party actually set off. Gunner and Axel went with Thea, and Ray had
asked Spanish Johnny to come and to bring Mrs. Tellamantez and his
mandolin. Ray was artlessly fond of music, especially of Mexican music.
He and Mrs. Tellamantez had got up the lunch between them, and they were
to make coffee in the desert.
When they left Mexican Town, Thea was on the front seat with Ray and
Johnny, and Gunner and Axel sat behind with Mrs. Tellamantez. They
objected to this, of course, but there were some things about which Thea
would have her own way. “As stubborn as a Finn,” Mrs. Kronborg sometimes
said of her, quoting an old Swedish saying. When they passed the
Kohlers’, old Fritz and Wunsch were cutting grapes at the arbor. Thea
gave them a businesslike nod. Wunsch came to the gate and looked after
them. He divined Ray Kennedy’s hopes, and he distrusted every expedition
that led away from the piano. Unconsciously he made Thea pay for
frivolousness of this sort.
As Ray Kennedy’s party followed the faint road across the sagebrush,
they heard behind them the sound of church bells, which gave them a
sense of escape and boundless freedom. Every rabbit that shot across the
path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway
thought, a message that one sent into the desert. As they went farther,
the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a
shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the
sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned
loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a
preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts
standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years
actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost
of that long-vanished sea. Beyond the phantom lake lay the line of
many-colored hills; rich, sun-baked yellow, glowing turquoise, lavender,
purple; all the open, pastel colors of the desert.
After the first five miles the road grew heavier. The horses had to slow
down to a walk and the wheels sank deep into the sand, which now lay in
long ridges, like waves, where the last high wind had drifted it. Two
hours brought the party to Pedro’s Cup, named for a Mexican desperado
who had once held the sheriff at bay there. The Cup was a great
amphitheater, cut out in the hills, its floor smooth and packed hard,
dotted with sagebrush and greasewood.
On either side of the Cup the yellow hills ran north and south, with
winding ravines between them, full of soft sand which drained down from
the crumbling banks. On the surface of this fluid sand, one could find
bits of brilliant stone, crystals and agates and onyx, and petrified
wood as red as blood. Dried toads and lizards were to be found there,
too. Birds, decomposing more rapidly, left only feathered skeletons.
After a little reconnoitering, Mrs. Tellamantez declared that it was
time for lunch, and Ray took his hatchet and began to cut greasewood,
which burns fiercely in its green state. The little boys dragged the
bushes to the spot that Mrs. Tellamantez had chosen for her fire.
Mexican women like to cook out of doors.
After lunch Thea sent Gunner and Axel to hunt for agates. “If you see a
rattlesnake, run. Don’t try to kill it,” she enjoined.
Gunner hesitated. “If Ray would let me take the hatchet, I could kill
one all right.”
Mrs. Tellamantez smiled and said something to Johnny in Spanish.
“Yes,” her husband replied, translating, “they say in Mexico, kill a
snake but never hurt his feelings. Down in the hot country, MUCHACHA,”
turning to Thea, “people keep a pet snake in the house to kill rats and
mice. They call him the house snake. They keep a little mat for him by
the fire, and at night he curl up there and sit with the family, just as
friendly!”
Gunner sniffed with disgust. “Well, I think that’s a dirty Mexican way
to keep house; so there!”
Johnny shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps,” he muttered. A Mexican learns
to dive below insults or soar above them, after he crosses the border.
By this time the south wall of the amphitheater cast a narrow shelf of
shadow, and the party withdrew to this refuge. Ray and Johnny began to
talk about the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, two places much shrouded
in mystery in those days, and Thea listened intently. Mrs. Tellamantez
took out her drawn-work and pinned it to her knee. Ray could talk well
about the large part of the continent over which he had been knocked
about, and Johnny was appreciative.
“You been all over, pretty near. Like a Spanish boy,” he commented
respectfully.
Ray, who had taken off his coat, whetted his pocketknife thoughtfully on
the sole of his shoe. “I began to browse around early. I had a mind to
see something of this world, and I ran away from home before I was
twelve. Rustled for myself ever since.”
“Ran away?” Johnny looked hopeful. “What for?”
“Couldn’t make it go with my old man, and didn’t take to farming. There
were plenty of boys at home. I wasn’t missed.”
