XVI
MOUNTAIN SHEEP
WHAT Gale might have thought an appalling situation, if considered froma safe and comfortable home away from the desert, became, now that hewas shut in by the red-ribbed lava walls and great dry wastes, a mattercalmly accepted as inevitable. So he imagined it was accepted by theothers. Not even Mercedes uttered a regret. No word was spoken ofhome. If there was thought of loved one, it was locked deep in theirminds. In Mercedes there was no change in womanly quality, perhapsbecause all she had to love was there in the desert with her.
Gale had often pondered over this singular change in character. He hadtrained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in thedesert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidiousprimitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all,merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now ofredoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. Notonly was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember. His idea was thata man laboring under a great wrong, a great crime, a great passionmight find the lonely desert a fitting place for either remembrance oroblivion, according to the nature of his soul. But an ordinary,healthy, reasonably happy mortal who loved the open with its blaze ofsun and sweep of wind would have a task to keep from going backward tothe natural man as he was before civilization.
By tacit agreement Ladd again became the leader of the party. Ladd wasa man who would have taken all the responsibility whether or not it wasgiven him. In moments of hazard, of uncertainty, Lash and Gale, evenBelding, unconsciously looked to the ranger. He had that kind of power.
The first thing Ladd asked was to have the store of food that remainedspread out upon a tarpaulin. Assuredly, it was a slender enoughsupply. The ranger stood for long moments gazing down at it. He wasgroping among past experiences, calling back from his years of life onrange and desert that which might be valuable for the present issue.It was impossible to read the gravity of Ladd's face, for he stilllooked like a dead man, but the slow shake of his head told Gale much.There was a grain of hope, however, in the significance with which hetouched the bags of salt and said, "Shore it was sense packin' all thatsalt!"
Then he turned to face his comrades.
"That's little grub for six starvin' people corralled in the desert.But the grub end ain't worryin' me. Yaqui can get sheep up the slopes.Water! That's the beginnin' and middle an' end of our case."
"Laddy, I reckon the waterhole here never goes dry," replied Jim.
"Ask the Indian."
Upon being questioned, Yaqui repeated what he had said about thedreaded ano seco of the Mexicans. In a dry year this waterhole failed.
"Dick, take a rope an' see how much water's in the hole."
Gale could not find bottom with a thirty foot lasso. The water was ascool, clear, sweet as if it had been kept in a shaded iron receptacle.
Ladd welcomed this information with surprise and gladness.
"Let's see. Last year was shore pretty dry. Mebbe this summer won'tbe. Mebbe our wonderful good luck'll hold. Ask Yaqui if he thinks it'll rain."
Mercedes questioned the Indian.
"He says no man can tell surely. But he thinks the rain will come,"she replied.
"Shore it 'll rain, you can gamble on that now," continued Ladd. "Ifthere's only grass for the hosses! We can't get out of here withouthosses. Dick, take the Indian an' scout down the arroyo. To-day I seenthe hosses were gettin' fat. Gettin' fat in this desert! But mebbethey've about grazed up all the grass. Go an' see, Dick. An' may youcome back with more good news!"
Gale, upon the few occasions when he had wandered down the arroyo, hadnever gone far. The Yaqui said there was grass for the horses, anduntil now no one had given the question more consideration. Gale foundthat the arroyo widened as it opened. Near the head, where it wasnarrow, the grass lined the course of the dry stream bed. But fartherdown this stream bed spread out. There was every indication that atflood seasons the water covered the floor of the arroyo. The fartherGale went the thicker and larger grew the gnarled mesquites and paloverdes, the more cactus and greasewood there were, and other desertgrowths. Patches of gray grass grew everywhere. Gale began to wonderwhere the horses were. Finally the trees and brush thinned out, and amile-wide gray plain stretched down to reddish sand dunes. Over to oneside were the white horses, and even as Gale saw them both BlancoDiablo and Sol lifted their heads and, with white manes tossing in thewind, whistled clarion calls. Here was grass enough for many horses;the arroyo was indeed an oasis.
Ladd and the others were awaiting Gale's report, and they received itwith calmness, yet with a joy no less evident because it wasrestrained. Gale, in his keen observation at the moment, found that heand his comrades turned with glad eyes to the woman of the party.
