Desert Heritage

by Zane Grey

  “Remember what Snap said?” queried Hare suddenly. “One man to kill Dene! Therefore one man to kill Holderness! That would break the power of this band.”

  “Ah, you’ve said it,” replied Dave, raising a taut arm. “It’s a oneman job. Damn Snap! He could have done it, if he hadn’t gone to the bad. But it won’t be easy. I tried to get Holderness. He was wise, and his men politely said they had enjoyed my call, but I wasn’t to come again.”

  “One man to kill Holderness,” repeated Hare.

  August Naab cast at the speaker one of his far-seeing glances, then he shook himself, wrestled himself, as if to throw off the grip of something hard and inevitable. “I’m still master here,” he said, and his voice showed the subdual of his passions. “I give up Silver Cup and my stock. Maybe that will content Holderness.”

  Some days went by, at the oasis, pleasantly for Hare, as he rested from his long exertions. Naab’s former cheer and that of his family reasserted itself once the decision was made, and the daily life went on as usual. The sons worked in the fields by day, and in the evening played at pitching horseshoes on the bare circle where the children romped. The women went on baking, sewing, and singing. August Naab’s prayers were more fervent than ever, and he even prayed for the soul of the man who had robbed him. Mescal’s cheeks soon rounded out to their old contour and her eyes shone with a shyer, happier light than Hare had ever seen there. The races between Silvermane and Black Bolly were renewed on the long stretch under the wall, and Mescal forgot that she had once acknowledged the superiority of the gray. The cottonwoods showered silken floss till the cabins and grass were white; the birds returned to the oasis; the sun kissed warm color into the cherries, and the distant noise of the river seemed like the humming of a swarm of bees.

  “Here, Jack,” said August Naab, one morning, “get a spade and come with me. There’s a break somewhere in the ditch.”

  Hare went with him out along the fence by the alfalfa fields, and around the corner of red wall toward the irrigating dam.

  “Well, Jack, I suppose you’ll be asking me for Mescal one of these days,” said Naab.

  “Yes,” replied Hare.

  “There’s a little story to tell you about Mescal, when the day comes.”

  “Tell it now.”

  “No. Not yet. I’m glad you found her. I never knew her to be so happy, not even when she was a child. But somehow there’s a better feeling between her and my womenfolk. The old antagonism toward Mescal is gone. Well, well, life is so. I pray that things may turn out well for you and her. But I fear . . . I seem to see . . . Hare, I’m a poor man once more. I can’t do for you what I would like. Still we’ll see, we’ll hope.”

  Thus he talked on, being in one of the moods when his thoughts flamed into speech, and Hare had again a glimpse into the bottomless well of this Mormon’s kindness, where hope sprang eternally. His was a heart unembittered by sorrow for an outlawed son, nor was it open to hatred of evil men.

  Work on the washed-out bank of the ditch had not progressed far when Naab raised his head as if listening.

  “Did you hear anything?” he asked.

  “No,” replied Hare.

  “The roar of the river is heavy here. Maybe I was mistaken. I thought I heard shots.” Then he went on spading clay into the break, but he stopped every moment or so, uneasily, as if he could not get rid of some perturbing thought. Suddenly he let go of the spade and lightning shot from his eyes.

  “Judith! Judith . . . here!” he called. Wheeling with a premonition of calamity, Hare saw the girl running along the wall toward them. Her face was the hue of a corpse; she wrung her hands and her cries rose above the roar of the river. Naab sprang toward her and Hare ran at his heels.

  “Father! Father!” she panted. “Come . . . quick . . . the rustlers! The rustlers! Snap! Dene! Oh, hurry! They’ve killed Dave . . . they’ve got Mescal!”

  Death itself shuddered through Hare’s veins, and then a raging flood of fire. He bounded forward to be flung back by Naab’s arm.

  “Fool! Would you throw away your life in mad haste? Go slowly. We’ll slip through the fields, under the trees.”

  Sick and cold, Hare hurried by Naab’s side around the wall and into the alfalfa. There were moments when his legs bent under him; others when he could have run wildly, and then Judith’s words inflamed in him a horrible lust to claw, to rend, to kill, transforming him into a tiger.

