Читать книгу The Desert Patrol - Roy J. Snell - Страница 3

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Curlie Carson’s knees trembled. Half suffocated, he held his breath as if fearing someone might hear, and he did fear that very thing. His mind was in a whirl. Had he seen a head rise above the fallen spruce tree that lay a hundred paces above him? He thought he had, yet could not be quite sure. And if he had, if it appeared again, what then? With a thumb that trembled he noiselessly lifted the hammer of the powerful rifle which his left hand gripped.

It was night. All about him trees loomed. Giants of a mountain-side forest they were, for the sound of the woodsman’s axe had never been heard here. It was cold; a chill ran up his spine. His feet were benumbed. At two o’clock in the morning the air on the side of the mountain, eight thousand feet above the sea, is like the winter air of the prairie or the desert.

The situation which confronted Curlie was fascinating and strange. To the right of him, not a hundred yards away, Ambrosio Chaves, a half Mexican whom Curlie suspected of being one of the most dreaded horse thieves in all the borderland between the United States and Mexico, lay hiding. It was part of Curlie’s present task, and purpose too, to defend this supposed bandit. If the head again appeared above that log; if the head were followed by hands and a rifle; if the rifle were lifted for a shot, he very much regretted to tell himself that it would be his duty to lift his own rifle and with an aim swift and sure, drop that mysterious stranger behind the log, drop him as he might a prowling wolf.

He would shoot the stranger, whom he knew not at all, to protect Ambrosio, whom he knew very well and whom he cordially hated. A strange situation indeed. As his mind dwelt upon it, he threw back his head as if to laugh.

He did not laugh. Instead, he dropped quite flat upon a bed of pine needles. His heart skipped a beat. Had he heard a movement to his left, or was it merely one of the horses moving in the valley below? In such a situation, one takes few chances. He lay quite still. His eyes were still fixed upon the spot where the head had seemed to appear. It was fairly dark and hard to distinguish figures. One of the attacking party, if indeed they were to be attacked, might slip quite upon him before he was aware.

“Rotten business!” he thought to himself. “But when you’ve put your hand to a thing, you’ve just naturally got to see it through—that is, if you’ve got any red blood in you.”

Hidden in this same forest, that made a horseshoe-like curve about the upper edge of a narrow pocket of a valley, were seven boys and men. Five of these were practically outlaws. If not outlaws at that moment, they had, Curlie believed, already put themselves in a position to be made outlaws. These men, for the moment, Curlie was determined to defend. The one other of the party was Clyde Hopkins, an honest young cowboy, Curlie’s companion. He too was ready to defend their position. Below them in a pole corral that was cleverly concealed with green branches, were some forty horses, colts and ponies. More than half these had been stolen, or at least Curlie supposed they had, by Ambrosio and his companions. Yet it was Curlie’s purpose to help defend the outlaws in their possession of the horses. Put on top of all this the fact that Curlie, while not an officer of the law, was as near to it as one might well be. He was a member of the Secret Service of the Air, whose station was far below and to the right across ten miles of wind-blown, sand-strewn desert. And at this moment, in the midst of great peril, under the strangest of situations, he was, as far as he could see, acting in the strict line of duty.

“Mighty queer!” he told himself. “Mighty queer! Could hardly believe—”

His thoughts were cut short. With a swift, noiseless motion his rifle slid into position. A head had surely appeared above a fallen tree. The expected rifle had followed it. It had been pointed in a direction to the right of Curlie and was beginning to steady for a shot, when a puff of smoke suddenly leaped out of the dark. It came from Curlie’s rifle. There followed a slight clatter, as if a rifle had been dropped upon a log. Then, as before, all was silent.

As if he himself had been shot, Curlie suddenly rolled down the steep hillside. He did this to protect himself. The enemy might shoot at the spot from which he had fired. Fifteen feet lower down, he came to rest against a giant of the forest. For a full minute he did not move. Then, gliding stealthily forward, he found a position at about the same level as the one he had first occupied, but some ten yards to the right of it. From this point he could still see the fallen tree. For five minutes his eyes never left the spot. Then with a whispered, “Hope I didn’t do him in,” he sank back to a position of repose.

