“As I am?” said Roger. “You forget. I am bound.”
“Break your bonds,” the doctor urged, in a quick, small voice. “I trust you now. You are stronger than all men, as you are wiser. Stretch your muscles, and the bandages will fall asunder like snow-wreaths.”
“It is too late,” Wroxham said, and laughed; “all that is over. I am not wise any more, and I have only the strength of a man. I am tired and wounded. I cannot break my bonds—I cannot help you!”
“But if you cannot help me—it is death,” said the doctor.
“It is death,” said Roger. “Do you feel it coming on you?”
“I feel life returning,” said the doctor, “it is now the moment—the one possible moment. And I cannot reach it. Oh, give it me—give it me!”
Then Roger cried out suddenly, in a loud voice: “Now, by all that’s sacred, you infernal decadent, I am glad that I cannot give it. Yes, if it costs me my life, it’s worth it, you madman, so that your life ends too. Now be silent, and die like a man if you have it in you.”
Roger lay and watched him, and presently he writhed from the chair to the floor, tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still.
Of all that befell Roger in that house the worst was now. For now he knew that he was alone with the dead, and between him and death stretched certain hours and days. For the porte-cochere was locked; the doors of the house itself were locked—heavy doors and the locks new.
“I am alone in the house,” the doctor had said. “No one comes here but me.”
No one would come. He would die there—he, Roger Wroxham—“poor old Roger Wroxham, who was no one’s enemy but his own.” Tears pricked his eyes. He shook his head impatiently and they fell from his lashes.
“You fool,” he said, “can’t you die like a man either?”
Then he set his teeth and made himself lie still. It seemed to him that now Despair laid her hand on his heart. But, to speak truth, it was Hope whose hand lay there. This was so much more than a man should be called on to bear—it could not be true. It was an evil dream. He would awake presently. Or if it were, indeed, real—then someone would come, someone must come. God could not let nobody come to save him.
And late at night, when heart and brain had been stretched almost to the point where both break and let in the sea of madness, someone came.
The interminable day had worn itself out. Roger had screamed, yelled, shouted till his throat was dried up, his lips baked and cracked. No one heard. How should they? The twilight had thickened and thickened till at last it made a shroud for the dead man on the floor by the chair. And there were other dead men in that house; and as Roger ceased to see the one he saw the others—the quiet, awful faces, the lean hands, the straight, stiff limbs laid out one beyond another in the room of death. They at least were not bound. If they should rise in their white wrappings and, crossing that empty sleeping-chamber very softly, come slowly up the stairs—
A stair creaked.
His ears, strained with hours of listening, thought themselves befooled. But his cowering heart knew better.
Again a stair creaked. There was a hand on the door.
“Then it is all over,” said Roger in the darkness, “and I am mad.”
The door opened very slowly, very cautiously. There was no light. Only the sound of soft feet and draperies that rustled.
Then suddenly a match spurted—light struck at his eyes; a flicker of lit candle-wick steadying to flame. And the things that had come were not those quiet people creeping up to match their death with his death in life, but human creatures, alive, breathing, with eyes that moved and glittered, lips that breathed and spoke.
“He must be here,” one said. “Lisette watched all day; he never came out. He must be here—there is nowhere else.”
Then they set up the candle-end on the table, and he saw their faces. They were the Apaches who had set on him in that lonely street, and who had sought him here—to set on him again.
He sucked his dry tongue, licked his dry lips, and cried aloud:—
“Here I am! Oh, kill me! For the love of Heaven, brothers, kill me now!”
And even before he spoke they had seen him, and seen what lay on floor.
“He died this morning. I am bound. Kill me, brothers; I cannot die slowly here alone. Oh, kill me, for pity’s sake!”
But already the three were pressing on each other at a doorway suddenly grown too narrow. They could kill a living man, but they could not face death, quiet, enthroned. “For the love of Heaven,” Roger screamed, “have pity! Kill me outright! Come back—come back!”
