“Hey, Guadalupe! We take a sleep right here.” The Doc halted. Great was his surprise when he saw the Papago striding on. Hot rage bubbled to his lips in an explosive Mexican oath.
“Hey, you lizard-eatin’ mozo, hear me? We stop here for the big shut-eye!” The Doc spurred his long legs into a gangling run to overtake the Indian, who had plodded on unheeding. All the arrogance of the white man in his fancied superiority fell with the doctor’s hand on the Indian’s shoulder. Guadalupe wrenched free and turned to face him sulkily.
“Sleep here—to-morrow much sun—no water. Maybe to-morrow we die here. Walk!” Guadalupe’s sparse vocabulary of Spanish words was drained; but the manner of his resuming the forward hike was sufficiently eloquent. Guadalupe, born to the desert code and grown to manhood under the inexorable desert law, had in mind but a single impulse—to survive. His mind plumped through the bog of discomforts wherein Stooder’s was mired to read clearly the tablets of the desert’s decalogue: ten commandments in one—live! In extremity throw over loyalty, discard obligations of oath or of blood, strip the soul to its elemental selfishness; but live!
Guadalupe strode on, still bearing to the north and the west, and still no road. Stooder, growing more weary each step, spent his strength in blind rage at the stubbornness of the Papago. He conned over various capital operations he would like to perform with Guadalupe for a subject. His brain tired of that and began to nurture the germ of a new thought. Why strain himself keeping up with that ring-tailed kangaroo rat who skipped on and on without rest? Guadalupe left the print of his foot every step he took; those footprints would point to wherever Guadalupe might go—and the Papago, of course, knew the shortest way out of this hellhole—so why break his own neck? The old Doc would take a little snooze and then just follow the footprints when he felt good and ready to do so.
The gangling form crumpled up as if cut off at the knees. Guadalupe heard a thud, turned for a half-glance over his shoulder and pushed steadily on under the stars. It was not in the Papago’s code to add one ounce to the weight of circumstance obtruding between himself and water. In a dozen steps his figure was swallowed up in the dark.
Stooder may have allotted to himself only that minimum of sleep designated as a snooze. But a high sun pried open his reluctant eyelids. He sat up and sent a dazed glance around an unfamiliar world. Mountains tawny and black with knife-edge water scores down their flanks; a sea of scrub stretching interminably from their bases; patches of gypsum and salitre showing dull white as scars of leprosy here and there amid the grey-green of the camisa. The sky already was taking on the yellow-white glaze indicative of imminent heat.
The Doc arose and shook the sand out of the creases of his clothing. First definite impression coming to him was the need of a drink: his favourite tequila if might be, water in a pinch. All the nerves in his body twittered “Hear—hear!” to the first of the alternatives. Then, his mind beginning to function along the line of the night’s impressions, Doc Stooder read the story of the footprints leading off to the north and west. There they were: good li’l signposts; they’d take him to a drink just as easy!
Stooder’s renewed strength carried him easily along the trail the Papago had left. For an hour, that is; then trouble. For the sand disappeared under a broad apron of caliche—a hardpan of baked mineral salts and earth almost impervious even to the shod hoof of a horse. It was like a door swung shut on the trailer—the locked door to some labyrinth beyond. Here the last firm print of a boot in the sand, there nothingness. The Doc paused, looked back over the cup-like shadows marking the footprint trail he had been following to take its line of direction, then he pushed ahead along that line.
Another hour, and he still was on the caliche outcrop. He stopped to consider. Where in the name of all the angels was that road—the Road of the Dead Men? If he’d driven the car a little south of it during the sand storm, surely Guadalupe must have cut tangent to it by this time. And if the road passed over the caliche flat there’d be wheel marks; that was sure. Miss that road and miss the Papago’s trail both—why then old Doc Stooder’d be a goner!
He tried to follow his own back trail by such small signs as the scratch of a hobnail against an embedded rock and a thin print of a sole in a pocket of dust. A while and he had lost even that. He stopped and swabbed his streaming face with a shirtsleeve—he now was carrying his coat.