by Don Wilcox
Looking back, we could see the dim imprints of his steps fading away over the gently rolling surfaces of yellow sand to the south, and nearer at hand our own converging with them.
“I’ll feel safer,” I muttered, “when the wind fills those footprints in. Hell, any winged mob with any sense could run us down with no trouble at all.” Wells gave a fatalistic nod. But he wasn’t in a mood to say much. He was deep in thought—maybe about that winged girl, though I hoped not. I hoped he was figuring out what we could say to the German professor to make him take us out of this desert.
A fountain pen and a pair of specs weren’t much to go on, but Wells made up his mind we were going to scour this chunk of mountain for more tracks.
“If the birds picked him up,” said Wells, “there’s still a chance that he fought free. We’ll rest first, then look around.”
We spiralled up the sloping base of the gray-green tower of rock and found some welcome shade. It was a few degrees less torrid, buried among the fleshy-leaved vegetation. We shook the sand out of our shoes, took a few swallows of water from our canteens, and went to sleep.
I was dead to the world, and later in the day when I half awakened to Wells’ whisper, “I’ll be back later, Mac. Snore on,” I took him at his word and fell back to sawing logs.
When I shook out of it, late in the afternoon, Wells was still gone, but I knew he had been back because my canteen had been filled.
This was good news. Between the cool drink and the refreshing rest I was ready for another go at the desert. Incidentally, I would remember this gray-green peak as a source of water if we ever came back this way.
About an hour before sundown Wells jogged back. He looked worn and pale, and I tried to get him to sleep before we started on.
“We’ve got to get across to the other range,” he said.
“Think they’re ahead of us yet?”
“I’m afraid they’re having tough sledding,” said Wells. “I sighted several flocks of wingmen flying along that row of peaks. I climbed almost to the top of this tower for a look—”
He broke off with his heavy mood as he picked up the canteen he had left hanging in the bushes. I was a bit mystified by the pleased squint he gave me, as if he’d forgotten filling the two canteens while I slept.
“Good,” he said. “We’ll push on.” Trudging out over the flat sand in the sunset we kept a constant lookout for danger. That particular female with the orchid wings hadn’t forgotten us. Wells kept looking back at the green-gray peak, and I knew he was seeing that little speck that kept circling the pinnacle. He didn’t say anything, though. So I got more and more suspicious. She must have been there all afternoon while I slept.
Twilight came on and we couldn’t see anything but the fantastic mountains silhouetted black against the blue sky, and the stars popping out all around. We caught our direction for the night’s hike and kept making tracks—tracks we hoped the sand would fill before daybreak.
“When I woke up this afternoon and didn’t see you around,” I said, “I figured you’d picked up the German professor’s trail.”
“No such luck,” said Wells.
“Not even a track?”
“I clambered all the way around that green tooth. Sand on all sides. But not a track.”
“Then the wingmen put his tracks to an end,” I said. “They’ll do the same for us whenever they get ready. Maxie and the gang may look out on the desert tomorrow morning and see us coming. And it would be like Maxie to come out to meet us with a couple canteens of water. And what’ll he find? Not us. Just our tracks coming to a stop. The two little men that weren’t there.”
“You’re a pessimist,” said Wells. “Hasn’t our luck been good enough for you the last forty-eight hours?”
“I think,” I said, “that that female with the orchid wings is a spy for the others. I’ll bet she was watching every move you made this afternoon.”
“I didn’t see her once,” said Wells. “I’ll bet she knew you were looking for the owner of the fountain pen and specs . . . I’ll bet she watched you fill the canteens.”
“Huh?” Wells’ voice was edged with annoyance. “You must be dizzy with the heat. I didn’t fill the canteens. You did it.”
“The hell I did,” I said. “That cool drink was waiting for me when I woke up. I figured you had—”
“I hiked all around that peak but I never did see a spring. Lay off your joking, McCorkle, and tell me where it was. We might need it again. Springs are too few and far between—”
“Like angels’ visits, huh?” I said. “Okay, it was an angel’s visit—an angel with talons.”
CHAPTER VII
Wells Falls
Wells chose to ignore my sarcasm. He was as delighted as a schoolboy with a good report card.
“She’s for us, McCorkle!” he said. “This proves it. She’s watching over us.”
I came back at him with some unkind mockery. Sure, she’d filled the canteens. She was watching over us, all right. Just like the farmer’s daughter watches over the turkeys before Thanksgiving.
“It don’t pay to let prize turkeys go thirsty,” I said.
That nettled him, and so we had another round. It grieved me to see how his attitude of trust in that winged girl was growing. I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. After what had happened to two of our men—after what seemed to have happened to the German professor—he was nevertheless feeling halfway charitable toward this dangerous female spy. It made me shudder.
Daylight found us still trudging eastward.
Soon the sun was rising, hot and fierce, as if to set the sands on fire. Wells had gone too long without sleep. It was beginning to tell on him. Seasoned though we were to desert heat, there was plenty of punishment in store for us for today.
Or would it take more than a day to get across? If so, hunger and thirst would catch up with us.
