Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  "Do you--recall his--name?" asked Adam, his voice halting with a thick sensation in his throat. The past seemed as yesterday.

  "Never was much on rememberin' names," responded Dismukes, scratching his shaggy head. "Let's see--why, yes, he called himself Collis--Collis--haw. That's it--Collishaw. Hard name to remember. But as a man he struck me easy to remember...Well, friend Wansfell, I've had enough talkin' to do me for a spell. I'm goin' to bed."

  While Adam sat beside the fire, motionless, pondering with slow, painful amaze over what he had just heard, Dismukes prepared for his night's rest. He unrolled a pack, spread a ragged old canvas, folded a blanket upon it, and arranged another blanket to pull up over him, together with the end of the canvas. For a pillow he utilised an old coat that lay on his pack. His sole concession to man's custom of undressing for bed was the removal of his old slouch hat. Then with slow, laboured movement he lay down to stretch his huge body and pull the coverlets over him. From his cavernous breast heaved a long, deep sigh. His big eyes, dark and staring, gazed up at the brightening stars, and then they closed.

  Adam felt tempted to pack and move on to a quiet and lonely place off in the desert, where he could think without annoyance. Keen and bitterly faithful as had been his memory, it had long ceased to revive thoughts of Collishaw, the relentless sheriff and ally of Guerd. How strange and poignant had been the shock of recollection! It had been the blow Adam had dealt--the savage fling of his gun in Collishaw's face--that had destroyed an eye and caused a hideous disfigurement. And the Texan, with that fatality characteristic of his kind, was ever on the look-out for the man who had ruined his eyesight. Perhaps that was only one reason for this thirst for revenge. Guerd! Had Collishaw not sworn to hang Adam? "You'll swing for this!" he had yelled in his cold, ringing voice of passion. And so Adam lived over again the old agony, new and strange in its bitter mockery, its vain hope of forgetfulness. Vast as the desert was, it seemed small now to Adam, for there wandered over it a relentless and bloodthirsty Texan, hunting to kill him. The past was not dead. The present and the future could not be wholly consecrated to atonement. A spectre, weird and grotesque as a yucca tree, loomed out there in the shadows of the desert night. Death stalked on Adam's trail. The hatred of men was beyond power to understand. Work, fame, use, health, love, home, life itself, could be sacrificed by some men just to kill a rival or an enemy. Adam remembered that Collishaw had hated him and loved Guerd. Moreover, Collishaw had that strange instinct to kill men--a passion which grew by what it fed on--a morbid mental twist that drove him to rid himself of the terrible haunting ghost of his last victim by killing a new one. Added to that was a certain leaning toward the notorious.

  "We'll meet some day," soliloquised Adam. "But he would never recognise me."

  The comfort of that fact did not long abide in Adam's troubled mind. He would recognise Collishaw. And that seemed to hold something fatalistic and inevitable. "When I meet Collishaw I'll tell him who I am--and I'll kill him!" That fierce whisper was the desert voice in Adam--the desert spirit. He could no more help that sudden bursting flash of fire than he could help breathing. Nature in the 'desert did not teach men to meet a threat with forgiveness, nor to wait until they were struck. Instinct had precedence over intelligence and humanity. In the eternal strife to keep alive on the desert a man who conquered must have assimilated something of the terrible nature of the stinging cholla cactus, and the hard, grasping tenacity of the mesquite roots, and the ferocity of the wild cat, and the cruelty of the hawk--something of the nature of all that survived. It was a law. It forced a man to mete out violence in advance of that meant for him.

  "To fight ant to think were to be my blessings," soliloquised Adam, and he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and terrible duty to himself!

