CHAPTER XI
THE SUN STRIKES
MORE than once did Murray curse himself for a fool as he piloted the car northward into the wastes, but he continued his course without delay.
The girl's story had moved him strangely, stirred him to the depths. Still it was not clear to him why he was thus taking Claire out into the desert—except that he was compelled thereto by the dominant will and massive personality of Tom Lee. To tell the truth, Murray was far from urging upon himself any logical reasoning for what he was doing; the presence of Claire beside him was reason enough. He was joyful at the intimacy established between them, at the friendly confidence that had risen. It was long since Douglas Murray had craved the company of a woman—and now he felt strangely happy and buoyant.
They were in the marble cañon now, and repairing a tire that had blown out. There was about them the full heat of a desert day, sickening and insufferable. The white walls of the cañon, where was no shade or relief from the blinding dazzle of the white sun, refracted the heat tenfold and shimmered before their eyes in waves of smoldering fire. All breeze was dead. The car, where the sunlight smote it, was blistering to the touch.
Murray got the tire repaired, and with a deep sigh of relief flung the jack into the car. He refilled the boiled-over radiator from one of the water canteens swinging beside the car, then climbed under the wheel. He paused to mop his streaming face.
"Do you think your father means to come out to Morongo Valley?"
"I think so, with the contractor—perhaps to-morrow or today. Really, Doctor Murray, I can't say just what he intends! When Father gives no explanation of his actions he simply is inscrutable."
Murray nodded and started the car forward. He could well understand that Tom Lee, masked by oriental calm and being governed by the unfathomable oriental mind, was, even to Claire, an absolutely unknown quantity.
They cleared the cañon at last. Here was not the table-flat desert, however. From the canyon the trail debouched into a wilderness of volcanic ash and wind-eroded pinnacles, where along the rocky portals great smears of smoke-weed hung wavering like the wraith of long-dead fires.
From here, at last, back to the desert—and into one of those salt sinks of the desert, a basin of some ancient sea, perhaps, where the road wound precariously between stretches of sun-baked, salty earth that none the less quivered to the touch of any object, and formed at the bottom of the baked crust a quagmire from which was no escape. The fiery air made the travelers gasp as each parched gust of breath smote their lungs; and the salty, invisible dust stung their skins and choked their throats with remorseless burning.
And in this cockpit of hell, the blistering heat combined with the rarefied atmosphere to blow out another tire—and to blow it out this time beyond repair.
"Whew!" exclaimed Murray disconsolately, viewing the damage. "Nothing for it but to strip her, and put on the other spare."
"Can't you run on the rim?" queried Claire anxiously.
"No chance, with this load of stuff in back, and the road we must follow! We'd smash every spring in the car. Well, here goes!"
There was no breeze. The far vistas of the horizon hung dancing with heat waves, like painted scenery jerking on springs. Mountains and mirages, all hung there and danced, a weird dance of death and desolation.
The unstirred air was heavy and thick with invisible dust. Sunlight crawled and slavered white-hot brilliance over everything, pierced into everything. His face running with blinding sweat, Murray impatiently threw aside his hat. Presently his unruly red hair was no longer wet and blackened; it crowned his flushed features like an aureole, crisp and dry and very hot.
He had the new tube and casing on, and attached the pump. Laboring steadily, he cursed to himself at the heat—the broiling, insufferably dry heat of that salt basin. A sudden breath of hot air caused him to glance up, and his lips cracked in a smile. Claire was leaning from the car and fanning him, her straw hat flapping the air down over him.
"Thanks, Clairedelune," he croaked hoarsely. "It helps."
"Will you have a drink? The water bottle"
"No, thanks. I'll finish this job first."
The tire was beginning to harden. He bent again over the pump, driving himself to the labor. At last it was done—done well enough, at least. He disconnected the pump and tossed it into the car. A word from Claire broke in upon him.
"What's that! Something moved against the sand—oh! It's a snake!"
He laughed unsteadily as he looked. A snake in truth—an incoherent, feeble object that slipped across the sand and blended there, shapeless and indistinct; a stark-blind thing, a living volute of death and venom. Murray flung a handful of sand. The reptile lashed out viciously at the air.
