Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  After that he plodded slower, rested oftener, weakened more perceptibly. Meanwhile the hours passed, and when he reached the huge gateway in the red iron mountain wall the sun was gone and purple shadows were mustering in the valley. When he reached the more level field where the thick-strewn boulders lay, all before his eyes seemed red. A million needles were stinging his nerves, running like spears of light into his darkened sight.

  The limit that he had put upon his endurance was to reach the shack. He did so, and he was nearly blind when the woman’s poignant call thrilled his throbbing ears. He saw her—a white shape through ruddy haze. Then he deposited his burden on the sand.

  “Oh!” the woman moaned. “He’s dead!”

  Adam shook his head. Pity, fear, and even terror rang in her poignant cry, but not love.

  “Ah! … You’ve saved him, then … He’s injured—there’s a great bruise—he breathes so heavily.”

  While Adam sat panting, unable to speak, the woman wiped her husband’s face and worked over him.

  “He came back once—and fell into a stupor like this, but not so deep. What can it be?”

  “Poison—air,” choked Adam.

  “Oh, this terrible Death Valley!” she cried.

  Adam’s sight cleared and he saw the woman, clad in a white robe over her grey dress, a garment clean and rich, falling in thick folds—strange to Adam’s sight, recalling the past. The afterglow of sunset shone down into the valley, lighting her face. Once she must have been beautiful. The perfect lines, the noble brow, the curved lips, were there, but her face was thin, strained, tragic. Only the eyes held beauty still.

  “You saved him?” she queried, with quick-drawn breath.

  “Found him—miles and miles—up the—valley—crawl-ing on—his hands and knees,” panted Adam. “I had—to carry him.”

  “You carried him!” she exclaimed, incredulously. Then the large eyes blazed. “So that’s why you were so livid—why you fell? Oh, you splendid man! You giant! … He’d have died out there—alone. I thank you with all my heart.”

  She reached a white worn hand to touch Adam’s with an exquisite eloquence of gratitude.

  “Get water—bathe him,” said Adam. “Have you ammonia or whisky?” And while he laboriously got to his knees the woman ran into the shack. He rose, feeling giddy and weak. All his muscles seemed beaten and bruised, and his heart pained. Soon the woman came hurrying out, with basin and towel and a little black satchel that evidently contained medicines. Adam helped her work over her husband, but, though they revived him, they could not bring him back to intelligent consciousness.

  “Help me carry him in,” said Adam.

  Inside the little shack it was almost too dark to see plainly. “Have you a light?” he added.

  “No,” she replied.

  “I’ll fetch a candle. You watch over him while I move my camp up here. You might change his shirt, if he’s got another. I’ll be back right away, and I’ll start a fire—get some supper for us.”

  By the time Adam had packed and moved his effects darkness had settled down between the slopes of the mountains. After he had unpacked near the shack, his first move was to light a candle and take it to the door.

  “Here’s a light, ma’am,” he called.

  She glided silently out of the gloom, her garments gleaming ghostlike and her white face with its luminous eyes, dark and strange as midnight, looking like a woman’s face in tragic dreams. As she took the candle her hand touched Adam’s.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Please don’t call me ma’am. My name is Magdalene Virey.”

  “I’ll try to remember … Has your husband come to yet?”

  “No. He seems to have fallen into a stupor. Won’t you look at him?”

  Adam followed her inside and saw that she marked his lofty height. The shack had not been built for anyone of his stature.

  “How tall you are!” she murmured.

  The candle did not throw a bright light, yet by its aid Adam made out the features of the man whose life he had saved. It seemed to Adam to be the face of a Lucifer whose fiendish passions were now restrained by sleep. Whoever this man was, he had suffered a broken heart and ruined life.

  “He’s asleep,” said Adam. “That’s not a trance or stupor. He’s worn out. I believe it’d be better not to wake him.”

  “You think so?” she replied with quick relief.

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps if you watch him awhile you can tell … I’ll get some supper and call you.”

