CHAPTER IV
The morning light did not confirm Gard’s impression that he was in the deep woods. Beyond the thin region of growth fed by the pool the little valley into which he had been led lay sandy and cactus-grown, like the desert. The stream that should have watered it, that had probably, at some time, made its way down the dry wash which he had traversed, now found some underground outlet, and was swallowed up by the vampire plain below.
Above the glade was a steep, rockbound ravine, down which the stream still flowed. The pool seemed to be its last stand against the desert. Gard, tentatively exploring the lower end of this ravine for fuel, found a few blackberries, drying upon the bushes, and ate them, eagerly, with appetite still unsated by his breakfast of mesquite beans. The mesquite grew here, too; with manzanita and scrub oak, arrow-weed, and black willow.
The man’s chief sensation was a vague surpriseat finding himself still alive. He was too sick—too weak—after his exertion and his rages of the day before, to consider the problem of keeping himself alive. He was chilled to the marrow, and yearned like a fire-worshipper toward the warmth of his camp-glow. He tended the fire carefully. He dared not let it go out; for that meant the sacrifice of another precious match.
The elemental appetite awoke when, stooping to drink from the pool, he saw fish darting about in its clear depths. He worked with the cunning of a pre-historic man until, by means of the feed bag, which he emptied of its contents, he succeeded in catching two of these.
A long thorn of palo-verde served him for a knife in dressing them, and he cooked them in the earth, with hot stones, laying each fish between the split halves of broad lobes of the prickly pear. They were insipid, and full of bones, but they served to satisfy his hunger.
He decided to keep a record of the days that he should spend in this place; by sticking palo-verde thorns into an out-reaching branch of willow, near the pool. He would stick in a thorn for each day. He cursed the first one, as he thrust it against the wood; because he felt powerless to do anything else.
Following, half sullenly, a mere human instinctto be busy about something, he set about making a knife from the smallest plate of the buggy-spring. He heated it in his fire till the paint came off, broke it in two and spent the day working one thin end down to a cutting edge, on a big, rough boulder. By night he had six inches of blade with one rounded, sharp end.
He used this, next day, to cut ocotilla-stalks, to make a bed, scraping away the thorns with sharp stones. He worked all day; less because he wanted a bed than because he dimly realized that sanity lay in occupation. That night he set a snare, and before morning managed to catch a cotton-tail which he dressed and roasted for his breakfast.
He was getting over the feeling of being hunted. They would not search for him now, he reasoned; they must feel satisfied that he had died in the cloudburst. He bathed in the pool that day, when the sun was high, and set about constructing a fireplace against the big boulder. This would make fire-keeping easier.
The days slipped into weeks. Little by little the man was adapting himself to his environment. He learned to dry the mesquite beans and grind them between stones into a coarse flour. This he made into little cakes, which he baked upon a flat stone before the fire. Later, he turned over a patch of earth, watered it, and sowed it with the oats hehad saved from the storm. Now, however, his food was the mesquite, the prickly pear, the century plant, and the fish and small game that he managed to catch.
As he grew stronger he fashioned himself a bow of oak, shaping and smoothing it with his rough knife, and stringing it with fibres from the century plant. His shafts were those of the desert Indians, the arrow weeds growing close at hand, and he tipped them with the cruel, steel-hard dagger-points of the yucca.
With this primitive weapon he gradually grew skilful; and at last he shot a buck, as the creature came down to the pool one night, to drink. He dried the meat, and used the skin, when he had made it ready, as a covering for his bed.
Twice, during the winter, the camel came back to the pool. The creature went as it came, silent, inscrutable. Whither it went Gard did not know; the pool was evidently one of its ports of call while going to and fro on the mysterious business of being a camel. It accepted the man as a matter of course, and left him, when ready, with the indifference of fate, though Gard could have begged it on bended knees, to remain.
He was horribly lonely, with nothing but his hate, and a sick longing for vengeance upon life, to bear him company. There were days when hecursed the chance that had kept his worthless hulk alive, while sending Arnold, in all his strength, down to death. He had no doubt but that the deputy had perished. Nothing could ever have come, alive, through the rush of water into which he had been flung.
The weeks became months. His oats were coming up, a little patch of cool green on the yellow sand, and he had occupation to fend the field from the small desert creatures that coveted it. He also worked at times at making various utensils of the red clay that he found in the valley, baking them in a rude kiln of his own fashioning.
He came by degrees to love this work, and took great pleasure in it. He even tried to contrive a potter’s wheel, but was balked by lack of material. He had to content himself, therefore, with modeling the clay into such shapes of use and beauty as his untaught hands could achieve. In time he came to ornament his work as well, graving designs on the edges of his plates and bowls. The camel’s counterfeit presentment figured on one or two of the larger pieces, and upon the others, as the impulse prompted, he put inscriptions, until the homely articles of his daily use came to be a sort of commentary, seen by no eyes save his own, of his moods, and the longing for their expression.
He wrote thus upon other things as well. Lackingpaper or implements charcoal and sharpened sticks became his tools; the rocks and trees; his broad earthen hearth; the plastic clay; even the yellow sand of the desert, his tablets, and little by little all these became eloquent of his lonely thoughts.
