Palace of Pleasure.Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5¢.Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.
Palace of Pleasure.
Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5¢.
Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.
Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.
“Beans, beer and a bed,” Sard thought, “how good those things are, and how lucky they are who can afford them. Well is it called a palace of pleasure, if that is the kind of life they live here. I begin to understand the phrase now: ‘he hasn’t got a bean.’ And at this time yesterday I was mate of a crack ship.”
From a mine to the westward from him there came the blare of a hooter, giving warning that siesta was nearly ended. Other hooters took up the blast, till the place rang with echoes coming back from the hills. Now from some of the houses workers came half awake, like sailors coming on deck, buttoning their shirts. They went slouching off towards the mines, rubbing their eyes.
A man came yawning from the door of the Palace of Pleasure. He had a straw-broom in one hand with which he pretended to sweep the doorstep. Half his face was covered with one hand as he yawned. It was the train-hand.
“Say, Kid,” he said, “step inside here.”
He stepped inside and shook the man’s hand and thanked him.
“Aw, come off,” the man said, shutting the door. “Come in here.” He led the way by a dark passage past a flight of stairs. Sard heard the rustle of skirts and smelt scent; looking up suddenly, he saw the heads of two women looking over the stair-rail on the landing above. One of them coquettishly sucked her cigarette to a glow as he passed, so that he might see her face the better.
The man opened a door into a room which had a bar at one side of it, and a long table, with benches, at the other. The bar was closed by a grating. Two men were asleep on the benches with their heads drooped on their outstretched arms; they were breathing heavily from purple faces: “Feeling their siesta doing them good,” the train-hand called it. A third man, powerfully built, with a mottled olive face, brass earrings and a purple neckerchief, was sitting at the table eating with his knife. He had a small slab of something pale upon a dish in front of him. He shovelled flakes of this on to his knife-blade and then shovelled them into his mouth. He was a noisy as well as an untidy eater, being still a little in drink. He seemed displeased at the entrance of Sard: he dug his knife-point twice into the table, as though into someone’s body, and he said nothing, which was unusual in a land where all at least offer to share their food and drink with the newcomer.
The train-hand took Sard to the end of the table away from the other three and sat him down.
“Say, Kid,” he said, “you wanna beat it right out-a here.”
“How about you?” Sard asked.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You broke prison. You helped me to escape. You flung a tile at the officer, and some of those men must have recognised you, since they came in on the train with you.”
“I’m not lying awake any,” the man said. “I’m one of the boys. But you ain’t. What in hell you doing here? That’s what gets me.”
Sard told him.
“Where you wanna get to?”
“Las Palomas.”
“How’re you going to get?”
“Could I get a ride on a freight-car?”
“No, sir. The only freight-cars from here is silver cars. There’s not much these ’Tale guys mind, but they mind their silver. You’d be shot, sure as hell.”
“Could I get a job on the train, shovelling coal?”
“Nit.”
“Why not?” Sard asked.
“Cut the train right out of your thought,” the man said. “The freight-cars ain’t going to be healthy to you. My mate Antonio will remember you.”
“Very well, then; I’ll walk along the line.”
“Hell, Kid,” the man said, “it’s a hundred and seven miles, desert all the way; and anyone seeing you on the silver line would shoot you sure as hell.”
“What am I to do then?”
“You could get a job in the Chicuna mine, sinking the new shaft. But I guess you’d have to stay a fortnight, before you touched your wad: they always hold back the first week. After that you could go in on the cars to Las Palomas. No, you couldn’t neither. You’d have to stay another week, or six days. They ain’t only but one train a week. They call her the Flying Fornicator or the Hop to Whoredom. I guess she’s about rightly christened.”
“I can’t wait,” Sard said, “I must start back right away. I’ll walk it. If I can’t walk along the line, I’ll shape a course of my own across the desert.”
“Watcha going to eat? Watcha going to drink? Kid, you can’t do it. Besides there’s snakes in the desert. Even the Jackarillers didn’t cross the desert from here. No, Kid; cut it right out; and go up to the Chicuna to-morrow before the whistle. It will be the quickest in the end. Here’s the boss; he’ll tell you the same.”
The boss came in with a demijohn and funnel; he had been doctoring cider with red pepper to serve as whisky for the later drinks of the evening. He was a very tall, fair-haired, sandy-moustached man, with a cold and evil blue eye. He carried a gun in front as well as one in a hip pocket. He nodded at the train-hand and cast an eye over Sard. He was in the business which brings men much into touch with the broken. He summed up Sard at once as being “on his uppers,” or penniless.
“Pitch,” the train-hand called. “ ’Low me to introduce my friend. What did you say your name was, Kid?”
“Harker.”
“Mr. Harker. Mr. Pitch Hanssen.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Pitch said: he did not look it. He put down his demijohn and funnel upon the bar, and stood there, looking at the company.
“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “Mr. Harker wants to get to Las Palomas. He ain’t got too much money; so I say he’d better put in a fortnight at the Chicuna. What do you say, Pitch?”
“He wants to get to Las Palomas?”
“Yes, or the coast,” Sard said.
“I guess you’d better inform yourself, sir,” Pitch said. “There’s only two ways of getting to a place; you know that as well as I do.”
“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “this gentleman’s a friend of mine.”
“If he’d like to order anything,” Pitch said, “he’ll be a friend of mine. But if he ain’t got any dough, or is the dead-broke bum I take him to be, I’ll ask him to take a walk. This is a place for men who can pay their way and can afford hats. Are you going to order, Alonzo?”
“Yes,” Sard said. “I am.”
Although his leg was numb from the poison, he could still move like an athlete. He slid from his bench to the landlord in one motion.
“I’m going to order you to mind how you talk to me.”
“Order me hell,” Pitch said. “You’d best order yourself a hat, you low-down hobo. Or order yourself a shave, while you’re at it. And now take a walk to some place where you can buy. Get out of it.”
