The desert patrol

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Shot in the Night. 9

II A Whispered Message. 19

Chapter I

Curlie Carson’s knees trembled. Half suffo¬ cated, 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 power¬ ful 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, 9 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 Mex¬ ico, 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 prowl¬ ing 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 mov¬ ing 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 at¬ tacking 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 horse¬ shoe-like curve about the upper edge of a nar¬ row 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, sandstrewn 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 sud¬ denly 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 dis¬ cover 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 law¬ breakers. Across that same international bound¬ ary 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, how¬ ever, 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 use¬ less, the radiophone was fast becoming a neces¬ sity. The lone ranger on the desert, the sheepherder on the top of a mountain, the irrigation farmer on his little oasis, were one and all con¬ nected by the radiophone to the nearest settle¬ ment 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 hear 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.

Chapter II

Curlie, lying here in hiding on the mountain side, had gone this far in recalling past events which had led up to his present rather strange position, when his keen ears detected some sound. Coming as it seemed from lower down and to the right, it at once set his nerves tingling.

“ From the direction of the corral/’ he told himself in a tense whisper.

For a moment he lay there silent, motionless, scarcely breathing. It had been but a faint sound, the rustling of a pine branch, perhaps. Not one of his confederates had noticed it, he felt sure of that. Only the keen, radio ears of a born radio detective could have done that. Yet there had been a sound, a movement. There was someone down there, he was quite sure of that.

“ Can’t be Ambrosio,” he told himself. “ He’s too sharp to give the location of the horses away like that.”

The next instant the boy sat bolt upright and stared. There had come to his waiting ears a familiar sound: the sharp, high-pitched whinny of a pony.

“ Canary! ” he whispered. “ Couldn’t mistake him from a thousand. He’s in danger, too, I’ll be bound. Never heard him say it just that way but once. That time two timber wolves were stalking him.

“ No timber wolves this time,” he said grimly as he dropped upon hands and knees and, thrust¬ ing his rifle before him, began making his way silently down the hill in the direction from which had come the pony’s call for aid. “ No timber wolves,” he repeated; “ human wolves, that’s what, and the worst kind at that. Raiders that raid those of their own kind. Well, they sha’n’t have Canary.”

Canary was a small blue mustang. Curlie had picked him up cheap out on the range. He had received many a throw and many a bruise before he had convinced the wiry little beast that he meant well by him and that it was a great deal more fun to have a master riding on his back for company than to be wandering alone and unprotected across the desert. When at last the pony had learned this lesson, he had become an inseparable companion to the boy at his lonely post on the desert. He had proved himself the speediest, pluckiest, toughest little pony in all that broad stretch of mountain and desert. He would follow his master about and only a cor¬ ral, such as now surrounded him, could keep him from the boy’s side.

He was Curlie’s first horse. Automobiles he had had and had managed well. He knew a little of airplanes, too. But these, he now knew, were mere machines, not in any way to be compared to a companion such as a horse, a creature of flesh and blood that could listen to you and understand as well as any human — sometimes better.

“ Yes, yes, old pal,” he whispered, as the pony whinnied again, this time as if he was confident that his call had been heard. “ Yes, yes, I’m coming. They won’t get you. They might have the others, though I don’t want that either, but you they shall never have.”

All this time he was gliding silently downward over the pine-needle blanket that was soft and silent as a cover of eiderdown.

After covering ten yards or more he paused to listen. A sound came to him. Closer than had been the other, it startled him. He might have come too close. There might be several of the raiders. He might be in danger of being ambushed.

His eyes circled from right to left and from left to right, like a searchlight. Now he shifted his position ever so slightly. Directly below him were two giant fir trees. Behind these was a mass of green that by the darkness was turned to pitchy black. This black mass was a camou¬ flage to hide the strong poles that made up the horse corral. Behind this were the forty ponies and horses.

“ Bars should be just at the right of those twin firs,” he told himself. “ No use going closer. Too risky. Stay here. I can see anyone who comes up to those bars. Can’t let the horses out any other way. Let ’em try it; I’ll get ’em first crack.”

Dropping flat upon the soft bed of needles, he cautiously moved his rifle forward to a resting place across the protruding root of a fir tree, then, with eyes and ears alert, waited for some¬ thing to happen. For full five minutes he remained thus. Not a sound came to him from near or far. The night air grew colder each moment. A breeze creeping up from the lower levels chilled him to the bone.

“Boo!” he breathed. “Wish this night’s watch was over.”

Since it was not over and would not be for some time to come, he settled himself as com¬ fortably as might be and gave himself again to thought. He was conscious of missing some¬ thing. Somehow he seemed incomplete. It was as if he had come out upon the streets of a city without collar or necktie. As his mind searched for the cause of his sense of incompleteness, he found it at last

“ My head-set/’ he said with a smile. “ I’ve grown so used to having those old radio things over my ears that I don’t feel dressed without them. Wish I had them now. Wish they were connected up with the air. ’Twouldn’t seem so lonesome and so cold. And I might catch some whisper from her, from the good little Whis¬ perer.”