  So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the composure of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his eves, as It had upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was not tired. He never tired any more. There seemed to be no task of a single day that could weary his strength. And for long he lay awake, listening to the deep breathing of his companion, and the howl of the coyotes, and the sounds of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the desert. A sadness weighed heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to have met Dismukes, but now he was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed to have been rent. The years had not really changed the relation of his crime, nor materially the nature of his sin. But they had gradually, almost imperceptibly, softened his ceaseless and eternal remorse. By this meeting with Dismukes he found that time effaced shocks, blows, stains, just as it wore away the face of the desert rock. That, too, was a law; and in this Adam dived a blessing that he could not deny. Dismukes had unleashed a spectre out of the dim glow of the past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days! There were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold mountains that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep blue sky above and in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face,' floating, fading, reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling--a face partaking of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of perfect manhood--the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam, and the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the sleepless hours--these were Adam's again, as keen as in the first days of his awakening down on the Colorado Desert where from the peaks of the Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to the purple peak--Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother's grave. "Some day I'll go back!" whispered Adam, as if answering to an imperative and mysterious call.

  The long night wore on with the heavens s ar-fired by its golden train, and the sounds at last yieldin' to the desert silence. Adam could see Dismukes, a wide, prone figure, with dark face upturned to the sky, a man seemingly as strange and strong as the wastelands he talked so much about, yet now helpless in sleep, unguarded, unconscious, wrapped in his deep dreams of the joy and life his gold was to bring him. Adam felt a yearning pity for this dreamer. Did he really love gold or was his passion only a dream? Whatever that was and whatever the man was, there rested upon his rugged, dark face a shadow of tragedy. Adam wondered what his own visage would reflect when he lay asleep, no more master of a mind that never rested? The look of an eagle? So Dismukes had said, and that was not the first time Adam had heard such comparison. He had seen desert eagles, dead and alive. He tried to recall how they looked, but the images were not convincing. The piercing eye, clear as the desert air, with the power of distance in the grey depths; the lean, long lines; the wild poise of head, bitter and ruthless and fierce; the look of loneliness--these characters surely could not be likened to his face. What a strange coincidence that Dismukes should hit upon the likeness of an eagle--the winged thunderbolt of the heights--the lonely bird Adam loved above all desert creatures! And so Adam wandered in mind until at last he fell asleep.

  Chapter XIII

  When Adam awoke he saw that Dismukes had breakfast steaming on the fire.

  "I'm on my way to-day," announced the prospector. "What'll you do?"

  "Well, I'll hang around Tecopah as long as I can stand it," replied Adam.

  "Humph! That won't be long, unless you got in mind somethin' like you did at the Donner Placers, down in the Providence Mountains."

  "Friend, what do you know about that?" queried Adam.

  "Nothin'. I only heard about it. Wansfell, do you pan any gold?"

  "Sometimes, when I happen to run across it," replied Adam, "but that isn't often."

  "Do you work?"

  "Yes, I've worked a good deal, taking it all together. In the mines, on the river at Needles, driving mule teams and guiding wagon trains. Never got paid much, though."

  "How do you live?" asked Dismukes, evidently curious.

  "Oh, I fare well enough to keep flesh on my bones."
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br />   "You've got flesh--or I reckon it's muscle. Wansfell, you're the best-built man I ever saw on the desert. Most men dry up an' blow away. Will you let me give you--lend you some money?"

  "Money! So that's why you're so curious?" responded Adam. "Thanks, my friend. I don't need money. I had some, you know, when you ran across me down in the Chocolates. I used about a thousand dollars while I lived with the Coahuila Indians. And I've got nine thousand left."

  "Say, you don't pack all that money along with you?"

  "Yes. Where else would I keep it."

  "Wansfell, some of these robbers will murder you."

  "Not if I see them first. My friend, don't be concerned. Surely, I don't look sick."

  "Humph! Well, just the same, now that you're headin' up into this country, I advise you to be careful. Don't let anybody see you with money. I've been held up an' robbed three times."

  "Didn't you make a fight for your gold?"

  "No chance. I was waylaid--had to throw up my hands...They tell me you are ready with a gun, Wansfell?"

  "Dismukes, you seem to have heard much about me."

  "But you didn't throw a gun on Baldy McKue," said Dismukes, with a dark flare from his rolling eyes.