"A rattler shedding its old skin; blind and deadly poisonous at this season," he said. "I remember Mackintavers warned us about it—no rattles, no sound at all!" He laughed, for his own voice astonished him; it sounded thin and tenuous, far away, distant.
With a distinct effort of the will, he forced himself to stoop after the jack; disengaging it, he rose and lifted it into the tonneau, with strange effort. Claire got out of the car in order to let him in more easily, but he did not climb into the shadow of the top. Instead, he held to the open door for an instant, then sank down upon the running board.
"I think I'll rest," he said, looking from bloodshot eyes at the figure of the girl beside him—the slender, cool figure that seemed to defy the sunlight. "Clairedelune—it comes from the troubadours, that name—the softly sweet glory of the silven moonlight—the sheer beauty that wrings the heart and soul of a man with pain and sweetness"
His head jerked suddenly. As though some inner instinct had wakened to fear and danger within him, his voice broke out sharply, clearly:
"No cold water, mind! It kills—no cold water, mind!"
Not until his head fell back into the car doorway did Claire Lee realize that something was actually wrong. She had thought him babbling a bit—now, for a terrible moment, she thought him dead. Yet his last words abode with her, remained fixed and distinct in her mind. No cold water! His heart was beating; he was not dead after all. He must have realized, in that moment, what the trouble was! Sunstroke. She realized it now, realized it with a fearful sense of her own futility. She had no water, except the ice-cold water in the porous waterbags beside the car!
Hesitation and fear, but only for an instant. She seized the nearest bag, her hands trembling in desperate haste, and jerked out the cork. Part of that precious fluid she poured into the sands, then stumbled to the front of the car and stooped to the pet-cock of the blistering radiator. As the hot water poured into the bag, she could feel its coldness change to a tepid warmth. Hastily she ran back to Murray and poured the contents of the bag over his head and shoulders.
She grew calmer, now; he was at least alive, and she had done her best! But there was more to do. Morongo Valley lay ahead, not so far, and she knew the road. With much effort, she lifted the unconscious body into the front seat, where it reposed limply, and then climbed over it. She had forgotten to crank the car, and had to go back again, out into the sunlight.
No word, no cry from her clenched lips. She cranked, climbed again into the car, and closed the door that would hold Murray in place. Then she drove, with an occasional frantic glance at the lurching, senseless man beside her.
She drove as fast as she dared set the car through the loose sands. When she had driven that road first, it was trackless. Now there lay faint markings to guide her—the tracks of her own and of Murray's car, the shuffled traces of hooves and feet. No wind ever lifted in this basin, no flurry of sand ever drove across the burning surface, down below the level of the surrounding desert. Until the rains or a storm came, the tracks would be there undisturbed, as the dust-marks within a pyramid of ancient Rameses.
Soon, so soon that she scarce realized it, the blue and brown mountains that had been trembling over the horizon were drawn into sharper and richer colorings, and the long walls of the valley were opening out ahead. The Dead Mountains, those—bare of men or beasts or devils!
Morongo Valley at last—the sharp turn, with the Box cañon opening out ahead, rich and sweetly splendid in its touch of vivid greens!
It was only two hundred yards in length, after that turn; yet to the tortured girl, those two hundred yards seemed endless. She did not pause at the shack, but drove on, toward the right-hand wall. Still within her mind dwelt the last words uttered by Murray—"no cold water!"
The trickle of the creek was icy cold; out of the ground and in again. But she knew where there was a seepage of warmer water—water unfit for drinking. She had found it while she was here with Tom Lee; it was a little up the hillside, above and facing that natural amphitheatre which Tom Lee had staked out as a building site. About it there was shade, for the water had provoked green growths on the hillside—a clump of green there against the brown.
She knew that this was the spot, and she headed for it. Recklessly, she drove the car at the steep hill, rocking and lurching across gullies and rocks, until the engine died down; then in low again, climbing a mad course, until at last a boulder blocked the wheel and the engine died on the crash.
There was but a little way to go. She got Murray out of the car, somehow, and dragged him, spurred by fear that she had been too late in getting here. Yet he still lived.
She laid him on his back in the course of the tiny seepage of water—and then it seemed so cold to her that new fear gripped on her soul. She tasted it, and grimaced. It was not cold, and it was brackish, impregnated with minerals. So slight was the flow, that it existed for little more than the length of Murray's body. And there was not the shade here that she had anticipated—it was too slight, too little, here at noonday!
