“There or thereabouts,” Jake agreed. “But, as you say, Missy being along, it’s up to us to dodge ’em.”
“Five days?” Sliver hopefully repeated. “We’d jes’ as well look out for trouble.”
Not till the morning of the third day did the “trouble” loom up over the horizon.
To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso. Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a few peon herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them away from water, the first necessity of desert travel.
From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse grass country dotted with sahuaros; thereafter into sage desert sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same; a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation, its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs. Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the railroad.
Dusk was falling when they—more correctly, the horses—found a small arroyo. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too, they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the “trouble” showed up in form of a line of sombreros behind the peak of a limestone ridge—unfortunately, to the eastward.
Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as they rode, Gordon saw the line of sombreros rise in correspondence as the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief against the sky-line.
“They’ve seen us!”
As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their galloping hoofs. “Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!”
A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the ridge.