  Adam’s habitual dexterity over camp tasks failed him this evening. Presently, however, the supper was ready, and he threw brush on the fire to make a light.

  “Mrs. Virey,” he called at the door, “come and eat now.”

  When had the campfire of his greeted such a vision, except in his vague dreams? Tall, white-gowned, slender, and graceful, with the poise of a woman aloof and proud and the sad face of a Madonna—what a woman to sit at Adam’s campfire in Death Valley! The shadowed and thick light hid the ravages that had by day impaired her beauty. Adam placed a canvas pack for her to sit upon, and then he served her, with something that was not wholly unconscious satisfaction. Of all men, he of the desert could tell the signs of hunger; and the impression had come to him that she was half starved. The way she ate brought home to Adam with a pang the memorable days when he was starving. This woman sitting in the warm, enhancing glow of the campfire had an exquisitely spiritual face. She had seemed all spirit. But self-preservation was the first instinct and the first law of human nature, or any nature.

  “When have I eaten so heartily!” she exclaimed at last. “But, oh! it all tasted so good … Sir, you are a capital cook.”

  “Thank you,” replied Adam, much gratified.

  “Do you always fare so well?”

  “No. I’m bound to confess I somewhat outdid myself tonight. You see, I seldom have such opportunity to serve a woman.”

  She rested her elbows on her knees, with her hands under her chin, and looked at him with intense interest. In the night her eyes seemed very full and large, supernaturally bright and tragic. They were the eyes of a woman who still preserved in her something of inherent faith in mankind. Adam divined that she had scarcely looked at him before as an individual with a personality, and that some accent or word of his had struck her singularly.

  “It was that miner, Dis—Dis—”

  “Dismukes,” added Adam.

  “Yes. It was he who sent you here. Are you a miner, too?”

  “No. I care little for gold.”

  “Ah! … What are you, then?”

  “Just a wanderer. Wansfell, the Wanderer, they call me.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “Why, I suppose they are the other wanderers. Men who tramp over the desert—men who seek gold or forgetfulness or peace or solitude—men who are driven—or who hide. These are few, but, taken by the years, they seem many.”

  “Men of the desert have passed by here, but none like you.” she replied, with gravity, and her eyes pierced him. “Why did you come?”

  “Years ago my life was ruined,” said Adam, slowly. “I chose to fight the desert. And in all the years the thing that helped me most was not to pass by anyone in trouble. The desert sees strange visitors. Life is naked here, like those stark mountain-sides … Dismukes is my friend—he saved me from death once. He is a man who knows this wasteland. He told me about your being here. He said no white woman could live in Death Valley … I wondered—if I might—at least advise you, turn you back—and so I came.”

  His earnestness deeply affected her.

  “Sir, your kind words warm a cold and forlorn heart,” she said. “But I cannot be turned back. It’s too late.”

  “No hour is ever too late … Mrs. Virey, I’ll not distress you with advice or importunities. I know too well the need and the meaning of peace. But the fact of your being here— a woman of your evident quality—a woman of your sensitiveness and delicate health—why, it
is a terrible thing! This is Death Valley. The month is April. Soon it will be May— then June. When midsummer comes you cannot survive here. I know nothing of why you are here—I don’t seek to know. But you cannot stay. It would be a miracle for your husband to find gold here, if that is what he seeks. Surely he has discovered that.”

  “Virey does not seek gold,” the woman said.

  “Does he know that a white woman absolutely cannot live here in Death Valley? Even the Indians abandon it in summer.”

  “He knows. There are Shoshone Indians up on the mountains now. They pack supplies to us. They have warned him.”

  Adam could ask no more, yet how impossible not to feel an absorbing interest in this woman’s fate. As he sat with bowed head, watching the glowing and paling of the red embers, he felt her gaze upon him.

  “Wansfell, you must have a great heart—like your body,” she said, presently. “It is blessed to meet such a man. Your kindness, your interest, soften my harsh and bitter doubt of men. We are utter strangers. But there’s something in this desert that bridges time—that bids me open my lips to you … a man who traveled this ghastly valley to serve me! … My husband, Virey, knows that Death Valley is a hell on earth. So do I. That is why he brought me … that is why I came!”

