by V. J. Banis
“Keeps it from getting so dry,” he explained, popping one into his own mouth as well.
Here began the most tortuous stretch of their entire journey. They abandoned their packs altogether. Claire fastened the pouch containing her money to her belt and took the revolver and its bullets. Morton carried the rifle and their empty canteens, still hoping that somewhere within reach was water.
Once more they set off across the desolate sands. Claire’s mind began to wander periodically. She imagined herself back in London, at her aunt’s or riding on the grounds at Everly Hall. She thought of Peter, long since dead, no doubt. And Summers: his death lay at her door as well. His ghost had no need to rail at her, she thought grimly, for surely she was to be punished. She would pay for his life with her own.
Still she plodded on, stumbling and falling and getting to her feet again, only to stumble a few yards farther on. She lost track of time. They walked and paused for rest, and walked some more. The sun rose, reaching to its burning heights, and fell, only to rise again. She was sleeping, thinking she was dead, and then somehow she was staggering onward, Morton’s arm about her to support her.
It was when Morton himself dropped to his knees in the sand that she truly thought the end had been reached. She knew that it was his strength that had carried her onward for at least a day, perhaps even two or three. She could no longer lift her feet from the sand, but only managed to drag them over the surface. She was nearly blind from the sun’s incessant glare, and her tongue was so swollen with thirst that she could form words only with great difficulty.
Released from Morton’s supporting arm, she sank limp and immobile upon the sand. Above, the sky was an unvarying sheet of blue stone, unmarked by cloud or wing of bird.
“Pigs,” Morton said beside her.
The word made no sense to her and she did not attempt a reply.
After a moment or two he said it again. “Pigs,” he said. “There’s been pigs here.”
Thinking he had at last sacrificed his own sanity to the sun, she turned her head to stare at him. To her surprise, to her fear even, he was grinning, his eyes gleaming with a feverish light.
“Look.” He put an arm about her again and dragged her to a sitting position, pointing to the ground just before them. The sand, crusted hard on the surface, had been broken by a trail of prints leading off across a hillock beyond them. Here and there the trail was marked by animal droppings.
“I don’t know a damn thing about the desert,” Morton said. “But I was a boy on a farm in Kentucky, and I know pig shit when I see it. Get up, girl.”
“I—I can’t,” she murmured, too weak and too tired to make the effort to stand.
He shook her, trying to penetrate her apathy. “Pigs,” he repeated yet again. “Pigs mean food, and water, somewhere around here. Ain’t no pig can live without water. Get up, damn you.”
He literally dragged her to her feet. She tried to stand, but her legs simply would not support her. Morton stared at her in frustration and disgust. She knew what he must be thinking, that his best course lay in abandoning her to the desert and pushing on alone.
“Goddamn it all,” he muttered. He bent and, embracing her about the hips, lifted her clumsily, throwing her over his shoulder as if she were a bag of flour. In this manner he proceeded to carry her over the sand.
Claire, her head jouncing roughly off his broad back, stared downward at the tracks they were following. Slowly the sense of what he had been saying began to penetrate her dazed condition. She beat feebly against him.
“Wait. I’ll try again,” she cried in a hoarse voice.
He stumbled and lowered her roughly to the ground. Ordinarily he could have carried her for miles without strain. Now the labored state of his breathing was pitiful evidence of his own weakened condition.
For the first time since they had set out alone, she gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you,” she said. “I—I think I can go on.”
He did not reply. After a moment to regain his breath, he took hold of her arm to help her along, and together they set out again.
They crossed the hillock and before them lay a wash, a creek bed for the run-off when the infrequent rains soaked the desert, a dry, flat ravine elsewise. Now it was dry, but even as they stared down at it, something grunted off to their right. They saw Morton’s pigs—desert peccaries, a half-dozen or more of them. The peccaries had led them to a waterhole, a muddied remnant of the last deluge that had washed through this ravine days, perhaps weeks, before.
Claire would have stumbled forward at once, but Morton held her back. She watched as he loaded his rifle and, lifting it to his shoulder, took careful aim. He fired, and one of the wild pigs leaped into the air, giving a final shriek before it died. The others scattered in every direction.
Claire and Morton ran forward, if running it could be called. They clung weakly to one another, each barely able to put one foot before the other.
She almost made it. One foot slipped on a pebble. She tried to hold on to Morton but it was no good. She went down, not just to her knees, but flat on her face.
Morton went on. She saw him fall face forward in the brackish water and she closed her eyes, trying to summon the strength to crawl on.
How long she lay there she wasn’t sure. To her surprise, Morton came back. He slipped an arm under hers and tugged her up. She felt something cool and wet brush her lips.
“Here,” he said. He had soaked the tail of his shirt in the water and brought it back to her. He wrung it out now, the precious drops of fluid falling upon her parched and swollen tongue.
“Easy,” he said. “Got to go slow at first.”
Too weak himself to lift her again, he began to scoot awkwardly across the desert floor on his bottom, tugging her along with him. She helped as best she could, crawling and scooting with him, and finally she felt her hand sink into thick, oozing mud. Another yard, another after that, and her burning skin sank beneath the surface of the water.
