Stairs of Sand

by Zane Grey

  How lightly and with what gratification she had trodden the broad and easy path toward destruction. She saw herself from a great height and looked down with withering scorn, with infinite pity at the creature she had been. Not once nor twice, but many times had the desert tested her, always to find her ready for the sin of Eve. She had not known it then; she had held aloof at the end, as in the affair with Stone; but that had only been due to the maddening variations of her temperament. Only accident had saved her in those long-past, apparently trivial affairs. When womanhood stripped away her girlish illusions, and she had met Stone, to work a stronger and more perilous charm on him, only God, using Adam Wansfell as his instrument, could have saved her.

  Ruth confessed it. She burned into her soul the brand of what she had been, of what she had escaped. Her mother’s prayer to Wansfell now clarified. She had been born with beauty of form, of face, of eye; and with their deadlier parallel—the longing—the passionate need to love and be loved. She saw it all, and abased her spirit in humility and gratitude. She lay there on the sand, propped against the palo verde, gazing out at the transfiguration of the desert she had hated, marvelling at this evidence of her changed soul, and at the freedom which had come like a lightning flash out of the heavens.

  Just yet she dared not surrender to the thought of her love, to the intimate and terriffic sweetness of it, to the deluge that must sweep away all before it. She must make forever hers the truth of herself, of the fate that could no longer be miserable and could never have a tragic end…. She understood Adam’s love. He was all love. He loved every creature on the desert, the beasts of men, even this illegitimate brother with all his malignance and corrupt maturity. That explained Wansfell, the Wanderer.

  Ruth would never have the past changed now, were that possible. By the memory of the past she might climb to the eagle’s crag.

  Wansfell, the Wanderer, that was to say the desert. The same supreme force that had moulded her stairs of sand had fashioned the boy Adam Larey into the man Wansfell.

  Out of the boundlessness of her woman’s heart, that vessel of perennial and eternal fertility, she must give to the desert that had saved him, give good for evil, give in place of the hate that had been a cancer in her breast, love—love for its ghastliness, its mutability, its ruthless cruelty and its eternal beauty, its driving iron to the Godlike in man.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DAYS passed that were happy ones for Ruth Virey. There was a week of unprecedented fine weather, for June in that low country. The desert seemed to be silent, watchful, waiting.

  Ruth saw Adam every night, and one day, when the heat was tempered by a rain storm in the north, Merryvale took her out to Adam’s hidden camp in the rock fastnesses. It was the wildest and weirdest place Ruth ever visited. A cataclysm in bygone ages had riven and scattered the stone crust of the earth; and the subsequent weathering had worn short canyons deep between splintered cliffs.

  Adam helped her climb high, to the point where he had stood to watch for her. Part of the way Adam carried her, as he had often carried her mother in Death Valley; and for Ruth the experience was both sweet and sad.

  From this height the view transcended that from Lost Lake. Ruth might never have looked at the desert, she thought. The whole ninety miles of silver sand dunes lay beneath her; and she caught her breath at sight of the endless slope of her stairs of sand.

  Here, in the shade of an overhanging rock, with the magnificence and immensity of the desert filling her eyes, Ruth told Adam all that she had been. She was merciless to herself. She confessed the littlest and meanest of her motives. She bared her soul. No enemy of hers could ever have sought less favor for her than she sought for herself.

  Then quite simply, without sentiment, or surrender to emotion, she told Adam of the gradual change which had come over her, from his arrival at Lost Lake to the last night in Yuma.

  Here she gave way to the agitation that would not be denied; nevertheless she went on with her confession. Then when it came to exposing the uttermost depths of her heart she faltered and whispered, and at last gasped out the confession of her love.

  Blind and spent then, she was snatched to Adam’s breast and crushed there, and kissed with a savage abandon that once she had dared to dream of. She had repudiated a fruition of that dream, because of her unworthy past.

  At sunset she was again with Merryvale, out on the red desert, returning home, with her body seemingly as light as thistledown, her feet like wings, her mind full of Adam’s words of love, and wisdom for her future conduct.

  And the next day Guerd Larey came back to Lost Lake with a string of freighters, stagecoaches, covered wagons, the van of the railroad workers.

