PARDS IN PERIL
As Lennon's clasp relaxed, the girl's tightened. She drew him toward the
pony.
"You've got to ride," she said. "You can't stand the pace. That poison
is no joke. Don't want to hold me back, do you?"
The question overcame Lennon's reluctance. The girl had refused to leave
him, and she was right about the poison. He could endure the severe pain
of his wounded hand, but he was still weak and badly shaken from the
effects of the venom. Unless he rode he would be a drag upon her.
"Very well," he agreed, and he permitted her to help him clamber up into
the saddle.
No time was lost over lengthening the stirrup leathers. Carmena handed
him his rifle and the half-emptied gallon canteen, caught up the small
one and her own rifle, and started off in lead of the pony. Her easy
swinging stride, though seemingly unhurried, covered the ground faster
than the pony could walk. Every little while the animal had to break
into a jog to catch up with her.
At the far end of the scattered mesquite growth Carmena edged off to the
left, down a shallow wash that brought them around to the west side of a
ridge. Under cover of the gaunt earth-rib of worn rock she headed north,
straight for the distant towers of Triple Butte.
The deceptive green of occasional palo-verde bushes now gave place to
the columns of the giant sahuaro. The fluted, leafless stems of these
high-towering cactus candelabras bristled with fierce thorns, yet each
was crowned with the glory of a gorgeous foot-wide blossom.
Over the loose hot sand, amidst this shadeless mockery of a forest,
Carmena swung steadily along at her graceful stride. Her movements
seemed as lacking in effort as the lope of a coyote or the bound of a
cat. Lennon would not have realized how greatly she was exerting herself
had he not seen how frequently she drank from her canteen.
No one of white blood, however thoroughly inured to thirst, can walk
fast under the blistering sun, in the bone-dry air of the desert,
without need of much water. Lennon, though riding, was no less parched
than the girl. He was fresh from a moist climate, and the Gila monster
poison had put him into a feverish condition. Hard as he tried, he could
not resist drinking. His canteen was emptied even sooner than
Carmena's.
This was little past mid-afternoon. They had left the sahuaros behind
and were coming down among widely scattered salt bushes to the border of
an utterly barren alkali flat. For the first time since the stop in the
mesquite, Carmena halted her quick advance. But it was not to rest. The
feverish crimson of Lennon's face sobered her reassuring smile. She
peered searchingly back along the trail, glanced at the sun, and hastily
transferred to their empty canteens all but a quart from the full
canteen on the saddlehorn.
"We've got to make it last till sundown, Jack," she warned. "Then, if
only we can hold our lead, we'll be able to keep going all night."
Lennon drew out two half dollars. "How about trying these in our
mouths?"
"They'll help," she replied, and she took one. "Be ready to tie your
neckerchief over your nose, soon as we strike the alkali."
The wisdom of this advice was evident when they started out across the
snow-white flat. Every step stirred up clouds of alkali dust that hung
about the fugitives like thick smoke. The impalpable powder penetrated
their clothes, smarted in their eyes, and all but choked them, even
behind the veiling neckerchiefs.
Before they had half crossed the fearful dust flat Carmena was walking
as slowly as the pony. At the far side she sank down beside a
thick-stemmed cactus. Lennon, half delirious from fever, sought to
spring off, with the vague idea of forcing her to ride. He succeeded
only in tumbling upon the sand. The startled pony shied clear. With a
smothered cry, Carmena leaped up to grasp his bridle.
"Close call!" she gasped at Lennon. "If he'd made off--no show for us at
all."
Lennon was too far gone for speech. His canteen was already half empty.
Carmena gave him a sip from her own and dragged him around until his
head lay in the small blot of shade made by a cactus stem. Half an hour
passed before he was able to get back into the saddle. But the rest
appeared to have fully restored the girl's strength. She set off at a
pace that again forced the pony into an occasional jog.
After a time the sheltering ridge ran down into the sandy level of the
desert. Yet Carmena continued to find a route protected by inequalities
of the ground or by growths of cactus and thorn scrub from any eyes that
might be peering across the Basin. As the sun sank nearer to the western
rim of buttes and mesas she kept an ever closer watch to the rear. Her
own and Lennon's canteens were again empty and her seemingly tireless
stride was at last beginning to flag.
