CHAPTER XXVIII
THE WAY OUT
When a woman treads the ways of deceit she smiles--like Mona Lisa. Butwas the great Leonardo deceived by the smile of his wife when she posedfor him so sweetly? No, he read her thoughts--how she was thinking ofanother--and his master hand wove them in. There she smiles to-day,smooth and pretty and cryptic; but Leonardo, the man, worked with heavyheart as he laid bare the tragedy of his love. The message was for her,if she cared to read it, or for him, that rival for her love; or, iftheir hearts were pure and free from guilt, then there was no message atall. She was just a pretty woman, soft and gentle and smiling--asVirginia Huff had smiled.
She had not smiled often, Wiley Holman remembered it now, as he wentflying across the desert, and always there was something behind; butwhen she had looked up at Blount and taken his fat hand, then he hadread her heart at a glance. If he had taken his punishment and notturned back he would have been spared this great ache in his breast; butno, he was not satisfied, he could not believe it, and so he hadreceived a worse wound. She had been playing with him all the time and,when the supreme moment arrived, she had landed him like a trout; andthen, when she had left him belly-up from his disaster, she had turnedto Blount and smiled. There was no restraint now; she smiled to theteeth; and Blount and the Directors smiled.
Wiley cursed to himself as he bored into the wind and burned up the roadto Keno. The mine was nothing; he could find him another one, butVirginia had played him false. He did not mind losing her--he could finda better woman--but how could he save his lost pride? He had played hishand to win and, when it came to the showdown, she had slipped in thejoker and cleaned him. The Widow would laugh when she heard the news,but she would not laugh at him. The road lay before him and his gastanks were full. He would gather up his belongings and drift. He steppedon the throttle and went roaring through the town, but at the bottom ofthe hill he stopped. The mine was shut down, not a soul was in sight,and yet he had left but a few hours before.
He toiled wearily up the trail, where he had caught Virginia running andheld her fighting in his arms, and the world turned black at thethought. What madness had this been that had kept him from suspectingher when she had opposed his every move from the start. Had she notwrecked his engine and ruined his mill? Then why had he trusted her withhis money? And that last innocent visit, when she had asked for herstock, and thanked him so demurely at the end! She would not bedismissed, all his rough words were wasted, until in the end she hadleaned over and kissed him. A Judas-kiss? Yes, if ever there was one; orthe kiss of Judith of Bethulia. But Judith had sold her kisses to saveher people--Virginia had sold hers for gold.
Yes, she had sold him out for money; after rebuking him from thebeginning she had stabbed him to the heart for a price. It was alwayshe, Wiley, who thought of nothing but money; who was the liar, themiser, the thief. Everything that he did, no matter how unselfish, wasimputed to his love of money; and yet it had remained for Virginia,the censorious and virtuous, to violate her trust for gain. It was notfor revenge that she had withheld the payment and snatched a milliondollars from his hand; she had told him herself that it was becauseBlount had returned their stock and she would not throw it away. Howquick Blount had been to see that way out and to bribe her byreturning the stock--how damnably quick to read her envious heart andknow that she would fall for the offer. Well, now let them keep it andsmile their smug smiles and laugh at Honest Wiley; for if there everwas a curse on stolen money then Virginia's would buy her nohappiness.
He raised his bloodshot eyes to look for the last time at the Paymaster,which he had fought for and lost. What had they done to save it, tobring it to what it was, to merit it for their own? For years it hadlain idle, and when he had opened it up they had fought him at everystep. They had shot him down with buckshot, and beaten him down withrocks and threatened his life with Stiff Neck George. His eyes clearedsuddenly and he looked about the dump--he had forgotten his feud withGeorge. Yet if his men were gone, who then had driven them out but thatcrooked-necked, fighting fool? And if George had driven them out, thenwhere was he now with his ancient, filed-down six-shooter? Wiley drewhis gun forward and walked softly towards the house, but as he passed ametal ore-car a pistol was thrust into his face. He started back, andthere was George.
"Put 'em up!" he snarled, rising swiftly from behind the car, and thehot fury left Wiley's brain. His anger turned cold and he looked downthe barrel at the grinning, spiteful eyes behind.
"You go to hell!" he growled, and George jabbed the gun into hisstomach.
