It put new heart into the dog. Master’s horse! Now we were getting somewhere! He trotted on, enduring the pain in his shoulders stoically until it faded to a general dull ache. Nothing brushed the arrow stub, now. You went carefully around bushes and kept to the mustang’s trail, avoiding all thorns and cats-claws. Several miles further on he came to where the buck had been shot and butchered. The bones and pieces of raw meat left behind smelt good, but Blaze was feverish and would not eat. His doggy instincts told him to starve out that fever. What lashed him most terribly now was the scourge of thirst. He had lost a good deal of blood, although the arrow had cut nothing vital. Water! He must have it!
Big John and Scotty had ridden on toward Papago Tanks with the buck on saddle after the kill. They had not waited for Sid, for it was their custom when any one went off lone hunting not to expect him back before nightfall. Blaze followed on after the white mustang’s tracks, sore and weary, his tongue hanging out with thirst and a high fever raging in him. Oh, to find Master! He would know! He would get him a canteen or something! To drink and drink and drink! To have cool strong hands draw out this burning pain that seared his shoulders like a hot iron! Only the indomitable courage of his breed kept him up. Blaze was a thoroughbred. He did not know what a streak of cur blood was! Kootenai Firebrand, Culbertson Rex, Champion Swiveller, all famous lion dogs of the West, were among his forebears and they would not let him give up. He staggered on, his feet wabbling crazily under him as the trail wound on southward through a country of black lava cones all around him, with vitrified and scoriated lava under foot.
Then Blaze stopped, for the horses had halted here. He looked wearily up toward a huge cone that rose to the east of him. Up that way these tracks led, and he must follow, too!
He arrived at the top, at last, and then gave a feeble yelp of joy. Here Master had got down off his horse, and the smell of him was sweet in Blaze’s nostrils! Below him stretched out a vast amphitheater, the sandy floor of a deep crater that was half a mile across. Through a gap in the opposite side the desert vegetation had come marching in, species by species, saguarro, bisanga, choya, creosote bush, to spread out on that wide floor three hundred feet below and cover it with green dots of vegetation. Blaze looked down, his doggy heart sinking with misgivings, for no one was down there. Could he ever muster up the strength to climb down into this thing? And where had Master come up out of it again? Only one set of tracks led down here and the descent was as steep as a chimney.
A wild, fresh odor decided him to attempt it. At his feet he snuffed hoof tracks, small, pointed, with musky dew claws—a deer of some kind, Blaze decided. He did not know that they were antelope, for the smell was new to him, but at once the old hunting ardor surged up in his soul, overriding weariness and physical pain. He attempted a valiant bark, which sounded somehow hoarse and dry in his throat; then he plunged down the steep declivity after the horses. Around him rose high rim rock, red and purple and black. These two lava gaps were the only places where the crater could be entered at all. They all had gone down here; that was reassuring. Here, too, were Ruler’s tracks, that four-footed companion whom Blaze secretly envied for his marvelous nose and openly despised for his absurd caution in attacking bear and lion. Here also was the smell of Indian, where Niltci had jumped off and led his mustang down by the bridle. And here Master and the other Young Master had dismounted and climbed down, side by side, their horses following most unwillingly as their sliding tracks showed.
On the crater floor the party had separated and there had been gallopings about in every direction. Blaze followed the white mustang, for she bore Master, his beloved. Soon he came upon a long smoky cartridge from the old .35 meat gun, and the mustang’s tracks veered sharply over to the right. The smell of fresh blood came to Blaze’s nose and he wabbled slowly out to the center of that vast volcanic pit following the scent. A pile of entrails, shank bones, blood dried up by the thirsty sands—that was all, for him, of the antelope that had been shot here!
Blaze lay down, completely tuckered out. Without at least a drink of life-giving water he could not go a step further. The assembling and galloping tracks that led off up to that other gap told which way they had gone out. He could never make that ascent, now! Instinct told him to wait until sundown, for it was hot and sultry down here now and there was not a breath of air. He lay down, panting, consumed with thirst. When he tried, later, to rise again he found that his wound had stiffened and the whole top of his shoulders seemed one raw, immovable lump.
He looked about him piteously, then raised his muzzle to the sky in a howl of dismay. Silence, of the brooding desert; and then an answer—the wild howl of a coyote! Blaze’s quick eye singled him out sitting up there in the gap, watching him wolf-like. His answering howl had not been of sympathy or anything like that, but to call other coyotes to help him prepare for this feast of dog flesh!
The danger stiffened Blaze up and strengthened his moral fiber. A savage challenge rumbled in his throat as he rose stiffly to his feet and faced the coyote menacingly. Then a whine of pain came from him. He could not fight, now; but he would not howl again for help, at any rate! That signal was too well understood by these wild dogs that had no master!
Blaze looked up at the coyote and then around him again. Should he climb up there and fight this fellow, anyhow, weak as he was, before any more of them came? He could never do it without, first, water! Then his eye fell on a small round brown object lying near by on the sand. He walked stiffly over to it and snuffed it. That thing was what his men drank water out of! It smelt of the young master, too! Scotty had forgotten his canteen during the butchering of that antelope and left it behind, but all Blaze knew about it was that the thing smelt of him and held water. He rolled it over with his paw. An enticing splash came from inside. Instantly all that pent-up thirst torture burst out of him in a frantic effort to get at the water inside. He took the canvas case in his teeth and worried and shook it savagely. Of no avail! The cork held tight, and the thing dropped on the sand, the water inside tinkling maddeningly. Blaze stopped a moment to consider. This thing was something like a bone, really! It had a bone, of a kind, its spout, sticking out one side. He lay down, with his paws on the body of the canteen, and then began to chew and gnaw fiercely at the cork and tin of the nozzle.