by Zane Grey
After supper Clifton had taken one side of the wide wash and Julio the other. The dogs were down among the sheep. Well those shepherd dogs knew their responsibility! The larger danger would be during the early hours of the evening, when beasts of prey were prowling about and sheep were ravenous. Ever and anon there would come a tiny bleat, wild and sharp on the air, suddenly quenched. That told a tragic story. One or the other of the shepherds always fired his rifle on these occasions.
Clifton’s beat was a high wall of black lava, broken in many sections, resembling huge blocks of granite, mostly rough and difficult to walk over. He had to keep going all the time and maintain a vigilant lookout. A mile or more to the eastward this hollow closed, and here under the cliff there was always water, even during the anno seco of the Mexicans. Feed, however, did not flourish hereabout, because there was very little soil. The sheep would work up as far as this, and turn back, one bunch after another. Westward the hollow spread out into the bleak bare desert. Here was the greatest danger of losing sheep at night, because the opening was wide and rough.
On the whole the shepherds were very fortunate, for the reason that the bad hours passed with little loss, and toward midnight the sheep, weary and sleepy, and fairly well fed, massed in an open spot.
Clifton perched on a high section of the broken wall, in a seat he had occupied on the trip down. It resembled an armchair, and the only drawback was that it induced slumber. Julio was down among the flock with his dogs. Clifton could see the slight dark figure moving to and fro, seldom resting. Clifton had learned to love Julio. The taint of peon blood did not signify anything to Clifton. The lad was honest, simple, true; he loved the sheep and he loved the life. Many and many a time Clifton had caught him absorbed in contemplation of the heavens.
Clifton had long ago learned to study them himself. But seldom indeed did he have opportunity at midnight.
The night or the hour seemed portentous. There was no wind, yet Clifton heard a faint moan out of any direction to which he turned a keen ear. The rocks and blocks of lava still held the heat of the day’s sun. For some occult reason the desert coolness had not set in. Clifton’s brow was moist; he did not wear his sombrero, and he sat on his coat. The metal of his rifle was hot to the touch.
It seemed to him that the air was drying up. League-long strips of black cloud, strangely weird, lined the sky; and between them wan, pale stars shone. All objects near at hand looked opaque. There was an invisible mantle over the desert, and upon it pressed the sultry atmosphere.
The season was early for heat lightning, yet far to the north, where the range heaved, fitful flares lighted the bold black horizon, and faded away, leaving an impression of the vastness of the desert and the infinity beyond.
Suddenly Clifton became aware that the darkness was lessening. It amazed him. There was no moon. The clouds had not moved away across the sky to leave it open. Yet there was light all around. He heard Julio cry out to his saints.
Then came a sound like the low rush of wind in high grass. It increased. So did the light. Clifton whirled to see the approach of a comet or a falling star. He sat transfixed, with all functions but that of sight in abeyance.
How inconceivably swift its flight, its brightening radiance, its strange increasing roar! All in a second the desert became whiter than a noon of the clearest day. The rushing body crackled like particles of dry splintering ice. It passed by, a blue-white streak like the air-blown molten iron in a blast furnace, leaving a diminishing tail as long as the distance it had come. Suddenly it exploded into immense blue-white stars that fell, faded, vanished. The long tail, like that left by a rocket, lived for a moment, paled and died.
It was when Clifton recovered from this spectacle that his decision to remain on the desert crystallized.
After the decision came his brooding, pondering thought. The desert had made him a thinker. Solitude and loneliness inspired the mind. Cities, people, noise were inimical to the harvest of quiet thinking.
From midnight to dawn Clifton thought—of his boyhood, his early family life, his school days, his brief college career with its misadventure, the war. Of his travail, his love of mother, father, Virginia and his fight for their sake, of catastrophe—and then the desert!
What he might be at this moment, of course, he owed to all that had happened; nevertheless, the desert and its thousand fold mysteries had been his salvation. He could never become a normal useful member of society as the thing was taught in school and business, and harangued from pulpits, from benches and editors’ chairs.
