discontentedly. "It's too much like work to suit me, and I ain't in shape
to make a hard ride. I've got soft layin' around the ranch." He stretched
his stiff muscles and made a wry face. Then he smiled. "I'd like to see
that brat's face when she comes with my grub this mornin'." He looked off
again to the skyline.
"I ketched her eyein' me once or twice in a way that didn't look good to
me; and I had that notorious strong feelin' take holt of me that she
wasn't on the square. I'd better be sure nor sorry;--that's no josh. I
takes no chances, me--Smith; I tips my hand to no petticoat."
He noted with relief that the wind was rising. He was glad, for it would
obliterate every print and make tracking impossible. He had kept to the
rocks, as the unshod and now foot-sore horses bore evidence, but, even so,
there was always a chance of tell-tale prints.
"I can take it easy after I get to water," he told himself. "This water
business is ser'ous"--he looked uneasily at the stretch of desolation
ahead of him--"but unless the Injuns lied, they's _some_.
"I hope the boys are to home," he went on, "for if they are it won't take
us long to work these brands over. When they take 'em off my hands and I
gets my wad, I'll soak it away, me--Smith. I'll hand it in at the bank,
and I'll say to the dude at the winder, 'Feller,' I'll say, 'me and a
little Schoolmarm are goin' to housekeepin' after while, so just hang on
to that till I calls.'" Smith grinned appreciatively at the picture.
"His eyes will stick out till you could snare 'em with a log-chain, for I
ain't known as a marryin' man." His face sobered. "I've got to get to work
and get a wad--she shot that into me straight; and she's right. I couldn't
ask no woman like her to hang out her own wash in front of a two-roomed
shack. I got to get the _dinero_, and between man and man, Smith, like you
and me, I'm nowise particular how I gets it, so long as she don't know.
I'll take any old chance, me--Smith. And dead men's eyes hasn't got the
habit of follerin' me around in the dark, like some I've knowed. She'd
think I was a horrible feller if--but shucks! What's done's done."
He lifted his arms and stretched them toward the skyline, and his voice
vibrated:
"I love you, girl! I love you, and I couldn't hurt you no more nor a
baby!"
Before he coiled the picket-ropes and started the horses moving, he got
down on his knees and took a mouthful of water from a lukewarm pool. He
spat it upon the ground in disgust.
"That's worse nor pizen," he declared with a grimace. "You bet I've got to
strike water to-day somehow. The horses won't hardly touch this, and
they're all ga'nted up for the want of it. There ought to be water over
there in some of them gulches, seems-like"--he looked anxiously at the
expanse stretching interminably to the northeast--"and I'll have to haze
'em along until we hit it."
His tired horse seemed to sag beneath his weight as he landed heavily in
the saddle; and the band of foot-sore horses, the hair of their necks and
legs stiff with sweat and dust, bore little resemblance to the spirited
animals that Susie had driven from the reservation. It was now no effort
to keep up with them, and Smith herded them in front of him like a flock
of sheep. He wondered what another day, perhaps two days more, of
constant travel would do, if fifty miles or so had used them up. There was
not now the fear of capture to urge him forward, but the need of reaching
water was an equally great incentive to haste.
Smith travelled until late in the afternoon without an audible complaint
at the intense discomforts of the day. He found no water, and he ate only
a handful of sugar as he rode. He journeyed constantly toward the
northeast, in which direction, he thought, must be the ranch which was his
destination. At each intervening gulch a hope arose that it might contain
water, but always he was disappointed. Between the alkali dust and the
heat of the midday sun, which was unusually hot for the time of year, his
lips were cracked and his throat dry.
"Ain't this hell!" he finally muttered fretfully. "And no more jump in
this horse nor a cow. I can do without grub, but water! Oh, Lord! I could
lap up a gallon."
The slight motion of his lips started them bleeding. He wiped the blood
away on the back of his hand and continued:
"This is a reg'lar stretch of Bad Lands. If them blamed Injuns hadn't
lied, I could have packed water easy enough. They don't seem to be no end
to it, and I must have come forty mile. You're in for it, Smith. It's
goin' to be worse before it's better. If I could only lay in a crick--roll
in it--douse my face in it--soak my clothes in it! God! I'm dry!"
He spurred his horse, but there was no response from it. It was dead on
its feet, between the hard travel of the previous day and night and
another day without water. He cursed the horses ahead as they lagged and
necessitated extra steps.
