Nora was at the fire, and the coffee water was boiling. Badger hunkered down, back a bit from the flames, and faced partly away from them. “So far so good, Danny,” he said. “You brought us to water.”
“Better tank up,” Rodelo answered. “Drink all you can. We’ve got the worst of all waiting for us out there.”
Harbin snorted. “I can do the rest of it standin’ on my head.”
Rodelo shrugged. “You pick your own way of doing it, Harbin, but I’ll see no man die out there if I can help it. There’s a belt of shifting dunes between here and the coast, miles of them, and not a drop of water to be had.”
Harbin looked at him. “You sure like to make a big man of yourself, don’t you?”
Rodelo made no reply. Harbin’s frustration and irritation, coupled with the harsh travel, had brought him to a murderous mood, and Rodelo realized it.
“Coffee’s ready,” Nora said. “Come and get it while it’s hot.”
“I’ll have some,” Rodelo said. “A cup of coffee would taste right good.”
Nora filled a cup and handed it to him, but Harbin reached over so suddenly he almost spilled the coffee in grabbing for the cup. “I’ll take that!” he said sharply.
“Sure,” Rodelo replied mildly, “you have it, Harbin.”
Harbin stared at him angrily. “What’s the matter? You yella? You afraid to fight?”
Rodelo shrugged. He was half smiling. “What’s there to fight about? We’ll all get coffee. You can have the first cup.”
“Maybe I’ll have the second too!” Harbin was prodding him; but the time was not right, and Rodelo could wait.
“All right, you have the second too.”
“And maybe I’ll take it all!”
“What about us, Joe?” Badger spoke quietly. “I’d like a cup myself.”
Nora held out a cup to Dan. “Take this. There’s no sense in bickering over a cup of coffee.”
Instantly, Joe Harbin slapped the cup from her hand and grabbed for his gun. He drew and fired so quickly that his shot missed, smashing into the just filled waterbags behind Rodelo.
Rodelo, close to him, went in on a long dive, his powerful right shoulder catching Harbin on the hip and knocking him spinning to the ground. Before he could get a good grip on his gun again, Rodelo kicked it from his hand.
With a grunted oath, Harbin came off the sand in a lunge, but he pulled his punch too wide and Dan Rodelo’s caught him on the cheekbone with a wicked right as he came in. Harbin, stopped in his tracks, was perfectly set up for the sweeping left, and he went down hard.
Instantly, Badger leaped in and grabbed Rodelo. “Easy now! Let’s not be fightin’!”
Stunned, Harbin lay still for a moment. When he got up he was quiet. “All right, Rodelo,” he said. “I’ll kill you for that.”
His voice was cold and even. The man who spoke was not the man Rodelo had knocked down, scarcely the man he had known for all those months in prison. For the first time Dan Rodelo felt something like fear. Yet he stood quietly and looked at Harbin. “You’ll be a fool if you try, Harbin,” he said. “You’re out of prison. You’re in Mexico. In a matter of a day or two you’ll be aboard Isacher’s boat and headed for Mazatlan. But believe me, you’ll need me from here until you get to the Gulf. You’ll need me until you get your feet on that boat.”
There was a growing welt on Harbin’s cheekbone, a thin cut on his jaw. Harbin’s fingers touched them, gingerly. “You marked me,” he said almost wonderingly. “Nobody ever put a mark on me before.”
He took up his coffee and, making no effort to retrieve his gun, walked off and sat down on a rock. Nora filled cups for Badger, Gopher, and Rodelo, and finally for herself. Nobody talked. They drank their coffee, the wind down the arroyo grew chill. Dan added wood to the fire, going out into the darkness for branches or roots of dried mesquite and creosote.
The fire blazed up, the smoke smelled good, the stars became brighter and the wind colder.
“Is there water down by the Gulf?” Badger asked.
“Some … and some of it is bad.”
“But you know the good springs?”
“Sure he does,” Harbin spoke up. “You can bet he knows. He knows just about everything.”
Badger strolled over to the waterbags. The sand was damp under them. He knew what he would see when he hfted the sacks, for he had seen the bullet strike. The bags had been piled together; now they were flat and empty. Each of them had been holed by the bullet, cutting a corner from one sack, going through another and into the third.
Harbin watched Badger examine the bags and drop them back on the ground. “We still got two canteens,” he said. “That should last us.”
“And the horses?”
“We’ll water them before we leave. They’ll make it.”
The horses were in bad shape and they all knew it; they were in no condition for a grueling ride through the last of the lava, and then the tough travel over the deep sand of the dunes.
Harbin came over, picked up his gun, rubbed the sand from it, and slid it into his holster.
“Where are they?” Nora asked. “The Indians, I mean.”
“Out there. They’re where they can see our fire, maybe even within the sound of our voices. They’ve seen all this before, you know. We’ll have to keep a good lookout tonight.”
He got up and walked over to the horses. Leading them to water, he allowed them to drink their fill. He noticed that the campfire showed scarcely at all when a man was well away from it. He let the horses take their time, then led them to some mesquite brush and picketed them nearer the fire.
Now for the first time he realized how tired he was, but he did not dare to sleep. He could trust no one of them, perhaps not even Nora. He had not figured her out at all, but then she could know nothing about him either.
He tried to remember all he knew about this country, and could recall only a little, most of it quite general. These natural tanks were the only water he knew of south of Tinajas Altas on which a man could rely, and even they might on occasion be empty or down to mere dregs. But there must have been rain not very long ago, for the tanks were well filled and the water was sweet. West of Pinacate was an area to be avoided. He had never penetrated far in that direction and it might be passable, but there were hundreds of small cones there, and rough, lava flows—desperately bad country to cross. To the east it was nearly as bad, but a ghost of a trail went that way and just at the base of the two highest peaks there were some tanks. He had never seen them, but a Yuma Indian had told him of them. This Indian had learned of them from the Sand Papagos, who had once lived in the Pinacate country.
Whether there was water or not, it would be a safer route, although somewhat longer. There were other tanks at the southern tip of Pinacate, but none of them or those to the east were reliable.
Why not, he asked himself, bring it to a showdown now? Yet the moment he thought of it he knew he dared do nothing of the kind. In the first place, he was out-numbered; in the second, he hoped to bring it off without a shooting if he could manage it. In a way, he was waiting, just as the Indians were, for them to play out. At the same time he knew he was giving them every break he could … was it because of Nora? Or some forgotten remnant of humanitarian impulse within him?
He could slip away and hide out in the desert. After all, one of the remaining canteens was his own. But without him there was little chance they would survive. A chance, yes, but a very small one.
The wind was cold. Rodelo looked up at the stars. The desert or mountain man was forever lifting his eyes to the peaks or to the stars; it was no wonder that men of the wilderness knew so much about the flight of birds and the habits of animals. In cities a man’s eyes were on the ground, or rarely above eye level.
He went back toward the fire, but stood back from it, beyond the edge of the light. He wanted to offer no target if one of the Indians decided now was the time.
“We’ve got to mount guard,” Badger said.
Harbin got up. “I’ll take first watch.” He turned to Nora. “Come on, let’s go.”