She would have drunk the pool dry, but Morton jerked her head back after only a taste. “Slow,” he warned again. “It’ll kill you otherwise.”
They sat like two scarecrows, staring at one another, each marveling that they were still alive. A desert wind rose suddenly, sweeping through the ravine. In the distance the wild pigs, apparently still frightened by the shooting of one of their number, squealed afresh.
Something rattled on a stone nearby. “Jesus,” Morton swore, his eyes going wide. She looked over her shoulder and saw an Indian arrow lying a few feet from them.
They both looked in the direction from which the arrow had come. A dozen savage faces stared at them over the crest of a sand hill. One of the Indians leaped up and loosed another arrow from his bow. It stuck in the earth a few inches from Claire’s foot, its shaft quivering angrily.
“Bad ones,” Morton said. He brought the rifle up and fired. The Indian yelped and fell backward, but at once a shower of arrows began to rain about them.
“We’re ducks in a pond here,” Morton said, crawling backward away from the arrows. “We got to get up there, among them rocks.”
He nodded in the direction of a pile of boulders on the opposite side of the wash. Claire stared at the rocks and then at him.
The next arrow nicked her arm, drawing blood. It gave her the impetus she needed.
Frantically sucking air into her lungs, she got to her knees. The rocks glittered in the blinding sun some twenty yards away. It looked like a thousand miles just now. Morton was mad, they could never reach that. She got to her feet. Behind her Morton was firing at the Indians, trying to give her cover, but the rocks were too far. Even without the Indians, if she had been able to husband what was left of her strength and crawl on her hands and knees, she wasn’t sure she could have made it. Now it seemed impossible, trying in this pathetic desperation to run, scramble, jump, anything to propel herself along, scraping her hands on the hard rough walls of the wash, tearing the flesh. The fire of the hot desert
sun was nothing to the fire blazing in her left side. She almost thought it would be easier to die than to go on like this, foot after foot, inch after inch, racing toward those distant rocks that seemed almost to recede as she ran.
Morton was running after her now, and behind them she heard a horrible shouting. She did not need to look back to know that the Indians were after them, pouring in a yelping wave over the banks of the wash.
She ran now, ran as she had never run before, and in her fear-crazed mind she thought she might already have died. It felt as if her feet weren’t even touching the ground.
And still the rocks seemed far, far away.
An arrow clattered among the stones at her feet. Behind them the shouting was louder, nearer. She could hear Morton’s breath rattling in his chest as he too struggled for some last measure of strength.
Ten yards now to go. She had reached the top of another hill, but her legs gave out and she pitched forward, knowing that she was falling not only down a hill, but out of life as well, plunging into death. She rolled and tumbled, striking her head on a rock, filling her mouth and her eyes with sand, until finally she rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill. It seemed that the screaming was everywhere now, before her as well as behind.
She lay stunned and helpless, the last reserves of her strength gone. Something moved near her head and she forced her eyes open. A pair of moccasin-clad feet. She strained her eyes upward and saw brown legs and an Indian loincloth.
Too weary now even to care, she closed her eyes again and let her face sink into the burning sand.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Strong arms lifted her, and she was being carried, so swiftly and lightly that she was almost convinced she was dreaming. She was dimly aware of the shouting and yelping of the Indians, growing gradually dimmer until it had faded with her consciousness.
The air, when she woke, was stale and smoky. She opened her eyes and stared upward at a leafy ceiling with an opening through which smoke was escaping. She was in a tipi-like structure, but whereas those Summers had bartered from the Pawnee had been made of long poles covered with hides, the poles here seemed covered with nothing but leaves and shrubs.
Still, it provided shelter. She could see through the opening that the sky above was dark, and she had reason to know that desert nights could be cool.
She turned her head to the side. Three bare-breasted Indian women sat about the central fire. One of them saw that she had awakened and barked something in a guttural tongue to the others, the youngest of whom jumped up and ran from the hut.
The other two approached the bed. They offered her food and water from bowls that appeared to be woven baskets, drawing the vessels back when she would have taken too much. All the while they stared at her in unabashed curiosity.
“Am I a prisoner?” she asked when she had gotten a little of the food down.
The two women looked at one another and giggled, exchanging rapid phrases in a tongue unfamiliar to her, though once or twice she almost thought she recognized a Spanish word.
The third woman suddenly reappeared, followed by an Indian man. He was so tall that his head, adorned with a single feather attached to a band, threatened to brush the walls of the tipi.
He bent his head to come stand over her, studying her with open, intelligent eyes. “You are Spanish?” he asked, to her surprise speaking in that tongue.
“No, English,” she replied. When that elicited no response she said, “I come from America.”
Though he spoke English too, albeit haltingly, her attempts to explain where they had come from seemed to confuse him. He seemed to have difficulty grasping the fact that they had actually come across the great desert in which he had found them.
She learned from him that Morton was alive, but when she asked the same question she had asked of the women, “Are we prisoners?” the Indian seemed surprised.
“You are our guests,” he said simply, and with that left her to the women.
