by Zane Grey
28
Beauty Stanton opened her eyes to see blue sky through the ragged ventsof a worn-out canvas tent. An unusual quietness all around added tothe strange unreality of her situation. She heard only a low, mournfulseeping of wind-blown sand. Where was she? What had happened? Was thisonly a vivid, fearful dream?
She felt stiff, unable to move. Did a ponderous weight hold her down?Her body seemed immense, full of dull, horrible ache, and she had nosensation of lower limbs except a creeping cold.
Slowly she moved her eyes around. Yes, she was in a tent--an abandonedtent, old, ragged, dirty; and she lay on the bare ground. Through a widetear in the canvas she saw a stretch of flat ground covered with stakesand boards and denuded frameworks and piles of debris. Then grim realityentered her consciousness. Benton was evacuated. Benton was depopulated.Benton--houses, tents, people--had moved away.
During her unconsciousness, perhaps while she had been thought dead, shehad been carried to this abandoned tent. A dressing-gown covered her,the one she always put on in the first hours after arising. The whitedress she had worn last night--was it last night?--still adorned her,but all her jewelry had been taken. Then she remembered being lifted toa couch and cried over by her girls, while awestruck men came to look ather and talk among themselves. But she had heard how the cowboy's shothad doomed her--how he had fought his way out, only to fall dead in thestreet and leave the girl to be taken by Durade.
Now Beauty Stanton realized that she had been left alone in an abandonedtent of an abandoned camp--to die. She became more conscious then ofdull physical agony. But neither fear of death nor thought of painoccupied her mind. That suddenly awoke to remorse. With the slow ebbingof her life evil had passed out. If she had been given a choice betweenthe salvation of her soul and to have Neale with her in her lastmoments, to tell him the truth, to beg his forgiveness, to die in hisarms, she would have chosen the latter. Would not some trooper comebefore she died, some one to whom she could intrust a message? Somegrave-digger! For the great U. P. R. buried the dead it left in itsbloody tracks!
With strange, numb hands Stanton searched the pockets of herdressing-gown, to find, at length, a little account-book with pencilattached. Then, with stiffened fingers, but acute mind, she began towrite to Neale. As she wrote into each word went something of the pang,the remorse, the sorrow, the love she felt; and when that letter wasended she laid the little book on her breast and knew for the first timein many years--peace.
She endured the physical agony; she did not cry out, or complain, orrepent, or pray. Most of the spiritual emotion and life left in herhad gone into the letter. Memory called up only the last moments of herlife--when she saw Ancliffe die; when she folded innocent Allie Leeto the breast that had always yearned for a child; when Neale in hismonstrous stupidity had misunderstood her; when he had struck her beforethe grinning crowd, and in burning words branded her with the onename unpardonable to her class; when at the climax of a morbid andall-consuming hate, a hate of the ruined woman whose body and mind hadabsorbed the vile dregs, the dark fire and poison, of lustful men, shehad inhumanly given Allie Lee to the man she had believed the wildest,most depraved, and most dangerous brute in all Benton when this LarryKing, by some strange fatality, becoming as great as he was wild, hadstalked out to meet her like some red and terrible death.
She remembered now that strange, icy gloom and shudder she had alwaysfelt in the presence of the cowboy. Within her vitals now was the samecold, deadly, sickening sensation, and it was death. Always she hadanticipated it, but vaguely, unrealizingly.
Larry King had lifted the burden of her life. She would have beenglad--if only Neale had understood her! That was her last waveringconscious thought.
Now she drifted from human consciousness to the instinctive physicalstruggle of the animal to live, and that was not strong. There came amoment, the last, between life and death, when Beauty Stanton's soullingered on the threshold of its lonely and eternal pilgrimage, and thendrifted across into the gray shadows, into the unknown, out to the greatbeyond.
Casey leaned on his spade while he wiped the sweat from his brow andregarded his ally McDermott. Between them yawned a grave they had beendigging and near at hand lay a long, quiet form wrapped in old canvas.
"Mac, I'll be domned if I loike this job," said Casey, drawing hard athis black pipe.
"Yez want to be a directhor of the U. P. R., huh?" replied McDermott.
"Shure an' I've did ivery job but run an ingine.... It's imposed onwe are, Mac. Thim troopers niver work. Why couldn't they plant thesestiffs?"
"Casey, I reckon no wan's bossin' us. Benton picked up an' movedyistiday. An' we'll be goin' soon wid the graveltrain. It's only dacentof us to bury the remains of Benton. An' shure yez ought to be glad tosee that orful red-head cowboy go under the ground."
"An' fer why?" queried Casey.
"Didn't he throw a gun on yez once an' scare the daylights out of yez?"
"Mac, I wuz as cool as a coocumber. An' as to buryin' Larry King, I'mproud an' sorry. He wuz Neale's fri'nd."
