Brand Blotters - Page 2/180

The tenderfoot rose from the ledge upon which he had been lying and

stretched himself stiffly. The chill of the long night had set him

shivering. His bones ached from the pressure of his body upon the rock

where he had slept and waked and dozed again with troubled dreams. The

sharpness of his hunger made him light-headed. Thirst tortured him. His

throat was a lime-kiln, his tongue swollen till it filled his mouth.

If the night had been bad, he knew the day would be a hundred times worse.

Already a gray light was sifting into the hollow of the sky. The vague

misty outlines of the mountains were growing sharper. Soon from a crotch

of them would rise a red hot cannon ball to pour its heat into the parched

desert.

He was headed for the Sonora line, for the hills where he had heard a man

might drop out of sight of the civilization that had once known him. There

were reasons why he had started in a hurry, without a horse or food or a

canteen, and these same reasons held good why he could not follow beaten

tracks. All yesterday he had traveled without sighting a ranch or meeting

a human being. But he knew he must get to water soon--if he were to reach

it at all.

A light breeze was stirring, and on it there was borne to him a faint

rumble as of thunder. Instantly the man came to a rigid alertness. Thunder

might mean rain, and rain would be salvation. But the sound did not die

away. Instead, it deepened to a steady roar, growing every instant louder.

His startled glance swept the cañon that drove like a sword cleft into the

hills. Pouring down it, with the rush of a tidal wave, came a wall of

cattle, a thousand backs tossing up and down as the swell of a troubled

sea. Though he had never seen one before, the man on the lip of the gulch

knew that he was watching a cattle stampede. Under the impact of the

galloping hoofs the ground upon which he stood quaked.

A cry diverted his attention. From the bed of the sandy wash a man had

started up and was running for his life toward the cañon walls. Before he

had taken half a dozen steps the avalanche was upon him, had cut him down,

swept over him.

The thud of the hoofs died away. Into the open desert the stampede had

passed. A huddled mass lay motionless on the sand in the track of the

avalanche.

A long ragged breath whistled through the closed lips of the tenderfoot.

He ran along the edge of the rock wall till he found a descent less sharp,

lowered himself by means of jutting quartz and mesquit cropping out from

the crevices, and so came through a little draw to the cañon.