Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  "Friend Dismukes, I have ears, if my long hair is worrying you," replied Adam. "And if I had not had mighty keen ears you'd still be grinding gold for your claim jumpers."

  At dusk, while the big bats darted overhead with soft swishing of wings, and the camp fire burned down to red and glowing embers, Dismukes talked and talked. And always he returned to the subject of gold and of his future.

  "Pard, I wish you were goin' with me," he said, and the slow, sweeping gesture of the great horny hand had something of sublimity. He waved it away toward the east, and it signified the far places across the desert. "I'm rich. The years of lonely hell an' never-endin' toil are over. No more sour dough! No more thirst an' heat an' dust! No more hoardin' of gold! The time has come for me to spend. I'll bank my gold an' draw my checks. At Frisco I'll boil the alkali out of my carcass. An', shaved an' clipped an' dressed, I'll take akin the name of my youth an' fare forth for adventure. I'll pay for the years of hard grub. I'll eat the best an' drink wine--wine, the sweetest an' oldest of wine! Wine in thin glasses...I'll wear silk next my skin an' sleep on feathers. I'll travel like a prince. I can see the big niggers roll their eyes. Yas, sah, yas sah, the best for you, sah! An' I'll tip them in gold...I'll go to my old home. Some of my people will be livin' An' when they see me they'll see their ship come in. They'll be rich. I'll not forget the friends of my youth. That little village will have a church or a park as my gift. I'll travel. I'll see the sights an' 'the cities. New York! Ha! if I like that place, I'll buy it! I'll see all there is to see, buy all there is to buy. I'll be merry, I'll be joyful. I'll live. I'll make up for all the lost years. But I'll never forget the poor an' the miserable. I can spend an' give a hundred dollars a day for the rest of my life. I'll cross the ocean. London! I've met Englishmen in the Southwest. Queer, cold sort of men! I'll see how they live. I'll go all over England. Then Paris! Never was I drunk, but I'll get drunk in Paris. I want to see the wonderful hotels an' shops an' theatres. I'll look at the beautiful French actresses. I'll go to hear the prima donnas sing. I'll throw gold double-eagles on the stage. An' I'll take a fly at Monte Carlo. An' travel on an' on. To Rome, that great city where the thrones of the emperors still stand. I'll go spend a long hour high up in the ruins of the Coliseum. An' dreamin' of the days of the Caesars--seein' the gladiators in the arena--I'll think of you, Wansfell. For there never lived on the old earth a greater fighter than you!...Egypt, the land of sun an' sand! I'll see the grand Sahara. An' I'll travel on an' on, all over the world. When I've seen it I'll come back to my native land. An' then, that green farm, with wooded hills an' runnin' streams! It must be near a city. Horses I'll have an' a man to drive, an' a house of comfort...Mebbe there'll come a woman into my life. Mebbe children! The thought you planted in me, pard, somehow makes me yearn. After all, every man should have a son. I see that now. What blunders we make! But I'm rich, I'm not so old, I'll drink life to the very lees...I see the lights, I hear the voices of laughter an' music, I feel the comfortin' walls of a home. A roof over my head! An' a bed as soft as downy feathers!...Mebbe, O my pard, mebbe the sweet smile of a woman--the touch of a lovin' hand--the good-night kiss of a child!...My God! how the thoughts of life can burn an' thrill!"

  Twenty miles a day, resting several hours through the fierce noon heat, the travellers made down across the Mohave Desert. To them, who had conquered the terrible elements and desolation of Death Valley, this waste of the Mohave presented comparatively little to contend with. Still, hardened and daring as they were, they did not incur unnecessary risks.

  The time was September, at the end of a fierce, dry summer. Cloudless sky, fervid and quivering air, burning downward rays of sun and rising veils of reflected heat from sand and rock--these were not to be trifled with. Dismukes's little thermometer registered one hundred and thirty degrees in the shade; that is, whenever there was any shade to rest in. They did not burden themselves with the worry of knowing the degrees of heat while they were on the march.

