The machinery at Lost Mesa found a purchaser at last, and Cuthbertson, through three blinding hot weeks, had to see it taken apart and numbered and packed on mule-back to the Los Santos line. Mules died and men sickened, heads grew light and tempers uncertain. For these three weeks, Cuthbertson lived at the mines; he had no thought to spare by day or night for the Rainmaker.
On the last day he rode back from Lost Mesa to the mines, alone and tired out, sitting his tired pony like a sack. The hills reeled in the afternoon heat, the desert was a grayish glare under a sky so hot it had no colour in it. Cuthbertson was waiting thirstily for the hour when the mesas would suddenly stand up in the evening like the foundations of some apocalyptic city forgotten of God, and the dark sweep in on the world like a wave foamed with stars. He looked about him as he rode, as though half-consciously waiting for something. He was waiting for the Rainmaker. Presently, as he turned down a shallow arroyo grown with mummied yuccas, he saw the little white dazzle of the eyes that preceded the vision.
“There’s the Rainmaker,” he said as usual, the man clear in his brain. “But I didn’t think he’d been so far west.” The Rainmaker was walking through the sand as a tired man walks. With a little jump of the pulses, Cuthbertson saw that the face of the apparition was turned fully towards him.
He sickened for one strange instant, fearing, with a fear as old as the desert, the shadow of his own dream. But the face, seen uncertainly through the flicker of the heat, was only that of a young Indian of the sands; lean, grave, watchful. The headband gleamed with copper or gold, the hair fell long and straight. And beneath it the eyes were directed, not at Cuthbertson, but intently beyond him to the east, along the desert road.
“I know,” said Cuthbertson, quick as thought, “you’re looking for Juana. . .”
He reined in. But the figure moved on, still looking to the east. Against an outcrop of honey-yellow rock it broke and went out. Cuthbertson shook up his horse and followed slowly.
The rock was surrounded with great waves of loose sand that drifted perpetually before the prevailing winds. Sometimes it was buried, then in a few days, bared to the sky. Now as Cuthbertson stooped from the saddle, he saw that the wind had uncovered a little worn hollow in the rock, and in it a pale glitter of colour. He dismounted. The glitter of colour was a piece of turquoise veined with gold.
He had it in his hand. Then, slowly, he stooped and took out what else there was from the keeping of the desert. These things he tied in his handkerchief and fastened to the saddle, and his brown fingers shook a little over the knot. Mounting he rode on. But at the foot of the arroyo he looked back gravely, his hand at the hat-brim.
“Rest with God,” said Cuthbertson.
It was late before he stopped at old Juana’s hut. She sat just within, her chin on her knees, staring out at the low steady stars.