He rode for awhile longer, until he realized that at the snail's pace they
were moving he was making little headway. A rest would pay better in the
long run, although there was some two hours of daylight left.
The dull-eyed horses stood with drooping heads, too thirsty and too tired
to hunt for the straggling spears of grass and salt sage which grew
sparsely in the alkali soil.
After Smith had unsaddled, he opened the grain-sack which contained his
provisions. Spreading them out, he stood and eyed them with contempt.
"And I calls myself a prairie man," he said aloud, in self-disgust.
"Swine-buzzom--when I'm perishin' of thirst! If only I'd put in a couple
of air-tights. Pears is better nor anything; they ain't so blamed sweet,
they're kind of cool, and they has juice you can drink. And tomaters--if
only I had tomaters! This here dude-food, this strawberry jam, is goin' to
make me thirstier than ever. No water to mix the flour with, nothing to
cook in but salt grease. Smith, you're up against it, you are."
He built a little sage-brush fire, over which he cooked his bacon, and
with it he ate a dry biscuit, but his thirst was so great that it
overshadowed his hunger. Chewing grains of coffee stimulated him somewhat,
but the bacon and glucose jam increased his thirst tenfold, if such a
thing were possible. His thoughts of Dora, and his dreams of the future,
which had helped him through the afternoon, were no longer potent. He
could now think only of his thirst--of his overpowering desire for water.
It filled his whole mental horizon. Water! Water! Water! Was there
anything in the world to be compared with it!
His face was deep-lined with distress as he sat by the camp-fire, trying
in vain to moisten his lips with his dry tongue. One picture after another
arose before him: streams of crystal water which he had forded; icy
mountain springs at which he had knelt and drank; deep wells from which he
had thrown whole bucketfuls away after he had quenched what he then called
thirst. Thirst! He never had known thirst. What he had called thirst was
laughable in comparison with this awful longing, this madness, this desire
beside which all else paled.
In any other than an alkali country, the lack of water for the same length
of time would have meant little more than discomfort, but the parching,
drying effect of the deadly white dust entailed untold suffering upon the
traveller caught unprepared as was Smith.
He rolled and smoked innumerable cigarettes, rising at intervals to pace
restlessly to and fro. His lips and tongue were so parched that both taste
and feeling seemed deadened. Had he not seen the smoke, it is doubtful if
he could have been sure he was smoking.
He wandered away from the fire after a time, walking aimlessly, having no
objective point. He desired only to be moving. Something like a half-mile
from his camp he came into a shallow cut which appeared to have been made
during bygone rainy seasons, but which now bore no evidence of having
carried water for many years. He followed it mechanically, stumbling
awkwardly in his high-heeled cowboy boots over the rocks which had washed
into its bed from the alkali-coated sides. Suddenly he cried aloud, with a
shrill, penetrating cry that was peculiar to him when surprised or
startled. He had inadvertently kicked up a rock which showed moisture
beneath it!
He began to run, with his mouth open, his bloodshot eyes wide and staring.
There was a bare chance that it might come from one of those desert
springs which appear and disappear at irregular intervals in the sand. As
he ran, he saw hoof-tracks in what had once been mud, and his heart beat
higher with hope. He had a thought in his half-crazed brain that the water
might disappear before he could reach it, and he ran like one frenzied
with fear. The world was swimming around him, his heart was pounding in
his breast, yet still he stumbled on at top speed.
[Illustration: IT MEANT DEATH--BUT IT WAS WET!--IT WAS WATER!]
The cut grew deeper, and indications of moisture increased. He saw a
growth of large sage-brush, then a clump or two of rank, saw-edged grass.
These things meant water! He turned a bend and there, beneath a high bank,
was a pool crusted to the edge with alkali!
Smith knew that it was strongly alkali; that it meant certain
illness--enough of it, death. But it was wet!--it was water!--and he must
drink. He fell, rather than knelt, in it. When taste came back he realized
that it was flat and lukewarm, but he continued to gulp it down. At any
other time it would have nauseated him, but now he drank to his capacity.
When he could drink no more, he sat up--realizing what he had done. He had
swallowed liquid poison--nothing less. The result was inevitable. He was
going to be ill--excruciatingly, terribly ill, alone in the Bad Lands!
This was as certain as was the fact that night had come.
