The Long Chance Read online

  CHAPTER II

  It was still dark when the Desert Rat regained consciousness. He lay forquite a while thereafter, turning things over in his befuddled brain,striving to gather together the tangled thread of the events of thenight. Eventually he succeeded in driving his faculties into line. Herolled over, got to his hands and knees and paused a minute to get afresh grip on himself. His aching head hung low, like that of a dyinghorse; in the silence of the night he could hear the drip, drip of hisblood into the sand.

  Presently he began to move. Round and round in the sage he crawled, likesome weary wounded animal, breaking off the rotten dead limbs which, lieclose to the base of the shrub. Three piles of sage he gathered, placingthe piles in a row twenty feet apart. Then he set fire to them andwatched them burst into flame.

  It was the desert call for help: three fires in a row by night, threecolumns of smoke against the horizon by day--and the Cahuilla Indian,coming down the draw from Chuckwalla Tanks five miles away, saw flamingagainst the dawn this appeal of the white man he loved, for whom helived and labored. Straight across the desert he ran, with the longtireless stride that was the heritage of his people. His large heavyshoes retarded him; he removed them, tucked them under his arm andwith a lofty disdain of tarantulas and side-winders fled barefooted.Three-quarters of an hour from the time he had first seen thesignal-fires, the mozo was kneeling beside the stricken Desert Rat, wholay unconscious close to one of the fires. The water from the mozo'scanteen revived him, however, and presently he sat up, while theCahuilla washed the gash in his head and bound it up with his master'sbandanna handkerchief.

  As the Indian worked, the white man related what had occurred and how.He recalled his conversation with his assailant, and shrewdly surmisedthat he would head for the Colorado river, after having first secured asupply of water at Chuckwalla Tanks. The Desert Rat's plan of action wasquickly outlined.

  "You will help me to get to the Tanks, where I'll have water and achance to rest for a day or two until I'm able to travel; then I'llhead for the Rio Colorado and wait for you in Ehrenburg. I'll keep onecanteen and you can take the other; I have matches and my six-shooter,and I can live on quail and chuckwallas until I get to the river. Youhave your knife. Track that man, if you have to follow him into hell,and when you find him--no, don't kill him; he isn't worth it, andbesides, that's my work. It's your job to run him down. Bring him to mein Ehrenburg."

  It was past noon when they arrived at the Tanks, and the Indian wascarrying the Desert Rat on his back. While the man was quite conscious,he was still too weak from the effect of the blow and loss of blood totravel in the heat.

  At the Tanks the Indian picked up the trail of four burros and a man.He refilled his canteen, took a long drink from the Tank, grunted an"_Adios, senor,_" and departed up the draw at the swift dog-trot whichis typical of the natural long-distance runner.

  The Desert Rat gazed after him. "God bless your crude untutored soul,you best of mozos" he murmured. "You have one virtue that most white menlack--you'll stay put and be faithful to your salt. And now, just to beon the safe side, I'll make my will and write out a detailed account ofthis entire affair--in case."

  For half an hour he scribbled haltingly in an old russet-coverednote-book. This business attended to, he crawled into the meager shadeof a _palo verde_ tree and fell asleep. When he awoke an hour or twolater and looked down the draw to the open desert, he saw that anothersandstorm was raging.

  "That settles it" he soliloquized contentedly. "The trail is wiped outand the best Indian on earth can't follow a trail that doesn't exist,But that wretched little bandit is out in this sandstorm, and the jackswill stampede on him and he'll pay _his_ bill to society--with interest.When the wind dies down the pack outfit will drift back to thiswater-hole, and when Old Reliable finds out that the trail is lost,_he'll_ drift back too. Anyhow, if the burros don't show we'll trail_them_ by the buzzards and find the packs. Ah, you great mysteriouswonderful desert, how good you've been to me! I can sleep now--inpeace."

  He slept. When he awoke again, he discovered to his surprise that he hadbeen walking in his sleep. He had an empty canteen over his shoulder andhe was bareheaded. His head ached and throbbed, his tongue and throatfelt dry and cottony; he seemed to have been wandering in a weary landfor a long time, for no definite reason, and he was thirsty.

