by B. M. Bower
Starr lifted an arm and laid it over Rabbit’s neck, fingering the silver-white mane absently. It brought him quite close to Helen May, so that she could have put her hand on his shoulder.
“Yes. It’s wonderful—when it ain’t terrible,” he said, his voice low.
After a silent minute she answered him, in the hushed tone that seemed most in harmony with the tremendous sweep of sky and that great stretch of plain and bare mountain. “I see what you mean. It is terrible even when it’s most wonderful. But one little human alone with it would be—”
“Sh-sh.” he whispered. “Listen a minute. Did you ever hear a big silence like this?”
“No,” she breathed eagerly. “Sh-sh—”
At first there was nothing save the whisper of a breeze that stirred the greasewood and then was still. Full in their faces the moon swung clear of the mountains behind San Bonito and hung there, a luminous yellow ball in the deep, star-sprinkled purple. Across the desert it flung a faint, straight pathway in the sand. Rabbit gave a long sigh, turned his head to look back at his master, and then stood motionless again. Far on a hilltop a coyote pointed his nose to the moon and yap-yap-yapped, with a shrill, long-drawn tremolo wail that made the girl catch her breath. Behind them the nine goats moved closer together and huddled afraid beside a clump of bushes. The little breeze whispered again. A night bird called in a hurried, frightened way, and upon the last notes came the eerie cry of a little night owl.
The girl’s face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically while it slept.
Her eyes turned to Starr, whose name she did not know; who had twice come riding out of the distance to do her some slight service before he rode on into the distance that seemed so vast. Who was he? What petty round of duties and pleasures made up his daily, intimate life? She did not know. She did not feel the need of knowing.
Standing there with his thin face turned to the moon so that she saw, clean-cut against the night, his strong profile; with one arm thrown across the neck of his horse and his big hat tilted back so that she could see the heavy, brown hair that framed his fine forehead; with the look of a dreamer in his eyes and the wistfulness of the lonely on his lips, all at once he seemed to be a part of the desert and its mysteries.
She could picture him living alone somewhere in its wild fastness, aloof from the little things of life. He seemed to epitomize vividly the meaning of a song she had often sung unmeaningly:
“From the desert I come to thee, On my Arab shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.”
While she looked—while the words of that old Bedouin Love Song thrummed through her memory, quite suddenly Starr began to sing, taking up the song where her memory had brought her:
“Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!”
Softly he sang, as though he had forgotten that she was there. Softly, but with a resonant, vibrating quality that made the words alive and quivering with meaning.
Helen May caught her breath. How did he know she was thinking that song? How did he chance to take it up just at the point where her memory had carried it? Had he read her mind? She stared at him, her lips parted; wondering, a little awed, but listening and thrilling to the human sweetness of his tones. And when he had sung the last yearning note of primitive desire, Starr turned his head and looked into her eyes.
Helen May felt as though he had taken her in his arms and kissed her lingeringly. Yet he had not moved except to turn his face toward her. She could not look away, could not even try to pull her eyes from his. It was as though she yielded. She felt suffocated, though her breath came quickly, a little unevenly.
Starr looked away, across the desert where the moon lighted it whitely. It was as though he had released her. She felt flustered, disconcerted. She could not understand herself or him, or the primary forces that had moved them both. And why had he sung that Bedouin Love Song just as she was thinking it as something that explained him and identified him? It was mysterious as the desert itself lying there so quiet under the moon. It was weird as the cry of the coyote. It was uncanny as spirit rappings. But she could not feel any resentment; only a thrill that was part pleasure and part pain. She wondered if he had felt the same; if he knew. But she could not bring herself to face even the thought of asking him. It was like the night silence around them: speech would dwarf and cheapen and distort.
Rabbit lifted his head again, perking his ears forward toward a new sound that had nothing weird or mysterious about it; a sound that was essentially earthly, material, modern, the distant purr of a high-powered automobile on the trail away to their right. Starr turned his face that way, listening as the horse listened. It seemed to Helen May as though he had become again earthy and material and modern, with the desert love song but the fading memory of a dream. He listened, and she received the impression that something more than idle curiosity held him intent upon the sound.
The purring persisted, lessened, grew louder again. Starr still looked that way, listening intently. The machine swept nearer, so that the clear night air carried the sounds distinctly to where they stood. Starr even caught the humming of the rear gears and knew that only now and then does a machine have that peculiar, droning hum; Starr studied it, tried to impress the sound upon his memory.
The trail looped around the head of a sandy draw and wound over the crest of a low ridge before it straightened out for a three-mile level run in the direction of San Bonito, miles away. In walking, Starr had cut straight across that gully and the loop, so that they had crossed the trail twice in their journey thus far, and were still within half a mile of the head of the loop. They should have been able to see the lights, or at least the reflection of them on the ridge when they came to the draw. But there was no bright path on sky or earth.
