# The Girl Of Ghost Mountain/Chapter 9

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CHAPTER IX
THE SUN MESSAGE
Quong was always the first man up on the Circle S. Sheridan was ever a close second. He felt that he should be at least one jump ahead of the men who worked for and with him. The first level ray of the sun over the saw tooths was signal for Quong's clarion on the gong, the welcome call to breakfast, or, as the cowboys termed it, to "chuck," though it was beginning to be agreed that this word was unsuitable to the quality of Quong's meals. He not only cooked them well but served them appetizingly.
This morning, the second since Sheridan had talked with Mary Burrows of the possibility of a farmer President, Jackson had judiciously waited until after the meal was over before he gave out the orders for the day. The job on hand was one of those hated by the average cowboy as a cat hates water, the digging of postholes and the setting up of a new section of fencing. It meant divorce from their horses, almost as much a separation as the dismemberment of a centaur into two parts; it meant leaving off their beloved high-heeled boots; it meant blisters and backaches.
But it had to be done and Quong's breakfast, digesting perfectly, eased the breaking of the sad news. Fence-posts had already been drawn from ​Metzal; wire and staples were on hand; as fast as the holes were dug the barrier could go up and, the sooner it was completed, the sooner an uncongenial task was finished.
Its purpose was to provide a special pasture for certain of Sheridan's best cows, picked fOr their reproducing qualities of certain good points already established in themselves, to be bred to his latest purchase, a thoroughbred Hereford into whose price had gone most of Sheridan's reserve. It was to be the beginning of his upgrading that eventually would lead to all-thoroughbred stock. No such animal had been seen on Chico Mesa. It was a magnificent creature heavy of bone and brawn and beef, shaggy of forefront, its hide, burnished like copper, so tightly waved as to suggest Sheridan's calling him Sir Marcelle Pompadour, instead of his much more dignified and illustrious pedigreed title.
With Stoney to boss the job of postholing and fencing, Sheridan and Jackson proposed to ride to the south holding and cut out certain of the selected cows tar an initial segregation. To them was to go the alfalfa as a pre-breeding stimulant and upbuilder.
As Sheridan stood outside the ranch-house, smoking the one pipe he craved after breakfast, Jim Lund, the cowboy who bad been beaten over the head the night of Quong's adventure, came round the house to draw a supply of tobacco against his wages. Sheridan gave him the key to the store cupboard and told him to help himself and charge it down on the slate. He had found all his men ​eminently honest and, while he maintained the key, had discovered that such permission to get their own goods helped to increase mutual goodwill.
"Head all right, Jim?" he asked.
"'Pears to be. Cure'll likely be complete soon as I square accounts with the feller that give me the slip."
"Any idea who it was?"
"Pedro Lopez, brother to Hollister's gel."
"How do you know?"
"He hid his face but he wears a bum ruby ring on his left hand. I saw that." Sheridan sensed deep resentment in Jim's manner of talk.
"Don't go doing anything foolish, Jim," he warned. "Don't give them a chance to get anything on you. You can't prove it was Pedro with that evidence. I put a bullet through his arm the other night. He won't be in shooting form himself for a while."
"I'll wait till his arm heals," said Lund. "Then I'll happen across him an' call him a few pet names that even a Greaser'll rile at. I'll see there's witnesses to that. I'll give him the chance to draw, Boss, but I'll shoot first an' I'll shoot straight."
"All right, Jim. Get your tobacco." It was small use trying to eliminate Lund's bloodthirstiness. It was quite natural. Such affairs would lapse only when such types as Pedro were swept from the mesa. Sheridan knew himself the quick, sharp temptation to use a gun. He had graduated swiftly in western ways of handling primitive questions.
Lund turned away with the key. He stopped at ​the house corner, blinking his eyes, rubbing them as if some insect or dust had suddenly blinded them. He looked towards the range, pointing to the crags of Ghost Mountain.
"Funny. I never seen that afore," he said. "Must be a reg'lar slab of mica rock up thar."