Lest my reader should begin at this point to lose faith in his one-time hero, Curlie Carson, who carried himself so nobly and with such an upright character through the adventures told in “Curlie Carson Listens In” and “The Yukon Trail,” let me assure you that he has not lost any of his sterling character, nor any of his bravery either. In fact, the undertaking in which he was engaged at this moment had involved him in more danger than any of his previous adventures and promised in the near future to lead him into dangers the like of which he had never before in all his eventful career come near to experiencing.

As for Curlie, at this particular moment he was engaged in a series of reflections regarding the days that had just passed. As had been the case in some of his other adventures, it had been a whisper, a whisper floating in over the air, that had led him to his present position. At first this whisper had been vague and undefined, yet telling of something big going on down in the Great American Desert, close to the Mexican border. The radiophone was being used as an aid by those who wished to thwart justice and rob others of their honest earnings. If this were the case, then here was a task for the members of the Secret Service of the Air, of whom Curlie was one. He had been sent to the desert to establish a listening-in post there and to discover if possible whether or not such a post could be of real service to the American citizens who lived here and there, scattered over the desert and through the forests of mountain ranges.

He had come. He had set his steel posts, like flagposts, high in air out in the desert. On these posts he had strung his aerials. Beneath the posts he had built a cabin of lumber and tar paper. There, with his powerful receiving and sending set at his elbow and with his head-piece drawn down over his ears, he had sat down to wait and to listen.

The message of importance, which he had felt sure would at last come to him from the lips of the “Whisperer,” that weird phantom-girl of the air, might, he knew quite well, have to do with any of a half dozen important affairs. It might concern whiskey runners, bringing the rawest and rankest kind of poison across the line from Mexico, peddling it alike to white men and Indians. Natives, driven mad by this poison liquor, had committed frightful crimes. It might be his task to assist in searching out these lawbreakers. Across that same international boundary line, from time to time Japanese and Chinese were smuggled. Perhaps the message would deal with this. Wild Mexican raiders, when least expected, crept across the border to steal cattle and horses from the scattered ranchers. Assisted by treacherous Indians who alone knew the trails of the desert mountain fastnesses, these bands were able to escape to Mexico with their booty. The radiophone could not but help them in arranging these raids. It might, however, also lead to their undoing.

What was the big thing that was to be his task? Curlie had asked himself this question over and over as the days passed. One thing surprised him: That was the way in which the radiophone was being adapted to the needs of the desert. In cities and thickly settled country places the radiophone was a luxury.

In these wild, little-frequented spots, where the telephone and telegraph had not found their way and where the automobile was all but useless, the radiophone was fast becoming a necessity. The lone ranger on the desert, the sheep-herder on the top of a mountain, the irrigation farmer on his little oasis, were one and all connected by the radiophone to the nearest settlement and to the whole world outside.

Often and often, as the glorious music of some great symphony or grand opera came floating to him faintly from afar, Curlie caught it in his receiver and, having passed it through his many-stage amplifier, had sent it booming forth to gladden the hearts of those who sat in waste and silent places far from others of the human kind. At other times he had assisted in the search for men lost on the desert, or in bringing doctors to bedsides where they were greatly needed.

All these services Curlie performed with the best skill that was in him, but always he listened for that important message from the Whisperer.

His motives for catching the message were two: He wished to do something in a big way. Nothing could so quickly establish the value and necessity of his station as this. He wished also to bear again the voice of the Whisperer. For months and months she had haunted his trail through the air. She had told him that her home was at the edge of this Great American Desert. He felt a great confidence that he would, sooner or later, on this desert come face to face with her. It will not seem strange, then, that after all these months of mystery he would be waiting eagerly for the word that might hasten the day when he might look at the mystery girl and say to himself with conviction, “She is the one. She is the Whisperer.”

Then came the day when the message thrilled out upon the air, the message that was to draw Curlie into such adventures as he had never before experienced.