Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  Black rock flowed to the end of the world. There were bits and even long stretches of glassy stuff, maddening to walk on, or rutted and ridged places terrible for moccasined feet. Again there were expanses like coal cinders made of blown glass, endless areas of petrified coke, and domes as large as huge haystacks as if there the molten rock had bubbled up and solidified before it could fall. In that black wilderness he made no attempt to follow the trail, but merely gave himself to a desperate effort to win across before night. That afternoon he recklessly exhausted his canteen and his strength. Yet the evening found him still struggling with bruised feet among those endless mounds of burned stone, and he submitted to the inevitable sorrow that was to come.

  The cinders were better for a bed than the rock. He scraped a quantity of them together, leveled them off, and scattered his pack upon them. But no sleep came to him that night. No matter how he wrapped himself, the wind that hisses among the rocks found its way to his skin, parching him, drying his throat to parchment. He forced a swallow at regular intervals to keep his throat partially moist, and each swallow was a greater effort, until his muscles ached. There seemed nothing vivifying in that wind, as though the oxygen had been robbed from it, so that he had to fight back a continual desire to open his mouth wide and gape down the air in great mouthfuls. He dared not do it. An instant’s gulping of the cold wind would desiccate his mouth until the tongue puffed and cracked at last. All the night he regulated his breathing and fought away the panic as it surged at him. Overhead, the stars were bright in a dim, steel-blue heaven, and they burned down closer and closer, to watch him. They started the panics, those eyelike stars.

  Dawn came. He had prayed for it. Then he roused out of a stupor and found the stars dim, the sky gray. The day was beginning. He sat up, dropped his face between his hands, and thought. If he turned back the way he had come, he knew that he could last out the journey and gain the last spring from which he had drunk in the mountainside. If he went on, there was an unknown stretch of the lava flow. Unless he crossed it before darkness, he would die. But to turn back meant the end of all hope of taking Moonshine. Tales of the book drifted through his memory, knights who had quested till they came to the very gates of discovery, and then turned away conquered by their own weak hearts. At last he took up his pack with trembling hands, set a course as well as he could by the cool, blue Zuni Mountains south and east, and started.

  The sun came up red, huge, without heat, and, drifting a little above the horizon, was lost in a sheeting of gray clouds. There it stayed all the day, small and dim as a moon, and left the world below to a wind which had grown in violence during the night. Now it whined among the rocks fully in Lee’s face. He became childishly sullen, as though the gale had been directed to that quarter of the compass by a personal malignancy. Worst of all, it forced down his nostrils a stinging dust that was invisible to the eye but burned his throat and stifled him with a peculiarly pungent odor. Several times he had to turn his back to the wind to take an easy breath.

  By the middle of the morning the gale had increased, but it ceased to take any scruple of the thoughts of Lee Garrison. His mind was fully occupied by a morbid study of the thirst that burned in him. In the first hour of walking, his tongue had begun to puff, and the effort of keeping his mouth closed nearly stifled him, but worse than that was the torment of swallowing. It was about noon, or thereabouts, that he stopped short, realizing that he could not swallow again. His throat was numb with the vain struggle. The panic which was ever just at his shoulder now leaped on him, and his reason staggered.

  Only a little more and he would plunge into gibbering idiocy. He thrust his hand in front of his eyes and studied the fingers as he wiggled them slowly back and forth. All the tortures of thirst were nothing compared to that fear of the insanity that comes with it. Another instant and the hallucinations would begin with daydreams of fountains of crystal cold water, of mountains of snow, of delectable berries, frosted and juicy, of endless bottles of icy wine. Then he would see a blue lake in the middle of the desert, a lake so real that the waves rolled in and broke with a shower of spray upon the shore.

  And with the dead aches in his throat he tried to occupy his mind by remembering long quotations from Malory, but always those quotations began to repeat themselves automatically, meaninglessly, and the whole force of his mind, he would discover suddenly, was fixed on a dream of the snowstorm in the Guadalupes. Ah, if such a storm should come now, he would walk with his head bent far back and let the great, luscious flakes pour into his open mouth. He would sweep them to his lips with both hands.

