Cassidy gazed long and blankly across the desert. "Wot a life!" he
muttered grimly. "Say, _wot_ a life this is!" Cassidy made the words
by putting his tongue against his set teeth and forcibly wrenching the
sounds out by the roots. The words had been a long time in the making,
but now, because of the infinite sourness of their birth and because
of the acrid grinding and gritting that had been going on in the dark
recesses of his soul, Cassidy was forced at last to listen. Rudely and
forever they dispelled Cassidy's dull impression that things were well
with Cassidy, and in so doing tore away the veil and revealed Truth
standing before him, naked, yet gloriously unashamed. But the general
outlines of the goddess had not been entirely unfamiliar to him.
Although his previous skull-gropings had brought forth neither a cause
nor a remedy, he had so long felt that things were far from
satisfactory that when at last she fronted him brazenly, eye to eye,
he only sighed heavily, spat twice in sad reflection, and----nodded
for her to pass on; she had been accepted.
"Gosh, wot a thirst I got!" he pondered, and kicked the empty canteen
at his feet. "Wot a simply horrible thirst! Say, pardner, I wonder did
a feller _ever_ have a thirst like this?" Luckily for Cassidy, his
throat was not yet so dry but that he could amuse himself by
fancifully measuring his thirst, first by pints, then by quarts.
"A quart would never do it, though," he meditated whimsically. "It
would be a mean, low trick to make it think so. This yere job rightly
belongs to a water-tank. Oh, gosh! And ten miles yet, across that
darned dry lake, tuh Ochre. Gid-ap, Tawmm!"
In slow response, the four blacks settled into their sweaty collars,
and the big Bain freighter, with its tugging trailer, heaved up the
swale and lurched drunkenly down the other side to the glittering
mesa.
For four long summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a
freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like
progress up and down the cañons, through the rocky washes and crooked
draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin
it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water
ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, dancing pillars of
grit that drove spitefully into his slack, parched mouth and sleepy
eyes.
"It's the goll-dinged monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined,
as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited
sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant
fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed
Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ain't
_human!_"
He frowned heavily at the sky-line of jagged mountains blued with
haze. "They look like a lot of big old alligators--just as if they was
asleep and lyin' with their shoulders half out of water," he murmured
in gentle, subdued reminiscence. "The darned old no-good things!"
Then, as the bitterness of his lonely life rose up and dulled his mind
and soured his tongue, "Why don't yuh get some mineral into yuh?" he
yelled with abrupt ferocity. "Why ain't yuh some good tuh a feller?
_Zing, zing, zing_--I _hate_ your old heat a-singin' in my ears all
the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh _do_ something? Huh? Yuh don't
make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't
give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest lay there and make
_heat!_"
[Illustration: "'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"]
[Illustration: "NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH
LOWERED EYES"]
Across the mesa the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his
angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side.
Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges.
Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet,
and alluring.
Cassidy burst into a howl of derision that startled his blacks into a
jogging trot: "Oh, yuh cain't fool me, yuh darned old fake!" He shook
a huge red fist in defiance of his ancient foe. "I'll beat yuh
yet--darn yuh!"
Late that night, a large man with a red face and a sunburned neck on
which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of
Number One Commissary Tent.
"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no
more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.
"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.
"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young
feller?"
"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy
repeated.
"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance.
He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite
still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick,
fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and
dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of
all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment
before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight,
and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.
For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of
surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together
they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing moments of
a gashed finger, only gazes at the wound in round-eyed wonder. Cassidy
had begun to remember.
He remembered that "back home" a man didn't have to live _all_ the
time on sour bread and canned tomatoes; "back home" you didn't have to
die of thirst, coming in with day-empty water-barrels to find the
spring dried up; "back home" the mountains didn't jiggle up and down
in front of you, through glassy waves of heat that rightfully
belonged in a blast-furnace. Things were different--and better--"back
home."
Cassidy lifted his head and listened. He had heard the sound of water.
Half hidden in the brush, a little brook was running by him down a
dark ravine. Joyously, tumultuously, it churked and gurgled over the
smooth green stones and moss down to the level, and then slipped away,
with low, contented murmurings, among the cottonwoods and willows.
Cassidy found himself following that brook. It took him down through
fields of dark lucerne. It led him through yellow pasturage, deep with
stubble and wild oats. It showed him long-aisled orchards glinting
with fruit in the sunlight. It ushered him into a wide and pleasant
valley. In the distance Cassidy saw a ranch. Near by, with blowsy
forelock and careless mane, a shaggy pony stood knee-deep in the
river-sedge.
