The Long Chance | Page 9

note-
book. This business attended to, he crawled into the meager shade of a
palo verde tree and fell asleep. When he awoke an hour or two later and
looked down the draw to the open desert, he saw that another
sandstorm was raging.
"That settles it" he soliloquized contentedly. "The trail is wiped out and
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 jacks will
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 this water-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 mysterious wonderful desert, how
good you've been to me! I can sleep now--in peace."
He slept. When he awoke again, he discovered to his surprise that he
had been walking in his sleep. He had an empty canteen over his
shoulder and he was bareheaded. His head ached and throbbed, his
tongue and throat felt dry and cottony; he seemed to have been
wandering in a weary land for a long time, for no definite reason, and
he was thirsty.
He glanced around him for the water-hole beside which he had lain
down to sleep and await the mozo and the burros. On all sides the vast
undulating sea of sand and sage stretched to the horizon, and then the
Desert Rat understood. He had been delirious. With the fever from his

wound and the thought of the fortune of which he had been despoiled,
uppermost even in his subconscious brain, he had left Chuckwalla
Tanks and started in pursuit. How far or in what direction he had
wandered he knew 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 Night Watchman walked beside him in the silent waste.
It came into his brain to light three fires--to flash the S. O. S. call of the
desert in letters of smoke against the sky--and he fumbled in his pocket
for matches. There were none; and with a sigh, that was almost a sob
the dauntless Argonaut turned his faltering footsteps to the south and
lurched away toward the Rio Colorado.
Throughout the long cruel day he staggered on. Night found him close
to 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'll
go 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, God
being 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 the
desert night. Slowly he approached the mouth of the canyon, crossing a
bare burnt space that looked like an old "wash."
Suddenly he paused, staring. There, before him in the old wash, was the
fresh trail of two burros and a man. The trail of the man was not well
defined; rather scuffed in fact, as if he had been half dragged along.
"Hanging to the pack-saddle and letting the jack drag him" muttered the
lost Desert Rat. "I'll bet it's little Boston, after all, and I'm not yet too
late to square accounts with that _hombre._"
In the prospect of twining his two hands around the rascal's throat there
was a certain primitive pleasure that added impetus to the passage of
the Desert Rat up the lonely canyon. The thought lent new strength to

the man. Dying though he knew himself to be, yet would he square
accounts with the man who had murdered him. He would--
He paused. He had found the man with the two burros. There could be
no mistake about that, for the canyon ended in a sheer cliff that towered
two hundred feet above him, and in this horrible cul de sac lay the
bleached bones of two burros and a man.
Here was a conundrum. The Desert Rat had followed a fresh trail and
found stale bones. Despite his youth, the desert had put something of its
own grim haunting mystery into this man who loved it; to him had it
been 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 that
during all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how to