He did not pull a gun, probably his guns were not loaded, but he poked up his left at Sard’s face as Sard had expected he would. Sard on the instant cross-countered with his right to the point. Pitch slithered sideways along the bar, fell, rolled over on the floor and lay quiet.
“Carai!” screamed the man with brass earrings, “Hijo de la gran puta. You dog-assassin of English!” He flung his knife at Sard with the backward flick from the wrist which “takes a year to learn,” so the bad men say. Had he flung the knife before screaming, Sard would have had the point through his throat, but the scream warned him; he had time to dodge. The knife stuck in the bar. Sard pulled it out. The two men at the table woke up. “Rough house,” one of them said.
“Cut out your dam’ row and let us sleep,” the other said.
“Carai, carai, carai,” cried the man with brass earrings. “I’ll give you dog-assassin with the bottle.” He came across the table at Sard with a bottle, knocking over one of the sleepers as well as a bench. Floundering in this wreck, he himself fell, cursing. There came a scurry of swift yet heavy steps on the floor above.
“Beat it, Kid,” the train-hand cried to Sard. “Here’s the missus.” He held the door open for Sard, who slipped through it to the front door, which was already open. He was moving swiftly, but had a glimpse as he fled of a monstrous woman, with an inflamed and frowsy face, who was floundering downstairs to him, calling him to stop. Something cracked the woodwork of the door to his left and something banged to his right: the woman was shooting at him.
He reached the street, turned sharply, ran round the house, scrambled over a low wall into an enclosure, and ran along it, while the pursuit grew loud behind him. At the end of the enclosure there was a wall, which he climbed. As he climbed it, there came cries of “There he is!” and bullets struck the wall and the earth beneath it. He dropped into a second enclosure. At the end of the enclosure there was a house, at the door of which a man lay in a chair taking his siesta with a gun upon his knees. The man woke up as Sard reached him, and at the same instant the pursuers reached the enclosure wall and opened fire. Sard slipped past the man in the chair into the house. He said, “Excuse me,” as he passed, and slammed the door behind him. There was a door on his left; a woman opened it, asking him, in Spanish, what was the matter. He said, “It is the washing, Madam,” and slipped past her and up the flight of stairs. On the upper floor were three children, who screamed when they saw him. He called out to them, in Spanish, that their mother was bringing them some sweets.
He tried a door, which was locked, and another door, which opened into a shuttered room; he then ran up the next floor. There was a door opposite the top of the stairs. He opened it, and found a young man lying on the bed, taking his siesta. The young man’s slouch hat was on the floor; Sard picked it up and put it on. There was no sash to the window of that room, but closed, green, jalousied shutters. He unhooked them, took a hurried look out, and found to his great joy that there was a fire-escape. He went down it, hand over hand, and reached the ground as the young man looked out, and asked him what in the blazes he was doing. He did not stop to answer, for he was collared, on the instant, by the man who had been sleeping in the chair. Sard back-heeled him, sent him flying and reached the garden gate, just as the woman and the three children came out of the door with a couple of dogs.
He got out of the garden gate with the dogs at his heels, and ran along the road, hearing the pursuit increase, as the men from the Palace of Pleasure joined in. He turned to his right, then sharp to his left, then again to his right, the dogs following him and joined now by three or four pariahs, which had been sleeping in the sand. The last turn that he made was into a blind alley. There was a wall at the end of it, overhung with trees. He leapt for a branch, but the branch broke in his hand, and he came down into the midst of the dogs. He sent them flying with a few blows, scrambled up the wall and down on to the other side. On the other side there was a woman sitting in a rocking-chair, knitting. “For the land’s sake,” she said, “for the land’s sake, young man, this ain’t no right of way. Go back the way you came.”
“I’m going back,” he said, and ran on.
“George! George!” the woman cried, “get your gun quick; there’s a rough-neck come through the garden.”
Somebody inside the house answered, “What’s that you say, Anna?”
Sard called to the man, “There’s a rough-neck murdered Mr. Davis; I’ve got to break it to the widow.”
“Stop him, George,” the woman said.
The man tried to stop him, and got one on the jaw which he remembered for a long time.
Sard got out into a road which led quite clear of the houses into the wilderness of the foothills. There was a sort of trail leading up the hill, through a sparsely-grown jungle of brushwood. He took his chance of snakes and dodged into the brush and zigzagged through it, keeping uphill all the time. At the top of the cañon, half a mile from the town, he stopped for a moment, but he heard people as well as dogs, so he set off downhill into a gully.
At the foot of the gully there were great rocks among which a little river ran. He ran upstream in the water for about a hundred yards, so as to puzzle the dogs, and then scrambled out of the water up a great rock. At the top of the rock there was a recess filled with dry sand and screened by boulders. In the sand were the fresh footprints of a wild cat, but Sard judged that wild cats are less dangerous than men, and flung himself down to get his breath.
In a couple of minutes he heard the dogs at the water, and the voices of men, encouraging the dogs to hunt. He judged that there were at least eight men up with the hounds, and others joined them. He could hear their conversation as they walked up and down, and poked among the rocks.
“He’s the silver bandit who broke gaol at the barracks this afternoon.”
Another said, “He nearly killed Hanssen at the Palace.”
Another said, “Mother Hanssen reckon she hit him with one of her shots; leastways there was blood under that wall.”
Another said, “He took to the water all right, but these dogs don’t seem to get the scent any.”
Another said, “Well, he must have gone upstream, because if he’d gone downstream, they would have got him.”
Another said, “He can’t have much breath left in him, the clip he has been going. Like as not he’s got in among these rocks here; maybe he’s listening all the time we’re talking.”
Another said, “The hell he ain’t got much breath! He goes over the darned ground like a darned cyclone.”
Another said, “Come, Peppy; come, Toto; I’ll just take this couple of dogs up along this further bank, and you get on upstream and see if we can’t pick up where he’s landed.”
