by B. M. Bower
“She likes you fine—my mother,” Estan observed, as the two sauntered to the corral where Rabbit was stowing away as much secate as he could against future hunger. “Sometimes you come and stay longer. We not see so many peoples here. Nobody likes to cross desert when she’s hot like this. Too bad you must go now.”
Starr agreed with him and talked the usual small talk of the desert Places while he placed the saddle on Rabbit’s still sweaty back. He went away down the rocky trail with the sun shining full on his right cheek, and was presently swallowed up by the blank immensity of the land that looked level as a floor from a distance, but which was a network of small ridges and shallow draws and “dry washes” when one came to ride over it.
The trail was narrow and had many inconsequential twists and turns in it, as though the first man to travel that way had gone blind or dizzy and could not hold a straight line across the level. When an automobile, for instance, traveled that road, it was with many skiddings in the sand on the turns, which it must take circumspectly if the driver did not care for the rocky, uneven floor of the desert itself.
Just lately some one had actually preferred to make his own trail, if tracks told anything. Within half a mile of the Medina rancho Starr saw where an automobile had swerved sharply off the trail and had taken to the hard-packed sand of a dry arroyo that meandered barrenly off to the southeast. He turned and examined the trail over which he had traveled, saw that it offered no more discouragement to an automobile than any other bit of trail in that part of the country, and with another glance at the yellow ribbon of road before him, he also swerved to the southeast.
For a mile the machine had labored, twisting this way and that to avoid rocky patches or deep cuts where the spring freshets had dug out the looser soil. So far as Starr could discover there was nothing to bring a machine up here. The arroyo was as thousands of other arroyos in that country. The sides sloped up steeply, or were worn into perpendicular banks. It led nowhere in particular; it was not a short cut to any place that he knew of. The trail to Medina’s ranch was shorter and smoother, supposing Medina’s ranch were the objective point of the trip.
Starr could not see any sense in it, and that is why he followed the tortuous track to where the machine had stopped. That it had stood there for some time he knew by the amount of oil that had leaked down into the sand. He did not know for certain, since he did not know the oil-leaking habits of that particular car, but he guessed that it had stood there for a couple of hours at least before the driver had backed and turned around to retrace his way to the trail.
In these days of gasoline travel one need not be greatly surprised to meet a car, or see the traces of one, in almost any out-of-the-way spot where four wheels can possibly be made to travel. On the other hand, the man at the wheel is not likely to send his machine over rocks and through sand where the traction is poor, and across dry ditches and among greasewood, just for the fun of driving. There is sport with rod or gun to lure, or there is necessity to impel, or the driver is lost and wants to reach some point that looks familiar, or he is trying to dodge something or somebody.
Starr sat beside that grease spot in the sand and smoked a cigarette and studied the surrounding hills and tried to decide what had brought the car up here. Not sport, unless it was hunting of jack rabbits; and there were more jack rabbits out on the flat than here. There was no trout stream near, at least, none that was not more accessible from another point. To be sure, some tenderfoot tourist might have been told some yarn that brought him up here on a wild-goose chase. You can, thought Starr, expect any fool thing of a tourist. He remembered running across one that was trying between trains to walk across the mesa from Albuquerque to the Sandia mountains. It had been hard to convince that particular specimen that he was not within a mile or so of his goal, and that he would do well to reach the mountains in another three hours or so of steady walking. Compared with that, driving a car up this arroyo did not look so foolish.
But tourists did not invade this particular locality with their overconfident inexperience, and Starr did not give that explanation much serious thought. Instead he followed on up the narrowed gulch to higher ground, to see where men would be most likely to go from there. At the top he looked out upon further knobs and hollows and aimless depressions, just as he had expected. Half a mile or so away there drifted a thin spiral of smoke, from the kitchen stove of the Señora Medina, he guessed. But there was no other sign of human life anywhere within the radius of many miles, or, to be explicit, within the field of Starr’s vision.
He looked for footprints, but in a few minutes he gave up in disgust. The ridge he stood on stretched for miles, up beyond Medina’s home ranch and down past the Sommers’ ranch, five or six miles nearer town, and on to the railroad. And it was a rocky ridge if ever there was one; granite outcroppings, cobblestones, boulders, anything but good loose soil where tracks might be followed. A dog might have followed a trail there before the scent was baked out by blistering heat; but Starr certainly could not.
He stood looking across to where the smoke curled up into the intense Blue of the sky. If a man wanted to reach the Medina ranch by the most obscure route, he thought, this would be one way to get there. He went back to where the automobile had stood and searched there for some sign of those who had ridden this far. But if any man left that machine, he had stepped from the running board upon rock, and so had left no telltale print of his foot.