"Put 'em up!" he ordered, but some devil of resistance seized Wiley ashis hands went up. It was close, too close, and George had the drop onhim, but one hand struck out and the other clutched the gun while hetwisted his lithe body aside. At the roar of the shot he went for hisown gun, leaping back and stooping low. Another bullet clipped his shirtand then his own gun spat back, shooting blindly through the smoke. Heemptied it, dodging swiftly and crouching close to the ground, and thenhe sprang behind the car. There was a silence, but as he listened heheard a gurgling noise, like the water flowing out of a canteen, and asudden, sodden thump. He looked out, and George was down. His blood wasgushing fast but the narrow, snaky eyes sought him out before they werefilmed by death. It was over, like a rush of wind.
Wiley flicked out his cylinder and filled it with fresh cartridges, thenlooked around for the rest. He was calm now, and calculating andinfinitely brave; but no one stepped forth to face his gun. A boy, downin town, started running towards the mine, only to turn back at someimperative command. The whole valley was lifeless, yet the people werethere, and soon they would venture forth. And then they would come up,and look at the body, and ask him to give up his gun; and if he did theywould take him to Vegas and shut him up in jail, where the populacecould come and stare at him. Blount and Jepson would come, and the Boardof Directors; and, in order to put him away, they would tell how he hadthreatened George. They would make it appear that he had come to jumpthe mine, and that George was defending the property; and then, with thejury nicely packed, they would send him to the penitentiary, where hewouldn't interfere with their plans.
In a moment of clairvoyance he saw Virginia before him, looking inthrough the prison bars and smiling, and suddenly he put up his gun. Shehad started this job and made him a murderer but he would rob her ofthat last chance to smile. There was a road that he knew that had beentraveled before by men who were hard-pressed and desperate. It turnedwest across the desert and mounted by Daylight Springs to dip down thelong slope to the Sink; and across the Valley of Death, if he could oncepass over it, there was no one he need fear to meet. No one, that is,except stray men like himself, who had fled from the officers of thelaw. Great mountain ranges, so they said, stretched unpeopled andsilent, beneath the glare of the desert sun; and though Death mightlinger near it was under the blue sky and away from the cold malice ofmen.
From his safe in the office Wiley took out a roll of bills, all that wasleft of his vanished wealth; and he took down his rifle and belt; andthen, walking softly past the body of Stiff Neck George, he cranked uphis machine and started off. Every doorway in town was crowded withheads, craning out to see him pass, and as he turned down the mainstreet he saw Death Valley Charley rushing out with a flask in his hand.
"We seen ye!" he grinned as Wiley slowed down, and dropped the flask ofwhiskey on the seat.
"You killed him fair!" he shouted after him, but Wiley had opened up thethrottle and the answer to his praise was a roar.
The sun was at high noon when Wiley topped the divide and glided downthe canyon towards Death Valley. He could sense it in the distance bythe veil of gray haze that hung like a pall across his way. Beyond itwere high mountains, a solid wall of blue that seemed to rise from thedepths and float, detached, against the sky; and up the winding washwhich led slowly down and down, there came pulsing waves of heat. Thecanyon opened out into a broad, rocky sand-flat, shut in on both sidesby knife-edged ridges dotted eve
nly with brittle white bushes; and eachjagged rock and out-thrust point was burned black by the suns ofcenturies.
He passed an ancient tractor, abandoned by the wayside, and a deserted,double-roofed house; and then, just below it where a ravine came down,he saw a sign-board, pointing. Up the gulch was another sign, stillpointing on and up, and stamped through the metal of the disk was thesingle word: Water. It was Hole-in-the-Rock Springs that old Charley hadspoken about and, somewhere up the canyon, there was a hole in thelimestone cap, and beneath it a tank of sweet water. On many a scorchingday some prospector, half dead from thirst, had toiled up that well-worntrail; but now the way was empty, the freighter's house given over torats, and the road led on and on.
