Stairs of Sand

by Zane Grey

  During the tedious hot hours the gamblers quarreled a good deal. Merryvale suffered from cramp in his bound arms. Towards the close of that day Brooks came to Adam.

  “Ain’t you gettin’ tired?” he queried, not without wonder.

  “Not very,” replied Adam.

  “Humph!—Air you goin’ to take me where your gold strike is?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Why ain’t you?”

  “You’ll kill me whether I take you or don’t. So why should I make you rich?”

  “No reason atall,” returned Brooks, with a grim laugh. “I’d figger the same. But, Wansfell, supposin’ I let you go?”

  “That’s different. But you’d have to make it so I’d trust you.”

  “Larey told me you’d struck it rich out hyar,” went on the bandit leader, evidently hazarding a lie. “He’s sure got all the old Mohave claim-jumpers beat. I’m tellin’ you I’ve got all that’s comin’ from him. An’ if you can show me some of the yellow dirt I’ll let you an’ your pard go, providin’ of course you stay hyar until I get away from the post with my hosses.”

  “Brooks, I tell you I’m afraid to trust you,” replied Adam, with apparent irritation.

  “Natural. But I’ve nothin agin you. Fact is I always had a sneakin’ pleasure in what I heerd about you. Now why should I want to kill you? Word given to as lowdown a hombre as this Larey wouldn’t count. Not with me. Think it over some more. My grub an’ water are low, an’ my men are stewin’ hyar.”

  At this juncture Stark approached with a meagre bit of bread and meat, which he set down between the prisoners, and then untied their hands. That, for Merryvale, at least, was immeasurable relief.

  “Say, Brooks, what’s the need of keepin’ these men tied up day an’ night? It’s cruelty to animals,” said Stark.

  “Huh! You wouldn’t ask why if you knowed thet man as I do,” replied Brooks, pointing to Adam.

  “Oh, wouldn’t I?” returned Stark, doubtfully. “Excuse me.”

  Another night passed, quicker and less wearying to Merryvale for the reason that he could not keep awake.

  The third day dawned hot, with wind at sunrise. Soon the sand began to fly.

  “They won’t last out this day,” whispered Adam. “It’ll be good or bad for us.”

  By mid-morning the canyon was a veiled vestibule of hell. Merryvale rested quietly, moving when he had to, and awaited developments. Adam lay propped against the wall, his eagle gaze on the restless, irritable bandits. They tried to keep at their game but it broke up. Brooks had manifestly won back most of the ill-gotten gains he had shared with his companions.

  The reflection of heat from the canyon wall became blistering. By lulls and gusts the dusty, sand-laden wind worked upon the brains of these elemental men.

  Merryvale heard parts of their conversation, and the tenor of it augured more ill than good to Adam and himself.

  “We gotta git out of hyar tonight, at the furdest,” said one.

  “I’d vote for goin’ right now,” added another.

  “Nix. Not till the sun sets an’ the sand stops,” advised a third.

  “What’s keepin’ us anyhow?” demanded Stark, whose voice had not been evident before.

  “Gold,” rejoined Brooks, laconically.

  “Gold, hell! Ain’t you enough of a prospector to know float or quartz never shows in this kind of rock?”

  “No, I ain’t. Are you?”

  “I sure am. I prospected all over the Mohave an’ Death Valley. This fellar is workin’ you.”

  “Thet idee has been eatin’ into me, like the sand in my biscuit…. Stark, you go knock him on the head, an’ the old geezer, too. Then we’ll pack out of hyar.”

  “Me? Say, Brooks, I’m not doin’ your dirty work,” replied Stark, scornfully.

  “You’re gettin’ most damn testy,” growled the leader. “I thought mebbe you’d like the idee of layin’ out Wansfell—”

  “Who?” flashed Stark.

  “Didn’t I tell you?—Wal, this hyar big fellow is Wansfell, the Wanderer.”

  “Why’n hell didn’t you tell me before?” yelled Stark, leaping up.

  “Why’n hell should I?” shouted Brooks, in amaze and anger. “Is he anythin’ to you?”

  “Never seen him in my life,” retorted Stark, and wheeling he rapidly approached the spot where Adam lay.

  Merryvale sensed events. Stark looked as forceful and forbidding as before, yet with an extraordinary difference that was baffling. He sank on one knee and fixed a most penetrating gaze upon Adam.

