“Sure is. Kind of expensive now, you understand—”
“I’ll lay some in. You can find the place easily—over by the oasis. And we . . . we might be able to talk about your prospecting, too.”
Tallant’s thin lips were set firm as he walked away.
The bartender opened a bottle of beer and plunked it on the damp-circled counter. “That’ll be twenty cents,” he said, then added as an afterthought, “Want a glass? Sometimes tourists do.”
Tallant looked at the others sitting at the counter—the red-eyed and unshaven old man, the flight sergeant unhappily drinking a Coke—it was after Army hours for beer—the young man with the long, dirty trench coat and the pipe and the new-looking brown beard—and saw no glasses. “I guess I won’t be a tourist,” he decided.
This was the first time Tallant had had a chance to visit the Desert Sport Spot. It was as well to be seen around in a community. Otherwise people begin to wonder and say, “Who is that man out by the oasis? Why don’t you ever see him anyplace?” The Sport Spot was quiet that night. The four of them at the counter, two Army boys shooting pool, and a half-dozen of the local men gathered about a round poker table, soberly and wordlessly cleaning a construction worker whose mind seemed more on his beer than on his cards.
“You just passing through?” the bartender asked sociably.
Tallant shook his head. “I’m moving in. When the Army turned me down for my lungs, I decided I better do something about it. Heard so much about your climate here I thought I might as well try it.”
“Sure thing,” the bartender nodded. “You take up until they started this glider school, just about every other guy you meet in the desert is here for his health. Me, I had sinus, and look at me now. It’s the air.”
Tallant breathed the atmosphere of smoke and beer suds, but did not smile. “I’m looking forward to miracles.”
“You’ll get ’em. Whereabouts you staying?”
“Over that way a bit. The agent called it ‘the old Carker place.’ ”
Tallant felt the curious listening silence and frowned. The bartender had started to speak and then thought better of it. The young man with the beard looked at him oddly. The old man fixed him with red and watery eyes that had a faded glint of pity in them. For a moment, Tallant felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air of the desert.
The old man drank his beer in quick gulps and frowned as though trying to formulate a sentence. At last he wiped beer from his bristly lips and said, “You wasn’t aiming to stay in the adobe, was you?”
“No. It’s pretty much gone to pieces. Easier to rig me up a little shack than try to make the adobe livable. Meanwhile, I’ve got a tent.”
“That’s all right, then, mebbe. But mind you don’t go poking around that there adobe.”
“I don’t think I’m apt to. But why not? Want another beer?”
The old man shook his head reluctantly and slid from his stool to the ground. “No thanks. I don’t rightly know as I—”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. Thanks all the same.” He turned and shuffled to the door.
Tallant smiled. “But why should I stay clear of the adobe?” he called after him.
The old man mumbled.
“What?”
“They bite,” said the old man, and went out shivering into the night.
The bartender was back at his post. “I’m glad he didn’t take that beer you offered him,” he said. “Along about this time in the evening I have to stop serving him. For once he had the sense to quit.”
Tallant pushed his own empty bottle forward. “I hope I didn’t frighten him away.”
“Frighten? Well, mister, I think maybe that’s just what you did do. He didn’t want beer that sort of came, like you might say, from the old Carker place. Some of the old-timers here, they’re funny that way.”
Tallant grinned. “Is it haunted?”
“Not what you’d call haunted, no. No ghosts there that I ever heard of.” He wiped the counter with a cloth and seemed to wipe the subject away with it.
The flight sergeant pushed his Coke bottle away, hunted in his pocket for nickels, and went over to the pinball machine. The young man with the beard slid onto his vacant stool. “Hope old Jake didn’t worry you,” he said.
Tallant laughed. “I suppose every town has its deserted homestead with a grisly tradition. But this sounds a little different. No ghosts, and they bite. Do you know anything about it?”
“A little,” the young man said seriously. “A little. Just enough to—”
Tallant was curious. “Have one on me and tell me about it.”
The flight sergeant swore bitterly at the machine.
Beer gurgled through the beard. “You see,” the young man began, “the desert’s so big you can’t be alone in it. Ever notice that? It’s all empty and there’s nothing in sight but, there’s always something moving over there where you can’t quite see it. It’s something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn’t there. Ever see it?”
“Optical fatigue—” Tallant began.
“Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn’t a tribe of Indians hasn’t got some way of accounting for it. You’ve heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it’s optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren’t quite the same, and there were the Carkers.”
“You’ve got a special localized legend?”
“Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You encase ’em in solid circumstance and they’re not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don’t quite see and you put
