Stairs of Sand

by Zane Grey

  Ruth, almost fainting, continued to lean for support against the man she had not yet seen.

  “Merryvale, I believe my long search is ended,” he said, quietly.

  Ruth, as one in a dream, saw the other man come round to face her. He looked stranger than any old prospector she had seen. But he had keen kindly blue eyes that fixed upon her with singular penetration.

  “Wal, Adam, I reckon you’re right. It’s Ruth.”

  Chapter Two

  RUTH swayed back a little against her rescuer. Her head hardly reached his shoulder.

  “Who are you—that call me Ruth?” she queried curiously.

  The old man’s worn and wrinkled visage seemed to emit a benevolent light.

  “I’m Merryvale, Miss,” he replied. “Adam’s pard these long four years.”

  Ruth then became aware of a gentle pressure of two great hands on her shoulders. But almost at once the man let go his hold and strode out to confront her.

  “Ruth, don’t you know me?” he asked.

  Ruth found herself gazing up at a very tall man, clad in the dusty weathered ragged garb of a desert wanderer. His face, dark almost as an Indian’s, and strange with its deep sloping lines of sadness, she knew yet did not know. Gray eyes, clear, piercing as those of an eagle, looked down upon her with a soft and wonderful light of joy. Ruth trembled. Who was this man? It was not only that she had seen him before, but she remembered that softness of light in his eyes.

  “I know you—yet I don’t,” she replied, tremulously.

  “Surely you remember me?” he asked, gently.

  “Yes—no-o,” answered Ruth, gravely shaking her head.

  “Have you forgotten Genie?”

  “Genie? Genie who?” she asked wonderingly, with quickening currents of thought, whirling, coalescing toward revelation.

  “Why, Genie Linwood.”

  “Oh!—Genie Linwood! … Santa Ysabel!” Ruth flashed. “Yes—yes. Oh, I remember Genie. It was to her I gave my pretty gowns when I left Santa Ysabel. She was to marry Gene, the young rancher…. Gene Blair, who fell in love with her—who thought her a poor desert waif when she was rich.”

  “Yes, Ruth—that was Genie,” replied the man, in a tone not untinged by sadness.

  “Now I remember you,” cried Ruth. “You were Genie’s friend—her desert man. Eagle, she called you. Oh, I remember now…. You had found her on the desert where she was starving with her mother. She was only a child. Then her mother died, and you took care of her for years—until she grew up. You brought her out of the desert—to civilization—to the ranch of the Blairs. You wanted to find a home for her. They took her in, loved her, believing her poor, and all the time she had riches. The gold her father had mined and which you had saved all those years. It was like a fairy story.”

  Ruth, warming with speech, was shaken with a disturbing and troubled memory not yet clear.

  “Wal, Adam, reckon I might as well unpack the burros,” spoke up Merryvale. “We aimed to camp heah anyway, an’ shore now there’s more reason.”

  “Yes, we’ll camp here,” replied Adam. “It’s too late to find a better place before night.”

  “How aboot these heah mules?” inquired Merryvale.

  “I’ll unhitch them presently. You fetch some firewood.”

  Adam strode to the prostrate form of Stone and gazed down upon him. Ruth recalling her part in his predicament was filled with concern.

  “Did you kill him?” she queried, aghast.

  “He’s just stunned,” replied Adam. He returned to Ruth and regarded her with eyes she found hard to meet. “Who is this fellow and what is he to you?”

  “His name is Stone. He’s nothing to me,” replied Ruth, shortly.

  “I don’t often mistake the actions of men,” said Adam, thoughtfully. “Where do you live? Where were you going? What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you presently,” rejoined Ruth. “It all comes back to me…. You left us at Santa Ysabel. You disappeared one night. We waited day after day. You didn’t come back. Genie postponed her marriage. At last she said: ‘he’s gone for good. I was afraid of it. Gone back to the desert! Just like Dismukes!’ I recall her very words. She was heartbroken…. She called you Eagle, but the others gave you a name…. Was it Wansfell?”

