Desert Heritage

by Zane Grey

  “Listen,” she whispered, and leaned against him. “I never said it . . . . I couldn’t say it. I wasn’t free . . . but now I am!” A fresh breeze bore the boom of the river. She caught her breath quickly: “Now I can say it . . . I love you! I love you! Good bye!”

  She kissed him and broke from his clasp. Then silently, like a shadow, with the white dog close beside her, she disappeared in the darkness of the river trail.

  She was gone before he came out of his bewilderment. He rushed down the trail; he called her name. The gloom had swallowed her, and only the echo of his voice made answer.

  Chapter Twelve

  When a thought came clear of the jumble in Hare’s mind, he halted irresolute. For Mescal’s sake he must not appear to have had any part in her headlong flight, or any knowledge of it.

  With stealthy footsteps he traversed the distance to the cottonwoods, stole under the gloomy shade, felt his way to a point beyond the twinkling lights, then, peering through the gloom until assured he was safe from observation, and taking the dark side of the house, he gained the hall, and his room. All in a fever and cold sweat, at once he threw himself on his bed, and endeavored to compose himself, to quiet his vibrating nerves, to still the triumphant bell beat of his heart. For a while all his being swung to the palpitating mounting consciousness of joy—Mescal had taken her freedom. She had evaded the swoop of the hawk.

  While Hare lay there, trying to gather his shattered force, the merry sound of voices and the music of an accordion hummed from the big living room next to his. Presently heavy boots thumped on the floor of the hall, then a hand rapped on his door.

  “Jack, are you there?” called August Naab.

  “Yes.”

  “Come along then.”

  Hare rose, opened the door, and followed August. The room was bright with lights, the table was set, and the Naabs, large and small, were standing expectantly. As Hare found a place behind them, Snap Naab entered with his wife. She was as pale as if she were in her shroud. Hare caught Mother Ruth’s pitying subdued glance as she drew the frail little woman to her side. When August Naab began fingering his Bible, the whispering ceased.

  “Why don’t they fetch her in?” he questioned.

  “Judith, Esther, bring her in!” said Mother Mary, calling into the hallway.

  Quick footsteps skipped up the hall, and the girls burst in impetuously, exclaiming: “Mescal’s not there!”

  “Where is she, then?” demanded August Naab, going to the door. “Mescal!”

  Succeeding his authoritative summons only the cheery sputter of the wood fire broke the silence.

  “She hadn’t put on her white frock,” went on Judith.

  “Her buckskins aren’t hanging where they always are,” continued Esther.

  August Naab laid his Bible on the table. “I always feared it,” he said simply.

  “She’s gone!” cried Snap Naab. He ran into the hall, into Mescal’s room, and returned, trailing the white wedding dress. “The time we thought she spent to put this on she’s been . . . .”

  He choked over the words, and sank into a chair, face convulsed, hands shaking, weak in the grip of a grief that he had never before known. Suddenly he flung the dress into the fire. His wife fell to the floor in a dead faint. Then the desert hawk showed his claws. His hands tore at the close scarf around his throat as if to liberate a fury that was stifling him; his face lost all semblance to anything human. He began to howl, to rave, to curse when his father circled him with iron arm and dragged him from the room.

  The children were whimpering, the girls weeping, the wives lamenting. The quiet men searched the house and yard and corrals and fields. But they found no sign of Mescal. After long hours the excitement subsided and all sought their beds.

  Morning disclosed the facts of Mescal’s flight. She had dressed for the trail; a knapsack was missing and food enough to fill it; Wolf was gone; Noddle was not in his corral; the peon slave had not slept in his shack. There were moccasin tracks and burro tracks and dog tracks in the sand at the river crossing, and one of the boats was gone. This boat was not moored to the opposite shore. Questions arose. Had the boat sunk? Had the fugitives crossed safely or had they drifted into the cañon? Dave Naab rode out along the river and saw the boat, a mile below the rapids, bottom side up and lodged on a sandbar.

  “She got across, and then set the boat loose,” said August. “That’s the Indian of her. If she went up on the cliffs to the Navajos, maybe we’ll find her. If she went into the Painted Desert . . . .” A grave shake of his shaggy head completed his sentence.