  They got out of the fields and advanced more cautiously into the grove. The screaming and wailing of women added certainty to their doubt and dread.

  “I see only the women . . . the children . . . no . . . there’s a man . . . Zeke,” said Hare, bending low to gaze under the branches.

  “Go slow,” muttered Naab.

  “The rustlers rode off . . . after Mescal . . . she’s gone!” panted Judith.

  Hare was so mystified and torn by the possibility implied in the half-crazed girl’s speech that he cast caution to the winds and ran forward into the glade. Naab’s heavy steps thudded behind him.

  In the corner of the porch scared and stupefied children huddled in a heap. George and Billy bent over Dave, who sat whitefaced against the steps. A reddish foam showed about his lips and through the fingers that he pressed to his breast oozed blood. Zeke was trying to calm the women.

  “My God! Dave!” cried Hare. “You’re not hard hit? Don’t say it!”

  “Hard hit . . . Jack . . . old fellow,” replied Dave, with a pale smile. Through his white clammy skin showed brown freckles that Hare had never seen before.

  “My son! My son!” groaned August Naab after one look at him.

  “Dad . . . I got Chance and Culver . . . there they lie in the road . . . not bungled, either.”

  Hare saw the inert, limp forms of two men lying near the gate; one rested on his face, arm outstretched with a Colt gripped in stiff hand, the other on his back, his spurs deep in the ground, as if he dug them there with his last stretch.

  August Naab and Zeke carried the injured man into the house. The women and children followed, and Hare, with Billy and George, entered last.

  “Dad . . . I’m shot clean through . . . low down,” said Dave as they laid him on a couch. “It’s just as well . . . as anyone . . . somebody had to . . . start this fight.”

  Naab got the children and the girls out of the room. The women were silent now, except Dave’s wife, who clung to him with low moans. He smiled upon all with a quick intent smile, then he held out a hand to Hare.

  “Jack, we got . . . to be . . . good friends. Don’t forget . . . that . . . when you meet . . . Holderness. He shot me . . . from behind Chance and Culver . . . and after I fell . . . I killed them both . . . trying to get him. You . . . won’t hang up . . . your gun . . . again . . . will you?”

  Hare wrung the cold hand clasping his so feebly. “No! Dave, no!” Then he fled from the room. For an hour he stood on the porch waiting in dumb misery. George and Zeke came noiselessly out, followed by their father.

  “It’s all over, Hare.” Another tragedy had passed by this man of the desert, and left his strength unshaken, but his deadly quiet and the iron-set gloom of his face were more terrible to see than any grief.

  “Father, and you, Hare, come out into the road,” said George.

  Another motionless form lay beyond Chance and Culver. It was that of a slight man, flat on his back, arms wide, long black hair in the dust. Under the white level brow the face had been crushed into a bloody curve.

  “Dene,” burst from Hare in a whisper.

  “Killed by a horse!” exclaimed August Naab. “Ah! What horse?”

  “Silvermane,” replied George.

  “Who rode my horse . . . tell me . . . quick!” cried Hare in a frenzy.

  “It was Mescal. Listen. Let me tell you how it all happened. I was out at the forge when I heard a bunch of horses coming up the lane. I wasn’t packing my gun, but I ran anyway. When I got to the house, there was Dave facing Snap, Dene, and a bunch of ru
stlers. I saw Chance at first, but not Holderness. There must have been twenty men.

  “‘I came after Mescal, that’s what,’ Snap was saying.

  “‘You can’t have her,’ was Dave’s reply.

  “‘We’ll shore take her, an’ we want Silvermane, too,’ said Dene.

  “‘So you’re a horse thief as well as a rustler?’ asked Dave.

  “‘Naab, I ain’t in any mind to fool. Snap wants the girl, an’ I want Silvermane, an’ that damned spy that come back to life.’

  “Then Holderness spoke from the back of the crowd . . . ‘Naab, you’d better hurry, if you don’t want the house burned!’

  “Dave drew and Holderness fired from behind his men. Dave fell, raised up, and shot Chance and Culver, then dropped his gun.

  “With that the women in the house began to scream, and Mescal ran out saying she’d go with Snap if they’d do no more harm.

  “‘All right,’ said Snap, ‘get a horse, hurry . . . hurry!’

