by Zane Grey
While the strange twilight deepened into weird night, they sat propped against stones, with eyes on the embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the sand with the light of great white stars on their dark faces.
* * * *
Each succeeding day and night Dwire felt himself more and more drawn to Hartwell. He found that after hours of burning toil he had insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. The fact bothered him. It was curious, perplexing. And finally, in wonder, he divined that he cared for Hartwell.
He reflected that after a few weeks in the desert he had always become a different man. In civilization, in the rough mining-camps, he had been a prey to unrest and gloom; but once down on the great heave and bulge and sweep of this lonely world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness. Always he began to see and to think and to feel. Did not the desert magnify men?
Dwire believed that wild men in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the elements in all their primal ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul, and became mere brutes. Likewise he believed that men wandering or lost in the wilderness often reversed that brutal order of life and became noble, wonderful, superhuman.
He had the proof in the serene wisdom of his soul when for a time the desert had been his teacher. And so now he did not marvel at a slow stir, stealing warmer and warmer along his veins, and at the premonition that he and Hartwell, alone on the desert, driven there, by life’s mysterious and remorseless motive, were to see each other through God’s eyes.
Hartwell was a man who thought of himself last. It humiliated Dwire that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder his companion from doing more than his share of the day’s work. It spoke eloquently of what Hartwell might be capable of on the burdened return journey.
The man was mild, gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to be made of the fiber of steel. Dwire could not thwart him.
Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Dwire, not for himself. If he struck his pick into a ledge that gave forth a promising glint, instantly he called to his companion. Dwire’s hands always trembled at the turning of rock that promised gold. He had enough of the prospector’s passion for fortune to thrill at the chance of a strike; but Hartwell never showed the least trace of excitement.
And his kindness to the burros was something that Dwire had never seen equaled. Hartwell always found the water and dug for it, ministered to the weary burros, and then led them off to the best patch of desert growth. Last of all he bethought himself to eat a little.
* * * *
One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon. The day had been exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the rocks persisted. A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully. The stars shone white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness.
Many times, since they started their wanderings, Dwire had seen Hartwell draw something from his pocket and peer long at it. On this night Dwire watched him again, and yielded to an interest which he had not heretofore voiced.
“Hartwell, what drives you into the desert?”
“Comrade, do I seem to be a driven man?” asked Hartwell.
“No. But I feel it. Do you come to forget?”
“I come to remember.”
“Ah!” softly exclaimed Dwire. Always he seemed to have known that.
He said no more. He watched Hartwell rise and begin his nightly pace to and fro, up and down.
With slow, soft tread, forward and back, tirelessly and ceaselessly, the man paced his beat. He did not look up at the stars or follow the radiant track of the moon along the canyon ramparts. He hung his head. He was lost in another world. It was a world which the lonely desert made real. He looked a dark, sad, plodding figure, and somehow impressed Dwire with the helplessness of men.
“He is my brother,” muttered Dwire.
He grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of the fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his own passion-driven soul. Dwire had come into the desert to forget a woman. She appeared to him then as she had looked when first she entered his life—a golden-haired girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and beautiful. He saw her as she had become after he had ruined her—a wild and passionate woman, mad to be loved, false and lost, and still cursed with unforgetable allurements. He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse knocked at his heart.
Rising, Dwire climbed out of the canyon to the top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro. He looked down into the weird and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on down the moon-track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the cold, blue horizon.
The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine. The desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of rock and sand, a dead thing, silent, austere, ancient, waiting, majestic. It spoke to Dwire. It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul.
In that wild solitude, the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly. They had shone upon a desert that had once been alive and was now dead, and that would again throb to life, only to die. It was a terrible ordeal for Dwire to stand there alone and realize that he was only a man facing eternity; but that was what gave him strength to endure. Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Dwire felt hovering near him fantoms of peace.
He returned to camp and sought his comrade.
“Hartwell, I reckon we’re two of a kind. It was a woman who drove me into the desert. But I come to forget. The desert’s the only place I can do that.”
“Was she your wife?” asked the other.
“No.”
A long silence ensued. A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering heat. The camp-fire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.
“I had a daughter,” said Hartwell, speaking as if impelled. “She lost her mother at birth. And I—I didn’t know how to bring up a girl. She was pretty and gay. She went bad. I tried to forget her and failed. Then I tried to find her. She had disappeared. Since then I haven’t been able to stay in one place, or to work or sleep or rest.”
Hartwell’s words were peculiarly significant to Dwire. They distressed him. He had been wrapped up in his remorse for wronging a woman. If ever in the past he had thought of any one connected with her, he had long forgotten it; but the consequences of such wrong were far-reaching. They struck at the roots of a home. And here, in the desert, he was confronted by the spectacle of a splendid man—the father of a wronged girl—wasting his life because he could not forget—because there was nothing left to live for.
