Devil's Manhunt (Stories from the Golden Age) (5 page)

This then was one of Bonnet’s companions. The body was partially sunken into the alkali and Tim yanked it out, scrabbled beneath it in a wild search for a weapon. There was nothing there but the man’s worn clothes and the tattered shoes on his feet.

Tim crouched and looked back to the canyons which led up to the cool lush heights of Desperation Peak. He could see something moving now, eight hundred yards above and beyond the canyon’s mouth. A feverish prayer sprang to his lips and he glanced beseechingly at the sky. He gripped his knife and sought to posture the burro in such a way that it might act as a shield. Whenever he moved the mummy, the sharp dust bit into his eyes and his nostrils, and the alkali salt settled over him and caked his hands and his face and his clothes.

Then, for the first time, he noticed how long the shadows were. He glanced toward the sun and found, with a shock, that he could not see it. There was a sighing in the air. It was not like the sibilance of the wind in the pines, but more vicious, like the hiss of a poisonous snake. Then a dust devil was all about him, filling his mouth and eyes with the hot acridness of alkali.

His lungs, already inflamed with running, began to shrivel within him. Over him, remorselessly played the gigantic column of dust, scorching him and suffocating him. It lessened and whipped back. Clearing his eyes for an instant as it receded, Tim had seen that the entire area about him was alive with these freakish whirlwinds. They filled the air with a fog which made sight impossible. He was smothered again then; choking darkness drifted down around him.

Chapter Four

F
OR
the better part of the night Bonnet and Sven ranged the flat, adventuring out upon it as far as a mile; then Bonnet returned to a spur of Desperation Peak immediately below their camp, to await Sven who still searched. At dawn Sven found Bonnet sleeping comfortably. Sven shook his shoulder.

“Coom up now, Mr. Bonnet. He vas dead, Aye think.”

Bonnet sat up and rubbed his eyes; he replaced his hat, smoothed out his corduroy, blew a speck of dust out of the muzzle of his rifle, and looked out across the expanse already scorching in the morning sun. A fresh dust devil was spinning, a small one. As the day progressed they would grow larger and larger until at sunset the contrary and buffeting winds would entirely populate this hell with them. It was a bleak and depressing sight.

Bonnet sighed.

“He coom to his finish,” said Sven. “It vas impossible to cross him until November. Huh, Mr. Bonnet?”

“Too bad,” said Bonnet. “Sven, I feel like the buzzard denied of his prey, the jackal robbed of his carcass, the wolf cheated of his kill. Ungrateful of him, isn’t it?”

“Three, four days he coom up with much sport,” said Sven, scowling at Bonnet.

“Ah yes, Sven. But the kill, man, the kill. We yelled ‘tallyho’ and then didn’t bring him to bay. We have no brush to show. Regrettable.”

“Vat you mean, Mr. Bonnet?”

“Fox hunting,” said Bonnet. “First one to the kill gets the fox’s tail.”

“It vas like mine head,” said Sven, heavily.

“Ah yes, just like your head, Sven. Quite so.” Bonnet looked out across the alkali flats and then sighed again. “The hunting is all well and good, Sven. But what’s a hunt unless you come in at the end? He had us after all.”

“He vas dead. Aye am sure,” said Sven.

“But the alkali got him, we didn’t,” said Bonnet. “That’s the difference.”

“So long as he vas dead,” said Sven. “All dot Aye vas interested in vas de gold. Coom up, Mr. Bonnet. Aye am hongry.”

Bonnet rose languidly, stretched, put his rifle across his wrist and put his hands in his pockets. He sauntered up the slope after Sven, toward a greener elevation. Now and then Bonnet would look backward at the alkali flats which had cheated him. At last he resigned himself to it and grudgingly assigned to the desert its dead.

S
ven quickened his pace as the music of the creek came to him. He trotted down into the bottom, crashed through some alder and floundered up to his knees in the stream. He bent and ducked himself, head and shoulders, into the reviving water. He came up and instantly grabbed at his gun.

Mr. Bonnet’s howl of anger still echoed in the ravine. Sven looked every place for the source of annoyance, then stared at his master.