He put them down upon whatever served, for the mere comfort of seeing them; scraps of lessons conned in the old brick school-house; sums; fragments of the multiplication table; roughly drawn maps and sketches of boyhood scenes; lines from half-remembered poems and hymns; familiar Bible verses that his mother had taught him. They came back to him bit by bit, in his solitude. And one and all his soul found them camps by the way on its long journey up from despair.
From one of his excursions into the valley he brought home the empty shell of a desert turtle. This he split, and fashioned the upper half into a bowl to contain the palo-verde thorns of his record. They were already crowding the willow branch, and but for them he could scarcely have realized the passage of days.
There were a hundred and forty-seven thorns on the day that he transferred them to the new receptacle. Gard could not be sure that he had one for each day in the desert, but he knew that each one there actually represented a day.
“I’ve had every one of that lot,” he told himself, talking aloud, as a solitary man gets to do. “Had ’em in the open, in spite of the law sharks.”
He still lived from day to day, however, despite his vows, and his threats of vengeance. He had known, when he sought Ashley Westcott, begging the price of a ticket east, that he was a doomed man.
“It’s all borrowed time,” he muttered, shaking the turtle-shell.
His face darkened.
“’T ain’t either,” he cried. “It’s time won back. They stole it from me down there. They robbed me of three years, the filthy thieves! What’s a hundred and forty-seven days against that?”
He remembered an occasion when to get away from the wood-pile that was his special charge, in his boyhood, he had heaped a scant supply of split wood over a pile of chunks yet untouched by the axe, and exhibiting the result as his finished task had escaped with his fellows upon some expedition of pleasure. He had meant to return in time to complete his work before the cheat should be discovered, but he forgot it.
His father had first thrashed him well for his wickedness, then lectured him tenderly about it. The wicked, he had told him, would not live outhalf their days. Gard’s laugh as he recalled the words was more nearly a snarl.
“He was a good man all right,” he said, “but he didn’t know it all; not by an eternal lot.”
He tormented himself with other boyish memories: the broad grassy stretches of the prairie came up before him; the woods that neighbored his father’s farm; the pleasant fields, and occasional low hills that had seemed to him so high, before he had seen mountains; the swimming-pool where he and the fellows played in summer; the skating-pond where they raced and built forts and fought mimic battles in winter; the red brick school-house at “The Corners”; the white church at “The Centre,” where he had gone to Sunday school; the little shed chamber with its creaking stairs that his mother had climbed, how many cold nights! to see if he were warmly covered. She was gone from earth now, but the old boyhood places were left, and he yearned for them all, with yearning unspeakable.
“I thought I was going to get back to it,” he groaned, through his set teeth. “I trusted that poison-snake to help me; God! If I could get these hands on him, just once!”
But the quiet of his hundred and forty-seven days, and the balm of the healing air, had wrought within him more than he knew. His excursionsafield grew longer, day by day, and in the gray of one beautiful morning he started out to explore the mountain.
He had traversed the cañon before now, climbing over rocks, and around mighty boulders washed down by ancient avalanches, or torn from above by titanic storms, until he came to where the mountain stream took a leap of some seventy feet, and the sheer face of the cliff barred his way. This time, however, he followed the cañon’s edge, to which the trees clung precariously, sycamores, oaks, and, to his delight, some walnuts. He marked the spot where they grew, as a place to be visited in the nut season.
The morning was far spent when he reached this point, so he lingered to rest, to eat the jerked venison and mesquite bread he had brought with him. Then he resumed his climb until he was well beyond the timber growths and had to fight his way through chaparral.
He crawled among this on hands and knees, now and then, frightening birds, and other small game, from their hiding-places, and at last came out upon the rocky open, and the broad spaces where the large creatures of the mountains make their homes. He noted more than one faint trail leading over the wastes, and now and again he caught sight of deer in the distance.
Higher still he climbed, into the regions of white sunlight, until the cold, pure air of the snowy ranges blew through his hair, and he began to feel the altitude. In spite of this he pressed on, and at last reached a ridge where grew a few scattered heralds of the great pine belt above him. Here, quite unexpectedly, the vast waste of the desert suddenly met his gaze, far, far below.
There was a strange, horrible unreality about it. The far gray plain; the mountain’s bare, brown bones; the wind-distorted trees; the solemn, snowy sierras, even the blue arch of the sky, seemed but components of some fearful nightmare.
“I’m not asleep,” he muttered; “and it’s no dream; I’ve died, and gone to hell!”
The bitterness of desolation was upon him. His very soul lay bare in the bright, white sunlight of the heights, and he cowered, like a child afraid of the dark.
As he stood thus, from out the silence a soft, clear whistle rose upon the air. It was repeated, then taken up, farther away. The man quivered as though the sound had struck him. Then his tense muscles relaxed; he saw the whistlers to be a covey of quail, moving along the rocks a little below him.
They came nearer, walking in single file, full of curiosity about him, alert, speculative, keeping upa murmur of little ornithological remarks among themselves, the while. The gentle fearlessness of the small, pretty creatures filled all that grim place with an ineffable grace. A sob strained at the man’s throat.
“Just as if they were in a garden!” he whispered.
Long he stood watching the birds, who presently, as if satisfied that no harm dwelt in him, scattered about the rocky waste in search of food. One only remained on watch, guarding the flock from a little eminence where he stood motionless save for his pretty crest, which the wind blew from side to side. Gard watched him, fairly hushing his own breath lest he alarm the small sentinel, who in turn regarded him, with bright, innocent eyes.