Sheridan followed the direction of his finger. The Sim was well above the saw tooths and it had chased the shadows half way down the slopes. On Ghost Mountain showed flashes of brilliant light, winking, winking persistently. Lund, self-explaining the phenomenon, had disappeared. Sheridan dived into the door as Jackson came around from the corral with the sorrel mare and the roan, ready saddled for their ride. He came out with his own shaving mirror in one hand and his copy of the code. Jackson had already noticed the signaling and hitched the two ponies to the set-rail.
"Count 'em, Red," said Sheridan. "It may be just an invitation to see the furniture set up, but it's a bit early in the morning for that sort of message."
Jackson nodded, counting the intermittent winks that came distinctly.
"Four-three. Three-two. Three-two. Two-three. Four-two. Two-four. Five-two. Five-four. Four-three. Three-two. Three-two———"
"Repeating ain't she?"
"Yes." Sheridan's brow was furrowed. The letters seemed only nonsense. Perhaps one of the women was merely practicing.
I-K-K-O-M-E-Q-U-I-K-K
​Jackson kept calling and the sequence was the same.
"All right, Red, I've got it. There's trouble."
"What is it?"
"It's Thora sending. We started in the middle of a word. Her spelling isn't exactly American. K-O-M-E Q-U-I-K. Come quick. That's what she's saying over and over again. Get your second gun, Red, and mine. It's on the shelf over my bed. Fill up my cartridge belt and yours. I'll tell her we understand."
His shaving mirror was circular, swinging in a frame of heavy nickel that also made up the handle. One glass magnified, the other side gave ordinary reflection. He used the first, tilting the glass to catch the image of the sun, shooting up a flash and then losing it as he shifted angles.
Two-three. Three-two (O. K.) he signaled, time after time, not certain whether Thora would understand the abbreviation. Then she flashed it back to him. O. K.
Jackson came hurrying with the extra guns, with the cartridge belts and a box of cartridges to fill any vacancies in the webs.
"We can shove 'em in as we go," he said briefly and jumped for his saddle. The mare was fresh. Sheridan set foot in stirrup, one hand in mane, the other on his horn. As he left ground the mare swerved in a sudden volte of a quarter-circle calculated to upset the careless rider. It was spirit more than temper. Sheridan stood with his weight in stirrup, his body close to her withers. At the ​end of her jump he swung his right leg swiftly over saddle and settled as she jumped into her stride, tearing after the roan, already twenty yards away. For a while Sheridan gave her free rein and the two raced towards Pioche Gap, drumming the light soil with an even rataplan of flying hoofs. Once he got a handful of cartridges from Jackson and filled his belt.
Neither spoke a word, their minds filled with speculation. Sheridan decided that there must have been an accident and then forsook his decision. In that case Thora would have called for a doctor. Something had happened to Mary. And he could not disassociate that possibility from Hollister. He had felt foolishly secure since they had built the gate. Even now he could not believe that Hollister had discovered the secret of the bar. He shook it all doggedly from him and bent all his energies on riding the mare to the best advantage. Both she and the roan had been resting up for a day or two and they were in rare fettle. The fresh air of morning left them cool and unsweated as they turned into Pioche Gap and galloped neck to neck along the smooth highway. Both mounts had speed and both had wide chests to hold the well-developed lungs, widened and deepened by living in the rare air of the heights, for Chico Mesa was four thousand feet above sea level.
They swung to the east and drifted, smooth and fast as the shadows of flying clouds along the foot of the mountains, clattered up the narrow ravine and through the spray of the waterfall without pausing, their riders bent to their saddle-horns. ​Sheridan shot on his torch and kept the mare at a trot over the rocky floor, snorting, protesting but believing in the right of her master to guide her at his will, not hers.
So they came to where the gate had been.
The stout timbers of the frame were charred and still smoking. Sullen flakes and sparks of fire glowed here and there. The door itself had been first burned and then battered down.
Sheridan set the mare, shying a little at the smoke and heat, and she leaped through the gap, followed by Jackson on the roan, up the passage to the turn, out of it to the gorge, up, terrace by terrace, past the sculptured sandstone monuments, both horses catching the fiery impulses of their masters, mounting sure-footed and swift as mountain goats until they reached the rim and tore across the level meadow to where the log house, backed by its grove of pines, was reflected in the peaceful lake. There was no sign of Thora. Sheridan had expected her to meet them at the gate.