  “My God!” breathed Adam, staring incredulously at her. Dismukes had prepared him for tragedy; the desert had shown him many dark and terrible calamities, misfortunes, mysteries; he had imagined he could no longer be thrown off his balance by amaze. But that a sad-eyed, sweet-voiced woman, whose every tone and gesture and look spoke of refinement and education, of a life infinitely removed from the wild ruggedness of the desert West—that she could intimate what seemed in one breath both murder and suicide—this staggered Adam’s credulity.

  Yet, as he stared at her, realizing the tremendous passion of will, of spirit, of something more that emanated from her, divining how in her case intellect and culture had been added to the eternal feminine of her nature, he knew she spoke the truth. Adam had met women on the desert, and all of them were riddles. Yet what a vast range between Margarita Arallanes and Magdalene Virey!

  “Won’t your husband leave—take you away from here?” asked Adam, slowly.

  “No.”

  “Well—I have a way of forcing men to see things. I suppose I—”

  “Useless! We have traveled three thousand miles to get to Death Valley. Years ago Elliot Virey read about this awful place. He was always interested. He learned that it was the most arid, ghastly, desolate, and terrible place of death in all the world … Then, when he got me to Sacramento—and to Placerville—he would talk with miners, prospectors, Indians—anyone who could tell him about Death Valley … Virey had a reason for finding a hell on earth. We crossed the mountains, range after range—and here we are … Sir, the hell of which we read—even in its bottommost pit—cannot be worse than Death Valley.”

  “You will let me take you home—at least out of the desert?” queried Adam, with passionate sharpness.

  “Sir, I thank you again,” she replied, her voice thrilling richly. “But no—no! You do not understand—you cannot— and it’s impossible to explain.”

  “Ah! Yes, some things are … Suppose you let me move your camp higher up, out of this thick, dead air and heat— where there are trees and good water?”

  “But it is not a beautiful and a comfortable camp that Virey—that we want,” she said, bitterly.

  “Then let me move your shack across the wash out of danger. This spot is the most forbidding I ever saw. That mountain above us is on the move. The whole cracked slope is sliding like a glacier. It is an avalanche waiting for a jar— a slip—something to start it. The rocks are rolling down all the time.”

  “Have I not heard the rocks—cracking, ringing—in the dead of night!” she cried, shuddering. Her slender form seemed to draw within itself and the white, slim hands clenched her gown. “Rocks! How I’ve learned to hate them! These rolling rocks are living things. I’ve heard them slide and crack, roll and ring—hit the sand with a thump, and then with whistle and thud go by where I lay in the dark … People who live as I have lived know nothing of the elements. I had no fear of the desert—nor of Death Valley. I dared it. I laughed to scorn the idea that any barren wild valley, any maelstrom of the sea, any Sodom of a city could be worse than the chaos of my soul … But I didn’t know. I am human. I’m a woman. A woman is meant to bear children. Nothing else! … I learned that I was afraid of the dark— that such fear had been born in me. These rolling rocks got on my nerves. I wait—I listen for them. And I pray … Then the silence—that became so dreadful. It is insupportable. Worse than all is the loneliness … Oh, this godforsaken, lonely Death Valley! It will drive me mad.”

  As Adam had anticipated, no matter what strength of will, what sense of secrecy bound this woman’s lips, she had been victim to the sound of her own voice, which, liberated by his sympathy, had spoken, and a word, as it were, had led to a full, deep, passionate utterance.

  “True. All too terribly true,” replied Adam. “And for a woman—for you—these feelings will grow more intense… I beg of you, at least let me move your camp back out of danger.”

  “No! Not a single foot!” she blazed, as if confronted with something beyond his words. After that she hid her face in her hands. A long silence ensued. Adam, watching her, saw when the tremble and heave of her breast subsided. At length she looked up again, apparently composed. “Perhaps I talked more than I should have. But no matter. It was necessary to tell you something. For you came here to help an unknown woman. Not to anyone else have I breathed a word of the true state of my feelings. My husband watches me like a hawk, but not yet does he know my fears. I’ll thank you, when you speak to him, if you stay here so long, not to tell him anything I’ve said.”