And then, since even Apaches are human, they did come back. One of them caught up the candle and bent over Roger, knife in hand. “Make sure,” said Roger, through set teeth.
“Nom d’un nom,” said the Apache, with worse words, and cut the bandages here, and here, and here again, and there, and lower, to the very feet.
Then between them the three men carried the other out and slammed the outer door, and presently set him against a gate-post in another street, and went their wicked ways.
And after a time a girl with furtive eyes brought brandy and hoarse muttered kindnesses, and slid away in the shadows.
Against that gate-post the police came upon him. They took him to the address they found on him. When they came to question him he said, “Apaches,” and his variations on that theme were deemed sufficient, though not one of them touched truth or spoke of the third drug.
There has never been anything in the papers about that house. I think it is still closed, and inside it still lie in the locked room the very quiet people; and above, there is the room with the narrow couch and the scattered, cut, violet bandages, and the Thing on the floor by the chair, under the lamp that burned itself out in that May dawning.
I. Members of the criminal underworld of Paris, first named such in 1904 in an article in a French newspaper that likened the criminals to the well-known Native American tribe.
II. “So, let’s go.”
III. Nepenthe is described in Homer’s Odyssey as a drug banishing grief or troubles; “constantia Nepenthe” is apparently the mad doctor’s name for a topical anaesthetic.
IV. “The Iron Mask.” The doctor refers to the near-legendary French prisoner whose identity was never known. In Dumas’s 1830 Man in the Iron Mask, he is revealed to be the twin of Louis XIV.
V. Window shutters.
Mary Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois in 1868, but she’s now thought of primarily as a southwestern writer, thanks largely to her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903). At the age of 19, Austin moved with her family to California, where they’d been offered public land to homestead, but they arrived in a drought. Times were tough, so at 22 she married a novice farmer named Stanford Wallace Austin. The marriage was not happy, and the arrival of their severely handicapped daughter Ruth added further strain to the family. Mary found most of her comfort hiking the desert with Ruth strapped to her back and writing about it. Divorcing her husband in 1907, she moved to Carmel, California where her friends included Jack London and Willa Cather. This story comes from her 1909 collection Lost Borders, although “The Pocket-Hunter” was first introduced in The Land of Little Rain, where she says she liked him “for his clean, companionable talk.” Austin died in 1934.
The Pocket-Hunter’s Story by Mary Austin
The crux of this story for the PocketHunterI was that he had known the two men, Mac and Creelman, before they came into it; known them, in fact, in the beginning of that mutual distrust which grew out of an earlier friendliness into one of those expansive enmities which in the spined and warted humanity of the camps have as ready an acceptance as the devoted partnerships of which Wells Bassit furnished the pre-eminent example. It was, he believed, in some such relationship their acquaintance had begun, and from which they now drew the sustenance of those separate devils of hate that, nesting in corrosive hollows of their hosts, rose to froth and r
age, each at the mere intimation of a merit in the other.
No one knew what the turn of the screw had been that set them gnashing, but it was supposed, on no better evidence, perhaps, than that such trouble is at the bottom of most quarrels in the camps, to have been about a mine. The final crisis, the very memory of which seemed to hold for him a moment of recurrent, hairlifting horror, was known by the PocketHunter, and by some of the others, to have been brought on by an Indian woman down Parrimint-way.
She was Mac’s woman; though, except as being his, he was not thought to set particular store by her. He used to leave her in his cabin while he was off in the Hills for a three weeks’ pasear;II but the tacit admission of an Indian woman as no fit subject for whitemen to fight over forbade his being put to the ordinary provocation on account of her. Therefore, when Creelman projected his offence, which was to excite in his enemy the desire for killing without providing him with a sufficient excuse, there was a vague notion moving in the heavy fibre of his mind that there was a species of humor in what he was about to do. But he would probably not have gone on to Tres PiñosIII and told of it, if he had known how soon it was to come to Mac’s ears.
This, you understand, was long after their grudge had climbed by inconsiderable occasions to the point where Mac had several times offered to kill Creelman on no motion but the pleasure of being rid of his company.
