Sun and Sand Page 19

  He said: “Oliver Badget was Joe Mendoza. I just seen a bit of Mendoza’s handwriting, so I know. Buzz Mahoney and Tim Riley were the best friends of Joe. Mendoza is dead. Buzz and Tim are carrying on where Mendoza left off. That means they’re starting something big. So big that Mendoza risked his neck to get out of prison. He must’ve met those two hombres. Before he died, he told them things. And it’s my idea, Jigger, that what that chart tells is the location of the cache where Mendoza put away the whole savings of his life.”

  The teeth of Landy clicked together. His eyes grew green with bright greed. “And Mendoza never spent nothing. He never did nothing but save,” he added. “Jigger, I’ve got three of my best men, and they’re gonna ride with you when you start the game.”

  “I work a lone hand or I don’t work at all,” said Jigger dreamily, as he lay stretched on his bed, peering steadily out the window.

  “Damn it,” growled Landy, “if you try to handle the two of ’em, they’ll sure bust you full of lead. Mendoza never had nothing to do with gents that wasn’t murderers. Those are two gunmen, Jigger, and when you handled ’em before, you was dealing with rattlers without knowing it.”

  “I’ll handle ’em alone or not at all,” said Jigger in the same voice.

  “Jigger . . . you’ll carry a gun, then, won’t you?”

  Jigger shook his head. “Any fool can carry a gun,” he answered. “The fun of the game is handling fire with your bare hands.”

  There was a muffled, snarling sound from Doc Landy. Then he strode from the room without another word.

  And five minutes later Jigger shuddered, for a man with a long, linen duster on had just stepped through the front door of the post office. The duster covered him very efficiently, but a certain weight about the shoulders, a certain sense of power in the arms was not lost on Jigger.

  He was off his bed, down the stairs, and instantly in the stable behind the hotel. A moment later he had jerked the saddle on the back of the stallion and snapped the bridle over his head. Then he hurried down the alley and crossed into the vacant lot beside the hotel, where a clump of tall shrubs covered him. He could see without being seen.

  And he had hardly taken his post before the man in the linen duster came out from the post office again, paused to yawn widely, glanced up and down the street with quick eyes, and turned the corner.

  Jigger, running to the same corner, had a glimpse of two men swinging on the backs of two fine horses. At once the pair swung away at a rapid canter.

  They left Weldon, headed north for five miles, swung sharply to the west, then went straight south through the mountains.

  For two days, Jigger shivered in the wet winds and the whipping rains of the high ravines, following his quarry.

  It was close work, dangerous work. Sometimes in a naked valley, he had to let the pair get clear out of sight before he ventured to take the trail again. Once, coming through a dense fog that was simply a cloud entangled in the heights, he came suddenly around a rock, face to face, with a starry light. And through the mist, not five steps away, he heard the loud voice of Buzz Mahoney yell out: “Who’s there? What’s that?”

  “A mountain sheep, you fool,” suggested Tim Riley.

  Six days out of Weldon. Jigger was riding anxiously through a ravine that was cluttered with such a litter of rocks that danger might have hidden there in the form of whole regiments. It was only the hair-trigger sensitiveness of the nose of the stallion that detected trouble ahead.

  He stopped, jerked up his head, and the next instant, Jigger saw the wavering of sunlight on a bit of steel, the blue brightness of a leveled gun.

  He whirled Fanfare away. Two rifles barked, sent long, clanging echoes down the ravine, and Jigger swayed slowly out from the saddle, dropped, and hung head down with trailing arms, his right leg hooked over the saddle as though caught in the stirrup leather and so, precariously, supported.

  The rifles spoke no more.

  Instead, two riders began to clatter furiously in pursuit. A good mile they rushed their swift horses along, but Fanfare, with his master still hanging at his side, widened the distance of his lead with every stride and finally was lost to view among the sea of boulders.

  After that, the noise of the pursuit no longer beat through the ravine, and Jigger pulled himself back into the saddle. His leg ached as though the bone had been broken, his head spun, but there was no real harm done by his maneuver.

