“Will I—never—get there?” panted Adam, almost spent.
Finally Adam reached a well-defined trail leading up out of the stream bed. He followed it to a level flat covered with willows and cottonwoods, all full foliaged and luxuriantly green, and among which stately palms, swaddled in huge straw sheaths of their own making, towered with lofty tufted crowns. The dust in the trail showed no imprints of feet. Adam regarded that as strange. Still, he might be far from the camp or village that had looked so close from the slope above. Suddenly he emerged from the green covert into an open glade that contained palm-thatched huts, and he uttered a little cry of joy. But it took only a second glance to convince him that the huts were deserted, and his joy was short lived. Hastily he roamed from one hut to another. He found ollas, great, clay water jars, and pieces of broken pottery, and beds of palm leaves through which the lizards rustled, but no Indians, nor any signs of recent habitation.
“Gone! Gone!” he whispered, hoarsely. “Now—I’ll starve—to death!”
His accents of despair contained a note of hardness, of indifference born of his extreme fatigue. His eyes refused to stay open, and sleep glued them shut. When he opened them again it was to the light of another day. Stiff and lame, with a gnawing at the pit of his stomach and an oppressed mind, Adam found himself in sad plight. Limping down to the stream, he bathed his face and quenched his thirst, and then, removing his boots, he saw that his feet were badly blistered. He decided to go barefoot, to save his boots as well as to give the raw places a chance to heal.
Then without any more reflection he wrought himself into a supreme effort of will, and it was so passionate and strong that he believed it would hold as long as intelligence governed his actions.
“My one chance is to live here until the Indians come back,” he decided. “There’s water here and green growths. It’s an oasis where animals, birds, living creatures come to drink.... I must eat.”
His first move was to make slow and careful examination of the trails. One which led toward the mountain bore faint traces of footprints that a recent rain had mostly obliterated. He lost this trail on the smooth rock slope. The others petered out in the stones and sage. Then he searched along the sand bars of the stream for tracks of living creatures; and he found many, from cat tracks to the delicate ones of tiny birds. After all, then, the desert was an abode for living things. The fact stimulated Adam, and he returned to the glade to exercise every faculty he possessed in the invention of instruments or traps or snares.
He had a knife and a pair of long leather boot strings. With these, and a bundle of arrowweed sticks, and a tough elastic bow of ironwood, and strips of bark, and sharp bits of flinty rock Adam set to work under the strong, inventive guiding spirit of necessity. As a boy he had been an adept at constructing figure-four traps. How marvelous the accuracy of memory! He had been the one to build traps for his brother Guerd, who had not patience or skill, but who loved to set traps in the brier patches for redbirds. Adam’s nimble fingers slacked a little as his mind surveyed that best part of his life. To what extremity a man could be reduced! The dexterity of his idle youth to serve him thus in his terrible hour of need! He remembered then his skill at making slings; and following this came the inspired thought of the possibility of constructing one. He had a strong rubber band doubled round his pocketbook. Sight of it thrilled him. He immediately left off experimenting with the bow and went to making a sling. His difficulty was to find cords to make connections between the rubbers and a forked prong, and also between the rubbers and a carrier of some sort. For the latter he cut a triangular piece out of the top of his boot. Always in the old days he had utilized leather from cast-off shoes, and had even made a collection of old footgear for this purpose. But where to get the cords? Bark would not be pliable and strong enough. Somewhere from the clothes he wore he must extract cords. The problem proved easy. His suspenders were almost new and they were made of linen threads woven together. When he began to ravel them he made the discovery that there was enough rubber in them to serve for a second sling.
When the instrument was finished he surveyed it with satisfaction. He had no doubt that the deadly accuracy he had once been master of with this boyish engine of destruction would readily return to him. Then he went back to work on the other contrivances he had planned.
A failing of the daylight amazed him. For an instant he imagined a cloud had crossed the sun. But the sun had set and darkness was at hand.