strung and irritable in his own nerves. There was no longer a drowsy hum in his ears. It was a wild rushing.

Once, the horses shuffled to a dead stop. Wayland looked up from the dancing sand at his feet. He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

"I keep thinking I see a white horse lagging behind that dust drift.

What puzzles me is whether they are trying to _get out_ of the Desert or _lose_ us in it. While we are seeing them, you can bet they are seeing us! There hasn't been a yard for a mile back, where the hoof tracks weren't b.l.o.o.d.y. They'll lose a horse if they keep on to-day: then, they'll be without a packer; but if they are plumb up against it, why don't they face round and fight? They are three to our two? They could hide behind any of these sand rolls and pot us crossing the sinks; but if they are not at the end of their tether, why don't they hustle and get out of sight? If they aren't played out, they could outride us in half a day."

The old man was shading his eyes and gazing across the sun glare.

Wayland noticed that he was steadying himself in the saddle by the pummel.

"Is my eye playing me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something stuck on yon bush along the way? First glance, it looks like the leaf of a note book. Keep looking, it might be a tent a couple of miles away. That used to happen when we were buildin' bridges in the Rockies. Surveyors crossing upper snows would stick up a message in neck of a ginger ale bottle: then, when we'd come along with the line men after trampin' the snow for hours, we'd mistake the thing for a man with a white hat till we almost tumbled over the bottle. Is it the Desert playin' me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something? Look, . . . where that bit of brush grows against the lava rock there."

Wayland's glance ran along the trail; and for an instant, the writhing sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so that he had the sensation of staggering. It was a dirty leaf from a note book fouled by the Desert winds and lodged in the sage brush.

Then, he looked twice. It was not lodged. It was stuck down in the branches secure against the wind. The ranger pulled the thing off.

The under side showed tobacco stains. On the upper were scrawled in heavy pencil; _By. 20 ml du est if yu don't cath upp hit itt est flagg midnite frate carrie yu mine sitty_.

"Railway twenty miles due East," translated Wayland. "That is probably true. I think there is a branch line runs a hundred miles in to Mine City. If you don't catch up, hit it East, flag the midnight freight, she'll carry you to Mine City. Well? What do you make of it? Did they leave it; or did some body else? If it had been there long, the wind would have torn it to tatters."

"Let me see it." The old man turned it over in his hand. "Evidently left to direct the man back in the Pa.s.s; they don't believe he's dead."

The Ranger took it back and read it over. "If they're lagging back for the missing man, why didn't they leave a message sooner? Trail doesn't fork here. Why did they leave word here?"

"There really is a railway somewhere here, Wayland?"

"There must be if one knew where to find it."

Matthews smiled. "Then, A take it this is a gentle hint to go off and lose ourselves trying to find it."

Wayland's eyes rested on the slow-moving dust cloud against the horizon.

"Then it is a case of who lasts out!" He looked at his white haired companion. "But there's no call for you to risk _your_ life on the last lap of the race. It's not your job. It means another day; perhaps, two. If you'd take my horse, it's fresher, and the water bag, you could ride out to the railroad to-night. Those fellows are not good for many miles more unless they hit a spring. Let me go on alone, sir."

"Alone?" The old man's face flushed furious, livid. . . . "Git epp!"

Up a sand bluff, heaving to the heat waves; down a slither of ash dust; then, across the petrified black lava roll; down to a saline sink, white and blistering to the sight; over a silt bank crumbly as flour; and on and yet on; across the dusty sage-smelling parched plain . . .

they moved; always following the tracks; tracks confused and doubling back as if the hind horse lagged; with blood drip and shuffling dragging hoofs; always keeping the dust whirl of the fore horizon in view; on and on, but speaking scarcely at all!

The Ranger again had that curious sensation of the earth slipping away from his foot steps. He had thrown away his leather coat early in the morning. Now be found himself tearing off the loose red tie round the flannel collar of the Service suit; and he pulled himself sharply together recognizing the fevered instinct to strip off all hampering clothing. It was as much a heat-death symptom as sleep forbodes frost death. He did not walk in a daze as the old man rode, half numbness, half drowse. He walked with a throb--throb--throb in his temples like the fall of water. He wanted to run; to strip himself as an athlete for a race; and all the time, he kept walking as if the heaving earth went writhing away from each step.

"Don't y' think ye better open that pack, an' get a drink for y'rself, my boy?"

Wayland was pausing in the shadow of a sand b.u.t.te, and the old man had ridden up.

"Want it for yourself?"

"Not a drop."