  The desert seemed to have broodingly awaited this day of Larey’s return. For it let loose the blasts of the sand-furnaces, the ghastly shades and shadows of the wastelands.

  Ruth was kept closely confined by the whirling clouds of sand and the intolerable burning heat. In the evening Merryvale told her that Larey had returned sober, but showed the effects of debauch and mental strain. They waited under the trees a long time for Adam, and waited in vain. Perhaps the heat and the crowded post had kept him away. Merryvale was told that the advance guard of freighters, surveyors, bridge-builders and masons, with an army of white laborers, Chinese, Mexicans, Indians, were on their way to Lost Lake, and the loneliness and quiet of the post were gone forever.

  A new era set in for Lost Lake, and it was one that Ruth both welcomed and deplored. Tents and shacks and houses went up as if by magic. The increase of population went on, and it was good, Ruth thought. But she hated the rough element, and the hilarity of the night revellers.

  Ruth kept her poise and peace, though the torrid summer had fallen, and she had to content herself with seeing Adam less, and writing notes to him, which Merryvale delivered at night. The days passed swiftly for her, because she lived her dream, and denied the outside influences.

  Larey kept to the post, a changed man, Merryvale said: hard-working, hard-thinking, wary yet friendly to all, with ponderous brow behind which there was surely a seething brain. He made no attempt to see Ruth.

  The day that Hunt went back to the post, once more to work with Larey, was an ominous one for Ruth. He had spared her, perhaps gladly, any confidences regarding his renewed relation with Larey. The shrewd Merryvale, growing more brooding and watchful every day, shook his head distrustfully. Ruth concluded he had more on his mind than worry. When she asked him point-blank if he was confiding wholly in her, the answer was not to her liking, not that it intimated any immediate trouble for her, but that it roused her to wonder if there was any dark growing project in Merryvale’s mind.

  That night in the gloom of the palo verdes, waiting for Adam, she deliberated on the situation as it stood. She sensed something she could not analyze. It was an invisible intangible pressure from without. It had to do with the torrid day, the sultry night, the return of her grandfather to the post and his assertions of the friendly reception he had there, the sombreness of Merryvale, the Indians and hard-faced unfamiliar men who sometimes peeped at her through the fence. Nature and the desert were bringing the festering sore of Lost Lake to a head. And the thorn in its flesh was Guerd Larey.

  The advent of Adam checked the current of her thought.

  “Where is Merryvale?” asked Adam, after greeting her.

  “He’s usually around at this hour. Perhaps you’ll find him in his tent. But, Adam, he has become strange. He worries me.”

  “I’ve noticed it,” returned Adam, thoughtfully. “However, it may not amount to anything. He is growing old. And these last days have been trying.”

  Adam added that he would slip down to the spring to fill his canteen, and then see if Merryvale was there. While Adam was gone Ruth pondered over the inference she had deduced from his concern about Merryvale. Was he afraid Merryvale might kill Guerd Larey? And then a cold sensation followed—giving rise to a grim thought that between Adam and Merryvale
and herself it did not appear Guerd Larey would live long enough to further his nefarious schemes.

  Like a noiseless shadow Adam stole back to Ruth’s side, to deposit his canteens on the ground.

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “Then he’ll come presently,” she returned.

  “Ruth, I’ve got to tell you something. On my way here, not far from the gate there, I almost stepped on a man lying flat on the ground. I think he heard my steps, but couldn’t see me, so he lay down.”

  “What did you do?” she asked with a stirring of pulses.

  “I nearly choked the life out of him, trying to make him talk. But I couldn’t. He was a greaser. It’s pretty dark but I’ll know him again. I didn’t want to kill him, for he might not have meant any ill to you or me. So I let him go.”

  “Mexicans and Indians are always sneaking around,” replied Ruth. “They always were. But lately I’m suspicious. Perhaps it is silly.”

  “Yes. But just the same be more careful than ever,” he advised. “So will I be. I ought not come often, yet when I have to come for water it would seem overcautious not to see you.”

  “See me whenever you come,” she said. “I shall not leave the porch again unless Merryvale is with me.”

  They had their stolen hour in the shadow of the palo verdes, and prolonged it until Merryvale arrived, stealthily creeping to them from the inside of the fence.

