This episode is alluded to by the foolish cowboys as "Chalkeye's victory--all talk and run."
A couple of miles to the eastward of La Morita Jim found that his little partner weighed a ton. After working all night, and struggling to the limit of his strength, he could go no further. The day was breaking; to move by daylight meant an extra risk of being seen, and there was nothing to be gained by travelling. So he staggered to the nearest hilltop, found a good look-out point, then smashed up some local rattlesnakes, and laid Curly to rest under a sheltering rock. From there he watched what the _Weekly Obituary_ described as "an infamous outrage, perpetrated at La Morita by a gang of cowardly ruffians." Not that Jim was shocked--indeed, I reckon the lad put up signs of depraved joy. He said to the little partner--
"We're sure saved, Curly, from being tracked down by the Guards and murdered."
I calculate that one ordinary Arizona day without food and water would have finished Curly, but as it happened this was a desert Sabbath, when the clouds had a round-up for prayer. I ain't religious; it's no use for a poor devil like me to make a bluff at being holy, and if I went to church the Big Spirit would say: "Look at this Chalkeye person playing up at Me in a boiled shirt--ain't this plumb ridiculous?"
It's no use, because I'm bad, but yet it humbles me down low to watch the clouds when they herd together for prayers, flirting their angel wings against the sun, lifting their gruff voices in supplication, tearing up the sky with their lightnings, sending down the rain of mercy to us poor desert creatures. The respectable people hire preachers to tell the Big Spirit of their wants, but it's the white clouds of the sky that says prayers for us ignorant range folks, for the coyotes, the deer and panthers, the bears and cows, the ponies and the cowboys. Then the rain comes to save us from dying of thirst, and we cusses around ungrateful because it makes us wet.
When the storm broke that morning, the rain roared, the ground splashed, the hills ran cataracts, and Jim and Curly got washed out of their camp, the same becoming a pool all of a sudden, and were much too wet to go to sleep again. Moreover, the fever had left off prancing around in Curly's brain, and the cold had eased her wound like some big medicine.