  He turned again on the trail. All that Doc Landy had told him, all that he could have guessed, was reinforced doubly now. For when men would not delay to capture such a horse as Fanfare when the rider was apparently wounded to death, it was sure proof that Mahoney and Riley were bound toward a great goal.

  They went on securely now, but steadily. They cleft through the mountains, following the high Lister Pass, and then they dipped down along the side of the range into the terrible sun, mist, and dusty glare of Alkali Flat.

  Imagine a bowl a hundred miles across, rimmed with cool blue distance on either side, but paved with white heat and the welter and dance of the reflected sun. That was Alkali Flat.

  Jigger, looking from the rim of the terrible depression, groaned softly. He glanced up and saw three soaring buzzards come over the head of the mountain, turn, and sweep with untroubled wings back the way they had come. Even at that height, they seemed to dread the pungent heat that poured up from the vast hollow.

  Jigger, sitting in the shadow of a rock, sat down to think. He could find no resource in his mind. There was no way in which he could travel out into the desert.

  Whoever had chosen to hide a treasure in the midst of such an ocean of despair had chosen well.

  In the middle of the day, a man needed three pints of water an hour. A fellow whose canteen went dry in the middle of that hell would be mad with thirst by the time he had walked fifteen miles, at the most. They went mad and died—every man the same way. The first act was to tear off the shirt. The second was to commence digging with bare hands in the sand and the rocks. They would be found that way afterward, the nails broken from their fingers, the flesh tattered, the very bones at the tips of the fingers splintered by the frightful, blind efforts of the dying men.

  Jigger, remembering one dreadful picture he had seen, slowly ran the pink tip of his tongue across his lips and sat up to breathe more easily. He had a canteen that would hold a single quart—and the valley was a hundred miles across!

  He had saddlebags, of course. They were new and strong, of the heaviest canvas.

  He took a pair of them and went to the nearest sound of running water. He drank and drank again of that delightfully bubbling spring—the mere sight of Alkali Flat had implanted in him an insatiable thirst. Then he filled one of the bags. The canvas was perfectly water-tight, but the seams let the water spurt out in streams.

  He looked about him, not in despair, but with the sense of one condemned. If he could not enter the desert assured of a fair chance of getting through, why, he would enter it without that chance and trust to luck like a madman.

  He was drawn by that perverse hunger for danger like a dizzy man by the terrible edge of a cliff.

  Then he saw the pine trees that were filling the mountain air with sweetness, and he remembered their resin.

  Resin? It exuded from them in little fresh runs; it dripped from the wounded bark; it flavored the air with its clean scent. He began to collect it rapidly with his knife, and as he got it, he commenced to smear the stuff over the seams of his saddlebags, which he turned inside out.

  He had two pairs, and he resined all four in hardly more than an hour. That was why the stallion was well weighted down with a load of the purest spring water, going down the slope toward Alkali Flat.

  His master went ahead of him, jauntily, whistling a little, but the heat from the desert already was beginning to sting the eyes and make the lids of them tender.

  VI

  In Alkali Flat, the earth was not a mother. It was a grave. Once there had been
a river running through it; now there was only the hollow trough filled with the dead bones of the stream. Once there had been trees; now there were only the scarecrow trunks of a few ancient survivors. It was worse than the Sahara, because in the Sahara there was never life, and here there was a ghost of it.

  As Jigger passed down into the frightful glare of that wasted land, he saw the trail of Mahoney and Tim Riley lead up to the bank of the dead river and then pass down the length of it. He felt that he knew, at once, the nature of the windings that had been depicted on the chart, and he could not help admiring the cleverness of Joe Mendoza, leaving his treasure here in the middle of a salt waste.

  The temperature was above a hundred.

  That is a phrase that people use casually, liberally without understanding. Actually every part of a degree above blood heat begins to draw the strength from the heart. A dry heat is then an advantage in a sense, because the quick evaporation of the perspiration cools the flesh a little.

