Mojave Crossing (1964)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 11

  “A few miles now, you keep your eyes open. We’ll come up to a water hole, and I’d prefer not to miss it.”

  She offered no comment, and it was just as well. But she was a mighty pretty woman, and I’d have preferred riding easy with her, not worrying about folks coming up on me unexpected.

  “You in some kind of trouble, ma’am?”

  “I hadn’t mentioned it,” she said, coolly enough.

  Well, that was fair. Only I was taking a risk, helping her this way.

  It grew hot … and hotter. Not a breath of air stirred. The white sands around us turned to fire.

  Heat waves shimmered a veil across the distance.

  We saw strange pools of water out there on the desert. Sweat trickled into our eyes. Our horses plodded along slowly; sweat streaked the gray film of dust that lay over them, and over us.

  Neither of us was of any mind to talk now.

  From time to time I turned to look back, for we were out in the open, masked only by the shimmering heat waves and the wall of the mountain along which we rode.

  There was nothing behind us but heat waves and the far-off shoulder of mountain.

  Cook’s Well was some place along here, but we missed it, and I was of no mind to waste time in search. Blind Spring lay somewhere ahead, and if we missed that, there would be no water until Cottonwood, down at the end of the mountain chain.

  Had they cut in after us? Or were they, as I hoped, riding west along the Government Road toward Marl Spring?

  “It might make a lot of difference,” I spoke out suddenly, “if I knew how anxious they were to find you.”

  She let her horse go on a few steps before she made answer, and then she said, “The man who is after me would kill you or a half dozen others to put his hands on me … and then he would kill me.”

  Well, that answered that.

  At high noon we drew up and I helped her down. I switched saddles and sponged out the mouths of our horses with water from a canteen.

  We each had a drink, and then we mounted up again and started on.

  All the long day through we pushed on, and it was coming on to dark when I finally gave up on Blind Spring. We’d been too far out from the mountain or too close in, one or the other. The water in our canteens was low, and I hated to think what would happen if we didn’t find water soon. We might make it, but the horses could not; and without the horses we would be helpless.

  At dusk we halted and stripped the saddles from our horses and I worked over them, rubbing them down, sponging out their mouths. Whatever Dorinda thought she wasn’t inclined to say, nor was I inclined to listen.

  The night came on, soft and dark, with the stars hanging easy in the sky. A cool wind blew up from somewhere, just a smidgin of it, but it felt good. When I was finished with the horses I dug into my saddlebags for the last of the bread. It was hard and dry, but when I broke off a chunk and passed it to her, she tied into x like it was cake.

  We sat there on a sandbank, chewing away, and finally she said, “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “It’s like this,” I said. “According to what I was told, from the point of the mountain we’ve got a three-cornered chance. Within three or four miles of this place there are three springs, they say, so we’ve a fair chance of locating one of them.”

  There was little time for rest, but trusting to the horses to warn us of any trouble coming, she rolled up in my bed and I hunkered down in the sand, working out a hollow for my body that came up on both sides of me, and there we rested.

  In the morning, when I was pulling on my boots in the light of the last lone star, I saw Dorinda was awake, lying quiet, looking up at the star. “This country,” I commented, “is hell on women and horses.”

  She did not turn her head or reply for several minutes, and then when I stood up to sling my gunbelt around my hips she said, “You get me to Los Angeles … that’s all I ask.”

  I didn’t answer her. With my bandana I carefully wipped the dust from the action of my pistol, checking the roll of the cylinder. She was asking a whole lot more than she knew, and right there I figured not to make any promises I couldn’t keep.

  When we had saddled up I said to her, “Just let the bridle alone. From here on, our horses might find water quicker by themselves.”

  Though I’d been told that Cottonwood was over the toe of the mountain from where we were, I decided to chance the other two springs, figuring there was no use wasting time in perhaps the wrong direction.

  So I headed south and let that stallion have his head.