  “Yes,” replied Adam. “Desert men called me Wansfell. But that is not my real name. It was given me by a drunken prospector, many years ago. And somehow it stuck to me.”

  “Wansfell? I’ve heard that name more than once since grandpa and I left Santa Ysabel,” mused Ruth. “But I hated the past almost as I hated the present. I cherished no memories. They hurt me so.”

  “Ruth, now that I’ve found you, tell me your story,” he said, with a tone she found it difficult to resist.

  “Found me! What do you mean?” she queried, catching her breath.

  “Ruth, it was you I ran away from at Santa Ysabel four long long years ago,” he answered, with deep feeling. “Not from Genie and her happiness. Not to wander back into the lonely desert. I left you in the night, without a word, because if I had stayed an hour longer my strength would have failed. I loved you so terribly that it would have betrayed me. You were only nineteen, lonely, unhappy, yearning for love. I felt that I might have made you care for me. And I had no right. I suffered under the brand of Cain. I was an outlaw. Any day I might have been caught and hanged for my crime. So I left you.”

  “Ah—yes—it all comes back now,” she murmured. “I wondered. I was deeply—hurt…. You were so good—so different…. I remember you upbraided me for being a weak dreaming girl. And I asked you to stay.”

  He took her hand and held it in his. “I had my ordeal, Ruth. If it had not been for my years on the desert I would have fallen. I wandered from place to place, fighting myself. Every cloud, every stone had the contour of your face. But at last I gave you up. I went on and on, finally to the oasis where fourteen years before, as a boy I had nearly starved to death. Day after day, in the hot silent hours, and night after night, in the lonely desert starlight, I walked with my spectres. But in the end I conquered. I took the trail back to the scene of my crime. Picacho! I meant to give myself up and suffer my punishment. The law wanted me. The sheriff whom I had scarred for life had sworn to hang me for murder. I sought him to expiate my crime and so find peace for my soul. I went back to Picacho. It had been a wild rushing miners’ camp, prosperous, thronged by men. I found it abandoned, but there was a settlement on the river. The surrounding ruin and decay were fresh reminder of the lapse of years. Merryvale was there. It was hard to make him recognize in me the boy he had known there fourteen years before. But at last he did. I told him I had come to accept the penalty for killing my brother. Then Merryvale explained that I had rushed off into the desert without knowing the truth. I had not killed the brother I had loved. He was alive. I was not a murderer…. I had become a fugitive—a wanderer of the wasteland—I had endured all the agony the desert could deal to a man—for nothing, nothing.”

  Ruth felt a hard constriction of her throat that made speech difficult. She had been compelled to lift her eyes to meet his gaze. His face became familiar to her again, seeing it under change and play of emotion.

  “It was your brother—you thought you’d killed,” she said, at last. “All those years! … How terrible!—Oh, thank God, for you, Adam, that it was all a mistake!”

  “I rushed back to Santa Ysabel to tell you I was free,” he went on, “only to find you gone. I did not think of seeing Genie. I thought only of you…. Then began my search. It led me all over Southern California, over into Mexico and Arizona, and finally into the desert. You were like a grain of sand lost out there. I never knew the name of your relative—your grandfather. And not until a few days ago did I ever meet a man who I believed had seen you. He was a prospector I chanced to run across in Yuma. I had known him years before. He believed he had seen you at a waterhole we used to call Indian Well, which is now Lost Lake…. So I came—and I have found
you.”

  Ruth covered her face with her hands. The moment was stingingly full of a sweet and explicable shame.

  “I’m not what I was when you knew me,” she whispered.

  He kept silent so long that Ruth feared his next words.

  “I did not expect you to be. Anything might have happened to you. I remember the tragedy of your mother.”

  “Oh—that is what I’ve been trying to remember,” she cried out. “You knew my mother. You spoke of her. But you told me so little. Tell me now, I beg of you.”

  “All in good time, Ruth,” he returned. “But not quite yet…. I felt that if I ever found you it would be reward enough. The least I expected was to tell you my story, your mother’s, and then to serve you, as I tried to serve her.”

  Ruth felt the hot blood bum her cheeks as she gazed into the gray eyes that seemed to read her very soul with understanding and love.

