Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  First Adam went to the spring. He found a bubbling gush of velvet-looking water pouring out of a hole and running a few rods to sink into the sand. The color of it seemed invit-ing—so clear and soft and somehow rich. The music of its murmur, too, was melodious. Adam was a connoisseur of waters. What desert wanderer of years was not? Before he tasted this water, despite its promise, he knew it was not good. Yet it did not have exactly an unpleasant taste. Dismukes had said this water was all right, yet he seldom stayed long enough in one locality to learn the ill effects of the water. Adam knew he too could live on this water. But he was thinking of the delicate woman lost here in Death Valley with an idiot or a knave of a husband.

  The spring was located some two hundred yards or more from the shack and just out of line of the rock-strewn slope. Spreading like a fan, this weathered slant of stones extended its long, curved length in the opposite direction. Adam decided to pitch his permanent camp, or at least sleeping place, here on the grass. Here he erected a brush and canvas shelter to make shade, and deposited his effects under it. That done, he returned to the shack to cook breakfast.

  There appeared to be no life in the rude little misshapen hut. Had the man who built it ever been a boy? There were men so utterly helpless and useless out in the wilds, where existence depended upon labor of hands, that they seemed foreign to the descendants of Americans. Adam could not but wonder about the man lying in there, though he tried hard to confine his reflections to the woman. He did not like the situation. Of what avail the strong arm, the desert-taught fierceness to survive? If this man and woman had ever possessed instincts to live, to fight, to reproduce their kind, to be of use in the world, they had subverted them to the debasements of sophisticated and selfish existence. The woman loomed big to Adam, and he believed she had been dragged down by a weak and vicious man.

  Leisurely, Adam attended to the preparation of breakfast, prolonging tasks that always passed swiftly through his hands.

  “Good morning, Sir Wansfell,” called a voice with something of mockery in it, yet rich and wistful—a low-pitched contralto voice full of music and pathos and a pervading bitterness.

  It stirred Adam’s blood, so sluggish this morning. It seemed to carry an echo from his distant past. Turning, he saw the woman, clad in grey, with girdle of cord twisted around her slender waist. Soft and clean and fleecy, that grey garment, so out of place there, so utterly incongruous against the background of crude shack and wild slope, somehow fitted her voice as it did her fragile shape, somehow set her infinitely apart from the women Adam had met in his desert wanderings. She came from the great world outside, a delicate spark from the solid flint of class, a thoroughbred whom years before the desert might have saved.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Virey,” returned Adam. “How are you—and did your husband awake?”

  “I slept better than for long,” she replied, “and I think I know why … Yes, Virey came to. He’s conscious, and asked for water. But he’s weak—strange. I ’d like you to look at him presently.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “And how are you after your tremendous exertions of yesterday?” she inquired.

  “Not so spry,” said Adam, with a smile. “But I’ll be myself in a day or so. I believe the air down in the valley affected me a little. My lungs are sore … I think it would be more comfortable for you if we had breakfast in your kitchen. The sun is hot.”

  “Indeed yes. So you mean to—to do this—this camp work for me—in spite of—”

  “Yes. I always oppose women,” he said. “And that is about once every two or three years. You see, women are scarce on the desert.”

  “Last night I was upset. I am sorry that I was ungracious. I thank you, and I am only too glad to accept your kind service,” she said, earnestly.

  “That is well. Now, will you help me carry in the breakfast?”

  Unreality was not unusual to Adam. The desert had as many unrealities, illusions, and specters as it had natural and tangible things. But while he sat opposite to this fascinating woman, whose garments exuded some subtle fragrance of perfume, whose shadowed, beautiful face shone like a cameo against the drab wall of the brush shack, he was hard put to it to convince himself of actuality. She ate daintily, but she was hungry. The grey gown fell in graceful folds around the low stone seat. The rude table between them was a box, narrow and uneven.

  “Shall I try to get Virey to eat?” she asked, presently.