A wave of lonesomeness swept over him. Suddenly for the first time he realized that the messages of this mysterious Whisperer of the air had come to mean a great deal to him.

Curlie was a boy without a family. If 'he had any living relatives, he did not know of them. Finding himself lonely at times, he had at last taken the whole world for his family. By the broad sweep of his radio he had brought them together and all very close to him. He meant to be, in so far as was possible, of service to them all. But this Whisperer, in spite of him, had come nearer than any or all the rest of them.

Without his head-set by which he might receive any little whispered message that she might send out to him, he became intensely lonely.

It was only natural that, finding himself in this frame of mind, he should turn his thoughts to the last message he had received from her. No, not quite the last, for there had been one later, but at least the most important and longest message he had ever received from her.

“ And to think,” he told himself, as his mind took up the thread of it, “ when she whispered to me, only thirty miles of desert lay between us, yet I might not see her whom I have never seen; could only listen to her voice.”

He recalled it all now as if it had been but an hour before. He had been waiting for a mes¬ sage, any message, for he had had a feeling that one would come. He had been standing beside his pony with his head-set pressed down over his ears. In another moment he would have gone spinning out across the desert. Then her mes¬ sage had come floating over the air.

His hand had dropped from the pommel of the saddle and he had leaped for the shack door.

“ Hello, Curlie! Hello! Are you there? ”

His nerves had tingled at the sound; his pulse had quickened at the thought. He had caught in that whisper the old note of suppressed mystery.

“ Things doing!” he had murmured as he waited breathlessly for the next sentence.

He had not long to wait. Out of the air it came, a low whisper, but distinct as the loudest shout might have been: “ Hello, Curlie! How would you like to take a little vacation? How would you like to go chasing wild horses on the Timber Reservation? ”

“ Chasing wild horses! What nonsense! ” Curlie had exclaimed.

“ You make a fine figure of a cowboy on your little blue pony, Curlie. It matches your com¬ plexion beautifully! ” There had been almost a laugh in the whisper. Curlie did not exactly like it.

“ Yes, you do, Curlie; you look fine, you do, and I’m sure they’d take you. Tell you what.

Curlie; there’s a regular cowboy down at Bill McKee’s ranch. He just came from Denver. He’s a great rider. I saw him win his saddle and spurs in a contest where there were ten riders of the very best competing against him. Clyde Hopkins is his name. He’s tired of city life and is out for excitement. And believe me, Curlie, he’ll get it up there in the timber running wild horses.” Again for a moment the whisper had ceased.

“ Thinking up some more nonsense,” Curlie had grinned.

Curlie had been puzzled at the turn affairs had taken. He had thought the Whisperer had wanted to tell him something of importance, something related to his work. And here she was “ joshing” him — or so it seemed to him. Surely she could not be in earnest, suggesting that he go hunting wild horses on the Timber Reservation.

“ First time I ever heard of wild horses in the timber,” he had whispered to himself. “ Don’t believe there is a one. Plenty of moose and elk, but wild horses — what nonsense ! 99

Hearing the nicker of his blue pony outside, he had been tempted to hang his head-piece on the wall, lock the door, leap upon his pony and go racing away over the sand.

“ Be late, as it is,” he had told himself. He had planned a trip to Mogordo for provisions. It was a long ride, fifteen miles and back.

“ And now I think — ”

He had meant to say that he thought the Whisperer might go to thunder, for he had more important business than listening to her non¬ sense, when the whisper had begun again:

“ You think I’m joking.”

Curlie had started. It was as if the Whisperer had read his thoughts from afar.

“ I knew you would, Curlie.” The tone of the whisper was entirely serious now. “ I wasn’t, though. I said that just to get you curious. Thought you might ride away on your blue pony before I was through, if I didn’t get you guess¬ ing.

“ But, Curlie, the matter’s really serious. There are wild ponies up in the canyons of the Timber Reservation, real little horses, wild as deer. For the most part they don’t belong to anyone. The one who catches them owns them. Sometimes the boys of the prairies go up there and build a trap in a ravine. Then they drive the ponies down through and catch them. They do it more for fun than anything else, as the ponies are small and not worth much.

“ But now, Curlie, a man has arrived on the scene who says he proposes to make a serious business of catching these ponies and shipping them east. I don’t think he really intends to do it; he’s using that for a blind. He’s after big¬ ger game than those little yellow ponies. What that game is, Curlie, is your job to find out. You are the Desert Patrol. Your business is to run down men who use the air for illegal purposes. This man has a fellow with him who is an expert radiophone operator. And that man is both crooked and ambitious, Curlie; there’s the dan¬ ger. His name is Ambrosio Chaves. And the name of the other man is Pete Modder. Modder has four big, lazy boys who are just like himself. They used to live in Texas. They stayed until they were wanted for stealing and fraud. Then they went to Canada. When the Mounties began to look for them, they came back over the border into Washington. When they were wanted in Washington they moved to Idaho. And now they are here. Their game is to get a few horses one way or another, then to move to town and go into business. When they have robbed everyone who trusts them, they move on.