Thea wriggled down in the hot sand and rested her chin on her arm. “Tell
Johnny about the melons, Ray, please do!”
Ray’s solid, sunburned cheeks grew a shade redder, and he looked
reproachfully at Thea. “You’re stuck on that story, kid. You like to get
the laugh on me, don’t you? That was the finishing split I had with my
old man, John. He had a claim along the creek, not far from Denver, and
raised a little garden stuff for market. One day he had a load of melons
and he decided to take ‘em to town and sell ‘em along the street, and he
made me go along and drive for him. Denver wasn’t the queen city it is
now, by any means, but it seemed a terrible big place to me; and when we
got there, if he didn’t make me drive right up Capitol Hill! Pap got out
and stopped at folkses houses to ask if they didn’t want to buy any
melons, and I was to drive along slow. The farther I went the madder I
got, but I was trying to look unconscious, when the end-gate came loose
and one of the melons fell out and squashed. Just then a swell girl, all
dressed up, comes out of one of the big houses and calls out, ‘Hello,
boy, you’re losing your melons!’ Some dudes on the other side of the
street took their hats off to her and began to laugh. I couldn’t stand
it any longer. I grabbed the whip and lit into that team, and they tore
up the hill like jack-rabbits, them damned melons bouncing out the back
every jump, the old man cussin’ an’ yellin’ behind and everybody
laughin’. I never looked behind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have
been a mess with them squashed melons. I didn’t stop the team till I got
out of sight of town. Then I pulled up an’ left ‘em with a rancher I was
acquainted with, and I never went home to get the lickin’ that was
waitin’ for me. I expect it’s waitin’ for me yet.”
Thea rolled over in the sand. “Oh, I wish I could have seen t
hose melons
fly, Ray! I’ll never see anything as funny as that. Now, tell Johnny
about your first job.”
Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and
kindly—perhaps the chief requisites in a good story-teller.
Occasionally he used newspaper phrases, conscientiously learned in his
efforts at self-instruction, but when he talked naturally he was always
worth listening to. Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had,
almost from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss. As
a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read
instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary. By the light of
many camp-fires he had pondered upon Prescott’s histories, and the works
of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book-agent.
Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general culture came
hard, and he was determined to get it. Ray was a freethinker, and
inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was
braking, down on the Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb
into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker
about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll’s
speeches and “The Age of Reason.”
Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a great deal to give
up his God. He was one of the stepchildren of Fortune, and he had very
little to show for all his hard work; the other fellow always got the
best of it. He had come in too late, or too early, on several schemes
that had made money. He brought with him from all his wanderings a good
deal of information (more or less correct in itself, but unrelated, and
therefore misleading), a high standard of personal honor, a sentimental
veneration for all women, bad as well as good, and a bitter hatred of
Englishmen. Thea often thought that the nicest thing about Ray was his
love for Mexico and the Mexicans, who had been kind to him when he
drifted, a homeless boy, over the border. In Mexico, Ray was Senor
Ken-ay-dy, and when he answered to that name he was somehow a different
fellow. He spoke Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth of that tongue
kept him from being quite as hard as his chin, or as narrow as his
popular science.
While Ray was smoking his cigar, he and Johnny fell to talking about the
great fortunes that had been made in the Southwest, and about fellows
they knew who had “struck it rich.”
“I guess you been in on some big deals down there?” Johnny asked
trustfully.
Ray smiled and shook his head. “I’ve been out on some, John. I’ve never
been exactly in on any. So far, I’ve either held on too long or let go
too soon. But mine’s coming to me, all right.” Ray looked reflective. He
leaned back in the shadow and dug out a rest for his elbow in the sand.
“The narrowest escape I ever had, was in the Bridal Chamber. If I hadn’t
let go there, it would have made me rich. That was a close call.”
Johnny looked delighted. “You don’ say! She was silver mine, I guess?”
“I guess she was! Down at Lake Valley. I put up a few hundred for the
prospector, and he gave me a bunch of stock. Before we’d got anything
out of it, my brother-in-law died of the fever in Cuba. My sister was
beside herself to get his body back to Colorado to bury him. Seemed
foolish to me, but she’s the only sister I got. It’s expensive for dead
folks to travel, and I had to sell my stock in the mine to raise the
money to get Elmer on the move. Two months afterward, the boys struck
that big pocket in the rock, full of virgin silver. They named her the
Bridal Chamber. It wasn’t ore, you remember. It was pure, soft metal you
could have melted right down into dollars. The boys cut it out with
chisels. If old Elmer hadn’t played that trick on me, I’d have been in
for about fifty thousand. That was a close call, Spanish.”