  “That depends. On the desert, after a collapse, we are careful with food and water.”

  “Will you look at him?”

  Adam followed her as she swept aside a flap of the canvas partition. This room was larger and lighter. It had an aperture for a window. Adam’s quick glance took this in, and then the two narrow beds of blankets raised on brush cots. Virey lay on the one farther from the door. His pallid brow and unshaven face appeared drawn into terrible lines, which, of course, Adam could not be sure were permanent or the result of the collapse in the valley. He inclined, however, to the conviction that Virey’s face was the distorted reflection of a tortured soul. Surely he had been handsome once. He had deep-set black eyes, a straight nose, and a mouth that betrayed him, despite its being half hidden under a moustache. Adam, keen and strong in that moment as he received his impressions of Virey, felt the woman’s intensity as if he had been studying her instead of her husband. How singular women were! How could it matter to her what opinion he formed of her husband? Adam knew he had been powerfully prejudiced against this man, but he had held in stern abeyance all judgment until he could look at him. For long years Adam had gazed into the face of the desert. Outward appearance could not deceive him. As the cactus revealed its ruthless nature, as the tiny inch-high flower bloomed in its perishable but imperative proof of beauty as well as life, as the long flowing sands of the desert betrayed the destructive design of the universe—so the face of any man was the image of his soul. And Adam recoiled instinctively, if not outwardly, at what he read in Virey’s face.

  “You’re in pain?” queried Adam.

  “Yes,” came the husky whisper, and Virey put a hand on his breast.

  “It’s sore here,” said Adam, feeling Virey. “You’ve breathed poisoned air down in the valley. It acts like ether … You just lie quiet for a while. I’ll do the work around camp.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Virey.

  The woman followed Adam outside and gazed earnestly up at him, unconscious of herself, with her face closer than it had ever been to him and full in the sunlight. It struck Adam that the difference between desert flowers and the faces of beautiful women was one of emotion. How much better to have the brief hour of an unconscious flower, wasting its fragrance on the desert air!

  “He’s ill, don’t you think?” queried the woman.

  “No. But he recovers slowly. A man must have a perfect heart and powerful lungs to battle against the many perils in this country. But Virey will get over this all right.

  “You never give up, do you?” she inquired.

  “Come to think of that, I guess I never do,” replied Adam.

  “Such a spirit is worthy of a better cause. You are doomed here to failure.”

  “Well, I’m not infallible, that’s certain. But you can never tell. The fact of my standing here is proof of the overcoming of almost impossible things. I can’t make Death Valley habitable for you, but I can lessen the hardships. How long have you been here?”

  “Several months. But it’s years to me.”

  “Who brought you down? How did you get here?”

  “We’ve had different guides. The last were Shoshone Indians, who accompanied us across a range of mountains, then a valley, and last over the Panamints. They left us here. I rode a horse. Virey walked the last stages of this journey to Death Valley—from which there will be no return. We turned horse and burros loose. I have not seen them since.”

  “Are these Shoshones supposed to visit you occasionally?”

  “Yes. Virey made
a deal with them to come every full moon. We’ve had more supplies than we need. The trouble is that Virey has the inclination to eat, but I have not the skill to prepare food wholesomely under these rough conditions. So we almost starved.”

  “Well, let me take charge of camp duties. You nurse your husband and don’t neglect yourself. It’s the least you can do. You’ll have hardship and suffering enough, even at best. You’ve suffered, I can see, but not physically. And you never knew what hardship meant until you got into the desert. If you live, these things will cure you of any trouble. They’ll hardly cure Virey, for he has retrograded. Most men in the desert follow the line of least resistance. They sink. But you will not … And let me tell you. There are elemental pangs of hunger, of thirst, of pain that are blessings in disguise. You’ll learn what rest is and sleep and loneliness. People who live as you have lived are lopsided. What do they know of life close to the earth? Any other life is false. Cities, swarms of men and women, riches, luxury, poverty—these were not in nature’s scheme of life … Mrs. Virey, if anything can change your soul it will be the desert.”