"I was so dry," he whimpered, "I couldn't help it! I was so dry!" He
scrambled to his feet.
"I gotta get back to camp. This water's goin' to raise thunder when it
begins to get in its work. I gotta get back to my blankets and lay down."
Before he reached the heap of ashes which he called camp, the first
symptoms of his coming agony began to show themselves. He felt slightly
nauseated; then a quick, griping pain which was a forerunner of others
which were to make him sweat blood.
Many of these springs and stagnant pools carry arsenic in large
quantities, and of such was the water of which Smith had drunk. In his
exhaustion, the poison and accompanying impurities took hold of him with a
fierceness which it might not have done had he been in perfect physical
condition; but his stomach, already disordered from irregular and improper
food, absorbed the poison with avidity, and the result was an agony
indescribable.
As he writhed on his saddle-blankets under the stars, he groaned and
cursed that unknown God above him. His face and hands were covered with a
cold sweat; his forehead and finger-tips were icy. The night air was
chill, but he was burning with an inward fever, and his thirst now was
akin to madness. With all his strength of will, he fought against his
desire to return to the pool.
Smith did not expect to die. He felt that if he could keep his senses and
not crawl back to drink again, he would pull through somehow. The living
hell he now endured would pass.
He wallowed and threshed about like a suffering animal, beating the earth
with his clenched fists, during the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching pain.
His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into
insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother's
face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known.
He was just Smith--self-centred--alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering
and struggling for his life. His anguish found expression in the single
sentence:
"I'm sick! I'm sick! Oh, God! I'm sick!" He repeated it in every key with
every inflection, and his moans lost themselves in the silence of the
desert.
Yet underneath it all, when his agony was at its height, he still believed
in himself. In a kind of subconscious arrogance, he believed that he was
stronger than Fate, more powerful than Death. He would not die; he would
live because he wanted to live. Death was not for him--Smith. For others,
but not for him.
At last the paroxysms became less frequent and lost their violence. When
they ceased altogether, he lay limp and half-conscious. He was content to
remain motionless until the flies and insects of the sand roused him to
the fact that another day had come.
He was incredibly weak, and it took all his remaining strength to throw
his forty-pound cow-saddle upon his horse's back. His knees shook under
him, and he had to rest before he could lift his foot to the stirrup and
pull himself into the seat.
Before he rode away he turned and looked at the hollow in the sand where
his blankets had been.
"That was a close squeak, Smith," was all he said.
He had no desire for breakfast; in fact, he could not have eaten, for his
tongue was swollen, and his throat felt too dry to swallow. His skin was
the color of his saddle-leather, and his inflamed eye-balls had the
redness of live coals. Smith was far from handsome that morning.
His own recent sufferings had in nowise made him more merciful: he spurred
his stiff and lifeless horse without pity, but he spurred uselessly. It
stumbled under him as he drove the spiritless band toward the hopeless
waste ahead of him.
"Unless I'm turned around, we ought to get out of this to-day," he
thought. The effort of speaking aloud was too great to be made. "Unless
I'm lost, or fall off my horse, we ought to make it sure."
Distance had meant nothing to him during the first evening and night of
his ride. He had fixed his eye upon the furthermost object within his
range of vision and ridden for it--buoyant, confident, as his horse's
flying feet ate up the intervening miles. Now he shrank from looking
ahead. He dreaded to lift his eyes to the interminable desolation
stretching before him. The minutes seemed hours long; time was protracted
as though he had been eating hasheesh. He felt as if he had ridden for a
week, before his horse's shadow told him that noon had come. The jar of
his horse hurt him, and it all seemed unreal at times, like a torturing
nightmare from which he must soon awake. He rode long distances with
closed eyes as the day wore on. The world, red and wavering, swung around
him, and he gripped his saddle-horn hard. The only real thing, the agony
of which was too great to be mistaken for anything else, was his thirst.
This was superlatively intense. There were moments when he had a desire to
slide easily from his horse into the sand and lie still--just to be rid
for a time of that jar that hurt him so. He viewed the distance to the
ground contemplatively. It was not great. He would merely crumple up like
a drunken person and go to sleep.
But these moments soon passed: the instinct of self-preservation was quick
to assert itself. Each time, he took a fresh grip on the slack reins and
kept his horse plodding onward, ever onward, through the heavy sand and
blistering alkali dust, and always to the northeast, where somewhere there
was relief which somehow he must reach.