At the house he jumped off the mare and looked in at the open door. Jackson went round to the back. The main room was in confusion. The Colonial furniture had arrived. Pieces of it were in place, curtains up at the windows, but much of it was upset. Chairs sprawled, one of them broken. The door to the inner room was open, showing a bed, a mahogany four-poster, with its linen and blankets tossed aside. There were a few articles of clothing on a chair. He noticed stockings. But the place was empty. Jackson called to him.
​"Up here! She's up here. Bring some water."
There was a pail full of water on the verandah, cool, in the shade. Sheridan caught it up and, following the voice, saw Jackson waving to him from high up the slope, above the pine grove, close to the rim of the mountain. He had dismounted and must have run at prodigious speed to have made the ascent. Sheridan hurried through the grove along the well-trodden trail and found Red standing beside Thora who was lying outstretched on the ground, unconscious. A khaki skirt and coat seemed to have been hurriedly thrown on above her night-dress which was torn almost to ribbons. Her feet were in unlaced boots. Her hair lay flung out from her head in two immense braids of palest silver-gold.
Jackson took the pail from the panting Sheridan without ceremony and began to toss palmfuls of water into Thora's face. The cold shock of it brought her to almost instantly and she opened wide eyes that held a latent horror. Then she appeared to recognize them and sat up.
"I bane fainted for first time in my life," she said, talking with difficulty. "Give me the pail." It was half full but she lifted it without difficulty and drank deeply. When she set it down she wiped her lips with the back of her hand, uptilting her chin. They saw around her neck the purpling wealmark of a cord. Her face was bruised and smeared with blood, one ear, large and symmetrical, was torn a little at the lobe and blood had run freely from this down to her bosom, half exposed by the tattered gown. She suddenly flushed almost ​scarlet and buttoned her coat closely, turning up the collar.
"Now I get up," she said. Both men gave her a hand and she rose stiffly. "I tell you at the cabin," she told them and started to run down the trail with them behind her. At the door she paused, facing them on the verandah, talking fast, dramatically.
"I don't know how they get through the gate," she said. "But they bane come this morning before it bane light. We are asleep, in the new bed that come with the furniture. We fix that last night, all the house. With the gate we do not lock this door, nor the one inside.
"They bane come an' we are asleep. I wake first an' hear them on the verandah. I yump from the bed an' they meet me at the bedroom door. Five they are. Five men. I bane try to get to gun, to a club. If I git to my axe I keel them all. But they are on top of me, they cling like wildcats. I throw them off, they come back. I knock one down an' there bane two more in his place. An' all the time my pretty is sitting up in the bed in her nightdress an' I call to her to stay still.
"They drag me into the big room an' we smash about. All the new pretty furniture that bane come. One, two men yump for the door an' Mary shut it in their face. She bane put something against it. I break away. I bane grab those two men an' I smash their head together. They drop. Then a rope come roun' my neck. I bane choke. But I smash that one who throw the rope. I break his ​mouth an' teeth. Then the rope git tight an' all bane go black.
"When I bane see again I bane bound up, han' an' foot," She thrust out her wrists, raw and bleeding. I am near naked, flung in a corner. I struggle but they bane tie too hard. Mary, my pretty, she is in the arms of that Hollister. I see where she tear at his face but he is too strong. One man he fetch some of her clothes. Hollister he laugh and say, 'Will you bane come as you are or will you put on some clothes? Never mind make fuss,' he say. 'I will be your looking-glass.' I bane fight so hard they come to me an' keek me. Hollister, he bane say, 'We leave you, you big beetch. You can tell that lover of hers I take her—for myself. Maybe, when I am through I send her back.' And he bane laugh again for what I call heem till he grow tired an' they gag me.
"Mary, she go in room an' put on some clothes. I think she try to yumnp through window for some one laugh outside. So she come out an' they bind her pretty hands.
"'You can scream all you want,' say that Hollister to her. 'I like your voice. Or you can whistle.' An' they take her away. I lie an' fight an' I hear their horse go away, clop-clop. But she does not scream. She bane give me one look an' I know what she mean.
"I fight but the rope bane too tight. Then I think, an' I bane wriggle to where I bane get on my knees against the table. I rub off the gag against the drawer handle. I bane pull out that drawer ​with my teeth an' everything fall out on the floor. I bane git knife in my teeth. I bane git point of knife in floor an' I cut my wrist free. I cut my legs free an' I grab my rifle an' run out.