  Morning also disclosed Snap Naab once more in the clutch of his demon, drunk and unconscious, lying like a log on the porch of his cottage.

  “This means ruin to him,” said his father. “He had one chance . . . he was mad over Mescal, and, if he had got her, he might have conquered his thirst for rum.”

  He gave orders for the sheep to be driven up on the plateau, and for his sons to ride out to the cattle range, and bade Hare to pack and get in readiness to accompany him to the Navajo cliffs, there to search for Mescal.

  The river was low, as the spring thaws had not yet set in, and the crossing promised none of the hazard so menacing at a later period. Billy Naab rowed across with the saddle and packs. Then August had to crowd the lazy burros into the water. Silvermane went in as he did everything, with a rush, and Charger took to the river like an old duck. August and Jack sat in the stern of the boat, while Billy handled the oars. They crossed swiftly and safely. The three burros were then loaded, two with packs, the other with a heavy water bag.

  “See there,” said August, pointing to tracks in the sand. The imprints of little moccasins reassured Hare, for he had feared a possibility suggested by the upturned boat. “Perhaps it’ll be better if I never find her,” continued Naab. “If I bring her back, Snap’s as likely to kill her as to marry her. But I must try to find her. Only what to do with her . . . .”

  “Give her to me,” interrupted Jack.

  “Hare!”

  “I love her!”

  Naab’s stern face relaxed. “Well, I’m beat. Though I don’t see why you should be different from all the others. It was that time you spent with her on the plateau. I thought you too sick to think of a woman.”

  “Mescal cares for me,” said Hare.

  “Ah! That accounts. Hare, did she . . . did you play me fair?”

  “We tried to, though we couldn’t help loving.”

  “She would have married Snap but for you.”

  “Yes. But I couldn’t help that. You brought me out here, and saved my life. I know what I owe you. Mescal meant to marry your son when I left for the range last fall. I renounced every hope, except to think of her. But she’s a true woman and could not marry him. August Naab, if we ever find her, will you marry her to him . . . now?”

  “That depends. Did you know she intended to run?”

  “I never dreamed of it. I learned it only at the last moment. I met her on the river trail.”

  “You should have stopped her.”

  Hare maintained silence.

  “You should have told me,” went on Naab.

  “I couldn’t. I’m only human.”

  “Well, well, I’m not blaming you, Hare. I had hot blood once. But I’m afraid the desert will not be large enough for you and Snap. She’s pledged to him. You can’t change the Mormon Church. For the sake of peace I’d give you Mescal, if I could. Snap will either have her or kill her. I’m going to hunt this desert in advance of him, because he’ll trail her like a hound. It would be better to marry her to him than to see her dead.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “Hare, your nose is on a blood scent, like a wolf ’s. I can see . . . . I’ve always seen . . . well, remember, I’m Snap’s father and your friend. It’s man to man between you now.”

  All the while during this talk they were winding under the bluff of Echo Cliffs, gradually climbing, and working up to a lev
el with the desert, which they presently attained at a point near the head of the cañon. The trail swerved to the left, following the base of the cliffs. The tracks of Noddle and Wolf were plainly visible in the dust. Hare felt that if they ever led out into the immense airy colored space of the desert all hope of finding Mescal must be abandoned. This was his first ride on the Painted Desert side of the cañon, and now the strange call of something evermore about to be came on the wisps of dusty wind, and the rustling silken streams of sand.

  They trailed the tracks of the dog and burro to Bitter Seeps, a shallow oozing spring of alkali, and there lost all trace of them. The path up the cliffs to the Navajo ranges was bare, time-worn in solid rock, and showed only the imprint of age. Desertward the ridges of shale, the washes of copper earth, baked in the sun, gave no sign of the fugitives’ course. August Naab shrugged his broad shoulders and pointed his horse to the cliff. It was dusk when they surmounted it. The fragrance of juniper and cedar and white sage, striking Hare fully as he gained the top, vividly recalled the plateau, the memorable days with Mescal, tending the sheep, watching the sun set, listening to the wind in the cedars.

