Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  Adam scarcely heard Genie. He was piercing through eyes and face to the mind and soul and life and meaning of her beauty. Her skin was creamy, golden brown, transparent, with tiny tracery of veins underneath and faint tints of rose. The low forehead and level brows showed moist and soft and thoughtful under the dark, damp curls with their amber glints. A hint of desert leanness hid in the contour of her oval face. Her mouth was strong, with bowed upper lip, the under sensitive and sad—a red, sweet mouth, like a flower. And her eyes, now meeting his so frankly, losing the mock solemnity and the fun, became deep-brown, crystal gulfs of light and shade, of thought and feeling, beautiful with the beauty of exquisite color, but lovelier for the youth, the joy and wonder of life, the innocence of soul.

  “Wanny—are you—playing?” she asked, tremulously, and her warm little hand clasped his.

  That changed the spell of her. To look at her beauty was nothing comparable with the warm throb of her young pulsing life. Out of Adam’s slow and painful and intense thought at last evolved a nucleus of revelation. But those clear eyes strangely checked this growing sense of a truth about to overwhelm him. They made him think, and thought had begun to waver and pale beside some subtler faculty of his being. Thus he realised the slow preponderance of feeling over thought, of body over soul, of physical over spiritual. And in this realization of unequal conflict he divined the meaning of his strange sense of peril in Genie’s presence. The peril lay in the sophistication of his mind, not in Genie’s beauty. Naturally as the mating of the birds he wanted her. That was all. It was like her simplicity, inevitable as life itself, and true to nature! But in his thoughts, flashing after comprehension, the simple fact loomed with staggering, overwhelming significance.

  Bidding Genie rest or amuse herself, Adam climbed to a ledge above the waterfall, and there, with the mighty mass of mountain crowding out the light, he threw himself upon the bare stone.

  Not long did he torment himself with wonder and fury and bewilderment over an indubitable fact. Almost at once he sank into a self-accusing state which grew from bad to worse, until he was sick, sore, base, and malignant in his arraignment of self. Again the old order of mind, the habit of youthful training, the learned precepts and maxims and laws, flooded back to augment his trouble. And when they got their sway he cursed himself, he hated himself, he beat his breast in the shame of an abasement terribly and inevitably and irretrievably true at that hour.

  But this was a short-lived passion. It did not ring true to Adam. It was his youth had suffered shame—the youth trained by his mother—the youth that had fallen upon wild and evil days at old Picacho. His youth flaming up with all its chivalry, its ideals, its sense of honor and modesty, its white-hot shame at even an unconscious wrong to a girl! Not the desert philosophy of manhood that saw nature clearly and saw it whole!

  “Peace!” he cried, huskily, as if driving back a ghost of his youth. “I am no beast—no animal!”

  Nay, he was a lonely wanderer of the wastelands, who many and many a time had dreamed himself sweetheart, lover, husband of all the beautiful women in the world. Ah! it was his love of beauty, of life!

  And so in his dreams, nature, like a panther in ambush, had come upon him unawares to grip him before he knew. Aye—he wanted Genie now—yearned for her with all that intense and longing desire which had falsely seemed love and joy of the whole living world. But it was not what it seemed. All the tenderness of a brother, all the affection of a father Adam had for Genie—emotions that now faded before the master spirit and the imperious flame of life. How little and pitiful arose the memory of Margarita Arallanes— how pale beside this blood fire of his senses! Life had failed him in his youth; life had cheated him. Yet he had arisen on stepping-stones of agony to intenser love of that life. He had been faithful, while life had mocked him.

  Passionate love of life, to see, to hear, to feel, to touch, had come to him with its saving grace, after the ruthless and violent strife of the desert had taught him to survive. But these were not the soul of nature. This was not nature’s secret. He was a man, a creature of inherited instincts that the desert had intensified. In nature’s eyes he was no different from the lonely desert bird or beast seeking its mate. The law was not wrong, but all the progress of mankind as represented in Adam’s revolt made that law wrong.

  When at last he had driven shame from his mind and justified his manhood over the instincts of which he could have no control, then he faced the ordeal.

