Dust of the Desert

by Robert Welles Ritchie

A stir in the bed of the dry wash below them. Up went their carbines with cheeks laid against wood and eyes sighting along the lances of light. Again the stir down there. A gaunt figure rose from hand and knees to its feet, stood swaying for an instant, then pitched forward against the support of a slab of rock.

A very leprechaun of the rocks was it: ribs creasing burned skin about the naked torso; whity-grey hair streaming down to mingle with a beard; bare arms like a spider’s legs and all cracked by the sun. The husk of Doc Stooder, plaything of the desert god, was come here, following the still living spark of instinct prompting a water search in a canyon. Come, too, to the secret hiding place of the treasure whose glitter had so mercilessly befooled him.

Grant, stupefied by the apparition of death and failing in any recognition of the skeleton thing as the bibulous doctor of Arizora, suspected a trick of Urgo. Again he laid his eye along his rifle sight, vigilant for what might ensue. The creature spread-eagled against the rock slowly pushed itself upright with its hands; its shaggy head turned wearily as thirsting eyes scanned the dry chasm.

Then a shout from across the gorge. Bagley had leaped from his hiding place and was rushing precariously down to succour the ghost. Just as he reached Stooder and had thrown an arm about him to heave his wasted form onto a shoulder the crack of a rifle shivered the gorge’s silence. Rock dust spurted within a foot of the rescuer.

The sun went out that second—instantly, like a powerful incandescent switched off. A yellow penumbra tinged the darkness.

Almost as one the rifles of Grant and Benicia jetted lead. Two more shots from the dry wash. The giant figure of Bagley with Stooder limp over one shoulder never faltered in its leaping and scrambling up the declivity to the shelter he had quitted. The two who had been following his flight with stilled hearts saw him disappear behind a great rock; an instant and a jet of fire lanced down thence at the attackers by the Gate.

A blob of rain large as a Mexican dollar smacked on Benicia’s hand as she pumped the ejector—another and a third. Then the gorge was blasted by a thunder shock amid the peaks, and a stab of lightning painted the whole pit sulphurous blue. By its flash the defenders saw scurrying figures leaping from rock to rock in the stream bed. Quelele, the quick of eye, fired his first shot by the light of storm fire; one of the rurales went down like a wet sack.

A second stunning burst of thunder which knocked out the underpinning of the sky. Then deluge.

It was not rain that fell; it was solid water in sheets and cones which hissed with the speed of its descent. Water so compacted that it was like a river on edge, engulfing. With it the almost continuous quiver and jerk of electrical flame. The gorge was become a watery hell. More than that, for Urgo and his men in the wash it threatened momentarily to be their tomb. Already a white streak of foam in the lightning flashes marked where the once bone-dry watercourse was changing character.

The rurales and their leader found the odds all of a sudden snatched from their hands by this frenzied ally of the hunted girl and her supporters. They had come eleven against five, with their quarry caught in a hole in the Pinacate sierra; before the cloudburst had endured three minutes Urgo realized he had let himself and his men into a fatal trap. Their horses, confidently left behind them in the lower reaches of the gorge, must already have stampeded under the lash of the storm. Spiteful rifle flashes from both sides came with each baleful flicker of fire from the sky to deny escape from the rising waters up either wall of the chasm.