Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) (54 page)

"I would never hide!" Ruth Virey had said in passionate scorn.

She was like her mother, wonderful as steel in her will. Yet these women seemed all heart. They transcended men in love, in sacrifice, in that living flame of soul, turbulent and unquenchable as the fire of the sun.

"I'll hide no more!" burst from Adam, and the whisper startled him, like those soundless whispers in the shadows.

He could live no longer a life in hiding. He must stand, in his own consciousness, if only for a moment, free to look any man in the face, free to be worthy to love Ruth Virey, free as the eagle of his spirit. He would no longer hide from man, from punishment. Love of that purple-eyed girl had been a stinging, quickening spur. But it was only instrumental in the overthrow of fear. Some other power, not physical, not love, but cold, pure, passionless, spiritual, had been drawing him like a wavering compass needle to its pole.

Was it the faith Genie's dying mother had placed in God? Was it a godlike something in him which conflicted with nature? Was it the strange progress of life, inscrutable and inflexible, that dragged men down or lifted them up, made them base or made them great?

The darkness of his mind, the blackness of the abyss of his soul, seemed about to be illumined. But the truth held aloof. Yet could he not see what constituted greatness in any man? What was it to be great? The beasts of the desert and the birds recognised it--strength--speed-- ferocity--tenacity of life. The Indians worshipped greatness so that they looked up and prayed to their gods. They worshipped stature, and power and skill of hand, and fleetness of foot, and above all--endurance. More, they endowed their great chieftains with wisdom. But above all--to endure pain, heat, shock, all of the desert hardships, all of the agonies of life--to endure--that was their symbol of greatness.

Adam asked no other for himself or for any man. To endure and to surmount the ills of life! Any man could be great. He had his choice. To realise at last--to face the inevitable fight in any walk of life--to work and to endure--to slave and to suffer in silence--to stand like a savage the bloody bruises and broken bones--to bite the tongue and hold back the gasp--to plod on down the trails or the roads or the streets and to be true to an ideal--to endure the stings and blows of misfortune--to bear up under loss--to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief--to be victor over anger--to smile when tears were close--to resist disease and evil men and base instincts--to hate hate and to love love--to go on when it would seem good to die--to seek ever the glory and the dream--to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be--that was what any man could do and so be great!

At midnight Adam paced under the palms. All seemed dim, grey, cool, spectral, rustling, whispering. The old familiar sounds were there, only rendered different by his mood. Midnight was haunting. Somehow the desert with its mustering shadows, dark and vast and strange, resembled his soul and his destiny and the mystery of himself. How sweet the loneliness and solitude of the oasis! There under the palms he could walk and be himself, with only the eye of nature and of spirit on him in this final hour of his extremity.

Happiness was not imperative; self-indulgence was not essential to life. Adam realised he had done wonderful things--L-perhaps noble things. But nothing great Perhaps all his agony had been preparation for this supreme ordeal.

How saving and splendid would it be, if out of his stultified youth, with its blinded love of brother and its weakness of will--if out of the bitter sting of infidelity and his fatal, tragic deed--if out of the long torture of hardship of the desert and its strife and its contact with souls as wild as his--how glorious it would be if out of this terrible tide of dark, contending years, so full of remorse and fear and endless atonement, there should rise a man who, trained now in the desert's ferocity to survive, should use that force to a noble aim, and, climbing beyond his nature, sacrifice himself to the old Biblical law--a life for a life--and with faith in unknown future lend his spirit to the progress of the ages!

Adam divined that he did not belong to himself. What he wanted for himself, selfishly, was not commensurable with the need of others in this life. He was concerned here with many ideals, the highest of which was sacrifice, that the evil of him should not go on. Since he had loved Ruth Virey the whole value of life had shifted. Life was sweet, but no longer if he had to hide, no longer under the ban of crime. The stain must be washed away. By slow and gradual change, by torments innumerable, had he come to this realisation. He had deceived himself by love of life. But the truth in him was the truth of the immortality of his soul, just as it was truth that he inherited instincts of the savage. Life was renewal. Every base, selfish man held back its spirituality.