Suddenly Dwire felt an inward constriction, a cold, shivering clamp of pain, at the thought that perhaps he had blasted the life of a father. He shared his companion’s grief. He knew why the desert drew him. Since Hartwell must remember, he could do so best in this solitude, where the truth of the earth lay naked, where the truth of life lay stripped bare. In the face of the tragedy of the universe, as revealed in the desert, what were the error of one frail girl, or the sorrow of one unfortunate man?
“Hartwell, it’s bad enough to be driven by sorrow for someone you’ve loved, but to suffer sleepless and eternal remorse for the ruin of one you’ve loved—that is worse. Listen! In my younger days—it seems long ago now, yet it’s only ten years—I was a wild fellow. I didn’t mean to do wrong. I was just a savage. I gambled and drank. I got into scrapes. I made love to girls, and one, the sweetest and loveliest girl who ever breathed, I—I ruined. I disgraced her. Not knowing, I left
her to bear the brunt of that disgrace alone. Then I fell into terrible moods. I changed. I discovered that I really and earnestly loved that girl. I went back to her, to make amends—but it was too late!”
Hartwell leaned forward a little in the waning camp-fire glow, and looked strangely into Dwire’s face, as if searching it for the repentance and remorse that alone would absolve him from scorn and contempt; but he said nothing.
III
The prospectors remained in that camp for another day, held by some rust-stained ledges that contained mineral.
Late in the afternoon, Dwire returned to camp to find Hartwell absent. His pick, however, was leaning against a stone, and his coat lying over one of the packs. Hartwell was probably out driving the burros up to water.
Gathering a bundle of greasewood, Dwire kindled a fire. Then into his gold-pan he measured out flour and water. Presently it was necessary for him to get into one of the packs, and in so doing he knocked down Hartwell’s coat. From a pocket fell a small plush case, badly soiled and worn.
Dwire knew that this case held the picture at which Hartwell looked so often, and as he bent to pick it up he saw the face shining in the light. He experienced a shuddering ripple through all his being. The face resembled the one that was burned forever into his memory. How strange and fatal it was that every crag, every cloud, everything which attracted his eye, took on the likeness of the girl he loved!
He gazed down upon the thing in his hand. It was not curiosity; only a desire to dispel his illusion.
Suddenly, when he actually recognized the face of Nell Warren, he seemed to feel that he was paralyzed. He stared and gasped. The blood thrummed in his ears.
This picture was Nell when she was a mere girl. It was youthful, soft, pure, infinitely sweet. A tide of emotion rushed irresistibly over him.
The hard hoofs of the burros, cracking the stones, broke the spell that held Dwire, and he saw Hartwell approaching.
“Nell was his daughter!” whispered Dwire.
Trembling and dazed, he returned the picture to the pocket from which it had fallen, and with bent head and clumsy hands he busied himself about the campfire. Strange and bewildering thoughts raced through his mind. He ate little; it seemed that he could scarcely wait to be off; and when the meal was ended, and work done, he hurried away.
As thought and feeling multiplied, he was overwhelmed. It was beyond belief that out of the millions of men in the world two who had never seen each other could have been driven into the desert by memory of the same woman. It brought the past so close. It showed Dwire how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had happened long ago.
That which made life significant to him was a wandering in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret. He was mad, blinded, lost.
Some fateful chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had wrecked. It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one thing of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both father and lover would have declared unendurable. It would be the scoring of unhealed wounds. In the thoughtful brow, the sad, piercing eye, the plodding, unquiet mood of the other, each man would see his own ruin.
Dwire’s pain reached to despair when he felt this insupportable relation between Hartwell and himself.
Something within him cried out and commanded him to reveal his identity. Hartwell would kill him, probably, but it was not fear of death that put Dwire on the rack. He had faced death too often to be afraid. It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man whom he had come to love.
All at once Dwire swore that he would not augment Hartwell’s trouble, or let him stain his hands with blood, however just that act might be. He would reveal himself, but he would so twist the truth of Nell’s sad story that the father would lose his agony and hate, his driving passion to wander over this desolate desert.
This made Dwire think of Nell as a living, breathing woman. She was somewhere beyond the dim horizon line. She would be thirty years old—that time of a woman’s life when she was most beautiful and wonderful. She would be in the glare and glitter, sought and loved by men, in some great and splendid city. At that very moment she would be standing somewhere, white-gowned, white-faced, with her crown of golden hair, with the same old haunting light in her eyes — lost, and bitterly indifferent to her doom.
Dwire gazed out over the blood-red, darkening desert, and suddenly, strangely, unconsciously, the strife in his soul ceased.
