OVERLAND RED
CHAPTER I
THE PROSPECTOR
For five years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desertstation on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paidscant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed withthe idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He boughtsupplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew his name.
The prospector was much younger than he appeared to be. The desert sunhad dried his sinews and warped his shoulders. The desert wind hadscrawled thin lines of age upon his face. The desert solitude hadstooped him with its awesome burden of brooding silence.
Slowly his mind had been squeezed dry of all human interest save therecurrent memory of a child's face--that, and the poignant memory of thechild's mother. For ten years he had been trying to forget. The lastfive years on the desert had dimmed the woman's visioned face as thechild came more often between him and the memory of the mother, in hisdreams.
Then there were voices, the voices of strange spirits that wingedthrough the dusk of the outlands and hovered round his fire at night.
One voice, soft, insistent, ravished his imagination with visions ofillimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it wouldwhisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and drawnearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as achild, fearfully certain of a reply.
Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand,would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And inthe indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. Thevagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities ashis desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in itsextravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself tobe a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with hisfeet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.
Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of starsand silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobilityof the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....
The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or wrackinghim terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day andnight with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume ofa woman's hair.
Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-houseand gave royally like a courtesan of kings.
The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakeningbitter on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewedhis shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.
He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their accumulated burdens.He realized that the dream was all--its fulfillment nothing. He knewhimself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound ofhuman voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness ofhis child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whisperedto him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed fromafar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment. Hefound Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging manfoothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to consumehis years in dust.
A narrow canon held his secret. He had wandered into it, panned a littleblack sand, and found color. Finally he discovered the fountainhead ofthe hoarded yellow particles that spell Power. There in the fastness ofthose steep, purgatorial walls was the hermitage of the twovoices--voices that no longer whispered of hope, but left him in theutter loneliness of possession and its birthright, Fear.
He cried aloud for the companionship of men--and glanced fearfully roundlest man had heard him call.
He again journeyed to the town beside the railroad, bought supplies andvanished, a ragged wraith, on the horizon.
Back in the canon he set about his labors, finding a numbing solace intoil.
But at night he would think of the child's face. He had said to thosewith whom he had left the child that he would return with a fortune.They knew he went away to forget. They did not expect him to return.That had been ten years ago. He had written twice. Then he had drifted,always promising the inner voice that urged him that he would find goldfor her, his child, that she might ever think kindly of him. So he triedto buy himself--with promises. Once he had been a man of his hands, aman who stood straight and faced the sun. Now the people of the deserttown eyed him askance. He heard them say he was mad--that the desert had"got him." They were wrong. The desert and its secret was his--a sullenparamour, but _his_ nevertheless. Had she not given him of her veryheart?
He viewed his shrunken body, knew that he stooped and shuffled, realizedthat he had paid the inevitable, the inexorable price for the secret.His wine of dreams had evaporated.... He sifted the coarse gold betweenhis fingers, letting it fall back into the pan. Was it for _this_ thathe had wasted his soul?
* * * * *
In the desert town men began to notice the regularity of his comings andgoings. Two or three of them foregathered in the saloon and commented onit.
"He packed some dynamite last trip," asserted one.
There was a silence. The round clock behind the bar ticked loudly,ominously.
"Then he's struck it at last," said another.
"Mebby," commented the first speaker.
The third man nodded. Then came silence again and the absolute tickingof the clock. Presently from outside in the white heat of the road camethe rush of hoofs and an abrupt stop. A spurred and booted rider, hisswarthy face gray with dust, strode in, nodded to the group and calledfor whiskey.
"Which way did he go, Saunders?" asked one.
"North, as usual," said the rider.
"Let's set down," suggested the third man.
They shuffled to a table. The bartender brought glasses and a bottle.Then, uninvited, he pulled up a chair and sat with them. The riderlooked at him pointedly.
"Oh, I'm in on this," asserted the bartender. "Daugherty is theWells-Fargo man here. He won't talk to nobody but me--about _business_."
"What's that got to do with it?" queried the rider.
"Just what you'd notice, Saunders. Listen! The rat left a bag of dust inthe Company's safe last trip. Daugherty says its worth mebby fivehundred. He says the rat's goin' to bring in some more. Do I come in?"
"You're on," said the rider. "Now, see here, boys, we got to find out ifhe's filed on it yet, and what his name is, and then--"
"Mebby we'd better find out _where_ it is first," suggested one.
"And then jump him?" queried the rider over his glass.
"And then jump him," chorused the group. "He's out there alone. It'seasy." And each poured himself a drink, for which, strangely enough, noone offered to pay, and for which the bartender evidently forgot tocollect.
Meanwhile the prospector toiled through the drought of that summerhoarding the little yellow flakes that he washed from the gravel in thecanon.