A voice came from amongst the bushes: “Say, boys, did you get him yet?”
They said, “No, we ain’t got him yet, but we guess we’re going to get him.”
“I guess I’m going to get him too,” the voice said. “He come into my room, when I was having a lay down, and sneaked my hat right off of my pillow.”
“Well, come on,” said another, “and we’ll get him and the hat.”
They went splashing up the stream, and then presently all the dogs burst into a frenzy of barking. He heard cries of “They’re on to him! Come on, boys, they’re on to him; he can’t only be but a little ways ahead.”
Sard heard the hunt pass upstream and gradually grow fainter towards the head of the gully. He lay still for about half an hour. He heard some shouts and presently the footsteps of men returning, some distance up the stream.
“It’s very odd where he’s got away to,” one of them said.
Another said, “It’s my belief he never got away, but just lay quiet somewheres. Back in town is the place to look for him, if you ask me.”
Another said, “That’s right. You know that time the dogs went on like they was crazy; it’s my belief they was on a panther, not on a man at all. It was somewheres around here we lost him, and it’s somewhere around here we’d find him again.”
“Well, the scent’s cold now,” another said; “and not only that, the dogs has forgotten what he smelled like. Besides, the trail’s been all trodden out. We’d best get back to town.”
“Well, I ain’t going back to town,” said the young man, “not without my hat I ain’t.”
“Well,” another said, “no one seems to me to be able to describe the fellow. You saw him, kid; what was he like?”
“I wasn’t only half awake,” the boy said. “He was a great big fellow, an ugly fellow, and Pop says he was a big fellow; and he ain’t got no coat, only just pants and a shirt.”
A man said, “Well, kid, even if he were to spring up right among us now, I guess you couldn’t say it was him. Maybe he’s gone downstream after all.”
“Well, I guess I’m going to get my hat,” the boy said; “no cheap skate ain’t going to pinch my hat and get away with it.”
“That’s right, kid,” said a man, “you get him, and when you get him, soak him good.”
They moved away downstream all together, beating with their sticks as they went, to scare the snakes. Presently they were out of earshot, down the stream. Sard lay very still, waiting for darkness. He heard the hooters from the mines blowing for six o’clock. The light by this time was going from the river-bed, but from where he lay he could see the brush shining in the sun at the top of the cañon. He was very weary of lying still. He said to himself, “They’ve gone, it’ll be safe to move, I might be starting now.”
He was on the very point of rising from where he lay, when a rifle was suddenly fired, not twenty yards from him, on the other side of the river. It was a repeating rifle, followed by a second shot an instant later. He heard something snarl, and a man’s voice cried, “Got you, you son of a gun!”
Another voice said, “Well, was she a painter?”
The other said, “No, a wild cat, and she’s got her nest hereabouts. Maybe we could find the kittens. She’s got her nest somewhere among them rocks, the other side of the water. I see’d her little tracks, where she’s hopped from stone to stone, so as not to get her feet wet. See here.”
“What’s she carrying?” said one of the men. “Is it a rabbit?”
“Not it; it’s a woodchuck, I guess.”
“Are you sure she’s dead,” said one man. “I’ve known ’em to play dead, so as to get a bit of their own back.”
“She’s dead,” said the other. “See here. Pretty poor, too; skin’s no good, but I guess I’ll take her along. If we’d got dogs, we’d have them kittens out. See here, the tracks lead this way. Here’s the place she crossed. My, that’s a pretty good lep! But where did she go, after this? That darned bunch this afternoon have trodden out all the signs. She’s gone somewhere up them rocks, and it’s in among there, most likely. If you’ll give me a leg up, I’ll go up and have a look round.”
“Hold on a minute,” said the other; “it ain’t too light down here. I guess I’m not going to poke around in any cavern when this cat’s mate may be about. The toms are as bad as the shes, and if it’s up there laying for us, I’d guess we should know it. We’ll come around in the morning and bring a couple of dogs.”
“Now come on, man,” said the other; “the tom’ll have hidden the kittens to-morrow morning. Finish the job, now we’re at it. Give me a leg up.”
“I guess I won’t,” said the other. “These cats blinded old ’Lije Goldschmidt. He went after ’em into a place where he couldn’t see, and they fair tore his face off him.”
“Funk!” said the other man.
“I guess I am a funk,” said his friend; “but I don’t want to sit at any street corner holding a tin pan for pennies, the way old ’Lije done, for the rest of my days. But I’ll come along to-morrow morning, and I’ll bring a shot-gun, which is a sight more use than the thing you’re using.”
“Well, if you don’t care to come,” said the other man, “I’ll do it alone. You take my rifle and hand it up to me when I’m up.”
“No,” his friend said, “I ain’t going to be a party to no such foolishness. If you want to get your eyes clawed out, you can. Even if you got your rifle up there, you couldn’t see to shoot. It’s just darned foolishness, and I’m not going to stand for it. We’ve got the she, after waiting long enough, and the whistle’s been gone this half-hour. Take what we’ve got and come on, and we’ll come again in the morning.”
The other man growled a little at his friend, but, at last, picked up the dead cat and turned homewards up the gully. They stopped every now and then to complain of the steepness of the climb, then their voices ceased to sound.
It was fast falling dark and the stars were already bright above the gully. Sard cautiously rose, wondering whether the cat’s mate were thereabouts. He was very stiff from lying still. It was cold down there among the rocks and he was faint from want of food. He scrambled down to the water and drank. After groping about for a little while, he found the woodchuck, which he brought along.
He scrambled up the cañon on the side away from the town. It was very steep, the scrub was full of prickles. Presently he reached the top and saw a wilderness of scrubby foothills stretching away for miles, as it seemed, into the Sierra. Behind him, whenever he turned, he could see the lights of the town, and hear the dull thumping of the machinery and the noise of the band playing in the Plaza. On his right was a vast sea of ghostly paleness stretching away for hundreds of miles into the sky, where crimson faded into a kind of green. In the green, here and there, the tops of mountains made jagged marks. The stars were bright in the heaven. He looked up to the eastward stars, with the thought that by rights he should be in his ship, watching these stars, four degrees to the eastward from where he was. He realised that there was no reaching the coast by the railway line.