He needed to sit down alone with the elements. What he had gone through had left no bitterness now, no hate, no unrest, no scorn for the selfish, the ignorant, the brutal. He had seen behind a veil, caught just a glimpse of the infinite from which man had come and where he must go.
Clifton watched the gray dawn lighten. A rose bloomed over the eastern ramparts of the desert. Wisps of clouds grew shell-pink and burned to silver. Then a glory of red and gold stole over the lifeless reaches of the naked earth. He had eyes to see and a mind to think; and there the sheep bleated and the wide trail wound away. When he slid down from his perch he was whistling. It was good to be grateful, to have chosen irrevocably.
On the march northward that day he saw Old Baldy stick a white, round dome up over the rim of the world. It had the unreality of a mirage—the illusion that it seemed soon attainable. But for days the strange blue medium between Clifton and the peak that loomed over his home remained the same. It was distance on the desert, and it had never deceived him.
The closer Clifton came to San Luis the more proof he had of his tranquillity. Far back along the sheep-herders’ trail he had left that phantom of himself—the frail, suffering, tormented past. He had rebuilt his soul on the rocks of the desert.
About the 1st of May the shepherds reached their permanent camp on the range behind Don Lopez’ ranch, a few miles back of San Luis.
Julio had missed count of days, so that Clifton could only guess at the date. However, the cottonwoods said it was spring on the uplands and summer below. Clifton found cactus blooming and bunches of daisies. The sage appeared gray and forlorn after the long winter and needed rain that would come soon.
The summer range for Lopez’ sheep consisted of valleys and ridges as far from Sycamore as the herders could graze the flock and get back the same day. Since the decline and almost total failure of cattle this range had been a boon to sheepmen. There had been snow during the winter, and the grass was coming out fresh and green.
Sycamore was the name of the camp at the head of one of the large bottle-necked valleys characteristic of this region. Water flowed from a narrow gorge. A few distorted old sycamore trees, pale white and brown, with many dead branches, and green leaves just starting, gave the spot its name.
The sheep knew they were home. Almost they rolled in the green grass. But they avoided the corrals and long chutes that led to the dipping-troughs. All except the lambs, and they had yet to learn of sheep-dip.
Clifton liked the place well. Years before, with boys from town, he had come here to shoot rabbits. Cottontails were more plentiful now than then, which was owing to the depletion of foxes and coyotes.
It was in Clifton’s mind to start a flock of his own, however small it might be. Lopez, after the manner of sheepmen, would sell that fall. Clifton had seven months’ pay coming, which, little as it was, would purchase a few sheep. He laughed at his wardrobe, which was on his back, a patchwork of his own mending. He would require a new outfit, for Sycamore was far removed from Guadaloupe. It would be fun, however, to let his mother—and anyone else, for that matter—see him in his present shepherd’s garb.
Julio went singing away across the valley, taking the trail to San Luis. He was to stop at the ranch and report to Lopez, then go on to San Luis to see his people and return with supplies.
Clifton remained with the sheep. They had made Sycamore early in the afternoon, and Clifton, meaning this camp to be his hom
e during the summer, pitched his tent with an idea of permanence. Up the gorge there was abundance of cedar brush, some of which he cut for his bed. He built a fireplace, and packed down a quantity of wood. His tasks this day, however, were broken by desultory spells, in which he gazed raptly over the hill. Three miles from San Luis—five from home—six from Cottonwoods! Incredible! He could not keep from wondering, longing, hoping. These were emotions which must abide with him the rest of his life. He wondered about those he loved, he longed to see them, he hoped for their well-being and happiness.
All afternoon he alternated between long periods of labor and short ones of idle speculation. But the sum of his work resulted in a most comfortable, picturesque camp.
Sunset and evening star! Always different, always the same! He ate supper beside his lonely camp fire. Always the sheep-herder would be lonely, no matter where. The lambs were bleating, but the dogs were quiet. All was well with the flock. And with him.