  “Ah, Sir Wansfell, so you have philosophy as well as chivalry,” she replied, with the faint accent that seemed to be mockery of herself. “Change my soul if you can, wanderer of the desert! I am a woman, and a woman is symbolical of change. Teach me to cook, to work, to grow strong, to endure, to fight, to look up at those dark hills whence cometh your strength … I am here in Death Valley. I will never leave it in body. My bones will mingle with the sands and molder to dust … But my soul—ah! that black gulf of doubt, of agony, of terror, of hate—change that if you can!”

  These tragic, eloquent words chained Adam to Death Valley as if they had been links of steel; and thus began his long sojourn there.

  Work or action was always necessary to Adam. They had become second nature. He planned a brush shelter from the sun, a sort of outside room adjoining the shack, a stone fireplace and table and seats, a low stone wall to keep out blowing sand, and a thick, heavy stone fence between shack and the slope of sliding rocks. When these tasks were finished there would be others, and always there would be the slopes to climb, the valley to explore. Idleness in Death Valley was a forerunner of madness. There must be a reserve fund of long work and exercise, so that when the blazing, leaden-hazed middays of August came, with idleness imperative, there would be both physical force and unclouded mind to endure them. The men who succumbed to madness in this valley were those who had not understood how to combat it.

  That day passed swiftly, and the twilight hour seemed to have less of gloom and forbidding intimations. That might well have been due to his eternal hope. Mrs. Virey showed less gravity and melancholy, and not once did she speak with bitterness or passion. She informed Adam that Virey had improved.

  Two more days slipped by, and on the third Virey got up and came forth into the sunlight. Adam happened to be at work nearby. He saw Virey gaze around at the improvements that had been made and say something about them to his wife. He looked a man who should have been in the prime of life. Approaching with slow gait and haggard face, he addressed Adam.

  “You expect pay for this puttering around?”

  “No,” replied Adam, shortly.

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, when men are used to the desert, as I am, they lend a hand where it is needed. That’s not often.”

  “But I didn’t want any such work done round my camp.”

  “I know, and I excuse you because you’re ignorant of desert ways and needs.”

  “The question of excuse for me is offensive.”

  Adam, rising abreast of the stone wall he was building, fixed his piercing eyes upon this man. Mrs. Virey stood a little to one side, but not out of range of Adam’s gaze. Did a mocking light show in her shadowy eyes? The doubt, the curiosity in her expression must have related to Adam. That slight, subtle something about her revealed to Adam the in-evitableness of disappointment in store for him if he still entertained any hopes of amenable relations with Virey.

  “We all have to be excused sometimes,” said Adam, deliberately. “Now I had to excuse you on the score of ignorance of the desert. You chose this place as a camp. It happens to be the most dangerous spot I ever saw. Any moment a stone may roll down that slope to kill you. Any moment the whole avalanche may start. That slope is an avalanche.”

  “It’s my business where I camp,” rejoined Virey.

  “Were you aware of the danger here?”

  “I am indifferent to danger.”

  “But you are not alone. You have a woman with you.”

  Manifestly, Virey had been speaking without weighing words and looking at Adam without really seeing him. The brooding shade passed out of his eyes, and in its place grew a light of interest that leaped to the crystal-cold clearness of a lens.

  “You’re a prospector,” he asserted.

  “No. I pan a little gold dust once in a while for fun because I happen across it.”

  “You’re no miner then—nor hunter, nor teamster.”

  “I’ve been a little of all you name, but I can’t be called any one of them.”

  “You might be one of the robbers that infest these hills.”

  “I might be, only I’m not,” declared Adam, dryly. The fire in his depths stirred restlessly, but he kept a cool, smothering control over it. He felt disposed to be lenient and kind toward this unfortunate man. If only the woman had not stood there with that half-veiled mocking shadow of doubt in her eyes!

