by Zane Grey
In the room between Ruth’s and the corridor slept Adam and Merryvale. At least the latter slept, for he had the snore of an old man. Faithful old Merryvale! For years the sharer of Wansfell’s wanderings! What was his story? He had no home, no kin, no children, no work, no one to love him—nothing except this giant of the sands, this aloof and saintly avenger with bloodstained hands. Yet, tragic as it was, that seemed enough.
Ruth had been tortured into a changing awesome outlook on life. She was being reborn. She was being tom and riven and divided. That passionate, selfish, intolerant egoist was no longer the sweet blind intimate creature she had been. Ruth saw her with hard accusing eyes. She saw her as something to destroy. And the old self, which had been all of Ruth, fighting like a lioness, wild-eyed, mighty being of the habit and mastery of years, was being driven and flayed and beaten to the wall.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS scarce daylight when Merryvale awakened Ruth, telling her to hurry. She tried to comply, but her cramped sore muscles hindered her to such an extent that she could hardly get up to dress. But she made valiant effort, and found it a painful process.
She had breakfast alone, with the dark-eyed little senorita attendant upon her. Merryvale came to the door and asked her to be ready in ten minutes to go with him.
“Where is Adam?” asked Ruth, anxiously.
“He’s waitin’ outside,” replied Merryvale.
Ruth was ready a little ahead of time. The senorita, helping her with the veil, said shyly: “Adios, I’luvia d’oro.”
“Goodbye, dusky eyes,” replied Ruth, returning the compliment; and then bidding the other kind Mexican women farewell she pulled down her veil and went out leaning on Merryvale’s arm.
He did not at once take her clear out to the street, but halted in the areaway, explaining that it would be just as well for them to await the stageccach. Before Ruth had time to grow more concerned the stage rolled up to the sidewalk, out of a cloud of dust.
“Heah we are,” said Merryvale, cheerfully, and he almost lifted Ruth along.
“But Adam?” she whispered.
“Don’t worry, lass. Adam ain’t far away,” he replied, and led her out.
The stage door was open, and as Merryvale helped her up someone approached her: “Adios, Senorita. May the gracious Virgin watch over you!” Ruth recognized the voice as that of Adam’s Mexican friend. She thanked him. In the stage were several passengers whom she could not distinguish clearly through her veil.
“I’ll ride on top,” decided Merryvale.
Just then a quick step checked Ruth from demanding of Merryvale why Adam did not come. She knew that step. It stirred her pulse. Adam’s tall, dark form appeared. “Drive on,” he called, and when he stepped up the stage was in motion. He closed the door, and sat down beside her, with a greeting. Ruth was relieved and overjoyed, too conscious of sudden tumult to reply.
What with her veil and the cloud of dust that rolled through the open windows Ruth could not see Adam very well; but she felt her shoulder against his arm, and she seemed all at once to be filled with a great palpitating sense of comfort.
The stage rolled rapidly out of town, and the dust lessened so that it was no longer stifling.
“You can put up your veil now,” said Adam.
Ruth was not sure whether he meant that he wished to see her face, or that it was safe now for her to remove the veil, which was a nuisance at best. But when she lifted and fastened it back, and looked up at Adam, she decided he had meant both, and especially the former. It sent a sweet warm rush through her.
“How are you this morning?” he asked. “I saw that you limped.”
“I slept well. But it was terribly hard to move this morning. I’ve aches and pains—when I think of them.”
Besides Ruth and Adam there were only three other passengers inside the stage. A stolid Chinaman with a bundle on his lap and a Mexican laborer, sat across from them. The corner on the other side of Ruth was occupied by a rough looking miner who appeared to be sleeping off a debauch. How fortunate, Ruth thought, that there were so few passengers, and none who would be curious about her, or who would be apt to be familiar with last night’s happenings!
She gave vent to a long sigh. Yuma lay behind, and the happenings there could be put out of mind. Lost Lake with its problem was a whole day and more distant. She could not comprehend why this early morning hour seemed wonderful, different from any she had ever lived, unless it was because of her escape. She was content to let the present moment suffice.