That was easily remedied. A trip to the car, and she had opened Murray's lashed bundles. A trip down the hillside to the shack provided her with stakes. From four of these she stretched a blanket above the recumbent man, and saw that now the congestion had died out of his face. He was breathing more easily, too.
Then reaction came upon her, and bodily weariness, and flooding tears.
She rallied, however, and fell to work. By mid-afternoon she had accomplished much. Seeing no hope of moving Murray to the shack, she made another low canopy of blankets, preparatory to removing him from the seepage; opened out provisions, brought up a tiny sheet-iron stove from the shack—it would be cold with the night, bitter cold! There were many things to be done, and her hands were unaccustomed to doing these things; but she did them. And when they were done, she took the hand-ax she found in the car, and sallied down past the shack in search of firewood, for the hillside was bare.
When she returned, and came into sight of the camp, she dropped her burden and ran forward; for Murray was standing there in the sunlight, one hand to his head, staring around him dazedly!
Her cry of protest swung him about. He managed a wan smile, then obeyed her imperative, panted orders and dropped beneath the blanket canopy she had erected. She came up to him, breathless with effort and fear.
"The sun got me, eh?" murmured Murray. "Clairedelune, you're a wonder! I don't see how you did it. Lord but I feel ill again"
He dropped back limply, and she burst into tears of despair and helplessness as she knelt above him.
Again she lashed herself to work, removed the blanket from above the seepage, and laid it aside for a night-covering. A Californian, she knew little about sunstroke; but she believed that now he had fallen into a coma, which might pass into sleep, and his regular breathing gave her some assurance.
The afternoon dragged into evening, and the night came. Still Murray lay senseless, breathing heavily but evenly. The sun slipped out of sight under the western rim, and darkness clamped down until the stars shone.
Claire spread her blankets above the tiny shelter she had made for Murray, and lay with her face to the south and Two Palms. What time it was when she wakened, she did not know; she lay for a moment wondering why she had roused, then glanced toward Murray's shelter. In the starlight she could see that he had not moved. She could hear his breathing, as it had been. Then—her gaze leaped to the desert floor, where two moving stars were drawing close.
An automobile! Hope sprang within her, drew a quick, glad cry from her lips. She leaped up and arranged her dress with shaking fingers. Tom Lee was coming, then, was almost here!
Hurriedly she made shift to light a tiny blaze from the fragments of her fire, to guide the arrivals. As the car came into the valley below, the sound apprised her that it was a flivver, and she became certain that Tom Lee had come. The car threaded its way up the hillside, and ten feet from Murray's car, came to a halt. Its engine was not shut off, and its headlights held Claire in the center of this scene, lighting the place dimly, but efficiently.
Two dark figures leaped from the car and came toward her. A cry broke from Claire, and she drew back—not Tom Lee after all! Here was Piute Tomkins, and with him a stranger whom she did not know. But her fear vanished swiftly, and she choked down her disappointment.
"I'm so glad you came!" she exclaimed. "Doctor Murray has been hurt—why, what's the matter?"
She halted, blankly astounded. The stranger and Piute both produced revolvers, and their manner was distinctly unfriendly. The stranger now flashed the badge of a sheriff; he was a keen-eyed man, bronzed and resolute.
"You're under arrest, Miss Lee," he said. "So is Doctor Murray. That him yonder?"
"Arrest?" faltered the girl, shrinking in amazement and fear.
"Yep, complicity," said Piute. "The doc had a lot of opium in his room, and morphine—and you're helpin' him in his getaway! This here is the sheriff—Hennesy sent him over a-flyin'"
"But—but it's impossible!" wailed the girl, anguish in her voice. "He's ill—he's had sunstroke! And he's never had any opium"
The sheriff, who seemed to dislike his job, shook his head. "Sorry, Miss Lee, but we got the goods on him. My car broke down and we had to impress Bill Hobbs to bring us out here"
At this instant another figure came into the rays of light from the car. It was Bill Hobbs.
"What's the matter, Miss Lee?" he demanded. "Where's the doc?"