  “You’re an educated man!” ejaculated Virey, incredulously.

  “I might claim to be specially educated in the ways of the desert.”

  “And the ways of women, are they mysteries to you?” queried Virey, with scorn. His interrogation seemed like a bitter doubt flung out of an immeasurable depth of passion.

  “I confess that they are,” replied Adam. “I’ve lived a lonely life. Few women have crossed my trail.”

  “You don’t realize your good fortune—if you tell the truth.”

  “I would not lie to any man,” returned Adam, bluntly.

  “Bah! Men are all liars, and women make them so. You’re hanging around my camp, making a bluff of work.”

  “I deny that. Heaving these stones is work. You lift a few of them in this hot sun … And my packing you on my back for ten miles over the floor of Death Valley—was that a bluff?”

  “You saved my life!” exclaimed the man, stung to passion. There seemed to be contending tides within him—a fight of old habits of thought, fineness of feeling, against an all-absorbing and dominating malignancy. “Man, I can’t thank you for that … You’ve done me no service.”

  “I don’t want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost me.”

  “As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you— which is a courtesy due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I didn’t want, why do you linger here?”

  “I wish to help your wife.”

  “Ah! that’s frank of you. That frankness is something for which I really thank you. But you’ll pardon me if I’m inclined to doubt the idealistic nature of your motive to help her.”

  Adam pondered over this speech without reply. Words always came fluently when he was ready to speak. And he seemed more concerned over Virey’s caustic bitterness than over his meaning. Then, as he met the magnificent flash in Magdalene Virey’s eyes, he was inspired into revelation of Virey’s veiled hint and into a serenity he divined would be kindest to her pride.

  “Go ahead and help her,” Virey went on. “You have my sincere felicitations. My charming wife is helpless enough. I never knew how helpless till we were thrown upon our own resources. She cannot even cook a potato. And as for baking bread in one of those miserable black ovens, stranger, if you eat some of it I will not be long annoyed by your attentions to her.”

  “Well, I’ll teach her,” said Adam.

  His practical response irritated Virey excessively. It was as if
he wished to insult and inflame, and had not considered a literal application to his words.

  “Who are you? What’s your name?” he queried, yielding to a roused curiosity.

  “Wansfell,” replied Adam.

  “Wansfell?” echoed Virey. The name struck a chord of memory—a discordant one. He bent forward a little, at a point between curiosity and excitement. “Wansfell? I know that name. Are you the man who in this desert country is called Wansfell the Wanderer?”

  “Yes, I’m that Wansfell.”

  “I heard a prospector tell about you,” went on Virey, his haggard face now quickened by thought. “It was at a camp near a gold mine over here somewhere—I forget where. But the prospector said he had seen you kill a man named Mc something—McKin—no, McKue. That’s the name … Did he tell the truth?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to say. I killed Baldy McKue—or rather, to speak as I feel, I was the means by which the desert dealt McKue the death justly due him.”

  Virey now glowed with excitement, changing the man.

  “Somehow that story haunted me,” he said. “I never heard one like it … This prospector told how you confronted McKue in the street of a mining camp. In front of a gambling hell, or maybe it was a hotel. You yelled like a demon at McKue. He turned white as a sheet. He jerked his gun, began to shoot. But you bore a charmed life. His bullets did not hit you, or, if they did, to no purpose. You leaped upon him. His gun flew one way, his hat another … Then—then you killed him with your hands! … Is that true?”

  Adam nodded gloomily. The tale, told vividly by this seemingly galvanized Virey, was not pleasant. And the woman stood there, transfixed, with white face and tragic eyes.

  “My God! You killed McKue by sheer strength—with your bare hands! … I had not looked at your hands. I see them now … So McKue was your enemy?”

  “No. I never saw him before that day,” replied Adam.

  Virey slowly drew back wonderingly, yet with instinctive shrinking. Certain it was that his lips stiffened.

  “Then why did you kill him?”

  “He ill-treated a woman.”