  Contending tides of passion and strife! That had been his desert life. And as the years had passed each new mounting tumult in heart or soul, each fight against men or elements, had exceeded the last. Would there never be an end? Was this his great ordeal—the last—before which he must go down in defeat? No—by all the gods false or true—no, it should never be! Thus he shot arrowy lightnings of soul at the fiery army of instincts trooping on to overwhelm his consciousness.

  For a long time the ordeal never got so far as argument. It was revel of the senses, unleashed at last, untamed by the past, fiercer and stronger and more irresistible for all disuse. Melancholy and terrible was the truth that his desert years, so hard, so clean, so cold, so pure, the restraint of his enforced exile, had developed in him instincts masterless in their importunity. Life shrieking out of his flesh and blood for the future that nature demanded! There was revolt here, conscienceless revolt against the futility of manhood, voices from the old bones of his ancestors, from the dim and mystic past. Here at last was revealed the deepest secret of the desert, the eternal law men read in its lonely, naked face— self-preservation and reproduction. The individual lived and fought and perished, but the species survived.

  Adam’s instinctive reaction seemed that of a savage into whose surging blood had been ejected some inhibitory current of humanism which chafed at the quivering shores of his veins and tried to dam the flood. He was like a strong man convulsed by fever. Like the strung thread of a bent bow he vibrated.

  There came a knocking at the gate of his mind. The tempter! The voice of the serpent! Nature or devil, it was all one—a mighty and eloquent and persuasive force. It whispered to Adam that he was alone on the desert. Fate had been cruel. Love had betrayed him. Life had denied him. A criminal, surely not forgotten by justice, he could never leave the lonely wastelands to live. A motherless, fatherless girl, with no kith or kin, had been left in his care, and he had saved her, succored her. Care and health and love had made her beautiful. By all the laws of nature she was his, to hold, to cherish, to cheer the lonely, grey years. He had but to open his arms and call to her, reveal to her the mystery and glory of life, and she would be his forever. Unconsciously she herself leaned toward this fate, tempting him in all her innocence. She would grow into a glorious woman—the keen, sweet, fierce youth of her answering to the work of the desert. Were not all desert flowers more rare and vivid—were not all desert creatures more beautiful and strong than their like elsewhere? Genie would be his, as the eagle had its mate, and she would never know any other life. She would be compensation for his suffering, a companion for his wandering. Think! the joy of her, the thrill of her! The wonderful fire of her dark eyes and the dance of her curls and the red lips ripe for kisses! No man had any right to deny himself immortality. What was the world and its customs to him? Where was the all-wise and beneficent God who looked after the miserable and forlorn? Like was life, and that was everything. Beauty in life—that was eternal, the meaning of nature, and every man must love it, share it, and mark the image of himself upon the future. Lastly and most potent, the present fleeting hour that must soon pass! Let him grasp his precious jewel before it was too late—live in the moment. Life might be eternal, but not for him. Soon the seeping sand would nestle round his bleached bones and fill the sockets where once his eyes had burned. Genie was a gift of chance. He had wandered down into this valley, and now his life should never be lonely again. Lover of beauty and worshipper of nature, he had but to extend his arms to receive a treasure far greate
r than the gold of the desert, more beautiful than its flaming flowers, more mysterious than its fierce and inevitable life. A girl whose white body, like a transparent opal, let the sunshine through! A woman, gift of the ages to man, flame of love and life, most beautiful of all things quick or dead, a mystery for man to cherish, to love, to keep, to bind!

  Then, at the instant when Adam’s fall was imminent, and catastrophe leaned like the huge overhanging mountain mass, he wrestled up to fling the supremity of his soul into the teeth of nature.