  “Say, big fellar, I want to know somethin’,” he said, in low voice. “Are you the man Wansfell, the Wanderer?”

  “Yes. The desert gave me that name. But it’s not my real one,” replied Adam, sitting up, suddenly intense.

  “Honest to Gawd?” added the bandit, huskily. His ruddy skin had paled.

  “Shore he’s Wansfell,” interposed Merryvale. “I’ve knowed him for eighteen years.”

  “My name is Stark. Bill Stark. Ever hear of me?” went on the bandit leaning closer.

  “Stark? The name’s familiar. But I can’t place you,” answered Adam.

  “You once killed a man named Baldy McKue. A gambler, claim-jumper. Flashy man keen on women?”

  His words were significant enough to thrill Merryvale, but nothing to his knife-edged tone and the quivering steel light of his eyes.

  Adam labored to raise himself higher, and the bandit with a powerful arm, helped him. Then they locked eyes.

  “Yes, I did,” replied Adam, slowly, sombrely.

  “You cracked the bones of his arms, an’ busted his ribs—an’ broke his neck—all with your bare hands?” whispered the bandit, his intensity growing terrible.

  Wansfell nodded with a gloom that overshadowed his interest in this man.

  “What’d you kill McKue for?”

  “Well, I’d just wandered into that mining camp,” replied Adam, grasping from the man’s growing agitation the tenseness of this situation. “And I happened on a little woman, starving and ill in a shack. She had been pretty once. Baldy McKue had beaten her, abandoned her. I never learned who she was or her story. She kept her secret. I nursed her, tried to save her life. But I couldn’t. She was not strong enough for childbirth. And they both died. She did tell me, though, before she died, that the baby was not McKue’s.”

  “Oh, my Gawd! Oh, my Gawd! Oh, my Gawd!” moaned Stark, his face convulsed and wet, his body shaken, his big hands wringing each other. Then he bent to the wall and his broad shoulders heaved.

  Merryvale gazed in wonder. Adam made as if to put a kindly hand on Stark’s shoulder, but his arms were bound.

  “She was—my wife,” said Stark, raising his head, disclosing a havoc-lined face. “An’ the baby was mine.”

  “Well! I always wondered,” returned Adam, gently. “She had been a good girl. I could see that. McKue had got around her.”

  “He was no worse than me,” responded Stark, growing stern and dark. “I drove her to her ruin … Wansfell, I always wanted to meet you.”

  “Queer we should meet here. Life plays us tricks. But I’m glad, too, if meeting me has helped you.”

  “Roll over on your face,” returned Stark, opening a clasp-knife.

  Adam laboriously moved, and turned, face down. The knife blade flashed. Adam’s great hands spread. He sat up, rubbing them. Stark motioned for Merryvale to turn. Then in another second Merryvale felt his numb arms drop free.

  “Brooks, come hyar,” yelled Stark, bounding up. He was agile for so heavy a man. His aspect, as he strode out, was sinister and formidable. He stalked more than half way to meet the bandit leader.

  “Brooks, there won’t be any knockin’ Wansfell an’ his old pard on the head,” he announced, in a voice that lashed the air.

  “The hell you say!” retorted Brooks, furiously.

  “You heard me.”

  “Who’s runnin’ this hyar outfit?” demanded Brooks.r />
  “If you must shoot do it with more’n your chin,” replied Stark, bitingly sarcastic.

  “Ha! That’s strong talk, Stark.”

  “Look. I cut them fellars hands loose.”

  But Brooks did not spare a glance in the direction of the liberated prisoners.

  “Stark, I never liked you no how,” he snarled.

  “There wasn’t no love lost.”

  Both men lurched for their guns, and Stark was the swiftest to shoot. Brooks emitted an awful groan, and falling face down in the sand, he twitched a little, then lay still.

  Stark, smoking gun in hand, leaped over his body to confront the other men.

  “If it’s anythin’ to you—out with it,” he hissed. “But I ain’t talkin’.”

  The followers of Brooks were intimidated. Perhaps it meant no great loss to them.

  “All right. Divide Brooks’ roll between you, an’ then we’ll pack to get out of hyar.”

  Adam moved then towards the camp and Merryvale followed.

  “We’re square, Wansfell,” said the bandit, gruffly. “Take your canteen an’ go. Keep your mouth shut at the post, till we’re gone with our hosses.”

  As an afterthought he added to Merryvale: “Say, old geezer, do you need thet whiskey more’n me?”