"But they bane gone. It take too long for me to bane think of that knife. They bane gone! God damn them for dirty cowards!"
Her face had worked convulsively while she told her tale, the two men listening stern and silent. With her earnest, unblasphemous oath she controlled herself.
"I bane git mirror. I bane find code. Now you know. Now we git her back an'—kill—kill—kill!
The intensity of her quieter anger was terrific. So might some ancestress of hers, standing on the strand of some dark fiord, have sworn to revenge herself upon the slayers of her viking lover.
She turned and fetched her rifle, cramming her coat pockets with cartridges.
"You bane git my horse. Red," she said. "I do not think they bane take him. He is in the spring pasture." And, when he went to do her bidding, she quietly brought stockings from the room, removed her shoes, put them on, laced up her boots methodically. Her sweater was in a corner and she picked this up and went back into the bedroom with it, coming out again to Sheridan dressed for action, her braids coiled and pinned, her sombrero on her head.
"Now I bane ready," she said quietly, "when you are."
​Sheridan had been standing like a man turned to stone, only his brain racing madly over problems of rescue. Trailing would be an almost impossible feat. At the foot of the range beyond the tunnel the gramma grass grew in places like a mat. They would be lucky if they guessed whether the gang had ridden east or west. Not towards Pioche, he was sure of that. Nor to Metzal. But to some hideout known to Hollister. And they had a tremendous start. Two hours at the least. It might be six or twelve before they could pick up a trace.
He moved at the touch of sarcasm he fancied in Thora's words and she started at the look on his face. It was set in harsh lines, unmoving, save for the flaring of his nostrils. His eyes were cold as sea-ice behind which burned a flame of purpose and hate.
"As soon as Jackson finds your horse and saddles it," he said, and his voice was deep and low in his throat, "we shall ride fast. Are you going to wear that skirt?"
She stripped it from her with a swift gesture of self-disapproval and stood in overalls, thewed like a giantess, her own face rigid, her own eyes with the same icy quality as his. Jackson came round the house with the horse, a white charger, bony enough, but seeming fairly up to her weight. Sheridan surveyed it critically but said nothing. But he decided there and then that Thora could not be in the chase. They would ride far faster than her mount could go.
​"This yore saddle?" She nodded. Jackson flung it across the horse, his hands flying as he fastened the cinch. He led it to the edge of the verandah and she mounted. The three of them, at a gallop, crossed the meadow and made the gorge at break-neck gait. When she saw the burned gate in the ray of the torch Thora gave the only sound she made. At the opening of the ravine both men dismounted and anxiously hunted for a sign.
They found it, the mixed tracks of several horses on a soft patch by the stream. They were headed west. Towards Pioche Gap.
West they galloped, the white horse laboring hard to keep up under the handicap of years and weight. Where they struck the road Sheridan and Red again hunted for tracks and disagreed. Jackson was inclined to fancy the party had gone south but the wagon road was metaled and he could not be sure. Nor could they discover a sign farther west. The soil was too fertile, too well turfed with the long grass, waving in the wind as if to mock their efforts. Thora sat her horse, knowing herself useless in such extremity, yet craning her neck and bending from the saddle to find some trace, to be doing something. She had gnawed her lips till they bled. She was no rider and her mount was in bad shape, scant of wind, stained with sweat, standing with hanging head.
"Well?" said Red. "Looks like a blind lead."
"We'll try towards Metzal," said Sheridan.
"We'll ride to Hollister's ranch. Maybe we can get something out of that girl, Juanita. We can work ​on her jealousy. She may know of some hideout. If she does, she'll tell it," he said grimly.
"If she knows, I bane make her tell," said Thora. "You leave her to me."
"If we draw blank there we may round up some dope in Metzal," suggested Jackson. "I know where to try. An' I'll try my damnedest."
"Hollister's first."
The mare and the roan still stood up well but they were forced to accommodate their pace to Thora's horse or leave her behind. This she saw and her face betrayed her struggling agony of mind.
"I bane got to talk to that girl myself," she said once, urging the poor brute to efforts beyond its capacity.