For three days the women tended her in the tipi while she gradually regained her strength. The tall man with the single feather, whose name, appropriately enough, was Lone Feather, came each day to see how she was getting on.
Only one of the women, the youngest who had first gone to fetch Lone Feather, spoke any English, and that clumsily at best, but from her and from Lone Feather’s brief visits, Claire gradually learned something of what had happened.
These Indians were not the same as the ones who had attacked Morton and her by the waterhole. They had, indeed, driven those others off. Having rescued the travelers, they brought them back to their camp in the nearby hills.
Exactly why they had been rescued was a bit more difficult for Claire to grasp, but as she talked with the Indians she began to understand that this desert was not their customary home.
“We are of the Malibu,” Lone Feather said with noticeable pride in his voice, “on the edge of the great sea.”
The great sea, Claire thought. That must mean the ocean! “Then we are in California?”
He seemed surprised that she knew the word. “California, yes,” he said.
Her initial excitement paled somewhat when she learned that they were in fact many days’ travel—a week at least—from the California coast. Whether this desert was actually a part of the province of California, Lone Feather could not say.
Wanderers in what was for them a foreign land, these people had had occasion themselves to quarrel with the fierce Indians who lived in this area. When they had heard a shot and, coming to investigate, had seen two whites in danger of being killed by the locals, the Indians had reacted instinctively to save them.
Though her nurses treated her kindly, Claire began to see that they were impatient for her to be up and about. This was because they feared further trouble from the local savages. Knowing this, and none too eager to wear out her welcome, Claire exerted herself to a maximum effort, so that at the end of three days she was able to stand and walk about for a short period, and on the fourth day was ready to venture out of the tipi.
What she found was a smaller camp than she had imagined. There were only half a dozen ragtag tipis such as the one in which she had convalesced, cooking fires, and here and there a makeshift bed on the desert rocks. It was vastly more primitive and squalid than the camp of the Pawnees had been, and she might have been inclined to regard these people as contemptuous had not Lone Feather explained to her with an unmistakably defensive tone that this camp was only makeshift. They had traveled long and far from their home, and were now nearing the end of their journey, homeward bound.
Morton, she found, had been up and about a day sooner than she. She found him seated before one of the cook fires, engaged in conversation with another brave and hungrily devouring the dried meat that was the staple of the tribe.
“Nice piece of luck, ain’t it?” He greeted her. “Just when it looks like we’re about to hand over our scalps to the Indians, and who rescues us but some more Indians, and from California at that.”
“I want to thank you,” she said. “It seems I once again owe my life to you.”
It had been so long since he had approached her sexually that her former loathing of him had receded somewhat. She had tended to be forgiving of his faults and appreciative of his merits, so that, though she would hardly have thought of him with love or even abiding affection, there was a closeness impossible to explain to others that was not unlike a deep friendship.
It was with genuine dismay, therefore, that she saw in the look he gave her the almost forgotten gleam of sexual arousal. She knew at once that he would expect her to pay for whatever he had done for her.
“I’ve talked to that head Indian, Lone Feather,” he said, running his tongue over his fleshy lips. “He says we can have a tipi to ourselves the rest of the time we’re here. Says they’ll be moving out pretty soon now.”
“No, please,” she said, shaking her head, “I beg you I am grateful to you, but....”
He did not
wait to hear her objections. He strode off to speak to Lone Feather about something.
* * * * * * *
That night the women left the tipi, leaving her alone. Though water was in short supply, they had brought her a vessel of it earlier, so that she had been able to take at least a token bath and wash some of the desert dirt from her hair. She wished for a mirror and told herself ruefully it was probably just as well that she was without one, for she could well imagine what she must look like. Her lips had begun to heal, but were still broken and occasionally bled. Her hair was now nearly waist length, matted and tangled.
She thought of the men who had plotted and flirted and, in one instance at least, attempted murder, for the sake of marrying her, and laughed to herself. Which of them, seeing her now, would burn with desire? Perhaps, she thought bitterly, Morton was the best she could hope for now.
As if in reply there was a sound outside, and Lone Feather stepped into the tipi. Oddly, he did not speak, but only stood for a long moment staring at her. She had been attempting to comb out her hair with a brush of bound twigs the women had given her, and she stood with it in her hand, raised to her brow. Her hair, newly rinsed, gleamed wet and golden in the Firelight.
She waited for the Indian to speak, but he only regarded her for a long moment as if weighing her in some invisible scales. Then, still without a word, he turned and left the tipi.
Morton came later. At first she pleaded with him, and even briefly tried to resist him, but the outcome was inevitable and at last, weary and dispirited, she submitted passively, grateful that his lengthy abstinence made the ordeal brief.
* * * * * * *
It was not until he was dressing the following morning that Morton said, “I’ll be leaving today.”
Claire, who had been lying with her back to him, sat up, forgetting for the moment that she was nude. “But I thought we would leave with the Indians.”
“The Indians are heading back to their village, someplace called the Malibu. But that Lone Feather tells me there’s a white man’s town, some place he calls Los Awn-hell-ace, off to the south a little ways. That’s where I’m headed. Don’t figure on living in no Indian village, not any longer than I have to.”