"Senor Laddy, you think--you believe--we shall--" she faltered, and hervoice failed. It was the woman in her, weakening in the light of realhope, of the happiness now possible beyond that desert barrier.
"Mercedes, no white man can tell what'll come to pass out here," saidLadd, earnestly. "Shore I have hopes now I never dreamed of. I waspretty near a dead man. The Indian saved me. Queer notions have comeinto my head about Yaqui. I don't understand them. He seems when youlook at him only a squalid, sullen, vengeful savage. But Lord! that'sfar from the truth. Mebbe Yaqui's different from most Indians. Helooks the same, though. Mebbe the trouble is we white folks never knewthe Indian. Anyway, Beldin' had it right. Yaqui's our godsend. Now asto the future, I'd like to know mebbe as well as you if we're ever toget home. Only bein' what I am, I say, Quien sabe? But somethin'tells me Yaqui knows. Ask him, Mercedes. Make him tell. We'll all bethe better for knowin'. We'd be stronger for havin' more'n our faith inhim. He's silent Indian, but make him tell."
Mercedes called to Yaqui. At her bidding there was always a suggestionof hurry, which otherwise was never manifest in his actions. She put ahand on his bared muscular arm and began to speak in Spanish. Her voicewas low, swift, full of deep emotion, sweet as the sound of a bell. Itthrilled Gale, though he understood scarcely a word she said. He didnot need translation to know that here spoke the longing of a woman forlife, love, home, the heritage of a woman's heart.
Gale doubted his own divining impression. It was that the Yaquiunderstood this woman's longing. In Gale's sight the Indian'sstoicism, his inscrutability, the lavalike hardness of his face,although they did not change, seemed to give forth light, gentleness,loyalty. For an instant Gale seemed to have a vision; but it did notlast, and he failed to hold some beautiful illusive thing.
"Si!" rolled out the Indian's reply, full of power and depth.
Mercedes drew a long breath, and her hand sought Thorne's.
"He says yes," she whispered. "He answers he'll save us; he'll take usall back--he knows!"
The Indian turned away to his tasks, and the silence that held thelittle group was finally broken by Ladd.
"Shore I said so. Now all we've got to do is use sense. Friends, I'mthe commissary department of this outfit, an' what I say goes. You allwon't eat except when I tell you. Mebbe it'll not be so hard to keepour health. Starved beggars don't get sick. But there's the heatcomin', an' we can all go loco, you know. To pass the time! Lord,that's our problem. Now if you all only had a hankerin' for checkers.Shore I'll make a board an' make you play. Thorne, you're theluckiest. You've got your girl, an' this can be a honeymoon. Now witha few tools an' little material see what a grand house you can buildfor your wife. Dick, you're lucky, too. You like to hunt, an' upthere you'll find the finest bighorn huntin' in the West. Take Yaquiand the .405. We need the meat, but while you're gettin' it have yoursport. The same chance will never come again. I wish we all was ableto go. But crippled men can't climb the lava. Shore you'll see somecountry from the peaks. There's no wilder place on earth, except thepoles. An' when you're older, you an' Nell, with a couple of fine boys,think what it'll be to tell them about bein' lost in the lava, an'huntin'
sheep with a Yaqui. Shore I've hit it. You can take yours outin huntin' an' thinkin'. Now if I had a girl like Nell I'd never gocrazy. That's your game, Dick. Hunt, an' think of Nell, an' howyou'll tell those fine boys about it all, an' about the old cowman youknowed, Laddy, who'll by then be long past the divide. Rustle now,son. Get some enthusiasm. For shore you'll need it for yourself an'us."
Gale climbed the lava slope, away round to the right of the arroyo,along an old trail that Yaqui said the Papagos had made before his ownpeople had hunted there. Part way it led through spiked, crested,upheaved lava that would have been almost impassable even without itssilver coating of choya cactus. There were benches and ledges andridges bare and glistening in the sun. From the crests of theseYaqui's searching falcon gaze roved near and far for signs of sheep,and Gale used his glass on the reaches of lava that slanted steeplyupward to the corrugated peaks, and down over endless heave and rolland red-waved slopes. The heat smoked up from the lava, and this, withthe red color and the shiny choyas, gave the impression of a world ofsmoldering fire.