At the end of the Gap they crossed Ghost Creek and rode west towards the Lazy H. They had gone less than a mile when they saw some one coming towards them on a bay horse at a fast lope.
The two men jerked their heads at each other. Thora, coming alongside, sensed their gesture.
"It bane her?" she asked.
The rider came on fast, straight towards them, a girl in a waist of orange silk and a divided skirt of dark stuff. She was hatless and her black hair streamed on the wind. They caught the flash of her eyes before they could define her features. It was Juanita Lopez. A short way off she set spurs into her fiery little mount and then brought him to a standstill, his forefeet plowing the turf.
"So," she cried. "You know. Dios! You go after them. Bueno!"
​She looked at the rifle that Thora had persisted in carrying across her pommel though Red had tried to relieve her of the cumbersome thing, and she laughed. Her small, olive-skinned face, not unbeautiful in a wild, reckless way, was aflame with emotion.
"I come to the Circle S, senor," she said to Sheridan. "First I think to ride after heem, w'en I know that he is gone to do w'at he say, w'en I wake up from w'at he put in my dreenk. Si.
"Las' night there come Luis an' Ramon Guiterrez an' Felipe Vasquez. They breeng weeskey an' they talk an' dreenk with Hollister an' Pedro. It is late. I am in my bed, try to sleep. I know for long time, senor, Hollister hav' no more use for me. Me, I am like new sombrero to heem. I look fine an' he choose, he take, he use. Bimeby he get too much used to that sombrero, it feet too easy, he look aroun', see another kind, another shape, he throw old sombrero away. Si." She spoke with flowing gesture that emphasized the text of her words, talking with every inch of her lithe vivacity centered in the story.
"So I try to sleep. Bimeby I hear them in nex' room. Talk, laugh, dreenk. I hear about the girl on Monte del Muerte. Hollister say he goin' to take her, to get even with you, Senor Sheridan. He say—never min' w'at he say about that girl who is your querida—she is your querida, senor?"
Sheridan nodded.
"But he is goin' to take her away. He is sol' all this land, all the cattle, an' he is goin' to ​Mexicali, maybe Los Angeles. But that is manana. First he is take girl an' then he is send her back to you, senor, afterwards. They are all to go to el Monte del Muerte an' he geev them money to help.
"Me, I am listen to all this, senor, an' I grow hot an' mad. W'en he start to talk again about the girl I get from my bed, I fin' my knife—an'—pronto!—I am in that room with them, an' that knife is so close to Hollister throat that his eyes look at Death, he see el muerte, senor, as it scratch his skeen. An' he is afraid. Pedro, he take away the knife, he throw me back, he slap my face an' Hollister laugh an' say—'Take her away.'
"So they throw me on my bed like the old sombrero an' I lie an' weep because I have no more knife. Then Hollister he come in an' say you mus' dreenk this. I theenk maybe it is poison but he make me dreenk, only the las' mouthful I do not swallow, senor, but w'en he go out I spit it on the floor. So maybe I do not sleep so long as he weesh. It did not taste muy bueno, that weeskey. Now you go to find your querida an' to keel Hollister. I would like to do that. Si. But I am too chico. too weak."
Her eyes flamed, her breast was tumultuous under the orange silk, the pulses beat in her throat and she seemed filled with venom, a snake that was tied short, able to hiss, to rear, to strike but not to reach.
"Where has he taken her? Do you know that?" demanded Sheridan.
"Si, senor. To El Pueblo del Silencio. The City of Silence. Does the senor know where that is?"
​"I do," said Jackson. "'Way west, almost to the Pyramid Hills. All of thirty miles. A bunch of rocks heaved out of the mesa that look a heap like churches."
"Si, that is it. There are cuevas (caves) there. The contrabandista use them one time, long ago."
"What about Pedro and the others?"
"I do not hear all they say, senor. Sometime they talk low. But he geev Pedro money, like the res'. An' Pedro say maybe he meet him manana in Mexicali or Los Angeles. So I think Pedro, maybe the res', they go away after they help him get the girl. Si. An' you, senor, it is muy bueno if you find her before it is dark."
The emphasis of the last words was ominous, it called for haste. But Sheridan regarded her doubtfully. She was still racked with passion, with jealousy, but he wanted to be sure.