  “I meant the years had changed me for the worse,” she explained. “You called me a dreaming, petulant girl. I was. But even so, I had hours of hope, of desire to be good, to help grandfather to find a happy future. I am twenty-three now. All the four years since I met you I’ve lived on this desert—at that God-forsaken place, Lost Lake. It is lost. It is as false as the mirages I see every day. This desert of shifting sands has made me like it. I am all change, storm—burning, burning for I know not what. Sometimes I see myself as a woman trying to climb those stairs of sand. The dreams and hopes of my girlhood are gone. And I mock myself because I am a creature of terrible moods—because I cannot grow indifferent to everything—and sink—sink to the level of an Indian woman—as that boy Stone expected me to.”

  “That is because you have clung to an ideal.”

  “I have no ideal—and you’ve found me too late, replied Ruth, bitterly.

  “Nay, it could not be too late while you live.”

  Ruth was used to the importunities of men. But they, like desert hawks, were fierce and hungry. No man had ever thought of her needs, of what it would take to make her happy. Wansfell stirred unplumbed depths of thought that had the strange effect of augmenting her antagonism to the best in her.

  A movement on the part of her companion caused Ruth to turn. Stone was struggling to a sitting posture. His trembling hand went to his swollen and bloody face, now almost unrecognizable. Wansfell strode over to confront him.

  “Where were you taking this girl?” he demanded.

  “San Ysidro—then San Diego,” replied Stone, speaking thickly.

  “But you’re off the road.”

  “When the sand began to blow I lost my way.”

  “It wasn’t blowing enough to hide wheel tracks. It looks as if you deliberately turned off into this canyon.”

  “I didn’t. I thought the road ran here. Then the mule balked.”

  “Why did you attack this girl?”

  “I meant no harm,” he replied, sullenly. “We’d eloped. When the mule balked and she found out we’d have to spend the night here—she changed her mind. She started to walk back. I tried to hold her and she fought, that’s all.”

  Wansfell turned slowly to the girl.

  “How much of what he says is true?”

  “All of it—except that he didn’t mean to harm me,” replied Ruth, with the heat of anger and shame rising to her face. She scorned the reluctance she felt to confess to this man. “I objected to his—his attentions. When I realized my mistake I started to walk home. Then he became violent.”

  “Get up,” Wansfell ordered. And when Stone hastily arose he continued: “you take a canteen and some grub, and light out.”

  Stone lost no time in complying, and soon he was on his way toward the gateway of the canyon. Once he looked back over his shoulder.

  Merryvale, returning with a bundle of firewood, passed Stone and turned to gaze after him.

  “Wal, now, he shore is a pleasant nice young fellar,” remarked Merryvale, as he reached the others and threw down the wood. “Heah is what he said: ‘I’ll get even with her’—Adam, didn’t you let him off sort of easy?”

  “Ruth, you really eloped with that boy?” inquired Wansfell thoughtfully.

  “Yes. I was a fool. But I’d have gone with anyone,” she returned, impatiently.

  In the look he bent on her there was no blame, merely an immutable loyalty. Ruth’s quick intuition grasped that nothing could make any difference to this man. It did not matter to him what she was. He had found her Something vague and vast began to form around her, loom over her, baffling and disconcerting.

  “Wal, the sand has settled, an’ I reckon we’ll be comfortable heah, soon as it’s cooler,” remarked Merryvale, as he knelt with active hands.

  Ruth watched the band of gold sunlight fade off the canyon rim above. Long before this her absence would have been noticed, and her grandfather would be prey to alarm. She felt a pang in her breast, even though he had not had much pity for her. The desert had obsessed him, as it had her mother and father.

  While she mused the shadows deepened in the canyon. The low faint moan of wind died out altogether. The camp fire crackled. Merryvale hopped back and forth in sprightly fashion from packs to his heating pots and pans. A savory fragrance made Ruth reflect that her mental state did not kill hunger. Why should a person feel tired of living yet be a victim to appetite? She watched Wansfell unroll the blankets, and make her a bed under the protecting wall of stone. Then he fetched her a pan of warm water, and her bag from the wagon.

