Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  “Aye, an’ therein lies your greatness!” boomed the prospector, his ox eyes dilating and flaring. “I am a selfish pig—a digger in the dirt for gold. My passion has made me pass by men, an’ women, too, who needed help. Riches— dreams! But you—you Wansfell—out there in the loneliness an’ silence of the wastelands—you have found God! … I said you would. I’ve met other men who had.”

  “No, no,” replied Adam. “You’re wrong. I don’t think I’ve found God. Not yet! … I have no religion, no belief. I can’t find any hope out there in the desert. Nature is pitiless, indifferent. The desert is but one of her playgrounds. Man has no right there. No. Dismukes, I have not found God.”

  “You have, but you don’t know it,” responded Dismukes, with more composure, and he began to refill a neglected pipe. “Well, I didn’t mean to fetch up such talk as that. You see, when I do fall in with a prospector once in a month of Sundays I never talk much. An’ then it’d be to ask him if he’d seen any float lately or panned any color. But you’re different. You make my mind work. An’, Wansfell, sometimes I think my mind has been crowded with a million thoughts all cryin’ to get free. That’s the desert. A man’s got to fight the desert with his intelligence or else become less than a man. An’ I always did think a lot, if I didn’t talk.”

  “I’m that way, too,” replied Adam. “But a man should talk when he gets the chance. I talk to my burros, and to myself, just to hear the sound of my voice.”

  “Ah! Ah!” exclaimed Dismukes, with deep breath. He nodded his shaggy head. Adam’s words had struck an answering chord in his heart.

  “You’ve tried for gold here?” queried Adam.

  “No. I was here first just after the strike, an’ often since. Water’s all that ever drew me. I ’d starve before I ’d dig for gold among a pack of beasts. I may be a desert wolf, but I’m a lone one.”

  “They’re coyotes and you’re the grey wolf. I liken most every man I meet to some beast or creature of the desert.”

  “Aye, you’re right. The desert stamps a man. An’, Wans-fell, it’s stamped you with the look of a desert eagle. Ha-ha! I ain’t flatterin’ to either of us, am I? Me a starved grey wolf, huntin’ alone, mean an’ hard an’ fierce! An’ you a long, lean-headed eagle, with that look of you like you were about to strike—gong! … Well, well, there’s no understandin’ the work of the desert. The way it develops the livin’ creatures! They all have to live, an’ livin’ on the desert is a thousand times harder than anywhere else. They all have to be perfect machines for destruction. Each seems so swift that he gets away, yet each is also so fierce an’ sure that he catches his prey. They live on one another, but the species doesn’t die out. That’s what stumps me about the desert. Take the human creatures. They grow fiercer than animals. Maybe that’s because nature did not intend man to live on the desert. An’ it is no place for man. Nature intended these classes of plants an’ these species of birds an’ beasts to live, fight, thrive, an’ reproduce their kind on the desert. But men can’t thrive nor reproduce their kind here.”

  “How about the Indians who lived in the desert for hundreds of years?” asked Adam.

  “What’s a handful of Indians? An’ what’s a few years out of the millions of years that the desert’s been here, just as it is now? Nothin’—nothin’ at all! Wansfell, there will be men come into the desert, down there below the Salton Sink, an’ in other places where the soil is productive, an’ they’ll build dams an’ storage places for water. Maybe a lot of fools will even turn the Colorado River over the desert. They’ll make it green an’ rich an’, like the Bible says, blossom as a rose. An’ these men will build ditches for water, an’ reservoirs an’ towns an’ cities, an’ cross the desert with railroads. An’ they’ll grow rich an’ proud. They’ll think they’ve conquered it. But, poor fools! they don’t know the desert! Only a man who has lived with the desert much of his life can ever know. Time will pass, an’ men will grow old, an’ their sons an’ grandsons after them. A hundred an’ a thousand years might pass with fruitfulness still in the control of man. But all that is only a few grains of time in all the endless sands of eternity. The desert’s work will have been retarded for a little while. But the desert works ceaselessly an’ with infinite patience. The sun burns, the frost cracks, the avalanche rolls, the rain weathers. Slowly the earth crust heaves up into mountains an’ slowly the mountains wear down, atom by atom, to be the sands of the desert. An’ the winds—how they blow for ever an’ ever! What can avail against the desert winds? They blow the sand an’ sift an’ seep an’ bury. Men will die an’ the places that knew them will know them no more an’ the desert will come back to its own. That is well, for it is what God intended.”