  It seemed that Adam was loathe to leave her, though he did not say so in words. Perhaps Ruth’s portent of some untoward thing had communicated itself to him. At length he accompanied her to the end of the porch, and kissed her goodbye, which was unusual with him, then went back to join Merryvale.

  Ruth stood awhile at her door, fearful of the night, of the opaque gloom of the desert. She had arisen above material fears. But out there gloomed inscrutable mystery. Only an occasional gust of hot dust-encumbered wind, whipped over the oasis. When it swooped down to the dim lights of the post it had the substance of fine snow. Dark figures passed to and fro. The roar of the saloons rose faintly.

  It was the void out there that fascinated Ruth, the dark space whence swept the variable wind. Night, and the moaning wind, or the dead silence! It seemed impossible that human beings could be isolated here, savagely surrounded by an untamed hostile desert. Ruth realized the futility of their lives. How fear of them conquered their rapacious instincts, over-developed in that harsh environment, let alone the ceaseless compressing influence of this desolate land!

  The windy day had brought one of the dark nights, when there was no sky, no stars, only the thick moving gloom overhead.

  Ruth felt as loath to go indoors as Adam had been to leave her. There was something neither could fathom. Ruth could never again feel herself as a tiny grain of sand tossed and blown by the winds of circumstance; nevertheless there abided a stunning sense of helplessness in the things over which she had no control. Once inside her room with the heavy bar in place, in the blackness and close atmosphere, she felt removed from a nameless peril that had loomed like the canopy of night. But that sense of safety did not extend to those few individuals with whom her life was indissolubly bound.

  She went to bed without the use of a lamp. The casement of her window let in the grayness of the night, the omnipresent fragrance of sand and cactus and rock, the occasional discordant sounds from the post, and the desert loneliness. No longer did she mind loneliness or heat or wind, or any of the other things that had once been nightmares. There was nothing hideous any more, except the natures of some men. And she was reminded of Adam’s story of the one-eyed female creature of Tecopah, more hideous than any man, more terrible than any beast. Ruth could no longer hate the idea of such an unsexed and debased being. How easily she herself might have sunk to such depths! The round of circumstance, the lack or failure of love, the blasting desert—these could make of any woman something lower than the lowest man. As for herself she was on the stairway to the stars.

  Ruth always awoke these days at a late hour, and at the low ebb of her vitality, caused by the enervating influence of the summer heat. And this particular morning there was the weight of the preceding night’s morbid visitations. Ruth had to combat all these, and extreme lassitude, and sluggish blood, and a weary questioning wonder at the limpness of her hands. But effort and movement wore these sensations away.

  Opening her door Ruth faced the white daylight, and her first sight, as always, rested upon the far-stepping silver sand dunes. Her second was suddenly attracted to a group of men at the gate.

  She called her grandfather. He did not answer. Ruth knocked at his door, opened it and entered. He was not there, and he had not slept in the bed.

  In an instant Ruth was stung palpitatingly alive. Catastrophe had fallen, like the lightning flash of the desert. She did not need to see Merryvale come sombrely and haltingly up the path.

  “Ruth, somethin’ tumble—has happened,” he said, in a husky tone.

  “Grandpa!” she cried.

  “Yes…. An’ shore I hate to tell you, Ruth. But you must bear up…. He’s daid!”

  Ruth’s legs gave way under her, and she fell into a chair. For several moments she could not find her voice.

  “Dead!” she whispered at last. “Poor grandad! … He had been ailing lately. And I did so little…. Oh, I—I can’t realize…. Was he ill, Merryvale? Was it one of his old attacks of acute indigestion?”

  “No, Ruth. I wish to Gawd it had been. But he was killed—murdered!”

  Ruth turned icy cold, frozen doubly by fact and imagination.

  “Somebody hit him behind the ear with a heavy stone or club. He was knocked so his haid fell under water. We caint say whether the blow killed him or he drowned. But it shore doesn’t alter the fact that he was murdered.”

  “How horrible!” burst out Ruth, flaming now where she had been frozen. “Who—who did it?”