Mac was a sickly man, and by that, and his having had the worst of it in their earlier encounters, his rage so much the more possessed him that, when he had come back to his cabin and the Indian woman had told him her story, he was able by that mere spur of a possession trifled with to take the short leap from intent to performance at a bound. There was no such bodily leap possible, of course; he had to trudge the whole of one day on foot to Tres Piños, an old weakness battling with his rage. He was one of those illy-furnished souls whom the wilderness despoils most completely—hair, beard, and skin of him burned to one sandy sallowness, the eyelashes of no color, the voice of no timbre, more or less stiffened at the joints by the poison of leaded ores, his very name shorn of its distinguishing syllable; no more of him left, in fact, than would serve as a vehicle for hating Creelman. When he came to Tres Piños and learned that the other had gone on from there, nobody would tell him where, the rage of bafflement threw him into some kind of a fit, and blood gushed from his nose and mouth.
All this the Pocket-Hunter was possessed of when he set out shortly after with his pack and burros, prospecting toward the Dry Creek district, where in due time he crossed the trail of Shorty Wells and Long Tom Bassit. There was no particular reason why Wells should have been called Shorty, except that Long Tom was of a stature to give to any average man in his vicinity a title to that adjective. Further than that he gave no other warrant to the virtues, aptitudes, propensities with which Shorty credited him, than the negative one of not denying them. In camps where they were known the opinion gained ground that there was very little to Long Tom but his size and his amiability, which was remarked upon, but, that Shorty, having discovered this creditable baggage in his own pack, had laid it to Bassit, not being able to say else how he came by it; but there they were, as inveterate a pair of partners as the camps ever bred, owning to no greater satisfaction than just to be abroad in the hills together following the Golden Hope; and there on a day between Dry Creek and Denman’s the Pocket-Hunter found them.
The way he came to tell me about it was this. I had laid by for a nooning under the quaking aspIV by Peterscreek on the trail from Tunawai, and found him before me with his head under one of those woven shelters of living boughs which the sheep-herders leave in that country, and he moved out to make room for me in its hand’s-breadth of shade.
Understand, there was no more shade to be got there. Straight before us went the meagre sands; to every yard or so of space its foothigh, sapless shrub. Somewhere at the back of us lifted, out of a bank of pinkish-violet mist, sierras white and airy. Eastward where the earth sagged on its axis, in some dreary, beggared sleep, pale, wispish clouds went up. Now and then to no wind the quaking-asps clattered their dry bones of leaves.
We had been talking, the Pocket-Hunter and I, of that curious obsession of travel by which the mind, pressing on in the long, open trail ahead of the dragging desert pace, seems often to develop a capacity for going on alone in it, so that it becomes involved in one sliding picture, as it were, of what is ahead and what at hand, until, when the body stops for necessary rest and food, it is impossible to say if it is here where it halted, or there where the mind possessed. I had said that this accounted to me not only for the extraordinary feats of endurance in desert travel, but for the great difficulty prospectors have in relocating places they have marked, so mazed they are by that mixed aspect of strangeness and familiarity that every district wears, which, long before it has been entered by the body, has been appraised by the eye of the mind.
“But suppose,” said the Pocket-Hunter, “it really does go on by itself?”
“And where,” I wished to know, “would be the witness to that, unless it brought back a credible report of what it had seen?”
“Or done,” suggested the Pocket-Hunter, “what it set out to do. That would clinch it, I fancy.”
“But the mind can only take notice,” I protested. “It can’t do anything without its body.”
“Or another one,” suggested the PocketHunter.
“Ah,” said I, “tell me the story.”
