Mr. Baker coughed apologetically, holding his hands out in front of him. They were still firmly tied, the string cutting into his wrists.
“This is rather uncomfortable,” he said.
Waldo moved over. A knife would have cut through, but the bandit had taken all our weapons. It was a struggle to untangle them and in the end he had to use his teeth to bite through a particularly stubborn knot. The outlaws hadn’t left us anything with which to cut the string, not even a pocket knife.
“Well, I guess that we should gather anything we’ve got left to eat and get moving,” I said. Our stagecoach was useless now, a hulking black thing, burning in the sun.
“What about the other bandits?” Rachel pointed to the bushes, where the rifle barrels still glinted. “They’re watching.”
“Haven’t you realized?” I asked.
“So you cottoned on.” Isaac grinned.
“What … are you talking about?” the others chorused.
“They aren’t real,” I said, pointing to the glinting barrels.
We turned to look at the bushes, dotted with five gun barrels all trained on us. Five gun barrels that hadn’t moved an inch during the entire hold-up. Five outlaws who hadn’t showed their faces in support of their leader.
“Real outlaws don’t just sit in the bushes,” Isaac said. “Surely you noticed.”
Waldo was fuming, his face red with anger. “If you two are so clever, why didn’t you tell the rest of us? … Darn it,” he began to shout. “If I had known there was only one man with a gun, I WOULDN’T HAVE LET HIM TREAT ME LIKE AN IDIOT. I WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM—”
“Calm down, Waldo,” I cut in, raising my voice above his. “I only realized too late.”
Aunt Hilda, who shared Waldo’s loud indignation, was marching up to the bushes behind him. The rest of us followed. We went up to the gap between the pinyon pines through which the outlaw had appeared. A lizard scuttled out of my way. It was easy to spot where a path had been forced into the shrubbery.
There, in and behind the bushes, we found the rest of the “outlaws” and their “guns.” Five bottles rigged up on a system of twigs and string. Five bottles, their silver-painted necks sparkling in the sun, looking just like gun barrels.
Isaac began to laugh—and I couldn’t help joining him. It really was a neat little ruse. “Really ingenious that outlaw,” Isaac said. “He had me fooled for a—”
“Ten seconds?” Aunt Hilda barked. “Next time share your insights with us, Israel.”
Isaac giggled, but a look at our glum faces and the dawning realization of the hole we were in made him stop, fast. We really were stuck. In front of us was desert, behind us was desert, and to the side was arid rock. All that grew here were tough plants, like the bulbous Joshua tree. They dropped their roots deep into the sand, searching for every drop of water. Like the desert fox and the lizard, they had learned to survive. But with the sun beating down on our heads, and the scorching sand reflecting the heat back up, we wouldn’t last long.
“How much water do we have left?” Aunt Hilda asked.
Isaac was scrabbling in the trunk that held the food—the measly bits the bandits had left us. His face as he turned to us was grave.
“Just two canisters,” he said. “That’ll last the six of us a couple of days at the most.”
I looked at the horizon, toward the end of Death Valley. There was a blue smudge visible. Hope, water, a town or homestead and our salvation. But, tramping on our own two feet under that merciless sun, it would take a lot more than a couple of days to reach it.