The sun swam dizzily at meridian so that the footprints the Doc followed were hard to see—mere shallow spoon marks. On and on towards the south!
What was that thing moving over yonder in that bunch of saltbush? Yes, sir, moving!—A coyote, by th’ eternal!—Naw, coyotes weren’t white like this animal; coyotes were a mangy yellow.—But, by criminy! this thing had the looks of a coyote—sharp nose and baggy tail half way ’tween its hind legs, skulkin’ like.—An albino coyote! Lookit! Eyes pinky like a white rabbit.—Whoever heard of an albino coyote?
No phantom of the imagination that slinking, dirty-white creature which matched its pace to the Doc’s on parallel course through the low lying scrub. The desert Ishmael trotted along with a foolish air of being strictly about its own business, as if no other creature were in sight. When Stooder stopped to bawl curses at it the albino thing halted and made a great pretence of snouting at a flea bite, utterly oblivious to his presence. A fragment of dead bush-stock was hurled at it; the coyote lifted a corner of his lip in a deprecatory smile but did not abate his casual trot.
“Huh, you mangy bag o’ bones! Think you’re goin’ have a feed off’n me, do you? Well, I’m tellin’ you, you got a mighty long tromp ahead!”
On through the desert slogged the man and on trotted the freaky animal whose colour made him outcast even from his own kind. These twain alone under the hot sky: two mites of life in a land of death, each blindly following the call of every life cell in him to live—live!
What had been a piled-up cloud of blue and faint rose to the south when the Doc started his hike had unfolded hour by hour into definite form. Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from a mountain mass and detached mountains with their tops blown off stood against the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here were the mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness of lava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred and forbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only the big-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how.
The undeviating trend of the trail southward towards this ragged mass had perplexed Stooder when first he became conscious of it. The auto should be lying somewhere off to eastward if he didn’t miss his guess; those mountains ahead were strange to him. But he could not know how far nor where he had wandered the day before; even though he thought long since he should have come upon a second line of footprints—his own—running along with those of the Papago, yet there was no denying he was following the right trail back to the auto and the cached tomatoes. There sure could not be two lines of footprints here in this least-travelled part of Altar.
So ran the mind of him whom the mocking Gog and Magog of the desert’s diarchy had put on a false trail to desolation. Deeper and deeper into a waterless scrap-heap of forgotten ages his steps took him. And the albino coyote was his aloof companion.