“To think of it,” the man murmured, “the little, little things, so fearless, up here in this—this—secret—place—of—the—Most—High!”
He stopped, in vague surprise at his own speech. He had not meant to say that, but from some neglected recess of his boyhood’s memory the words had sprung, vital with meaning.
“I wish,” he finally began, after a long pause, and ceased speaking as a wave of sickening despair swept over his soul. The idleness of the phrase mocked him; the folly of wishing anything, helpless there in the bitterness of desolation, camehome to him with cruel force. Then the ache of his spirit’s yearning drew his clenched hands up toward the blue vault.
“I wish,” he breathed, his heart pounding, his brain awhirl with a sudden vision of the infinite wonder of things, “I wish that—if there is such a thing as God in the world I might come to know it.”
Slowly his hands came down to his sides. The sentinel of the rocks gave a soft little call of reassurance to the flock, which had halted, observant of the gesture, and the birds resumed their feeding. Gard turned for another look at the snowy ramparts on high; at the vast plain below. All their horror was gone, for him, and he began the descent of the mountain with the peaceful visage of one who has been in a good place.
Far into the night he awoke with the feeling of something stirring near him. In the dim firelight he could make out a shadowy figure on the hearth, and he sprang up in haste. A second glance, however, as he sat upon his ocotilla bed, showed him that there was no harm in the visitor shivering there by the coals.
It was a burro, and the listless pose, the drooping ears and the trembling knees proclaimed a sick burro. It was too miserable even to move,when Gard threw an armful of brush on the fire and speedily had a blaze by which he could see the intruder plainly. His first glance revealed a jagged, dreadful sore on the shoulder next to the light.
Speaking very gently, he drew nearer to the burro and though the little creature trembled violently, it let him bend down and examine the wound.
A great spike of the long, tough crucifixion-thorn had somehow become imbedded in the flesh, and the whole surface of the shoulder was swollen and inflamed. Gard made a little sound of pity in his throat, and the burro, turning, tried to lick the sore.
“No use to do that yet, Jinny,” the man said. “That thorn’s got to come out first.”
The burro had probably never before been touched by hands; but not for nothing was Jinny wide between the ears. She scrutinized her would-be helper closely, for a moment, through her long lashes, and drooped her wise-looking little gray head still lower. Gard threw another armful of light stuff on the fire and when the blaze was brightest attacked the thorn, using one of his sharp arrows as a probe.
Once or twice the creature flinched. Once she snapped her strong teeth at the hurting side; butGard worked steadily and quickly, and presently had the offender out.
“Look a’ that, Jinny,” he cried, triumphantly. It was a joy to hear himself speaking to something alive.
“Look a’ that!” he repeated, “Ain’t you glad you found the doctor in?”
He dipped warm water from an earthen pot in the ashes, and washed the wound carefully, talking all the while to the still trembling patient, silently regarding him. When the place was quite clean he made a poultice of prickly pear and bound it on with a strip of deer-skin.
“Lucky I shot another buck, Jinny,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have that nice bandage.”
The little burro expressed no thanks; only stared solemnly at the fire. Gard strode out into the darkness and pulled, recklessly, an armful of his precious, growing oats. He threw the green stuff down before her and she sniffed it curiously before she began, ravenously, to eat it.
“Hungry, weren’t you?” the man said, sympathetically. “Been too sick to eat. Well, well, make yourself at home.”
He threw a big stick upon the fire and went back to his bed, leaving the burro chewing, meditatively, before the blaze.
He was just falling asleep when he felt somethingwarm fumbling about him, and he awoke with a start, and an exclamation that quickly turned to something very like a laugh. The grateful little burro was licking his hands.
“Why, Jinny!” he cried, sitting up. “Well, well, Jinny! Well, I’ll be jiggered!”
He slipped an arm over the rough little neck and the two watched the fire till dawn.
CHAPTER V
The burro got well and throve. Gard devoted the period of her convalescence to teaching her the essential arts of the higher companionship. Her first lesson in burden-bearing was to bring ocotilla-stalks from the valley. With these she saw the oat patch fenced in from her own depredations, and lifted up her voice in remonstrance when she found herself barred out of that delectable ground. Gard explained the matter to her.
“This is a world, Jinny,” he said, “where we have to wait till the things we want are ripe. I’m waiting myself, Jinny, for my time to come. It will, some day, ah—some day!”
He was thinking of Westcott, but the curses that he was wont to call upon his enemy’s head died upon his lips. It was not that his hatred had died, but there seemed, somehow, to be other things than hate, even in his tiny world.
He hunted up a palo-verde thorn with which to mark his day, Jinny keeping him company. Hestill kept the record on the willow branch, removing the thorns and putting them away whenever he had ten. There were that number this morning.
Spring was well advanced, now. The air was soft, and sweet with the scent of manzanita in the chaparral. For days past hundreds of wild bees had been hovering about the pool, and the underbrush. Gard had a line on them, and thought he knew where the bee-tree was located. His oats were nearly ready for harvest; a century plant in the valley was sending up a long bloom-stalk, and the sound of water leaping down the cañon mingled with the voices of birds in the chaparral.
As Gard put back his shell, with its contents of thorns and turned toward the pool sudden recognition came to him of a heretofore unsuspected truth.