  They camped in the lee of an uplifting crag. When the wind died down, the night was no longer unpleasantly cool, and Hare, finding August Naab uncommunicative and sleepy, strolled along the rim of the cliff, as he had been wont to do in the sheepherding days. He could scarcely dissociate them from the present, for the bittersweet smell of tree and bush, the almost inaudible sigh of breeze, the opening and shutting of the great white stars in the blue dome, the silence, the sense of the invisible void beneath him—all were the same creative thought-provoking parts of that past of which nothing could ever be forgotten. The preceding weeks of enforced illness, wherein his reflection had centered around Mescal, had left scarce opportunity for his lonesome habit of watching and listening, formed on plateau and range, but now it reasserted itself, his glance seemed to pierce the gloom and rend the desert shadows, and his ear filled with the silence.

  But it was a silence that rewarded a trained sensitive ear. It broke to far distant and faint sounds, to the weathering of the cliff, to mourning wolf or moan of wind in a splintered crag. Then he heard a cry. Weird and low, it wailed up from the desert, winding along the hollow trail, freeing itself in the wide air, and dying away. He had often heard the scream of lion and squall of wildcat, and barks and yelps of other desert beasts, but this sound was one of the strange cries August Naab had told him he could hear, one of the inexplicable cries of cañon and desert night. Many lonely vigils had he kept on the ranges, and, on some of them, when his ear was like his mood, listening, sentinel-like for wild cries, he had been frozen by a sound that had no name, by something that spoke to his spirit. In the light of day when he remembered, he had thought it imagination. He also saw visions in the purple distances of the desert. What of the Ghost Mountains, deep blue at dawn, lilac in the glare of light, red at sunset? Yet the mountains were not really there. At night from the rim of one of these lofty walls of the desert, the depths were a black moving marshalling world of shifting shadows and specter. But it was only space wrapped in darkness. He heard mocking echoes in the cañons, singing and sighing to the cedars, voices in the night, lifting on the wind.

  And that which had moved him wafted up again, so low, so unreal, that it seemed a cry in a dream, the something evermore about to be had spoken. Or was it Mescal, lost in the desert, calling him with her spirit? Or was it both? Baffled by this fugitive cry, which he strained to hear again, and failed, he shook himself impatiently and turned for camp, striving to assert once more his practical, unemotional self. But no ready laugh came; another epoch in his regeneration had closed; there was a communion between him and the silence and the night; he could not live under the open stars in the face of the wind, or the heights, among the solitudes, and not feel the things he could not know.

  Daylight revealed Echo Cliffs to be of vastly greater range than the sister plateau across the river. The roll of cedar level, the heave of craggy ridge, the dip of white sage valley gave this side a diversity widely differing from the two steps of the Vermilion tableland. August Naab followed a trail leading back toward the river. For the most part thick cedars hid the surroundings from Hare’s view; occasionally, however, he had a backward glimpse from a high point, or a wide prospect below, where the trail overlooked an oval hemmed-in valley.

  About midday August Naab brushed through a thicket, and came abruptly on a declivity. He turned to his companion with a wave of his hand.

  “The Navajo camp,” he said. “Eschtah has lived there for I don’t know how many years. It’s the only permanent Navajo camp I know. These Indians are nomads. Most of them live wherever the sheep lead them. This plateau ranges for a hundred miles, farther than any white man knows, and everywhere, in the valleys and green nooks, will be found Navajo hogans. That’s why we may never find Mescal.”

  Hare’s gaze traveled down over the tips of cedar and crag to a pleasant vale, dotted with round mound-like white-streaked hogans, from which lazy floating columns of blue smoke curled upward. Mustangs and burros and sheep browsed on the white patches of grass. Bright red blankets blazed on the cedar branches. There was slow colorful movement of Indians, passing in and out of their homes. The scene brought irresistibly to Hare the thought of summer, of long warm afternoons, of leisure that took no stock of time.