  “Who indeed? That’s what stumps me. The post’s full of greasers, redskins, chinks, an’ riff-raff from Yuma. He’d been robbed of money, watch, all he had of value. That might mean nothin’ an’ then again it might mean a lot.”

  “Merryvale! … Your mind runs like mine?” she gasped, with a hand covering her mouth.

  “I reckon. We’re both liable to lay anythin’ to one particular source. It might be wrong. But I caint help myself,” replied Merryvale, almost with despair.

  “Adam! Get Adam!” she exclaimed, wildly.

  “Wal, first off I thought of gettin’ Adam heah,” he said, deliberating. “But that wouldn’t do no good, ‘cept to comfort you, an’ it might lead to harm. I’m going to find out who killed Hunt. If I know these yellow dawgs that won’t be no hard matter.”

  “What—what shall I do?”

  “Bear it as best you can, lass, an’ leave your grandfather for me to look after. You mustn’t see him. I’ll have him taken to the post, an’ get the priest, an’ give him decent burial down there in the little buryin’ ground.”

  “Shouldn’t he be taken to—to—Yuma?” faltered Ruth, tearfully.

  “It could be done, with heaps of trouble an’ expense. But what’s the use? Lost Lake is as good a place to bury a man as Yuma. It’d suit me better, if I had a choice. Leave this to me, Ruth dear.”

  “It’s—such an—awful surprise,” replied Ruth, breaking down.

  “Go ahaid an’ cry, lass. It’ll do you good. Then brace up an’ see this heah trouble as it is. We’re on the desert, where few men die in their beds. Your grandpa was old and failin’ fast. It’s a pity…. But it happened. We re in deeper now, Ruth than ever, an’ you must not give in.”

  “Merryvale, I’m shocked to my heart…. But—but I’ll stand it. Do the best you can for—for him. And let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Ruth, I’m goin’ down to the post. It suits me to be the first to tell Guerd Larey aboot this,” replied Merryvale, with a queer intent flash of eyes, and he turned away with bent wagging head.

  Ruth did not see him a
gain until nearly twilight.

  “Wal, it’s over, all us poor mortals can do,” he sighed, wiping a lined and saddened face. “An’ I’ll say a daid man doesn’t mean no more heah than in Yuma.”

  Ruth asked a few questions about the disposition of her grandfather’s body. And Merryvale, more than usually the verbose talker, told in detail the events of a long harrowing day.

  “An now he lays deep under a palo verde,” concluded Merryvale, with strong emotion. “Too deep for the desert winds to uncover him. But they’ll moan and whisper over him in the night. He’ll not lie alone, Ruth. No grave on the desert is lonely. There are hosts out on the sands in the daid of night, wanderin’ down the naked shingle of the desert. May he rest in peace. Lord knows he had no peace heah. Lost Lake was no place for Caleb Hunt.”

  Presently he remembered that he bore a letter to her from Guerd Larey.

  “I had half a mind not to give it to you,” he said. “But I shore was keen to know what he’s up to now.”

  “Merryvale, what did he say and look like, when you told him?” asked Ruth, in low voice, as she gazed as if fascinated by a snake at the letter in her hands.

  “Ruth, I’m shore bound to admit that Larey is innocent of any complicity in your grandpa’s death—or he’s the deepest, slickest devil this side of hell,” declared Merryvale in long drawn-out speech.

  “He may indeed be innocent. I hope to heaven he is. But just the same he’s that last you called him,” returned Ruth.

  “Wal, we are agreed on some things, lass. I reckon Adam will not see this heah as we do. Sometimes I believe he blinds himself on purpose—But read the letter, Ruth.”

  She broke the seal and the clear bold handwriting took her back three years, to the time when letters from Larey were frequent. This epistle was one of condolence, and on the face of it was kindly, courteous, sympathetic, without in the least encroaching upon her with personal intimations. Life was hard on the desert, but never really appreciated as such until it came home in loss of someone beloved. Larey inclined to the opinion that some Mexican whom Hunt had refused credit at the post, or some Indian or Indians long nursing a grudge over the water rights, had committed the crime. He would personally endeavor to apprehend and punish the murderer. And he reminded Ruth that she now had greater responsibilities than ever—that she must not grieve unduly over this loss.