  Water holes well known to Dismukes, though out of the beaten track, were found to be dry; and so the travellers had to go out of a direct line to replenish their supply. Under that burning sun even Dismukes and Adam suffered terribly after several hours without water. A very fine penetrating alkali dust irritated the throat and nostrils and augmented the pain of thirst. Once they went a whole day without water, and at sundown reached a well kept by a man who made a living by selling water to prospectors and freighters and drivers of borax wagons. His prices were exorbitant. On this occasion, surlily surveying the parched travellers and the thirsty burros, he said his well was almost dry and he would not sell any water. Dismukes had told Adam that the well-owner bore him a grudge. They expostulated and pleaded with him to no avail. Adam went to the well and, lifting a trap-door he peered down, to see quite a goodly supply of water. Then he returned to the little shack where the bushy-whiskered hoarder of precious water sat on a box with a rifle across his knees. Adam always appeared mild and serene, except when he was angry, at which time a man would have had to be blind not to see his mood. The well-owner probably expected Adam to plead again. But he reckoned falsely. Adam jerked the rifle from him and with a single movement of his hands he broke off the stock. Then he laid those big, hard hands on the man, who seemed to shrink under them.

  "Friend, you've plenty of water. It's a live well. You can spare enough to save us. We'll double your pay. Come."

  Adam loosened his right hand and doubled up the enormous mallet-like fist and swung it back. The well-owner suddenly changed his front and became animated, and the travellers got all the water they needed. But they did not annoy him further by pitching camp near his place.

  This country was crisscrossed by trails, and, arid desert though it was, every few miles showed an abandoned mine, or a prospector working a claim, or a shack containing a desert dweller. Adam and Dismukes were approaching the highway that bisected the Mohave Desert. It grew to be more of a sandy country, and anywhere in sand, water was always scarce. Another of Dismukes's water holes was dry. It had not been visited for months. The one wanderer who had stopped there lay there half buried in the sand, a shrunken mummy of a man with a dark and horrible mockery in the eyeless sockets of his skull. His skin was drawn like light-brown parchment over his face. Adam looked, and then again, and gave a sudden start. He turned the sun-dried visage more to the light. He recognised that face, set in its iron mask of death, with its grin that would grin forever until the brown skull went to dust.

  "Regan!" he exclaimed.

  "You know him?" queried Dismukes.

  "Yes. He was an Irishman I knew years ago. A talky, cheerful fellow. Hard drinker. He loved the desert, but drink kept him in the mining camps. The last time I saw him was at Tecopah, after you left."

  "Poor devil! He died of thirst. I know that cast of face...Let's give him a decent burial."

  "Yes. Poor Regan! He was the man who named me Wansfell. Why he called me that I never knew--never will know."

  Deep in the sand they buried the remains of Regan and erected a rude cross to mark his lonely grave.

  Dismukes led Adam off the well-beaten trail one day, up a narrow sandy wash to a closed pocket that smelled old and musty. Here a green spring bubbled from under a bank of sand. Water clear as crystal, slightly green in tinge, sparkled and murmured. A whitish sediment bordered the tiny stream of running water.

  "Arsenic!" exclaimed Adam.

  "Yes. An' here's where I found a whole caravan of people dead. It was six years ago. Place hasn't changed much. Guess it's filled up a little with blowin' sand...Aha! Look here!"

  Dismukes put the toe of his boot against a round white object protruding from the sand. It was a bleached skull.

  "Men mad with desert thirst never stop to read," replied Adam, sadly.

  In silence Adam and Dismukes gazed down at the glistening white skull. Ghastly as it was, it yet had beauty. Once it had been full of thought, of emotion; and now it was tenanted by desert sand.

  Adam
and Dismukes spent half a day at that arsenic spring, under the burning sun, suffering the thirst they dared not slake there, and they erected a rude cross that would stand for many and many a day. Deep in the crosspiece Adam cut the words: "DEATH! ARSENIC SPRING! DON'T DRINK! GOOD WATER FIVE MILES. FOLLOW DRY STREAM BED."

  Dismukes appeared to get deep satisfaction and even happiness out of this accomplished task. It was a monument to the end of his desert experience. Good will toward his fellow men!