  “God and nature, then, with you are one and the same?” queried Adam.

  “Yes. Twenty years sleepin’ on the sand with the stars in my face has taught me that. Is it the same with you?”

  “No. I grant all that you contend for the desert and for nature. But I can’t reconcile nature and God. Nature is cruel, inevitable, hopeless. But God must be immortality.”

  “Wansfell, there’s somethin’ divine in some men, but not in all, nor in many. So how can that divinity be God? The immortality you speak of—that is only your life projected into another life.”

  “You mean if I do not have a child I will not have immortality?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what of my soul?” demanded Adam, solemnly.

  Dismukes dropped his shaggy head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve gone so deep, but I can’t go any deeper. That always stumps me. I’ve never found my soul! Maybe findin’ my soul would be findin’ God. I don’t know. An’ you, Wansfell—once I said you had the spirit an’ mind to find God on the desert. Did you?”

  Adam shook his head. “I’m no further than you, Dis-mukes, though I think differently about life and death … I’ve fought to live on this wasteland, but I’ve fought hardest to think. It seems that always nature strikes me with its terrible mace! I have endless hours to look at the desert and I see what you see—the strange ferocity of it all—the fierce purpose. No wonder you say the desert stamps a man!”

  “Aye! An’ woman, too! Take this she-devil who runs a place here in Tecopah—Mohave Jo is the name she bears. Have you seen her?”

  “No, but I’ve heard of her. At Needles I met the wife of a miner, Clark, who’d been killed here at Tecopah.”

  “Never heard of Clark. But I don’t doubt the story. It’s common enough—miners bein’ killed an’ robbed. There’s a gang over in the Panamints who live on miners.”

  “I’m curious to see Mohave Jo,” said Adam.

  “Well, speakin’ of this one-eyed harridan reminds me of a man I met last trip across the Salton flats, down on the Colorado. Met him at Walters—a post on the stage line. He had only one eye, too. There was a terrible scar where his eye, the right one, had been. He was one of these Texans lookin’ for a man. There seems to be possibilities of a railroad openin’ up that part of the desert. An’ this fellow quizzed me about water holes. Of course, if anyone gets hold of water in that country he’ll strike it rich as gold, if the country ever opens up. It’s likely to happen, too. Well, this man had an awful face. He’d been a sheriff in Texas, some one said, an’ later at Ehrenberg. Hell on hanging men! Of course I never asked him how he lost his eye. But he told me—spoke of it more than once. The deformity had affected his mind. You meet men like that—sort of crazy on somethin’. He was always lookin’ for the fellow who’d knocked out his eye. To kill him!”

  “Do you—recall his—name?” asked Adam, his voice halting with a thick sensation in his throat. The past seemed as yesterday.

  “Never was much on rememberin’ names,” responded Dismukes, scratching his shaggy head. “Let’s see—why, yes, he called himself Collis—Collis—haw. That’s it— Collishaw. Hard name to remember. But as a man he struck me easy to remember … Well, friend Wansfell, I’ve had enough talkin’ to do me for a sp
ell. I’m goin’ to bed.”

  While Adam sat beside the fire, motionless, pondering with slow, painful amaze over what he had just heard, Dis-mukes prepared for his night’s rest. He unrolled a pack, spread a ragged old canvas, folded a blanket upon it, and arranged another blanket to pull up over him, together with the end of the canvas. For a pillow he utilized an old coat that lay on his pack. His sole concession to man’s custom of undressing for bed was the removal of his old slouch hat. Then with slow, labored movement he lay down to stretch his huge body and pull the coverlets over him. From his cavernous breast heaved a long, deep sigh. His big eyes, dark and staring, gazed up at the brightening stars, and then they closed.