"Why, hello, hossy!" whispered Cassidy, with soft surprise. "Why, say!
I know yuh!"
A full, warm wind began to sough through the pines on the hillside. He
could hear it blowing, blowing unendingly, from across the hills. His
ears rang with the whirring sound, as it came singing along with the
vox humana chords of a great 'cello, streaming down from the heights,
gentle-fingered, but wondrously vast-bodied--booming along with half a
world behind it. Fair in the face it smote him with its resinous
breath, and he felt his lips parting to inhale its fiery tonic--felt,
as he used to feel, the magic glow tingling in his veins again and
brightening his eyes with the pure pagan glory of his living.
And then, very sadly indeed for Cassidy, and in much the same way that
whisky and he had let it all slip through their fingers long ago, the
sound of the brook stilled. The valley, the meadows, the ranch, and
the kind, warm wind faded, one by one. In their stead came the creak
and shock of a belated wagon-train pulling into camp. He heard the
panting of laboring horses. He caught the salt reek of sweaty harness.
He heard the drivers curse querulously as they jammed down the
brake-levers, tossed the reins away, and clambered stiffly down.
Cassidy turned a strained, hard face on the boy. "I reckon not," he
said sadly, grimly. "I ain't a-goin' home. Nope; I ain't a-goin' no
place that's good. Yuh kin always be sure of that, kid."
"Oh, now, that's all right. Don't get sore," soothed the boy. "That's
all right, Cassidy."
"No, it ain't!" roared Cassidy, angry with the long, hot days and
stifling nights, angry with the work and the scanty pay, angry most
of all with himself. "No, it _ain't_ all right!"
[Illustration: "'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"]
As a previously concealed resolve crystallized at last somewhere in
his brain, his voice rasped up a whole octave.
"Nothin's all right, pardner!" he yelled. "Yuh hear me? Yuh know what
I'm goin' tuh do?" He waved the time-check defiantly above his head
and let go one last howl of sardonic self-derision:
"I'm goin' down tuh the Bucket of Blood _tuh get drunk_!"
* * * * *
The desert town of Ochre, in its more salient points, was not unlike a
desert flower, although its makers were far from desiring it to blush
unseen. Yesterday it had slept unborn in a nook of the sand-hills, the
abiding-place of cat's-claw, mesquit, and flickering lizards.
To-day it burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth.
Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all
these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be
reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling
commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending
counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would
simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. Thus is vanity repaid.
Although Cassidy had begun at the "Bucket," he soon discovered that it
possessed no phonograph, and, possessing a craving for music, he had
removed himself and the remains of the pink check to where an aged
instrument in "Red Eye Mike's" guttered forth a doubtful plea for one
"Bill Bailey" to come home.
Here he had remained for five fateful, forgetting days. What Mike and
Mike's friends did to him in that space of time cannot be dwelt upon.
Suffice it to say that on the morning of the sixth day the bleary
semblance of a man who had slept all night in the sand, alongside of a
saloon, awoke to the daylight and a hell of pain.
By dint of soul-racking exertions it managed to roll to its hands and
knees. Then, by slow stages, it pulled itself together, and after
several unsuccessful attempts, tottering, stood on its feet. Tents,
horses, sky, desert, and sun revolved in a bewildering kaleidoscope
before his eyes. In the vastness of his skull a point of pain darted
agonizingly back and forth. In his mouth was a taste like unto nothing
known on this earth or in either bourn.
"I got money yet," he mumbled dazedly to himself, as was his
conversational wont. "Say! I'm tellin' yuh, I got money yet!"
Fumbling, he searched his pockets, but quite to no avail. Sadder yet,
a repetition of the search, even to turning his clothes inside out and
then looking anxiously on the sand, produced nothing. With a puzzled
look on his haggard face, he stumbled into Mike's saloon.
Not at all disconcerted by the bedraggled form that leaned on his bar
and mouthed disconnectedly, the worthy keeper of the hostel proceeded
to produce a sheet of paper from the till.
"I don't savvy what you're talking about at all," he remarked
ingenuously; "but seein' as you've been spendin' a few bucks amongst
your friends here, I'll tell you how you stand."
"How do I stand?" asked Cassidy thickly.