  But the heat in the great Alkali Flat was above a hundred and twenty. There were twenty-two degrees of fatal heat, and the dryness not merely turned sweat into mist at once, it laid hold on the flesh like a thousand leeches, sucking out the liquid from the body.

  The feet of Jigger began to burn in his boots. There seemed to be sand under his eyelids. The drying lips threatened to crack wide open. And thirst blew down his throat like a dusty wind at every breath he drew.

  At the same time, the skin of his face commenced to pull and contract, and the dry skin of his body was rubbed and chafed by his clothes.

  Fanfare, indomitable in all conditions, now held on his way with his ears laid flat against his skull.

  When Jigger looked up, he saw a wedge of three buzzards sliding out from the mountain height and hanging in the air. They might shun the air above the horrible flat, but not when foolish living creatures attempted to cross the floor of the oven.

  What insane beings, even a Mahoney and a Riley, ventured on such a journey by the light of the day?

  Jigger looked from the dizzy sky back to the earth. It was like a kitchen yard, a yard on which thousands of gallons of soapy water, in the course of generations, have been flung upon a summer-baked soil, thrice a day. For a singular odor rose from the ground, and it was everywhere gray-white.

  Along the banks of the river, one could see where water had once flowed at varying levels. The banks had been eaten back by the now-dead stream. Here and there, at the edges of the levels, appeared the dry roots of long-vanished plants and trees, as fine as hair.

  There was no steady breeze, but now and again a twist of the air sucked up dust in a small air pool that moved with swiftness for a short distance and then melted away. If one of those white phantoms swayed toward Jigger, he swerved the horse to avoid it. Fanfare himself shrank from the contact, for the alkali dust burned the passages of nose and lungs and mouth like dry lye, and the eyes were eaten by that unslaked lime.

  Yet the other pair still advanced more deeply into that fire. An hour went by, and another, and another, and another. At a walk or a dogtrot, Fanfare stuck to his work. His coat was beginning to stare, as his sweat dried and the salt of the perspiration stiffened the gloss of his hair. When Jigger stroked the glorious neck of the horse, a thin dust followed his hand.

  They had passed the danger point, long ago. That is to say, they had passed the point when a man could safely attempt to journey out of the alkali hell without water to carry. A fellow with a two-quart canteen, no matter how he nursed it, would probably be frantic for liquid before he reached the promise of the mountains that, already, were turning brown and blue in the distance.

  And then the two figures far ahead, only discernible in the spyglass that Jigger now and then used for spotting them, dipped away from the flat and disappeared. They had descended into the stream bed.

  It might mean that they had spotted the pursuer and were going to stalk him in ambush. It might mean, also, that they had reached the proper bend of the dry draw and that they were about to search for the marked spot on the chart.

  Jigger, taking a chance on the second possibility, pushed Fanfare ahead rapidly until he was close to the point of the disappearance. Conscience, duty, and a strange spirit seemed to ride in his shadow and drive him ahead, but his conscious mind rebelled against this torment. It told him to rush away toward one of those spots of cool, blue mirage that continually wavered into view on the face of the desert; it told him that all was useless—wealth, fame, honor no more real than the welter of the heat waves. But he kept on.

  When he was reasonably close, he dipped Fanfare down into the channel of the vanished river and watered him from the second saddlebag. The water was now almost the heat of blood, and it had developed a foul taste from cooking inside the heavy canvas, but Fanfare supped up the water greedily until the bag was empty.

  There remained to Jigger one half of his original supply, and yet one half of his labor had not been completed.

  Under a steep of the bank where there was a fall of shadow, he placed the horse and made him lie down. But the shadow was not a great blessing. The dimness seemed to thicken the air; it was like breathing dust, and the sand, even under the shadow, was hot to the touch.

  Here Fanfare was left, lifting his head and sending after his master a whinny of anxiety, no louder than a whisper. For the stallion knew as well as any man the reason those buzzards wheeled in the stillness of the hot air above.