  Adam felt tempted to pack and move on to a quiet and lonely place off in the desert, where he could think without annoyance. Keen and bitterly faithful as had been his memory, it had long ceased to revive thoughts of Collishaw, the relentless sheriff and ally of Guerd. How strange and poignant had been the shock of recollection! It had been the blow Adam had dealt—the savage fling of his gun in Coll-ishaw’s face—that had destroyed an eye and caused a hideous disfigurement. And the Texan, with that fatality characteristic of his kind, was ever on the lookout for the man who had ruined his eyesight. Perhaps that was only one reason for this thirst for revenge. Guerd! Had Collishaw not sworn to hang Adam? “You’ll swing for this!” he had yelled in his cold, ringing voice of passion. And so Adam lived over again the old agony, new and strange in its bitter mockery, its vain hope of forgetfulness. Vast as the desert was, it seemed small now to Adam, for there wandered over it a relentless and bloodthirsty Texan, hunting to kill him. The past was not dead. The present and the future could not be wholly consecrated to atonement. A specter, weird and grotesque as a yucca tree, loomed out there in the shadows of the desert night. Death stalked on Adam’s trail. The hatred of men was beyond power to understand. Work, fame, use, health, love, home, life itself, could be sacrificed by some men just to kill a rival or an enemy. Adam remembered that Collishaw had hated him and loved Guerd. Moreover, Collishaw had that strange instinct to kill men—a passion that grew by what it fed on—a morbid mental twist that drove him to rid himself of the terrible haunting ghost of his last victim by killing a new one. Added to that was a certain leaning toward the notorious.

  “We’ll meet someday,” soliloquised Adam. “But he would never recognise me.”

  The comfort of that fact did not long abide in Adam’s troubled mind. He would recognize Collishaw. And that seemed to hold something fatalistic and inevitable. “When I meet Collishaw I’ll tell him who I am—and I’ll kill him!” That fierce whisper was the desert voice in Adam—the desert spirit. He could no more help that sudden bursting flash of fire than he could help breathing. Nature in the desert did not teach men to meet a threat with forgiveness, nor to wait until they were struck. Instinct had precedence over intelligence and humanity. In the eternal strife to keep alive on the desert, a man who conquered must have assimilated something of the terrible nature of the stinging cholla cactus, and the hard, grasping tenacity of the mesquite roots, and the ferocity of the wild cat, and the cruelty of the hawk—something of the nature of all that survived. It was a law. It forced a man to mete out violence in advance of that meant for him.

  “To fight and to think were to be my blessings,” soliloquized Adam, and he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and terrible duty to himself!

  So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the composure of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his eyes, as it had upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was not tired. He never tired anymore. There seemed to be no task of a single day that could weary his strength. And for long he lay awake, listening to the deep breathing of his companion, and the howl of the coyotes, and the sounds of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the desert. A sadness weighed heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to have met Dismukes, but now he was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed to have been rent. The years had not really changed the relation of his crime, nor materially the nature of his sin. But they had gradually, almost imperceptibly, softened his ceaseless and eternal remorse. By this meeting with Dismukes he found that time effaced shocks, blows, stains, just as it wore away the face of the desert rock. That, too, was a law; and in this Adam divined a blessing that he could not deny. Dismukes had unleashed a specter out of the dim glow of the past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days! There were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold mountains that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep blue sky above and in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face, floating, fading, reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling—a face partaking of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of perfect manhood—the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam, and the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the sleepless hours—these were Adam’s again, as keen as in the first days of his awakening down on the Colorado Desert where from the peaks of the Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to the purple peak—Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother’s grave. “Some day I’ll go back!” whispered Adam, as if answering to an imperative and mysterious call.