  He glanced around him for the water-hole beside which he had laindown to sleep and await the mozo and the burros. On all sides the vastundulating sea of sand and sage stretched to the horizon, and then theDesert Rat understood. He had been delirious. With the fever from hiswound and the thought of the fortune of which he had been despoiled,uppermost even in his subconscious brain, he had left Chuckwalla Tanksand started in pursuit. How far or in what direction he had wandered heknew not. He only knew that he was lost, that he was weak and thirsty,that the pain and fever had gone out of his head, and that the NightWatchman walked beside him in the silent waste.

  It came into his brain to light three fires--to flash the S. O. S. callof the desert in letters of smoke against the sky--and he fumbled in hispocket for matches. There were none; and with a sigh, that was almost asob the dauntless Argonaut turned his faltering footsteps to the southand lurched away toward the Rio Colorado.

  Throughout the long cruel day he staggered on. Night found him closeto the mouth of a long black canyon between two ranges of black hills,whose crests marked them as a line of ancient extinct volcanoes.

  "I'll camp here to-night," he decided, "and early tomorrow morning I'llgo up that canyon and hunt for water. I might find a 'tank.'"

  He lay down in the sand, pillowed his sore head on his arm, and, Godbeing merciful and the Desert Rat's luck still holding, he slept.

  At daylight he was on his way, stiff and cramped with the chill of thedesert night. Slowly he approached the mouth of the canyon, crossing abare burnt space that looked like an old "wash."

  Suddenly he paused, staring. There, before him in the old wash, was thefresh trail of two burros and a man. The trail of the man was not welldefined; rather scuffed in fact, as if he had been half dragged along.

  "Hanging to the pack-saddle and letting the jack drag him" muttered thelost Desert Rat. "I'll bet it's little Boston, after all, and I'm notyet too late to square accounts with that _hombre._"

  In the prospect of twining his two hands around the rascal's throatthere was a certain primitive pleasure that added impetus to the passageof the Desert Rat up the lonely canyon. The thought lent new strengthto the man. Dying though he knew himself to be, yet would he squareaccounts with the man who had murdered him. He would--

  He paused. He had found the man with the two burros. There could be nomistake about that, for the canyon ended in a sheer cliff that toweredtwo hundred feet above him, and in this horrible _cul de sac_ lay thebleached bones of two burros and a man.

  Here was a conundrum. The Desert Rat had followed a fresh trail andfound stale bones. Despite his youth, the desert had put something ofits own grim haunting mystery into this man who loved it; to him had itbeen given to understand much that to the layman savored of the occult;at birth, God had been very good to him, in that He had ordained thatduring all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how todie, and meet the issue unafraid. For the Desert Rat was a philosopher,and even at this ghastly spectacle his sense of humor did not deserthim. He sat down on the skull of one of the burros and laughed--a drycackling gobble.

  "What a great wonderful genius of a desert it is!" he mumbled. "It'sworth dying in after all--a fitting mausoleum for a Desert Rat. Here Icome staggering in, with murder in my heart, stultifying my manhood withthe excuse that it would be justice in the abstract, and the Lord showsme an example of the vanity and littleness of life. All right, Boston,old man. You win, I guess, but I've got an ace coppered, and even if youdo get through, some day you'll pay the price."

  He sat there on the bleached skull, his head in his hands, trembling,pondering, yet unafraid in the face of the knowledge th
at here hiswanderings must end. He was right. It was a spot eminently befitting thefinish of such a man. It was at least exclusive, for the vulgar and thecommon would never perish here. In all the centuries since its formationno human feet, save his own and those of the man whose skeleton laybefore him, had ever awakened the echoes in its silent halls. Pioneers,dreamers both, men of the Great Outdoors, each had heard the call ofthe silent places--each had essayed to fight his way into the treasurevaults of the desert; and as they had begun, so had they finished--inthe arms of Nature, who had claimed the utmost of their love.

  The Desert Rat was a true son of the desert. To him the scowl of thesun-baked land at midday had always turned to a smile of promise atdawn; to him the darkest night was but the forerunner of another day ofglorious battle, when he could rise out of the sage, stretch his younglegs and watch the sun rise over his empire. He knew the desert--he sawthe issue now, but still he did not falter.

  "Poor little wife," he mumbled; "poor little unborn baby! You'll hope,through the long years, waiting for me to come back--and you'll neverknow!"