"You say Hollister has sold his place and his cattle? What about your mother? Where is she?"
"Mi madre? Oh, she will stay an' be cocinero, housekeep' for the man who buy. She is ol', mi madre she stay where she know she can work an' eat. Me, I am go to the Circle S, senor, to tell you about your querida, then I go to Yuma. There I have a man who weel marry me. Si. Who weel not throw me away like the ol' sombrero."
"Hollister was your lover? You loved him?"
"Si. But, senor, love is like cream. It is very sweet an' then, maybe, unless it is look out for, it is sour. Love an' hate, they are so."
She thrust out one little fist, fingers upwards, ​as if it held something, then reversed it swiftly, spreading her fingers wide. But Sheridan wanted to be sure.
"Pedro is your brother?"
"He is the son of mi madre, not my own brother. W'en Hollister beat me, Pedro laugh, he slap my face. He is bad, like Hollister."
Thora broke in.
"Why we bane wait?"
"I don't know whether she is telling us the truth. She may have been sent by Hollister to put us on a false trail."
"Then let me talk to her." Thora handed her rifle to Jackson, rode close to Juanita and ranged the bony horse alongside the fretful bronco, head to flank. She put one hand upon the horn of Juanita's saddle, above the girl's own hands. The Mexican looked up wonderingly at the great woman, so much her opposite, Nordic against Latin, blonde against brunette, ice against fire, both in that moment elemental.
"Are you bane speaking the truth? Look at me, in the eyes. So."
Their glances held, welded. Then Juanita broke out.
"Senora, I swear I speak true. Madre di Dios! Sangre di Cristo!" She crossed herself, snatching her hands from beneath Thora's palm, plucking a cross from her bosom and kissing it.
"Never you bane mind all that," said Thora heavily. "You tell me, woman to woman, do you tell the truth? You shall stay with me until I find ​out. Suppose you bane lying I take you an' I bane break every bone in your body, slow, one at a time, like this."
A quirt hung from the horn of the Mexican saddle, its handle of hardwood, seasoned palo verde, stout as steel, covered with woven horsehair. Thora took the whip and broke the grip between her fingers as easily as if it had been a brittle stick of candy. Juanita's face paled.
"I tell you the truth," she faltered. "Mujer a la mujer. Woman to woman, I say I tell you the truth."
"Then we go. You bane hear what she say, to find her before it bane dark?"
"Thora," said Sheridan. "You're tired. Your horse is played out. He couldn't carry you another five miles. You can't ride Juanita's bronco, you're too heavy. You go to the ranch and take Juanita with you, if you want to. I'll give you a note to Quong." He started to scribble as he talked, tearing out a page from his notebook. "He is not to let our men follow us. Jackson and I can handle it."
"No. I bane go along."
"You can't, Thora. We can't spare time to go to the ranch or I'd gladly get fresh horses for Red and myself. You've got to trust to us, Thora, I'm sorry."
He spoke quickly but gently, genuinely sorry for the despairing face.
"You love her. Mister Sheridan. You will ride and fight for her." Thora turned to Jackson. "Red, if you come back without her, do not bane come back to me. And Hollister a . . . !"
​"He won't come back," said Sheridan shortly. "Give Red the cartridges for the rifle, Thora. Wish us good luck."
As they looked back, once, they saw the big figure of Thora on the tired, white, bony nag, plugging by the side of Juanita, tiny on her chico bronco. Thora's hand gripped one rein of the other's bridle.
"She sure scared the truth out of Juanita," said Red while they rode at a steady lope.
"Willed it out of her, I fancy," returned Sheridan. He looked anxiously at the sun. It was close to the zenith, then- shadows had dwindled, shrinking beneath the bellies of their mounts. It was within an hour of noon.
"What kind of travel between here and the rocks, Red?" he asked.
"None too good. Gets worse. Prit' nigh all desert the last ha'f . There is a spring, if I can locate it, 'bout eight mile in. We'll water up."
His words had a hidden meaning. They had no canteens with them. They held in the horses, walk and lope and walk again, under the burning sun. The character of the mesa began to slowly change. In the long ago it had been heavily crevassed. Now these splits were nearly filled with the powdery sand, forming a series of ridges with draws between, sometimes quite deep.