The moment that followed was one of incalculable realization of change, in which his eyes seemed to pierce the vastness of cloud and range and the mystery of gloom and shadow—to see with strong vision the illimitable space of sand and rock. He felt the grandeur of the desert, its simplicity, its truth, and he learned at last the lesson it taught.
No longer strange or unaccountable was his meeting with Hartwell. Each had marched in the steps of destiny, and as the lines of their fates had been inextricably tangled in the years that were gone, so now their steps had crossed and turned them toward one common goal.
For years they had been two men marching alone, answering to an inward and driving search, and the desert had brought them together. For years they had wandered alone, in silence and solitude, where the sun burned white all day and the stars burned white all night, blindly following the whisper of a spirit. But now Dwire knew that he wras no longer blind. Truth had been revealed—wisdom had spoken— unselfish love had come—and in this flash of revelation Dwire felt that it had been given him to relieve Hartwell of his burden.
IV
Dwire returned to camp. As always, at that long hour when the afterglow of sunset lingered’ in the west, Hartwell was plodding to and fro in the gloom.
“I’m wondering if Hartwell is your right name,” said Dwire.
“It’s not,” replied the other.
“Well, out here men seem to lose old names, old identities. Dwire’s not my real name, either.”
Hartwell slowly turned. It seemed that there might have been a suspension, a blank, between his usual quiet, courteous interest and some vivifying, electrifying mood to come.
“Was your real name Warren?” asked Dwire.
Hartwell moved with sudden start.
“Yes,” he replied.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Dwire went on. “A while back I knocked your coat down, and a picture fell out of your pocket. I looked at it. I recognized it. I knew your daughter Nell.”
“You!”
The man grasped Dwire and leaned close, his eyes shining out of the gloom.
“Don’t drag at me like that! Listen. I was Nell’s lover. I ruined her. I am Gail Hamlin!”
Hartwell became as a man struck by lightning, still standing before he fell.
“Yes, I’m Hamlin,” repeated Dwire.
With a convulsive spring Hartwell appeared to rise and tower over Dwire. Then he plunged down upon him, and clutched at his throat with terrible, stifling hands. Dwire fought desperately, not to save his life, but for breath to speak a few words that would pierce Hartwell’s maddened mind.
“Warren, kill me, if you want,” gasped Dwire; “but wait! It’s for your own sake. Give me a little time! If you don’t, you’ll never know. Nell didn’t go bad!”
Dwire felt the shock that vibrated through Hartwell at those last words. He repeated them again and again.
As if wrenched by some resistless force, Hartwell released Dwire, staggered back, and stood with uplifted, shaking hands. The horrible darkness of his face showed his lust to kill. The awful gleam of hope in his luminous eyes revealed what had checked his fury.
“Comrade,” panted Dwire, “it’s no stranger that you should kill me than that we should meet out here. But give me a little time. Listen! I want to tell you. I’m Hamlin—I’m the man who broke Nell’s heart. Only she never went bad. You thought wrong—you heard wrong. When she left Peoria, and I learned my true feelings, I hunted her. I traced her to St. Louis. She worked ther
e, and on Sundays sang in a church. She was more beautiful than ever. The men lost their heads about her. I pleaded and pleaded with her to forgive me—to marry me—to let me make it all up to her. She forgave, but she would not marry me. I would not give up, and so I stayed on there. I was wild and persistent; but Nell had ceased to care for me. Nor did she care for any of the men who courted her. Her trouble had made her a good and noble woman. She was like a nun. She came to be loved by women and children—by everyone who knew her.
“Then some woman who had known Nell in Peoria came to St. Louis. She had a poison tongue. She talked. No one believed her; but when the gossip got to Nell’s ears, she faded—she gave up. It drove her from St. Louis. I traced her—found her again. Again I was too late. The disgrace and shock, coming so near a critical time for her, broke her down, and—she died. You see, you were mistaken. As for me—well, I drifted West, and now for a long time I’ve been taking to the desert. It’s the only place where I can live with my remorse. It’s the only place where I can forget she is dead!”
“Dead! Dead all these years!” murmured Hartwell, brokenly. “All these years that I’ve thought of her as—”
“You’ve thought wrong,” interrupted Dwire. “Nell was good, as good as she was lovable and beautiful. I was the one who was evil, who failed, who turned my back on the noblest chance life offers to a man. I was young, selfish, savage. What did I know? But when I got away from the world and grew old in thought and pain learned much. Nell was a good woman.”
“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” cried Hartwell, and he fell on his knees.
Dwire stole away into the darkness, with that broken cry quivering in his heart.
How long he absented himself from camp, or what he did, he had no idea. When he returned, Hartwell was sitting before the fire, and once more he appeared composed. He spoke, and his voice had a deeper note, but otherwise he seemed as usual. The younger man understood, then, how Hartwell’s wrath had softened.