With his arms he drags himself into a safer position. This done, he unbuckles his belt, and as he lays it before him to have it handier he thinks of the time away back on the Platte when he had first put one on. How proud he then felt, as a stripling boy, of the outfit. How bright the future had looked, and now it was all to end. After all, life with him had been a hard one. It had brought to him few of the treasures for which he had longed. For an instant he thought “why not take the sixshooter and end it all?”
“Suicide?”
“No,” he would die fighting.
He would take some of them with him. Yet, why kill at all. They were but savages—Apaches. Their deaths would mean nothing, would gain nothing. Better to kill himself and keep from them the satisfaction of doing it. No; relief might come. Some of the many scouting parties of cavalry always in the field, or, perhaps, a party of prospectors might hear the firing, and then with a good doctor all would yet be well. He could find one at any of the military posts.
All these thoughts and a thousand others crowded through his brain while he was placing himself in a better position for defense. Cautiously raising himself he glanced over the boulder in the direction from whence the last shots came. Crack! crack! crack! the bullets whiz surlily around him.
Bang! bang! bang! goes the rifle.
A new feeling takes possession of him. His nerves tighten like steel, and he pumps empty shells out of the rifle’s chamber and cartridges in with a fierce speed. Kill! kill! let him take one of those howling murderers with him, and he doesn’t care how soon after death comes. But what is the matter with his aim? He has not yet killed one, not even wounded one that he knows of. He refills the magazine of his rifle in nervous, feverish haste, and then peeps through the crevices of the boulders to see if there is an enemy in sight. None. They are there, though. They are waiting and he is dying. How hot it is! He is burning up with thirst and heat. How “it” hurts. He has got so that he thinks of his wound only as “it,” as if it were some terrible monster that he could not escape. The blood—small as the quantity—that flows from his wound has formed a pool, clotted and coagulated. It adds to his discomfort by its stickiness. He thinks, how strange that one’s own blood should annoy one so, and then wonders where so many flies could have come from, as he raises a swarm by the movement of his body. He looks across to where the burro has fallen with the canteen and sees that the vessel has been jammed by coming in contact with the boulder, and that the precious fluid has nearly all run out. How much he would give to have what little water remains! He feels almost tempted to try to reach it, but no; that would mean throwing his life away without a chance for revenge. Revenge. He will have it. Thirst is nothing; death is nothing now if he can only kill, kill!
If he could only kill them all, how happy he would die!
He looks over the boulder. Nothing in sight but boulders, lava, cacti, sand and gaete grass. “They are there, though.” He almost laughs in sarcasm as he catches himself scanning the horizon to see if any relief were in sight. Relief? For days he and the man that laid dead there had traveled without finding a trail made by a shod horse—without finding a trail of any kind. How childish to expect any help. Better brace up and die like a man.
He looked at the body of the dead man. How hideous the face looked with its swollen lips, open mouth, staring eyes. How black it had grown. What a vast quantity of blood had come from the wound in the head. His eye catches a movement in the tuft of grass to his left. Bang! bang! goes his rifle. “Nothing there,” he thinks, as he crouches closer to the ground to escape the shots that come in return.