  At last the day came when Adam watched Dismukes drive his burros out on the lonely trail, striding along with his rolling gait, a huge short, broad backed man, like a misshapen giant. What a stride he had! The thousands of desert miles it had mastered had not yet taken its force and spring. It was the stride of one who imagined he left nothing of life behind and saw its most calling adventures to the fore. He had tired of the desert. He had used it. He had glutted it of the riches he craved. And now he was heading down the trail toward the glittering haunts of men and the green pastures. Adam watched him with grief and yet with gladness, and still with something of awe. Dismukes's going forever was incomprehensible. Adam felt what he could not analyse. The rolling voice of Dismukes, sonorous and splendid, still rang in Adam's ears; "Pard, we're square!...Good-bye!" Adam understood now why a noble Indian, unspoiled by white men, reverenced a debt which involved life. The paying of that debt was all of unity and brotherhood there existed in the world. If it was great to feel gratitude for the saving of his life, it was far greater to remember he had saved the life of his saviour. Adam, deeply agitated, watched Dismukes stride down the barren trail, behind his bobbing burros, watched him stride on into the lonely, glaring desert, so solemn and limitless and mysterious, until he vanished in the grey monotony.

  Chapter XXII

  When the following March came, Adam had been a week plodding southward over the yucca plateaus of the Mohave. The desert had changed its face. Left behind were the rare calico-veined ranges of mountains, the royal-purple porphyries, the wonderful white granites, the green-blue coppers, the yellow sulphurs, and the ruddy red irons. This desert had colour, but not so vivid, not so striking. And it had become more hospitable to the survival of plant life. The sandy floor was no longer monotonously grey.

  Adam loved the grotesque yucca trees. They were really trees that afforded shade and firewood, and they brought back no bitter-sweet memories like the palo verdes. The yuccas were fresh and green, renewed in the spring from the dusty grey sunburnt trees they had been in the autumn. Many of them bore great cone-shaped buds about to open, and on others had blossomed large white flowers with streaks of pink. A yucca forest presented a strange sight. These desert trees were deformed, weird, bristling, shaggy trunked, with grotesque shapes like spectres in torture.

  Adam travelled leisurely, although a nameless and invisible hand seemed to beckon him from the beyond. His wandering steps were again guided, and something awaited him far down toward the Rio Colorado. He was completing a vast circle of the desert, and he could not resist that call, that wandering quest down toward the place which had given the colour and direction to his life. But the way must be long, and as there were the thorns and rocks for his feet, so must there be bruises to his spirit.

  At night on the moon-blanched desert, under the weird, spectral-armed yuccas, Adam had revelation of the clearness of teaching that was to become his. The years had been preparing him. When would come his supreme trial? What would it be? And there came a whisper out of the lonely darkness, on the cool night wind, that some day he would go back to find the grave of his brother and to meet the punishment that was his due. Then all that was physical, all that was fierce, enduring, natural, thrust the thought from him. But though the savage desert life in him burned strong and resistless, yet he began to hear a new, a different, a higher voice of conscience. He imagined he stifled it with fiercely repudiating gestures, but all the wonderful strength of his brawny hands, magnified a thousand times, could not thrust a thought from him.

  Toward sunset one day Adam was down on the level desert floor, plodding along a sandy trail around the western Wall of San Jacinto. The first bisnagi cacti he saw seemed to greet him as old friends. They were small, only a foot or so high, and sparsely scattered over the long rocky slope that led to the base of the mountain wall. The tops of these cacti were as pink as wild roses. Adam was sweeping his gaze along to see how far they grew out on the desert when he discovered that his burro Jinny had espied moving objects.

  Coming toward Adam, still a goodly distance off, were two men and two burros, one of which appeared to have a rider. Presently they appeared to see Adam, for they halted, burros and all, for a moment. It struck Adam that when they started on again they sheered a little off a straight following of the trail. Whereupon Adam, too, sheered a little off, so as to pass near them. When they got fairly close he saw two rough-looking men, one driving a packed burro, and the other leading a burro upon which was a ragged slip of a girl. The sunlight caught a brown flash of her face. When nearly abreast, Adam hailed them.

  "Howdy, stranger!" they replied, halting. "Come from inside?"

  "No. I'm down from the Mohave," replied Adam. "How's the water? Reckon you came by the cottonwoods?"

