Desert Gold

  They rode in single file with Ladd in the lead.  He did not keep to the trail of the raiders all the time.  He made short cuts. The raiders were traveling leisurely, and they evinced a liking for the most level and least cactus-covered stretches of ground. But the cowboy took a bee-line course for the white escarpment pointed out by the Yaqui; and nothing save deep washes and impassable patches of cactus or rocks made him swerve from it. He kept the broncho at a steady walk over the rougher places and at a swinging Indian canter over the hard and level ground.  The sun grew hot and the wind began to blow.  Dust clouds rolled along the blue horizon.  Whirling columns of sand, like water spouts at sea, circled up out of white arid basins, and swept away and spread aloft before the wind.  The escarpment began to rise, to change color, to show breaks upon it rocky face.  Whenever the rangers rode out on the brow of a knoll or ridge or an eminence, before starting to descend, Ladd required of Gale a long, careful, sweeping survey of the desert ahead through the field glass.  There were streams of white dust to be seen, streaks of yellow dust, trailing low clouds of sand over the glistening dunes, but no steadily rising, uniformly shaped puffs that would tell a tale of moving horses on the desert. At noon the rangers got out of the thick cactus.  Moreover, the gravel-bottomed washes, the low weathering, rotting ledges of yellow rock gave place to hard sandy rolls and bare clay knolls. The desert resembled a rounded hummocky sea of color.  All light shades of blue and pink and yellow and mauve were there dominated by the glaring white sun.  Mirages glistened, wavered, faded in the shimmering waves of heat.  Dust as fine as power whiffed up from under the tireless hoofs.

  The rangers rode on and the escarpment began to loom.  The desert floor inclined perceptibly upward.  When Gale got an unobstructed view of the slope of the escarpment he located the raiders and horses.  In another hour's travel the rangers could see with naked eyes a long, faint moving streak of black and white dots.

  "They're headin' for that yellow pass," said Ladd, pointing to a break in the eastern end of the escarpment.  "When they get out of sight we'll rustle.  I'm thinkin' that waterhole the Yaqui spoke of lays in the pass."

  The rangers traveled swiftly over the remaining miles of level desert leading to the ascent of the escarpment.  When they achieved the gateway of the pass the sun was low in the west.  Dwarfed mesquite and greasewood appeared among the rocks.  Ladd gave the word to tie up horses and go forward on foot.

  The narrow neck of the pass opened and descended into a valley half a mile wide, perhaps twice that in length.  It had apparently unscalable slopes of weathered rock leading up to beetling walls. With floor bare and hard and white, except for a patch of green mesquite near the far end it was a lurid and desolate spot, the barren bottom of a desert bowl.

  "Keep down, boys" said Ladd.  "There's the waterhole an' hosses have sharp eyes.  Shore the Yaqui figgered this place.  I never seen its like for a trap."

  Both white and black horses showed against the green, and a thin curling column of blue smoke rose lazily from amid the mesquites.

  "I reckon we'd better wait till dark, or mebbe daylight," said Jim Lash.

  "Let me figger some.  Dick, what do you make of the outlet to this hole?  Looks rough to me."

  With his glass Gale studied the narrow construction of walls and roughened rising floor.

  "Laddy, it's harder to get out at that end than here," he replied.

  "Shore that's hard enough.  Let me have a look....Well, boys, it don't take no figgerin' for this job.  Jim, I'll want you at the other end blockin' the pass when we're ready to start."

  "When'll that be?" inquired Jim.

  "Soon as it's light enough in the mornin'.  That Greaser outfit will hang till to-morrow.  There's no sure water ahead for two days, you remember."

  "I reckon I can slip through to the other end after dark," said Lash, thoughtfully.  "It might get me in bad to go round."

  The rangers stole back from the vantage point and returned to their horses, which they untied and left farther round among broken sections of cliff.  For the horses it was a dry, hungry camp, but the rangers built a fire and had their short though strengthening meal.

  The location was high, and through a break in the jumble of rocks the great colored void of desert could be seen rolling away endlessly to the west.  The sun set, and after it had gone down the golden tips of mountains dulled, their lower shadows creeping upward.