“And that looks mighty darn queer,” said Starr, “if it was just accidental. But if a fellow wanted to take to the rocks to cover his trail, why, he couldn’t pick a better place than this. She’s a dandy ridge and a dandy way to get up on her, if that’s what’s wanted.” Starr looked at his watch and gave up all hope of catching the next eastbound train, if that had really been his purpose. He lifted his hat and drew his fingers across his forehead where the perspiration stood in beads, resettled the hat at an angle to shade his face from the glare of the sun, ran two fingers cursorily between the cinch and Rabbit’s sweaty body, picked up the stirrup, thrust in his toe and eased himself up into the saddle; and his mind had not consciously directed a single movement.
“Well, they’ve left one mark behind ’em that fair hollers,” he stated, in so satisfied a tone that Rabbit turned his head and looked back at him inquiringly. Starr, you must know, was not given to satisfied tones when he and Rabbit were enduring the burden of heat and long miles. “And you needn’t give me that kinda look, neither. Take a look at them tire tracks, you ole knot-head. Them’s Silvertown cords, and they ain’t equipping jitneys with cord tires—not yet. Why, yo’re whole carcass ain’t worth the price uh one tire, let alone four, you old sheep. You show me the car in this country that’s sportin’ Silvertowns all around, and I’ll show you—”
Just what he would show, Starr did not say, because he did not know. But there was something there which might be called a mystery, and where there was mystery there was Starr, working tirelessly on the solution. This might be a trivial thing; but until he knew beyond all doubt that it was trivial, Starr pushed other matters, such as a young woman afraid of a horned toad, out of his mind that he might study the puzzle from all possible angles.
CHAPTER SIX
“DARN SUCH A COUNTRY!”
Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope, every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its barrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply, intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton floating aimlessly here and there. In a big, wild, unearthly way it was beautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined.
Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though the beauties of the desert l
and do not always appeal to alien eyes. She felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by which to measure any part of it. Also, she summed up all her resentment and her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehement sentence that lacked only one word of being a curse.
“Darn such a country!” is what she said, gritting the words between her teeth.
“See anything of ’em?” bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he was engaged in dipping up water with a tomato can and pouring it over his head, shivering ecstatically as the cold trickles ran down his neck.
Helen May glanced down at him with no softening of her eyes. Vic had lost nine goats out of the flock he had been set to herd, and he failed to manifest any great concern over the loss. On the contrary, he had told Helen May that he wished he could lose the whole bunch, and that he hoped coyotes had eaten them up, if they didn’t have sense enough to stay with the rest. There had been a heated argument, and Helen May had not felt sure of coming out of it a victor.
“No, I didn’t, and you’d better get back to work or the rest will be gone, too,” she called down to him petulantly. “It’s bad enough to lose nine, without letting the rest go.”
“Aw, ’s matter with yuh, anyway?” Vic retorted in a tone he thought would not reach her ears. “By gosh, you don’t want a feller to cool off, even! By gosh, you’d make a feller sleep with them darned goats if you could get away with it! Bu-lieve me, anybody can have my job that wants it. ’S hot enough to fry eggs in the shade, and she thinks, by hen, that I oughta stay out there—”
“Yes, I do. And if you want anything to eat tonight, Vic Stevenson, you get right back there with those goats! They’re going over the hill this minute. Hurry, Vic! For heaven’s sake, are you trying to take a bath in that can? Climb up that ridge and cut across and head them off! That old Billy’s headed for town again—hurry!”
“Aw for gosh sake!” grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the old hoe-handle he used for a staff. “What ridge?” He paused to thunder up at her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when he needs it most.
“That ridge before your face, chump,” Helen May informed him crossly. “If it comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I’ll take the goats! And if there’s any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I’d like to know where it is. The idea of expecting people to live in such a country! It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon’s surface. And,” she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, “it’s here, and I’m here. I can’t get away from it—that’s the dickens of it.” Then, because Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed at the incongruity of it all. “Me—me, here in the desert trying to raise goats! Can you beat that?”
She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavish dependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again. “You’d think,” she told the scenery for want of other companionship, “you’d think Vic was seventy-nine years old at the very least. Makes a difference whether he’s after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts to the top of Mount Wilson! I don’t believe that kid ever did wear his legs out having fun, and it’s a sure thing he’ll never wear them out working! Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps.”
Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring. Lower down, where the ridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that had cost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped out briskly at the head of the band. Helen May wondered what new depravity was in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in and confront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always to possess that animal.
Helen May did not know how vitally important it is to have a good dog at such work. She did not know that Billy and his band felt exactly like boys who have successfully eluded a too lax teacher, and that they would have yielded without argument to the bark of a trained sheep dog. She had set Vic a harder task than she realized; a task from which any experienced herder would have shrunk. In her ignorance she blamed Vic, and called him lazy and careless and a few other sisterly epithets which he did not altogether deserve.
She watched now, impatient because he was so long in crossing the gully; telling herself that he was trying to see how slow he could be, and that he did it just to be disagreeable and to irritate her—as if she were there of her own desire, and had bought those two hundred miserable goats to spite him. Harmony, as you must see, did not always dwell in Sunlight Basin.
