Desert Gold and the Light of Western Stars

by Zane Grey

  “Gene Stewart’s roan, or I’m a son of a gun!” exclaimed Stillwell, and he dropped heavily to his knees and began to scrutinize the tracks. “My eyes are sure pore; but, Nels, they ain’t fresh.”

  “I reckon them tracks was made early yesterday mornin’.”

  “Wal, what if they was?” Stillwell looked at his cowboy. “It’s sure as thet red nose of your’n Gene wasn’t ridin’ the roan.”

  “Who’s sayin’ he was? Bill, it’s more’n your eyes thet’s gittin’ old. Jest foller them tracks. Come on.”

  Stillwell walked slowly, with his head bent, muttering to himself. Some thirty paces or more from the campfire he stopped short and again flopped to his knees. Then he crawled about, evidently examining horse tracks.

  “Nels, whoever was straddlin’ Stewart’s hoss met somebody. An’ they hauled up a bit, but didn’t git down.”

  “Tolerable good for you, Bill, thet reasonin’,” replied the cowboy.

  Stillwell presently got up and walked swiftly to the left for some rods, halted and faced toward the southwest, then retraced his steps. He looked at the imperturbable cowboy.

  “Nels, I don’t like this a little,” he growled. “Them tracks make straight fer the Peloncillo trail.”

  “Shore,” replied Nels.

  “Wal?” went on Stillwell, impatiently.

  “I reckon you know what hoss made the other tracks?”

  “I’m thinkin’ hard, but I ain’t sure.”

  “It was Danny Mains’s bronch.”

  “How do you know thet?” demanded Stillwell, sharply.

  “Bill, the left front foot of thet little hoss always wears a shoe thet sets crooked. Any of the boys can tell you I’d know thet track if I was blind.”

  Stillwell’s ruddy face clouded, and he kicked at a cactus plant.

  “Was Danny comin’ or goin’?” he asked.

  “I reckon he was hittin’ across country fer the Peloncillo trail. But I ain’t shore of thet without back-trailing him a ways. I was jest waitin’ fer you to come up.”

  “Nels, you don’t think the boy’s sloped with thet little hussy, Bonita?”

  “Bill, he shore was sweet on Bonita, same as Gene was an’ Ed Linton before he got engaged, an’ all the boys. She’s shore chain-lightnin’, that little black-eyed devil. Danny might hev sloped with her all right. Danny was held up on the way to town, an’ then in the shame of it he got drunk. But he’ll show up soon.”

  “Wal, mebbe you an’ the boys are right. I believe you are. Nels, there ain’t no doubt on earth about who was ridin’ Stewart’s hoss?”

  “Thet’s as plain as the hoss’s tracks.”

  “Wal, it’s all amazin’ strange. It beats me. I wish the boys would ease up on drinkin’. I was pretty fond of Danny an’ Gene. I’m afraid Gene’s done fer, sure. If he crosses the border where he can fight it won’t take long fer him to get plugged. I guess I’m gettin’ old. I don’t stand things like I used to.”

  “Bill, I reckon I’d better hit the Peloncillo trail. Mebbe I can find Danny.”

  “I reckon you had, Nels,” replied Stillwell. “But don’t take more’n a couple of days. We can’t do much on the round-up without you. I’m short of boys.”

  That ended the conversation. Stillwell immediately began to hitch up his team, and the cowboys went out to fetch their strayed horses. Madeline had been curiously interested, and she saw that Florence knew it.

  “Things happen, Miss Hammond,” she said, soberly, almost sadly.

  Madeline thought. And then straightway Florence began brightly to hum a tune and to busy herself repacking what was left of the lunch. Madeline suddenly conceived a strong liking and respect for this Western girl. She admired the consideration or delicacy or wisdom—whatever it was—which kept Florence from asking her what she knew or thought or felt about the events that had taken place.

  Soon they were once more bowling along the road down a gradual incline, and then they began to climb a long ridge that had for hours hidden what lay beyond. That climb was rather tiresome, owing to the sun and the dust and the restricted view.

  When they reached the summit Madeline gave a little gasp of pleasure. A deep, gray, smooth valley opened below and sloped up on the other side in little ridges like waves, and these led to the foothills, dotted with clumps of brush or trees, and beyond rose dark mountains, pine-fringed and crag-spired.

  “Wal, Miss Majesty, now we’re gettin’ somewhere,” said Stillwell, cracking his whip. “Ten miles across this valley an’ we’ll be in the foothills where the Apaches used to run.”

  “Ten miles!” exclaimed Madeline. “It looks no more than half a mile to me.”

  “Wal, young woman, before you go to ridin’ off alone you want to get your eyes corrected to Western distance. Now, what ’d you call them black things off there on the slope?”

  “Horsemen. No, cattle,” replied Madeline, doubtfully.

  “Nope. Jest plain, every-day cactus. An’ over hyar—look down the valley. Somethin’ of a pretty forest, ain’t thet?” he asked, pointing.

  Madeline saw a beautiful forest in the center of the valley toward the south.

  “Wal, Miss Majesty, thet’s jest this deceivin’ air. There’s no forest. It’s a mirage.”

  “Indeed! How beautiful it is!” Madeline strained her gaze on the dark blot, and it seemed to float in the atmosphere, to have no clearly defined margins, to waver and shimmer, and then it faded and vanished.

  The mountains dropped down again behind the horizon, and presently the road began once more to slope up. The horses slowed to a walk. There was a mile of rolling ridge, and then came the foothills. The road ascended through winding valleys. Trees and brush and rocks began to appear in the dry ravines. There was no water, yet all along the sandy washes were indications of floods at some periods. The heat and the dust stifled Madeline, and she had already become tired. Still she looked with all her eyes and saw birds, and beautiful quail with crests, and rabbits, and once she saw a deer.

  “Miss Majesty,” said Stillwell, “in the early days the Indians made this country a bad one to live in. I reckon you never heerd much about them times. Surely you was hardly born then. I’ll hev to tell you some day how I fought Comanches in the Panhandle—thet was northern Texas—an’ I had some mighty hair-raisin’ scares in this country with Apaches.”

  He told her about Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, the most savage and bloodthirsty tribe that ever made life a horror for the pioneer. Cochise befriended the whites once; but he was the victim of that friendliness, and he became the most implacable of foes. Then Geronimo, another Apache chief, had, as late as 1885, gone on the war-path, and had left a bloody trail down the New Mexico and Arizona line almost to the border. Lone ranchmen and cowboys had been killed, and mothers had shot their children and then themselves at the approach of the Apache. The name Apache curdled the blood of any woman of the Southwest in those days.

  Madeline shuddered, and was glad when the old frontiersman changed the subject and began to talk of the settling of that country by the Spaniards, the legends of lost gold-mines handed down to the Mexicans, and strange stories of heroism and mystery and religion. The Mexicans had not advanced much in spite of the spread of civilization to the Southwest. They were still superstitious, and believed the legends of treasures hidden in the walls of their missions, and that unseen hands rolled rocks down the gullies upon the heads of prospectors who dared to hunt for the lost mines of the padres.

  “Up in the mountains back of my ranch there’s a lost mine,” said Stillwell. “Mebbe it’s only a legend. But somehow I believe it’s there. Other lost mines hev been found. An’ as fer the rollin’ stones, I sure know thet’s true, as any one can find out if he goes trailin’ up the gulch. Mebbe thet’s only the weatherin’ of the cliffs. It’s a sleepy, strange country, this Southwest, an’, Miss Majesty, you’re a-goin’ to love it. You’ll call it romantic. Wal, I reckon ro-mantic is correct. A feller gets lazy out
hyar an’ dreamy, an’ he wants to put off work till to-morrow. Some folks say it’s a land of Mañana—a land of to-morrow. Thet’s the Mexican of it.

  “But I like best to think of what a lady said to me onct—an eddicated lady like you, Miss Majesty. Wal, she said it’s a land where it’s always afternoon. I liked thet. I always get up sore in the mawnin’s, an’ don’t feel good till noon. But in the afternoon I get sorta warm an’ like things. An’ sunset is my time. I reckon I don’t want nothin’ any finer than sunset from my ranch. You look out over a valley that spreads wide between Guadalupe Mountains an’ the Chiricahuas, down across the red Arizona desert clear to the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Two hundred miles, Miss Majesty! An’ all as clear as print! An’ the sun sets behind all thet! When my time comes to die I’d like it to be on my porch smokin’ my pipe an’ facin’ the west.”

  So the old cattleman talked on while Madeline listened, and Florence dozed in her seat, and the sun began to wane, and the horses climbed steadily. Presently, at the foot of a steep ascent, Stillwell got out and walked, leading the team. During this long climb fatigue claimed Madeline, and she drowsily closed her eyes, to find when she opened them again that the glaring white sky had changed to a steel-blue. The sun had sunk behind the foothills and the air was growing chilly. Stillwell had returned to the driving-seat and was chuckling to the horses. Shadows crept up out of the hollows.

  “Wal, Flo,” said Stillwell, “I reckon we’d better hev the rest of thet there lunch before dark.”

  “You didn’t leave much of it,” laughed Florence, as she produced the basket from under the seat.

  While they ate, the short twilight shaded and gloom filled the hollows. Madeline saw the first star, a faint, winking point of light. The sky had now changed to a hazy gray. Madeline saw it gradually clear and darken, to show other faint stars. After that there was perceptible deepening of the gray and an enlarging of the stars and a brightening of new-born ones. Night seemed to come on the cold wind. Madeline was glad to have the robes close around her and to lean against Florence. The hollows were now black, but the tops of the foothills gleamed pale in a soft light. The steady tramp of the horses went on, and the creak of wheels and crunching of gravel. Madeline grew so sleepy that she could not keep her weary eyelids from falling. There were drowsier spells in which she lost a feeling of where she was, and these were disturbed by the jolt of wheels over a rough place. Then came a blank interval, short or long, which ended in a more violent lurch of the buckboard. Madeline awoke to find her head on Florence’s shoulder. She sat up laughing and apologizing for her laziness. Florence assured her they would soon reach the ranch.

  Madeline observed then that the horses were once more trotting. The wind was colder, the night darker, the foothills flatter. And the sky was now a wonderful deep velvet-blue blazing with millions of stars. Some of them were magnificent. How strangely white and alive! Again Madeline felt the insistence of familiar yet baffling associations. These white stars called strangely to her or haunted her.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ROUND-UP

  It was a crackling and roaring of fire that awakened Madeline next morning, and the first thing she saw was a huge stone fireplace in which lay a bundle of blazing sticks. Some one had kindled a fire while she slept. For a moment the curious sensation of being lost returned to her. She just dimly remembered reaching the ranch and being taken into a huge house and a huge, dimly lighted room. And it seemed to her that she had gone to sleep at once, and had awakened without remembering how she had gotten to bed.

  But she was wide awake in an instant. The bed stood near one end of an enormous chamber. The adobe walls resembled a hall in an ancient feudal castle, stone-floored, stone-walled, with great darkened rafters running across the ceiling. The few articles of furniture were worn out and sadly dilapidated. Light flooded into the room from two windows on the right of the fireplace and two on the left, and another large window near the bedstead. Looking out from where she lay Madeline saw a dark, slow up-sweep of mountain. Her eyes returned to the cheery, snapping fire, and she watched it while gathering courage to get up. The room was cold. When she did slip her bare feet out upon the stone floor she very quickly put them back under the warm blankets. And she was still in bed trying to pluck up her courage when, with a knock on the door and a cheerful greeting, Florence entered carrying steaming hot water.

  “Good mawnin’, Miss Hammond. Hope you slept well. You sure were tired last night. I imagine you’ll find this old rancho house as cold as a barn. It’ll warm up directly. Al’s gone with the boys and Bill. We’re to ride down on the range after a while when your baggage comes.”

  Florence wore a woolen blouse with a scarf round her neck, a short corduroy divided skirt, and boots; and while she talked she energetically heaped up the burning wood in the fireplace, and laid Madeline’s clothes at the foot of the bed, and heated a rug and put that on the floor by the bedside. And lastly, with a sweet, direct smile, she said:

  “Al told me—and I sure saw myself—that you weren’t used to being without your maid. Will you let me help you?”

  “Thank you, I am going to be my own maid for a while. I expect I do appear a very helpless individual, but really I do not feel so. Perhaps I have had just a little too much waiting on.”

  “All right. Breakfast will be ready soon, and after that we’ll look about the place.”

  Madeline was charmed with the old Spanish house, and the more she saw of it the more she thought what a delightful home it could he made. All the doors opened into a courtyard, or patio, as Florence called it. The house was low, in the shape of a rectangle, and so immense in size that Madeline wondered if it had been a Spanish barracks. Many of the rooms were dark, without windows, and they were empty. Others were full of ranchers’ implements and sacks of grain and bales of hay. Florence called these last alfalfa. The house itself appeared strong and well preserved, and it was very picturesque. But in the living-rooms were only the barest necessities, and these were worn out and comfortless.

