by Grey, Zane
At sunset the old chief came to Adam, somber and grave, but with dignity and kindness tempering the seriousness of his aspect. He spoke the language of his people.
“White man, you are of the brood of the eagle. Your heart is the heart of an Indian. Take my daughter Oella as your wife.”
Long had Adam feared this blow, and now it had fallen. He had tried to pay his debt, but it could not be paid.
“No, chief, the white man cannot marry Oella. He has blood upon his hands—a price on his head. Someday—he might have to hang for his crime. He cannot be dishonest with the Indian girl who saved him.”
Perhaps the chief had expected that reply, but his inscrutable face showed no feeling. He made one of his slow, impressive gestures—a wave of his hand, indicating great distance and time; and it meant that Adam was to go.
Adam dropped his head. That decree was irrevocable, and he knew it was just. While he packed for a long journey twilight stole down upon the Indian encampment. Adam knew, when he faced Oella in the shadow of the palms, that she had been told. Was this the Indian maiden who had been so shy, so strange? No, this seemed a woman of full, heaving breast, whose strong, dark face grew strained, whose magnificent eyes, level and piercing, searched his soul. How blind he had been! All about her seemed eloquent of woman’s love. His heart beat with quick, heavy throbs.
“Oella, your father has ordered me away,” said Adam. “I am an outcast. I am hunted. If I made you my wife it might be to your shame and sorrow.”
“Stay. Oella is not afraid. We will hide in the canyons,” she said.
“No. I have sinned. I have blood on my hands. But, Oella, I am not dishonorable … I will not cheat you.” “Take me,” she cried, and the soft, deep-toned, passionate voice shook Adam’s heart. She would share his wanderings.
“Good-bye, Oella,” he said, huskily. And he strode forth to drive his burro out into the lonely, melancholy desert night.
Chapter
XII
The second meeting between Adam and the prospector Dis-mukes occurred at Tecopah, a mining camp in the Mohave Desert.
The mining camp lay in a picturesque valley where green and grey growths marked the course of the gravel-lined creek, and sandy benches spread out to dark, rocky slopes, like lava, that heaved away in the bleak ranges.
It was in March, the most colorful season in the Mohave, that Adam arrived at Tecopah to halt on a grassy bench at the outskirts of the camp. A little spring welled up here and trickled down to the creek. It was drinking water celebrated among desert men, who had been known to go out of their way to drink there. The telltale ears of Adam’s burros advised him of the approach of someone, and he looked up from his camp tasks to find a familiar figure approaching him. He rubbed his eyes. Was that strange figure the same as the one so vividly limned on his memory? Squat, huge, grotesque, the man coming toward him was Dismukes! His motley, patched garb, his old slouch hat, his boots yellow with clay and alkali, appeared the same he had worn on the memorable day Adam’s eyes had unclosed to see them.
Dismukes drove his burros up to the edge of the bench, evidently having in mind the campsite Adam occupied. When he espied Adam he hesitated and, gruffly calling to the burros, he turned away.
“Hello, Dismukes!” called Adam. “Come on. Plenty room to camp here.”
The prospector halted stolidly and slowly turned back. “You know me?” he asked, gruffly, as he came up.
“Yes, I know you, Dismukes,” replied Adam, offering his hand.
“You’ve got the best of me,” said Dismukes, shaking hands. He did not seem a day older, but perhaps there might have been a little more grey in the scant beard. His great ox eyes, rolling and dark, bent a strange, curious glance over Adam’s lofty figure.
“Look close. See if you can recognize a man you befriended once,” returned Adam. The moment was fraught with keen pain and a melancholy assurance of the changes time had made. Strong emotion of gladness, too, was stirring deep in him. This was the man who had saved him and who had put into his mind the inspiration and passion to conquer the desert.
Dismukes was perplexed, and a little ashamed. His piercing gaze was that of one who had befriended many men and could not remember.
“Stranger, I give it up. I don’t know you.”
“Wansfell,” said Adam, his voice full.
Dismukes stared. His expression changed, but it was not with recognition.
“Wansfell! Wansfell!” he ejaculated. “I know that name … Hell, yes! I’ve heard of you all over the Mohave! I’m sure glad to meet you. But, I never met you before.”