By the following afternoon we were still going, but I knew we were about done. The sun was cooking us alive. Fatigue had caught up with Wells at last. He was sick. He tried to deny it, but I knew.
I knew, too, that he had let me drink more than my share of water. The canteens were empty now.
We’d been fooled by those damned mountains. We’d thought they were closer. Maybe the bright colors had done it, or the atmosphere. If we could have had a map—but who would ever map this godforsaken land?
Well, the German professor might have. No telling what he had been up to. But the desert had got him by now, we thought. And it would get us.
Wells’ strength gave out all at once.
He fell on the bare sand. I could have wept.
He fell, and there, not two hundred feet away was that gruesome orchidwinged girl, sitting on the branch of a gnarled old petrified tree. She was watching us. She saw Wells fall. She was looking at us with eyes that were hungry.
I dropped down beside Wells and started to lift him. I hesitated. That winged girl’s savage face, her whole aspect of eagerness, caused my nerves to go brittle.
“We don’t dare stop here, Wells,” I said.
“Got to rest, Mac,” he said weakly. “You go on. I’ll catch up.”
“You know you’d never make it alone . . . Up on your knees, man . . . There, get an arm over my shoulder.”
“Too heavy, Mac. Let me rest . . . When the sun gets down . . .”
“You’re comin’ on,” I growled. “Lean on me . . . Now.”
I walked him along for about an hour, and we made less than a mile. He was right. I couldn’t take it. We fell down time and again, and each time I helped him to his feet we both had less strength to go on. But go on we did.
I tried to keep him quiet, but he kept talking out of a fever.
“Which way are we going?” he said. “You’re taking me the wrong way, Mac. There’s the mountains that way. They’re coming closer. They’re all red. Like blood. Where are the men, Mac? I don’t see the men . . . Oh, there they are. They’re coming to us. Wading in blood. T
hank God, they’re alive.”
“You’re clean outa your head,” I snarled. “There’s nothing that way but damned sunshine and sand. We’re going right. Leave that to me. Close your glassy eyes, damn it, before you go blind . . . Come on, now! Take it easy.”
It was awful. I couldn’t do much but keep fighting along, a foot at a time, and finally it seemed only inches. Our lips swelled until we quit our senseless talking. But I couldn’t stop thinking—thinking how Wells had helped me—on two different occasions—when we’d lost ourselves among the Germans and Italians that time long ago in Algiers.
He’d done it for me just like this—twice, and gladly. And both times I’d thought, what the hell use was it to drag a corpse like me around? Now it was my turn. Any one of his men would have done the same for him. With the possible exception of Franz Cobert, the half French sergeant. Somehow I always doubted whether Franz Cobert had any red loyalty in his guts. But the other men would have died for a guy like Wells.
“Going right?” Wells would murmur every few minutes.
“Sure,” I said. Then I would look back to see if that damned pair of bright wings was following. No, she was still there in the trees, more than a mile behind us now; but in this open vista of sand she stood out as plain as a moon in a sky.
Wells would try to look back. He must have known she was there. But he didn’t mention it. And I thought to myself, “The poor sap. He started on this stretch betting on her help. He bet on the wrong angel. She’s back there counting the minutes until feast time.”
We stopped only when the sun’s tortures were on the wane for the day. Wells was quiet. We both lay there resting, flat on our backs, waiting for the dark.
After a brief feverish sleep he awoke with his eyes toward the eastern mountains. He was sure they were much closer.
“You go on, Mac. Get water. I’ll wait here . . . till morning.”
I looked at him. I looked at the pistol in the holster. We had discarded part of our clothes, but that gun was still at his side. Now his hand moved to hide it as if to ward off my suspicions.
Was he thinking of a bullet for a possible winged attacker? Or for himself? I didn’t know.
“Go,” he said. “Orders.”
I started. I walked slowly. In the sunset these eastern mountains now looked to be only five or six miles away. Perhaps his plan was best. If I could only be sure he didn’t intend something else.
I looked back.
I looked in time to see a pair of orchid-tinted wings float down to skim close to the surface. The talons struck the sand—a little spray of dust—a graceful bounce of the body—then the wings folded, and she was walking up to him.
I started to run back. I fell, of course, for I was too near the point of cashing in, myself. There just wasn’t a hundred yard dash left in my system. That was all there was to it.
I thumped down on my arms. Then coming up on my elbows, lying on my stomach, I watched. I tried to yell, but my hoarse voice wouldn’t carry that far.
For a moment she seemed to be swabbing his face with a cloth. Perhaps she had picked up one of our discarded shirts.
Only a moment of this, then she dug her talons under his weight, picked him up bodily. With a light spring from one talon, she took off in flight, bearing him away to the west, toward the Green Tooth Mountain.
CHAPTER VIII
News from Maxie
Just as the twilight was fading to darkness she winged back again, and I knew she was looking for me. The light was in my favor. I saw her, a crescive speck silhouetted against the lavender sky.
By the time she circled over, it was too dark for her to see our tracks. Her instinct of direction must have carried her toward me. But if she expected to see a dark object lying on the sand she was disappointed. All she saw was sand. I took care of that with a little strategy of my own. I played a beach game and covered myself up, all but my Irish eyes and nose. There wasn’t enough of me left in sight for Patrick McCorkle to have recognized his grandson with a flashlight.