“By the great face of clay, Jinny,” he said, drawing a long breath, “We’re not so bad off, after all!”
Again his eyes ranged the green circle of the glade; at the farther side, where the growth was sparse, he could see the valley with its yellow sands and rose-tinted air. The bright red of blossoming cacti made vivid patches here and there in the waste; even the great barren felt the touch of spring.
“God may have forgot this country,” the mansaid, after a long silence, “But He sure made it, if He made the rest. It’s got the same brand, when you come to see it.
“I guess, Jinny,” he continued, still gazing afar, “that the best of one thing’s about as good as the best of another. What do you think about it?”
As Jinny did not commit herself he sat down upon a rock and reached out to scratch the shaggy gray head.
“If I’d got back to Iowa when I wanted to,” he went on, “I’d most likely be dead by now.”
Jinny’s head drooped till her nose rested upon his knee, and she nodded off to sleep. Gard let her stay and sat looking off across the valley, his mind full of new emotion.
“A man might think,” he slowly mused, considering the mystery of his coming to this place, “that ’twas what old Deacon Stebbins used to call a ‘leading’.”
He turned the thought over in his mind.
“Why not?” he asked.
His eyes rested upon one toil hardened hand as it lay upon Jinny’s back. He held it up, surveying it curiously.
“Rather different, from what it was,” he thought, clenching it into a great fist. “Yah—” with sudden anger, “It’ll be different for Ashley Westcott if ever he comes to feel it.”
His mind dwelt upon that possibility.
“If ever I do get hold of him,” he muttered, and then paused, as half-forgotten memories of that faithful teacher came flocking to the front.
“The deacon ’d be down on that idea,” he reflected. “Wonder how he’d work his pet hobby o’ forgiveness here. He couldn’t judge of everything,” his thought still ran on. “The deacon he never got so near Hell as Arizona. If he had he’d have found it a place his God of Mercy hadn’t got on His map.”
He put Jinny aside and set to work fashioning himself a new cup. He had broken his only one the night before.
“I guess I was wrong about that last notion.” His brain took up the question again as he shaped the red clay. “I guess He must have this place on the map. Looks like His mercy’d been trailing me here, so to speak.”
He paused to contemplate the proportions of his new cup, staring, half startled, at its rounded surface. Phrases from the old psalm that mothers love to teach were beating upon his brain.
“Goodness and mercy,” he murmured, feeling his stumbling way among the words, “goodness and mercy shall follow me.”
The familiar glade grew new and strange to his sight, as though he saw it for the first time.
“Why!” he cried, a sudden light dawning, “Isthatwhat it means?”
Almost mechanically he went on patting and pressing the clay.
“I guess it does mean that,” whispered he at last, pinching up a handle for his cup. “I didn’t think I’d be alive till now when I came up here. I’ve wanted to die, many a time; but I’m glad, now, I didn’t. I may get out of here some day, too. I may live to get Westcott yet!”
“‘Goodness and mercy shall follow me.’” Was that so he could live to see his dream of vengeance fulfilled?
Ah! He could not give that up! It could never mean that he must give that up! Else where were the good of remaining alive?
No; no; it did not mean that! Even the old deacon wouldn’t have thought he must forgive what he, Gabriel Gard, had borne.
“Oh, Lord,” Gard said aloud, “It can’t mean that! It ain’t in human nature that it should mean that!”
The cup in his hand was crushed again to formless clay. He tore and kneaded it viciously, great drops of sweat beading his forehead.
“It’s against human nature,” he groaned as he sought to bring the plastic stuff again into shape. “I can’t do it! But—” The words rose to anagonized wail as his spirit recognized the inexorableness of this demand upon its powers—“I’ve got to. I’ve got to!”
His mind went back to the day upon the mountain-ridge, when he had seen the quail, and he remembered his wish, the wish that had been almost a prayer; remembered it with a hushed feeling of awe.
“If I’d sensed it,” he said in a voice tense with his soul’s pain, “If I’d sensed that this is what comes of knowing there’s a God, I guess I wouldn’t have dared wish that.”
Hour after hour the battle was fought over the wet, red clay, and the day was far spent before the cup was ready for the kiln. When at last Gard, weary, but at peace, brought it for the final perfecting of the fire, he paused, ere he thrust it in, to read once more the rude letters graven deep in its fabric.
THE CUP OF FORGIVENESS
THE CUP OF FORGIVENESS
THE CUP OF FORGIVENESS
“We’ll see how it comes out,” he muttered, grimly, but already the hope grew in his heart that the clay would stand the test.
Throughout the spring Gard busied himself with building a cabin. He needed a place in which tokeep his stores from prowling creatures. A brown bear had secured a good part of the last deer he had shot—secured it while it was drying on branches of the mesquite—and the birds and small beasts of the chaparral took toll of all his scanty supplies. Then, too, he took a man’s delight in construction, and the building of the cabin had come to be a labor of love, as well as of necessity.
The walls of the structure were of desert stones laid up in mud. For the roof he brought skeleton stalks of suhuaro. Later he meant to plaster these with adobe, into which he should work straw, and the coarse gramma grass of the region.