“I’ll go eastwards,” he said. “Among these foothills there must be some trail by which I can reach the coast.”
He had seven matches remaining to him. By the help of two of these he contrived a little fire, at which he cooked the woodchuck, by toasting collops of it upon skewers. It was not as juicy as rabbit, nor so rank as ferret, but something between the two. He saved some of it for breakfast next morning. Then taking his bearings from the stars he set out to walk to the coast. He knew the trend of the coast from the charts; it was all in his favour. If Las Palomas were one hundred and seven miles from him, he reckoned that he might reach the port of San Agostino in ninety miles. He judged that he might do it in four days.
At the end of two hours of walking, he entered a sheltered valley in a high state of cultivation. He burst through bushes into a track, which led, presently, to a settlement, where the people were already asleep. He could see the little grey-tiled houses scattered, at intervals, among orchards. Dogs barked at his approach. The smell of oranges came to him on a warm breath of wind. He found himself walking between two orange fields. He could see great globes of the fruit among the dark and shining leaves. Some oranges had fallen and lay beneath the trees. He took some and ate them, skin and all, as he walked. At the end of the village or community, the fruit was thicker on the trees, and he was planning to step into one of the orchards to take some oranges when two men with guns stepped from underneath the trees, and called to him to stop.
“What are you doing here?” they said. One was a European fruit-farmer, the other a native servant.
“I’m walking through,” said Sard.
“Walking through? Where to?”
“San Agostino.”
“Where’s that?”
“On the coast,” he said.
“On the coast? How do you expect to make the coast from here?”
“Walk there,” Sard said.
“Walk? Hell!” said the farmer, “you’ve come along orange-pinching. You walk to hell clean out of here, or you’ll get lead into you so mighty darned quick, that you’ll think a cyclone’s struck you. Now get out, and don’t stop to pick no flowers till you’re past the end of my plantation.”
Sard walked on along the trail; the two men followed him at a distance of about a dozen yards, until he was clear of the plantation. The trail led on uphill out of the valley. It seemed to go on interminably, winding up the foothills, but remaining a track, apparently a good deal used. At about eleven o’clock that night the track swerved to the left towards a northern valley, which Sard judged to be useless to him. A sort of track or trail led on in his direction. Though he did not know it, the track was one made in the course of centuries by animals going to drink at the brook below. He followed it for about half an hour and then came out on a lonely hillside, from which he could see no sign of human habitation except the glare in the sky above the mining town, now many miles away. He could see little but mountains, most of them covered either with scrub or with pine trees. A kind of ghostly glimmer stood out into the sky in front, from those peaks of the Sierra which ran into the snow. In the sandy soil among the sage brush all round him there were little scurryings and squeakings from the gophers. Far away, he could not tell how far, it might have been miles away, he heard the howling of solitary wolves, a noise more uncanny than the crying of owls and more melancholy than lamentation.
High up there, in the foothills, the wind never ceased. It stirred the sage brush continually so that the whole hillside seemed filled with footsteps and the noise of people pushing through the brush. He could go no further for that night, but scooped himself a place in the sand in a sheltered nook of the hill, out of the wind. There he covered himself up and slept.
All through the next day he held on across the foothills through the sparse-growing sage. He was already in the wilderness, for the hills were waterless even so soon after the rains. He saw no sign of man all through that day, except once, when he had a view of the desert far below with a train, trailing under smoke, going to the west. As he was still fresh, he resolved to march without food this day: this resolve he kept. He found no water anywhere until towards the evening, when he struck an animal trail which led him to a dripping rock. In the pan of water below the rock the carrion of a wolf lay. He stayed at the rock to catch the drippings till his thirst was assuaged: then feeling like a new man, he went on till he could go no further. This was a good day compared with what followed. He made good some twenty miles of his course. He slept on the ground where he stopped; but slept ill owing to annoyance from the ticks.
After some hours he rose up as a sailor will, knowing that his watch was at an end. It was about a quarter to four. He felt uneasy, and sitting up in his shelter, he heard horsemen close to him. He heard the muttering of voices and horses wrenching at the brush. After listening intently, he decided that what he heard was neither men nor horses, but some other thing, he could not tell what. He remembered now that some six weeks before, on board thePathfinder, he had talked with an Occidental, who had come on board on ship’s business, about these very mountainous tracks in which he was wandering. He remembered that the man had said, “No one goes there, even to prospect for metals. They are bad places where bad things happen.” He remembered, too, stray bits of talk or of reading about these mountains, how nobody really knew them, except a body of men known as the Jacarillos, a tribe of most savage desert Indians, to whom all the most savage of the native bandits fled. These men, alone, were supposed to live in the Sierra, and when Sard sat up in the cold morning, hearing that muttering all around him in the dark, he judged that a war-party of the Jacarillos was passing that way.
Then he thought that that could not be so, because no frontiersman, and certainly no desert Indian, would speak when on a war-party, except by signs. There was something there that he did not understand. He crept very cautiously towards the noise, and presently was able to peer between boulders, at the hillside whence the noise came. It was not perfect darkness; he could see an open space where the brush was low. In this space, moving about exactly as though they had dropped something, which they were trying to pick up or hoping to find, were some gigantic men. One of them was standing not far from him. He was not very tall, less tall, perhaps, than Sard himself, but in bulk and bigness like a gorilla. They were going slowly over the ground in a suspicious way, muttering to each other. They were uneasy about something for which they were looking. Sard felt that they knew that he was there, and that they were looking for him. Then he felt that though they were men, they wanted some of the senses of men; they were like some race of men born blind, who felt for their enemies by some sense which men no longer have. They went very slowly over the ground across which he had certainly passed some hours before. They seemed to feel the ground and lift samples of it, then they muttered remarks about the samples. One of them, away to the right, the one furthest from Sard, seemed to be the captain. When this man reached the point where Sard had stumbled on his way to his lair, he paused and felt the ground and gave a little cry, at which all the others hurried to him. Sard could hear their mutterings and a discussion going on among them. Evidently they had come upon his trail and were puzzled about it.