Farther along the slope Yaqui halted and crawled behind projections toa point commanding a view over an extraordinary section of country.The peaks were off to the left. In the foreground were gullies,ridges, and canyons, arroyos, all glistening with choyas and some otherand more numerous white bushes, and here and there towered a greencactus. This region was only a splintered and more devastated part ofthe volcanic slope, but it was miles in extent. Yaqui peeped over thetop of a blunt block of lava and searched the sharp-billowedwilderness. Suddenly he grasped Gale and pointed across a deep widegully.
With the aid of his glass Gale saw five sheep. They were much largerthan he had expected, dull brown in color, and two of them were ramswith great curved horns. They were looking in his direction.Remembering what he had heard about the wonderful eyesight of thesemountain animals, Gale could only conclude that they had seen thehunters.
Then Yaqui's movements attracted and interested him. The Indian hadbrought with him a red scarf and a mesquite branch. He tied the scarfto the stick, and propped this up in a crack of the lava. The scarfwaved in the wind. That done, the Indian bade Gale watch.
Once again he leveled the glass at the sheep. All five weremotionless, standing like statues, heads pointed across the gully. Theywere more than a mile distant. When Gale looked without his glass theymerged into the roughness of the lava. He was intensely interested.Did the sheep see the red scarf? It seemed incredible, but nothingelse could account for that statuesque alertness. The sheep held thisrigid position for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then the leading ramstarted to approach. The others followed. He took a few steps, thenhalted. Always he held his head up, nose pointed.
"By George, they're coming!" exclaimed Gale. "They see that flag.They're hunting us. They're curious. If this doesn't beat me!"
Evidently the Indian understood, for he grunted.
Gale found difficulty in curbing his impatience. The approach of thesheep was slow. The advances of the leader and the intervals ofwatching had a singular regularity. He worked like a machine. Galefollowed him down the opposite wall, around holes, across gullies, overridges. Then Gale shifted the glass back to find the others. Theywere coming also, with exactly the same pace and pause of their leader.What steppers they were! How sure-footed! What leaps they made! Itwas thrilling to watch them. Gale forgot he had a rifle. The Yaquipressed a heavy hand down upon his shoulder. He was to keep wellhidden and to be quiet. Gale suddenly conceived the idea that the sheepmight come clear across to investigate the puzzling red thingfluttering in the breeze. Strange, indeed, would that be for thewildest creatures in the world.
The big ram led on with the same regular persistence, and in half anhour's time he was in the bottom of the great gulf, and soon he wasfacing up the slope. Gale knew then that the alluring scarf hadfascinated him. It was no longer necessary now for Gale to use hisglass. There was a short period when an intervening crest of lava hidthe sheep from view. After that the two rams and their smallerfollowers were plainly in sight for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Thenthey disappeared behind another ridge. Gale kept watching sure theywould come out farther on. A tense period of waiting passed, then asuddenly electrifying pressure of Yaqui's hand made Gale tremble withexcitement.
Very cautiously he shifted his position. There, not fifty feet distantupon a high mound of lava, stood the leader of the sheep. His sizeastounded Gale. He seemed all horns. But only for a moment did theimpression of horns overbalancing body remain with Gale. The sheep wasgraceful, sinewy, slender, powerfully built, and in poise magnificent.As Gale watched, spellbound, the second ram leaped lightly upon themound, and presently the three others did likewise.
Then, indeed, Gale feasted his eyes with a spectacle for a hunter. Itcame to him suddenly that there had been something he expected to seein this Rocky Mountain bighorn, and it was lacking. They werebeautiful, as wonderful as even Ladd's encomiums had led him tosuppose. He thought perhaps it was the contrast these soft, sleek,short-furred, graceful animals afforded to what he imagined the barren,terrible lava mountains might develop.
The splendid leader stepped closer, his round, protruding amber eyes,which Gale could now plainly see, intent upon that fatal red flag.Like automatons the other four crowded into his tracks. A few littleslow steps, then the leader halted.
