The Great Trek

by Zane Grey

  Chapter Seventeen

  Thunder! Deep, detonating, long-rolling, it caused Sterl to catch his breath. The rains must come, perhaps this very night, if not, then on the morrow—in any event, soon. That would alleviate this hell on earth; it would precipitate the crisis, the fight which hung in the air like a sword of Damocles.

  Krehl approached the burned-out campfire, his head lifting like that of a listening deer. Again the heart-shaking rumble, booming, thundering over the ramparts of the desert.

  “You heah, pard?” he queried.

  “You bet. It goes clear to my boots. Deeper, heavier tonight, Red.”

  “Rings to me like a great bell.”

  Friday loomed out of nowhere, soft-stepping, black as the night.

  “Rain!” he said impressively.

  “Red, that means tonight or tomorrow. We must sleep. When that storm breaks, there’ll be no rest till God only knows when.”

  “Right-o. Let’s hit the hay. But I reckon I’ll never sleep no more.”

  Friday replenished the fire with two sticks laid crosswise. He squatted down, rested his weapons, and became as a statue of black marble. Sterl watched him a moment while Red made for their tent. Friday could sleep in any position, at any time. Sterl had caught him asleep, standing on one leg like a sandhill crane. To Sterl he was a never-ending source of delight, knowledge, courage.

  Inside the tent, pulling off his boots, Sterl said: “What kicked you in the middle, pard?”

  Red heaved a sigh. “Somethin’ wuss tonight, Sterl. Don’t ask me. I had my gun out to murder Ormiston, when that first clap of thunder fetched me to my senses.”

  “A-huh! I’m sorry it thundered just then. But there’s an end to the longest road, old friend. I’ve a hunch it’s near. Leslie told me things while you were out there. But wait. Maybe I’ll forget them. Ah-h! Listen, Red! Did you ever hear thunder as strange and deep and angry as that?”

  “Nope, I reckon not. But we never been in such a strange, big, an’ mad country as this heah Outback of Australia. Gawd, but I’d love it…if I didn’t want to die!”

  Sterl cursed his friend lustily. It silenced Red and relieved his own overwrought feelings. Then he stretched out on the hot blankets to rest if not to sleep. As on the night before, this thundering forerunner of the season’s storms passed by the Forks, booming on, rolling on to rumble and mutter and die away in the distance. But it did not leave Sterl with the sickening sense of disappointment and dismay he had suffered previously. He now felt sure that the rains would come; besides, he had unabatable faith in Friday.

  Sterl went to sleep, and was called a few hours before daybreak. He and Red rode out upon the heat-blanketed veldt. They had little to say before they parted on guard. Red mentioned that the stars looked queer to him. To Sterl they appeared less pitilessly white and immutable.

  The cattle were quiet, not even one of the calves bawling. A brooding, dreaming, terrible silence lay on the land. Nature was about to check up on its waste and tardiness. There seemed to be a strange soundless voice abroad. No stir from the herd, no nighthawk crying, no wail of wild dog, no cowboy or drover brave enough to break the eternal silence and defy the solitude. It was uncanny. It portended evil. Sterl’s senses, attuned to an exquisite keenness, caught the faint swish of grass. No animal, no black, no white man could slip up behind him. But this was Friday, and his advent made the weirdness endurable.

  The hours passed. Day broke. The east flung up a crimson that spread to the zenith. The endless leagues of grass took on the hue of fire. When the sun rose, fire again possessed the sky and earth.

  At breakfast Larry told how three thunderstorms had passed about midnight, and the last had gone by to the west of the Forks.

  “We’ll get socked right in the eye tonight,” he said cheerfully.

  “Folks, am I gettin’ balmy, or is it hot sooner an’ wusser than yestiddy mawnin’?” inquired Red.

  “Feels hotter.”

  Slyter interposed to inform them that the last day of a hot spell was the hottest. The temperature this day would top one hundred and thirty degrees. If the Forks had been a dusty place, with hot gales blowing, life would have been impossible.

  “It’s that way Outback in the Never Never, they say,” he concluded.

  “Say, boss, I reckon you have one of them red-hot camp kettles over yore skull, huh?” drawled Red. “Wal, to hell with the heat. Let’s take to the water like the blacks. Then we cain’t get sunstroke.”

