Stairs of Sand

by Zane Grey

  “Still the same sweet old wildcat,” he returned mockingly. “Well, it suits me. Spit, scratch, bite, fight! I’ll like it…. But you’re pale, Ruth, a trifle thin. If it wasn’t for your eyes!”

  “Will you get out of here?” she demanded.

  “No. I won’t.”

  “I have not strength to throw you out. Will you rob me of my home? Force me out?”

  “The place is mine, I told you.”

  “You thief! You greaser bandit! … You murderer!”

  “Ruth, you always had a wicked tongue. It used to bother me. But you can’t faze me now.”

  “I know what you’ve done, Guerd Larey,” she said, hotly. “You had my grandfather made away with—to further your greed. Your loathesome lust! … Oh, you unspeakable monster!”

  He laughed at her, though the olive tan of his face began to whiten.

  “Now you’re like your old self. You lovely piece of flesh! Your purple blazing eyes! Your swelling breasts! … I almost remember I loved you once.”

  Ruth felt the futility of words. Yet she could no more have silenced her voice than she could have stopped the raging of her heart.

  “Loved!—You?—Why, you never loved even mother—or brother, did you?” she flung at him.

  That strangely pierced his degenerate armor. He stared at her, wondering, for a second, aghast.

  “By God, I never did,” he retorted, with bitter brevity.

  “Let me out of here,” cried Ruth, fearing to trust herself longer. The word brother had unnerved her. This man was Adam’s brother. Could she not escape—surrender everything—flee from him and the madness of vengeance, as if from a pestilence?

  “If you run I’ll drag you back,” he rasped out, with first show of passion. “Once I begged for your love. On my knees I begged. You could have made me a better man. But now I don’t want your love, your surrender. I want you to fight like the cat you are. I want to beat you, violate you…. I’ll make you cringe and crawl—you white piece of ice. You damned staring-eyed statue!”

  He had come out with his ultimatum. The fire of him matched its terrible portent. A great outward stillness seemed to possess Ruth, while internally all was chaos, a multitude of galvanic currents charging toward the fatal act, through which only there could be freedom.

  “Ice? Statue? … You should have asked Stone,” she taunted him.

  “Damn you!” he glared at her. “Fling that in my face, will you? … You hussy! You cheat! … I should have killed that fool. But I thought you were only playing with him.”

  “I was, Guerd,” she returned, with mockery. She had found the vulnerable place in his hard hide. Jealousy had always been his weakness. Who could stand before such jealousy? She would shake him as the storm shook the oak. “I played with Stone, as with all the others—until Wansfell came.”

  Larey’s flesh quivered spasmodically. His green eyes took a lurid sheen. He slid into the room, back against the wall.

  “Wansfell? That desert rat! … You—You—”

  “He is the most wonderful man in all the world,” she cried, and her voice rang with the sincerity of her feeling.

  “You’re crazy. This desert has acted queer on you,” he declared, thickly, uncomprehendingly. “Not satisfied with young men like Stone! Or men like me! … You seek the abnormal—the hideous. Ruth Virey, you’re a depraved woman!”

  “I am what the desert has made me.”

  “But Wansfell—that wandering tramp! That desert hermit madman! They tell me he is old, gray, like a bald eagle.”

  “He is younger than you. And Oh, indeed he is an eagle!”

  “Sanchez called him a saviour of virgins…. Wansfell, the Wanderer. For years that name has haunted me…. Damn his soul! I wish I had … But, Ruth, I ask you again. You can’t he serious about this giant beggar who thinks he’s a knight of the desert. Who goes about redressing human wrongs! Who has the instinct to kill!”

  “Serious?” queried Ruth, with slow sweet smile, and tone that did not require her passion to deceive. “I rather think I am seriate Once—the only time in my life. The first—the last! … I have awakened. I love Wansfell. I worship him. I am his slave…. I would bathe his feet with the water out there—that you swore I’d use on you … Bah, you toad! You slimy thing! … And I would wipe his feet dry with my hair.”

  Larey’s face was distorted and purple, and his breath whistled.

  “Woman!” he burst out, hoarsely. “Listen. You were his slave, then. For I have had him shot!”