Bonnet was tearing through the rubble of his camp, throwing buckskin sacks left and right. Sven struggled up the slippery bank from the sluice and looked stupidly on.

“Do something!” Bonnet screamed at him. “Do something, you condemned fool! It’s gone! It’s gone, I tell you! Gone! Gone! Gone!” And Bonnet tore again at the empty buckskin sacks.

Sven walked to the shallow cache where the gold had lain in the forty sacks. It was empty. Bleak bewilderment came over him. He looked from the sluice to his master and back again.

Bonnet was running back and forth like a hound, rifle held so tight that his knuckles, like his face, were pasty gray. Every now and then he would stop and shout at Sven, “Do something!”

Bonnet’s circles were growing wider and his actions wilder. He turned and threw his hat at Sven. “Circle out and pick up his track!” he shouted.

Sven picked up the two remaining canteens. “He vas took vater, yes.”

Bonnet came back, quivering, and then halted, staring at a plain footprint in the damp bank. Beside it was the impression of Sven’s huge sole. Mr. Bonnet pointed at it. Sven came up and looked at it thoughtfully.

“It vasn’t him,” said Sven. He scratched his head. “It vasn’t me and it vasn’t you and it vasn’t him.”

Bonnet’s face was becoming dark. “It was Sims, you bungler. I leave you to do a thing and you botch it; you’d be dead if it weren’t for me!”

Sven looked stupidly at the footprint. “But he vas hit over the ear with my fist. It vas a hard blow. Aye tell you. His skull vas cracked. He vas in the middle of the desert vithout vater!”

“It was Sims!” shouted Bonnet. “He followed us through and he’s waited here, laughing at us. He just waited until we were gone long enough so he could take the gold!”

“Maybe it vas that Cormoree
half-breed
,” said Sven.

“No! No! No!” said Bonnet, impatiently. “It wasn’t Cormoree. I blew his brains out myself. I tell you it’s that Sims. Spread out. Pick up his trail. It ought to be easy to follow him while he’s carrying all that gold.”

Sven looked at the track. “It vasn’t the young one. His heel tore off. Yah, it must be Sims. Aye vas hitting a veak blow; forgive me, Mr. Bonnet.”

But Bonnet wasn’t paying any attention to Sven. A yip of elation came from him. He had moved down the ravine. Sven lumbered down to where Bonnet was and found him bending over a track. There were the footprints again across a wet place; beside them, deeply sunken, were the hoof-marks of a jenny.

“Look,” said Bonnet. “It’s like I tell you. He got back to the other side after you hit him. And he came on through with a burro. He’s been waiting here, watching us while we wasted our time hunting that young fool of a miner. Sims actually made it back despite the desert all around here; he brought a burro!”

“Yah,” said Sven. “The burro vas carrying a heavy load.”

“He was carrying two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold,” said Bonnet. “Come along. Be quick now. He can’t be very far ahead. If he tried to head back across the sink, we may catch up to him. He won’t go fast through that soft alkali. Not with a cargo like that burro’s carrying. Oh, we’ll get you, Mr. Sims! Fill up the canteens!”

Sven rushed back and dipped the two remaining canteens in the stream, capped them and looked up to find that Bonnet was already well down the mountain. Sven lumbered after him.

From rise to rise, bending his eyes always toward the desert, blazing now under the morning sun, Bonnet made his excited way. He cut off all the angles of the trail which would have been made necessary by the zigzagging of a burro down a steep grade. Now and then he and Sven would lose the spoor entirely, only to pick it up further on.

They were content to catch it in spots because the course obviously tended toward the desert, and they knew that the alkali dust would reveal much. Sims, they knew, would have to cross desert to get out of here and it didn’t matter where he entered it. They would find the track.

At last they came to the place where the boulders thinned and the sinks began. Out there in that boiling hell lay certain death unless they were extremely careful of their water. This place could drink a man dry in six hours, squeeze him to death. It could suck out his juice and leave him a mummy in less than a day.