  “Shore I don’t,” replied Merryvale, hastily producing the flask.

  Adam was striding out along the grim wall. Merryvale had to hurry to catch up with him. They turned a comer, to face the long blue-and-yellow-hazed canyon. The wind whistled through the rock crevices.

  Chapter Seventeen

  MERRYVALE’S endeavor to keep pace with Adam back to Lost Lake, coupled with the stress of his emotions, well-nigh exhausted him. His heart warned him that it was being taxed far beyond its limit. But he would not retard Adam and he would have dropped dead in his tracks rather than miss seeing Guerd Larey and Wansfell come face to face.

  The day was at its bitter worst. The desert yawned, like a ghastly furnace mouth, horizon wide, from which issued a roar, and a smoke of whirling sand, and fire-hot breath, consuming, devastating. Lost Lake was swathed in white dust, blinding, suffocating, burning like invisible embers.

  Adam led Merryvale round to the back of the post, to the entrance of Ruth’s yard above the house. What welcome protection behind the thick hedge! Adam wiped the dusty grime from his face. Merryvale, panting and spent, wet with sweat, cleaned his black face and hands.

  They did not pause longer than a moment, nor did either speak. A monstrous urge kept Merryvale from sinking down. He was consumed with despair, yet upheld by hope. Ruth! If only—

  They reached the porch. Adam paused at some sound within the house. Then he knocked on Ruth’s door—knocked until Merryvale remembered this was no longer Ruth’s room.

  They strode on, and Adam’s footsteps rang from the porch.

  Suddenly the next door swiftly opened inward and Guerd Larey filled the aperture. Bloody marks marred the pallor of spent passion on his face. His jaw hung down, quivering. His rolling dilating eyes set black upon Adam. His thin white attire was dishevelled and stained.

  In one lunge Adam shoved him back into the room, so powerfully that he staggered clear to the back wall, crashing against it.

  Adam leaped across the threshold, with Merryvale at his heels. But Merryvale halted at the door, as if held by an unseen power.

  The room was in disorder. Table and contents had been overturned. Merryvale’s panic-stricken gaze swept over the dazed Larey, on to motionless Adam and down to the couch, where Ruth lay white as death.

  “Ruth!” cried Adam, in a voice that would have called her back from the verge.

  Merryvale’s poor heart froze. Was she dead? Had they come too late? Her glorious hair fell around her shoulders, half hiding her naked breast, where crimson stains burned against its whiteness.

  Then her eyelids fluttered and opened, to disclose purple filmed gulfs that stared blank, changed from lead to quick, and suddenly blazed.

  “Adam?” she whispered, faintly, and tried to rise.

  Even in that terrible moment Wansfell did not forget the rousing Larey, for he made no move toward Ruth.

  “Yes. I am here,” he said, with what seemed an unnatural, unholy calm.

  His compelling voice lifted her. Straining she half raised herself on her arms. Her hair fell like a golden mass. How lovely, how terribly tragic her face! The great eyes, expanding, shining like purple leaping flames, set with awful accusation upon Larey.

  “Kill him! Kill him!” she breathed almost too low for Merryvale’s strained ears. It was a command, supreme in agony, from an insupportable hate. Then, fainting, she fell back on the couch.

  Merryvale, out of the corner of his eye, had seen Larey stoop quickly, to pick up something behind him. He rose, he leaned, head out like a bird of prey, he stepped, all the time with his glittering green eyes riveted on Adam. But he kept his right hand behind his back.

  “Look out, Adam. He’s got a gun!” called Merryvale, shrilly.

  Larey’s dry lips framed words that did not sound clearly.

  “Wansfell, the Wanderer!”

  He was quivering from head to foot.

  “No, Guerd. I am your brother, Adam Larey,” returned Adam, In tones that had no life.

  Larey leaned closer as he stepped. All that was stress and strain about him magnified. He peered with intense scrutiny into Adam’s eyes—close—closer, until with a wondering, terrifying cry he straightened.

  “So help me God! … Adam! … Mama’s little goody boy! … Damn your soul—I know you!”

  “Eighteen years, Guerd! It was written, out there,” replied Adam, making a gesture toward the desert.

  Then it seemed to Merryvale that this prodigal brother became an archangel of the devil in his god-like beauty. Whiter than a corpse, yet burning, with eyes like green jade!

