“Thanks, dear God!”
So the sardonic genius of the waste places permitted the cloak of divinity to fall upon Ygnacio, fugitive and murderer, for that a surprising charity had prompted him to pause in the night by a raving man, divide with him his slender store of insurance against death, then pass on.
The root-of-the-sands which Stooder half devoured quickly restored him to something like the normal. Gone were the deliriums that had dogged him those hours of horror. He heard no longer the ghost bells of the Lost Mission summoning him to treasure buried in the bleak mountains yonder. Rational thought was his after all the wanderings in Bedlam. He mapped his strategy against the ever-present menace of the desert.
Here were Guadalupe’s tracks—the Papago hound; wait till he could get hands on the devil! Of course they would lead to the village of the Sand People on the edge of El Infiernillo. Well and good; but that might still be a long way ahead. Could he make it just on what was left of this mysterious root? About one chance in ten; and the old Doc wasn’t taking any more chances. What then?
Why, follow the tracks back to the stalled auto. Water might be there. Surely were cans of tomatoes—about a dozen of ’em. A dozen tomato cans would carry him a hundred miles on foot; he knew because he’d drunk uncooked canned tomatoes many a time—food and drink in small compass. All right; follow the tracks back to the auto, rest up a bit and then get a fresh start back over those same tracks and straight into the Sand People’s rancheria.
Stooder wrapped the precious remains of his giant radish in a strip of his shirt and started back over the line of blue shadow cups in the sand. As he laboured through the heavy going he reviewed all he could remember of yesterday’s terrors, and a great fear began to build in the back of his mind. Fear of the leagues upon leagues of blank space about him—land unchanged by time since the waters of a great sea were withdrawn into a shallow cup now called the Gulf. Fear of latent forces which lurked in the naked mountains all about, in the ghostly mirage which stretched vain beauties before his eyes. Over-mastering all was a corroding fear of his own body.
The Doc’s trained intelligence was functioning with deadly precision. It separated his mind from the rest of his being, counting the mind as a rider and the body the beast it rode. The rider willed that the beast carry it to a certain destination; did that beast stumble and fall the rider could cry out never so furiously but it would be lost. And that burden-bearer of the mind was capable of just so much. Its tissues and sinews were kept functioning by water and food. So much water and so much food gave so many foot-pounds of energy; no more. Inexorable mathematics!
When sweat began to trickle down into his eyes Stooder could not repress a shudder. Lost! Water lost from his body. The desert greasewood is wise enough to coat all its leaves and little stems with creosote to trick evaporation; the big sahuaro shows only the edges of its accordion flutings to the sun and greases them with paraffin; man yields water like a stranded jellyfish.
Better take another chew on that water-root dingus to make up for sweat lost. Better give the old pulse a feel to see how it’s runnin’.