  "No--I did not." replied Adam.

  "You killed McKue with your bare hands," flashed Dismukes. A red stain appeared to come up under his leathery skin. "Wansfell, will you tell me about that?"

  "I'd rather not, Dismukes. There are some things I forget."

  "Well, it meant a good deal to me," replied Dismukes. "McKue did me dirt. He jumped claims of mine down here near Soda Sink. An' he threatened to kill me--swore the claims were his--drove me off. I met him in Riverside, an' there he threatened me with arrest. He was a robber an' a murderer. I believe he ambushed prospectors. McKue was like most men who stick to the desert--he went down to the level of the beast. I hated him. This stranger who told me--he swore there wasn't an uncracked bone left in McKue's body. Wansfell, if you did that to McKue you've squared accounts. Is it true?"

  "Yes."

  Dismukes rubbed his huge hands together and his ox eyes rolled and dilated. A fierce and savage grimness distorted Ilk hard face for an instant and passed away.

  "What 'd you kill him for?"

  "Because he'd have killed me."

  "Didn't you look him up on purpose to kill him?"

  "No. A year before that time I went to Goffs. Some one took me into an old tent where a woman lay dying. I could do little for her. She denounced McKue; she blamed him that she lay there, about to die. She did die and I buried her. Then I kept an eye open for McKue."

  "I wondered--I wondered," said Dismukes. "It struck me deep. Lord knows fights are common out here. An' death--why, on the desert every way you turn you see death. It's the life of the desert. But the way this was told me struck me deep. It was what I'd like to have done myself. Wansfell, think of the wonderful meetin's of men on the desert--an', aye, meetin' of men with women, too! They happen different out here. Think of the first time we met! An' this time! Wansfell, we'll meet again. It's written in those trails of sand out there, wanderin' to an' fro across the desert."

  "Dismukes, the desert is vast. Sometimes you will not meet a man in months of travel--and not in years will you meet a woman. But when you do meet them life seems intensified. The desert magnifies."

  "Wansfell, I want you to go across into Death Valley," declared Dismukes, with the deep boom in his voice. "That woman in the shack! Her eyes haunt me. Somethin' terrible wrong! That man who keeps her there--if he's not crazy, he's worse than a gorilla. For a gorilla kills a woman quick. Wansfell, I'd give a lot to see you handle this man like you handled McKue!"

  "Quien sabe, as you say?" replied Adam. "Draw that map of your trails in Death Valley. I've got a little book here, and a pencil."

  It was singular to see the gold digger labour with his great, stumpy, calloused fingers. He took long to draw a few lines, and make a few marks, and write a few names in the little book. But when he came to talk of distance and direction, of trails and springs, of flat valley and mountain range--then how swift and fluent he was! All that country lay clearly in his mind, as if he were a great desert condor gazing down from the heights upon the wasteland which was his home.

  "Now, I'll be goin' down into the Funerals soon," concluded Dismukes. "You see here's Furnace Creek where it runs into Death Valley. You'll cross here an' come up Furnace Creek till you strike the yellow clay hills on the right. It's a hell of a jumble of hills--absolutely bare. I think there's gold. You'll find me somewhere."

  It seemed settled then that Adam and Dismukes were to meet in some vague place at some vague time. The desert had no limitations. Time, distance, and place were thought of in relation to their adaptation to desert men.

  "Well, it's gettin' late," said Dismukes, looking up at the white flare of sun. "I'll pack an' go on my way."

  While Dismukes strode out to drive in his burros Adam did the camp chores. In a short time his companion appeared with the burros trotting ahead of him. And the sight reminded Adam of the difference between prospectors. Dismukes was not slow, easy, careless, thoughtless. He had not suffered the strange deterioration so common to his class. He did not belong to the type who tracked his burros all day so that he might get started manana. Adam helped him pack.

  "Wansfell, may we meet again," said Dismukes, as they shook hands.

  "All trails cross on the desert. I hope you strike it rich."