  “Then Dene dismounted and went toward the corral saying . . . ‘I shore want Silvermane.’

  “Mescal reached the gate ahead of Dene. ‘Let me get Silvermane. He’s wild . . . he doesn’t know you . . . he’ll kick you if you go near him.’ She dropped the bars and went up to the horse. He was rearing and snorting. She coaxed him down, and then stepped up on the fence to untie him. When she had untied, she leaped off the fence to his back, screaming as she hit him with the halter. Silvermane jumped with a wild snort, and in three jumps he was going like a bullet. Dene tried to check him, and was knocked twenty feet. He was raising up when the stallion ran over him. He never moved again. Once in the lane Silvermane got going . . . Lord, how he did run! Mescal hung low over his neck like an Indian. He was gone in a cloud of dust before Snap and the rustlers knew what had happened. Snap came to first and, shrieking and waving his gun, spurred his pinto down the lane. The rest of the rustlers galloped after him.”

  August Naab placed a sympathetic hand on Hare’s shaking shoulder.

  “You see, lad, things are never so bad as they seem at first. Snap might as well try to catch a bird as Silvermane.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mescal’s far out in front by this time. Depend on it, Hare,” went on Naab. “That trick was the cunning Indian of her. She’ll ride Silvermane into White Sage tomorrow night. Then she’ll hide from Snap. The bishop will hide her. Mormons have hidden girls before.”

  Thus August Naab stripped from Hare unbearable fears.

  “As for seeking her . . . wait,” he continued. “She’ll be safer for the present in White Sage. We must bury these men. Tomorrow . . . my son. Then . . . .”

  “What then?” Hare straightened up.

  Unutterable pain darkened the clear, gray flame in the Mormon’s gaze. For an instant his face worked spasmodically, only to stiffen into a stony mask. Once more the old spiritual war had waged in his mind to fall at the last before primal instinct.

  “The time has come,” said George Naab.

  “Yes,” replied his father harshly.

  A great calm settled over Hare; his blood ceased to race, his mind to riot; in August Naab’s one momentous word he knew the old man had found himself. It signified that this desert demanded more of men than self-defense. It taught its wild creatures and its men to strike first, or to slink away in the shadows, always lean, always hopeless, until a stronger will ended life.

  “Zeke, hitch up a team,” said August Naab. “No . . . wait a moment. Here comes Paiute. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

  Paiute appeared on the zigzag cliff trail, driving a burro down at dangerous speed.

  “He’s sighted Silvermane and the rustlers,” suggested George, as the shepherd approached.

  Naab translated the excited Indian’s mingling of Navajo and Paiute languages to mean just what George had said, with more added. “Snap ahead of riders . . . Silvermane far, far ahead of Snap . . . running fast . . . damn!”

  “Mescal’s pushing him hard to make the sand strip,” said George.

  “Paiute . . . three fires tonight . . . Look-Out Point!” This order meant the execution of August Naab’s hurry signal for the Navajos, and, after he gave it, he waved the Indian toward the cliff, and lapsed into a silence that no one dared to break.

  Naab consigned the bodies of the rustlers to the famous cemetery under the red wall. He laid Dene in grave thirty-one, which number the outlaw had so facetiously designated as the last resting place of Dene’s spy. Chance and Culver he buried together. It was noteworthy that no Mormon rites were conferred on Culver, once a Mormon in good standing, nor were any prayers spoken over the open graves.

  What did August Naab intend to do? That was the question in Hare’s mind as he left the quiet house. It was a silent day, warm as summer, although the sun was overcast with gray clouds; the birds were still in the trees; there was no bray of burro or clarion call of peacock; even the hum of the river rested in silence. Hare wandered over the farm and down the red lane, meditating on the question. Naab’s few words had been pregnant with meaning; the cold gloom, so foreign to his nature, had been even more impressive; the order to signal for his Navajo friends was all menacing. His had been the revolt of the meek. The gentle, the loving, the administering, the spiritual uses of his life had failed.

  In that moment, thinking of Naab’s tragical life with its loss of son after son to violent ends, his first-born and best loved to outlawry, it seemed to Hare that the Mormon had been blind in his fanatical religion to expect any less from the desert. The man’s whole life had been a striving for the ideal under conditions in which he could not have survived a year but for his wonderful prowess. Yet he had gone in hoping, praying, believing.