He worked upon the building at odd times, as the summer went on, taking increasing joy in bringing it to completeness. He mascerated prickly-pear cactus in water and soaked the earthen floor with the resulting liquor, pounding it down afterwards until it was hard and smooth as cement. He made his door of ocotilla-stalks laid side by side and woven with willow-withes. In the same way he contrived a shutter for the window, and he constructed a second, smaller, fireplace, within the cabin.
“When we have distinguished visitors, Jinny,” he told the little burro, “We’ll kindle a fire for them here.”
He still used the larger hearth outside. He had learned, after many trials, to kindle a fire with theaid of flint and steel, and was no longer dependent upon matches.
When his shelter was complete he contrived furniture for it, for the sheer pleasure of construction. Lacking boards, or the means to manufacture them, he wove his table-top of arrow-weed and tough grasses from the cañon. It was beginning to be a source of delight to him to contrive solutions for each new problem of his hard existence.
One night, in the early autumn, Gard was wakened by a fearful crash of thunder. He sprang from his bed, to find Jinny already huddled against him. All about them was the roar of the sudden storm.
The pool had overflowed, and swept across the glade in a broad stream, pouring down the defile in a whelming tide. The heavens seemed to have opened, torrentially; Gard’s bed was beaten down, and the fire was flooded. Gard himself was almost thrown to earth by the thrashing rain ere he could reach the cabin, into which he darted, Jinny close at his heels.
The shelter was built against huge boulders, out of the track of the flood from the pool, but the mud and thatch roof leaked like a sieve. It served, however, to break the fierce violence of the storm, and they huddled there miserably till the worst should be over.
The sounds without were like those of a battle: the echoing rattle of thunder down the cañon; the rending of rocks; the crash of falling trees; the screaming of the wind—all mingled in a fierce, wild tumult.
A flash of lightning revealed a great scrub oak, torn from its anchorage above, crashing down into the glade. The next instant the whole place seemed filled with some giant thing that raged and snarled, hurling itself from side to side in mighty struggle.
It dashed against the fireplace, flinging the great stones of it in every direction, and fell upon the uprooted tree in a frenzy of titanic rage.
Its horrible roaring shook the cabin, and Jinny, pressing against Gard, was almost beside herself with terror. Gard himself, peering through the window of the hut, could make out nothing definite, until another flash suddenly showed him a huge grizzly, reared upon its hind legs, striking madly at the empty air.
The storm had moderated, now, and he could hear, as he strained to listen, the fearful snarls of the bear rising above the roar of the wind. The threshing tumult of its plunging had ceased, however, and even the snarling had grown weaker.
The rain ceased, but the wind still swept the glade, and the pool had become a lake. Gard waschilled to the bone, but dared not venture without. He had not heard the grizzly for some time, but Jinny still cowered against him, trembling.
At dawn he looked from the window upon a scene of devastation. The ground was strewn with debris. Great boulders had been hurled down by the torrent’s force, and beside one ragged block of granite lay the grizzly, terrible, even in death. One side of its savage head was crushed in, and a shoulder shattered.
Jinny was still too terrified to venture outside the hut, but Gard went out and set to work to restore some semblance of order about the place.
The roof of the shack was a wreck. Gard had to clear away a part of it that had fallen, before he could find his precious matches and get a fire. There were nine of the matches left, and it took two to start a blaze with the soaked wood. He breakfasted upon dried venison, which he shared with Jinny, grown catholic in her tastes, and then set about skinning and dressing the bear.
He stretched and scraped the great hide, and pinned it out upon the earth, (it meant warmth and comfort to him through the coming winter nights,) and cut the meat into long strips, to dry. It would be a welcome change, later, from venison and rabbit.
It was noon before his toil was completed andthe traces of it so far removed as to ease Jinny’s perturbation. He was obliged to bathe in the enlarged pool before she seemed comfortable when near him.
As he dressed, after his ablutions, his eye caught a broken bit of rock lying at the water’s edge. He picked it up, a curious tightening in his throat.
There is something about the glitter of a streak of yellow in a bit of rock that would set the heart of the last man on the last unsubmerged point of earth to beating fast. The piece of float was freshly severed and the flecks of yellow showed plainly in its split surface. Gard scrutinized the mud round about, and beyond the pool found another bit of float.
Forgetful of all else, he sprang up the cañon. It, too, was full of debris, witness to the mighty power of the storm. He hardly knew the place as he climbed along, making a new way for himself; for the swollen stream roared wildly where but the day before he had been able to walk.
The cañon walls on either side were wrought and twisted by the action of ancient heat, scarred and eroded by the force of ancient waters, but they revealed no fresh break, though he scanned them eagerly.
He kept on, however; for a quarter of a mile above the pool another bit of float pointed theway. It was a savage climb, but mounting, circling and crawling past heaped up boulders and masses of earth, he presently found progress checked by a landslip, beneath which the rushing water was already cutting a channel.
Here lay the vein, uncovered, the gleaming particles in the cloven rock making the man’s breath come thick as he studied them.
There was no doubt about it: he had discovered pay rock of the richest sort. How rich it was he had no means of determining, nor did he then dream; but he knew that right in sight was more gold than he should be able to get out with any tool at his command, and hope was already high within him.
He stooped and picked up small fragments of broken rock that lay among the debris. How heavy they were! What power they represented! What dreams might come true, by the aid of their yellow shine!
Here was his ticket east. Here was a ticket to the uttermost parts of the earth. With it he could go away, stand rehabilitated among his fellows. Golden vistas of power and pleasure spread out before him as he stood gazing long at the cleft, yellow-flecked rock before him.