They heard the car ease down the hill, heard the grind of the gears as the driver shifted to the intermediate for the climb that came after. They heard the chug of the engine taking the steep grade. Then they should have caught the white glare of the headlights as the car topped the ridge. Starr knew that nothing obstructed the view, that in daylight they could have seen the yellow-brown ribbon of trail where it curved over the ridge. The machine was coming directly toward them for a short distance, but there was no light whatever. Starr knew then that whoever they were, they were running without lights.
“Well, I guess we’d better be ambling along,” he said casually, when the automobile had purred its way beyond hearing. “It’s three or four miles yet, and you’re tired.”
“Not so much.” Helen May’s voice was a little lower than usual, but that was the only sign she gave of any recent deep emotion. “I’d as soon walk awhile and let you ride.” She shrank now from the thought of both riding.
“When you’ve ridden as far as I have,” said Starr, “you’ll know it’s a rest to get down and travel afoot for a few miles.” He might have added that it would have been a rest had he not been hampered by those high-heeled riding boots, but consideration for her mental ease did not permit him to mention it. He said no more, but started the goats ahead of him and kept them moving in a straight line for Sunlight Basin. As before, Rabbit followed slavishly in his footsteps, nose dropped to the angle of placid acceptance, ears twitching forward and back so that he would lose no slightest sound.
Helen May fell again under the spell of the desert and the moon. Starr, walking steadily through the white-lighted barrenness with his shadow always moving like a ghost before him, fitted once more into the desert. Again she repeated mentally the words of the song:
Let the night-winds touch thy brow With the breath of my burning sigh, And melt thee to hear the vow Of a love that shall not die!<
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Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
And now the lines sung themselves through her brain with the memory of Starr’s voice. But Starr did not sing again, though Helen May, curious to know if her thoughts held any power over him, gazed intently at his back and willed him to sing. He did not look back at her, even when she finally descended weakly to the more direct influence of humming the air softly—but not too softly for him to hear.
Starr paid no attention whatever. He seemed to be thinking deeply—but he did not seem to be thinking of Helen May, nor of desert love songs. Helen May continued to watch him, but she was piqued at his calm indifference. Why, she told herself petulantly, he paid more attention to those goats than he did to her—and one would think, after that song and that look.… But there she stopped, precipitately retreating from the thought of that look.
He was a queer fellow, she told herself with careful tolerance and a little condescension. A true product of the desert; as changeable and as sphynxlike and as impossible from any personal, human standpoint. Look how beautiful the desert could be, how terribly uplifting and calm and—and big. Yet tomorrow it might be either a burning waste of heat and sand and bare rock, or it might be a howling waste of wind and sand (if one of those sand storms came up). To herself she called him the Man of the Desert, and she added the word mysterious, and she also added two lines of the song because they fitted exactly her conception of him as she knew him. The lines were these:
From the desert I come to thee, On my Arab shod with fire.
This, in spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with velvet would have come nearer describing him.
So Helen May, who was something of a dreamer when Life let her alone long enough, rode home through the moonlight and wove cloth-of-gold from the magic of the night, and with the fairy fabric she clothed Starr—who was, as we know, just an ordinary human being—so that he walked before her, not as a plain, ungrammatical, sometimes profane young man who was helping her home with her goats, but a mysterious, romantic figure evolved somehow out of the vastness in which she lived; who would presently recede again into the mysterious wild whence he had come.
It was foolish. She knew that it was foolish. But she had been living rather harshly and rather materially for some time, and she hungered for the romance of youth. Starr was the only person who had come to her untagged by the sordid, everyday petty details of life. It did not hurt him to be idealized, but it might have hurt Helen May a little to know that he was pondering so earthly a subject as a big, black automobile careering without lights across the desert and carrying four men who looked like Mexicans.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOLMAN SOMMEKS, SCIENTIST
Helen May, under a last year’s parasol of pink silk from which the sun had drawn much of its pinkness and the wind and dust its freshness, sat beside the road with her back against the post that held the macaroni box, and waited for the stage. Her face did not need the pink light of the parasol, for it was red enough after that broiling walk of yesterday. The desert did not look so romantic by the garish light of midday, but she stared out over it and saw, as with eyes newly opened to appreciation, that there was a certain charm even in its garishness. She had lost a good deal of moodiness and a good deal of discontent, somewhere along the moonlight trail of last night, and she hummed a tune while she waited. No need to tell you that it was: “Till the sun grows cold, till the stars are old—” No need to tell you, either, of whom she was thinking while she sang.
But part of the time she was wondering what mail she would get. Her chum would write, of course; being a good, faithful chum, she would probably continue to write two or three letters a week for the next three months. After that she would drop to one long letter a month for awhile; and after that—well, she was a faithful chum, but life persists in bearing one past the eddy that holds friendship circling round and round in a pool of memories. The chum’s brother had written twice, however; exuberant letters full of current comedy and full-blooded cheerfulness and safely vague sentiment which he had partly felt at the time he wrote. He had “joshed” Helen May a good deal about the goats, even to the extent of addressing her as “Dear Goat-Lady” in the last letter, with the word “Lady” underscored and scrawled the whole width of the page. Helen May had puzzled over the obscure meaning of that, and had decided that it would have sounded funny, perhaps, if he had said it that way, but that it “didn’t get over” on paper.