The poignancy of that meeting for Adam reached a climax in the absolute failure of Dismukes to recognize him. Last and certain proof of change! The desert years had transformed Adam Larey, the youth, into the man Wansfell. For the first moment in all that time did Adam feel an absolute sense of safety. He would never be recognized, never be apprehended for his crime. He seemed born again.
“Dismukes, how near are you to getting all your five hundred thousand?” queried Adam, with a smile. There seemed to be a sad pleasure in thus baffling the old prospector.
“By Gad! how’d you know about that?” exclaimed Dis-mukes.
“You told me.”
“Say, Wansfell! Am I drunk, or are you a mind reader?” demanded the prospector, bewildered. “Comin’ along here I was thinkin’ about that five hundred thousand. But I never told anyone—except a boy once—an’ he’s dead.”
“How about your white-faced burro Jinny—the one that used to steal things out of your pack?” asked Adam, slowly.
“Jinny, Jinny!” ejaculated Dismukes, with a start. His great ox eyes dilated and something of shock ran through his huge frame. “That burro I never forgot. I gave her away to a boy who starved on the desert. She came back to me. Tracked me to Yuma. An’you—you—how’d you know Jinny? Man, who are you?”
“Dismukes, I was the boy you saved—down under the Chocolates—ninety miles from Yuma. Remember it was Jinny saw me wandering in a circle, mad with thirst. You saved me—gave me Jinny and a pack—told me how to learn the desert—sent me to the Indians … Dismukes, I was that boy. I am now—Wansfell.”
The prospector seemed to expand with the increased strain of his gaze into Adam’s eyes, until the instant of recognition.
“By God! I know you now!” he boomed, and locked his horny hands on Adam in a gladness that was beyond the moment and had to do, perhaps, with a far-past faith in things. “I thought you died on the desert. Jinny’s comin’ back seemed proof of that … But you lived! You—that boy, tall as a mescal plant—with eyes of agony. I never forgot. An’ now you’re Wansfell!”
“Yes, my friend. Life is strange on the desert,” replied Adam. “And now unpack your burros. Make camp with me here. We’ll eat and talk together.”
A sunset, rare on the Mohave, glowed over the simple camp tasks of these men who in their wanderings had met again. Clouds hung along the mountaintops, colored into deeper glory as the sun sank. The dark purples had an edge of silver, and the fleecy whites turned to pink and rose, while golden rays shot up from behind the red-hazed peaks. Over the valley fell a beautiful and transparent light, blending and deepening until a shadow as blue as the sea lay on Tecopah.
While the men ate their frugal repast they talked, each gradually growing used to a situation that broke the desert habit of silence. There was an unconscious deference of each man toward the other—Wansfell seeing in Dismukes the savior of his life and a teacher who had inspired him to scale the heights of human toil and strife; Dismukes finding in Wansfell a development of his idea, the divine spirit of man rising above the great primal beasts of the desert, self-preservation and ferocity.
“Wansfell, have you kept track of time?” asked Dis-mukes, reflectively, as he got out a black, stumpy pipe that Adam remembered.
“No. Days and weeks glide into years—that’s all I can keep track of,” replied Adam.
“I never could, either.
What is time on the desert? Nothin’. Well, it flies, that’s sure. An’ it must be years since I met you first down there in the Colorado. Let’s see. Three times I went to Yuma—once to Riverside—an’ twice to San Diego. Six trips inside. That’s all I’ve made to bank my money since I met you. Six years. But, say, I missed a year or so.”
“Dismukes, I’ve seen the snows white on the peaks eight times. Eight years, my friend, since Jinny cocked her ears that day and saved me. How little a thing life is in the desert!”
“Eight years!” echoed Dismukes, and wagged his huge shaggy head. “It can’t be … Well, well, time slips away. Wansfell, you’re a young man, though I see grey over your temples. And you can’t have any more fear because of that— that crime you confessed to me. Lord! man, no one would ever know you as that boy!”
“No fear that way anymore. But fear of myself, Dis-mukes. If I went back to the haunts of men I would forget.”
“Ah yes, yes!” sighed Dismukes. “I understand. I wonder how it’ll be with me when my hour comes to leave the desert. I wonder.”
“Will that be long?”
