At midnight The Worst Bad Man was very weak. He swayed and staggered and stopped every few hundred yards to rest, but he would not give up the baby.
“I'll last till sun-up,” he told himself; “I got to. I ain't the quittin' kind.”
About two o'clock in the morning the moon came out; from somewhere in the distance a coyote gave tongue, and The Worst Bad Man shivered a little. At three o'clock they came out of the dry salt lake into the sands again, and The Youngest Bad Man held out his arms for the baby.
“He needs grub mighty bad,” was what The Worst Bad Man tried to say, but the words came only as an unintelligible mumble. There had been no sage on the dry lake and they had been unable to make a fire. For two hours the baby had been whimpering with hunger and cold. The Worst Bad Man slipped out of his pack, gathered some dry sagebrush and lit a roaring fire, while his youthful companion ministered to the baby. And when Bob Sang-ster had finished The Worst Bad Man smoothed a two-foot area in the sand, and by the light of the campfire he wrote with his finger the words that he could not speak:
“You carry baby. I'm good two three miles more with pack. I leave you twelve miles from New Jerusalem. Don't lay up today keep moving put baby half rations savvy.”
The Youngest Bad Man nodded. When dawn began to show in the east they resumed the journey. After the first mile, The Worst Bad Man gave signs that the end was coming very soon. He fell more frequently, barking his hands and knees, filling his mouth and eyes with sand, tearing his flesh in the catclaws. Weary, monotonous gasps came from his constricted throat, but still he staggered along, although his strength had been gone for hours. He was traveling on his nerve now.
Slowly the dawnlight crept over the desert, softening with its magic beauty the harsh empire of death. The Worst Bad Man saw the rosy glow lighting up the saturnine face of the witch of Old Woman Mountain, and was content. He had promised himself to last till dawn. He had kept his word.
He sank to his knees in the sand. Bob, Sangster stooped and lifted him to his feet. He staggered along a few yards and fell again, and when Bob Sangster would fain have lifted him once more, The Worst Bad Man motioned him back with an imperious wave of his hand, for he did not want the boy to waste his strength. He tried to protest verbally, but a horrible sound was all that came from his swollen mouth.
The Youngest Bad Man tarried for a moment, irresolute, standing over him. The Worst Bad Man deliberately removed his hat and handed it to the young godfather, who took it, fitted a branch of sagebrush with three forks at one end into the crown of the wide-brimmed hat, and thus constructed a sort of crude parasol wherewith to keep the sun from the baby. The Worst Bad Man nodded his approbation, and Bob Sangster lowered the baby until its soft little face brushed the bloody bristles on The Worst Bad Man's cheek; a handclasp—and the last of the godfathers turned his young face toward New Jerusalem and departed into the eye of the coming day.
The Worst Bad Man watched him until he disappeared into the neutrals of the desert before he turned his head to glance back, along the trail by which they had come. Away off to the southwest, forty miles away, the Cathedral Peaks lifted their castellated spires, and the gaze of the stricken godfather went no farther. The Cathedral Peaks—how like a church they seemed, standing there in the solitude, sublime, indestructible, eternal, gazing down the centuries. The Worst Bad Man was moved to solemn thought—he who had so little time for thought now. His mind harkened back to the scene in the salt house on the dry lake, to Bill Kearny's challenge to the Omnipotent, to the answers that came to that anguished soul crying in the wilderness of doubt and unbelief; and suddenly a great desire came over The Worst Bad Man. He, too, wanted to know. He, too, would ask a sign. And if there was a God——