  For a while he plodded on, seeming uninterested in much of anything, but then a change in the wind brought his head up and he quickened his step, bearing off to the right toward what I guessed would be the Old Dad Mountains. But as we drew closer I could see there were two small ranges with a break between them.

  In a little cove in the rocks we found a spring. There was a small trickle of water, and we let the horses drink their fill. After filling our canteens, we started on.

  A dozen miles further along we found Willow Spring, with a good flow of water and some willows and a few cottonwoods around, most of them no bigger than whipstocks. Leaving Dorinda to freshen up, I took up my Winchester and hiked it to the crest of the ridge, where I could look over our back trail.

  There was a flat rock that lay half in shadow, and down in front of it, about six to eight feet lower, a patch of white drift sand. Sitting on the edge of the rock where the shadow had cooled it off a mite, I studied our back trail toward the end of the Providence Range.

  It was hot and still. Far off over the desert a dust devil danced among the Galleta grass and the creosote brush, but I saw no dust of human make. It could be we had shaken them.

  Maybe we would have no trouble after all.

  What made me turn my head I’ll never know, but glancing over my left shoulder I caught just a glimpse of a rifle muzzle as somebody drew sight on me.

  Mister, I left off of that rock like I was taking a free dive into a swimmin’ hole, and I hit that heaped-up sand on my shoulder and rolled over. When I came up it was on one knee, the other leg stretched out ahead of me, and my Winchester coming up to firing position.

  The echo of at least two shots hung in the hot desert afternoon. I saw a man come around a rock and I tightened my finger on that trigger and made the dust jump on his jacket.

  It was no great shooting, for he was no more than thirty yards off. I’d no idea where he’d come from, but one thing I did know. He wasn’t going any place else. That .44 ca’tridge bought him a free ticket to wherever the good Lord intended, and I up and scooted down among those rocks, a-duckin’ and a-dodgin’ and a-squirmin’ among rocks and brush, my shoulders braced for a bullet that never came.

  When I hit the brush I was runnin’ all out, and the next thing I know there’s a squeal of startled irritation and there’s that black-eyed woman holding her dress in front of her and starin’ at me so fierce I had a notion to go back and face those guns. But I had another notion that beat that one alt.

  “Lady,” I said, “unless you want to ride out of here naked, you’d better dress faster’n you ever did. They’ve come upon us.”

  A bullet spat sand over my boots and I rolled over in the brush and laid all flat out, peeking through the willow leaves for something to throw lead at. I saw nothing.

  The echoes died away, and the afternoon was hot and still as ever. I’d no idea who was out there, or how many, but when they’d started shootin’ at me they opened the ball, and I was going to call a few tunes my own self.

  After a moment I eased back into the willows and went for the horses. They were out of sight among the rocks, and when I got to them I stood by, waiting for that woman to come up. While I waited I kept a sharp eye out for trouble and kept thinking about that range of hills to the south … all of four miles away, and all of it bald desert.

  Nobody needed to tell me that whatever we did, we’d have to clear out of here. There w
as too much cover around from which these springs could be taken under fire. When that witch woman came out of the brush, her black eyes sparking fire, I didn’t wait for any fancy talk. I just taken her up by the waist and threw her into the saddle and said, “Ride, lady!” And I went up into my saddle and we taken out of there like hell a-chasin’ tanbark.

  Somebody started shootin’, and I caught time for one quick glance over my shoulder and saw there were four or five anyway, and then two more came up out of the ground right ahead of me. I shot into the chest of the first one, firing my Winchester one-handed, like you’d hold a pistol. The other one let fly at me and damned near busted my eardrums, and then my horse went into hm. I heard him scream when a hoof smashed into his chest, but I only had time to hope that hoof wouldn’t get hung up on the ribs.

  Swinging wide to get that woman and the other horses ahead of me, I levered three fast shots back at those men, but I didn’t hit anything but desert and rock. Ricochets have a nasty whine, though, and I caught a picture of the men duckin’ for cover … and then all they could see of us was our dust.