At this instant Gale's absorbed attention was directed by Yaqui to therifle, and so to the purpose of the climb. A little cold shockaffronted Gale's vivid pleasure. With it dawned a realization of whathe had imagined was lacking in these animals. They did not look wild!The so-called wildest of wild creatures appeared tamer than sheep hehad followed on a farm. It would be little less than murder to killthem. Gale regretted the need of slaughter. Nevertheless, he could notresist the desire to show himself and see how tame they really were.
He reached for the .405, and as he threw a shell into the chamber theslight metallic click made the sheep jump. Then Gale rose quickly tohis feet.
The noble ram and his band simply stared at Gale. They had never seena man. They showed not the slightest indication of instinctive fear.Curiosity, surprise, even friendliness, seemed to mark their attitudeof attention. Gale imagined that they were going to step still closer.He did not choose to wait to see if this were true. Certainly italready took a grim resolution to raise the heavy .405.
His shot killed the big leader. The others bounded away withremarkable nimbleness. Gale used up the remaining four shells to dropthe second ram, and by the time he had reloaded the others were out ofrange.
The Yaqui's method of hunting was sure and deadly and saving of energy,but Gale never would try it again. He chose to stalk the game. Thisentailed a great expenditure of strength, the eyes and lungs of amountaineer, and, as Gale put it to Ladd, the need of seven-leagueboots. After being hunted a few times and shot at, the sheep becameexceedingly difficult to approach. Gale learned to know that theirfame as the keenest-eyed of all animals was well founded. If he workeddirectly toward a flock, crawling over the sharp lava, always asentinel ram espied him before he got within range. The only method ofattack that he found successful was to locate sheep with his glass,work round to windward of them, and then, getting behind a ridge orbuttress, crawl like a lizard to a vantage point. He failed often.The stalk called forth all that was in him of endurance, cunning,speed. As the days grew hotter he hunted in the early morning hours anda while before the sun went down. More than one night he lay out onthe lava, with the great stars close overhead and the immense void allbeneath him. This pursuit he learned to love. Upon those scarred andblasted slopes the wild spirit that was in him had free rein. And likea shadow the faithful Yaqui tried ever to keep at his heels.
One morning the rising sun greeted him as he surmounted the higher coneof the volcano. He saw the vastness of the east aglow with a glazedrosy whiteness, like the changing hue of an ember. At this heightthere was a sweeping wind, still co
ol. The western slopes of lava laydark, and all that world of sand and gulf and mountain barrier beyondwas shrouded in the mystic cloud of distance. Gale had assimilatedmuch of the loneliness and the sense of ownership and the love of loftyheights that might well belong to the great condor of the peak. Likethis wide-winged bird, he had an unparalleled range of vision. Thevery corners whence came the winds seemed pierced by Gale's eyes.
Yaqui spied a flock of sheep far under the curved broken rim of themain crater. Then began the stalk. Gale had taught the Yaquisomething--that speed might win as well as patient cunning. Keepingout of sight, Gale ran over the spike-crusted lava, leaving the Indianfar behind. His feet were magnets, attracting supporting holds and hepassed over them too fast to fall. The wind, the keen air of theheights, the red lava, the boundless surrounding blue, all seemed tohave something to do with his wildness. Then, hiding, slipping,creeping, crawling, he closed in upon his quarry until the long riflegrew like stone in his grip, and the whipping "spang" ripped thesilence, and the strange echo boomed deep in the crater, and rolledaround, as if in hollow mockery at the hopelessness of escape.
Gale's exultant yell was given as much to free himself of some burstingjoy of action as it was to call the slower Yaqui. Then he liked thestrange echoes. It was a maddening whirl of sound that bored deeperand deeper along the whorled and caverned walls of the crater. It wasas if these aged walls resented the violating of their silent sanctity.Gale felt himself a man, a thing alive, something superior to all thissavage, dead, upflung world of iron, a master even of all this grandeurand sublimity because he had a soul.
He waited beside his quarry, and breathed deep, and swept the longslopes with searching eyes of habit.
When Yaqui came up they set about the hardest task of all, to pack thebest of that heavy sheep down miles of steep, ragged, choya-coveredlava. But even in this Gale rejoiced. The heat was nothing, themillions of little pits which could hold and twist a foot were nothing;the blade-edged crusts and the deep fissures and the choked canyons andthe tangled, dwarfed mesquites, all these were as nothing but obstaclesto be cheerfully overcome. Only the choya hindered Dick Gale.