To their right the foothills radiated the heat, backed by the higher cliffs of the range, gradually steepening until they were too sheer to sustain tree life. Cactus grew thick as weeds, sprawling, pillared, branching growths of greyish blue and green, barbed, ​hostile, half string, half pulp. Here and there a barrel cactus promised liquid if they failed to find the spring. The going was hard on man and beast; the gray dust rose and settled on them, clogged like flour where the sweat broke through hide and clothing. After the first mile they spoke little.
An hour had passed when Jackson pointed out a purple fissure in the range.
"They say you can git through to the Pioche side that way. Just a one-horse trail." The fissure widened, became a wedge, a deep notch as they came abreast of it, half a mile away. They had been looking for a sign but had not been disappointed at not finding it. There was no regular trail in such country. A man chose his own ridges and traversed them, east or west, avoiding the draws where the sand shifted on the slopes.
Suddenly the mare, going gamely on though, with the roan, nostrils gaped wide and flanks heaved under the pitiless pounding of the sun and the drag of the loose soil, shied, sprang high and leaped aside. A sidewinder, a hooded, grey, mottled rattlesnake, had glided across her trail, disturbed by the vibration of her hoofs. As she came down one forefoot seemed to break through into a hollow, the burrow of some creature. She drew it out, still trembling at sight and smell of the serpent, set it down, and limped, badly, persistently. The lines that had been sinking deeper and deeper into Sheridan's face grew swiftly sharper as he dismounted and examined the foot.
"Bowed a tendon, Red," he said simply. "She ​can't stand my weight with that." Jackson slid off the roan, his eyes anxious.
"It's sure hell," he said as his expertness corroborated Sheridan's diagnosis. "You take the roan. I'll hoof it back to the ranch an' foller up hard as I can with the pinto. Or I'll trail after you with the mare. Mebbe that's better. She can make out if she don't have to pack either of us."
Sheridan looked at him, man to man.
"I'll take the roan, Red. If it was Thora, it would be different."
"Sure. Want I should shift the saddles?"
"It doesn't matter. As to your going back. . . ."
Jackson, with the roan, was nearest to the range. Across a sandy draw was a dense thicket of chayas, the fleshy columns so close as almost to touch, in some cases to merge into each other. He went to the mounting side of the roan to loosen the cinches in the double rings. A big, vividly green fly settled on the roan's updrawn haunch as it rested one foot. Red started to slap at the vicious insect, stepping back as a shot rang out from the chaya thicket. A bullet nosed its way into the nigh shoulder of the roan and out through the off, leaving a bloody hole where the missile had mushroomed. With a strange, strangling cry the roan dropped to its knees and rolled over. Sheridan's gun came out and up, poised as he looked in vain for a target. Jackson swooped for the rifle he had set against a prickly pear when he dismounted. It came up to his shoulder, aiming at the clustering chayas where his quick, resentful eye had caught sight of a glint of blue that could not belong.
​The high-calibered weapon barked sharply, a steel-tipped bullet sloughed through a chaya column and from behind it there sounded one broken cry.
"Got him," said Jackson grimly. "Ah!"
Sheridan was pumping lead at a horseman on a piebald pony, a man clad in a striped serape and wearing a Mexican sun sombrero who had spurred out of a draw beyond the chayas and was heading towards the gap in the range, dodging behind clumps of cactus, deliberately weaving a zigzag course to escape Sheridan's accuracy of fire. Behind him pelted a riderless horse, heavy, tapidero'd stirrups swinging, reins trailing, the brute's ewe neck held high to keep them off the ground.
The man's dodging had not given Sheridan a fair shot. In a few bounds he was beyond all pistol range. Jackson, cursing as he waited for his chance, fired at last with the rifle. The sombrero flew from the fugitive's head and went spinning through the air. Next moment the rider plunged down into another draw, the second horse following, and neither of them saw him again.
"Missed by a mile," said Jackson disgustedly. "Why in hell didn't I stick to my six-gun? On'y I wanted to be sure an' bore through that chaya. There's one Greaser gone to his God the other side of that. An' the other one was Pedro, damn him."