  “Adam,” she said, smiling up at him, “you’re very good to think of me, but what is the use?”

  “Use of what?” he asked.

  “Oh, of bathing my miserable face or brushing my hair—of eating—of anything.”

  “You ask what is the use of doing for yourself? Well—only to make yourself strong and proficient in order to help others.”

  “That is your religion?”

  “No. It is how I saved myself.”

  Ruth fell silent. What kind of man was this Adam Wansfell? She remembered Genie Linwood’s story, and her heart beat unwontedly, despite her mocking of any faith or hope. Too late was it for this strange desert man to help her. Wearily she opened her bag and took out the things she wanted, and then let down her hair. She brushed it slowly. The silky sound and the soft feel of her hair always seemed pleasant, soothing. Then she bathed her hands and face. The mirror pictured the same face which she had jealously watched and lovingly cared for and yet increasingly hated for so long. What would Wansfell think of it? She could not help caring. It was an ineradicable instinct. She gazed at the thick wavy dark gold hair parted from a low level brow, at the purple eyes brooding, passionate, tragic, at the red bow-shaped lips, at the golden tan of cheek and neck, at the whole contour of face which the blasting desert had no power to change; and she was aware more than ever before of its haunting loveliness. No use to deny her vanity and pride! She knew, and never before had she so despised and ridiculed this trait that she could not understand.

  Meanwhile Adam was getting food and drink, which he presently set before Ruth.

  “I wonder if you see in your mirror what I see when I look at you?” he asked, with a smile.

  “What do you see?”

  “You have changed, Ruth. I remembered you of course, but your face of a girl is now that of a woman. The desert magnifies all beauty, as well as ugliness. There are no flowers as vivid and beautiful as desert flowers, nothing in nature so hideous as some desert forms. The desert seizes upon any characteristic peculiar to person or plant or animal and develops it with an appalling intensity. It is the ferocity of life, fighting to survive.”

  “Adam, are you paying me a compliment?” she asked, in perplexity.

  “No. I was just accounting for your beauty. You owe it to the desert and the sun you hate. You owe to it also the madness of such men as Stone. He was not to blame so much as you believe. Most men on the desert drop to the level of beasts. Many fall even lower. It is no fault of theirs, if they are born wi
thout mind and will to combat primitive instincts.”

  “You make me think, and I wish you wouldn’t,” replied Ruth. “But my primitive instinct of hunger is surely in the ascendant.”

  “Eat then. Merryvale is the best cook I’ve met on the desert.”

  Twilight had fallen and the heat of the day had tempered when Adam again approached Ruth.

  “You must be tired after your long ride,” he said. “Will you walk a while?”

  “Yes, I’d like to, presently—after we’ve talked,” she began, hurriedly. “There is so much…. But first, now that you’ve found me what do you think you’re going to do with me?”

  “It depends,” he replied, slowly.

  “On what?”

  “Why, on what is best and right for your happiness.”

  “Would you take me out of the desert—to San Diego?”

  “Anywhere, on that one condition.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll make you take me away from Lost Lake—from this hell of changing sand dunes…. But I couldn’t deceive you. I couldn’t let you hope to….”

  “Ruth, I had only one hope—to find you and to help you,” he interrupted. “There is a bond between you and me, which you don’t realize. I will explain when I come to tell you all about your mother.”

  “Oh, Adam, tell me—now?” she entreated, laying a hand on his.

  “It is not yet time,” he replied, enigmatically. “First let me help you to get over your distress. Meeting me has upset you. But it need not. You are bound in some way that you hate to confess. Is it not so?”

  “Yes, indeed I am,” she murmured.

  “Well then, know once for all that I love you and that my greatest wish is to serve you. I cannot hope that you might marry me—”

  “Adam, I—I can’t marry you,” she said, brokenly.

  “I gathered so much, but meant to ask you anyway,” he rejoined, gravely. “Nevertheless, I can make you happy…. Ruth, could you care for me?”

  “I did care. I—I shall care again. I know. I would gladly marry you. But it’s too late!”