The sun came up white over the Arizona mountains, so stark and ragged, and soon the air was hot, though fresh still and redolent of the river lowlands. The road wound between dust-laden thickets of arrowweed, and sometimes afforded sight of the broad belt of lowland greens and the sullen swirling red river.
“I don’t like the look of the sky,” observed Adam.
“Why? It looks heavenly to me.”
“Wind,” he said, indicating the thin curled wisps of clouds now losing their sunrise tint. “That strip of desert from Pilot Knob to the dunes is bad in a dust storm. And to be caught in the sand is far worse.”
“Let the wind blow,” returned Ruth, smiling up at him. The desert had no terrors for her while she was with him; nor had its beasts of men. If it had not been for a crowding sense of past events and a vague impending shadow of the future, Ruth would have actually been happy.
The stage rolled on and around and upward, at last emerging from the river basin, and the rising dust. The air cleared. And the grand desolate variations of the desert wilderness stood out in the white morning light. Away wandered the red green-bordered ribbon that was the river, at last piercing the dark mountains, so crinkly and bald and rugged. Away spread and rose the gray gravel slopes, fringed with green-spotted gullies, swelling to the level rim of the escarpment.
Ruth suddenly realized that she was not for the moment gazing drearily, mournfully, hatefully at the ghastly desert, with its ever unattainable horizon. But the instant she thought of it the binding fetters shut upon her. Was this but the untruthful conception of her imagination?
“Adam, don’t you hate the desert?” she queried, suddenly.
“Why, no child,” he replied, surprised.
“I’m not a child,” she said, impatiently. “You don’t hate it? Surely you cannot love it!”
“Of course,” he returned, simply. “It is the only home I know.”
“Home! … Don’t you hope ever to have any other home?”
“Yes, sometimes I dream of one—with you.”
That disconcerted her momentarily, but her roused searching mind would not abide any sentiment blocking her curiosity.
“Do you think the desert beautiful?” she went on.
“Infinitely. Beyond words. I remember sunrises, storms, avalanches, sunsets, nights when the blackness has been blazoned white by streaking comets and shooting stars, moonlight from the peaks—a thousand scenes. My memory seems full of them.”
“Isn’t the desert hot, terribly hot, and again cold at times, lonely, hard as iron, bitter as acid, cruel, destructive? Doesn’t it shut you in? Isn’t that blue sky now a delusion, and won’t it presently be a copper lid roasting down on you? Isn’t the sun horrible, the wind frightful, the solitude unbearable? Aren’t the Indians poor starved wretches? Aren’t prospectors and water-hunters poor deluded blind fools? Isn’t the dream of gold a passion that is never satisfied? Aren’t most desert men—like—like all these things I’ve mentioned?”
“Ruth, I am bound to say yes,” he replied, gravely. “But for me these things were something to conquer. In the fight I survived. In that survival I found my salvation.”
“I can understand that,” she replied, as earnestly as he. “But you are one man in a million. The desert’s influence cannot be judged by you. Have you ever known any men who did as you?”
“Oh, yes. Many old desert rats, as you would call them, and never look a second time. But these men have
lived through all you mention—yet would never leave the desert. Some day I will tell you the story of Dismukes. He was almost superhuman.”
“Do you mean that a man’s struggle to find what he wants or thinks he wants out there—his fight against heat, cold, thirst, starvation, solitude, makes him superhuman?”
“I think that is what I mean,” replied Adam, thoughtfully.
“How about the majority of men, in whom the spirit to fight is just as mighty, but who sink down to perdition?”
“They become superhuman, too. The evil in them magnifies with survival. Lust, hate, greed, blood, fanaticism,—these all become superlatively abnormal. It is the mystery of the desert dominating their minds. It is the devil in man, and not the godlike, that gains the ascendancy.”
“Very well, then. But how about a woman? I believe that she could sink to the uttermost depths, even lower than a man. But could she scale the heights—rise through this survival you speak of—so that she would be superhuman?”
“Yes, she could. I knew a one-eyed woman at Tecopah who was more bestial, more horribly deformed and distorted than any man I ever saw on the desert. Your own mother proved the opposite. By birth, breeding, character, by her defeat in life, and her frail physique. She was one whom the desert might have been expected to debase. But she rose above all.”
“Through you.”
“I only showed her the way, as Dismukes showed me…. But, though your mother died by accident, she could not have lived much longer in any case. The desert, not to say Death Valley, is fatal to white women. Even the Indian women cannot live long in some places. They are constituted differently from men. In white women, I don’t believe it a matter of sex. It is the mind of a woman that kills her.”
“Ah!—We have arrived at the thing I felt, but never have understood,” declared Ruth. “I am justified in my shrinking, my discontent, my horror. Am I not?”
“Ruth, I never said you were not.”
“Is it wholly my fault that I have been—oh, such a wild, raving, changeable, deceitful and hateful woman?”
“You have not been that. But even had you been—it could not all be blamed on your heritage and your beauty and weakness.”
“There. You give me heart to go on,” asserted Ruth, with agitation. I can hate myself less and understand the desert more…. But, you admit this desert is fatal to white women—and to such as my mother and me it is death.”
“Yes, in time, and as the years go—nothing like the normal life of woman.”
“Then—are you going to take me away from the desert before it’s too late?” she shot at him, with a glance of fire.
“Ruth! Of course I am. I did not apply the things I said to you.”
“But I did. And I want to know when.”
“As soon as you are free,” he said, very low.
“Free!” she exclaimed, leaning to whisper. “You think that will come before the desert eats my heart out?”
“It will come soon. It will come by the very nature of life and events on the desert. That is what sustains me here—and stays—”
“Don’t speak beyond me,” she interrupted him, entreatingly. “I need every single little atom of help possible…. You mean—the way he is going—he’ll not last long?”
“Not on this desert!” returned Adam, with dark and sombre sadness.
Ruth laid her head back and closing her eyes let silence and thought subdue the emotion that had mounted in spite of her. A long silence ensued. The stage creaked and swayed up the slope; and the time came when the wheels began to roll on a level.
“Look!” said Adam, touching her.
Ruth’s eyes opened to the vast colorful plane of desert, with its lacy fringe of green growths and its pale shimmering mirages, and at length rested upon a huge buttressed mountain, purple in hue, noble in outline, rising in a grand solitude.
“Picacho!” It was not so much the austerity of his look as the melancholy of his tone that affected Ruth almost to tears.
She slipped her trembling hand in his. She had just begun to get a glimmering of this man’s spirit, a glimpse into the abyss of his soul. What could she say to comfort? How impossible to reach him in his aloofness! Yet in the poignancy of the moment she could not resist voicing a woman’s childish vain sympathy.
“Never mind, Adam,” she whispered. “Picacho brought us together, and if there is a God we will be happy yet.”
“Perhaps that is the strange feeling it gives me now,” he replied dreamily. “Picacho called me for many long years. It is calling again.”
The heat began to burn through the old coach and a fine alkali dust that irritated eyes and lips sifted in the cracks and poured through the windows. Ruth commenced to feel a drowsy fatigue that encroached upon her active mind. She let her hand remain in Adam’s, and gradually, as the coach rolled and bumped along, her head slipped down against his arm and rested there. There seemed to be something sad and sweet, and very restful in this contact with him. It ended in her falling asleep.
She was awakened by Adam lifting her gently back from the shoulder she had appropriated. The stage was at a standstill.
“Ruth, I’ve got to take a look outside,” he said, and opening the door he stepped out.
“Shore looks pretty bad,” said Merryvale from on top.
“I’ve a good notion to turn back,” added the driver. “If we was across the sand I wouldn’t mind. But I ain’t crazy about bein’ hit along here.”
Adam appeared to be gazing upward in thoughtful perplexity. “You can’t go back to Yuma,” he said to the driver.
“Why not? It’d be safer—if that storm turns out as bad as it looks.”
“We are not turning back for any kind of a storm,” replied Adam.
Ruth heard this conversation with a growing apprehension and she gazed out at the small part of desert and sky that was visible to her. Then she rose and stepped down to the ground.
A weird and marvelous change had transformed the white glaring desert. A frowning pall of angry cloud, yellow and purple and storm-hued, was rapidly reaching the zenith. It blanketed the sun, which shone a strange sinister magenta through this moving medium.
“Well, what do you make of it?” queried the driver impatiently of Adam.
“It’ll be bad. And I believe you’d risk as much going back as if you go on or try to find a windbreak.”
“Hell, mister! No man could go on in the face of that,” growled the driver.
“I could,” returned Adam, quietly. “But we’d probably do better to find a clump of thick ironwood trees to get behind. Have you an axe?”
“Yes. An’ I see a tolerable big clump of ironwoods out ahead a couple of miles. Pile in, an’ we’ll rustle.”
Once more the coach rolled on, rumbling and swaying from the faster gait of the horses. The driver whooped and cracked his whip as if they were pursued by Indians. The shadow began to spread deeper and farther over the desert.
“There is danger, of course,” said Ruth, looking up at Adam. She had never been out in the dreaded sandstorm. It was dreadful enough to endure one safe in a close shut house.
“I have been through a thousand storms,” replied Adam.
The coach bumped off the road, over rocks and brush, to halt in the lee of some large thick-foliaged ironwood trees.
Adam got out as the driver and Merryvale descended from their perch.
“Ruth, you won’t be comfortable anywhere, but you’d best stay in the coach,” advised Adam.
“But I want to see,” replied Ruth, resolutely.
All the passengers but the miner left the stage, and while Ruth walked to a vantage point to view the oncoming storm, the men set about necessary tasks with the horses and the providing of as good a windbreak as possible.
It appeared to Ruth that the storm was yet a long way off. But it had cast its marvelous and formidable spell far over the desert. An amber twilight, thick and unreal, preceded the advancing sky-high pall of dust. The sun h
ad become a dim dark red ball. Back toward the south sky and earth were still clear, though darkening in the fading light. Pilot Knob, far away now, showed coal black against the pale blue. Picacho loomed all the higher for the distance. Its purple bulk had a golden crown. To the east the Chocolate Range seemed receding, diminishing in size, fading in color. And away to the north and left of the storm, spread the vast sea of sand dunes, billows and waves and hollows, crested ridges and scalloped hills, thousands of slopes bronze and yellow and red, rising higher and higher to merge into the sky.
The storm was fast swallowing up the sand dunes. For the first time on the desert Ruth stood transfixed, her unwilling heart grudgingly forced to a tribute of awe, of wonder, of exceeding amaze. It was magnificent, this menacing mood of the desert storm-wind. How it swept on! A low faint roar broke the dead stillness. The heat was oppressive, slumberous, hanging like a belt over the land.
Then the magenta sun faded and vanished. The farflung top whorl of the dust pall swept over the travelers, at a lofty height, while the body of it, heavy and dark, sweeping along like a flood, was still far from them.
“Ruth, get into the stage, now,” called Adam.
“Oh, one moment more,” she cried.
And before that moment was up the roar had accelerated to an all-engulfing shriek. A sombre transparent darkness preceded the wall of sand. The air all about Ruth seemed trembling. She saw the running streaks of dust that shot ahead of the wall, the balls of weed rolling like mad things over the desert, the beating down of the greasewood, the shower of palo verde blossoms like golden sparks flying aloft, and then the dusky dense base of the storm, a rolling, coalescing, mushrooming fury of sand-laden wind.
Adam broke her transport by seizing her arm and commanding: “You must get in the coach.” Ruth went with him reluctantly. There was something in this phenomenon that symbolized her gusts of passion—the wild storms that swept her soul.