CHAPTER VI
WHERE THE DESERT HAD BEEN
Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of SulphurFalls, nestled in the flats below the canyon of the Serpentine, with afeeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild,frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate andlawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurioushotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been inNew York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place withthe building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the warfactories which belched smoke back at the foot of the canyon. She didnot realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothingbut limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferryand a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in adozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousandsouls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon thepossible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.
Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she wasaccustomed to. Comfort and even luxury surrounded her, and the lawstalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman.That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law heldsway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she hadimagined it to be. Only De Launay's careless gibe as he had left herat the hotel held promise of performance. "To-morrow we'll start ourprivate butchery," he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hintedat a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.
De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared forthe change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike himlike a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking pavedsidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. Hehad come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitlessranges of his youth and this was what he found.
He had turned and looked back at the frowning canyon through which thetrain had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forestclad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lavagulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it waschanged.
Smoke hung above the canyon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant andsmelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the foreststhe loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of thetimber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, whiteribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change,where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow ofmasonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the canyon held avast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From thedam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also hugeditches and canals led the water out and around the valley downbelow.
Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across theSerpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink andgamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed withcottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, andmills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in theeffulgence of limitless electricity.
Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls,stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yieldingbountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west longtrains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.
The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot inevening clothes.
Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white withalkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patchesof farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of thesettlers.
But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond thedesert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an unevenand barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. Itwas faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeraldarange, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamedand uncivilized.
He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed thathis last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the drivingrestlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remainedto offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.
The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, andthat is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in theshiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him withdisgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.
With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, hehunted up a "livery and feed barn." He found one on a side street,near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke ofa considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness acheap automobile standing in front of the place.
But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a droppedhip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddleshanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches.If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, heforgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of anouter coat.
MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of moreconsequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at theside of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a lookabout him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when hewas asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he hadto deal with one who knew what he was about.
The horse was MacGregor's, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sellit. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fairprice. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the frontof the barn it was late afternoon.
Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on thesloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shadedtheir faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings werecool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned upat the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles oftheir boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles around theheels, where spurs had dented them.
One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. Hishair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.
The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.
The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shockof recollection. "Roll on, my little doggy!"
Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No onespoke for several minutes.
Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobodyin particular.
"They's sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town."
The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.
"They don't teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos,neither."
De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.
"You'd think some of them'd sense it that a gent has got a right to beprivate when he wants to be."
"It's a ---- of a town, nohow."
"People even run around smellin' of liquor--which is plumb illegal,Sucatash."
"Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on woodalcohol, Dave."
Silence settled down on them once more. It was broken this time by DeLaunay, who spoke as impersonally as they.
"They had real cow hands hereaways, once."
A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.
"I reckon the sheep eat 'em outa range and they done moved down toArizona."
The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:
"Them pilgrims is sure smart on g'ography an' history."
"An' sheep--especially," said the one called Dave.
"_Ca ne fait rien!_" said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like"sinferien" as he had heard the linguists of the A.?E.?F. do. The twomen slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware ofhis existence for the first time.
Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath
his habiliments,though the small mustache puzzled them.
"You-all been to France?" asked Dave. De Launay did not answerdirect.
"There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin' mules overseas," hemused. "Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see 'em."
"We didn't dry nurse no mules, pilgrim," said Sucatash. "When did youlick Hindenburg?"
De Launay condescended to notice them. "In the battle of _vin rouge_,"he said. "I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with the _vin_sisters, yourselves."
"You're sure a-sayin' something, old-timer," said Dave, with emotion.For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay's buttonhole. "Youdone a little more'n caf? fightin' though, to get that?"
De Launay shrugged his shoulders. "They give those for entertainin' apolitician," he answered. "Any cow hands out of a job around here?"
Both of the men chuckled. "You aimin' to hire any riders?"
"I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. Moreexactly, there's a lady, aimin' to head into the mountains and she'llneed a couple of packers."
"This lady don't seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, nonewhatever," was the comment.
"Which she hasn't, bein' troubled with notions about gold mines andsuch things. She needs taking care of."
"Ridin' the Esmeraldas this time o' year and doin' chores for Pop allwinter strikes me as bein' about a toss-up," said the man calledSucatash. "I reckon it's a certainty that Pop requires considerablelabor, though, and maybe this demented lady won't. If the wages isliberal----"
"We ought to see the lady, first," said Dave. "There's some ladypilgrims that couldn't hire me with di'monds."
"The pay's all right and the lady's all right. She's French."
"A mad'mo'selle?" they echoed.
"It's a long story," said De Launay, smiling. "You'd better see herand talk it over. Meantime, this prohibition is some burdensome."
"Which it ain't the happiest incumbrance of the world," agreedSucatash. "They do say that the right kind of a hint will work at theEmpire Pool Rooms."
"If they have it, we'll get it," asserted De Launay, confidently."You-all point the way."
The three of them rose by the simple process of straightening theirlegs at the knees, and walked away.
Louisiana Lou Page 7