  His faltering gaze wandered down the canyon where his own tracks andthose of the dead shone gray against the brown of the sun-swept wash. Hehad followed a trail that might have been ten years old; perhaps, inthe years to come, some other wanderer would see _his_ tracks, halting,staggering, uncertain, blazing the ancient call of the desert: "Cometo me or I perish." And following the trail, even as the Desert Rat hadfollowed this other, he, too, in his own time, would come at length tothe finish--and wonder.

  The Desert Rat sighed, but if in that supreme moment he wept it was notfor himself. He had many things to think of, he had much of happiness torenounce, but he was of that breed that dares to approach the end.

  Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch. About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

  For him the trail had ended here, as it had for this other remnant ofvanished life that lay before him now with arms outstretched. The DesertRat stared at the relic. A cross! The body formed a cross! Here againwas The Promise--

  A thought came to the perishing wanderer. "I'll leave a message" hegobbled. He could not forbear a joke. "To be delivered when calledfor" he added. "This other man might have done the same, but perhaps hedidn't care--perhaps there wasn't anybody waiting at home for him."

  From his shirt pocket he drew the stub of a lead pencil and thenote-book in which he had written his will and the record of hisbetrayal. He added the story of his wanderings since leaving ChuckwallaTanks, and the postscript:

  The company in which I will be found was not of my own seeking. He was here before me by several years and I found nothing whereby he might be identified.

  He tore the leaves out of the note-book, stuffed them inside his emptycanteen and screwed the cap on tight; after which he cast about for aprominent place where he might leave his last message to the world.

  At the head of the canyon stood an extinct volcano, its precipitoussides forming the barrier at the western end of the canyon. Away back inthe years when the world was young, a stream of thin soupy lava, spewedfrom this ancient crater, had flowed down the canyon out onto thedesert. It was this which the Desert Rat had at first taken for an old"wash." Owing to the pitch of the canyon floor, most of the lava had runout, but a thin crust, averaging in thickness from a quarter to threequarters of an inch, still remained. Originally, this thin lava had beena creamy white, but with the passage of centuries the sun had baked itto a dirty brown and the lava had become disintegrated and rotten. Asthe hot lava had hardened and dried it had cracked, after the fashion ofa lake bed when the water has evaporated, but into millions and millionsof smaller cracks than in the case where water has evaporated from mud.As a result of this peculiar condition, the entire lava capping in thecanyon was split into small fragments, each fragment fitting exactlyinto its appointed place, the whole forming a marvelous piece of naturalmosaic that could only have been designed by the Master Artist.

  With the point of his pocket knife the Desert Rat pried loose one ofthese sections of lava. Where it had been exposed to the sun on top itwas brown, but the under side was the original creamy white.

  The mystery of the phantom trail was solved at last. In fact, not tostate a paradox, there had been no mystery at first--at least to theDesert Rat. The moment he saw the bones he guessed the answer to thatweird puzzle.

  The tracks were easily explained. When one walked on the surface of thisthin lava crust it broke beneath him and crumbled into dust. The browndust on top mingled with the underlying white, the blend of colors onthe whole forming a slate-colored patch with creamy edges, marking theboundaries of the footprints; and here, in this horrible canyon, whererains would never erode nor winds obliterate, the tracks would show foryears until the magic of the desert had again wrought its spell on thelandscape and the ghostly white tracks had faded and blended again intothe all-prevailing brown.

  The Desert Rat was something of a geologist, and had he not been dying,an extended examination of this weird formation would have interestedhim greatly. But he had his message to leave to his loved ones, and timepressed. In the joy and pride of his strength and youth he had daredthe desert. He had dreamed of a fortune, and this--this was to be theawakening...

  He crawled out into a smooth undisturbed space and fell to work with thepoint of his knife. Carefully he raised piece after piece of the naturalmosaic, inverted it and laid it back in its appointed place. At theend of two hours he finished. There, in inlaid letters of creamy whiteagainst the desert brown, his message flared almost imperishable:

  Friend, look in my canteen and see that I get justice.

  A century must pass before that message faded; as for the coming of themessenger, he would leave that to the Almighty.

  The Desert Rat was going fast now. He moved back a few feet, fearfulthat at the end he might obliterate his message. With his fading gazefixed on the mouth of the canyon he lay waiting, hoping, praying, braveto the last ... and presently help came.

  It was the Night Watchman!