  Sterl seconded the motion, and Slyter’s drovers agreed to become amphibian during off hours. The listlessness, the skepticism that had prevailed, seemed to have vanished in the prospect of rain. Slyter warned against too much moving about. It would be safer to lie down in the shade and give up, rather than fight the heat. Beryl had fainted already that morning. Leslie, however, the youngest of the trekkers, did not go around gasping, with oppressed breast.

  “As long as your face is wet, you’re all right,” said Slyter, including everybody. “But, if it gets dry and hot, look out. Keep in the shade with a bucket of water and bathe your head.”

  Sterl’s attention was called presently, when Sterl followed Red to their tent, by Friday pointing to Eric Dann’s crossing the main fork of the dry riverbed toward Ormiston’s camp. In the mornings and evenings someone was always crossing to and fro. But in this instance Sterl had a premonition. Very likely this was the last of the dry spell. Momentous thoughts must be revolving in Ormiston’s mind, and in anyone who knew his plot. Sterl was certain that Eric Dann did not share Ormiston’s confidence.

  “Red, I’ve got a hunch,” said Sterl, and proceeded to get his field glass from under a flap of the tent. “Friday just tipped me off to that.” Sterl indicated Dann’s plodding across the soft sand, scattering the birds in a colorful shower.

  “A-huh. Reckon he’s gonna persuade Ormiston to drive his herd back on this side, before the river rises. Haw! Haw! Like hell…he will!”

  “Red, Eric Dann is either out of his head or crooked,” averred Sterl. “Let’s find a place where we can watch them through the glass.”

  “Good idea. Pard, last night I heahed Beryl tell Ormiston that her dad wanted Eric to get Ormiston to drive his mob over heah.”

  “What else did Beryl say?”

  “A hell of a lot. But not pertainin’ to this deal we know is comin’ off. Beryl thinks Ormiston will stick to her dad, for her sake. Of all the gullible….”

  “Here by this log,” interrupted Sterl. “Nobody can see us. Now!” He adjusted the glass and, leaning upon the huge trunk of a fallen gum, he rested on his elbows and peered at Ormiston’s camp. At first glance he saw that it was a pretty busy place, considering the torrid heat. Drovers naked to the waist were passing to and fro, packing things from one wagon to another. Ormiston paced a short beat under the shelter of palm and pandamus leaves. His right-hand man, Bedford, sat on the ground, mending harness. Both of them watched Eric Dann, plodding up the sand of the river slope, and their remarks must surely have fitted their malevolent looks. The magnifying glass brought the drover as close as if he had been right there in front of Sterl. In a moment more his visage underwent a remarkable change, and he was again the smiling Ormiston, greeting his visitor agreeably.

  Eric Dann wiped his pallid face. His shirt was wet through with sweat. He accepted the drink Ormiston offered him. Dann seemed a harassed man in a grip of contending tides. They talked, and Sterl did not need to hear them to know that Eric Dann never delivered his brother’s message.

  “Lemme have a look, you hawg,” spoke Red impatiently.

  Sterl relinquished the glass to the cowboy, and pondered dubiously over the situation.

  Red glued his eyes to that glass and remained rigid for a long time. “Wal, thet’s over, what ever it was,” he said presently. “Dann is comin’ back. He’s carryin’ the world on his shoulders, if I know a sucker when I see one. He doesn’t know Ormiston is goin’ to double-cross him, any more than does Stanley Dann. O
rmiston drinks out of thet black bottle. His big weakness for a bad hombre. He an’ Bedford understand each other, I’ll tell the world. Gosh, I can hardly wait to bore thet beady-eyed bastard! I shore ain’t a-gonna be sick to my stummick after I kill him. There goes Ormiston back to thet wagon they’re packin’. Cain’t see very good through the branches of thet tree. Reckon I’ve seen enough.”

  He handed the glass back to Sterl and stood erect, to wipe his red and sweaty face. His blue-ice eyes glinted like gunmetal steel as he faced Sterl.

  “All over but the rain…an’ the shootin’, pard,” he rang out.

  “Well, dammit, suppose you go over there and do the shooting before it rains,” declared Sterl impatiently.

  “Umpumm. There ain’t no motive yet thet’d go far with Stanley Dann. We gotta have thet. Why, what’ve we been waitin’ for all these months? Use yore haid, pard.”