When his heavy burden pulled him out of sure-footedness, and he plungedinto a choya, or when the strange, deceitful, uncanny, almost invisiblefrosty thorns caught and pierced him, then there was call for all offortitude and endurance. For this cactus had a malignant power oftorture. Its pain was a stinging, blinding, burning, sickening poisonin the blood. If thorns pierced his legs he felt the pain all over hisbody; if his hands rose from a fall full of the barbed joints, he washelpless and quivering till Yaqui tore them out.
But this one peril, dreaded more than dizzy height of precipice orsunblindness on the glistening peak, did not daunt Gale. His teacherwas the Yaqui, and always before him was an example that made himdespair of a white man's equality. Color, race, blood, breeding--whatwere these in the wilderness? Verily, Dick Gale had come to learn theuse of his hands.
So in a descent of hours he toiled down the lava slope, to stalk intothe arroyo like a burdened giant, wringing wet, panting, clear-eyed anddark-faced, his ragged clothes and boots white with choya thorns.
The gaunt Ladd rose from his shaded seat, and removed his pipe fromsmiling lips, and turned to nod at Jim, and then looked back again.
The torrid summer heat came imperceptibly, or it could never have beenborne by white men. It changed the lives of the fugitives, making thempartly nocturnal in habit. The nights had the balmy coolness ofspring, and would have been delightful for sleep, but that would havemade the blazing days unendurable.
The sun rose in a vast white flame. With it came the blasting,withering wind from the gulf. A red haze, like that of earliersunsets, seemed to come sweeping on the wind, and it roared up thearroyo, and went bellowing into the crater, and rushed on in fury tolash the peaks.
During these hot, windy hours the desert-bound party slept in deeprecesses in the lava; and if necessity brought them forth they couldnot remain out long. The sand burned through boots, and a touch ofbare hand on lava raised a blister.
A short while before sundown the Yaqui went forth to build a campfire,and soon the others came out, heat-dazed, half blinded, with parchingthroats to allay and hunger that was never satisfied. A little actionand a cooling of the air revived them, and when night set in they werecomfortable round the campfire.
As Ladd had said, one of their greatest problems was the passing oftime. The nights were interminably long, but they had to be passed inwork or play or dream--anything except sleep. That was Ladd's mostinflexible command. He gave no reason. But not improbably the rangerthought that the terrific heat of the day spend in slumber lessened awear and strain, if not a real danger of madness.
Accordingly, at first the occupations of this little group were manyand various. They worked if they had something to do, or could inventa pretext. They told and retold stories until all were wearisome.They sang songs. Mercedes taught Spanish. They played every game theyknew. They invented others that were so trivial children wouldscarcely have been interested, and these they played seriously. In aword, with intelligence and passion, with all that was civilized andhuman, they fought the ever-infringing loneliness, the savage solitudeof their environment.
But they had only finite minds. It was not in reason to expect acomplete victory against this mighty Nature, this bounding horizon ofdeath and desolation and decay. Gradually they fell back upon fewerand fewer occupations, until the time came when the silence was hard tobreak.
Gale believed himself the keenest of the party, the one who thoughtmost, and he watched the effect of the desert upon his companions. Heimagined that he saw Ladd grow old sitting round the campfire. Certainit was that the ranger's gray hair had turned white. What had been attimes hard and cold and grim about him had strangely vanished in sweettemper and a vacant-mindedness that held him longer as the days passed.For hours, it seemed, Ladd would bend over his checkerboard and nevermake a move. It mattered not now whether or not he had a partner. Hewas always glad of being spoken to, as if he were called back fromvague region of mind. Jim Lash, the calmest, coolest, most nonchalant,best-humored Westerner Gale had ever met, had by slow degrees lost thatcheerful character which would have been of such infinite good to hiscompanions, and always he sat brooding, silently brooding. Jim had noties, few memories, and the desert was claiming him.