She wondered if he would write again, or if his correspondence would prove as spasmodic, as easily interrupted as his attentions had been when they were both in the same town. Chum’s brother was a nice, big, comfy kind of young man; the trouble was that he was too popular to give all his interest to one girl. You know how it is when a man stands six feet tall and has wavy hair and a misleading smile and a great, big, deep-cushioned roadster built for two. Helen May appreciated his writing two letters to her, he who hated so to write letters, but her faith in the future was small. Still, he might write. It seemed worth while to wait for the stage.
Just when she was telling herself that the stage was late, far over the ridge rose the dust signal. Her pulse quickened expectantly; so much had loneliness done for her. She watched it, and she tried not to admit to herself that it did not look like the cloud kicked up by the four trotting stage horses. She tried not to believe that the cloud was much too small to have been made by their clattering progress. It must be the stage. It was past time for it to arrive at the post. And it had not gone by, for she had sent for a can of baking powder and a dozen lemons and fifty cents worth of canned milk (the delicatessen habit of buying in small quantities still hampered her) and, even if the stage had passed earlier than usual, the stuff would have been left at the post for her, even though there was no mail. But it could not have passed. She would have seen the dust, that always hung low over the trail like the drooping tail of a comet, and when the day was still took half an hour at least to settle again for the next passer-by. And besides, she had come to know the tracks the stage left in the trail. It could not have passed. And it had to come; it carried the government mail. And yet, that dust did not look like the stage dust. (Trivial worries, you say? Then try living forty miles from a post office, ten from the nearest neighbor, and fifteen hundred from your dearly beloved Home Town. Try living there, not because you want to but because you must; hating it, hungering for human companionship. Try it with heat and wind and sand and great, arid stretches of a land that is strange to you. Honestly, I think you would have been out there just after sunrise to wait for that stage, and if it were late you would have walked down the trail to meet it!)
Helen May remained by the post, but she got up and stood on a rock that protruded six inches or so above the sand. Of course she could not see over the ridge—she could not have done that if she had climbed a telegraph pole; only there was no pole to climb—but she felt a little closer to seeing. That dust did not look like stage dust!
You would be surprised to know how much Helen May had learned about dust clouds. She could tell an automobile ten miles away, just by the swift gathering of the gray cloud. She could tell where bands of sheep or herds of cattle were being driven across the plain. She even knew when a saddle horse was coming, or a freight team or—the stage.
She suddenly owned to herself that she was disappointed and rather worried. For behind this cloud that troubled her there was no second one building up over the skyline and growing more dense as the disturber approached. She could not imagine what had happened to that red-whiskered, tobacco-chewing stage driver. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that he was exactly twenty minutes later than his very latest arrival, and she felt personally slighted and aggrieved.
For that reason she sat under her pink silk parasol and stared crossly under
her eyebrows at the horse and man and the dust-grimed rattle-wheeled buggy that eventually emerged from the gray cloud. The horse was a pudgy bay that set his feet stolidly down in the trail, and dragged his toes through it as though he delighted in kicking up all the dust he could. By that trick he had puzzled Helen May a little, just at first, though he had not been able to simulate the passing of four horses. The buggy was such as improvident farmers used to drive (before they bought Fords) near harvest time; scaly as to paint, warped and loose-spoked as to wheels, making more noise than progress along the country roads.
The man held the lines so loosely that they sagged under the wire-mended traces of sunburned leather. He leaned a little forward, as though it was not worth while sitting straight on so hot a day. He wore an old Panama hat that had cost him a good deal when it was new and had saved him a good deal since in straw hats which he had not been compelled to buy so long as this one held together. It was pulled down in front so that it shaded his face—a face lean and lined and dark, with thin lips that could be tender and humorous in certain moods. His eyes were hazel, like the eyes of Starr, yet one never thought of them as being at all like Starr’s eyes. They burned always with some inner fire of life; they laughed at life, and yet they did not seem to express mirth. They seemed to say that life was a joke, a damnable joke on mankind; that they saw the joke and resented it even while they laughed at it. For the rest, the man was more than fifty years old, but his hair was thick and black as a crow, and his eyebrows were inclined to bushiness, inclined also to slant upward. A strong face; an unusual face, but a likeable one, it was. And that is a fair description of Holman Sommers as Helen May first saw him.
He drove up to where she sat, and she tilted her pink silk parasol between them as though to keep the dust from settling thick upon her stained khaki skirt and her desert-dingy high-laced boots. She was not interested in him, and her manner of expressing indifference could not have misled a horned toad. She was too fresh from city life to have fallen into the habit of speaking to strangers easily and as a matter of country courtesy. Even when the buggy stopped beside her, she did not show any eagerness to move the pink screen so that they might look at each other.