“Whoever runs this outfit,” he whispered, “has remembered it, after all.”
It was long before he could bring himself back to reality. Only the gathering autumn gloom, coming early, in the cañon’s depth, finally recalled him. He began turning over in his mind the means he must contrive with which to meet this emergency. If only he had the tools!
“It’s up to me to make some,” he said aloud, and at the words he suddenly turned and looked back at the golden vein he was leaving.
“You’re great!” he shouted; “You’re bully to have; but you ain’t all there is to it!”
He spread out his hard hands. “These that can make the things to get you out with are better yet,” he said, speaking more slowly.
For he suddenly remembered the pit from which he was digged, and the man’s heart yearned to his fire beside the clean pool, and for the life there that he had wrested from nothing.
CHAPTER VI
Gard and Jinny were on an expedition after salt. The instinct hidden in the gray little hide was so much more useful in the case than the thinking machinery beneath the man’s thatch of hair, that she had long ago led him to a desert supply of this commodity, which he had longed for, without being able to supply his need.
He was utilizing the trip in an effort to make Jinny bridlewise, a proceeding which filled her with great displeasure. She was a sturdy little brute, of good size for a wild burro, and she bore his weight without apparent effort; but she had a fondness for choosing her own direction, and objected, strongly, to the guiding rein. She protested, now, raising her voice, after the manner of her kind, when Gard, from her back, essayed to turn her at his will.
“Jinny! Jinny!” he remonstrated; “Not for the world would I call you anything but a lady; but I can’t be so mistaken, Jinny! You’re not a nightingale!”
Jinny was persistent, however, in her determination to travel eastward, and although her companion, had he been allowed a preference, would have elected to go toward the west, he had learned enough about his small gray friend to be willing to trust her judgment in the matter.
“Though I must say, Jinny,” he remarked, reproachfully, as he gave her her head, “that it’s spoiling the making of a good saddle-burro.”
It was well toward the end of Gard’s second year in the desert. In all this time he had but once encountered his own kind.
On that occasion, too, he had been after salt, and he had met a desert Indian afar on the plain. They had talked together, after a fashion, by the aid of signs, and Gard had learned that the railroad lay three days distant, toward the north-west. This was a matter about which he had often speculated, and he was glad of the information. Because of it, he proffered the Indian the deputy’s pipe, which he had with him, happening, on that day, to be wearing Arnold’s coat. The brave took it, the gift only serving to strengthen his already formed opinion that the gaunt white man with the great beard was loco.
It was a year since the discovery in the cañon. Gard had worked the vein, in a primitive way, making for the purpose a rough mattock, from hisuseful wagon-spring. It was by far the best tool he had constructed, and he regarded it with even more pride and pleasure than he took in the two heavy little buckskin bags for which he had made a hiding-place in the chimney of the rehabilitated cabin.
He had arrived in these days at a strange content. He loved the vast reaches of his large place; the problems of his elemental environment. The luminous blue sky, the colorful air, the immensity of the waste plain, gave him pleasure. Even the weird desert growths no longer oppressed him.
“After all, Jinny,” he said, as they threaded their way gingerly past a great patch of cholla, with its vicious, hooked spines, “there’s as much life here as there is death. I never sensed it before; but everything’s got a claw to hang onto life with.”
The thought of returning to civilization was put away with ever increasing ease. He had not abandoned the idea, but it came as a more and more remote possibility. Even his dream of vengeance had long been put aside. He had learned the futility of hate in the nights when he watched the great stars wheel by, marking the march of the year.
“There’s nothing in it,” he had finally said to himself.
“It ain’t a man’s job to be staking out claims in hell for another fellow.”
If Jinny, who heard this, did not understand, she at least offered no contradiction, being by that much wiser than many of her kind on a higher plane.
The desert stretched away before Gard, vast, silent, untamed, at this moment a thing of gold and flame, touched, far in the distance, by great cloud-shadows, that sent the man’s gaze from the fierce plain to the wide blue overhead. But not a cloud was in sight and he realized that, probably for the hundredth time, he had been deceived by patches of lava cropping up among the red and yellow sands.
Something that was not a cloud arrested his attention. Far in the sky half a dozen great black birds flew, now high, now lower, but circling always above one spot. Gard watched them with an understanding eye.
“Jinny,” he said, “There’s something dying, over there. You and I’d better go see what it is.”
He had dismounted some time since, and was walking beside the burro. Now he started forward at a faster pace. It might be only a hurt coyote that the hideous birds waited for, but itmightbe a man! The thought quickened his steps still more, till Jinny had to trot, to keep pace with him.
Once an aerial scavenger swooped lower than any other had yet done, and at the sight the man broke into a run. The birds still kept off, however. Whatever it was, lying out there, somewhere, it was yet alive.
They were traveling along the edge of a deep barranca that yawned in the desert, and presently Gard caught sight of a dark object lying on the sand, at the bottom of the fissure. It was a man. The banks of the ditch sloped just there. Evidently he had attempted to cross, and had been caught in quicksand.
He was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his feet wide apart, a curious rigidity about his whole figure. Gard’s long stride left Jinny far behind as he ran.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “Somebody’s coming!”
There was no response from the man. He lay as one dead, save for the occasional lifting now of one arm, now of the other.