  “Lord, how can I, when it aches like a toothache and burns like fire?”

  “Wal, so does mine. But, pard Sterl, it’s comin’ off, this deal, pretty pronto. I figger Ormiston will throw Eric Dann down, mebbe after gettin’ his hosses an’ cattle. I wouldn’t be in Eric’s boots then for a million.”

  “Neither would I. But, Red, oughtn’t we tell Stanley?”

  “Hell, no! Not before, an’ ruin our chance to bore them hombres. Afterward it’ll all be plain as print. We won’t have to talk. Ormiston will raid the boss’ mob an’ remuda, shore as you’re born.”

  “Yes, I got that, too. But is he such a fool as to think we won’t be on the lookout for it? Or to track him, if he gets away?”

  “Sterl, he’s jest thet big a conceited jackass,” Red bit out contemptuously. “He figgers this river in flood will keep us from getting acrost after him. Hell! If he only knew what little we care for flooded rivers!”

  “OK, then. But one last point. Where does Beryl come in?”

  “Pard, that stumps me, too. Beryl thinks Ormiston will take the Gulf road, now thet Stanley has given in to go thet way. But Ormiston isn’t takin’ it, as we know. An’ I’m about shore there’s no hope of Ormiston persuadin’ Beryl to elope, as he tried so hard. Mebbe he jest don’t want her.”

  “Red! The man was mad over her.”

  “Shore. But thet was months ago. An’ long months in which he has been with her some part of every day, an’ hours of every night. Mebbe he has had enough.”

  Sterl let that tense conjecture sink in, trying to think away any hasty conception of his whirling consciousness.

  “You see, Sterl,” went on the cowboy, “Ormiston is far from the kind of a man who’d risk much for a woman, let alone go to hell for her, an’ get himself shot full of holes. Shore, you’ve seen how Beryl has failed lately. Why, she’s only a shade of thet lovely girl we met back in Downsville. She’s goin’ downhill. She’d be a burden. I reckon he’s gonna let Beryl go. What he wants air hosses an’ cattle.”

  “Red, you’re overshooting the deal here, I swear,” declared Sterl with passion. “Ormiston is low-down enough to do anything. Beryl’s physical condition wouldn’t deter him one single whit, if he wants her. He has to travel with wagons. She can be packed like a bag of flour. If she dies on the way, what the hell? If it’s conceivable that she would hold up his trek…which it isn’t…well, I am pretty sore, pretty tough these days. Perhaps I’d better not say more about that. We’ll hope that, when it comes to the break, Beryl won’t go with him. I’ve forgotten how she said that she wouldn’t betray her father. Red, there’s still something soft left in me that this damned desert hasn’t hardened.”

  “Wal, there ain’t in me,” Red cut in wearily. “Let’s wait for the showdown. It’s a cinch Ormiston will try to steal some of Dann’s hosses an’ cattle. Mebbe some of Slyter’s, too. But if he’s as pore a bush-ranger as he is everythin’ else, why, hell, it’ll make us laugh. I’d like to laugh in his teeth, when I’m shootin’ hot bullets through his guts! Let’s make for the river. It’s shore too hellish hot to live.”

  Stanley Dann sent orders by Cedric for everyone to lie quiet that day, protected from the direct rays of the sun. Before that order was issued the cattle had strung out for two miles in the shade of trees along the riverbanks. There was little movement among the colored strings of birds. Kangaroos kept to the brush. The whirling hordes of flies were out early, but they soon vanished. The sun was too hot for them. The younger blacks stayed in or by the water; the older ones did not move from their shelters.

  Sterl and Red submerged themselves in the river until the hot water and green floating scum sickened them and drove them back to their tent. But they found the inside of the tent unendurable. They could not breathe. Red said the top of his skull would fly off, like the lid of an over-boiled coffee pot.

  Almost naked they lay under their wagon on the grass. There they faced torrid hours, conscious of the fact that life depended upon the least exertion possible. The air was blisteringly hot. Sterl kept track of each sensation, true to that ruling passion of his, a twist of curiosity as to the effect of outside things upon him. His brain seemed to be confined inside a binding band of hot metal. His pulse beats, his panting breaths labored as after strenuous, unusual exertion. As long as his skin continued to be moist, he was not alarmed. The difficulty was to force his mind to accept the idea that he could stand it. If it was so racking for him, how could those drinking trekkers keep from going mad?