He went to bed early. The cedar fragrance in his tent was sweet, and he thought how pleasant it was to stretch out and lie still. He was not haunted by the proximity of kith and kin. And when, with the closing of his eyes, he dropped to sleep, it was not to be untroubled by dreams. Nor did the sheep-herder who walked all day in the open, in sun and wind, wake before the dawn.
While Clifton ate breakfast, which was an apology for a meal, and later than usual that morning, the dogs set up a clamorous barking, so unusual that it startled him.
He espied Don Lopez riding across the green flat toward his camp. Then a rush of blood throbbed to Clifton’s temples, which, slowly receding, left him cold. He had been absent seven months. A long time in the life of elderly people! Fateful and mutable lapse of days for a girl in her twenties!
“Don Lopez!” he murmured, gladly, yet with reluctance. “He will tell me everything—if only I can understand him!”
Chapter Nineteen
THE selfsame hour that Clifton Forrest arrived at Sycamore that golden early May day, Virginia rushed out of the house, possessed by she knew not what. Indeed, she had been possessed ever since she had taken up her abode in the old home where as a girl she had played and wept and dreamed her girlhood away.
She could not stay indoors, despite the work that had fallen to her hands. The day was gorgeous, lovely, like one of the amber-tinted, white-clouded, pageanted June days in the East. The cottonwoods, fresh and thinly green with their new leaves, called to her in an unknown potent tongue. There was something in the air, beyond her ken.
Virginia had been distraught for long, waiting for him she called her shepherd to come home. But it had been a wholesome counter-irritant. Only lately had the aftermath of the tragedy of her father’s end left her to take up the threads of the future she prayed for and dreamed of. Sorrow would always abide with her, and remorse. For though her father had been the tool of an unscrupulous villain, he had at the last been true to the blood of the Lundeens.
Every day had been a little easier to bear. Summer was coming. It would not be long now until——And she would try to still her aching, throbbing heart. Ethel would be coming soon—after what seemed ages of separation.
She wandered restlessly under the cottonwoods, catching at the white thistledown cotton that floated from above, as if it bore hopes to clasp to her bosom. She kept out of sight of Jake and Con, who were working round the barn. She did not even glance out into the green valley where the last and best of her horses grazed. She sat by the irrigation ditch and trailed her hand in the cool clay-colored water that came sliding and gurgling along under the grassy banks. A few violets lifted wistful purple faces out of the green. She could not linger there long; the music of the water and the melody of birds grew unbearable. She dared not venture back into the garden, to that secluded corner by the broken wall where she had lured Clifton to ask her to marry him. She had gone there only once since coming to live here.
She strolled away. She stood watching the white sails in the sky. Her hands drooped idly. She saw nothing—heard nothing. Then the cloud-rimmed mountain peaks gave her a pang. She must go up to her shrine at Emerald Lake. There would be strength in the solitude and sublimity of the heights. But she could not go until——
The beauty and mystery of the day stung her. Of what avail to live, to be young, healthy, handsome, longing—to look back at sadness, and fear a gray uncertainty of future?
It had been only of late, though, Virginia reflected, that she could find no peace, no occupation. There had been incalculable happiness, upon her return from Georgia, in deeding Cottonwoods to its rightful owners—the Forrests. That had been no easy task—not for her to surrender, but for Clay Forrest to accept. In the end she had won him. “You girl—you Lundeen,” he had said, brokenly. “First my son—then his mother! An’ now I, too, must love you!”
With hatred overcome, and the recovery of his beloved Cottonwoods, Forrest became a transformed man. The years of his exile were as if they had never been. To do him full justice, though, Virginia had been compelled, and gladly, to admit she could never have won him to accept her sacrifice had she not told him that the estate in the south left by Lundeen had enriched her far beyond and outside Cottonwoods. It had been her whim to bind Forrest to secrecy for the present.