  “No! … No!” he gasped, hoarsely. “Not for me!” At the last he saw clearly. The love he had for Genie now proclaimed itself. The other had not been love, whatever its greatness, its importunity, its almost blasting power. He was an outcast, and any day a man or men might seek him out to kill him or be killed. What madness was this of his to chain a joyous girl to his wandering steps? What but woe to her and remorse to him could ever come of such relation? Genie was so full of life and love that she hated to leave even the loneliness of the desert. To her, in the simplicity and adaptation of her nature, he was all. But she was a child, and the day he placed her in an environment where youth called to youth, and there were work, play, study, cheer, and love, he would become a memory. The kisses of her red ripe lips were not for him. The dance of her glinting curls, the flash of her speaking eyes, the gold-brown flesh of her, had been created by nature; and nature must go on with its inscrutable design, its eternal progress, leaving him outside the pale. The joy he was to feel in Genie must come of memory, when soon he had gone on down into the lonely wastelands. She would owe life and happiness to him, and, though she might not know it, he always would. A child, a girl, a woman—and someday perhaps a wife and mother—some happy man’s blessing and joy—and these by the same inevitable nature that had tortured him would reward him in the solemn white days and the lonely starlit nights. For he had been and would be the creator of their smiles. How fierce and false had been his struggle, in the light of thought, when the truth was that he would give his life to spare Genie a moment’s pain!

  Chapter

  XXVII

  That afternoon when Adam returned to camp sore in body and spent in force, yet with strangely tranquil soul, there was an old Indian waiting for him. Genie had gone back long before Adam, and she sat on the sand evidently having difficult but enjoyable conversation with the visitor.

  At the sight of his hard, craggy, bronze face, serried and seamed with the lines of years, it seemed that a bolt shot back in Adam’s heart, opening a long-closed door.

  “Charley Jim!” he ejaculated, in startled gladness.

  “How, Eagle!” His deep voice, the familiar yet forgotten name, the lean brown hand, confirmed Adam’s sight.

  “Chief, the white man has not forgotten his Indian friend,” replied Adam.

  “Eagle no same boy like mescal stalk. Heap big! Many moon! Snows on the mountain!” said Charley Jim, with a gleam of a smile breaking the bronze face. His fingers touched the white hair over Adam’s temples. Pathos and dignity marked the action.

  “Boy no more, Charley Jim,” returned Adam. “Eagle has his white feathers now!”

  Genie burst into a trill of laughter.

  “You funny old people! You make me feel old, too,” she protested, and she ran away.

  Charley Jim’s somber eyes followed her, then returned to question Adam.

  “She same girl here—long time—sick man’s girl?” And he made signs to show the height of a child and the weakness of a man’s lungs.

  “Yes, chief. He her father. Dead. Mother dead, too,” replied Adam, and he pointed to the two green graves across the stream.

  “Ugh! No live good. No get well … Eagle, sick man have brother—him dead. Jim find ’um. Him dig gold—no water—dead … Jim find ’um heap bones.”

  It was thus Adam heard the story of the tragedy of Genie’s uncle. Charley Jim told it more clearly, though just as briefly in his own tongue. Moons before he had found a prospector’s pack and then a pile of rags and bones half buried in the sand over in a valley beyond the Cottonwood Mountains. He recognized the man’s pack as belonging to the brother of the sick man Linwood, both of whom he knew. Adam could trust an Indian’s memory. Genie’s uncle had come to the not rare end of a wandering prospector’s life. The old desert tragedy—thirst! All at once Adam’s eyes seemed to burn blind with a red dim veil, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and through his body passed a cold shudder, and he had a strange vision of himself staggering blindly in a circle, plunging madly for the false mirage. The haunting plague passed away. Adam turned to examine the few pack articles Charley Jim had brought for possible identification of the dead. One of these, a silver belt buckle of odd design, oxidized and tarnished, might possibly be remembered by Genie. Adam called her, placed it in her hands.

  “Genie, did you ever see that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, with a start of recognition. “It was my father’s. He gave it to my uncle.”

  Adam nodded to the Indian. “Chief, you were right.”

  “Oh, Wanny—it means he’s found my uncle—dead!” exclaimed Genie, in awe.

  “Yes, Genie,” replied Adam, with a hand of sympathy upon her shoulder. “We know now. He’ll never come back.”

  With the buckle in her hands the girl slowly walked toward the graves of her parents.

  Charley Jim mounted his pony to ride away.

  “Chief—tell me of Oella,” said Adam.

