More than once did Murray curse himself for a fool as he piloted the car northward into the wastes, but he continued his course without delay.
The girl's story had moved him strangely, stirred him to the depths. Still it was not clear to him why he was thus taking Claire out into the desert—except that he was compelled thereto by the dominant will and massive personality of Tom Lee. To tell the truth, Murray was far from urging upon himself any logical reasoning for what he was doing; the presence of Claire beside him was reason enough. He was joyful at the intimacy established between them, at the friendly confidence that had risen. It was long since Douglas Murray had craved the company of a woman—and now he felt strangely happy and buoyant.
They were in the marble ca?on now, and repairing a tire that had blown out. There was about them the full heat of a desert day, sickening and insufferable. The white walls of the ca?on, where was no shade or relief from the blinding dazzle of the white sun, refracted the heat tenfold and shimmered before their eyes in waves of smoldering fire. All breeze was dead. The car, where the sunlight smote it, was blistering to the touch.
Murray got the tire repaired, and with a deep sigh of relief flung the jack into the car. He refilled the boiled-over radiator from one of the water canteens swinging beside the car, then climbed under the wheel. He paused to mop his streaming face.
"Do you think your father means to come out to Morongo Valley?"
"I think so, with the contractor—perhaps tomorrow or today. Really, Doctor Murray, I can't say just what he intends! When Father gives no explanation of his actions he simply is inscrutable."
Murray nodded and started the car forward. He could well understand that Tom Lee, masked by oriental calm and being governed by the unfathomable oriental mind, was, even to Claire, an absolutely unknown quantity.
They cleared the ca?on at last. Here was not the table-flat desert, however. From the canyon the trail debouched into a wilderness of volcanic ash and wind-eroded pinnacles, where along the rocky portals great smears of smoke-weed hung wavering like the wraith of long-dead fires.
From here, at last, back to the desert—and into one of those salt sinks of the desert, a basin of some ancient sea, perhaps, where the road wound precariously between stretches of sun-baked, salty earth that none the less quivered to the touch of any object, and formed at the bottom of the baked crust a quagmire from which was no escape. The fiery air made the travelers gasp as each parched gust of breath smote their lungs; and the salty, invisible dust stung their skins and choked their throats with remorseless burning.
And in this cockpit of hell, the blistering heat combined with the rarefied atmosphere to blow out another tire—and to blow it out this time beyond repair.
"Whew!" exclaimed Murray disconsolately, viewing the damage. "Nothing for it but to strip her and put on the other spare."
"Can't you run on the rim?" queried Claire anxiously.
"No chance, with this load of stuff in back, and the road we must follow! We'd smash every spring in the car. Well, here goes!"
There was no breeze. The far vistas of the horizon hung dancing with heat waves, like painted scenery jerking on springs. Mountains and mirages, all hung there and danced, a weird dance of death and desolation.
The unstirred air was heavy and thick with invisible dust. Sunlight crawled and slavered white-hot brilliance over everything, pierced into everything. His face running with blinding sweat, Murray impatiently threw aside his hat. Presently his unruly red hair was no longer wet and blackened; it crowned his flushed features like an aureole, crisp and dry and very hot.
He had the new tube and casing on, and attached the pump. Laboring steadily, he cursed to himself at the heat—the broiling, insufferably dry heat of that salt basin. A sudden breath of hot air caused him to glance up, and his lips cracked in a smile. Claire was leaning from the car and fanning him, her straw hat flapping the air down over him.
"Thanks, Clairedelune," he croaked hoarsely. "It helps."
"Will you have a drink? The water bottle——"
"No, thanks. I'll finish this job first."
The tire was beginning to harden. He bent again over the pump, driving himself to the labor. At last it was done—done well enough, at least. He disconnected the pump and tossed it into the car. A word from Claire broke in upon him.
"What's that! Something moved against the sand—oh! It's a snake!"
He laughed unsteadily as he looked. A snake in truth—an incoherent, feeble object that slipped across the sand and blended there, shapeless and indistinct; a stark-blind thing, a living volute of death and venom. Murray flung a handful of sand. The reptile lashed out viciously at the air.