Mile after mile crept under his horse's lagging feet. The midday sun beat
down upon him, drying the very blood in his veins, scorching him,
shrivelling him, and yet there seemed no end to the waterless gulches, to
the sand, the cactuses, the stunted sage-brush. His horse was stumbling
oftener, but he felt no pity--only irritation that it had not more
stamina. A sort of numbness, the lethargy of great weakness, was creeping
over him; his heart was sagging with a dull despair. He believed that he
must be lost, yet he was past cursing or complaining aloud. Only an
occasional gasp or a fretful, inarticulate sound came when his horse
stumbled badly.
He thought he saw a barbed wire fence. A barbed wire fence meant
civilization! He swung his horse and rode toward it. The dark spots he had
thought were posts were only sage-brush. The smarting of his eye-balls and
eyelids aroused him to an astonishing fact: he was crying in his weakness,
crying of disappointment like a child! But he was astonished most that he
had tears to shed--that they had not dried up like his blood.
Tears! He remembered his last tears, and they kept on sliding down his
cheek now as he recalled the occasion. His father had given him a colt
back there where they slept between sheets. He had broken it himself, and
taught it tricks. It whinnied to him when he passed the stable. The other
boys envied him his colt, and he meant to show it at the fair. He came
home one day and the colt was gone. His father handed him a silver dollar.
He had thrown the money at his father and struck him in the face, and
while the tears streamed from his eyes he had cursed his father with the
oaths with which his father had so frequently cursed him; and he had kept
on cursing until he was beaten into unconsciousness. There had been no
love between them, ever, but he had not expected that. Since then there
had been no time or inclination for tears, for it was then he had "quit
the flat." The rage of his boyhood came back to Smith as he thought of it
now. He swore, though it hurt him to speak.
His eyes were still smarting when he raised them to see a horseman on a
distant ridge. The sight roused him like a stimulant. Was he friend or
foe? He reined his horse, and, drawing his rifle from its scabbard,
waited; for the stranger had seen him and was riding toward him down the
ridge.
"If he ain't my kind, I'll have to stop him," Smith muttered.
The strength of excitement came to him, and once more he sat erect in the
saddle, fingering the trigger as the horseman came steadily on.
"He rides like a Texican," Smith thought. There was something familiar in
the stranger's outlines, the way he threw his weight in one stirrup, but
Smith was taking no chances. He put out a hand in warning, and the other
man stopped.
The swarthy face of the stranger wore a comprehending grin. No honest man
drove horses across the Bad Lands. He threw the Indian sign of friendship
to Smith, and they each advanced.
"How far to water, Clayt?"
"Well, dog-gone me! Smith!"
"How far to water?" Smith yelled the words in hoarse ferocity.
The stranger glanced at the barebacked horses, and then at the shimmering
heat waves of the desert.
"Just around the ridge," he answered. "My God, man, didn't you pack
water?"
But Smith was already out of hearing.
XVI
TINHORN FRANK SMELLS MONEY
Smith did not care for money in itself; that is, he did not care for it
enough to work for it, or to hoard it when he had it. Yet perhaps even
more than most persons he loved the feel of it in his fingers, the
sensation of having it in his pocket. Smith was vain, in his way, and
money satisfied his vanity. It gave him prestige, power, the attention he
craved. He could call any flashy talker's bluff when his pockets were full
of money. It imparted self-assurance. He could the better indulge his
propensity for resenting slights, either real or fancied. Money would buy
him out of trouble. Yes, Smith liked the feel of money. He took a roll of
banknotes from the belt pocket of his leather chaps and counted them for
the third time.
"I'll buy a few drinks, flash this wad on them pinheads in town, and then
I'll soak it away." He returned the roll to his pocket with an expression
of satisfaction upon his face.
He had done well with the horses. The "boys" had paid him a third more
than he had expected; they had done so, he knew, as an incentive to
further transactions. And Smith had outlined a plan to them which had made
their eyes sparkle.
"It's risky, but if you can do it----" they had said.
"Sure, I can do it, and I'll start as soon as it's safe after I get back
to the ranch. I gotta get to work and make a stake--_me_," he had
declared.
They had looked at him quizzically.
"The fact is, I'm tired of livin' under my hat. I aims to settle down."
"And reform?" They had laughed uproariously.
"Not to notice."
