He grabbed for me.
I swung my right to his jaw in a blow that was a full-arm swing, timed perfectly. It lifted him off his feet. He flung back his hands and then stretched his length on the sand that was so hot it would have cooled an egg.
The Yaqui said nothing.
Phil Brennan muttered an exclamation of disgust — for me.
I didn’t care. I sat down on my heels and rolled a cigarette, waiting for Harry Karg to get back to consciousness.
We have to do things in the desert so that they’re done with the least waste of time.
The sand burned into the man’s back. The sun tortured his eyelids. He groaned and twisted like an ant on a hot rock. I waited until he had opened his red eyes and realization dawned in them. Then I talked to him.
“You’ve been hard,” I told him, “with men you could dominate. You’ve avoided those you couldn’t. That’s been all right in the city. You’re in a different place now. You’re in the desert. You can’t bluff the desert, and you can’t four-flush. You’re going to tackle a real fight. I’m getting you ready for it.
“Now do you want to go on, or do you want to turn back? Do you want to take that one punch as settling things, or do you want to try a little more of the same?”
He squirmed about like a fresh trout in a hot frying pan. He tried to avoid meeting my eyes. But I held my gaze on him until he had to look at me.
We stared at each other for a full five seconds.
I read hatred and futility in his eyes.
But I knew the desert. I was doing things the only way possible for our own good. His eyes turned away.
“All right,” he said. “I guess you know best.”
I got up and walked to the burros then, and left him to plod along after he’d got up and scraped the hot sand out of his sweaty hair.
That night I cut down on their water supply. We had plenty, and we were coming to a country where there were springs. But I was giving them a taste of what was to come.
They had about half a pint of water apiece. It was warm water, flat and insipid, and it tasted of tin from the canteen, but they’d have to get used to it.
Pedro Murietta, the Yaqui, took his water.
He didn’t seem to care what happened. His devotion to Harry Karg was absolute, and yet it seemed to me to be founded on a hatred. He seemed constantly trying to break away from Karg’s dominating influence, yet he couldn’t.
Phil Brennan took his water, and he started to protest. Then he averted his eyes.
He wanted to fight, but he hated to oppose his will against that of another man. It wasn’t that he was submitting. It was simply that he wasn’t fighting. I didn’t like it.
Harry Karg started to throw his water in my face.
I guess he’d have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for the showdown we’d had earlier in the day.
He finally took the water, gulped it down in two big swallows and held out the empty cup for more.
I turned on my heel and walked away, leaving him with the empty cup. He had to learn his lesson sooner or later. It might as well be sooner.
That night the desert started to talk.
Deserts will do that. They’ll be hot and silent, sometimes for days at a time. Then, at night, they’ll begin to whisper.
Of course, it’s just the sand that comes slithering along on the wings of the night winds that spring up from nowhere with great force, and die down as suddenly and mysteriously as they come up. But it sounds as though the sand is whispering as it slides along, hissing against the rocks, against the stems of the sage, the big barrels of the cacti, and finally, when the wind gets just right, against the sand itself.
But all the desert dwellers know those sand whispers, and, just before they drop off to sleep, they get the idea the desert is whispering to them, trying to tell them some age-old secret.
Some of the old timers will admit it, and claim they can understand the desert. Some of them don’t admit feeling that way. But they all have heard the song of the sand.
We lay in our blankets. The stars blazed down, and the sand talked. The spell of the desert gripped us.
I saw a shadow lurch against the stars, and some one came over toward my blankets. I stuck my hand on the butt of my six-gun, and slid back the trigger.
But it was only Phil Brennan.
He paused, then when I sat up, he came over toward me.
“I wasn’t sure you were awake,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I knew he had something he wanted to talk about.
“The sand seems to be hissing little whispers,” he said.
I nodded. He hadn’t come over to me to tell me the sand was whispering.
“Of course,” he said, “it’s nothing but the wind.”
I just sat there, listening.
“You said the desert was a beautiful place,” he said.
I nodded.
“You meant the sunsets and the colors, the sunrises and the purple shadows?” he asked uneasily.
“No,” I said. “That’s not real beauty. That’s just an illusion. I meant the desert was beautiful because it strips a man’s soul stark naked, because it rips off the veneer and blasts right down to the real soul. I meant it was beautiful because it’s so cruel. It makes a man fight. It constantly threatens him. It’ll kill you if you make a mistake. It’ll kill off four-flushers and cowards and make a man find himself.
“Man learns the lesson of life from fighting. Some men are afraid to fight. The desert lures them into itself with its soft colors and its beautiful sunsets and lights and shadows, and then, before they know it, they’re fighting, fighting for their lives.
“That’s been your trouble. You’ve been too damned sensitive to fight. Now wait and see what the desert does.”
And I dropped back in my light blanket, pillowed my head on the saddle, and let him see I’d talked all I was going to.
I heard him tossing in his blankets. And I heard the desert whispering to him. The sand whispers were soft and furtive that night, sand whispering to sand, mostly, and there was something as full of promise about them as a woman crooning whispers to the man she loves.
Some time after midnight the wind died away, all at once, and the desert became calm and silent, a great big aching void, empty of noise, menacing.
The desert knows the true philosophy of life. Man lives and suffers, and he learns through his suffering.
We plodded on.
The second day found us at the base of a big butte.
I rubbed it in a little.
“Here is where we could have come by machine,” I said.
The party was silent. The Yaqui because he was always silent. Phil Brennan, because he was thinking. Harry Karg, because he was afraid to trust himself to speech. He was fighting something now that he couldn’t dominate, and it bothered him.
“We’d have reached it in a half a day by auto,” I said.
That made Karg’s heat-tortured face writhe.
But he kept silent.
I turned, and led the way into the desert that could only be traveled on foot, and my three companions were almost hard enough to stand a chance — if nothing went wrong. They weren’t tough enough yet but what a dry water hole would have spelled disaster — but that’s part of the game one plays in the desert.
We marched into the shimmering heat until the shadows closed about us. Then we had a little tea, and pushed on until it got too dark to see where we were going.
We made camp. The desert was silent, ominously silent.
The next day was an inferno with mountains that grimaced at us from the distance, rocky, hot mountains that writhed and wriggled all over the horizon.
That was the Yaqui country.
That afternoon I noticed the Yaqui.
After we’d spread our blankets and unsaddled the burros, I went to Harry Karg.