* * *
It was, went on the Pocket-Hunter, after he had told me all that I have set down about the four men who made the story, about nine of the morning when he came to Dry Creek on the way to Jawbone Cañon, and the day was beginning to curl up and smoke along the edges with the heat, rocking with the motion of it, and water of mirage rolling like quicksilver in the hollows. What the Pocket-Hunter said exactly was that it was a morning in May, but it comes to the same thing. He had just come out of the wash by Cactus Flat when he was aware of a man chasing about in the heat fog, and making out to want something more than common. Even as early as that in the incident the Pocket-Hunter thought he had encountered some faint, floating films from that coil of inexplicable dreadfulness in which he was so soon to find himself involved, and yet he was not sure that it might not have been chiefly in the extraordinary manner of the man’s approach, seeing him caught up in the mirage, drawn out and dwarfed again, “like some kind of human accordion,” said the Pocket-Hunter, and now rolled toward him with limbs grotesquely multiplied in a river of mist.
Presently, however, he got the man between him and the sun, in such a way that he was able to make out it was himself who was wanted, and when he had slewed the burros round to come up to him, he could see plainly who it was, and it was Wells. It was altogether so unusual a circumstance to find Shorty Wells anywhere out of eyeshot of Tom Bassit that it was not reassuring, and Shorty himself was so sensible of it that almost before any greeting passed, he had let out with certain swallowing of the throat that Tom was dead.
It appeared the two of them had come over TinpahV two days before, and Bassit, who had a weakness of the heart that made high places a menace to him, had accomplished the Pass apparently in good order. But when they had taken the immense drop that carries one from the crest of Tinpah to Dry Creek like a bucket in a shaft, something had gone suddenly, irretrievably wrong. There had been a half collapse at the foot of the trail, and a complete one a few miles back on the trail to Denman’s, toward which they had turned in extremity. Tom had suffered agonizingly, so that if there had been any place nearer from which help might conceivably have come, Shorty could not have left him to go and fetch it; and along about the hour which the Indians call, all in one word, the bluish-light-of-dawn, Tom had died.
All the way back to camp, after he had met the Pocket-Hunter, Shorty kept arguing with himself as to whether, if he had done the one thing or had not done the other, it would have been better for poor Tom, and the Pocket-Hunter assuring him for his comfort that
it would not, keeping back, by some native stroke of sympathy, what he had lately heard at Tres Piños that Creelman had a cabin in the Jawbone, and was living in it what time Mac was camping on his trail. It was no farther from the foot of Tinpah than they had come toward Denman’s, but in the opposite direction, and from their not turning there it seemed likely they had not heard of it—kinder if Shorty might never come to know, seeing he had not known it in time to be of use to Tom. And this was a point the Pocket-Hunter was presently to make sure of, that neither Shorty nor Long Tom was acquainted with the location of the cabin, nor with Mac nor Creelman by sight.
As it was, he made the most of comforting Shorty for having stayed by his partner to the last.
“I never left him till he croaked,” Shorty told him. “It was along toward morning he went quiet, and just as I was goin’ for to cover him with the blanket, he croaked—and I come away.”
There was that touch of dread in him which ever the figure of death excites in simple minds, which, perhaps as much as the wish to bring help to the burial, had turned him from the body of the friend who was, and now kept his eyes fixed persistently upon the ground as they came back to it across the flat, which here, made smooth in shining, leprous patches of alkali, presented no screen to the disordered camp higher than the sickly pickle-weed about its borders. The Pocket-Hunter, therefore, as they came on toward the place where from two crossed sticks of Shorty’s fire a thin point of flame wavered upward, had time for wondering greatly at what he saw, which was so little what he had been led to expect there that he had not found yet any warrant for mentioning it, when Shorty, gathering himself toward what he had to face, lifting up his eyes, let out a kind of howl and ran.
The Pocket-Hunter said he did not know how soon Shorty grasped the fact, which he himself perceived with his eyes some time before his intelligence took hold of it, that the body lying doubled on the sand some yards from the empty bed was not the same that Shorty had left stiffening under the blanket. He thought they must have both taken account of it at the same time, and been stricken dumb by the sheer horror of it, for he could not remember a word spoken by either of them, between Shorty’s sharp yell of astonishment and the time when they took it by the shoulders and turned it to the sun.
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