“I recollec’. When the pocket gone, the town go bust.”
“You bet. Higher’n a kite. There was no vein, just a pocket in the rock
that had sometime or another got filled up with molten silver. You’d
think there would be more somewhere about, but NADA. There’s fools
digging holes in that mountain yet.”
When Ray had finished his cigar, Johnny took his mandolin and began
Kennedy’s favorite, “Ultimo Amor.” It was now three o’clock in the
afternoon, the hottest hour in the day. The narrow shelf of shadow had
widened until the floor of the amphitheater was marked off in two
halves, one glittering yellow, and one purple. The little boys had come
back and were making a robbers’ cave to enact the bold deeds of Pedro
the bandit. Johnny, stretched gracefully on the sand, passed from
“Ultimo Amor” to “Fluvia de Oro,” and then to “Noches de Algeria,”
playing languidly.
Every one was busy with his own thoughts. Mrs. Tellamantez was thinking
of the square in the little town in which she was born; of the white
church steps, with people genuflecting as they passed, and the
round-topped acacia trees, and the band playing in the plaza. Ray
Kennedy was thinking of the future, dreaming the large Western dream of
easy money, of a fortune kicked up somewhere in the hills,—an oil well,
a gold mine, a ledge of copper. He always told himself, when he accepted
a cigar from a newly married railroad man, that he knew enough not to
marry until he had found his ideal, and could keep her like a queen. He
believed that in the yellow head over there in the sand he had found his
ideal, and that by the time she was old enough to marry, he would be
able to keep her like a queen. He would kick it up from somewhere, when
he got loose from the railroad.
Thea, stirred by tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon and Death
Valley, was recalling a great adventure of her own. Early in the summer
her father had been invited to conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen, up
in Wyoming, near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play the
organ and sing patriotic songs. There they stayed at the house of an old
ranchman who told them about a ridge up in the hills called Laramie
Plain, where the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons were
still visible. The old man even volunteered to take Mr. Kronborg up into
the hills to see this place, though it was a very long drive to make in
one day. Thea had begged frantically to go along, and the old rancher,
flattered by her rapt attention to his stories, had interceded for her.
They set out from Laramie before daylight, behind a strong team of
mules. All the way there was much talk of the Forty-niners. The old
rancher had been a teamster in a freight train that used to crawl back
and forth across the plains between Omaha and Cherry Creek, as Denver
was then called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for California.
He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and slaughter, wanderings in
snowstorms, and lonely graves in the desert.
The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one. It led up and up,
by granite
rocks and stunted pines, around deep ravines and echoing
gorges. The top of the ridge, when they reached it, was a great flat
plain, strewn with white boulders, with the wind howling over it. There
was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep
furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now grown over with
dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail had
been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new trail
to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running
east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about among
the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind brought
to her eyes tears that might have come anyway. The old rancher picked up
an iron ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her for a
keepsake. To the west one could see range after range of blue mountains,
and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks, the clouds
caught here and there on their spurs. Again and again Thea had to hide
her face from the cold for a moment. The wind never slept on this plain,
the old man said. Every little while eagles flew over.
Coming up from Laramie, the old man had told them that he was in
Brownsville, Nebraska, when the first telegraph wires were put across
the Missouri River, and that the first message that ever crossed the
river was “Westward the course of Empire takes its way.” He had been in
the room when the instrument began to click, and all the men there had,
without thinking what they were doing, taken off their hats, waiting
bareheaded to hear the message translated. Thea remembered that message
when she sighted down the wagon tracks toward the blue mountains. She
told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human
courage seemed to live up there with the eagles. For long after, when
she was moved by a Fourth-of-July oration, or a band, or a circus
parade, she was apt to remember that windy ridge.
To-day she went to sleep while she was thinking about it. When Ray
wakened her, the horses were hitched to the wagon and Gunner and Axel
were begging for a place on the front seat. The air had cooled, the sun
was setting, and the desert was on fire. Thea contentedly took the back
seat with Mrs. Tellamantez. As they drove homeward the stars began to
The Song of the Lark Page 6