By the time the lower edge of the sun touched the rim of the Basin the
fugitives had come opposite a long range of broken hills. Carmena
dragged herself wearily up over an out-thrust spur ridge. Lennon was
swaying in the saddle, and his tongue, like hers, had begun to swell.
But the girl did not offer to open the canteen on the saddlehorn.
At the top of the ridge she hurried the pony down below the skyline and
crept back to peer over a ledge. Far to the rear, across the
shadow-streaked waste, her anxious eyes sighted a group of moving dots.
She ran to seize the pony's bridle and urge him into a jog.
"Must hurry!" she rasped in a thirst-harshened voice. "They're trailing
us--on the lope!"
The alarm shocked Lennon out of his semi-delirium. His relaxing grip on
the rifle tightened. He straightened in the saddle. Carmena did not look
back at him. She was turning into the mouth of a wash that appeared to
head over toward the far side of the hills. Half a mile up the wash the
gravelly bottom changed to loose stones. Carmena smashed the smaller
canteen and tossed it off to one side.
Some distance farther along the footing became all rock. Carmena stopped
on a flat ledge and flung the big canteen she was carrying as far as she
could up the arroyo. She then changed from her boots to the long-legged
moccasins that she had hidden in one of the saddlebags. No less hastily
she cut strips from the Navaho saddleblanket to tie over the pony's
lightly shod hoofs.
The sun had now been down for several minutes, and the clear desert
twilight was beginning to fade. Carmena turned the pony and carefully
led him at an easy angle up a flight of solid step ledges on the side of
the arroyo. Half circling a hill, she descended another arroyo that ran
northwest, back down into the level desert.
By the time the edge of the broken ground had been reached dusk was
deepening into night. Carmena halted and eased Lennon down out of the
saddle. Water, trickled a few drops at a time between his cracked lips,
gradually soothed his swollen tongue and parched throat. His fever was
already subsiding in the coolness of nightfall.
Carmena gave him almost half of the remaining quart of water. A half
pint more she used to rinse her own mouth and moisten the nostrils of
the pony. The few sips left were held in reserve.
Scant as was the water ration, it enabled both the girl and Lennon to
suck at lumps of raw bacon. They lay silently mouthing and chewing the
greasy fat, their rifles ready and their ears alert for the slightest
thud of approaching hoofs. But no sound broke the deathlike stillness of
the desert night.
"Looks like we fooled 'em," whispered Carmena. "They must have found the
canteens--figured we'd gone desperate with thirst and headed on across
for the nearest water hole. Can you mount again?"
Lennon dragged himself to his feet.
"You're wonderful!" he murmured. "If you'd leave me here--I'm only a
drag. You could ride at a gallop----"
She grasped his arm and pushed him around beside the horse.
"Don't be looney. We can go all night without a drop. Count on me to
out-travel the pony till sun-up. Get on. You don't suppose I'm going
back on my pard, do you?"
There was no room for argument. Lennon's condition was still so serious
that she had to help him into the saddle. With the pony in lead, she set
out straight toward the North Star.
Before many miles Lennon caught himself lapsing into a doze. He had
almost dropped his rifle. To make certain against its loss, he thrust it
into his cartridge belt like a pistol. After this he drowsed off again
into a half torpor of sleep and exhaustion. Some automatic functioning
of his subconscious mind kept him balanced in the saddle.
When at last he roused from the stupor it was to a miserable
realization of pain and weariness and cold. A bleak gray light was
filtering over the eastern rim of mesas down into the blackness of the
Basin. Dry as was this land of desolation, it was not so utterly arid as
the sea-level deserts of the lower Colorado.
Lennon shivered and forced open his heavy eyelids. He first made out the
bowed figure of Carmena plodding along, with one backward-dragged hand
noosed in the reins of the weary pony. The gray light gradually
brightened. He saw that the girl was swaying, almost staggering. He
forced out a hoarse cry:
"Stop!"
The call broke the hypnotic spell of motion that alone had enabled the
girl to keep placing one leaden foot before the other. She tottered and
sank down and lay still. Lennon dropped out of the saddle to bend over
her. Like the knees of the pony, the girl's moccasins were torn with the
thorns of cacti and desert bushes, against which they had struck in the
dark.
She had not fainted. Her dark eyes gazed up at Lennon, wide with an
anguish of self-reproach.
"Used up--can't make it," she whispered. "No chance for both--after
sun-up. Ride hard toward Triple Butte."