She had gone back to the old adobe home in the cottonwood grove, and asked no more than for Clifton to seek her out there. But would he? How endlessly long these last weeks! Was he dead? Her prophetic and loving heart could not abide that possibility. She knew, and the torture was only fear that he might not want her. Where had gone the old vain coquetries and audacities?
Virginia dragged herself back into the house, to try to take interest in the work of creating beauty and comfort there. For a while she shared the efforts of her two Mexican women servants, but soon she grew listless again. Her little room claimed her for hours by day as well as by night. It had been Clifton’s room, too. The few things he had left there had never been moved, or touched, except with reverence, for they were relics of his boyhood, his brief days at college, and of the war. She had made no change in this room. She trembled whenever she lay down on that old bed. The hard hair mattress had the same sag in the middle as when she was a girl. It used to hurt her back. As long as she could remember it had been there. And Clifton had lain there night after night, his mother had told her, sleepless and racked with pain, staring into the blackness, listening to the patter of the leaves outside and the murmuring water.
“I’ll be all right when he’s back, even if he doesn’t come to see me,” she sighed, and clenched her hands, and gazed up at the blank, dark wall.
And next day, Jake, returning from an errand to San Luis, informed Virginia that Clifton Forrest had come back with her sheep.
“My sheep!” cried Virginia, in rapture, and silent gratitude to God. But she was thinking of her shepherd.
“Eight hundred lambs, ole Lopez said,” went on Jake, grinning. “He shore was sore for sellin’. Thet was a plumb good buy of yours, lady. An’ with sheep jumpin’ on the market you’re settin’ pretty.”
“Did—did Lopez say how—how Clifton was?” asked Virginia, tremulously.
“Never nuthin’. Lopez is a talky ole cuss, too, but he was shore stumped about them eight hundred lambs.”
Virginia rushed away to the green covert of the cottonwoods, where she felt unseen even by the eyes of birds. And there she wept for joy, and raged at her weakness, and paced the walled aisle, and whispered to herself, and at the sound of her voice betrayed herself utterly.
“Oh, he’s back—he’s back! Thank God! . . . It was time. I’d soon have died. . . . He must be well again. Seven months on the desert! Alone! Ill and weak when he left! O God! Poor brave boy! And I could not help him!—Oh, how I love him! He must know! . . . But if he doesn’t know—if he doesn’t want me—his wife!—what can I do? I can’t crawl to him, like a dog to lick his feet. But I want to—I want to.”
She felt the better for her outburst, for the facing of her s
oul. That he was alive—strong enough to toil as a sheep-herder for over half a year—that he had come home—was near her—only a few short miles across the hills!—these facts mastered her selfish longings and stilled the troubled depths of her.
Virginia decided there was no understanding human nature. First she had prayed that if only Clifton would live, she would be forever grateful and satisfied. Then it was for his return. And now that he was home, she yearned irresistibly to see him. How little she divined the complexities of love! What would she want—nay, more terrifying, what would she do when she met him?
The following morning she drove to Las Vegas to meet Ethel, who was coming on the early train, and timed her arrival so that she would have but few moments to wait at the station. Since her return from Atlanta, and the change in her fortunes, she had avoided town and people as much as possible. There had been many a nine days’ wonder over the Lundeen-Forrest feud, but her relinquishing of Cottonwoods had made her the subject of endless gossip. She did not care to run the gauntlet of acquaintances just yet.
When the train pulled in, Virginia scanned the Pullman vestibules with eager eyes. Soon she saw Ethel appear on the step, trim, dainty, like a butterfly in her spring finery. She looked anxiously up and down the platform, and did not espy Virginia coming toward her from the parking place. There were other passengers, trainmen, and loungers present. Ethel pointed out her several pieces of baggage to the porter, which momentary lapse enabled Virginia to slip up behind her and put both hands over her eyes. She felt Ethel shake and whirl. Otherwise the meeting was the only solemn one they had ever had.
