“Put ’em on,” he repeated. “You’ll right soon find out why. They’re lighter, you understand.” The old man removed a bridle from another peg as he spoke. “They protect your legs from the cactus better. Them woollies would get all snarled up in them stickers before you could say Jack Robinson.”
Just twenty-one minutes from the time he had rapped at Hoaley’s front door, Hardin stood in the yard at the side of the docile, saddled and bridled Scotch. Chaser was already in a stall in the barn, busy with a much needed feeding, and with Hoaley’s promise of a rub-down. Hoaley was standing at Scotch’s head now, as Hardin swung into the unfamiliar saddle.
“I’m leaving Chaser and my rig here as security, Mr. Hoaley,” he told the old horse runner. “If I don’t make it back, he’s yours. If I do come back, I’ll pay you for the use of Scotch.”
“I want no pay of any sort,” Hoaley snorted, and retreated a pace from the horse’s head, glaring up at the tall rider. “You just come back, that’s all. That’s pay enough. And remember there’s no water fit to drink anywhere on that desert! You will have to make them canteens I gave you last you there and back—wherever you catch up with your lobo. Be sparing of the water yourself, and don’t give Scotch much. He ain’t used to it. Just give him enough to keep him going. Laws, sometimes I begin to think that little horse’s ma must have been some kin to a camel!”
“I’ll remember,” Hardin promised grimly, though fully realizing that the old man’s words were meant to cheer him up on his journey. “Well, good night, Mr. Hoaley. Maybe I can do something in return some day. You’ve just got to call on me.”
“Good night, son.” Hoaley took one swift step toward the mounted man and laid a hand on the bridle rein. “Listen, Gage Hardin. I’m an old man, and maybe I’ve seen a few things in the world you haven’t had a chance to learn yet. But there’s one thing: I have always held that a man who was afraid to throw in his last chip was a mighty poor gambler. Anyways when everything else he’s got is in the pot. And we’re all gamblers, Hardin—one way or another, though maybe some of us kind of hesitate to admit it. The fellows who buck the game hard enough—all the way through—are the ones that win. That’s all. I’ll be seeing you.”
The roan stretched his legs and threw out his big splayed feet. The sand showered behind him. Man and horse were gone, down the face of the desert—
To those who are not worthy of her favors and who cross her grim borders, the desert ruthlessly and relentlessly deals death, for there is no patience in her soul for either weaklings or those who will not stop to learn her moods and cater to her whims. But to those few who love her, she can give with tenderness and generosity. To such men—men like old Shark Hoaley, she can give of her rich secrets, her beauty, and sometimes the gold that men hold dear.
And so was Gage Hardin girded as he set out on his quest, by the advice of a man who knew and had traveled his desert, who loved it. Men might have called Shark Hoaley a desert rat, but that would have been because they did not know. In fact, he was one of the world’s strong, who had learned from Nature, who had learned to live alone, by his own strength. And it was the feeling of that added strength that was in Gage Hardin’s veins as he set out grimly through forests of gaunt cacti, through rolling dune wastes, weirdly sculptured in the dawning day.
Soon there would be a brassy glare that would burn his eyeballs—he knew it. Heat waves would billow up stiflingly. Deep sand would try to ensnare even Scotch’s splayed hoofs.
But none of it mattered. His eyes were set straight ahead. And in his heart was one grim purpose—to catch Rood Vandover and bring him back, thereby bringing nearer the justice for which he had vainly fought for nine years.
CHAPTER III
ON THE DEVIL’S DANCE FLOOR
GAGE HARDIN and Scotch were still traveling steadily long after the gray of dawn had given way to tenuous fingers of crimson and crystal light that slanted across the desert sands, turning them to shimmering gold. The sun, as it rose with startling suddenness over the horizon, poured a quivering sea of molten brass over the waste of sand and cactus and yucca, touching here and there a huge boulder that rose menacingly out of the yellow ocean.
Hardin sat loosely in the saddle, forcing the horse to an even mile-annihilating pace, though his every instinct was for spur and galloping haste. Scotch lived up to his owner’s praise of him. The horse seemed to know the desert, as he knew the potency of his own spread hoofs.
Gage Hardin smiled just once on that ride, and that was when for an instant he did manage to force his mind away from Lonny Pope and Mary and his own grim purpose. He smiled in remembrance of a story he had heard told in the bunkhouse. This ride of his was remindful of it. The story, as he recalled it, concerned a man in urgent need of making an extended ride, a man who passed a boy riding in the same direction and sought information of him.
Drawing abreast of the boy, so the bunkhouse rannies had told it, the man had inquired: “Say, boy, do you think I can make it to town by sunset?”
The boy surveyed the man’s mount calculatingly, and answered in a drawl: “Yeah. If you ride slow enough.”
The man scowled and rode on, forcing his horse to the utmost. Some hours later he was obliged to slow his weary mount to a mere persistent plodding. The boy came cantering by on an eager, still-fresh horse. The man, anxious and perturbed, called to him again: “Say, boy! Can I make it to town by sunset?”
And the boy, glancing back over his shoulder, answered curtly: “Yeah. If you ride fast enough.”
Hardin was taking no chances. He saw to it that the roan Scotch traveled slowly enough. There might be need for speed later—all that the stout-hearted little desert horse could give. Several times he halted the animal, to swab the dust and sand from Scotch’s nostrils with a wet bandanna, and to give him a mere sip of water from one of the canteens.
What old Hoaley had said was true. Hardin did not know the desert. He knew of it only, and had been glad enough of the old man’s advice. But he did know horses, he knew how to treat them, and how to ride. He knew the steady, patient method of putting the miles behind him, which was not much different in the sand with the proper horse under him than long miles ridden over hard ground.
At last, when the sun was climbing steadily toward the meridian, and the heat waves were like oven blasts, Hardin saw dimly, through the shimmering hot air, due ahead, the low-lying arc of dunes that rimmed the Devil’s Dance Floor. Though he had never been here before, Hardin recognized the approach to the Devil’s Dance Floor immediately, for Hoaley had impressed the dune formation upon him as an unmistakable landmark of his destination.
Pulling Scotch to a halt, Hardin sat motionless on the panting animal’s back, his hands crossed on the saddle horn, keenly studying the forbidding country spread before him, and searching for signs of his quarry. This was a kind of country with which he, used to rolling green prairie and lush-topped mesa land, was unfamiliar.
It was a country which he viewed with vast repugnance and unease, though he had realized he was coming to the open door of hell, as he had heard it described. It was a kind of nightmare country, a place of shifting sand held in place for the time being by low, matted patches of cacti and dry, unpleasant weeds the names of which he did not even know. And all of it looked as if it might shift at any moment to let the unsuspecting slip down into still hotter nether regions.
The only alternate sign of living growth was the aborted shapes of taller cacti, grotesque, contorted forms, like shambling skeletons stationed there by the desert itself as a grim warning to man not to enter.
Hardin’s gaze dropped to the sands. A few yards to his right were the clear tracks