  At long intervals Sterl would open his eyes. Krehl lay prone, his arms outspread, his brick-red visage covered with beads of perspiration, his breast heaving slowly, his posture one of extreme relaxation and calm. This cowboy, who had crossed the Texas Llano Estacado in mid-summer, would see this day through. Sterl knew he would, also, but the ordeal was hell multiplied.

  Nothing stirred, not a blade of grass, not a bleached plume, not a slender eucalyptus leaf. The heat bore down with leaden weight. Heat veils, like transparent smoke, poured off the earth, to rise swiftly upward. The sky was like a shield of shimmering brass reflecting the sun. That arched dome was all sun.

  Friday lay in the shade of the big gum tree. That was the only time Sterl ever saw the black incapacitated. He, too, being human, and as perfect an engine to resist the elements that evolution had ever turned out, had to fight for his life.

  Sterl’s temerity resulted in reddened eyesight. Bending over a bed of burning coals was nothing compared to exposing his eyeballs to that noonday glare. He did not repeat his rash act. He felt a queer little boil of the blood in his brain. And he knew when he began to have flighty spells. He would recognize when he was out of his head. The trick resembled somewhat the dreams he used to have of falling from a height, and yet, notwithstanding the vividness of his perception, he had always known he would wake up before he struck. He was not going to go mad over one day’s onslaught of the remorseless sun. The tension upon his nerves and blood vessels reached its peak—only perceptible to Sterl afterward, when his mind cleared, and there came a diminishing of the various pangs that had prostrated him. Sweat dripped from his brow again, and there was a pound in his breast, and the palms of his hands were wet.

  Red called out: “Pard, air you daid or in the land of dreams or burnin’ to beat hell?”

  “Gosh! I guess I’ve…been all of them,” gasped Sterl, and opened his eyes to a dusky golden effulgence. The sun had set. That awful door of the blast furnace had closed. In the west, colossal thunderhead clouds loomed halfway to the zenith. Low down over the horizon their base was a dusky purple, but as they billowed and mushroomed upward, the darkened hues changed to rose and gold, until their rounded tops were pearl white. All the way across the western horizon on around into the northeast these marvelous signs of a transformed desert lifted exquisite crowns on high.

  “Look at them thunderhaids, pard!” exclaimed the prosaic Red, when he stood upright again and reached to the wagon wheel for his shirt. “Did you ever see the beat of them? All same Staked Plain to make up for a dry spell!”

  “They are grand, Red.
At the end of this torturing day they are like God’s promise in the rainbow.”

  “Wal, I shore hope Gawd keeps his promise, Sterl,” drawled the cowboy. “Let’s look an’ see how many of us croaked. Wal, there’s Leslie, bless her game heart! She can still smile. An’ Bill is gettin’ supper. I see others movin’ about. And the cattle air workin’ out on the grass. How you feel, pard?”

  “I think I’m all right.”

  “Wal, I’m sorta daid on my feet, or in my haid, I don’t know which. Shore it must be hot as hell yet, but it doesn’t feel hot.”

  Friday appeared, stalking under the gum trees. He came directly to them.

  “Howdy,” he said, using the cowboy greeting Sterl had taught him. Accompanying it was a transfiguration in the black visage that Sterl recognized as Friday’s exceedingly rare smile.

  “Boss, rain come,” he said, as if he were a chief addressing a multitude of aborigines who had prayed for rain.

  “Bimeby?” Sterl asked huskily.

  “Alonga soon night.”

  Red expanded his chest to ejaculate. “Aw, Friday, our trouble’s over.”

  “Trubble come. Rain like hell.”

  A call to supper disrupted this interesting conversation. While the cowboys forced themselves to partake of the eternal damper, meat, and tea, the magnificent panorama of pillared cloud pageant lifted perceptibly higher and changed its hue as well as form. The bases closed the gaps between and turned to inky black. The purple deepened and encroached upon the gold, blotting it out, as if by magic, and, while the trekkers forgot to eat and sat gazing upward spellbound, the darkening transformation went on until the sculptured scalloped crowns lost their pearl and white. From glorious clouds of liveliness they changed to menacing clouds of storm.