For a few moments the thought of dealing with a race of giants was unnerving. He saw how such a race could live in that land in the great caves of the limestone, coming out only at night into the wilder places of the hills, taking their prey and going back before dawn. Then he thought, “They cannot be men, they must be bears. But if they are bears, it won’t be any better. They can only be grizzly bears who attack any man on sight.”
He kept still as a mouse for half an hour, while the bears loitered about and muttered among themselves and rummaged in the earth and seemed to find food, though he couldn’t think what. One of them came lumbering quite close to where he crouched. He saw him stand and look up at the stars, in an attitude exactly like that of one of the seamen in thePathfinder, at the wheel. While he was standing thus, he seemed to be conscious of some scent that was not usual. Sard could see his head tip up and down in an attempt to get the stray wafts, to give some certain evidence, one way or the other. He moved away a little and repeated the process, and then moved back, moving with his head exactly like a questing hound and peering sometimes in Sard’s direction, yet not seeing him. At last he seemed to be satisfied, and went shambling off to his fellows. They moved off into the thickets and he saw them no more.
When he felt that they were out of earshot and smell of him, he turned his back upon that place and went on through the scrub up a hill that went up and up, yet never came to any summit. He must have walked for about two hours when he stopped suddenly, hearing a woman singing. It sounded like an Indian woman with a very sweet voice, singing one of the tuneless Indian songs. A little listening showed him that it was not a woman, but a little hidden spring of water, gurgling from a pipe to a trough. The air came with a waft of sweetness upon his face, as of azaleas in blossom and oranges in fruit growing together in a thicket.
He said, “There’s a house here.” He called aloud in Spanish, “Is anybody there? I am a friend. Is anybody there?” In front of him he could see this thicket, which smelled so sweet, all starred either with blossoms or with fruits. He knew from the look and feel of the place that it had been made by good people and was good, and that the people were there, watching him, to see what he would do.
“I am not armed,” he said. “I am an English sailor going to the coast. Don’t turn your dogs at me, but let me have shelter.”
Nobody answered, but he felt quite certain that the thicket was full of people looking at him.
He said, “Don’t shoot. You see I put my hands up. I am alone.”
He went forward to the thicket and there saw that there was no one, only a profusion of creeping flowers that looked at him like eyes, out of the darkness of the hedge. It must have been years since anybody had lived there. The hedge, which had been planted, had gone back to jungle. He walked round it till he came to what had been the gate. There he could see within a little ruined chapel with one bell. As he came through the gateway in the first of the dusk, a bird, perhaps an owl, which had been perched beneath the bell, flew out with a cry. Her wings struck the bell, which jangled a little. It was exactly as though Sard had rung the door-bell. He drew his breath and stood still in the court, wondering who would answer the bell.
It was still not more than twilight, but birds were stirring in the scrub, and colours could be seen. Some blue birds with orange breasts came wavering down among the bushes, tore a few petals apart, from wantonness, and flew on, talking to each other.
Sard stepped across the courtyard and looked in at the deserted chapel’s western door. It must have been built very soon after the Conquest. It had been deserted for perhaps half a century, which in that dry climate had not been enough to destroy it. The roof had gone, except over the altar. From the wall-plate of the falling roof great strings of flowers hung. Many flowers and grasses had sprouted among the stones. Just over the altar a bough had thrust through the wall, and had blossomed there with a white clustered blossom which smelled sweeter than honeycomb. The wall above the altar had once been painted in fresco. Most of the paintings were now gone, but Sard saw, as it were, the heads of men, eagerly looking upward. To right and to left of the door within the enclosure there were marks in the earth which showed where the mission huts had once stood. But monks, converts, mission, and the very memory of their dealings were utterly gone. Sard might well have been the first man to have stood there, since the mission ended. It ended in pestilence, he thought; nobody was left alive here for the mission to save. He judged that the pestilence which had destroyed the mission might still be there, in the air, the earth, the water. Yet the place seemed good, it was unvisited, it seemed sheltered, and there were no scorpions nor snakes.
He lay down in the shelter of the altar, and instantly fell asleep. He had not slept long before he became aware that somebody was calling him by name from infinitely far away, in a voice which was familiar and yet strange. The voice called, “Harker! Sard Harker! Sard!” from a distance so great that it seemed like another continent. He knew, in his sleep, that the voice wanted him to wake. He woke and sat up and found it still twilight there in the chapel, with the stars not yet gone from the hole in the roof. No one was calling, the blue birds were back again, tearing the blossoms, no call had disturbed them. He thought, “I wonder whose voice that was. I seem to know the voice”; and while he wondered, he fell asleep.
In his sleep he saw the owner of the voice, a boy called Peter Maxwell, who had been dead eleven years. He saw Peter, not as he had ever known him, but eager, like the faces in the fresco. He knew that Peter had some message for him, yet could not say it, having no longer any human tongue or any use for human thought. He saw Peter leaning out of the altar wall from the place where the branch was blossoming. Peter was stretching out his right hand to him, but what he wanted he could not tell. He cried out, “Peter, old man, is that you?” and in his gladness at seeing Peter so near, he woke up and saw the blossoming branch shaking, as though someone had brushed it by. It was daylight but not sunlight as he rose up. No one was there, no one had been there; the birds were still tearing the blossoms, uttering little cries. No man could have been within a mile of them, probably no human being was within ten miles, and yet he expected to see Peter Maxwell.