“ But, Curlie,” the whisper became more seri¬ ous still, “Ambrosio Chaves is ambitious. He wants to become a cattle king. He would stop at nothing. He has been suspected of much, but nothing thus far has been proved against him. If you can get him, get him hard and dead to rights, Curlie, you’ll win your western spurs. They’ll be golden spurs with points of platinum; I promise it, Curlie.

“ So now, Curlie, you just skip over to the ranch I told you about and ask Clyde Hopkins if he doesn't want to ride over to the gap in the Big Black Canyon and join in with those men who are going after wild horses. He'll go, Curlie, for he likes excitement. They'll let you help them, too, Curlie, for they don't like work, and it's real work to build a trap that will catch horses."

The whisper had ceased. Curlie had sat down unsteadily.

“ Huh! " he had breathed softly. “ Sounds like something, after all, something really big. And those golden spurs with the platinum points, they sound good to me too. Fine keepsake to take back to old Chicago. I'll have them, sure. Skin me alive, if I don't have 'em from the fair lady's own hand, too."

Had Curlie known how true these words were to prove to be, and how many strange adven¬ tures he would go through before they came true, he might have remained seated thinking longer than he did. As it was, he had hung up his re¬ ceiver, locked the door and, leaping upon his pony, had ridden away over the moonlit desert.

“And that,” he told himself as he came to that part of his recollections, “ is why I am here to¬ night. That is—”

His reflections cut short, he suddenly gripped his rifle. He had caught a flash of light against the dark green of the fir boughs.

“ Flashlight! ” he breathed softly. “ The raid¬ ers are at the bars. Now, Canary, it’s quick ac¬ tion and danger, or you are lost! ”

Chapter III

Rising upon one knee, with the butt of his heavy rifle pressed solidly against his shoulder, he waited. So silent was the forest, so ghostly the night, he heard the regular tick-tick of his watch and counted the beats of his own heart. Little drops of perspiration stood out upon the tip of his nose. His knees quivered, but still he sat there motionless.

“ The light will flash again and then — ” he whispered to himself.

A full moment passed, a moment in which he fancied many things. Now he imagined he caught a movement at his right. Someone was creeping upon him. And now there did come a faint thud from below. Whether this was the stamp of a horse’s hoof or the drop of a raid¬ er’s rifle to the ground, he could not tell.

Then, suddenly lighting up the dark, there came a prolonged flash from the electric torch. At the edge of that circle of light appeared a dark face, a face entirely strange to Curlie; the face of some swarthy Mexican. The next in¬ stant, with muscles tense, Curlie thrust out a finger for his trigger. At that same instant, as if by prearrangement, the light snapped out Again all was darkness.

This darkness was not for long. When again the light appeared, it revealed a pair of hands. One hand gripped the light; the other held a pair of wire-cutters. The bars of the corral were wired into position. The man intended cut¬ ting those wires. Beyond doubt he had a con¬ federate at the back of the corral who was ready, once the bars were down, to send the whole band of frightened horses thundering down the can¬ yon trail in the night. It was a bold attempt, but these Mexican raiders were bold.

All this flew through Curlie's mind like a flash. The next instant his finger was on the trigger. There came a sharp crack. The light flared out.

Then again, save for the sound of stealthy move¬ ments in the dark, there was silence.

Curlie lost not one moment of time. He glided swiftly away to his right Yet, quick as he had been, someone else was quicker. Suddenly above him there loomed the figure of a man, and in his hand there gleamed a knife. Curlie had shot the torch from the Mexican’s hand and, baffled and enraged, the man had charged up the slope and, fortune being with him, had come directly upon the crouching boy.

For a second Curlie was frozen with fear; the next he was all action. There was not time to grasp his rifle and so defend himself. There was only an instant in which to do a whirling back somersault. As the Mexican lunged forward, his arm came sweeping down. His knife slashed into the pine needles; that was all. The next mo¬ ment his broad sombrero was knocked down over his eyes; his arm was struck a violent blow that sent his knife whirling through the air. In the twinkle of an eye, Curlie had done all this. Then he turned to flee, but just a second too late. The long arm of the Mexican swung about and, grasping him by his stout coat, sent him crash¬ ing to earth with such force as all but drove the senses from him. In the next instant he felt a crushing weight come hurtling down upon him. He lay face down upon the earth; the Mexican was on his back.

For full ten seconds he was unable to regain his senses. When at last he caught a gasping breath and attempted to move, he found that he might as well be buried beneath a mountain as to be held down by that burly Mexican. What was worse, he could feel the Mexican making stealthy movements with his hands. First to right, then to left, they groped about.

“ Searching for his knife,” Curlie thought in despair. “ If he finds it I’m a goner. He’ll stab me to the heart as though I were a toad.”