  “Ah! Eighteen years!” his voice rang out like a clarion. “A lifetime, in which I have gone to hell, as once you prophesied, and you have become Wansfell, the Wanderer. How things work out! … My ruin is great, but I’d live it again ten thousand times for this moment.” He halted, towering, beautiful, beginning to sway and choke over passion too terrible for human strength.

  “You love—this woman, Ruth Virey,” he panted. “Oh, I know…. You couldn’t help yourself.—And she loves you—loves you—loves you, curse her…. I took her for a hussy—a strumpet—a twining white-throated harlot…. But she was pure. My jealous black heart could, not see it…. Look at her now!”

  Larey pointed with left hand that seemed rigid yet had an exquisitely slight and rapid tremor.

  Merryvale’s look followed Larey’s gesture. Ruth in her pitiful frailty and tragic loveliness would, have melted a heart of stone. But Larey’s heart had burned out love, tenderness, mercy. Adam never shifted his piercing gaze from his brother.

  “Look at her now!” went on Larey. “I have killed her soul! This woman who loves you! … Your wandering, knightly, Christ-like code has failed you here!”

  Merryvale’s tortured acumen read the intent behind Larey’s denunciation. He shrilled a warning. Larey’s right arm swept out with a glinting gun. Adam leaped like a panther. His hand caught the rising arm. The gun exploded. Then Adam’s mighty frame wrestled into terrific motion. He swung Larey off his feet. There was a rending sound, a cracking of bones.

  The gun flew at Merryvale’s feet. He snatched it up.

  Adam catapulted Larey against the wall with sodden thud. But Larey did not fall. His arm hung limp, dripping blood, but he appeared not to be conscious of it.

  Adam extended those clutching hands, those talons of the desert, and they seemed to speak the death his gray mute lips could not utter.

  Merryvale had existed for this, prolonged his life for it. But it was more than human nature could bear. Even at that awful moment he felt Wansfell’s anguish. Raising the gun he held, he shot Larey—once—twice—through the heart.

  They laid Ruth on the li
ttle bed in the room that had been hers.

  Adam knelt, still mute, no longer rigid. Merryvale flew to fetch water. It was he who bathed Ruth’s still white face, and called to her, hoarsely, hopelessly, until his voice failed.

  But she was not dead. The sad pale eyelids moved, languidly opened. Staring black her eyes, through which she came back to consciousness.

  “Ruth. It—is—over,” whispered Adam.

  She tried to lift her hand. She gazed at Adam, at Merryvale, around the room.

  “Lass, it’s all right—all—right,” said Merryvale quaveringly, taking up her hand.

  “Guerd!” she whispered.

  “He’s daid!”

  “Oh, God! … Adam, I made you kill him…. Your brother…. After all my love—my vow—Oh my stairs of sand! I climbed only to fall—only to fall!”

  “Ruth, Guerd’s blood is not upon my hands,” said Adam solemnly. “I meant to kill him. I would have done so…. But I did not.”

  “Ruth, I couldn’t stand it,” interposed Merryvale, huskily. “I wanted more than hope of Heaven—to see Adam break his bones—an’ crack his neck…. But when the time came I couldn’t let him do it…. So I shot Larey myself.”

  Then these two shaken men knelt at her bedside. Merryvale thought he saw a change that was not physical, though a shade seemed strangely to pass away from her face.

  “Ruth, it is hard enough,” said Adam, his voice gathering strength. “But Merryvale spared me this deed—fear of which has made your life and mine a hell of contending fires. It is over…. Now let me think of you.”

  “I—but Adam,—I can only die,” she wailed.

  “Hush! Have I been blessed by God with your love—only to lose you? No! No!”

  “Guerd Larey could not die before—telling you—what—”

  “He’d killed your soul, he said. But Ruth, that was only a madman’s jealousy. That was my brother’s curse. Your soul is God’s and love’s.”

  “But do you love me—now?”

  “More, my darling. More a thousand times.”

  “But could I make you happy?”

  “Ruth, all that has made life significant for me is embodied in you. Your heritage of discontent, your weakness for men, your love—your fight—your climb—you toiled up your stairs of sand on steps of your dead self—and you reached the heights. I would love you the same if you had not. But think of my faith in you and the splendor of my happiness to know it was justified. I love you with all the passion and strength that the desert has given me. But the joy of that is little compared with my joy in your victory over yourself. I think your mother must know.”