  The man was terrific in his sincerity, in an agony that was half fiendish joy. He blazed the truth. Before it Ruth staggered back, stricken to the soul, almost swooning. But her own hate would not relinquish clutch on the moment. She rallied.

  “Yes, by heaven!” he continued, in husky exultation. “I had your Wansfell shot. My men have been on his trail three days. And this morning a messenger came. They’d got him. I had paid them beforehand. So they were off to cross the border … And he was your lover? Wansfell, the Wanderer! I sought only to free myself of a dangerous man. A protector of fair virtue! And all the time he was your lover. You white-throated harlot! You shiny-haired reptile! You destroyer of men! Your lover!”

  Ruth swept close to him, to look into the writhing soul of him, to pierce him at the last, mortally, beyond recall.

  “My lover. Yes. And he was more…. Your brother!”

  Larey certainly thought she had gone mad. But the icy hiss of her voice and its rending content directly changed the current of his passion.

  “You’re out of your head,” he growled, with evil speculation.

  “Wansfell is Adam Larey,” she shrilled.

  “Liar! Shut up, or I’ll—”

  “Do you remember Margarita Arallanes? Do you remember the wheel on the sandy bank, where you stole that Mexican girl from Adam? Do you remember why Adam fought you in that gambling-hall at Picacho? Do you remember who put out Collishaw’s eye?”

  “Hell! I never forgot!” gasped out Larey.

  “Did not Sanchez tell you Wansfell shot out Collishaw’s other eye—that night at Yuma?”

  Larey rallied from that swift volley, but white to the lips, he eyed her in awe, and something of horror.

  “A trick to add to his name,” he replied, doggedly. “Wansfell had heard that story, no doubt. And he has filled your mind with it. But you can’t make me swallow it.”

  “Oh, can’t I though?”

  “No, you white fiend. No! … Make that wandering lover of yours my brother—who starved on the desert eighteen years ago? … No, Adam Larey is dead. And I’d give ten years of my life to kick his bleached skull out of the sand.”

  “Wansfell was Adam Larey!” she cried, with such triumphant exultance that he flamed anew.

  “Proof! or I’ll choke you quiet,” he thundered.

  Back from him and to the table Ruth glided, every move like bending steel.

  “Guerd, Larey, you bore Adam an inhuman hate. You hated your mother. From childhood you nursed your implacable jealousy. You tortured Adam with his mother’s shame.”

  Larey’s rolling eyes fixed upon this skeleton ghost of the past. His jaw dropped. His face changed convulsively, turned livid, and set in appalling expectancy.

  “You bastard! Bastard! BASTARD!”

  “Hell!” he screamed, as one whose flesh had sheathed a naked blade.

  Ruth pulled open the table drawer and snatched out the gun. As she swept it round Larey bounded like a cat, struck up her hand just at the flash and report. Then he seized her arm and wrung it, sending the weapon flying. Violently he swung her away from him against the couch, where she sank. With baleful eyes riveted on her, with his hair like the mane of a beast, he moved to kick the door shut.

  Chapter Sixteen

  MERRYVALE filled his canteen, and hiding it under his coat he took an opposite direction from the post, down through the palo verdes and mesquite. Making a wide detour out of sight of any watchful eye, he headed at last for
the wildly broken rock country to the west.

  The day was hot, but the air free of blowing dust. Merryvale sensed that he had begun to fail during this last trying week. It was like something cold creeping up from his feet. And similarly his mood had altered. He had turned to Adam as the last resource. What days of racking pain might have been spared Ruth! Always Merryvale had seen clearly. For eighteen years it had been written that Adam must kill his brother. The hour had struck. And Merryvale’s old slow heart thumped at the thought and his blood warmed and grew hot, and burned out the coldness of his veins. Old though he was the passion to see Adam beat and tear and crush the life out of Guerd made Merryvale young again.

  He reached the end of the escarpment, and started down the slope into lower country. The sand had given place to stone. It appeared that the mountain range to the west had reached down a long arm into the lowland, a broken mass of rock like yellow lava, cut by the elements into every conceivable kind of break.