“You can never tell. I might strike it rich tomorrow. Always I dream I’m goin’ to. It’s the dream that keeps a prospector nailed to the lonely wastes.”
Indeed, this strange man was a dreamer of dreams. Adam understood him now, all except that obsession for just so much gold. It seemed the only flaw in a great character. But the fidelity to that purpose was great, as it was inexplicable.
“Dismukes, you had a third of your stake when we met years ago. How much now?”
“More than half, Wansfell, safe in banks an’ some hid away,” came the answer, rolling and strong. What understanding of endless effort abided in that voice!
“A quarter of a million! My friend, it is enough. Take it and go—fulfill your cherished dream. Go before it’s too late.”
“I’ve thought of that. Many times when I was sick an’ worn out with the damned heat an’ loneliness I’ve tempted myself with what you said. But no. I’ll never do that. It’s the same to me now as if I had no money at all.”
“Take care, Dismukes,” warned Adam. “It’s the gaining of gold—not what it might bring—that drives you.”
“Ah! Quien sabe? as the Mexicans say … Wansfell, have you learned the curse—or it may be the blessing—of the desert—what makes us wanderers of the wastelands?”
“No. I have not. Sometimes I feel it’s close to me, like the feeling of a spirit out there on the lonely desert at night. But it’s a great thing, Dismukes. And it is linked to the very beginnings of us. Someday I’ll know.”
Dismukes smoked in silence, thoughtful and sad. The man’s forceful assurance and doggedness seemed the same, yet Adam sensed a subtle difference in him, beyond power to define. The last gold faded from the bold domes of the mountains, the clouds turned grey, the twilight came on as a stealthy host. And from across the creek came discordant sounds of Tecopah awakening to the revelry of a gold diggings by night.
“How’d you happen along here?” queried Dismukes, presently.
“Tecopah was just a water hole for me,” replied Adam.
“Me, too. An’ I’m sure sayin’ that I like to fill my canteens here. Last year I camped here, an’ when I went on I kept one of my canteens so long the water spoiled. Found some gold trace up in Kingston range, but my supplies ran low an’ I had to give up. My plan now is to go in there an’ then on to the Funeral Mountains. They’re full of mineral. But a dry, hard, poison country for a prospector. Do you know that country?”
“I’ve been on this side of the range.”
“Bad enough, but the other side of the Funerals is Death Valley. That gash in summer is a blastin’, roarin’ hell. I’ve crossed it every month in the year. None but madmen ever tackle Death Valley in July, in the middle of the day. I’ve seen the mercury go to one hundred and forty degrees. I’ve seen it one hundred and twenty-five at midnight, an’, friend, when them furnace winds blow down the valley at night sleep or rest is impossible You just gasp for life. But strange to say, Wansfell, the fascination of the desert is stronger in Death Valley than at any other place.”
“Yes, I can appreciate that,” replied Adam, thoughtfully. “It must be the sublimity of death and desolation—the terrible loneliness and awfulness of the naked earth. I am going there.”
“So I reckoned. An’ see here, Wansfell, I’ll get out my pencil an’ draw you a little map of the valley, showin’ my trails an’ water holes. I know that country better than any other white man. It’s a mineral country. The lower slope of the Funerals is all clay, borax, soda, alkali, salt, nitre, an’ when the weather’s hot an’ that stuff blows on the hot winds, my God! it’s a horror! But you’ll want to go through it all, an’ you’ll go back again.”
“Where do you advise me to go in?”
“Well, I ’d follow the Amargosa. It’s bad water, but better than none. Go across an’ up into the Panamints, an’ come back across again by Furnace Creek. I’ll make you a little map. There’s more bad water than good, an’ some of it’s arsenic. I found the skeletons of six men near an arsenic water hole. Reckon they’d come on this water when bad off for thirst an’ didn’t know enough to test it. An’ they drank their fill an’ died in their tracks. They had gold, too. But I never could find out anythin’ about these men. No one ever heard of them, an’ I was the only man who knew of the tragedy. Well, well, it’s common enough for me, though I never before run across so many dead men. Wansfell, I reckon you’ve found that common, too, in your wanderings—dried-up mummies, yellow as leather or bleached bones an’ grin-nin’ skull, white in the sun?”
“Yes, I’ve buried the remains of more than one poor devil,” replied Adam.