  Here his sane self wakened Lee from a trance in which he actually walked with his head far back, his mouth gaping wide. It had been a narrow escape. The perspiration started out all over his weakened body as he realized how close the peril had come, and he forced his bleeding feet into a run. Yet the thought of escape by flight was in itself madness. He stopped. He sank his teeth in his forearm and sucked the crimson substance. And that gave him the power to draw one free breath and swallow again.

  Out of the torture that followed he remembered two things. Once he looked behind him and saw that a red trail led up to him made by his own lacerated feet. And again there was a crisis during which he seriously considered lancing the swollen tongue that choked him. He balanced that thought soberly for a time, walking with the open knife in his hand.

  Coming out of another haze, he noticed that he was seeing the lava hummocks farthest ahead of him against a background of light gray, as the desert stretched before him. He shouted — it was only a hoarse, gagging murmur — and the black nightmare vanished. Then he dropped to his knees, scooped up the sand, and let it fall back through his fingers, laughing aloud.

  It was hearing that horrible, small laughter that sobered him to the understanding that, although sand were preferable to stone, he was still far from water, and ten days’ searching might not find it. What would Moonshine himself do? He had a gift like other wild horses, doubtless, and would scent water from far off. On this hint he built. If he could find Moonshine’s trail, it might lead him to safety. As well look for the paths of the stars in the seas, however, as try to find the trace of his footprints in this sand that ran like water into every depression Lee’s moccasins made. A touch of wind washed the surface smooth again. With the soft sand easing the pain of his feet like a blessing, he laid his course in an S-shape, winding back and forth in the hope of striking a bit of firm ground that would hold the sign of the stallion.

  He found it at last in a little island of clay among the drift- sand — three hoof marks. With his knife he drew a straight line through the prints — it pointed the direction of Moonshine’s flight. Even then his chance was small, for that direction might change, if the horse had not actually scented water.

  The sun, as if realizing that there was no longer a chance of discouraging the traveler with gray and cold, had broken through the clouds that tumbled down to the horizon. Facing a blinding sun, he struck away from the firm ground and was instantly ankle deep. As he labored on, the blood swayed into his brain each time he lifted the rearward foot. It crowded behind his eye until the skull threatened to split, then ebbed, and weakness ran through him. Between the spasms of agony of breathing and walking he felt a sort of divine promise that, if he endured this last test of fire, Moonshine must be his. He was paying in full.

  Straight before him something glittered, as though there were two suns, one in the sky and one flat on the desert. It changed to a ball of fire set in pale blue. A cloud drifted across the sun. The ball of fire grew dim among the sands. It was water, a wide, blue pool, a miracle of spring water brimming a hollow not fifty feet away.

  He went on his hands and knees until he lay at full length on the moist brim with his face buried in the pool.

  VII. GOLD

  THE SAND WAS a tremendous handicap to Moonshine. For his small hoofs cut deeply into the earth while Lee merely dusted through the surface, so to speak. And now
the horse was rarely out of sight, a glimmering shape struggling through the reddish-brown dirt. Sometimes, to shake off that slow, plodding, restless form, the stallion burst into a gallop, but a few minutes of it brought him back to a walk. A little later Garrison would come bobbing out of the skyline.

  In the meantime, the cowpuncher was seasoned to his work. He knew to perfection the short step that served him best in such going. The slipping of his feet no longer worried him, and his leg muscles were turning to iron. He passed Yacoma of the Moki Indians in their strange, semi-Oriental costumes, with their hair bobbed over their shoulders and white cotton trousers, and from them, the first human beings he had seen since the long trail began, he bought two rolls of their Indian bread with the last of his money. His cartridge supply was perilously low, but food was more important than bullets.

  He had reason to bless that purchase, for a bitter country lay before him, swept clean of forage for Moonshine and game for man. Near Nic Doit Soe Peak a sandstorm struck him, a dull, reddish mist rolling up on the horizon and spreading until the sun itself was veiled. It had been hot, sweltering and still, but the temperature dropped fifty degrees in as many moments, and then the wind struck him with its burden of fine red silt. Only the presence of a sandstone butte, behind which he took shelter, saved him that day, and how Moonshine ever lived through it he never would understand. But when the storm passed followed by a heat wave, he found the horse still journeying before him, red, now, instead of white.