Not more than seventy or eighty feet from me, however, she dropped something down that might have been a message on a parachute, and I thought to myself, “Corkie, that’s for you.”
She flew away and I scrambled to my feet. Would it be Wells’ last will and testament done up in a sheepskin? Or a warrant for my arrest? Or could it possibly be a canteen of water?
I groped over the sand very stealthily. A horrifying thought struck me. Maybe it would be Wells’ bones—his skull, perhaps?
With the best of luck I found the thing.
It was a shirt. And if that doesn’t sound like especially good news, let me add that the shirt had been soaked in a spring and was soppy with cool water. Water than which none ever tasted better to Yours Truly. Now maybe you’re thinking that a sweaty old army shirt isn’t quite your idea of a sanitary drinking cup, whether the drink is water, champagne, or peach juice. My answer is that in this particular desert on this particular night there were no complaints.
I drank. I also managed, with care, to store a little water in my canteen. Finally, I took a sort of bath with the damp shirt. All of which cheered me up tremendously.
I plodded on toward the east. And with every step, I thought to myself. “What a pair of wings wouldn’t do for a fellow in this godforsaken world!”
Then I would think of the ironical thing they did do for Wells. He had spent days trying to get east across this flat. And this tricky pair of orchid wings had taken him all the way back in a couple hours.
Although I didn’t know it that night, the five other living members of our party along that east range had been thinking a lot about wings, too. But the kind they had in mind were those attached to motors, propellers, bomb chambers, and a sight that would spot the center of this strange gory wingman’s world. They were swearing to bring death and destruction to this land. I was to hear this talk a-plenty before long. But on this lonely night the only thing I knew for sure was that Wells had gone back west; and that I was still walking east, and that those damned starlit mountains kept moving away from me. So I lay down and slept most of the night away.
The next forenoon another most welcome miracle happened. Someone came out to meet me from those mountains, and it turned out to be Maxie Hammerstein with two shoulderloads of canteens.
“Pudding Puss, as I live and breed!” Maxie called with the air of an old lodge brother meeting up with me at the annual convention. “Where’s the big cheese?”
I thrust a thumb over my shoulder, which might have meant that he was just over the next sand dune. I felt a secret guiltiness over what had happened.
“Speak up,” said Maxie, looking me over pretty skeptically, “or has one of these flying cats got your tongue? Not so unlikely, at that. Hell, man, you’ve been through another war.”
I nodded and drank, and Maxie kept scanning the tracks back of me for signs of Wells.
“Ye gods, have I brought these extra canteens for nothing?”
I unburdened him of his extra load and said, “Come on. We’ll take him some water . . . Water must be plentiful where you come from.”
“Water—yes. Food—no,” said Maxie, falling into pace alongside.
The forenoon sun was on our backs. Away to the west I could see a little dot on the landscape that I knew was the old petrified tree where Orchid Wings had perched to watch Wells and me go by. And on farther, miles and miles that spelled at least a two day hike, was the Green Tooth Mountain and the other cathedral spires of the western range.
“Where the hell we going?” said Maxie. “How much farther?”
“Don’t start asking questions like that this early in the morning. We’re on our way back to pick up Wells. Let it got at that.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get sore. I just wondered. The lads back yonder will be kinda curious, you know. They’re sitting in the shade watching through binoculars. They’ve kept on eye on you and Wells for the last two days. We’d have signalled, if it hadn’t been t
hat now and then a pin feather would come floating down from the sky just to remind us not to stick our necks out.” To prove it, Maxie produced a little collection of feathers which you’d have sworn could have come from your Aunt Mathilda’s impertinent parrot.
I was rather alarmed that there should have been such close contact with these winged creatures. Had they been policing Maxie and Franz Cobert and the other three men, as Orchid Wings had been policing us? If so, what had happened to their appetities? Hadn’t they overlooked a good thing in Maxie?
“You’re plump,” I said. “You’re young and tender. Not middle aged and leathery like me. By-their standards you should make a fine dish. With cactus berries—”
“Stop it,” said Maxie, “or I’ll bop you over the head with a canteen. After what I’ve seen of those gory freaks, it’s no joke.”
“Sorry,” I said. “But seriously I don’t understand it. How can you feel so safe? If they actually know where you are—”
“They don’t know, thank heaven. We see them through a ledge.”
“Through a ledge?”
“These damned mountains—have you found your way into any of them?” said Maxie, giving me an important eye. “No? Well, they’re hollow. Some of them, anyway. Franz Cobert figured it out from geology and guesswork. The wing-men may not know it, but it’s so—anyway in our particular mountain.”
“Hot or cool?”
“Cool like a musty wine cellar. You keep sweating, but it’s cool. We found our way in through the top, and spiralled down in the dark and finally discovered this crack of light. By George, it was wonderful. There was a four inch horizontal window of sunshine and air. We sit there all day long in the coolness, watching the winged men and women strut past so close we don’t dare whisper—”
“And watch Wells and me plow across the desert in the heat, I suppose.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s pie,” I said. “You’ve been perfectly safe—”