  The Indian gazed down upon Adam with somber eyes. Then his lean, sinewy hand swept up with stately and eloquent gesture to be pressed over his heart.

  “Oella dead,” he replied, sonorously, and then he looked beyond Adam, out across the lonesome land, beyond the ranges, perhaps to the realm of his red gods. Adam read the Indian gesture. Oella had died of a broken heart.

  He stood there at the edge of the oasis, stricken mute, as his old Indian friend turned to go back across the valley to the Coahuila encampment. A broken heart! That superb Indian maiden, so lithe and tall and strong, so tranquil, so sure—serene of soul as the steady light of her midnight eyes—dead of a broken heart! She had loved him—a man alien to her race—a wanderer and a stranger within her gates, and when he had gone away life became unendurable. Another mystery of the lonely, grey, melancholy wastelands! Adam quivered there in the grip of it all.

  Later when he returned to Genie it was to say, simply, “My dear, as soon as I can find my burros we pack for the long trail.”

  “No!” she exclaimed, with lighting eyes.

  “Yes. I shall take you out to find you a home.”

  “Honest Injun?” she blazed at him, springing erect.

  “Genie, I would not tease about that. We know your uncle is dead. The time to go has come. We’ll start at sunrise.”

  Forgotten were Genie’s dreams of yesterday! A day at her time of life meant change, growth, oblivion for what had been. With a cry of wondering delight she flung herself upon Adam, leaped and climbed to the great height of his face, and there, like a bird, she pecked at him with cool, sweet lips, and clung to him in an ecstasy.

  “Don’t! … Still a child, Genie,” he said, huskily, as he disengaged himself from her wild embrace. He meant that she was not still a child. It amazed him and hurt him to see her radiance at the thought of leaving the desert oasis which had been home for so long. Fickleness of youth! Yesterday she had wanted to live there forever; today the enchantments of new life, people, places, called alluringly. It was what Adam had expected. It was what he wanted for her. How clear had been his vision of the future! How truly, the moment he had fought down his selfish desires, had he read her innocent heart! His own swelled with gladness, numbing out the pang. For him, some little meed of praise! Not little was it to have conquered self—not little was it to have builded the happiness of an orphan!

  Adam’s burros had grown grey in their years of idle, contented life at the oasis. Like the roadrunners, they enjoyed the proximity of cam
p; and he found them shaggy and fat, half asleep while they grazed. He drove them back to the shade of the cottonwoods, where Genie, seeing this last and immutable proof of forthcoming departure, began to dance over the sand in wild glee.

  “Genie, you’ll do well to save some of your nimbleness,” admonished Adam. “We’ll have a load. You’ve got to climb the mountain and walk till I can buy another burro.”

  “Oh, Wanny, I’ll fly!” she cried.

  “Humph! I rather think you will fly the very first time a young fellow sees you—a big girl in those ragged boy’s clothes.”

  Then Adam thrilled anew with the sweetness, the wonder of her. His cold heart warmed to the core. How he would live in the hope and happiness and love that surely must be awaiting this girl! His mention of a young fellow suddenly rendered Genie amazed, shy, bewildered.

  “But—but—Wanny—you—you won’t let any yo— young fellow see me this way!” she pleaded.

  “How can I help it? You just wouldn’t sew and make dresses. Now you’re in for it. We’ll meet a lot of lads … And, Genie, just the other day you didn’t care how I saw you.”

  “Oh, but you’re different! You’re my dad, my brother, old Taquitch, and everything.”

  “Thank you. That makes me feel a little better.” Suddenly she turned her dark eyes upon him, piercing now and dilating with thought.

  “Wanny! Are you sorry to leave?”

  “Yes,” he replied, sadly.

  “Then I’ll stay, if you want me—ever—always,” she said, very low. The golden flush paled on her cheek. She was a child, yet on the verge of womanhood.

  “Genie, I’m sorry, but I’m glad, too. What I want most is to see you settled in a happy home, with a guardian, young friends about you—all you want.”

  She appeared sober now, and Adam gathered that she had thought more seriously than he had given her credit for.