Thorne and Mercedes, however, were living, wonderful proof that spirit,mind, and heart were free--free to soar in scorn of the colossalbarrenness and silence and space of that terrible hedging prison oflava. They were young; they loved; they were together; and the oasiswas almost a paradise. Gale believe he helped himself by watching them.Imagination had never pictured real happiness to him. Thorne andMercedes had forgotten the outside world. If they had been existing onthe burned-out desolate moon they could hardly have been in a harsher,grimmer, lonelier spot than this red-walled arroyo. But it might havebeen a statelier Eden than that of the primitive day.
Mercedes grew thinner, until she was a slender shadow of her formerself. She became hard, brown as the rangers, lithe and quick as apanther. She seemed to live on water and the air--perhaps, indeed, onlove. For of the scant fare, the best of which was continually urgedupon her, she partook but little. She reminded Gale of a wild browncreature, free as the wind on the lava slopes. Yet, despite the greatchange, her beauty remained undiminished. Her eyes, seeming so muchlarger now in her small face, were great black, starry gulfs. She wasthe life of that camp. Her smiles, her rapid speech, her low laughter,her quick movements, her playful moods with the rangers, the dark andpassionate glance, which rested so often on her lover, the whispers inthe dusk as hand in hand they paced the campfire beat--these helpedGale to retain his loosening hold on reality, to resist the lure of astrange beckoning life where a man stood free in the golden open, whereemotion was not, nor trouble, nor sickness, nor anything but thesavage's rest and sleep and action and dream.
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Although the Yaqui was as his shadow, Gale reached a point when heseemed to wander alone at twilight, in the night, at dawn. Far downthe arroyo, in the deepening red twilight, when the heat rolled away onslow-dying wind, Blanco Sol raised his splendid head and whistled forhis master. Gale reproached himself for neglect of the noble horse.Blanco Sol was always the same. He loved four things--his master, along drink of cool water, to graze at will, and to run. Time andplace, Gale thought, meant little to Sol if he could have those fourthings. Gale put his arm over the great arched neck and laid his cheekagainst the long white mane, and then even as he stood there forgot thehorse. What was the dull, red-tinged, horizon-wide mantle creeping upthe slope? Through it the copper sun glowed, paled, died. Was it onlytwilight? Was it gloom? If he thought about it he had a feeling thatit was the herald of night and the night must be a vigil, and that madehim tremble.
At night he had formed a habit of climbing up the lava slope as far asthe smooth trail extended, and there on a promontory he paced to andfro, and watched the stars, and sat stone-still for hours looking downat the vast void with its moving, changing shadows. From thatpromontory he gazed up at a velvet-blue sky, deep and dark, bright withmillions of cold, distant, blinking stars, and he grasped a little ofthe meaning of infinitude. He gazed down into the shadows, which,black as they were and impenetrable, yet have a conception ofimmeasurable space.
Then the silence! He was dumb, he was awed, he bowed his head, hetrembled, he marveled at the desert silence. It was the one thingalways present. Even when the wind roared there seemed to be silence.But at night, in this lava world of ashes and canker, he waited forthis terrible strangeness of nature to come to him with the secret. Heseemed at once a little child and a strong man, and something very old.What tortured him was the incomprehensibility that the vaster the spacethe greater the silence! At one moment Gale felt there was only deathhere, and that was the secret; at another he heard the slow beat of amighty heart.
He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did notrealize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And whenhe decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to theprimal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as hehad experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scaleof a man's values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More ofdesert experience, Gale believe, would be too much for intellect. Thedesert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over astrange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to thesavage?
Yaqui was the answer to that. When Gale acknowledged this he alwaysremembered his present strange manner of thought. The past, the oldorder of mind, seemed as remote as this desert world was from thehaunts of civilized men. A man must know a savage as Gale knew Yaquibefore he could speak authoritatively, and then something stilled histongue. In the first stage of Gale's observation of Yaqui he hadmarked tenaciousness of life, stoicism, endurance, strength. Thesewere the attributes of the desert. But what of that second stagewherein the Indian had loomed up a colossal figure of strange honor,loyalty, love? Gale doubted his convictions and scorned himself fordoubting.
