Anthony M. Rud

“ A suicidal failing that, one that a desert man such as Chotty ought never to allow; for always at the elbow of those who venture into or through the wastes is the gaunt, greedy hellion of thirst, waiting, sneering. What man of the alkali has not lived to see the day when the thirst devil has come upon him, altering deep laid plans, forcing a quick retreat or a flight, or worse?
Simply nothing at all happened. Chotty and his burro alone were there, night fell, and no one else was within sight, or appeared. After an hour Chotty allowed the gun to drop from his aching wrist. ”

“ Apparently Chotty Bedell, fearing Bill Halliday’s stern retribution, had hesitated to molest anything this time, and had gone away. Max heaved a sigh of infinite relief, for he dreaded the sinister bully with all his heart. Using the rope with which he had climbed—and which, fastened only by a hempen cord hard to discern from the ground, and a rock for weight, had been thrown over the upward eight feet, while Max was in the cave—little Max first lowered some bulging, heavy sacks, and then came down slowly and painfully, his feet against the rock and every sinew strained. ”

“ Crouching there, short necked like a buzzard in the queer flare of light and shadow, was the figure of a man whom Bill stared at and found oddly familiar. It was not more than a fugitive sense of something wrong that stirred in him, yet it called for caution; and Bill respected the desert and its messages so greatly that he would not knowingly disregard a single one of its occult waves. Hunches, some men called them. Well, they often were right.
He abandoned his forthright stride. He bent, tying the rawhide strings which bound his right, pivoted holster, to his thigh. ”

“ And now to exist until the outlaw gunman came again! Max ran over to the same barrel cactus which Chotty had chopped in half for the use of his burro. The pulp had not hardened too much. Max delved, and found the juicy, water-bearing stuff just what he needed. Perhaps the rasping roughage of it contained no real nourishment, yet it would enable him to stave off the immediate pangs of hunger and thirst until Chotty came again. And after this next visitation Max either would be alive and alone, or dead and uncaring. ”

“ The young prospector, however, was looking for something more. There was no chance here for panning out a fortune, or even for sluicing it in case some outside chance gave the requisite water supply. He was looking toward the gravely bed of this ancient stream, toward a spot deep below this silt, where pockets of the heavier gold might lie. Max Kurtt frowned a little deeper at that. He, too, was seeking treasure, and more than likely his search was fully as harebrained, though he did not think that. ”

“ Animals wounded or aged and unable to struggle further against the wiles of thirst.
Thirst. Arsenic in the bubbling water. Six morosely staring skulls upon a rock shelf below a placard. White sifted mesquite, scrubby piñon and gaunt cactus. These were the lures of the shunned oasis, Six Bones!
CHOTTY BEDELL came with one heavily loaded burro; came from a toilsome circuit of the Quitobaguitas which extended leagues into the plain La Abra, and on which baking heat is the only unflinching constant, the only thing not called queer. ”

“ He was confident that below soil which bore flake and grain gold, as did this, he must discover either placer pockets or ore.
A MAN who that moment lay with blackened tongue extending his blackened lips, a man who breathed with difficulty, could have told Bill Halliday much. He could have said that this silt gold meant nothing beyond; that in order to find the bed rock of the river which once had made a broad bed through this desert, a prospector would have to dig more than sixty feet. ”

“ With that much to offer, though, he could have gone to Ajo or any other town peopled by unfortunate prospectors, and bought a half share in a whole season of gold seeking. Chotty rather liked that sort of thing. He didn’t object at all to the desert, or to the arid crags where men sought flecked white quartz or veins of knife-soft silver; but the pick and drill, or even the circling pan of the placer hunter, did not appeal. As all the deluded or wise old rats who made their home where nature’s skull is bare to the fangs, he loved gold and desired it. ”

“ The thought seared across Chotty’s mind, and suddenly he laughed. The cache! Somehow he had thrust the canteen in among one of the treasure sacks when he had put them away. Darn’ fool! Still, it was almost certain. Any alternative was crazy to consider. There weren’t any such things as spooks. A dead man was dead! His skull and bleaching skeleton out there couldn’t even see or hear the taunts Chotty had been throwing out toward the immensity of the desert for the last weeks! ”