  However, when Madeline went outdoors she forgot the cheerless, bare interior. Florence led the way out on a porch and waved a hand at a vast, colored void. “That’s what Bill likes,” she said.

  At first Madeline could not tell what was sky and what was land. The immensity of the scene stunned her faculties of conception. She sat down in one of the old rocking-chairs and looked and looked, and knew that she was not grasping the reality of what stretched wondrously before her.

  “We’re up at the edge of the foothills,” Florence said. “You remember we rode around the northern end of the mountain range? Well, that’s behind us now, and you look down across the line into Arizona and Mexico. That long slope of gray is the head of the San Bernardino Valley. Straight across you see the black Chiricahua Mountains, and away down to the south the Guadalupe Mountains. That awful red gulf between is the desert, and far, far beyond the dim, blue peaks are the Sierra Madre in Mexico.”

  Madeline listened and gazed with straining eyes, and wondered if this was only a stupendous mirage, and why it seemed so different from all else that she had seen, and so endless, so baffling, so grand.

  “It’ll sure take you a little while to get used to being up high and seeing so much,” explained Florence. “That’s the secret—we’re up high, the air is clear, and there’s the whole bare world beneath us. Don’t it somehow rest you? Well, it will. Now see those specks in the valley. They are stations, little towns. The railroad goes down that way. The largest speck is Chiricahua. It’s over forty miles by trail. Here round to the north you can see Don Carlos’s rancho. He’s fifteen miles off, and I sure wish he were a thousand. That little green square about half-way between here and Don Carlos—that’s Al’s ranch. Just below us are the adobe houses of the Mexicans. There’s a church, too. And here to the left you see Stillwell’s corrals and bunk-houses and his stables all falling to pieces. The ranch has gone to ruin. All the ranches are going to ruin. But most of them are litt
le one-horse affairs. And here—see that cloud of dust down in the valley? It’s the round-up. The boys are there, and the cattle. Wait, I’ll get the glasses.”

  By their aid Madeline saw in the foreground a great, dense herd of cattle with dark, thick streams and dotted lines of cattle leading in every direction. She saw streaks and clouds of dust, running horses, and a band of horses grazing; and she descried horsemen standing still like sentinels, and others in action.

  “The round-up! I want to know all about it—to see it,” declared Madeline. “Please tell me what it means, what it’s for, and then take me down there.”

  “It’s sure a sight, Miss Hammond. I’ll be glad to take you down, but I fancy you’ll not want to go close. Few Eastern people who regularly eat their choice cuts of roast beef and porterhouse have any idea of the open range and the struggle cattle have to live and the hard life of cowboys. It’ll sure open your eyes, Miss Hammond. I’m glad you care to know. Your brother would have made a big success in this cattle business if it hadn’t been for crooked work by rival ranchers. He’ll make it yet, in spite of them.”

  “Indeed he shall,” replied Madeline. “But tell me, please, all about the round-up.”

  “Well, in the first place, every cattleman has to have a brand to identify his stock. Without it no cattleman, nor half a hundred cowboys, if he had so many, could ever recognize all the cattle in a big herd. There are no fences on our ranges. They are all open to everybody. Someday I hope we’ll be rich enough to fence a range. The different herds graze together. Every calf has to be caught, if possible, and branded with the mark of its mother. That’s no easy job. A maverick is an unbranded calf that has been weaned and shifts for itself. The maverick then belongs to the man who finds it and brands it. These little calves that lose their mothers sure have a cruel time of it. Many of them die. Then the coyotes and wolves and lions prey on them. Every year we have two big round-ups, but the boys do some branding all the year. A calf should be branded as soon as it’s found. This is a safeguard against cattle-thieves. We don’t have the rustling of herds and bunches of cattle like we used to. But there’s always the calf-thief, and always will be as long as there’s cattle-raising. The thieves have a good many cunning tricks. They kill the calf’s mother or slit the calf’s tongue so it can’t suck and so loses its mother. They steal and hide a calf and watch it till it’s big enough to fare for itself, and then brand it. They make imperfect brands and finish them at a later time.