"He's ill—he had to fix a tire and the sun made him ill," she said weakly. "These men are trying to arrest him and me—oh, it's ridiculous!"
"Gee!" breathed Willyum, staring from her to the recumbent figure beneath the blankets. Then he swung on the other two. "So that was why you had me run you out here, huh? Tryin' to make a pinch, huh? You kept darned quiet about it!"
"Enough for you," snapped the sheriff. "Get busy, and help carry that man"
Suddenly Bill Hobbs changed. In a moment, he became a new man. Across his face swept an altered look; his hand leaped to his armpit, and an automatic flickered out toward the two men. He took them completely by surprise, covered them before their weapons could lift.
"Put up yer mitts!" he breathed hoarsely, a wild light in his flaring eyes. "Put 'em up, youse! So help me, if I gotta croak you"
The two obeyed, utterly astounded.
"You'll do time for this," began the sheriff furiously. Bill Hobbs flung an excited, reckless laugh at him.
"Will I? You'll go to hell first! Now look here—the doc ain't done nothin' at all, and you'd ought to know it! You big stool, you," Bill cast the words venomously at Piute. "I'll cook ye for this!"
"Hey! It wasn't me!" spoke up Piute in obvious alarm. "It was Doc Scudder! Don't go to p'inting that there gun too reckless"
"Scudder, was it?" Bill Hobbs swore. "I said that gink was crooked! So he tried to frame the doc, here, did he?"
"Good lord!" uttered the sheriff suddenly. He had been staring hard at Bill Hobbs; now he took a step backward, across his face flitting a look of recognition. "It's Swifty Bill!"
Willyum snarled at him.
"Yah, Swifty Bill!" he jeered. "Seen me before, have ye?"
"I've got pictures of you, my man," said the sheriff. "And word that you're wanted in Memphis—you've been wanted there for a long time! Those handbills have been up on my office wall for three years—why I didn't know you before, I can't say why"
Bill Hobbs spat a vicious oath at him. Claire had shrunk back, white-faced and fearful, watching the intense scene before her with eyes that only half comprehended.
"Know me, do you?" flung out Bill Hobbs. "And ye'll try to pinch one o' Swifty Bill's mob, will ye? I guess not! The doc ain't done nothin', I tell you! Youse guys ain't goin' to frame him an' get away with it, not for a minute!"
"See here," broke out the sheriff. "You're trying to buck the Government, Swifty Bill, and you know what that means! This man Murray had a lot of opium and morphine in his possession, and has no permit for it. You'd better put down that gun"
"I got that gat down on you," said Bill firmly, "and she stays like she is."
Suddenly he paused, then broke out anew, an impulsive eagerness brightening in his face.
"Say! What d'you guys say to this—leave the girl an' the doc go, and take me with you? I'll go! How's that, now? If ye want me, all right. If ye don't, I'll sure croak both of youse if we don't blow out o' here!"
Piute looked at the sheriff, but the latter scarcely hesitated. Those three-year-old handbills on the wall of his office recurred to his memory; Swifty Bill was implicated in a federal job back in Memphis, and there was more credit to be gained from the capture of such a man, than from taking in Murray. Besides, the drugs had been confiscated, and the chances were that Murray could not be punished for merely having them in his possession.
"You're on!" said the sheriff quickly.
"Then leave your guns and beat it to the car. I'll come in a minute."
The sheriff nodded to Piute. The two men dropped their weapons and retraced their steps. After watching them for an instant, Bill Hobbs turned to Claire Lee, and gestured toward Murray; his eyes were suddenly brimming with devoted affection.
"He ain't dead, miss?"
"No—but he's very ill"
"Listen! I gotta beat it with these guys, see? When we get to Two Palms, I'll wise up your dad. I guess the doc ain't bad hurt. What's in this dope frame-up, anyhow?"
"I don't know—it's all some mistake," said Claire vaguely.
"All right, then. Say, tell the doc I'm squarin' things up, will you? Him and me's pals, see. Tell him, will you?"
Claire nodded dumbly. So quickly had the situation evolved itself, that she was not yet fully sensible of its significance. The meaning of all this rapid-fire exchange of words was as yet only partially comprehensible to her. She could only nod assent.
Bill Hobbs turned and stumbled away to the car and the waiting handcuffs.