  We had good horses, and those men in tryin’ to sneak up on us had left theirs somewhere behind them.

  We were runnin’ all out and reachin’ for the shadow of the Bristol Mountains before I looked back and saw them come out of the hills, far back.

  Closing in beside the Robiseau woman, I said, “Next time you take a bath it better be in Los Angeles.”

  Chapter Three.

  It worried me that those men had come up on me from out of nowhere. Somebody in the lot of them was a tracker, or a shrewd one at judging what a man had in mind, and it left me uncertain of what to do. Having a woman with me complicated matters … or would if I let it.

  Whatever they’d had in mind to start off with, it was a shooting matter now. There were three men down, and it was likely all three were dead, or hurting something fierce, and it wasn’t likely the others would pull off and forget it.

  Until now I’d been lucky—unlucky that they found us at all, but lucky in that I got off scot-free and didn’t catch lead myself.

  Nor the woman or horses.

  There was only one thing I could see to do, and that was to make them so miserable trying to catch us that they’d quit … if they had quit in them, which I doubted. So far it had cost them, but it was up to me to make it cost them more.

  We crossed over the Bristol Mountains and headed due south for a pass in the Sheep Holes, thirty-five or forty miles off, with not a drop of water anywhere between.

  On the horizon, not far ahead of us, loomed the black cone of a volcanic crater, and the black of a lava field. Beyond lay a wide dry lake, and I pointed our horses right at the spot where lava and dry lake joined, and we rode on.

  After a while, when we looked back, the notch in the mountains through which we had come was gone, vanished behind a shoulder of the mountain. There was no sound, there was no movement but our own, and the tiny puffs of white dust that lifted from the face of the playa as our horses walked.

  Behind us were shimmering heat waves, before us and around us the air wavered, and changed the looks of things.

  Small rocks seemed to tower above the desert, and the sparse brush seemed to be trees. Sweat streaked the flanks of our horses, dust rose around us. We were in a lost world, shut out from all about us by distance and by the shimmering heat.

  Far off, something more than twenty miles away, loomed a blue range of hills … the Sheep Hole Mountains. Beyond them would be more desert and more mountains.

  Would they follow us? Or, wiser than we were, mightn’t they turn and ride right to Los Angeles, knowing we would come there?

  Only, of course, they did not know. We might go to San Diego, or we might ride back north and go to San Francisco along the coast road.

  They had to follow, and before they caught up with us I figured to lead them a chase. If they wanted tracks to follow, I aimed to show them a-plenty, and across some wild country. Only thing was, this black-eyed woman wasn’t going to like it. In fact, I figured she regretted her bargain already. What waited her when those men caught up with us, I couldn’t say, but it would have to be amighty bad to equal what lay ahead of us now.

  Joe Walker and Old Bill Williams, mountain men both of them, had told me a good deal about the Mojave, but I’d learned of it from others as well, including a couple of Hualapai Indians I’d met in Prescott, both of whom had raided the ranchos for horses. It had been these Indians who told me most of what I knew of San Gorgonio Pass.

  Desert travel was not new to me, for I’d crossed the cap rock of west Texas by the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and I’d been across the White Sands of New Mexico, as well as made a trip up the Journada del Muerto, the “journey of death,” so I was no tenderfoot when it came to deserts.

  The desert can be a friendly place to a man on the dodge, but it is always better to hole up some place and wait for sundown. We were doing the worst thing a body could do in traveling by day, under a hot sun. The trouble was, those men back there behind us weren’t about to give us any time.

  Nobody knew better than me how lucky I’d been in that shindig back there, and it wasn’t likely to happen that way again.

  We pushed on, sagging in the saddle, the horses plodding steadily. Only me, I taken a look, time to time, to see if anything was gaining on us. Twice we stopped and I sponged out the horses’ mouths and gave that Dorinda girl a mouthful of water to drink.