“Peter,” he said, “Peter.”
When he saw that there was no Peter, he thought, “That was a strange dream. Peter Maxwell has been dead since 1886. He died of yellow fever in theCliomene. Yet that was Peter in my dream.”
He walked round the little enclosure. There was nothing to alarm him, except the sense that he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He was weary from his tramp and his hard day. He returned to the chapel and presently slept again. This time he slept for some hours, but towards noon, at about the time when his watch would be drawing to an end, he was aware that a trumpet was being blown and that armed figures were there, wanting him to go. With a little effort he cleared his eyes, so that he could see these figures. There were three: two women and a man. The man was standing between the women and raised above them. He was standing on the altar blowing a blast upon the trumpet, and the notes of the trumpet came out like flames, so that Sard could see them as well as hear them. The women were looking at him with faces so calm that they could not have been mortal, yet when they saw that he saw them, their faces became alive and incredibly eager. They both turned to him and bent to raise him, and with their free hands they pointed at the trumpeter, who shone in all his being and pointed the way to go, and blew upon his trumpet a blast like a cock-crow: “Get you gone out of here, get you gone out of here!”
In his dream Sard called to the trumpeter: “What is it, Peter, what is it? What is it, you great spirits?”
But the women faded from him, Peter faded from him into the wall, but he could still see the shining trumpet and notes like flakes of fire failing all around him. The trumpet dwindled slowly and resolved itself into the blossoming branch that had grown through a crack in the wall. The figures were gone, the fiery notes had vanished, only as Sard stood up he smelled very faintly a smell of burning. He walked to the altar and felt along the wall. It was a wall of perishing plaster. No one had been there. He went out into the enclosure, and as he passed through the door, he smelled again the smell of burning. “Get you gone out of here,” he repeated. “Get you gone out of here! What is that smell of burning?”
Once long before, far out at sea in the Pacific, he had smelled a smell of burning during the night-watch and had reported it to his mate. The mate said, “Yes, you often smell that here, at this season of the year. They are burning the scrub on the mountains four hundred miles away.” He thought of that remark now. Looking out of the enclosure at the thickets beyond, he saw a faint trail of smoke curling among some dwarf oaks.
“I believe this scrub’s on fire,” he said. “I’d better get me gone out of here, or I’ll be burnt like a rat in a trap.”
As near as he could judge, the wind was blowing from the north-west, and his course was to the east of north. If the scrub were on fire, as he supposed, he would have to get across its path. He left the enclosure of the ruined chapel and set off further up the hill to a clear space among the scrub, where he could see. The foothill on which he stood looked like a moraine across the track of some ancient glacier. From the top of it he could look right up the valley down which the glacier may once have flowed. The wind was blowing straight down this valley, driving a line of fire behind a wall of smoke, which was beaten down below the tops of the dwarf oaks. Suckers and snakes of flame ran out along the sides of the valley and over its summit. From time to time these suckers seemed to die out, but others always leaped up in front of them. It was advancing in a ragged line, coming pretty fast, with a crackling, hissing, sighing noise that sounded very terrible. Sard judged that it might be, at the furthest, a mile from him. It died down and glittered up like a living thing. At that distance it did not look like a raging fire, but it was laying all things dead behind it.
Sard could not see how far it stretched on the side towards which he was going, but he judged that he would have to hurry to get round it, so he set off at his best pace along the ridge of what might have been the moraine. As he went along, the air thickened with intensely bitter smoke from the burnt bush. Little floating fiery particles came flying past and settled on his clothes. Every now and then some streamer of flame would blow down on something dry, set it on fire and blow out. He ran for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and he reached the top of that side of the valley to which he ran. He found that on the other side of the hill the ground tipped very sharply down into a rocky chasm. Beyond this rocky chasm, which contained water, was a hillside covered with scrub, blazing like the Day of Judgment. There was no possibility of getting round the fire. He was shut in on that side, and he hadn’t time to get back. His only chance was to get down to the water.
There was a place where the crag had fallen in a scree of big pieces of stone. He scrambled down this towards the water, but the scrub burning on the other side of the stream was so bright and hot that he had to cover his eyes as he slithered down. Quite close to the lip of the water there was a big shelving stone, worn smooth by floods. It was so hot from the blaze that he could hardly bear his hand upon it. He slithered into the water from it, just as a flame seized the scrub upon the opposite bank, and scorched it into nothing.
In a minute the fury of the fire had passed, and it was running up the hillside away from him, leaving a blackened earth, covered with glowing stalks, which hissed and sighed. It went on, he could see it running up the hill, licking down the scrub and leaving blackness. The wind blew over the burnt tract, bringing soft ash, little fiery particles, and a breath as from a furnace door.
Sard clambered out of the water, which was brackish and quite unfit to drink, and set off upon his course again. He walked, like Satan, on the burning marl, in a desert which had been grim before, but was now terrible. He followed along the course of the chasm for half a mile, and came out above on to a sort of tableland of rock, where the fire had ceased. He paused here to take his bearings, and noticed, for the first time, that a house or hut had been destroyed by the fire, close to where he stood. It must have been almost the last thing burned; so he went to it, thinking that perhaps somebody had been burnt in it. On a sort of shelf at one end of it was a skeleton of a man, gripping a crucifix. It might have been there fifty years. The only other remains were a couple of earthenware ollas of a good size. These were Indian pots of a dull yellow colour, with decorations of black and red. One of them had a thong about its mouth, and had been used as a waterbucket; the other, which was still covered with its earthenware lid, contained parched corn, shrivelled to the dryness and toughness of split peas, but still food. There was nothing to show what the man had been. He was tall for an Indian; the crucifix seemed against his being a miner or prospector. He may have been some hermit, or contemplative.
