“Arrastra!” queried Adam.
The Indian nodded and made a weak motion of his hand toward the trail that led to the yellow wilderness of clay, and then further gestures, which, with a few more gutturally whispered words, gave Adam the impression that a man of huge bulk, wide of shoulder, was working the old Spanish treadmill—arrastra—grinding for gold. Then the Indian uttered, with a last flash of spirit, the warning he could not speak, and, falling back, he gasped and faded into unconsciousness.
Adam stood up, thinking hard, muttering aloud some of his thoughts.
“Arrastra!... That was the way of Dismukes—to grind for gold.... He’s here—somewhere—down in that yellow hole.... Robbers have jumped his claim—probably are holding him—torturing him to tell of hidden gold ... and they beat this poor Indian to death.”
There was necessity for quick thought and quick action. The Indian was not dead, but he soon would be. Adam could do nothing for him. It was imperative to decide whether to wait here for the return of the water carrier or at once follow the trail to the yellow clay slopes. Adam wore a gun, but it held only two unused shells, and there was no more ammunition in his pack. The Indian had no weapon. Perhaps the water carrier would be armed. If Dismukes were dead, there need be no rash hurry to avenge him; if he lived as prisoner a little time more or less would not greatly matter. Adam speedily decided to wait a reasonable time for the man who packed water, and, if he came, to kill him and then hurry up the trail. There was, in this way, less danger of being discovered, and, besides, one of the robbers dispatched would render the band just so much weaker. Adam especially favored this course because of the possibility of getting a weapon.
“And more,” muttered Adam, “if he happens to be a tall man I can pretend to be him—packing water back.”
Therefore Adam screened himself behind a thick clump of mesquite near the trail and waited in ambush like a panther ready to spring.
As he crouched there, keen eyes up the canyon, ears like those of a listening deer, there flashed into Adam’s mind one of Magdalene Virey’s unforgetable remarks. “The power of the desert over me lies somewhere in my strange faculty of forgetting self. I watch, I hear, I feel, I smell, but I don’t think. Just a gleam—a fleeting moment—then the state of consciousness or lack of consciousness is gone! But in that moment lies the secret lure of the desert. Its power over men!”
Swiftly as it had come the memory passed, and Adam became for fleeting moments at a time the embodiment of Magdalene Virey’s philosophy, all unconscious when thought was absent from feeling. The hour was approaching midday and the wind began to rustle the mesquites and seep the sand. Adam smelled a dry dust somewhat tangy, and tasted the bitterness of it as he licked his lips. Flies had began to buzz around the dead Indian. Instinctively Adam gazed aloft, and, yes, there far above him circled a vulture, and above that another, sweeping down from the invisible depths of blue, magically ringing a flight around the heavens, with never a movement of wings. They sailed round and round, always down. Where did they come from? What power poised them so surely in the air?
Adam waited. All at once his whole body vibrated with the leap of his heart. A tall, hulking man hove in sight, balancing a bar across his shoulders, from each end of which hung a large bucket. These buckets swung to and fro with the fellow’s steps. Like a lazy man, he advanced leisurely. Adam saw a little puff of smoke lift from the red, indistinct patch that was this water carrier’s face. He had cigarette or pipe. As he approached nearer and nearer, Adam received steadily growing and changing impressions of the man he was about to kill, until they fixed in the image of a long, loosely jointed body, a soiled shirt open at the neck, bare brown arms, and cruel red face. Just outside the mesquites, the robber halted to peer at the spot where the Indian had fallen, and then ahead as if he expected to see a body lying in the trail.