Lennon's reply was to open the canteen and hold it to her lips. Only a
few drops were left when she managed to thrust it away. He put his
uninjured arm about her slender waist and lifted her to her feet.
"Ride--your turn," he commanded. "I walk. Never say die!"
Her sunken eyes lighted with a faint glow. A last flicker of strength
enabled her, with his help, to pull herself into the saddle. Lennon
caught up her rifle and started off toward Triple Butte in desperate
haste.
An hour after sunrise found him still staggering forward almost at a dog
trot. The northern border mesas of the Basin were now only a short
distance ahead. But already his swollen tongue was beginning to blacken
in his mouth. When at last he came to the foot of the lower mesa he
could barely totter.
Carmena rode up alongside. She huskily whispered for him to hand over
her rifle and grasp the stirrup leather. He had not dragged along beside
the pony more than a hundred paces when a jerk on the reins headed the
weary beast around into the mouth of a broad canon. Carmena uttered a
sharp cry and pointed ahead. Near the base of the canon wall a dark
patch on the ledges was shimmering in the sunrays.
Hope flared high in the hearts of the perishing fugitives--only to
flicker and die out again in utter despair. The black patch was
water--a tiny spring that seeped from a horizontal crevice between the
stratas of rock--but its trickle was spread out in a paper-thin sheet
down the sloping lower ledges. At their foot it vanished in the dry sand
of the canon bed.
They could cool their swollen tongues and so obtain temporary relief
from their suffering. But they could not suck up enough water to quench
their terrible thirst. Nor could they collect in the canteen even a gill
of water to take with them.
Lennon, however, was an engineer. Even while hope fled from him, his
eyes were peering around with the scrutiny of a trained observer and
thinker.
His roving gaze fixed upon a bank a little way out from the canon mouth.
He staggered down to it and came back with a handful of dry clay. This
he spread out upon the least tilted of the wet ledges. By patting and
scraping he soon had a little ball that kneaded like putty in his eager
fingers.
Carmena already had perceived his purpose and was hurrying to fetch a
heaping hatful of the dry clay. Before many minutes they had built a
little concave dam, in which the down-seeping water slowly but steadily
collected.
When at last they had quenched their thirst Lennon took his rifle and
went to sit under a shady ledge where he could look out into the Basin.
Carmena lingered at the spring to water the pony and fill the canteen.
She then gave all the cornmeal to the beast and brought slices of raw
bacon to share with Lennon.
He clasped the hand in which she held out his first slice.
"So we made it, after all. Good work?"
"Yes, we made it, Jack!" she exulted. "Close shave--but worth the risk.
I know now for sure you're a man, a real man!"
Her glowing eyes brought a deeper red into Lennon's sunburnt face.
"I'm still pretty much of a tenderfoot," he protested. "And there's this
game arm. I'd rather run than fight."
The girl smiled.
"That's all right till you get back the use of your hand. But it won't
hurt to show those bronchos the range of your rifle. They're coming a
bit too fast to suit us."
Lennon stared out across the open plain. Rather more than a mile away a
dozen or more riders were loping along the trail of the fugitives.
The sights slid up on Lennon's rifle. He put the butt to his left
shoulder and rested the barrel across a rock. The first bullet raised a
puff of dust a little to the left of the Indians. The second must have
shrieked close over their heads. They wheeled their ponies and scattered
out in fanlike formation.
Lennon's fourth shot caught one of the ponies broadside. The beast
tumbled over and lay motionless. Its rider dashed behind a cactus. The
rest of the Apaches wrenched their ponies about and raced to get back
beyond range. They had not bargained on a rifle that could shoot so far.
A renegade prefers to kill without risk to himself.
"That's enough," chuckled Carmena. "There's no cover for 'em unless they
crawl up afoot. Some will ride around and climb the mesa. Time we were
moving. Come on. We'll beat 'em into the Hole."
Lennon elevated his rifle and sent a parting shot over the heads of the
fleeing riders. When he came running back into the canon mouth Carmena
had the canteen swung to the saddlehorn and was lacing on her boots, in
place of the torn moccasins.
After a last deep drink from the pool and another sombreroful for the
pony, the little dam was carefully scraped off the ledge and the clay
covered with a loose boulder. The Apaches would be able to lap the wet
stone but not to drink. They were not engineers or dam builders.