Eventually Vic toiled up the far side of the gully, which was deep and as hot as an oven, and followed it down within rock-throwing distance of the goats. A well-aimed pebble struck Billy on the curve of one horn and halted him, the band huddling vacant-eyed behind him. Vic aimed and threw another, and Billy, turning his whiskered face upward, stared with resentful head-tossings and a defiant blat or two before he swerved back into the Basin, his band and Vic plodding after.
“Well, for a wonder!” Helen May ejaculated ungraciously, grudging Vic the small tribute of praise that was due him. But she was immediately ashamed of that, and told herself that it was pretty hard on the poor kid, and that after all he must hate the country worse than she did, even, which would certainly mean a good deal; and that she supposed he missed his boy chums just as much as she missed her friends, and found it just as hard to fit himself comfortably into a life for which he had no liking. Besides, it wasn’t his health that had shunted them both out here into the desert, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for treating him the way she did.
After that she decided that it was her business to find the nine goats that were lost. Vic certainly could not do both at once; and deep down in her heart Helen May knew that she was terribly afraid of Billy and would rather trudge the desert for hours under the hot sun than stay in the Basin watching the main flock. She wished that she could afford to hire a herder, but she shrunk from the expense. It seemed to her that she and Vic should be able to herd that one band, especially since there was nothing else for them to do out there except cook food and eat it.
Speaking of food, it seemed to take an enormous quantity to satisfy the hunger of two persons. Helen May was appalled at the insatiable appetite of Vic, who seemed never to have enough in his stomach. As for herself—well, she recalled the meal she had just eaten, and wondered how it could be possible for hunger to seize upon her so soon again. But even so, food could not occupy all of their time, and a two-room cabin does not take much keeping in order. They would simply be throwing away money if they hired a herder, and yet, how they both did loathe those goats!
She climbed back down the pinnacle, watching nervously for snakes and lizards and horned toads and such denizens of the desert. With a certain instinct for preparing against the worst, she took a two-quart canteen, such as soldiers carry, to the spring, and filled it and slung it over her shoulder. She went to the cabin and made a couple of sandwiches, and because she was not altogether inhuman she cut two thick slices of bread, spread them lavishly with jam, and carried them to Vic as a peace offering.
“I’m going to hunt those nasty brutes, Vic,” she cried from a safe distance. “Come here and get this jam sandwich, and lend me that stick you’ve got. And if I don’t get back by five, you start a fire.”
“Where you going to look? If you couldn’t see ’em from up there, I don’t see the use of hunting.” Vic was taking long steps towards the sandwich, and he stretched his sunburned face in that grin which might have made him famous in comedy had fate not set him down before his present ignoble task. “Yuh don’t want to go far,” he advised her perfunctorily. “We ought to have a couple of saddle horses. Why don’t yuh—”
“What would we feed them on? Besides we’ve got to save what money we’ve got, Vic. We can walk till these insec
ts grow wool enough to pay for something to ride on.”
“Hair, you mean. I can get a gentle horse from that Mexican kid, Luis. He good as offered us the one—that I borrowed—” Vic was giving too much attention to the jam sandwich to argue very coherently.
“There’s that old Billy starting off again; you watch him, Vic. Don’t let him get a start, or goodness knows where he’ll head for next. We can’t keep a horse, I tell you. We need all this grass for the goats.”
“Oh, darn the goats!”
In her heart Helen May quite agreed with the sentiment, but she could not consistently betray that fact to Vic. She therefore turned her back upon him, walking down the trail that led out of the Basin to the main trail a mile away, the trail which was the link connecting them with civilization of a sort.
Here passed the depressed, dust-covered stage three times a week. Here, in a macaroni box mounted on a post, they received and posted their mail. Helen May had indulged herself in a subscription to the Los Angeles daily paper that had always been left at their door every morning, the paper which Peter had read hastily over his morning mush. Every paper brought a pang of homesickness for the flower-decked city of her birth, but she felt as though she could not have kept her sanity without it. The full-page bargain ads she read hungrily. The weekly announcements of the movie shows, the news, the want columns—these were at once her solace and her torment; and if you have ever been exiled, you know what that means.
Here, too, she left her shopping list and money for the stage driver, who bought what she needed and left the goods at the foot of the post, and what money remained in a buckskin bag in the macaroni box.
An obliging stage driver was he, a tobacco chewing, red-faced, red-whiskered stage driver who nagged at his four horses incessantly and never was known to beat one of them; a garrulous, soft-hearted stage driver who understood very well how lonely these two young folks must be, and who therefore had some moth-eaten joke ready for whoever might be waiting for him at the macaroni box. Whenever Helen May apologized for the favor she must ask of him—which was every time she handed him a list—the stage driver invariably a nasal kind of snort, spat far out over the wheel, and declared pettishly: