If Jinny, who heard this, did not understand, she at least offered no contradiction, being by that much wiser than many of her kind on a higher plane.
The desert stretched away before Gard, vast, silent, untamed, at this moment a thing of gold and flame, touched, far in the distance, by great cloud-shadows, that sent the man’s gaze from the fierce plain to the wide blue overhead. But not a cloud was in sight and he realized that, probably for the hundredth time, he had been deceived by patches of lava cropping up among the red and yellow sands.
Something that was not a cloud arrested his attention. Far in the sky half a dozen great black birds flew, now high, now lower, but circling always above one spot. Gard watched them with an understanding eye.
“Jinny,” he said, “There’s something dying, over there. You and I’d better go see what it is.”
He had dismounted some time since, and was walking beside the burro. Now he started forward at a faster pace. It might be only a hurt coyote that the hideous birds waited for, but it might be a man! The thought quickened his steps still more, till Jinny had to trot, to keep pace with him.
Once an aerial scavenger swooped lower than any other had yet done, and at the sight the man broke into a run. The birds still kept off, however. Whatever it was, lying out there, somewhere, it was yet alive.
They were traveling along the edge of a deep barranca that yawned in the desert, and presently Gard caught sight of a dark object lying on the sand, at the bottom of the fissure. It was a man. The banks of the ditch sloped just there. Evidently he had attempted to cross, and had been caught in quicksand.
He was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his feet wide apart, a curious rigidity about his whole figure. Gard’s long stride left Jinny far behind as he ran.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “Somebody’s coming!”
There was no response from the man. He lay as one dead, save for the occasional lifting now of one arm, now of the other.