  "Some day--some day. Goodbye," returned Dismukes, and with vigorous slaps he started the burros.

  Adam was left to his own devices. After Dismukes passed out of sight in the universal grey of the benches Adam spent a long while watching a lizard on a stone. It was a chuckwalla, a long, slim, greenish-bronze reptile, covered with wonderful spots of vivid colour, and with eyes like jewels. Adam spent much time watching the living things of the desert, or listening to the silence. He had discovered that watching anything brought its reward--sometimes in a strange action or a phenomenon of nature or a new thought.

  Later he walked down to the creek bottom, where the smelter was in operation. Labourers were at a premium there, and he was offered work. He said he would consider it. But unless there turned out to be some definite object to keep him in Tecopah, Adam would not have bartered his freedom to the dust-clouded mill for all the gold it mined. These clanging mills and hot shafts and dark holes oppressed him.

  Chapter XIV

  The long-deferred hour at last arrived in which Adam, on a ruddy-gold dawn in early April, drove his burros out into the lonesome desert toward the Amargosa. He did not look back. Tecopah would not soon forget Wansfell! That was his grim thought.

  The long, drab reaches of desert, the undulating bronze slopes waving up to the dark mountains, called to him in a language that he felt. If Adam Larey--or Wansfell, wanderer of the wasteland, as he had come to believe himself--had any home, it was out in the vast open, under the great white flare of sunlight and the star-studded canopy of night.

  This was a still morning in April, and the lurid sun, bursting above the black escarpment to the east, promised a rising temperature. Day by day the heat had been increasing, and now, at sunrise, the smoky heat veils were waving up from the desert floor. For Adam the most torrid weather had no terrors, and the warmth of a morning like this felt pleasant on his cheek. He had been confined to one place, without action, for so long that now, as he began to feel the slow sweat burn pleasantly on his body, there came a loosening of his muscles, a relaxing of tension, a marshalling, as it were, of his great forces of strength and endurance. The grey slopes beyond did not daunt him. His stride was that of a mountaineer, and his burros had to trot to keep ahead of him.

  And as Adam's body gradually responded to this readjustment to the desert and its hard demands, so his mind seemed to slough off, layer by layer, the morbid, fierce, and ruthless moods that like lichens had fastened upon it. The dry, sweet desert air seemed to permeate his brain and clear it o
f miasmas and shadows. He was free. He was alone. He was self-sufficient. The desert called. From far beyond that upheaved black and forbidding range, the Funeral Mountains, something strange, new, thrilling awaited his coming. The strife of the desert had awakened in him a craving to find the unattainable. He had surmounted all physical obstacles. He would conquer Death Valley; he would see it in all its ghastliness; he would absorb all its mysteries; he would defy to the limit of endurance its most fatal menaces to life.

  In the afternoon Adam rounded a corner of a league-long sloping mesa and gazed down into the valley of the Amargosa. It looked the bitterness, the poison, and the acid suggested by its Spanish name. The narrow meandering stream gleamed like silver in the sunlight. Mesquite and other brush spotted its gravelly slopes and sandy banks. Adam headed down into the valley. The sun was already westering, and soon, as he descended, it hung over the ragged peaks. He reached the creek. The burros drank, but not with relish. Adam gazed at the water of the Amargosa with interest. It was not palatable, yet it would save life.

  Adam set about the camp tasks long grown second nature with him, and which were always congenial and pleasant. He built a fire of dead mesquite. Then he scoured his oven with sand and greased it. He had a heavy pan which did duty as a gold-pan, a dish-pan, and a wash-pan. This he half-filled with flour, and, adding water, began to mix the two. He had gotten the dough to about the proper consistency when a rustling in the brush attracted his attention. He thought he caught a glimpse of a rabbit. Such opportunity for fresh meat was rare on the desert. Hastily wiping his hands, he caught up his gun and stole out into the aisle between the mesquites. As luck would have it, he did espy a young cottontail, and was fortunate enough to make a good shot. Returning to camp, he made sudden discovery of a catastrophe.