Sven, snuffling eagerly, found the place where the tracks led out. And with Bonnet close beside him, face muffled to the eyes with a scarf, Sven struck off into the alkali. The canteens banged together. Bonnet floundered through the powder, watching the spoor ahead, eyes lifting eagerly to find his game.

For three hours they traveled on the trail, conserving their water. Then, anxiety dying through the toil of walking, they rested for a moment.

“He can’t be far,” said Bonnet.

“Ve’ll coom up with him,” said Sven, “und then you vas get your kill. Huh, Mr. Bonnet?”

Bonnet grinned and reached for the canteen. It was curiously light in his hand and he stared at it. He pulled out the cork and excitedly uptilted it. A solitary drop came out.

Sven, in the sudden nausea of terror, uncorked the other canteen. It was empty as well. They stood up. Bonnet looked out into the desert and then turned slowly to look back at Desperation Peak, three hours of fast travel behind them—
twelve miles
!

But they couldn’t travel as fast on the return, and they had not drunk on the way out. The hottest, most aching part of the day remained. The desert sun and the alkali were drinking heavily from Bonnet’s body, till the extraction of water was a physical sensation. He looked at the empty canteen in his hand and then turned it up to examine it.

It did not matter now, nothing mattered now, but there was a small hole made by the point of a knife in the canteen’s bottom from which the water had drip, drip, dripped, to evaporate before it ever struck the ground.

Bonnet stared at Desperation Peak. Sven was already beginning to lumber back toward the first spur of the distant mountain. It was so deceptively near, the green meadows, the green trees, so cool and inviting. Sven stumbled on, faster now, floundering, blowing hard as he lumbered through the alkali, surging back in animal desperation for a life which his mind knew was already forfeited.

Bonnet looked at the track which led out into the alkali wastes, fixed his spyglass to his eye. The hot metal of the rim burned him but he gazed thoughtfully. The track led on for another half a mile and then curved slowly to the right to head back toward Desperation Peak. It passed within five hundred yards of the outgoing trail, angling off and getting wider. Bonnet crossed the bow and found the returning spoor. He was reeling already from thirst.

He went outward along it a little way, for there was no jenny here—only a man and a man walking light. This puzzled him and he thought perhaps he might find the gold. But ten minutes later he knew that even this satisfaction was to be denied him.

Beside the trail, indifferently covered with alkali dust, were the two front legs of a mummified burro. They had been sawed off at the knees with a knife. There were also two tattered old boots with peculiar red tops. He recognized them instantly as belonging to the half-breed Cormoree, whom he had murdered.

Bonnet smiled wanly as he looked at these “tracking irons.” “What a fool I am,” he thought to himself. One of these hoofs even had a nick in it, a flaw which, if his greed had not blinded him, would easily have disclosed that two hoofs, not four, had been used.

He had been fooled; while they had searched in the wastes, the trap had been laid for them last night. The hunters had been trapped by the fox. The young miner would be back there lying beside a cool stream by now.

Bonnet turned and looked back at Desperation Peak. The dust devils were gathering with the approaching noontide. The exhaustion of moisture from him was such as to make him faint. It was easily a hundred and forty degrees here, and death would not be too pleasant.

Sven was merely a speck, stumbling more often now, picking himself up to rush on, a hopeless, degrading figure in the near distance. The major portion of his journey was yet to be traveled. He would obviously never make it.

Bonnet breathed a contemptuous, “Animal.” He took out his Colt. The metal was hot to his touch. In a moment he would not mind that; he placed the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger.

The shot ranged faintly across the alkali wasteland and was swallowed up in the sing of the whirling dust devils.

In the distance, Sven turned, wiped a shaking hand across his cracked lips, and looked back. His small eyes picked out the huddled dot. He convulsively took two steps toward it before he understood. Sven staggered and then, face hidden in his hands, sank down hopelessly to wait.

T
im Beckdolt came back from the spur from which he had been watching. He walked wearily up the gully toward his placer, came to the spot where the water sank away. He bathed his face and went on. Just before dusk he arrived at his diggings. He sat down, tiredly.