  “Mrs. Virey, I’ll stay as long as you are here,” said Adam, simply.

  The simplicity of his speech, coupled with the tremendous suggestion in the fact of his physical presence, his strength and knowledge to serve her despite her bitter repudiation, seemed again to knock at the heart of her femininity. In the beginning of human life on the earth, and through its primal development, there was always a man to protect a woman. But subtly and inevitably there had been in Adam’s words an intimation that Magdalene Virey stood absolutely alone. More, for with spirit, if not with body, she was fighting Death Valley, and also some terrible relation her husband bore to her.

  “Sir—you would stay here—on a possible chance of serving me?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” replied Adam.

  “Virey will not like that.”

  “I’m not sure, but I suspect it’ll not make any difference to me what he likes.”

  “If you are kind to me he will drive you away,” she went on, with agitation.

  “Well, as he’s your husband he may prevent me from being kind, but he can’t drive me away.”

  “But suppose I ask you to go?”

  “If that’s the greatest kindness I can do you—well, I’ll go … But do you ask me?”

  “I—I don’t know. I may be forced to—not by him, but by my pride,” she said, desperately. “Oh, I’m unstrung! I don’t know what to say … After all, just the sound of a kind voice makes me a coward. O God! if people in the world only knew the value of kindness I never did know. This desert of horrors teaches the truth of life. Once I had the world at my feet! … Now I break and bow at the sympathy of a stranger!”

  “Never mind your pride,” said Adam, in his slow, cool way. “I understand. I’ve a good deal of a woman in me. Whatever brought you to Death Valley, whatever nails you here, is nothing to me. Even if I learn it, what need that be to you? If you do not want me to stay to work for you, watch over your husband—why, let me stay for my own sake.”

  She rose and faced him, with soul-searching eyes. She could not escape her nature. Emotion governed her.

  “Sir, you speak nobly,” she replied, with lips that trembled. “But I do
n’t understand you. Stay here—where I am— for your sake! Explain please.”

  “I have my burden. Once it was even more terrible than yours. Through that I can feel as you feel now. I have lived the loneliness—the insupportable loneliness—of the desert—the silence, the heat, the hell. But my burden still weighs on my soul. If I might somehow help your husband, who is going wrong, blindly following some road of passion—change him or stop him, why that would ease my burden. If I might save you weariness, or physical pain, or hunger, or thirst, or terror—it would be doing more for myself than for you. We are in Death Valley. You refuse to leave. We are, right here, two hundred feet below sea level. When the furnace heat comes—when the blasting midnight wind comes—it means either madness or death.”

  “Stay—Sir Knight,” she said, with a hollow, ringing gaiety. “Who shall say that chivalry is dead? … Stay and know this. I fear no man. I scorn death … But, ah, the woman of me! I hate dirt and vermin. I’m afraid of pain. I suffer agonies even before I’m hurt. I miss so unforgettably the luxuries of life. And lastly, I have a mortal terror of going mad. Spare me that and you will have my prayers in this world— and beyond … Good-night.”

  “Good-night,” replied Adam.

  She left him to the deepening gloom and the dying camp-fire. Adam soon grew conscious of extreme fatigue in mind and body. Spreading his blankets on the sands, he stretched his weary, aching body without even an upward glance at the stars, and fell asleep.

  Daylight again, as if by the opening of eyelids! The rose color was vying with the blue of the sky and a noble gold crowned the line of eastern range that Adam could see through the V-shaped split that opened into the valley.

  He pulled on his boots, and gave his face an unusual and detrimental luxury in the desert. Water was bad for exposed flesh in arid country. The usual spring and buoyancy of his physical being was lacking this day. Such overstrain as yesterday’s would require time to be remedied. So Adam moved slowly and with caution.