  Would the two men ahead take heed of the second group of the buzzards? Or would they fail to notice, earthbound as their eyes must be, that the vultures wheeled and sailed in two parts?

  Jigger went on swiftly, but with care. And he could wish, now, that he had not left Weldon with empty hands. He had his knife, to be sure, and if he came to close range, that heavy knife with its needle-sharp point would be as deadly in his hands as any gun. It might well dispose of one of the pair, but the second one would certainly take revenge for his fall.

  Very clearly Jigger knew what it meant if the couple were real companions of Joe Mendoza, that super murderer. He would have none about him except savages as brutal as wild beasts. He would have none except experts in slaughter.

  This knowledge made the step of Jigger lighter than the step of a wildcat as he heard, directly around the next bend, the sound of blows sinking into the earth. From the sharp edge of the bank he saw, as he peered around it, both Mahoney and tall Tim Riley hard at work with a pick and a shovel that they had taken from their packs.

  Their two horses, like the stallion, had been placed under the partial shadow of the western bank. One stood head down, like a dying thing; the other, with more of the invincible Western toughness supporting its knees and its spirit, wandered with slow steps down the draw, sniffing curiously at the strange dead roots that projected here and there from the bank.

  The two workers, hard at it, had now opened a good-size hole in the earth and they were driving it deeper and deeper when Mahoney uttered a wild cry and flung both arms above his head. Then, leaning, he tore at something buried in the earth. There was the brittle noise of the rending of a tough fabric. Mahoney jerked up, holding what seemed a torn strip of tarpaulin in his hands, and leaned immediately to grasp it again. Riley helped him. They were both yelling out senseless, meaningless words.

  And now Jigger saw a very strange thing to do, and did it. He slipped quietly out from his post of vantage and went up to the horse that was wandering with slow steps down the bank, the water sloshing with soft gurglings inside the burlap-wrapped huge canteen that hung from the saddle.

  Jigger took the horse calmly by the bridle and led it, step by step, around the bend. He had the horse almost out of view when Mahoney, leaping to his feet, apparently looked straight at the thief.

  Instead of drawing a gun, Buzz Mahoney pulled off his hat and began to wave it and shout with delight. Tim Riley also commenced to prance around like a crazy man.

  “The whole insides of the Levison Bank!” yelled Riley. �
�Kid, we got it! We’re rich for life!”

  They were blind with happiness. That was why Mahoney had failed to see the thief in his act of stealing, and now Jigger was walking steadily down the draw with the horse behind him. He kept on until he reached the great stallion, which rose eagerly to meet him and touch noses with the other horse.

  Then Jigger mounted Fanfare and put two miles of steady cantering behind him. After that, he rode up the bank to the level of the ground above and waited.

  He sat in the shade under the side of Fanfare and ventured to smoke a cigarette that filled his lungs with a milder fire than that of the alkali dust.

  One horse, two men, and the long, burning stretch of the desert to cross before the blue peace of the mountains surrounded them. It seemed to Jigger that there was nothing in the world so beautiful as mountains, these mountains to the north. Yes, perhaps there were other regions even more delightful. There were the great Arctic and Antarctic plains where the ice of ages is piled. But to lie all day where water can flow across the body, where the lips can draw up clear water every moment—that is a bliss beyond words.

  It was easy to think, also, of the cool, shadowy interiors of saloons and the refreshing pungency of beer. Barrels of beer buried in vast casks of chipped ice and snow.

  Men of sense should work with ice. What happy fellows are those who deliver the great, white, ponderous cakes of it, sawing and splitting it up for customers, drifting comfortably from house to house.

  Time passed. He watered the two horses and himself drank sparingly. There was still plenty of sun. It was high, high above the horizon, and those two fellows who had found the treasure of Joe Mendoza did not seem, as yet, to have discovered the loss of the second horse with more than half of their remaining water supply.

  Well, the wind of joy would cool them for a spell, but afterward . . .

  He thought, too, of the old, white-headed banker, Levison, still straight backed, level eyed, fearless of the hatred that men poured on him since the failure of his bank after the robbery.