Down the sloping bank Gard ran, to the very edge of the shifting sand. Here he stopped, and began cautiously to tread, his feet side by side, stamping, stamping, moving forward half an inch at a time, but never ceasing to tread. He was harried by the need of haste, but he made sure of his progress as he went, knowing that the sand must be solidly packed, every inch of the way.
From time to time he spoke to the man, and at last got a mumbled word or two from the swollen lips. The need of haste was increasing every second, and Gard worked breathlessly, now, till at last he could touch his fellow, lying there.
Still marking time with his feet upon the sand, he slipped from his own waist the riata he always carried when he came down to the plain. He had made it himself of finely braided hide, suppled and wrought with faithful care, and he knew its strength. Working fast, he raised the man’s shoulders, ever so little, and slipped the rope beneath his arms. He knotted it into a loop and adjusted it over his own shoulders. Then, getting a strong hold with his hands under the man’s arms, he straightened up.
The sand slipped, and ran, gurgling horribly, sucking, sucking, loth to lose its victim, but the pull of rope and hands together counted. Gard took a backward step and gained a few precarious inches.
A second time he stooped, and straightened, repeating the performance again and again, until the man lay upon the trampled path. Gard could use his strength to better advantage now, and half lifting the dead weight, he drew it back to the edge of the sand.
The man was barely conscious, but Gard laidhim on the sloping bank and gave him a little water from his canteen.
It revived him somewhat, and was repeated, after a moment. He was able to mumble now, begging for more, which Gard gave him as fast as he dared, till at last the poor fellow got to his hands and knees, and was able, with help, to crawl slowly up to the plain.
Here, Gard soaked a little cake of oat flour in water, and fed him like a baby, but it was an hour before he was able, after many attempts, to get the man upon Jinny’s back.
He could not sit erect, but Gard walked beside him, supporting him, and the little cavalcade set out for home. The rescued man was half delirious, and muttered continually, between his pleadings for water, of the heat; of thirst, and of the vultures. Gard could not make out what particular disaster had befallen him, but the empty canteen slung at his back, and the absence of anything like food, or of an outfit, was eloquent witness that a desert tragedy had been averted.
Before they had gone far up the trail to the glade the delirious muttering ceased; the man swayed toward his rescuer until his head rested upon the latter’s shoulder, and so they went on. Whether he was asleep, or in a faint, Gard could not tell.
“He’s had a tough pull, that’s certain, Jinny,” he said, giving the burro an encouraging pat.
Could Jinny have spoken she might have said that she was herself having a hard pull. She had often carried Gard, on the plain, but this dead weight, on an up-grade, was a brand-new surprise for her. She wagged her solemn little head sorrowfully as she plodded on, and not even the oat cake that Gard reached forth to her seemed to impart any charm to life as she then saw it.
They reached the glade at last, and Gard got the stranger upon his own bed, covering him with the great bear-skin robe. He brought him nearly all that was left of the deputy’s whiskey, cherished carefully all these months, and set to preparing a meal.
He kicked aside the smoldering ashes of a nearly burned out fire on the hard earth, and with a few thrusts of a broad, flat stick, disclosed the earthen jar of mesquite beans that he had left to cook in his absence. Simmering with the beans were the marrowbone of a deer and the carcass of a rabbit caught that morning. The savory whiffs from the steaming mess made the exhausted man on the bed turn his face to the fire.
“How in all git out,” he began, feebly, and stared in amazement; for Gard had flanked the bean-pot with another, taken from the fire he hadquickly kindled by transferring the still smoldering sticks from the bake-fire to the fireplace. The visitor sniffed at this second pot, incredulously.
“Where ’d you git coffee?” he demanded.
“Sweet acorns,” Gard explained, briefly. He was tasting the full joy of hospitality as he brought wild honey, and more oat cakes, from the shack.
The stranger reached eager hands toward the acorn coffee.
“Gimme some—hot!” he pleaded.
Gard filled a crooked earthen bowl with it and brought it to him, steaming. He drained it, almost savagely, handing the bowl back with a sigh of satisfaction that left nothing for words to express.
“Partner,” he said, his little close-set eyes taking in the scene, wonderingly, “This is sure a great layout. How’d ye find the place, an’ what’s yer game?”
“I got up here by chance,” Gard said, evasively. “I liked the spot, and so I’ve stayed along. My name’s Gard,” he added, remembering that he had not told it.
“Mine’s Thad Broome,” the other replied, “an’ I’m runnin’ the hell of a streak o’ luck.”
Gard had moved his little table up beside his guest, and now he proceeded to serve his meal on flat, clay plates of rather nondescript shape. He had a fork and a spoon, rudely fashioned of wood, and these he allotted to the stranger.
“Did you make everything ye’ve got?” Broome demanded, examining them curiously.
“Very nearly,” was the reply, and the new-comer began to eat, eagerly. At intervals, during the meal, he told his story.
“I’m a cowman myself,” he said, flinging a bone out across the glade, “An’ if ever I git back on the range ye kin fry me in skunk ile first time ye ketch me off it.”
He took another great draught of the acorn coffee, swearing, savagely, as he set the bowl down.
“Seems like I’d never git the taste o’ the desert out’n my mouth again,” he muttered.
“I was with the ‘K bar C’ outfit,” he went on, “Up Tusayan way. Know it?”