Smith sincerely believed that nothing stood between him and Dora but his
lack of money. Once she saw it, the actual money, when he could go to her
and throw it in her lap, a hatful, and say, "Come on, girl"--well, women
were like that, he told himself.
Ahead of Smith, on the dusty flat, was the little cow-town, looking, in
the distance, like a scattered herd of dingy sheep. He was glad his ride
was ended for the day. He was thirsty, hot, and a bit tired.
Tinhorn Frank, resting the small of his back against a monument of elk and
buffalo horns in front of his log saloon, was the first to spy Smith
ambling leisurely into town.
"There's Smithy!" he exclaimed to the man who loafed beside him, "and he's
got a roll!"
His fellow lounger looked at him curiously.
"Tinhorn, I b'lieve you kin _smell_ money; and I swear they's kind of a
scum comes over your eyes when you see it. How do you know he's carryin' a
roll?"
Tinhorn Frank laughed.
"I know Smithy as well as if I had made him. I kin tell by the way he
rides. I always could. When he's broke he's slouchy-like. He don't take no
pride in coilin' his rope, and he jams his hat over his eyes--tough. Look
at him now--settin' square in the saddle, his rope coiled like a top
Californy cowboy on a Fourth of July. That's how I know. Hello, Smithy!
Fall off and arrigate."
"Hullo!" Smith answered deliberately.
"How's she comin'?"
"Slow." He swung his leg over the cantle of the saddle.
"What'll you have?" Tinhorn slapped Smith's back so hard that the dust
rose.
"Get me out somethin' stimulating, somethin' fur-reachin', somethin' that
you can tell where it stops. I want a drink that feels like a yard of
barb-wire goin' down." Smith was tying his horse.
"Here's somethin' special," said Tinhorn, when Smith went inside. "I keeps
it for my friends."
Smith swallowed nearly a tumblerful.
"When I drinks, I drinks, and I likes somethin' I can notice." He wiped
the tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand.
"I guarantee you kin notice that in about five minutes. It's a never
failing remedy for man and beast--not meaning to claim that its horse
liniment at all. Put it back, Smithy; your money ain't good here!"
Tinhorn Frank's dark eyes gleamed with an avaricious light at sight of the
roll of yellow banknotes which Smith flung carelessly upon the bar, but he
had earned his living by his wits too long to betray eagerness. He masked
the adamantine hardness of his grasping nature beneath an air of generous
and bluff good-fellowship.
He was a dark man, with a skin of oily sallowness; thickset, with
something of the slow ungainliness of a toad. His head was set low between
stooped shoulders, and his crafty eyes had in them a look of scheming,
scheming always for his own interests. Smith knew his record as well as he
knew his own: a dance-hall hanger-on in his youth, despised of men; a
blackmailer; the keeper of a notorious road-house; a petty grafter in a
small political office in the little cow-town. Smith understood perfectly
the source of his present interest, yet it flattered him almost as much as
if it had been sincere, it pleased him as if he had been the object of a
gentleman's attentions. When he had money, Smith demanded satellites,
sycophants who would laugh boisterously at his jokes, praise him in broad
compliments, and follow him like a paid retinue from saloon to saloon.
This was enjoying life! And upon this weakness, the least clever, the
most insignificant and unimportant person could play if he understood
Smith.
The word had gone down the line that Smith was in town with money. They
rallied around him with loud protestations of joy at the sight of him.
Smith held the centre of the stage, he was the conspicuous figure, the
magnet which drew them all. He gloried in it, revelled in his popularity;
and the "special brand" was beginning to sizzle in his veins.
"I'm feelin' lucky to-day, me--Smith!" he cried exultantly. "I has a
notorious idea that I can buck the wheel and win!"
He had not meant to gamble--he had told himself that he would not; but his
admiring friends urged him on, his blood was running fast and hot, his
heart beat high with confidence and hope. Big prospects loomed ahead of
him; success looked easy. He flung his money recklessly upon the red and
black, and with throbbing pulses watched the wheel go round.
Again and again he won. It seemed as if he could not lose.
"I told you!" he cried. "I'm feelin' lucky!"
When he finally stopped, his winnings were the envy of many eyes.
"Set 'em up, Tinhorn! Everybody drink! Bring in the horses!"
Bedlam reigned. It was "Smithy this" and "Smithy that," and it was all as
the breath of life to Smith.