“What is it, then?  What is it?” he cried, between his teeth.  “Can’t I ever get rid of you?  Ain’t I ever going to shake you off?  Don’ keep it up this way.  Show yourselves.  Let’s have it out right away.  Come on.  I ain’t afraid if you’ll only come on; but don’t skulk this way.”  Suddenly he cried aloud in a frenzy of exasperation, “Damn you, come on, will you?  Come on and have it out.”  His rifle was at his shoulder, he was covering bush after bush, rock after rock, aiming at every denser shadow.  All at once, and quite involuntarily, his forefinger crooked, and the rifle spoke and flamed.  The canyons roared back the echo, tossing it out far over the desert in a rippling, widening wave of sound.

McTeague lowered the rifle hastily, with an exclamation of dismay.

“You fool,” he said to himself, “you fool.  You’ve done it now.  They could hear that miles away.  You’ve done it now.”

He stood listening intently, the rifle smoking in his hands.  The last echo died away.  The smoke vanished, the vast silence closed upon the passing echoes of the rifle as the ocean closes upon a ship’s wake.  Nothing moved; yet McTeague bestirred himself sharply, rolling up his blankets, resaddling the mule, getting his outfit together again.  From time to time he muttered: 

“Hurry now; hurry on.  You fool, you’ve done it now.  They could hear that miles away.  Hurry now.  They ain’t far off now.”

As he depressed the lever of the rifle to reload it, he found that the magazine was empty.  He clapped his hands to his sides, feeling rapidly first in one pocket, then in another.  He had forgotten to take extra cartridges with him.  McTeague swore under his breath as he flung the rifle away.  Henceforth he must travel unarmed.

A little more water had gathered in the mud hole near which he had camped.  He watered the mule for the last time and wet the sacks around the canary’s cage.  Then once more he set forward.

But there was a change in the direction of McTeague’s flight.  Hitherto he had held to the south, keeping upon the very edge of the hills; now he turned sharply at right angles.  The slope fell away beneath his hurrying feet; the sage-brush dwindled, and at length ceased; the sand gave place to a fine powder, white as snow; and an hour after he had fired the rifle his mule’s hoofs were crisping and cracking the sun-baked flakes of alkali on the surface of Death Valley.

Tracked and harried, as he felt himself to be, from one camping place to another, McTeague had suddenly resolved to make one last effort to rid himself of the enemy that seemed to hang upon his heels.  He would strike straight out into that horrible wilderness where even the beasts were afraid.  He would cross Death Valley at once and put its arid wastes between him and his pursuer.

“You don’t dare follow me now,” he muttered, as he hurried on.  “Let’s see you come out here after me.”