“ FORTY minutes before the sun Chotty awoke. At first he regarded his surroundings dully, and pottered into the first details of breakfast making without as much as recalling his fears. Things were wrong, however. He could not find his canteen. Great heavens, it was not there!
In a rush all recurred to him. He snatched out a gun. Thereafter, even while he rushed madly hither and thither in the panic of deadly fear, he did not relinquish the weapon for an instant. ”

“ If an old man’s observation counts at all, it is the painful truth that no marriages made for money yield permanent happiness. Of course if this young woman loves you she will take you. If she does not, the wealth that you may find will no more than cloud the findings of her heart. And Bill, there are just three things in the world which every true man must seek, or be less than a true man! One is the handclasp such as you offered me back there.” Max nodded and gestured in the general direction of the sierra. ”

“ With the first gray finger of dawn stirring the murk of the zenith came that hour when nerves surrender, when outdoor men in the grip of fatigue sleep as in death. Chotty had dreamed, had tossed, had wakened in a perspiration, gripping for his six-guns. ”

“ Chotty’s brain was working again, He wondered at his period of spineless quiescence. Why had he not inquired, done something against the day when Bill Halliday would foot the long score of indebtedness? Foot it involuntarily, of course. Chotty still recalled the resolution he had made, which was, in short, to creep upon that lanky tenderfoot from the rear, and shoot. If the young man was not quite dead when Chotty crept upon him afterward, so much the better; Chotty would take no big chance there, however! ”

“ Max smiled. “You are my partner now, so I shall tell you. If we discover the treasure of Itimixtl, I shall take my half and equip a private laboratory where I may putter through my old age in happiness; for that is my great dream, friend of mine! You—you will take your portion, and with it you will go to a city where dwells a girl you love. Also, however, you will carry with the treasure what I might term an agent for happiness—an old man’s advice!”
“Shoot!” grinned Bill, albeit he waited anxiously for the deliberate narrator to reach his point. ”

“ He wished heartily that he had not left those first bags of ore at the poison spring. Something indefinite—though not a fear of that sprawled body left where it had fallen—urged him not to return to Six Bones.
It was a genuine hunch, an intuition—let anyone call it as he wills. Desert wanderers feel it strongly and quite often. Most pay some attention to it, though scoffing as they obey. It seldom is wrong. It may be an occult sense of self preservation such as many of the large carnivori and the vultures possess. At any rate, Chotty Bedell was uneasy ”

“ THE meaner the dog, under some circumstances, the quicker he has his day, however. While Bill toiled in his widening and deepening hole in the ground, and little Max with patience infinite climbed one after another of the rocky involutions of Quitobaquita, Chotty Bedell drank and gamed. His money melted, particularly after he killed the man at Sediente who made fun of the scars and toothless gaps in Chotty’s face. For then Chotty had to recross the line, and take his chances that Ajo had forgotten his looks and character. ”

“ Men and beasts that can do so avoid this spot with reason. At first sight that seems queer, for on the northernmost declivities of the honeycombed, sun-baked Sierra Quitobaquita, Six Bones appears a green oasis in a hell of reds, yellows and alkaline white. To the east is the thirsty plain of La Abra. Six shots from a rifle, such as Chotty Bedell carried, would take one from this fag end of Pima County, Arizona, into Mexico. To the west and to the south, arise the craggy nakedness of Quitobaquita. ”

“ But then, even if this was not gold, it was stuff that was worth a lot. Ten thousand simoleons, five hundred great big yellow boys, more than he could carry in a half dozen money belts, would put him on easy street for life! Even in this instant, as his brain was envisioning some plan for duping the little man into telling him the methods of marketing the lesser treasure, Chotty did not dream of letting Max Kurtt escape. ”

“ Out there he found a whole skeleton, one to which tatters of cloth still clung. The coyotes had disarticulated some of the joints, yet with his scientist’s skill the rearranging in an attitude would be simple. “Larger skull than mine,” he commented aloud. “Chotty never will see the difference, though.”
First dropping to his knees and offering a single sentence of prayer for this unknown one who had died so terribly, Max lifted the bones in small armfuls and carried them back to the spot where he had lain with his thirsty mouth pressed against the ground. ”

“ From the start, when a pair of the heavy sacks—too much of a load for any burro to carry handily—were loaded on, and Max was weighted down with all the non-essentials of camp equipment while Chotty took care of the canteens and food, it was a barely disguised inquisition. Chotty intended to find out minute details concerning the method of marketing the valuable ore, “hydrogen peroxide,” for he intended to do that marketing himself. While Max was valuable to him as a pack animal, and until that necessary information was in the outlaw’s possession, Max would live. That is, possibly he would live ”