"My Gawd! but he wor chain lightnin', Casey. They said he shot the womanStanton, too."
"Mac, thet wore a dom' lie, I bet," replied Casey. "He shot up Stanton'shall, an' a bullet from some of thim wot was foightin' him must hev hither."
"Mebbe. But it wor bad bizness. That cowboy hit iviry wan of thimfellars in the same place. Shure, they niver blinked afther."
"An' Mac, the best an' dirtiest job we've had on this," Casey's hugehand indicated a row of freshly filled graves, "U. P. was the plantin'of thim fellars," over which the desert sand was seeping. Then droppinghis spade, he bent to the quiet figure.
"Lay hold, Mac," he said.
They lowered the corpse into the hole. Casey stood up, making a sign ofthe cross before him.
"He wor a man!"
Then they filled the grave.
"Mac, wouldn't it be dacent to mark where Larry King's buried? A stoneor wooden cross with his name?"
McDermott wrinkled his red brow and scratched his sandy beard. Then hepointed. "Casey, wot's the use? See, the blowin' sand's kivered all thegraves."
"Mac, yez wor always hell at shirkin' worrk. Come on, now, Drill, yeterrier, drill!"
They quickly dug another long, narrow hole. Then, taking a rudestretcher, they plodded away in the direction of a dilapidated tent thatappeared to be the only structure left of Benton. Casey entered ahead ofhis comrade.
"Thot's sthrange!"
"Wot?" queried McDermott.
"Didn't yez kiver her face whin we laid her down here?"
"Shure an' I did, Casey."
"An' that face has a different look now!... Mac, see here!"
Casey stooped to pick up a little book from the woman's breast. His hugefingers opened it with difficulty.
"Mac, there's wroitin' in ut!" he exclaimed.
"Wal, rade, ye baboon."
"Oh, I kin rade ut, though I ain't much of a wroiter meself," repliedCasey, and then laboriously began to decipher the writing. He haltedsuddenly and looked keenly at McDermott.
"Wot the divil!... B'gorra, ut's to me fri'nd Neale--an' a loveletter--an'--"
"Wal, kape it, thin, fer Neale an' be dacent enough to rade no more."
Lifting Beauty Stanton, they carried her out into the sunlight. Herwhite face was a shadowed and tragic record.
"Mac, she wor shure a handsome woman," said Casey, "an' a loidy."
"Casey, yez are always sorry fer somebody.... Thot Stanton wuz a beautyan' she mebbe wuz a loidy. But she wuz dom' bad."
"Mac, I knowed long ago thot the milk of human kindness hed curdled inyez. An' yez hev no brains."
"I'm as intilligint as yez any day," retorted McDermott.
"Thin why hedn't yez seen thot this poor woman was alive whin we packedher out here? She come to an' writ thot letter to Neale--thin shedoied!"
"My Gawd! Casey, yez ain't meanin' ut!" ejaculated McDermott, aghast.
Casey nodded grimly, and then he kn
elt to listen at Stanton's breast."Stone dead now--thot's shure."
For her shroud these deliberate men used strippings of canvas from thetent, and then, carrying her up the bare and sandy slope, they loweredher into the grave next to the one of the cowboy.
Again Casey made a sign of the cross. He worked longer at the filling inthan his comrade, and patted the mound of sand hard and smooth. When hefinished, his pipe was out. He relighted it.
"Wal, Beauty Stanton, shure yez hev a cleaner grave than yez hed abed.... Nice white desert sand.... An' prisintly no man will ivir knowwhere yez come to lay."
The laborers shouldered their spades and plodded away.
The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thinsheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barrenwaste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind,the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled BeautyStanton's grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darknessgrew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sandseeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surfaceof the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter ofgraves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out ofthe vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit besidethis woman's last resting-place--a spirit like the night, sad, lonely,silent, mystical, immense.
And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves.
In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed andforgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by thedivinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.
The place that had known Benton knew it no more. Coyotes barked dismallydown what had been the famous street of the camp and prowled in and outof the piles of debris and frames of wood. Gone was the low, strangeroar that had been neither music nor mirth nor labor. Benton remainedonly a name.
The sun rose upon a squalid scene--a wide flat area where stakes andfloors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by ahurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylightfound no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blewthe dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strifeof toil and gold and lust and blood and death. A train passed that day,out of which engineer and fireman gazed with wondering eyes at what hadbeen Benton. Like a mushroom it had arisen, and like a dust-storm onthe desert wind it had roared away, bearing its freight of labor, ofpassion, and of evil. Benton had become a name--a fabulous name.
But nature seemed more merciful than life. For it began to hide what manhad left--the scars of habitations where hell had held high carnival.Sunset came, then night and the starlight. The lonely hours were winged,as if in a hurry to resolve back into the elements the flimsy remains ofthat great camp.
And that spot was haunted.