Gard shook his head.
“Then ye’re that much better off,” Broome said, gloomily. “The grub was fierce; they was a foreman that was seven hull devils all rolled in one, an’ a range that’d drive ye crazy to ride. I was mighty sick of it, a while along, an’ I met up with a cuss one day that ’d bin out prospectin’ an’ struck it rich. So, bein’ a blame fool, I got the fever.”
He paused to watch his host, who was gathering the remains of the meal and putting things shipshape with a certain fine neatness that had become the habit of Gard’s solitude.
“D’ye allus put on as much dog as that?” he asked.
“As much as what?”
“Cleanin’ camp like an old maid school-ma’am,” was the reply. “Jus’ you alone: wha’d ye bother for?”
“It had to be that, or to go on all fours.” Gard offered no further explanation. Thad Broome’s type was familiar enough; he had foregathered with it by many a camp fire. He had saved this man from a horrible death, and the fellow was his guest; yet he realized, with a feeling of shamed hospitality, that Broome’s presence was irksome.
“Been here long?” the latter asked.
“Longer than it has seemed, maybe,” laughed Gard.
“There’s a difference in things,” he added, lightly. “I guess, now, the time you were down in the quicksand seemed longer than it really was?”
“Hell, yes!” Broome was launched again on the stream of his troubles. He resumed the narrative, sprinkling it liberally with oaths. He had started out with a full equipment and a good bronco, and the creature had “died on him,” a week before, in the desert.
“You should have had a burro,” Gard said.
“So they said. But I stuck to the idee of a bronc. I ain’t no walkist.”
“He didn’t last but three weeks,” he added, “an’ when he croaked the damned buzzards was on ’im before I got out o’ sight.”
“Where were you going when you struck the quicksand?” the other asked.
“Tryin’ to strike the railroad, afoot,” was the reply. “It’s me fer ridin’ when I can. I said I wan’t no walkist. I got turned ’round. I kep’ lightin’ load, an’ my grub gin out. Then I run out o’ water.” He gave a shuddering gulp, and continued:
“I run round a lot, lookin’ fer’t, till I got in the quicksand. That was just before you hollered, I guess. But them buzzards was Johnny on the spot the minute I was down. I most went mad with ’em.”
“Didn’t you have a gun?” Gard asked. “Why didn’t you fire it?”
“Gun? You bet yer life I had a gun. I fired all my am-nition an’ then I fergit what. I guess I threw the damned thing away. I got dotty, havin’ no water.”
“And there was good water within twenty feet of you,” Gard said, musingly.
“How’s that?” Broome’s tone was incredulous.
“Why didn’t you tap the nigger-head there by the barranca?” his companion asked.
“What—the big cactus like a green punkin? What for?” Broome demanded, and Gard explainedthe nature of the bisnaga. If he had cut off the top he would probably have found a quart or two of water. Broome listened with curious intentness, and when the other had finished, broke into a torrent of execration.
He cursed the desert in its nearness and its remoteness, inclusively and particularly, for several moments, until presently words seemed to fail him, and the torrent of his oaths dribbled to an intermittent trickle.
When he finally paused for breath Gard sat as though he had not heard, staring across the glade at the fire, but Jinny, at his side, seemed all attention, her long ears pricked forward, her sagacious little visage turned full upon the stranger. There was something disconcerting in the attitude of the two, and Broome felt it, without comprehending it. His voice trailed off weakly.
“Mebby ye don’t like my remarks,” he said, lamely, “I notice ye don’t cuss none yerself?”
“Don’t I?” Gard asked the question in all simplicity. “I didn’t know it.”
Broome stared, uneasily, until the other was constrained to take notice.
“I guess I do,” he laughed, half apologetically. “I guess I swear as much as anybody, when I feel so,” he added, “but I don’t feel so much—not nowadays.”
“Ye kin jus’ bet yer life,” blustered Broome, with a show of being at ease, “that if ye’d bin through what I have ye’d be ready to cuss the hull blamed outfit.”
He laughed loudly, as he spoke, but Gard was replenishing the fire, and made no reply.
Long hours after Broome was sleeping, exhausted, his host sat before the glowing embers. The day’s experiences had brought much to consider.
For one thing, it was certain that the time had arrived when he must return to civilization. He could not keep Broome with him, even if the latter wished to stay. He saw endless possibilities of pain and trouble in such a partnership. And since he could not keep him, he must himself go before Broome had a chance to make any explorations. His heart sank at the prospect.
“It’s been mighty peaceful here, Jinny,” he whispered to his faithful little comrade, who dozed beside him in the firelight. “We’ll sure miss it.”
Jinny shifted her weight in her sleep, and her head drooped lower.
“One thing, old girl,” Gard said, regarding her, whimsically, “You don’t have to think about it. A man’s different; he knows when he’s well off, and hates to leave it.”
He glanced about him. The firelight touchedfitfully the encircling trees, the great rocks, the open door of the shack where Broome lay asleep, the gleaming pool. Above in the violet depths, blazed the dipper; how many times he had watched it patrol the sky!
“I hate to go,” he whispered, again, “I hate to go, Jinny; but good as ’tis, I know it ain’t really life. A man belongs with men. They may be good or they may be bad; but a man’s got to take ’em as he meets up with ’em. He can’t be a real man forever, just by himself.”