"A rattler shedding its old skin; blind and deadly poisonous at this season," he said. "I remember Mackintavers warned us about it—no rattles, no sound at all!" He laughed, for his own voice astonished him; it sounded thin and tenuous, far away, distant.
With a distinct effort of the will, he forced himself to stoop after the jack; disengaging it, he rose and lifted it into the tonneau, with strange effort. Claire got out of the car in order to let him in more easily, but he did not climb into the shadow of the top. Instead, he held to the open door for an instant, then sank down upon the running board.
"I think I'll rest," he said, looking from bloodshot eyes at the figure of the girl beside him—the slender, cool figure that seemed to defy the sunlight. "Clairedelune—it comes from the troubadours, that name—the softly sweet glory of the silven moonlight—the sheer beauty that wrings the heart and soul of a man with pain and sweetness——"
His head jerked suddenly. As though some inner instinct had wakened to fear and danger within him, his voice broke out sharply, clearly:
"No cold water, mind! It kills—no cold water, mind!"
Not until his head fell back into the car doorway did Claire Lee realize that something was actually wrong. She had thought him babbling a bit—now, for a terrible moment, she thought him dead.
Yet his last words abode with her, remained fixed and distinct in her mind. No cold water! His heart was beating; he was not dead after all. He must have realized, in that moment, what the trouble was! Sunstroke. She realized it now, realized it with a fearful sense of her own futility. She had no water, except the ice-cold water in the porous waterbags beside the car!
Hesitation and fear, but only for an instant. She seized the nearest bag, her hands trembling in desperate haste, and jerked out the cork. Part of that precious fluid she poured into the sands, then stumbled to the front of the car and stooped to the petcock of the blistering radiator. As the hot water poured into the bag, she could feel its coldness change to a tepid warmth. Hastily she ran back to Murray and poured the contents of the bag over his head and shoulders.
She grew calmer, now; he was at least alive, and she had done her best! But there was more to do. Morongo Valley lay ahead, not so far, and she knew the road. With much effort, she lifted the unconscious body into the front seat, where it reposed limply, and then climbed over it. She had forgotten to crank the car, and had to go back again, out into the sunlight.
No word, no cry from her clenched lips. She cranked, climbed again into the car, and closed the door that would hold Murray in place. Then she drove, with an occasional frantic glance at the lurching, senseless man beside her.
She drove as fast as she dared set the car through the loose sands. When she had driven that road first, it was trackless. Now there lay faint markings to guide her—the tracks of her own and of Murray's car, the shuffled traces of hooves and feet.
No wind ever lifted in this basin, no flurry of sand ever drove across the burning surface, down below the level of the surrounding desert. Until the rains or a storm came, the tracks would be there undisturbed, as the dust-marks within a pyramid of ancient Rameses.
Soon, so soon that she scarce realized it, the blue and brown mountains that had been trembling over the horizon were drawn into sharper and richer colorings, and the long walls of the valley were opening out ahead. The Dead Mountains, those—bare of men or beasts or devils!
Morongo Valley at last—the sharp turn, with the Box Ca?on opening out ahead, rich and sweetly splendid in its touch of vivid greens!
It was only two hundred yards in length, after that turn; yet to the tortured girl, those two hundred yards seemed endless. She did not pause at the shack, but drove on, toward the right-hand wall. Still within her mind dwelt the last words uttered by Murray—"no cold water!"
The trickle of the creek was icy cold; out of the ground and in again. But she knew where there was a seepage of warmer water—water unfit for drinking. She had found it while she was here with Tom Lee; it was a little up the hillside, above and facing that natural amphitheatre which Tom Lee had staked out as a building site. About it there was shade, for the water had provoked green growths on the hillside—a clump of green there against the brown.
She knew that this was the spot, and she headed for it. Recklessly, she drove the car at the steep hill, rocking and lurching across gullies and rocks, until the engine died down; then in low again, climbing a mad course, until at last a boulder blocked the wheel and the engine died on the crash.
There was but a little way to go. She got Murray out of the car, somehow, and dragged him, spurred by fear that she had been too late in getting here. Yet he still lived.
She laid him on his back in the course of the tiny seepage of water—and then it seemed so cold to her that new fear gripped on her soul. She tasted it, and grimaced. It was not cold, a............