Sard removed the ollas into the open. After a little search he found the spring where the hermit had got his drinking water. He made a fire and cooked what was left of the woodchuck with the parched corn, and took his bearings while the meal was cooking. In front of him the path of the fire still ran on along the valley. It was already far away, running in little bright flickers of flame, under driven-down smoke. To his left, on the line of his course, there was a mile of scrubless desert of sand and rock, without even a cactus or a prickly pear, stretching to the rocky bulk of the Sierra. By the Sierra, in the direction in which he wished to go, was a chasm or cleft or cañon, it could hardly be called a glen. It ran into the very heart of the hills, for a mile or two, as far as he could see, but beyond it there were crags with pine trees, and beyond those more crags, and beyond those, crags with snow and more crags. To his right he could see very little. Foothills shut in the line of sight on that side. Wherever he looked there was no sign of the works of man, there was desert, rock, desolation and death. Between sixty and seventy miles of unknown country still lay between him and the coast. With some tough tendrils which had escaped the fire he contrived slings for the two ollas. He was now equipped with bread and water for two days.
As he judged that the chasm or cleft would give him an easier path into the hills, he set off towards it. As he drew near to its entrance, it looked like the entrance to hell. He remembered that he had read somewhere, or somebody had told him, that the Indians dreaded these clefts in the mountains, and said that unspeakable things lived in them. Now as he drew near the mouth, he heard far up the cañon something like a voice, which was not a voice, crying in the heart of the rocks. It was a strange, metallic cry of “Ohoy!” The echoes repeated it. It was no beast that he knew. It was not like a beast. It was like the voice of the rock itself. He stopped at the very mouth of the cañon, trying to think what that voice could be. It was not any human voice, and yet it had a human ring. It was not the voice of any beast, and yet it came, as it were, from the strength of a beast. It could not be the voice of a bird, no bird could be big enough, and yet there was something birdlike in its tone. If it were not the voice of a man, beast or bird, what could it be? Though it could not be a bird, it was likest to a bird; there was something spiritual and birdlike about it. It gave him the impression of some giant bird, some bird of poetry, some phœnix or roc, crying from a full heart. Then in its deeper notes it sounded like the voice of some giant who was beating on an anvil, and crying as he struck the blows, “Ohoy!” At these times it came with a pure metallic clang, which thrilled him to the marrow. He stood still to listen to it. Whatever it was, it came from some living thing, it had not the rhythm of any machine. It was not any drill or pile-driver beating into the heart of the rock. Sard’s mind offered many suggestions, one after the other. Now it was like some great bell, but it was not a bell. Now it was like some ringing true blow struck by a gigantic tuning-fork, or like the blow of an axe upon a gong, or like the drilling of some gigantic woodpecker into a musical wood. He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It came from the heart of the wilderness of rock, miles from any human dwelling. It was like the rock speaking. Into his mind there came again those words which he had read or heard, “The Indians do not go into the Sierra, nobody goes into the Sierra; there are strange things in the Sierra which do not want to be known.”
He asked himself whether he were not delirious and imagining this noise. But it rang clearly and made an echo.
The cañon was paven with clean dry desert sand. It led into the heart of the hills. The side of the mountain had been snapped asunder there and torn fifty yards apart. Sard could see a great black boulder midway up the cliff, on his right hand, and its other half on his left hand. He saw the patterns of veins and lines, where they once had joined each other. It needed some little resolution to go on towards that noise, but he repeated his proverb, “A danger met is less than a danger expected,” and went forwards toward it.
There were no tracks in the sand, perhaps no human foot had trodden that path for fifty years or five hundred years. “Here,” he thought, “I may come upon some unknown beast or bird or race of men or giants, for there may be anything in a place like this.” Half a mile up the cañon he stopped, for in front of him the walls of the cañon drew together, and there at each side of the chasm the rock had been hewn into a semblance of columns, a hundred feet high. Drawing a little nearer, he saw that the heads of the columns were carven with the heads of monsters which were crushing human skulls between their teeth; blood seemed to be flowing from their mouths; blood spattered the columns; as he drew near, he could hear it dripping on the rocks below. The noise of the great bird, or whatever it was, had been silent for some time; now he heard it much nearer and with a new note, not of joy nor of sorrow, but of laughter that had no feeling in it. Sard stopped; he felt his hair stand on end, while his heart seemed to come up into his throat and thump there till it was as dry as bone.
“All the same, I’ll go on,” he said; “there’s no going back. That thing knows that I’m here. If I’ve got to die, I’ll die, and I may as well get it over.”
All the time the great figures on the columns seemed to chew their quids and the blood spattered down upon the rocks.
“They’re only those streams,” he said, “with iron ore or with red pigment in them, and they’ve led them in channels to those figures’ mouths. That’s all it is.”
It was all that it was, but in the dusk of the cañon and of the day, to one very weak and weary as well as feverish, it was enough. He walked boldly up to the feet of the figures. They stood in blood, like butchers, and the red water splashed Sard as he stood there. Though he had expected much, he had not expected what he saw. The two great columns stood one on each side of a narrow pass, not more than four feet across. Within the pass the cañon widened out again, but not very far. On both sides of it the rocks had been carven into gigantic shapes. It was an avenue of the gods, all of them terrible; they seemed to turn their heads and look at him; the wardens at the gate seemed to turn round upon him after he had passed them. Into his mind, from some forgotten book or speaker, came the phrase of what the Indians in that country had said of these old temples, that their gods come to life at dusk, and are alive all night, and live on men. They seemed to gnash their teeth and lick their lips, and to tremble as he drew near.
He would have thought nothing of it had he had so much as a dog beside him. A lunatic, even a village idiot, would have seemed a comrade and a backing to him. But he had to face it alone. He backed into the rock of the pass and tried to reassure himself, but he kept telling himself, “It was one of these things whom I heard singing. They do come to life at dusk.”
Then he said, “It isn’t so. If these things were beautiful, I would fear them, but they are not, and there is nothing in them that I will recognise as gods. These things are all over this land: I have heard of them. I’ll go on, and if they kill me, they’ll get little glory by it.”