  The long night wore on with the heavens star-fired by its golden train, and the sounds at last yielding to the desert silence. Adam could see Dismukes, a wide, prone figure, with dark face upturned to the sky, a man seemingly as strange and strong as the wastelands he talked so much about, yet now helpless in sleep, unguarded, unconscious, wrapped in his deep dreams of the joy and life his gold was to bring him. Adam felt a yearning pity for this dreamer. Did he really love gold or was his passion only a dream? Whatever that was and whatever the man was, there rested upon his rugged, dark face a shadow of tragedy. Adam wondered what his own visage would reflect when he lay asleep, no more master of a mind that never rested? The look of an eagle? So Dis-mukes had said, and that was not the first time Adam had heard such comparison. He had seen desert eagles, dead and alive. He tried to recall how they looked, but the images were not convincing. The piercing eye, clear as the desert air, with the power of distance in the grey depths; the lean, long lines; the wild poise of head, bitter and ruthless and fierce; the look of loneliness—these characters surely could not be likened to his face. What a strange coincidence that Dismukes should hit upon the likeness of an eagle—the winged thunderbolt of the heights—the lonely bird Adam loved above all desert creatures! And so Adam wandered in mind until at last he fell asleep.

  Chapter

  XIII

  When Adam awoke he saw that Dismukes had breakfast steaming on the fire.

  “I’m on my way today,” announced the prospector. “What’ll you do?”

  “Well, I’ll hang around Tecopah as long as I can stand it,” replied Adam.

  “Humph! That won’t be long, unless you got in mind somethin’ like you did at the Donner Placers, down in the Providence Mountains.”

  “Friend, what do you know about that?” queried Adam.

  “Nothin’. I only heard about it. Wansfell, do you pan any gold?”

  “Sometimes, when I happen to run across it,” replied Adam, “but that isn’t often.”

  “Do you work?”

  “Yes, I’ve worked a good deal, taking it altogether. In the mines, on the river at Needles, driving mule teams and guiding wagon trains. Never got paid much, though.”

  “How do you live?” asked Dismukes, evidently curious.

  “Oh, I fare well enough to keep flesh on my bones.”

  “You’ve got flesh—or I reckon it’s muscle. Wansfell, you’re the best-built man I ever saw on the desert. Most men dry up an’ blow away. Will you let me give you—lend you some money?”

  “Money! So that’s why you’re so curious?” responded Adam. “Thanks, my friend. I
don’t need money. I had some, you know, when you ran across me down in the Chocolates. I used about a thousand dollars while I lived with the Coahuila Indians. And I’ve got nine thousand left.”

  “Say, you don’t pack all that money along with you?”

  “Yes. Where else would I keep it.”

  “Wansfell, some of these robbers will murder you.”

  “Not if I see them first. My friend, don’t be concerned. Surely, I don’t look sick.”

  “Humph! Well, just the same, now that you’re headin’ up into this country, I advise you to be careful. Don’t let anybody see you with money. I’ve been held up an’ robbed three times.”

  “Didn’t you make a fight for your gold?”

  “No chance. I was waylaid—had to throw up my hands … They tell me you are ready with a gun, Wansfell?”

  “Dismukes, you seem to have heard much about me.”

  “But you didn’t throw a gun on Baldy McKue,” said Dis-mukes, with a dark flare from his rolling eyes.

  “No—I did not.” replied Adam.

  “You killed McKue with your bare hands,” flashed Dis-mukes. A red stain appeared to come up under his leathery skin. “Wansfell, will you tell me about that?”

  “I’d rather not, Dismukes. There are some things I forget.”

  “Well, it meant a good deal to me,” replied Dismukes. “McKue did me dirt. He jumped claims of mine down here near Soda Sink. An’ he threatened to kill me—swore the claims were his—drove me off. I met him in Riverside, an’ there he threatened me with arrest. He was a robber an’ a murderer. I believe he ambushed prospectors. McKue was like most men who stick to the desert—he went down to the level of the beast. I hated him. This stranger who told me— he swore there wasn’t an uncracked bone left in McKue’s body. Wansfell, if you did that to McKue you’ve squared accounts. Is it true?”