“ I think, little tillicum, that we may write off Chotty Bedell’s many sins as expiated! Now—” and Bill Halliday changed the subject abruptly because he detected signs of weakening in the countenance of Max—“won’t you give me the lowdown on this mysterious treasure. Gosh, I’m aching to have a look at it. Is it in those sacks back there in the cave?”
“Yes, part of it. Come with me,” said Max. “Do you know, I kind of wish we’d let him off with his life?”
“A rattler’s fangs fill up with poison overnight,” responded Bill Halliday tersely. “When one tries to bite you, squash it!” ”

“ All saw a man transformed. No longer a dejected, dusty prospector, returned with nothing to show for his greatest hopes, Bill had torn off his sombrero and was dancing a wild fandango of joy, and whooping as often as he could get breath for more noise! ”

“ Chotty talked aloud in a dry, grating voice. He was making preparations now for the long trip across the night stretches of alkali; and he was doing the job well, hacking down the last two of the cacti, stripping off pieces to chew, to assuage his brain, swollen tongue and threat. Even with the half-dry stuff to yield him a modicum of water, he would been thirsty man by the time he reached the destination, which would be elsewhere, this time than the cache back on the: other side of Quitobaquita. ”

“ Chotty’s lowering brows raised suddenly. He clumped down to his knees, unscrewed the canteen cap, sloshed it appraisingly, shook his head. “I ain’t got much water left——” A sudden glint of recognition came into Chotty’s eyes. This was the damned dude tenderfoot he had made dance to the spitting of his guns in the saloon at Ajo, the previous spring!
“If that man dies I shall shoot your head off!” ”

“ Chotty grinned to himself as he drank from the gurgling canteen. How good that gushing spring of deadly quality would look to this little man he hated!
“We gotta keep what water we got, till we get back to the keg,” he stated, when six miles had passed. And grinned again at Max’s woebegone face. “Yuh kin fill up, though, at the spring ahead. There’s where we’ll cache this stuff. It’s inside the U.S. line, and we kin come down after it with six-seven reg’lar mules what kin carry somep’n. Great water at the spring ahead, cool and sweet like sody! ”

“ So it came about that Chotty, imagining that his arch enemy must be prospecting northward, near Six Bones in Quitobaquita, a place many another tenderfoot had tried to his sorrow, started on a long detour is search of Bill Halliday. Chotty reached the arsenic spring of Six Bones, which he knew right well, even as Billi Halliday was throwing the shovelfuls from his hopeless diggings far away on the plain of La Abra. ”

“ Bill wasn’t out. He never lost consciousness. It took him a time to lurch to his knees, however, and blink about the cone shaped excavation for a possible enemy. The single Colt still hung at his right hip. The other gun with the spare belt was in sight on top of his grub pack, undisturbed. And the canteens were there; they gurgled with fulness when shaken. ”

“ Eighteen miles of malpais cannot be traversed in a hurry, even by a lanky, earnest giant who improves every minute with a hundred or more forty-inch strides. On the most level stretches Bill bettered four miles an hour, There were broken, miniature mesas, however, and shallow arroyos and bare rock barriers like denuded bunkers—miles through which it seemed impossible that the kite drag could have passed without hanging up even as it had done in the stope of his mine. ”

“ Somewhere within a mile or two, a man had a cooking fire!
After an hour of careful reconnoitering, Chotty discovered that heap of hot ashes upon which a meal had been cooked. That was all he found. Footprints, yes. The trail led to a blank wall of rock more than fifty feet in height, and ended there! Around the camp site was not so much as an empty canteen or a crust of bread. Whoever had built this fire had decamped, apparently over the cliff, without leaving a sensible trace. ”

“ Water was scarce, so Chotty chopped off a big section of a barrel cactus, and placed strips from this in front of the straining animal. They would have to do, and burros were tough. Chotty himself had drunk more water than he should have drunk, using it time and again as tantalization. Now he would be forced to go carefully. Not so much was left in that keg back at Quitobaquita, considering the number of trips that would be necessary before the valuable “hydrogen peroxide ore” was transferred safely to United States soil. ”