  The change in Hare which he now saw in a light of sharpened intelligence, in a clarifying perspective, like the clearing of a dust cloud from a stretch he had to cross, he attributed to what he had seen and suffered and lived on this desert. It was as if he had been there all his life; he had to think hard to remember his old self, as dead always, as if he had never awakened in the White Sage trail to August Naab’s cheery call. What the desert had done to him was what it meant; it had to engender in him its elements to fight, to resist, to survive. If he, a stranger of a few years, had to be molded in the flaming furnace of its fiery life, what then must be the cast of August Naab, born on the desert, and sleeping five nights out of seven on the sands for sixty years?

  The desert! Hare trembled as he grasped all its meaning in a single act of thought. Then he slowly resolved that meaning. There were the measureless distances to narrow the eye and teach restraint; the untrodden trails, the shifting sands, the thorny brakes, the broken lava to drag and pierce the flesh; the heights and depths, unscalable and unplumbed, to meet the greatest effort with eventual defeat. And over them all flamed the sun, red and burning The parched plants of the desert fought for life, growing far apart, sending enormous roots deep to pierce the sand and split the rock for moisture, arming every leaf with a barbed thorn or poisoned sap, never thriving and ever thirsting.

  The creatures of the desert endured the sun and lived without water, and were at endless war. The hawk had a keener eye than his fellow of more fruitful lands, a crueler beak, greater spread of wings, and sharper claws of deeper curve. Because there was so little for him to eat, a rabbit now, a rock rat then, Nature made his swoop like lightning and it never missed its aim. The gaunt wolf never failed in his sure scent, in his silent stalk. The lizard flicked an invisible tongue into the heart of a flower, and the bee he caught stung with a poisoned sting. The battle of life went to the strong.

  So the desert trained each individual member of its wild denizens to survive. No eye of the desert but burned with the flame of the sun! To kill or to escape death—that was the dominant motive. To fight barrenness and heat—that was stern enough, but each creature must fight his fellow.

  What then of the men who drifted into the desert and survived? They must of necessity endure the wind and
heat, the drought and famine; they must grow lean and hard, keen-eyed and silent. The weak, the humble, the sacrificing must be winnowed from among them. As each man developed, he took on some aspect of the desert—Holderness had the amber clearness of its distances in his eyes, its deceit in his soul; August Naab, the magnificence of the desert pine in his giant form, its strength in his heart; Snap Naab, the cast of the hawk beak in his face, its cruelty in his nature. But all shared alike in the common element of survival—ferocity. August Naab had subdued his to the promptings of a Christ-like spirit, yet did not his very energy, his wonderful tirelessness, and his implacable will to achieve, his power to resist, partake of that fierceness? Moreover, after many struggles, he had been overcome by the desert’s call for blood. The mystery of him was no longer a mystery. Always in those moments of revelation that he claimed not to believe in, he had seen himself as faithful in the end to the desert.

  Hare’s slumbers that night were broken and dreamful. He dreamed of a great gray horse leaping in the sky from cloud to cloud with the lightning and the thunder under his hoofs, the storm winds sweeping from his silver mane; he dreamed of Mescal’s brooding eyes and they were dark gateways of the desert open only to him, and he entered to chase the alluring stars deep into the purple distance. He dreamed of himself waiting in serene confidence for some unknown thing to pass. He awakened late in the morning and found the house hushed. The day wore on in a repose unstirred by breeze or sound, in accord with the mourning of August Naab. At noon a solemn procession wended its slow course to the shadow of the red cliff, and as solemnly returned.

  Then a single long-drawn piercing Indian whoop broke the midday lull. It heralded the approach of the Navajos. In single file they rode up the lane, and, when the falcon-eyed Eschtah dismounted in the dignity of his war bonnet before his white friend, the line of his warriors still turned the corner of the red wall. Next to the chieftain rode Scarbreast, the grim warlord of the Navajos. His painted and plumed followers trailed into the grove. Their sinewy bronze bodies, almost naked, glistened wet from the river. Full a hundred strong were they, a silent, lean-limbed desert troop.