“Is it best to bury them? I let them lay as warnin’ to other poor devils. No one but a crazy man would drink at a water hole where there was a skeleton. Well, to come hack to your goin’ to Death Valley. I ’d go in by the Amargosa. It’s a windin’ stream an’ long, but safe. An’ there’s firewood an’ a little grass. Now when you get across the valley you’ll run into prospectors an’ miners an’ wanderers at the water holes. An’ like as not you’ll meet some of the claim jumpers an’ robbers that live in the Panamints. From what I hear about you, Wansfell, I reckon a meetin’ with them would be a bad hour for them, an’ somethin’ of good fortune to honest miners. Hey?”
“Dismukes, I don’t run from men of that stripe,” replied Adam, grimly.
“Ahuh! I reckon not,” said Dismukes, just as grimly. “Well, last time I was over there—let’s see, it was in September, hotter ’n hell, an’ I run across two queer people up in a canyon I ’d never prospected before. Didn’t see any sign of any other prospectors ever bein’ in there. Two queer peo-ple—a man an’ a woman livin’ in a shack they’d built right under the damnedest roughest slope of weathered rock you ever saw in your life. Why, it was a plain case of suicide, an’ so I tried to show them! Every hour you could hear the crack of a rollin’ boulder or the graty slip of an avalanche, gettin’ uneasy an’ wantin’ to slide. But the woman was deathly afraid of her husband, an’ he was a skunk an’ a wolf rolled into a man, if I ever saw one. I couldn’t do anythin’ for the poor woman, an’ I couldn’t learn any more than I’m tellin’ you. That’s not much. But, Wansfell, she wasn’t a common sort. She’d been beautiful once. She had the saddest face I ever saw. I got two feelin’s, one that she wasn’t long for this earth, an’ the other that the man hated her with a terrible hate. I meet with queer people an’ queer situations as I wander over this desert, but here’s the beat of all my experience. An’, Wansfell, I ’d like to have you go see that couple. I reckon they’ll be there, if alive yet. He chose a hidden spot, an’ he has Shoshone Indians pack his supplies in from the ranches way on the other side of the Panamints. A queer deal, horrible for that poor woman, an’ I’ve been haunted by her face ever since. I ’d like you to go there.”
“I’ll go. But why do you say that, Dismu
kes?” asked Adam, curiously.
“Well—you ought to know what your name means to desert men,” replied Dismukes, constrainedly, and he looked down at the camp fire, to push forward a piece of half-burnt wood.
“No, I never heard,” said Adam. “I’ve lived ’most always alone. Of course I’ve had to go to freighting posts and camps. I’ve worked in gold diggin’s. I’ve guided wagon trains across the Mohave. Naturally, I’ve been among men. But I never heard that my name meant anything.”
“Wansfell! I remember now that you called yourself Wansfell. I’ve heard that name. Some of your doings, Wans-fell, have made campfire stories. See here, Wansfell, you won’t take offense at me.”
“No offence, friend Dismukes,” replied Adam, strangely affected. Here was news that forced him to think of himself as a man somehow related to and responsible to his kind. He had gone to and fro over the trails of the desert, and many adventures had befallen him. He had lived them, with the force the desert seemed to have taught him, and then had gone his way down the lonely trails, absorbed in his secret. The years seemed less than the blowing sand. He had been an unfortunate boy burdened with a crime; he was now a matured man, still young in years, but old with the silence and loneliness and strife of the desert, grey at the temples, with that old burden still haunting him. How good to learn that strange men spoke his name with wonder and respect! He had helped wanderers as Dismukes had helped him; he had meted out desert violence to evil men who crossed his trail; he had, doubtless, done many little unremembered deeds of kindness in a barren world where little deeds might be truly overappreciated; but the name Wansfell meant nothing to him, the reputation hinted by Dismukes amazed him, strangely thrilled him; the implication of nobility filled him with sadness and remorse. What had he done with the talents given him?
“Wansfell, you see—you’re somethin’ of the man I might have been,” said Dismukes, hesitatingly.
“Oh no, Dismukes,” protested Adam. “You are a prospector, honest and industrious, and wealthy now, almost ready to enjoy the fruits of your long labors. Your life has a great object … But I—I am only a wanderer of the wasteland.”