  Entering the mouth of a canyon Merryvale trudged on, absorbed in his sombre brooding, yet aware of the changing growing ruggedness of the region. It was infernally hot down there, and the shade of stone walls was most welcome. Twice he had recourse to his canteen, and as he tipped it up he saw the splintered rock slide far above, where Adam had taken Ruth one day. Merryvale had forgotten to signal Adam, and now, if he were up there on the heights it was impossible to locate him. Merryvale would press on to his camp.

  Suddenly a man stepped out from behind a rock to level a cocked gun at Merryvale.

  “Howdy, old geezer. Hands up!” he called, with gruff grim humor.

  Merryvale obeyed. And his breast seemed to cave in and his heart to turn to lead.

  “Who are you? An’ what you want?” queried Merryvale, quaveringly.

  “Me? Aw, I’m a bold bad bandit from Arizonie. An’ I’m invitin’ you up the canyon to a picnic.”

  Merryvale’s keen scrutiny took in a sturdy man of middle age, with a face that was a record of blasting desert years. Merryvale noted particularly the ruffian’s eyes, gray, bloodshot, hard as steel, indicative of extraordinary character.

  “Move on,” he ordered, and as Merryvale complied he stepped in behind, and jerked Merryvale’s gun from his belt “Now you can drop your hands, pardner.”

  Merryvale strode up the canyon, head bent, eyes on the hot yellow stone and gravel. He had been too late. Larey’s hirelings had found Adam’s hiding place, and had killed or captured him. Merryvale’s tortured mind reverted to Ruth. What would become of her? It was heart-breaking. Merryvale all but sank in the sand, spent, finished, ready and glad to have the bandit end his misery. Yet his spirit could not wholly surrender. He had seen so many miracles on the desert. What did this outlaw and his accomplices know of Wansfell? If they had not killed him from ambush or in a fight they were still in peril. Merryvale thought of the terrible battle in which Wansfell had rescued Dismukes from the claim-jumpers in Death Valley.

  From time to time Merryvale felt a prod from behind.

  “Say, Mister Arizonie, I’m doin’ the best walkin’ I can. You’re a younger man than me.”

  “Air you tired livin’?” queried the man, roughly facetious.

  “Wal, to be honest, I reckon I am,” replied Merryvale, with a sigh.

  “Air you the big fellar’s pard?”

  “What big fellar?”

  “The one we got tied up hyar.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Merryvale, immensely relieved and glad at this information.

  “You’re out of luck, old man. Fer the boss has orders to shoot your pard. An’ you’ll come in fer a pluggin’ too.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “Say now, ain’t you the wise old fool? But I don’t know that it matters. Fact is I ain’t acquainted with whose orders they was an’ what they was fer. Damn queer deal to me. An’ I’ve had all I want of this hellhole in the rocks.”

  “Shore is pretty hot,” agreed Merryvale. “Caint we rest a bit. I’ve drink, both water an’ whiskey.”

  “I should smile we can rest a bit. You set there … An’ I’ll have the water first, thank you.”

  Merryvale watched this loquacious bandit wipe his wet face with a dirty scarf, and then drink lustily from the canteen, all the while holding the cocked gun on his knee, in dangerous alignment with Merryvale.

  “I reckon you needn’t cover me with that gun. Leastways you can let the hammer down,” complained Merryvale.

  “Sure. It is onconsiderate of me. You’re a harmless old fellar, an’ I ain’t stuck on this job.”

  Merryvale clutched at straws. He knew men. And this bandit radiated something the best and worst of western characters had in common. Again Merryvale’s mind began to cast off fatality and to work.

  Presently he was ordered to move on again. Another long arduous toiling over rocks and washes, winding through recesses of the dividing canyons, brought them to a spreading of the gloomy walls. Merryvale smelled smoke. There were bits of green and yellow brush, cactus and stunted palo verde.

  They came to a camp in the shade of a bulging wall. It indeed was a meagre outfit, as dry camps on the desert were likely to be. Four men sat playing cards. Two of these had their shirts off.

  “Hey, can’t you heah anythin?” called Merryvale’s captor, as they approached.

  A big man, hairy of breast, with sallow cadaverous face and eyes of a ghoul, got up to greet the speaker.

  “If it ain’t Stark! Howdy do? An’ who’s the stranger?”

  “He’s the old geezer you said you was told to look out fer,” replied Stark.

  “Good. Tie him up an’ let him be company for the big fellar. Then go back on watch again.”

  “Not me, Brooks,” rejoined Stark. “You can send somebody else.”

  “Seein’ we got the two of ’em we don’t need any watch, except over them,” replied Brooks, and squatted back to the game.

  “Say, boss, what’s the idee stayin’ longer?” queried Stark, gruffly.

  “That’s my bizness. You rope the old gent an’ come sit in the game,” was the answer.

  Stark bound Merryvale’s hands behind his back, using first a scarf and then over that a stout cord.

  “Come over hyar to your pard, an’ don’t make any queer moves. Savvy?” commanded Stark, and led Merryvale a few paces back toward the wall where Adam lay bound and propped on his side. Merryvale sat down, gladly, with his back to a slab of stone; and he bent anxious eyes upon his friend. Adam looked the same as usual. Certainly he had not been injured. When Stark went back to his comrades Merryvale spoke.

  “How are you, Adam?”

  “Ruth!” replied Adam, hurriedly.

  “Wal, she was all right this mawnin’. Shore full of grit. An’ I believe she’ll hold her own for a little anyhow. But we haven’t any time to lose gettin’ back to her.”

  “Listen,” rejoined Adam, whispering. “This is the Arizona gang I saw in Yuma at Sanchez’s. Brooks is an outlaw. He knew me years ago. I can’t place the others. But it’s plain Stark is the man most to be reckoned with. I could break loose any time. But there’s been no chance yet.”

  “Don’t make a rash move. Let’s wait. Somethin’ may develop. This heah Stark seems square, an’ he’s sore. Let me work on him,” returned Merryvale, in like whisper.

  “Pard, if you ever thought hard do it now,” groaned Adam.

  “What’s their game?”

  “They left their horses at the post, and tracked me here. They’ve water but little food. Guerd, of course, put them on my trail. They surprised me, held me up, took my gun. Brooks recognized me, but kept it to him self. He’s a deep one. He would doublecross Guerd as quick as carry out his orders to shoot me. But Brooks knew me as a prospector. He thinks I’ve found gold in this canyon, and that Guerd is after it. But for this, I’d probably have been shot at once.”

  “Ahuh! An’ you’ve been helpin’ Brooks think you have a gold claim up heah?”

  “Yes. And all the time
waiting for a chance to jump them.”

  “Keep on waitin’,” huskily whispered Merryvale. “Don’t risk your life unless you see a good chance. Remember Ruth! She may have hell with Larey, but that’s not as bad as you bein’ daid. Shore he’ll not kill her.”

  Merryvale composed himself to wait and to listen and to think, while pretending to sleep. The hours dragged for him and Adam, though manifestly not for the gamblers.

  At sundown Stark fetched them some biscuits and meat.

  “You can slip me a nip of whiskey,” said Stark. “I ain’t mean enough to rob you of it all.”

  “Shore. Take a good big nip. My pard an’ me keep it only for snake-bite,” replied Merryvale, indicating where the flask rested in his pocket. Stark took his drink, but a sparing one.

  “Thanks, old boy,” he said.

  “Say, excuse me, Stark, but I’m shore curious to know why a fine fellar like you is mixed up with this outfit.”

  “Haw! Haw! Thet’s good!—See hyar, friend. Brooks an’ his pardners are pretty easy-goin’ fellars compared to me.”

  “Wal, shore that’s what I meant,” returned Merryvale, enigmatically.

  Night fell. The bandits, having but little firewood to bum for a light, abandoned their game. One of them sat guard over the prisoners. He was surly and he knew his job. The moon crossed the belt of sky, flooding the canyon. Merryvale slept by fits and starts. Several times he heard Adam roll over, once to touch him. Some time during the night the guard was relieved by a bandit, wakeful as the other, and even harder of aspect.

  Day came at last. And Adam, who no doubt had remained awake all night, fell asleep, until roused by Stark, who came with coffee and biscuits.

  That morning ushered in another gambling session, in which Stark took part. Adam and Merryvale were permitted to walk along the cliff, between the camp and the wall. The thing that sustained Merryvale was a feeling he assimilated from his patient imperturbable comrade. Adam radiated inevitableness. Strange facts, opportunities gravitated toward him.