“No fresh sign of animals going this way. Must have been dry for weeks. Our mining friends have taken what little water there was and left young Hoff to die of thirst,” said the other grimly. “Well, that explains the empty canteen all right.”
He turned and renewed his quick progress, leaping from boulder to boulder, between narrowing walls of gray-white rock. Just as Average Jones was spent and almost ready to collapse the leader checked.
“Hark!” he whispered.
Above the beating of the blood in his ears, Jones heard an irregular, insistent scuffing sound. He crouched in silence while the captain crept up to a ledge and cautiously peered over, then went forward in response to the other’s urgent beckoning. They looked down into a rock-basin of wild and curious beauty. To this day Average Jones remembers the luminous grace and splendor of a Matilija poppy, which, rooted between two boulders, swayed gently in the white moonlight above a figure of dread. The figure, naked from the waist up, huddled upon the hard-baked mud, digging madly at the earth. A sharp exclamation broke from Average Jones. The digger half-rose, turned, collapsed to his knees, and pointed with bleeding fingers to his open mouth, in which the tongue showed black and swollen.
They went down to him.
An hour later, “Rickey” Hoff was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion in camp. Average Jones felt amply qualified to join him. But it was not in the Ad-Visor’s character to quit an enterprise before it was wholly completed. So long as the two bandits were on their way to cash the young spendthrift’s checks—Jones had heard from the victim a brief account of the extortion—success was not fully won.
“We’ve got to get that money back,” he said to Captain Funcke with conviction.
The hunter made no reply in words. He merely leaned his shotgun against his thigh, reached around beneath his coat and produced a forty-five caliber revolver. This he held out toward Jones.
“Good thing to have,” conceded the other. “But—well, no; not in this case. They got the booty with a show of legality, since Hoff signed the copartnership agreement and turned over the checks. It was under duress and threats, it’s true, but who’s to prove that, they being two to one, and this being Mexico? No; they’re within the law, and I’ve a notion that we can get the swag back by straight sale and barter. Provided, always, we can catch them in time.”
“They’ll want to make pretty good time to the Tenaja Poquita,” pointed out the captain. “They’re shy on water.”