He went on, and as he went a strange moaning music seemed to wind from one god to another. It was the wind striking sharp angles in the rocks at the chasm top, but it sounded like the song of the figure of Memnon in Egypt. Just in such a way should the thoughts of the gods pass to each other, without a movement of the lips.
“Those Indians spoke the truth,” he thought, “when they said that the gods speak in music from dusk to dawn.”
At the head of the cañon was a small stone temple, high up at the top of a flight of steps. The columns and the walls were brightly painted with images of terror and of power, in war and triumph. Bats were flickering out from the temple door. They were the first living things that he had seen since he entered the cañon. They made him feel that he was coming back to life, after walking in the kingdom of death. As he went up the temple steps, which were as perfect as when they had been laid down, centuries before, the voice of the bird, or whatever it was, rose up from somewhere in the mountain not far ahead. It rose up with a new note, it was like laughter with exultation. He could see nothing because the temple shut away all that was in front of him, but he heard above the noise of the laughter the clanking as of enormous wings, slowly rising from the ground and gathering power and moving away and away.
As he entered the temple there came a great rush of many hundreds of bats, whirling past his ears into the air. He passed between walls of carven and painted figures, which were still sharp and bright in detail. He went through a first room, as long as a cricket-pitch, into another, which was pleasant with the sound of water. A pool had been cut in the rock in the midst of this great room; water spouted into it from the tongues of grotesque heads. At the end of the room there were stairs leading up to an altar made of a piece of black obsidian chipped to a point. At the back of this altar there were rooms filled with the murmur of pigeons. These rooms must once have been the priests’ dwellings. They were now dovecotes for the blue rock-pigeons which flew out, on his approach. He clambered out after them on to a terrace cut upon the rock of the mountain for two hundred yards by a people who had no explosives save the will of their rulers. There was no green thing in sight, nothing but rocks and sand. The rocks were of every savagery of splinter, of savage colours, bright blue, yellow, red and black, all spiked and toppled and tumbled, and only brought into order upon this terrace by the unknown priests of dead gods.
He took what he could of the eggs of the rock-pigeons, then shaped his course and went on into the wilderness, until his way was barred by a cliff across his path, eight hundred feet high and more. He walked along it for over a mile, but found no scaling place. At the end of his walk the cliff bowed over so as to make a shelter or cave. Here in some remote time some forgotten tribe had built up a house for themselves by piling a wall of stones without mortar, between the hollow and the light. The path of these men still led to their entrance, a hole in the wall, just big enough for a small man to crawl through. Sard did not dare to try to enter by that door for fear of snakes. There was a sheltered place among the rocks where he lay down to rest. He fell into a deep sleep, and slept until the cold woke him. He felt something pressed against his chest which had not been there before. It was some snake which had crawled there for the warmth. Very cautiously he moved his stiff arms, until he could fling it from him, and leap up in the one motion. He leaped clear of it, and then leaped clear of the place.
It was then about four in the morning and intensely cold. The snake was perhaps too sluggish to attack. He was too miserable with cold to stay longer there. He ate a little of his food, and went on along the face of the cliff, until he found a place of fallen rocks where it was possible to climb.
It seemed to him that he had gone for hours out of his way trying to find a path, and that already he was weaker than he had been from want of proper food and rest. He knew now how easy it would be for him to die up there in the Sierra; why, he might wander for days trying to find food or drink, the way out or the way back. He knew now that he might have been wiser to risk the silver escorts, and follow the railway across the desert.
All that day he wandered on among the mountains, far to the west of his proper course. The crags of a great snowy peak were like a wall upon his right hand, they seemed to edge him off to the west at every point. He would walk for a mile and then think, “Now I can get across to the eastward,” but always when he had scrambled up the screes, he would come to some cliff which he could not climb. He saw no living thing in all this day, except two little birds running among the rocks, and the eagles quartering in the heaven.
At last as he wandered, he saw above him a gash or chimney in the cliff. He scrambled to its very foot and looked up it. There was a percolation of water down the side, which he tasted and found sweet. The rock was very rotten, but he saw that it was a way up this cliff. As it was a possible means of getting back to his course, he set himself to climb it. It took him an hour to reach the top, and as he scrambled up to safety above it, the thongs of his ollas broke, and both jars dropped to the bottom of the chimney and smashed to pieces there.
He found himself on a great heave of rocky mountain which went on to a pine forest. Beyond the pine forest the main crags of the Sierra rose, covered with snow. They were blindingly bright in front of him, rocks as blue as steel and ice as white as death, a wall between him and the sea, which he would have to climb.
At about sunset, when he was entered into the pine forest, he smelled suddenly a smell of smoke. It was the smoke of burning pine-cones or pine-needles. He judged that it came from a little fire, because he so easily lost the scent. He turned towards it, thinking that even the most savage of mountain Indians would be less terrible than that loneliness. Sometimes he lost the scent, then he cast about like a dog, until he picked it up again. Presently he was almost certain that he heard a moan. It seemed the fitting speech for such a place. He went towards it, and soon heard the moaning pass into something much more savage, a cursing and a calling down of vengeance. After a minute of violence, it died again into grief and mourning and lamentation.
He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest. Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang. It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.
The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine trees.
“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.
“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.
“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.
“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”
“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that will take me there?”
“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”
“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the Sierra, going eastwards from this?”
“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here, keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only pass in all that range.”
“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.
“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”
Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women. They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree, then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him, firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned and ran.
He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.
Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.
“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”
Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines. Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought, “as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.
Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of thePathfinder, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven, casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese, butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of thePathfindercame to his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr. Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.” Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.
He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale. When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must be some way through the mountains there.
He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags, but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water. Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.
It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone. Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.
He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone that had ceased to be stone.
In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in that waste.
He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake, and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake, found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep has no cause to grumble.”