  At sundown we could see mountains close ahead of us, and I began searching for the pass. One long arm of mountain had showed up to the east of us, and soon there was another on our right. A notch showed itself and I headed for that, glancing back one last time. There was a thin trail of something that might be dust, hanging against the sky.

  In the cool dark, with a kit fox yapping somewhere up in the rocks, we rode through the Sheep Hole Mountains and made dry camp in a tiny cove.

  Me, I was dead beat, and when I took that black-eyed Dorinda from her horse she could scarce stand, so I helped her to a place on the sand and kindled ourselves a hatful of fire and made coffee. Nobody needed to tell me how much she needed a hot drink, and I wasn’t against the idea myself. Meanwhile, I checked out my Winchester, then my pistol. Rummaging around in my bedroll, I dug out a spare Colt, and made sure it was loaded, too.

  “You killed a man back there,” she said suddenly.

  “Yes, ma’am. Maybe two or three.”

  “You don’t seem bothered by it.”

  “They were comin’ at me.”

  I poured out a cup of coffee for her and sat back on my heels, far enough from the fire not to be easily seen, and far enough from the crackle of the flames to hear if anything came upon us.

  “I never had it in mind to shoot at any man, ma’am, but when somebody takes up a gun and comes for you in anger, he borrows grief. He was fetching trouble, so I gave him what he asked for.”

  She was half asleep already, and I passed her over a piece of jerked beef to chew on. “Go ahead,” I told her, “it doesn’t look like much, but there’s a lot of stayin’ quality in it.”

  After chewing a while myself, I said, “Carryin’ a gun is a chancy thing. Sooner or later a man is put in position to use it. And a body has to figure that if somebody packs iron he plans to use it when the time comes; and if he draws it out, he plans to shoot.”

  I saw that she was fast asleep, so I covered her with a blanket and killed the fire. Then I went out and rubbed my horses down and gave them water, just a mite squeezed into theirthe mouths. It wasn’t much, and they wished for more; but it was all I had to offer, and it’s likely they understood.

  Taking my Winchester, I prowled around, and stood off under the stars, listening. This was spooky country, with big Joshua trees hither and yon, any one of which might be a man standing there. But the desert night was cool, and mean-tired though I was, it felt likely to my spirit.

  Work and war never gave me much time for poetry, but there was
a man in my outfit during the fighting near Shiloh who fancied it, and a time or two he’d quoted things at me from a book he carried in his shirt. I thought of it now, wishing I had some of those words he used to speak of the desert night.

  Sitting down on a rock, I sort of listened and waited, studying the night with my ears, and each sound held meaning for me. Sometimes I had to sort the sounds a mite, but I knew what each one was … and I heard no sound of man nor horse, no creak of saddle, clink of metal, or brush of garment upon stone.

  That woman back there was done in. Like it or not, we had to hole up somewhere and give her time to rest, but the worst of it was, one of those men in that outfit trailing us was a tracker and a hunter, and a sight better than most. It was that man who worried me, for if he continued to be as good as he’d been so far, we would be facing a showdown a lot sooner than I hoped.

  More and more I wondered what I’d got myself into, and what Dorinda Robiseau had done to make them want her so much.

  Not that she wasn’t a beautiful woman, and the kind of woman any man would want. Even now, tired out as she was, she was lovely. But there was more to it than that. And the chances were good that I’d gotten myself on the wrong side of the law. Still, none of those men back at Hardyville had been wearing a badge … nor did they look likely to.

  Though all the men who wore badges through the western lands could not be said to measure up to a proper standard.

  After a while I went back to our corner, checked the horses again, and burrowed into the sand to sleep.

  But sleep did not come, dead tired though I was, for it came upon me that I knew mighty little about Dorinda Robiseau—not where she came from, who she was, nor where she planned to go. There was no telling about her, and all I had was my first suspicions that she was a witch woman.

  Not that I place much stock in witches. All my life I’d heard tell of them, but I had never seen one, nor anything of their doings that I could swear to. …