A jagged, saw-tooth range rose up to block his way and the sand-flatnarrowed down to a deep wash; and, then, still thundering on, hestruggled out through its throat and the Valley seemed to rise up andsmite him. He stopped his throbbing motor and sat appalled at itsimmensity. Funereal mountains, black and banded and water-channeled,rose up in solid walls on both sides and, down through the middle as faras the eye could see, there stretched a white ribbon, set in green. Itswung back and forth across a wide, level expanse, narrow and gleamingwith water at the north and blending in the south with gray sands. Thewrithing white band was Death Valley Sink, where the waters fromcountless desert ranges drained down and were sucked up by the sun. Farfrom the north it came, when the season was right and the cloudburstsswept the Grape-Vines and the White mountains; the Panamints to the westgave down water from winter snows that gathered on Telescope Peak; andevery ravine of the somber Funeral Range was gutted by the rush offorgotten waters.
The Valley was dry, bone-dry and desiccated, and yet every hill, everygulch and wash and canyon, showed the action of torrential waters. Thechocolate-brown flanks of the towering mountain walls were creased, andripped out and worn; and from the mouth of every canyon a great spit ofsand and boulders had been spewed out and washed down towards the Sink.On the surface of this wash, rising up through thousands of feet, thetips of buried mountains peeped out like tiny hill-tops, yet black, andsharp and grim. The great ranges themselves, sweeping up from theprofundity till they seemed to cut off the world, looked like moldedcakes of chocolate which had been rained on and half melted down. Theywere washed-down, melted, stripped of earth and vegetation; and downfrom their flanks in a steep, even slope, lay the debris and scouringsof centuries.
The westering sun caught the glint of water in the poisonous,salt-marshes of the Sink; but, far to the south, the great ultimateSink of Sinks was a-gleam with borax and salt. It was there where thewhite band widened out to a lake-bed, that men came in winter to dotheir assessment work and scrape up the cotton-ball borax. But if anywere there now they would know him for a fugitive and he took the roadto the west. It ran over boulders, ground smooth by rolling floods andburned deep brown by the sun, and as he twisted and turned, throwinghis weight against the wheels, Wiley felt the growing heat. His shirtclung to his back, the sweat ran down his face and into his stingingeyes and as he stopped for a drink he noticed that the water no longerquenched his thirst. It was warm and flat and after each fresh drinkthe perspiration burst from every pore, as if his very skin cried outfor moisture. Yet his canteen was getting light and, until he couldfind water, he put it resolutely away.
The road swung down at last into a broad, flat dry-wash, where thegravel lay packed hard as iron, and as his racer took hold and began toleap and frolic, he tore down the valley like the wind. The sun wassinking low and the unknown lay before him, a land he had never seen;yet before the night came on he must map out his course and stake hislife on the venture. Other automobiles might follow and snatch him backif he delayed but an hour in his flight; but, once across Death Valleyand lost in those far mountains, he would leave the law behind. The menhe met would be fugitives like himself, or prospectors, or wanderingShoshones; and, live or die, he would be away from it all--where hewould never see Virginia again.
The deep wash pinched in, as the other had done, before it gave out intothe plain; and, then, as he whirled around a point, he glided out intothe open. The foothills lay behind him and, straight athwart his way,stretched a sea of motionless sand-waves. As far north as he could see,the ocean of sand tossed and tumbled, the crests of its rollers crownedwith brush and grotesque drift-wood, the gnarled trunks and roots ofmesquite trees. To the east and west the high mountains still rose up,black and barren, shutting in the sea of sand; but across the valley apass led smoothly up to a gap through the wall of the Panamints. It wasEmigrant Wash, up which the hardy Mormons had toiled in their westernpilgrimage, leaving at Lost Wagons and Salt Creek the bones of wholecaravans as a tribute to the power of the desert.
A smooth, steep slope led swiftly down to the edge of the Valley ofDeath and as Wiley looked across he saw as in a vision a massive gatewayof stone. It was flung boldly out from the base of a blue mountain,enclosing a dark valley behind; and from between its lofty walls a whiteriver of sand spread out like a flower down the slope. It was thegateway to the Ube-Hebes, just as Charley had described it, and it wasonly a few miles away. It lay just across the sand-flat, where thegreat, even waves seemed marching in a phalanx towards the south; andthen up a little slope, all painted blue and purple, to the mysteriousvalley beyond. The sun, swinging low, touched the summits of distantsand-hills with a gleam of golden light and all the dark shadows movedtoward him. A breath of air fanned his cheek, and as he drank deep fromhis canteen he nodded to the Gateway and smiled.