  On the way down the trail they encountered a flock of sheep driven by a little Navajo boy on a brown burro. It was difficult to tell which was the more surprised, the huge-eared burro that stood stockstill, or the boy who first kicked and pounded his shaggy steed, and then jumped off and ran with black locks flying. Farther down, Indian girls started up from their tasks, and darted silently into the shade of the cedars. August Naab whooped when he reached the valley, and Indian braves appeared, to cluster around him, shake his hand and Hare’s, and lead them toward the center of the encampment.

  The hogans where these desert savages dwelt were all alike; only the chief ’s was larger. From without it resembled a mound of clay with a few white logs, half embedded, shining against the brick red. August Naab drew aside a blanket hanging over a door, and entered, beckoning his companion to follow. Inured as Hare had become to the smell and smart of wood smoke, for a moment he could not see, or scarcely breathe, so thick was the atmosphere. A fire, the size of which attested the desert Indian’s love of warmth, blazed in the middle of the hogan, and sent much of its smoke upward through a round hole in the roof. Eschtah, with blanket over his shoulders, lean black head bent, sat near the fire with the many members of his family at various occupations near him. He noted the entrance of his visitors, but immediately resumed his meditative posture, and appeared not to be aware of their presence.

  Hare imitated August’s example, sitting down and speaking no word. His eyes, however, roved discreetly to and fro. Eschtah’s three wives presented great differences in age and appearance. The eldest was a toothless, wrinkled, parchment-skinned old hag who sat sightless before the fire; the next was a solid square squaw who engaged herself in the task of combing a naked, little boy’s hair with a comb made of stiff thin roots tied tightly in a round bunch. If the youngster’s action and grimaces were matters to judge from, this combing process was not pleasant. The third wife, much younger, had a comely face, and long braids of black hair, of which, evidently, she was proud. She leaned on her knees over a flat slab of rock, and holding in her hands a long oval stone, she rolled and mashed corn into a meal. There were young braves, handsome in their bronzeskinned way, bands binding their straight thick hair, silver rings in their ears, silver bracelets on their wrists, silver buttons on their moccasins. There were girls who looked up from their blanket weaving with shy curiosity, and then turned to their frames strung with long threads and plied nimble fingers, slipped the wool-carrying needles in and out, making the colored strips grow. One of these Navajo girls had the same dark level brows, hair, and brown skin as Mescal, and resembl
ed her, too, though she was not so small and sleek of head, and slender and graceful of form. Then there were younger boys and girls, all bright-eyed and curious, and babies sleeping on blankets. Where the walls and ceiling were not covered with feathered bonnets, beaded buckskin garments, weapons and blankets, Hare saw the white wood ribs of the hogan structure. It was a work of art, this circular, clean house of forked logs and branches, interwoven into a dome, arched and strong, and all covered outside and cemented with clay.

  At a touch of August’s hand Hare fixed his attention on the old chief, and awaited his speech. It came with the uplifting of Eschtah’s head, and the offering of his hand in the white man’s salute. August’s replies were slow and labored; he could not speak the Navajo language fluently, but he understood it very well and his translation to Hare was free and literal.

  “The White Prophet is welcome,” was the chief ’s greeting. “Does he come for sheep or braves or to honor the Navajo in his home?”

  “Eschtah, he seeks the Flower of the Desert,” replied August Naab. “Mescal has left him. Her trail leads to the bitter waters under the cliff, and then is as a bird’s.”

  “The desert eagle’s fledgling has flown to the free crags. Eschtah is old and wise . . . he knows . . . he has waited, yet Mescal has not come to him.”

  “She has not been here?”

  “Mescal’s shadow has not gladdened the Navajo’s door.”

  “She has climbed the crags or wandered into the cañons. The white father loves her . . . he must find her.”

  “Eschtah’s braves and mustangs are for his friend’s use. Eschtah’s friendship is not light . . . he will find Mescal if she is not as the perfume of the flower of her name, blown far on the winds. The Navajo will find her if she is not as the grain of drifting sand. But is the White Prophet wise in his years? Eschtah has seen the summers of three warriors, his word is wisdom. Let the Flower of the Desert take root in the soil of her forefathers.”