  "Nope. There ain't none there," replied one of the men, shortly. "Plenty an' fine water down the trail."

  "Thanks. Where you headed for?"

  "Riverside. My gal hyar is sick an' pinin' fer home."

  Adam had been aware of the rather sharp scrutiny of these travellers and that they had exchanged whispers. Such procedures were natural on the desert, only in this case they struck Adam as peculiar. Then he shifted his gaze to the girl on the burro. He could not see her face, as it was bowed. Apparently she was weeping. She made a coarse, drab little figure. But her hair shone in the light of the setting sun--rather short and curly, a rich dark brown with glints of gold.

  Adam replied to the curt good-bye of the men, and after another glance at them, as they went on, he faced ahead to his own course. Then he heard low sharp words, "Shet up!" Wheeling, he was in time to see one of these men roughly shake the girl, and speak further words too low for Adam to distinguish. Adam's natural conclusion was that the father had impatiently admonished the child for crying. Something made Adam hesitate and wonder; and presently, as he proceeded on his way, the same subtle something turned him round to watch the receding figures. Again he caught a gleam of sunlight from that girl's glossy head.

  "Humph! Somehow I don't like the looks of those fellows," muttered Adam. He was annoyed with himself, first for being so inquisitive, and secondly for not having gone over to take a closer look at them. Shaking his head, dissatisfied with himself, Adam trudged on.

  "They said no water at the cottonwood," went on Adam. "No water when the peak is still white with snow. Either they lied or didn't know."

  Adam turned again to gaze after the little party. He had nothing tangible upon which to hang suspicions. He went on, then wheeled about once more, realising that the farther on he travelled the stronger grew his desire to look back. Suddenly the feeling cleared of its vagueness--no longer curiosity. It had been his thoughts that had inhibited him.

  "I'll go back," said Adam. Tying his burros to grease-wood bushes near the trail, he started to stride back over the ground he had covered. After a while he caught a glimmer of firelight through the darkness. They had made dry camp hardly five miles beyond the place where Adam had passed them.

  It developed that these travellers had gone off the trail to camp in a wide, deep wash. Adam lost sight of the campfire glimmer, and had to hunt round until he came to the edge of the wash. A good-sized fire of greasewood and sage had been started, so that it would burn down to hot embers for cooking purposes. As Adam stalked out of the gloom into the camp he saw both men busy with preparations for the meal. The girl sat in a disconsolate attitude. She espied Adam before either of the men heard him. Adam saw her quiver and start erect. Not fright, indeed, was it that animated her. Sudd
enly one of the men rose, with his hand going to his hip.

  "Who goes thar?" he demanded, warningly.

  Adam halted inside the circle of light. "Say, I lost my coat. Must have fallen off my pack. Did you fellows find it?"

  "No, we didn't find no coat," replied the man, slowly. He straightened up, with his hand dropping to his side. The other fellow was on his knees mixing dough in a pan.

  Adam advanced with natural manner, but his eyes, hidden under the shadow of his wide hat brim, took swift stock of that camp.

  "Pshaw! I was sure hoping you'd found it," he said, as he reached the fire. "I had a time locating your camp. Funny you'd come way off the trail, down in here."

  "Funny or not, stranger, it's our bizness," gruffly replied the man standing. He peered keenly at Adam.

  "Sure," replied Adam, with slow and apparent good nature. He was close to the man now, as close as he ever needed to get to any man who might make a threatening move. And he looked past him at the girl. She had a pale little face, too small for a pair of wonderful dark eyes that seemed full of woe and terror. She held out thin brown hands to Adam.

  "Reckon you'd better go an' hunt fer yer coat," returned the man, significantly.

  In one stride Adam loomed over him, his leisurely, casual manner suddenly transformed to an attitude of menace. He stood fully a foot and a half over this stockily built man, who also suddenly underwent a change. He stiffened. Warily he peered up, just a second behind Adam in decision. His mind worked too slowly to get the advantage in this situation.

  "Say, I'm curious about this girl you've got with you," said Adam, deliberately.

  The man gave a start. "Aw, you are, hey?" he rasped out. "Wal, see hyar, stranger, curious fellars sometimes die sudden, with their boots on."