“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”
“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the Sierra, going eastwards from this?”
“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here, keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only pass in all that range.”
“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.
“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”
Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women. They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree, then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him, firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned and ran.
He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.
Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.
“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”
Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines. Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought, “as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.