There in the gloom sat the silent, impassive, inscrutable Yaqui. Hisdark face, his dark eyes were plain in the light of the stars. Alwayshe was near Gale, unobtrusive, shadowy, but there. Why? Galeabsolutely could not doubt that the Indian had heart as well as mind.Yaqui had from the very first stood between Gale and accident, toil,peril. It was his own choosing. Gale could not change him or thwarthim. He understood the Indian's idea of obligation and sacred duty.But there was more, and that baffled Gale. In the night hours, aloneon the slope, Gale felt in Yaqui, as he felt the mighty throb of thatdesert pulse, a something that drew him irresistibly to the Indian.Sometimes he looked around to find the Indian, to dispel these strange,pressing thoughts of unreality, and it was never in vain.
Thus the nights passed, endlessly long, with Gale fighting for his oldorder of thought, fighting the fascination of the infinite sky, and thegloomy insulating whirl of the wide shadows, fighting for belief, hope,prayer, fighting against that terrible ever-recurring idea of beinglost, lost, lost in the desert, fighting harder than any other thingthe insidious, penetrating, tranquil, unfeeling self that was comingbetween him and his memory.
He was losing the battle, losing his hold on tangible things, losinghis power to stand up under this ponderous, merciless weight of desertspace and silence.
He acknowledged it in a kind of despair, and the shadows of the nightseemed whirling fiends. Lost! Lost! Lost! What are you waiting for?Rain!... Lost! Lost! Lost in the desert! So the shadows seemed toscream in voiceless mockery.
At the moment he was alone on the promontory. The night was far spent.A ghastly moon haunted the black volcanic spurs. The winds blewsilently. Was he alone? No, he did not seem to be alone. The Yaquiwas there. Suddenly a strange, cold sensation crept over Gale. It wasnew. He felt a presence. Turning, he expected to see the Indian, butinstead, a slight shadow, pale, almost white, stood there, not closenor yet distant. It seemed to brighten. Then he saw a woman whoresembled a girl he had seemed to know long ago. She was white-faced,golden-haired, and her lips were sweet, and her eyes were turningblack. Nell! He had forgotten her. Over him flooded a torrent ofmemory. There was tragic woe in this sweet face. Nell was holding outher arms--she was crying aloud to him across the sand and the cactusand the lava. She was in trouble, and he had been forgetting.
That night he climbed the lava to the topmost cone, and never slippedon a ragged crust nor touched a choya thorn. A voice called to him.He saw Nell's eyes in the stars, in the velvet blue of sky, in theblackness of the engulfing shadows. She was with him, a slender shape,a spirit, keeping step with him, and memory was strong, sweet, beating,beautiful. Far down in the west, faintly golden with light of thesinking moon, he saw a cloud that resembled her face. A cloud on thedesert horizon! He gazed and gazed. Was that a spirit face like theone by his side? No--he did not dream.
In the hot, sultry morning Yaqui appeared at camp, after long hours ofabsence, and he pointed with a long, dark arm toward the west. A bankof clouds was rising above the mountain barrier.
"Rain!" he cried; and his sonorous voice rolled down the arroyo.
Those who heard him were as shipwrecked mariners at sight of a distantsail.
Dick Gale, silent, grateful to the depths of his soul, stood with armover Blanco Sol and watched the transforming west, where clouds ofwonderous size and hue piled over one another, rushing, darkening,spreading, sweeping upward toward that white and glowing sun.
When they reached the zenith and swept round to blot out the blazingorb, the earth took on a dark, lowering aspect. The red of sand andlava changed to steely gray. Vast shadows, like ripples on water,sheeted in from the gulf with a low, strange moan. Yet the silence waslike death. The desert was awaiting a strange and hatedvisitation--storm! If all the endless torrid days, the endless mysticnights had seemed unreal to Gale, what, then, seemed this stupendousspectacle?
"Oh! I felt a drop of rain on my face!" cried Mercedes; and whisperingthe name of a saint, she kissed her husband.
The white-haired Ladd, gaunt, old, bent, looked up at the maelstrom ofclouds, and he said, softly, "Shore we'll get in the hosses, an' packlight, an' hit the trail, an' make night marches!"
Then up out of the gulf of the west swept a bellowing wind and a blackpall and terrible flashes of lightning and thunder like the end of theworld--fury, blackness, chaos, the desert storm.