"No more! No more!" cried Adam, looking up.

And in that cry he accepted the spirit of life, the mighty being that pulsated there in the darkness, the whispering voice of Genie's mother, the love of Ruth that never was to be his, the strange, desperate fights with his instincts, the stranger fight of his renunciation--he accepted these on faith as his idea of God.

"I will give my life for my brother's," he said. "I will offer myself in punishment for my crime. I will pay with my body that I may saves my soul!"

Chapter
XXX

Adam lingered in his travel through the beautiful Palo Verde Valley, and at last reached the long swell of desert slope that led down to the Rio Colorado.

Tranquil and sad was his gaze on the majestic river as it swirled red and sullen between its wide green borders toward the upflung wilderness of coloured peaks he remembered so well.

All day he strode behind his faithful burros, here high on the river bank where he could see the sombre flood rolling to the south, and there low in, the willow-shaded trail. And 'though he had an eye for the green, dry coverts and the wide, winding valley, he seemed to see most vividly the scenes of boyhood and of home. And the memory revived the love he had borne his brother Guerd. High on the grassy bill at the old village school--he was there once again, wild and gay, playing the games, tagging at the heels of his idol.

The miles slipped by under his tireless stride. Hour by hour he had quickened his pace. And when sunset caught him with its call to camp, he could see the grand purple bulk of old Picacho looming in the sky. Twilight and dusk and night, and the lonely camp fire! He heard the sullen gurgle of the river in the weeds and he saw the trains of stars reflected along its swirling surface. A killdeer, most mournful of birds, pealed his plaintive, lonely cry. Across the blue-black sky gleamed a shooting star. The wind stirred in the leaves, gently and low, and fanned the glowing embers, and bore the white ashes away into the darkness. Shadows played from the flickering blaze, fantastic and weird, like dancing spectres in the gloom. Adam watched the gleaming river rolling on to its grave in the Gulf. Like all things, it died, was dispersed, and had rebirth in other climes. Then he watched the stars at their grand and blazing task.

On the afternoon of the third day he turned under the red bluff into the basin of Picacho. Long the trail had been overgrown and dim, and cattle tracks were scarce. The wide willow and mesquite flat, with its groves of cottonwoods, had grown denser, wilder, no more crisscrossed by trails. Adam had slowed down now, and he skirted the edge of the thicket till he reached the bank of bronze rock that had flowed down from the peaks in ages past. The ocatillas, so pearly grey, softly green and vividly scarlet, grew there just the same as long ago when he had plucked a flower for the dusky hair of Margarita. He welcomed sight of them, for they were of the past.

And here, side by side, stood the crucifixion tree and the palo verde under which Margarita had told him their legends. The years had made no change that Adam could discern. The smoke tree and the green tree raised their delicate, exquisite, leafless foliage against the blue of sky, beautiful and soft, hiding from the eye the harsh law of their desert nature.

Adam tarried here. His wandering steps were nearing their end. And he gazed across the river at the wilderness of Arizona peaks. It seemed he knew every one. Had he seen them yesterday or long ago?

The sculptured turrets of Picacho were taking on a crown of gold, and from the sheer, ragged bluffs of the purple mass shadows and hazes and rays were streaming down into the valley. One golden streak slanted from the wind-worn hole in the rim. Solemn and noble the castled mountain towered in the sky. In its lonely grandeur there was strength.

One moment longer Adam watched and listened, absorbing the colour and glory and wildness, stung to the depths of his heart by his farewell to loneliness. He retrograded one last instant to the savage who sensed but did not think. He thrilled to the old, mysterious, fading instinct. Then, as in answer to a sonorous call in his ear, he measured slow and labouring strides through the aisles to the river.