"I thought it was Pedro. I wish we could have got that horse."
"Juanita lied to us after all, Sheridan."
"I don't think so. She said she didn't hear all. I fancy Hollister posted those two here in case we ​got after him straight. We've got the best of him so often he grew careful. They were to ambush us and then cut through the gap to Pioche and the raihoad. Pedro will go through to Calexico."
"Maybe. Or maybe he'll wait for Hollister to show. He'll gamble all he's got away in Spigotty Town, outside Pioche, and look to Hollister for a fresh stake. I wonder did that hombre I touched up pack a canteen? Will you shoot the roan while I'm gone? I ain't got the heart."
Jackson walked over carefully towards the chayas, the rifle discarded, a precautionary gun in his right hand. He found a way between the cacti and disappeared. Sheridan put his own pistol to the roan's head and sent it out of misery. The mare stood by shuddering, sniffing the taint of blood on the air, as Sheridan took off saddle and bridle from the dead horse.
Jackson came back with the strap of a canteen over his shoulder, a pint flask partly full of a yellowish liquid in his hand. He had put away his gun.
"They been nestin' in there, waitin' for us to happen along," he said. "I got that Greaser plumb through the heart. Luck-shot. That's the second man I ever killed," he went on quietly. "Both of 'em took a first shot at me. That hombre had his mouth smashed to a pulp an' all swollen up. His teeth was knocked out. I wouldn't wonder but that was the one that roped Thora.
"There won't be enough of him left by the time we come back to hold an inquest on. See that?"
He jerked up his head. High in the sky a dark ​dot soared, a buzzard, volplaning down from its aerial watching place to the feast.
"We can fill the canteen at the spring," said Red. "After we wash it out good. I wouldn't drink what was left after that Greaser if I was thirstin' to death. An' we can use the flask. We'll likely go shy of water before we git through."
He pulled out the cork and smelled the contents.
"Faugh!" he exclaimed as he spilled them on the ground. "Smells like benzine. Vasquez' booze. I'll cache my saddle before we go on."
Sheridan watched him wrap saddle and bridle with their blanket and cover them with sand. They were going on, afoot, twenty-five miles of ever increasing desert ahead. If they got to the Painted Rocks by midnight they would be doing well. And how were they to find the girl and Hollister by night? How would they find her? "Get her before it is dark," Juanita, discarded mistress of Hollister, had warned. All the way that they would go the sun would be sinking ahead of them, marking off the day.
As Jackson straightened up Sheridan placed his reins behind his saddle horn. He turned the mare and slapped her on the flanks, bidding her go home.
"Go home, Goldie, poor old girl," he said. "Go home."
She went a little way, uncertainly, then stopped and whinnied. He urged her on and she started, limping. But, when the two men turned to trudge on to their distant goal, the mare wheeled and ​followed them, like a dog that craves company. Sheridan halted.
"She must go back," he said. "She'll find her way home easy enough. If she comes she'll have to share our water."
"If we git any. But she saw the roan shot an' she's scared. You can't shoo her home. Better let her follow. We may need her after all, if she is lame."
And the three trailed on, following the sun that seemed simultaneously to beckon and threaten, on to where even the cactus began to fail and the mesa turned to a desert where nothing grew. Once they turned aside to the foot of the range and Jackson found his spring, a brackish puddle with which they filled canteen and flask and slaked their thirst.
The sun set back of Pyramid Hills, still far away and the swift change of temperature found them shivering. They had had no food save a few prickly pears they had peeled, some lumps of cactus they had skinned and chewed. In the fever of pursuit they had forgotten provisions. The sun and sand had taken heavy toll. The lame mare was now the best of the three. Three hours later the moon came up, blanching all the plain. Their water was gone. They did not miss it so much in the coolness but their tongues were soon swollen and they were tired to stumbling, caked with the desert.
They plodded up and down a draw. They no longer chose a path but kept straight on towards Pyramid Hills and a low mound that was slowly rising in mid distance, the Painted Rocks, the City of Silence. On the ridge Jackson went to his hands ​and knees. Sheridan bent to help him but Red was pointing to the sand. There, edges shaded by the moon, were the tracks of two horses. They were on the trail. It put new strength into them and their crawl changed once again to a semblance of a stride.