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 was 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.