His burros scratched their packs on the thorny mesquites to get down to the arrow-weed and willow. Where once had been open bank, now all was green, except for a narrow sandy aisle. The dock was gone. A sunken barge lay on a bar, and moored to its end were two leaky skiffs. Traffic and trade had departed from the river landing. Adam remembered a prospector had told him that the mill had been moved from the river up to the mine under the peak. So now, he thought, supplies and traffic must come and go by way of Yuma.

He drove his burros down the sandy aisle. A glimpse of an old adobe wall, grey through the mesquites, stopped his heart. He went on. The house of Arallanes was a roofless ruin, the vacant windows and doors staring darkly, the walls crumbling to the sands. The shed where Adam had slept was now half hidden by mesquites. The ocatilla poles were bleached and rotten and the brush was gone from the roof; but the sandy floor looked as clean and white as the day Adam had spread his blankets there. Fourteen years! Silent he stood, and the low, mournful wind was a knell. The past could never be undone.

He went back to the lane and to the open. Old stone walls were all that appeared left of houses he expected to see. Over the trees, far up the slope, he espied the ruins of the dismantled mill. Unreal it looked there, out of place, marring the majestic sweep of the slope.

His keen desert nostrils detected smoke before he saw blue columns rising through the green. He passed a plot of sand-mounded graves. Had they been there? How fierce a pang pierced his heart! Rude stones marked the graves, and on one a single wooden cross, crude and weathered, slanted away. Adam peered low at the lettering--M.A. And swiftly he swung erect.

There was a cluster of houses farther on, low and squat, a few of them new, but most of them Adam remembered. A post-office sign marked this village of Picacho. The stone-fronted store looked just the same, and the loungers there might never have moved from their tracks in fourteen years. But the faces were strange.

A lean old man, grey and peaked, detached himself from the group and tottered toward Adam with his cane in the sand.

"Wal, stranger, howdy! You down from upriver?"

His voice twanged a chord of memory. Merryvale Slowly the tide of emotion rose in Adam's breast. He peered down into the grey old face, with its narrow, half-shut eyes and its sunken cheeks. Yes, it was Merryvale.

"Howdy, friend!" replied Adam. "Yes, I come from up the river."

"Strange in these parts, I reckon?"

"Yes. But I--I was here years ago."

"Wal, I knowed you was strange because you come in by the river. Travellers nowadays go around the mountain. Prospectors never come any more. The glory of Picacho had faded."

"Aren't they working the mill?" queried Adam, quickly.

"Haw! Haw! The mill will never grind with ore that is gone! No work these last five years. The mill has rusted out--fallen to ruin. And the gold of old Picacho is gone. But, stranger, she hummed while she lasted. Millions in gold--millions in gold!"

He wagged his lean old head and chuckled.

"I knew a man here once by the name of Arallanes. What has become of him?

"Arallanes? Wall, I do recollect him. I was watchman at the mill an' he was boss of the gang. His daughter was knifed by a greaser named Felix...Arallanes left here these ten years ago an' he's never been back."

"His--daughter!...Is that her grave back there--the sunken mound of sand--with the wooden cross?"

"I reckon that's Margarita's grave. She was a pretty wench--mad about men--an' there's some who said she got her just deserts."

The broad river gleamed yellow through the breaks in the Mesquites. Ponderous and swirling, it glided on round the bend. Adam's gaze then sought the peak. The vast, stormy, purple mass, like a mountain of cloud, shone with sunset crown of silver.

Somewhere near, hidden by the trees, a Mexican broke the stillness with song--wild, sensuous, Spanish love, in its haunting melody.

"I knew another man here," began Adam, with the words a sonorous knell in his ear. "His name was Collishaw...What's become of him?"

"Collishaw? Never will forgit him!" declared the old man, grimly. "Last I heard he was cheatin' Injuns out of water rights over here at Walters--an' still lookin' fer somebody to hang...Haw! Haw! That Collishaw was a Texas sheriff."

Suddenly Adam bent lower, so that his face was on a level with Merryvale's.

"Don't you recognise me?"