  After that came the Colorado, a mile-wide gulch whose rock walls were like banks of mist with a setting sun behind them, gray-green cliffs of diorite, cold granite fogs, rhyolite, an incredible lavender-pink, everywhere benches and slides of earth, blue, yellow, purple, brown, and farther down the caqon a naked cliff face of talc, dazzling white. That riot of pigments stretched beyond, and over miles and miles of badlands to the north, south, and west, with the blues of evening pooled in hollows here and there, and dimming the brightest red to purple. And the stream which had done this vast piece of quarrying? Far below, it lay like a brown chalk mark scraped across the rocks.

  Halfway down the cliff he paused to see the stallion emerge from the river on the farther side, the desert stain washed away, and once more a form of silver. After that glance he bent grimly to his work and came at length, panting, to the valley floor with a rush of small rocks about him. That sound, near at hand, almost masked a distant rattling. He threw himself forward, heard a sound like vast wings, and then a fall that rocked the earth. The largest rocks of the landslide came skipping about him, and then the caqon walls took up the roar of that fall. As mirrors catch and repeat light, so the cliffs, angling in and out, caught the long thunder of the landslide and sent it far away. Once it quite died out, and then some projecting wall sent it sharply back and made Lee glance over his shoulder in alarm.

  He was seven days in the badlands to the north before he pulled over the crest of the Virgin Mountains and saw the Little Muddy Range beyond. That valley was a rest to him, and the climbing of the Little Muddy, on the other side, was a small matter, but, when he dropped onto the lower plateau beyond, it was different.

  It was well into April, now, and with the later season and the lower ground he struck the full blast of the mountain-desert heat. Like a prophecy of evil, the first living creature he met was a sickly, gray-green horror with a flabby beavertail, a lizard body, chameleon head, and saw-teeth in its vast mouth. He kicked the Gila monster to death; there was a carrion feeling to the flesh even while it lived. That evening he pumped his last three bullets at an elusive rabbit for his evening meal. After that he had desert to travel on, and rocks or sticks to knock down his game. Ten days before that prospect would have stopped him short, but, now, he lived like a wild beast, never looked ahead further than one meal, and denied himself the luxury of hunger until he saw the game.

  The second day he wound into the Hyko Mountains with the Silver Caqon Range thrusting out fingers from the south, and on the third day he dropped over the Hyko Mountains into the Pahroc Valley, ninety miles of desert. Through it a cloud of dust swept and dissolved into a herd of wild horses that picked up Moonshine at the foot of the hills, and then swept away from his feeble galloping.

  He left the Hykos with a full canteen in the middle of the day. He reached Dry Lake that night, far up the valley, and found it dry, indeed. Then, with an empty water tin, he tramped behind the glimmering form of Moonshine down the road to Coyote Wells and sank beside the watering troughs after a sixty-five-mile march.

  Strength and muscle and nerve ebbed away in the time that followed. To White River, and White Pine Mountains, then a stretch of desert from the White Pines to the Buttes, and desert again from the Buttes to Hastings Pass. Every day he found his march smaller, every day he roused from his sleep later, with a heavy buzzing in his ears and a mist before his eyes. Flesh began to drop away from him, not superfluous fat, that had been burned away in the first week of his march, but the vital, necessary muscle itself. His step grew shorter. Yet, each morning, he braced himself and threw his head high like a runner entering the home stretch, feeling it impossible that the shambling skeleton that hobbled before him, the dull, gray cartoon of horse, could last out another struggle until the dark. But always there was something left under those bones and that flabby skin which enabled Moonshine to come out of that down-headed, trailing walk into a trot and then into a laboring gallop.

