CHAPTER XVI

BITTER WATERS

But for all that the outlaws seemed hard pressed, they succeeded in keeping ahead.  The velvet dark of the night in the arroyo had given place to a sickly saffron dawn.  Where the cut-way widened and lost itself in an alkali sink, the hoof prints of the fugitives’ horses led out again to the open country of gray torrid earth dotted by sage brush and greasewood.  The yellow sky met the ochre panting earth in a tremulous heat mist of wavering purple; and against that sky line, a swirl of dust marked the receding figures of the riders.

“There they go, Wayland!  It’s a case of who lasts out now!  If we can only keep pushing them ahead, this heat wull do the rest.”

The old man shaded his eyes as he gazed across the desert dawn.

“Queer way y’r mountains here keep shiftin’ an’ mufflin’ an’ meltin’ their lines!  They’re here one minute about a mile away, then as you look, they’ve a trick of movin’ back!  That dust against the sky line is about ten miles off as A make it in this high rare air; an’ they’re goin’ mighty slow!  We’ve played ’em out.”

“Yes; but they have played us out!  Let us get off and have breakfast.  If that small wren coming out of the cactus could speak, it might tell us where to find water.”

They had camped one noon hour at a Desert pool beneath a cottonwood, where the putrid carcass of a dead ox polluted air and water.  The Ranger whittled the cottonwood branches for a small chip fire, and he boiled enough water to fill the skin bag for the next day’s travel; but a high wind was blowing, restless, nagging, gusty, pelting ash dust in their eyes, and not to lose the trail, they had pressed on through the sweltering heat of mid-day.  Wayland’s muscles had begun to feel hardened to the dryness of knotted whip cords.  His skin had bronzed swarthy as an Indian’s.  He was beginning to rejoice in the vast spacious relentless Desert with its fierce struggle of life against death; the cactus, the greasewood, the brittle sage brush, all matching themselves against the heat-death.  Was there a thing, beast or bush, not armed with the fangs of protection and onslaught?  Wayland looked at his leather coat.  It had been jagged to tatters by thorn and spine.  Silent, too; the struggle was silent and insidious and crafty as death.  Who could guess where the water-pools lay beneath the dry gravel beds; or why the cactus fortified its storage of moisture in bristling spear points; the greasewood and pinon with thorns and resin; the sage brush with a dull gray varnish that imprisoned evaporation?  The very crust above the earth of ash and silt conspired to hide the trail of wolf and cougar; and wolf and cougar, wren and condor, masked in colors that hid their presence.  Twice Wayland had almost stumbled on a wolf sitting motionless, gray as the ash, watching the horsemen pass; pass where?  Was it down the