  It was after each vain pursuit that Lee realized he must either give up the pursuit or else lighten his load. Already he had thrown away everything except the rope, the knife, and Malory. That night he read the book for the last time, or, rather, he sat turning the ragged, familiar leaves. He knew the creases and the tears fully as well as he knew the print. That page, where Dinaden jousted with Palomides while Tristan looked on, was marked with a great brown stain of rain water, and the tournament of Lonazhep was obscured by half a page worn away, a great wrinkle crossed the death scene of Balin, when he “yede” on his hands and knees to the red knight and found that he had killed his brother, and the print of Lancelot’s fight with Turquin was too dim to follow, for the book had here lain face upward to the sun through the whole day.

  The next morning Malory lay in a shallow grave beneath a rock, and Lee went on some vital ounces lighter, but with a mournful sense of loss.

  That day he pressed the mustang hard, yet his nerve was gone. He trembled like a woman, when his foot slipped on a rolling pebble. He no longer tried for short cuts. Where Moonshine went, he followed, up hill and down. He lived on game he could knock over with rocks, stupid mountain grouse, or sage hens, running clumsily. Indeed, it was when he caught up a stone to throw at a grouse, that he found the gold.

  As he raised his hand, the morning light glittered in the quartz, a rosy, semi-transparent rock with brownish cubes in it, and all these cubes were spotted and sparkling with gold. All about, the hillside sparkled with the outcropping that a small landslide had stripped to the sun. A glimpse of that hill would start a gold rush. He marked the place. Above him was a higher summit crested with naked white rocks. Below him a creek twisted noisily down a rough-sided valley and carried its foam and its talking out to a level lowland.

  But yonder, a bony gray horse paused and looked back at Lee, one ear pricked forward and the other flagging wearily back. A childish thought came to the man — suppose the mustang had purposely led past this place to bait him with gold. He tossed up the quartz. It flashed in a rosy streak and fell heavily into his palm — heavy with gold, thought Lee. Then he saw that Moonshine had disappeared. After he had caught the horse, then there would be time for the gold. He paused only to drag his belt still tighter about his hollow waist, and then stumbled off.

  Till mid-afternoon he reeled on the downpitch or labored with groans up the rise of those endless ridges until a voice sounded just over the next crest. It had the booming quality of an echo, and he imagined for a moment that it might be his own voice, for many times before he h
ad been startled by a sound and found that it was his own singing or talking as he walked in a dream. But, now, on the edge of the ridge appeared a burro with flopping ears and patient, sagging head. Looking up from the hollow the pack seemed as big as the beast, a burden monstrous in the sky, and Lee felt that every knob and projecting corner of the pack must speak of the provisions with which it was jammed. Lee pictured a man newly out of town, with a store of syrup, yellow cornmeal, snow-white flour, and bacon — oh, miracle among foods — bacon! There would be plenty of sugar for the coffee, black coffee with soul-enchanting breath, and there would be a small box of assorted cookies not yet consumed. But, above all, there must be a great store of tobacco of all kinds — half a dozen varieties of cigarettes, much tobacco for the pipe, and, perhaps, even a few cigars. His brain floated on a bright cloud of laughter, and his eyes watered. But bitter disappointment cleared the dimness away, for the first glance showed that the man had been long, long on the trail.

  Yet, even if no delicacies were left in his larder, how welcome a sight was that great hulking body, the flapping hat of soft felt, the blue shirt, dull with time and dirt, and a short pipe upside down between bearded lips. A winged angel would not have been so welcome to Lee as the sight of that pipe.

  He stood right against the skyline with a huge arm thrown up in greeting, and the wind parting his black beard. He shouted a greeting, a vast voice that flooded about Lee and made his own weakness seem tenfold greater. He waved his answer, and, struggling on, he stumbled and fell upon both hands. A heavy boot crunched on the gravel. An arm shot beneath him, and he was jerked erect.

  “What the devil?” said the man. “Now, what the devil?”

  “Sort of — lost my balance,” gasped out Lee.

  “Hmm,” muttered the other, “you sit down on that rock yonder, and I’ll fix you up some flapjacks. Damned if I ain’t out of bacon and coffee, but I got a sack of flour left and a bit of grease. What you need is something in your belly, m’young friend.”