overconfident inexperience, and Starr did not give that explanation much
serious thought. Instead he followed on up the narrowed gulch to higher
ground, to see where men would be most likely to go from there. At the
top he looked out upon further knobs and hollows and aimless
depressions, just as he had expected. Half a mile or so away there
drifted a thin spiral of smoke, from the kitchen stove of the Señora
Medina, he guessed. But there was no other sign of human life anywhere
within the radius of many miles, or, to be explicit, within the field of
Starr's vision.
He looked for footprints, but in a few minutes he gave up in disgust.
The ridge he stood on stretched for miles, up beyond Medina's home
ranch and down past the Sommers' ranch, five or six miles nearer town,
and on to the railroad. And it was a rocky ridge if ever there was one;
granite outcroppings, cobblestones, boulders, anything but good loose
soil where tracks might be followed. A dog might have followed a trail
there before the scent was baked out by blistering heat; but Starr
certainly could not.
He stood looking across to where the smoke curled up into the intense
Blue of the sky. If a man wanted to reach the Medina ranch by the most
obscure route, he thought, this would be one way to get there. He went
back to where the automobile had stood and searched there for some sign
of those who had ridden this far. But if any man left that machine, he
had stepped from the running board upon rock, and so had left no telltale
print of his foot.
"And that looks mighty darn queer," said Starr, "if it was just
accidental. But if a fellow _wanted_ to take to the rocks to cover his
trail, why, he couldn't pick a better place than this. She's a dandy
ridge and a dandy way to get up on her, if that's what's wanted." Starr
looked at his watch and gave up all hope of catching the next eastbound
train, if that had really been his purpose. He lifted his hat and drew
his fingers across his forehead where the perspiration stood in beads,
resettled the hat at an angle to shade his face from the glare of the
sun, ran two fingers cursorily between the cinch and Rabbit's sweaty
body, picked up the stirrup, thrust in his toe and eased himself up into
the saddle; and his mind had not consciously directed a single movement.
"Well, they've left one mark behind 'em that fair hollers," he stated, in
so satisfied a tone that Rabbit turned his head and looked back at him
inquiringly. Starr, you must know, was not given to satisfied tones when
he and Rabbit were enduring the burden of heat and long miles. "And you
needn't give me that kinda look, neither. Take a look at them tire
tracks, you ole knot-head. Them's Silvertown cords, and they ain't
equipping jitneys with cord tires--not yet. Why, yo're whole carcass
ain't worth the price uh one tire, let alone four, you old sheep. You
show me the car in this country that's sportin' Silvertowns all around,
and I'll show you--"
Just what he would show, Starr did not say, because he did not know. But
there was something there which might be called a mystery, and where
there was mystery there was Starr, working tirelessly on the solution.
This might be a trivial thing; but until he knew beyond all doubt that it
was trivial, Starr pushed other matters, such as a young woman afraid of
a horned toad, out of his mind that he might study the puzzle from all
possible angles.
CHAPTER SIX
"DARN SUCH A COUNTRY!"
Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head
of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and
the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched
away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope,
every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her
unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its
barrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply,
intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton
floating aimlessly here and there. In a big, wild, unearthly way it was
beautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined.
Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though
the beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes. She
felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life
of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by
which to measure any part of it. Also, she summed up all her resentment
and her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehement
sentence that lacked only one word of being a curse.
"Darn such a country!" is what she said, gritting the words between
her teeth.
"See anything of 'em?" bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he was
engaged in dipping up water with a tomato can and pouring it over his
head, shivering ecstatically as the cold trickles ran down his neck.
Helen May glanced down at him with no softening of her eyes. Vic had lost
nine goats out of the flock he had been set to herd, and he failed to
manifest any great concern over the loss. On the contrary, he had told
Helen May that he wished he could lose the whole bunch, and that he hoped
coyotes had eaten them up, if they didn't have sense enough to stay with
the rest. There had been a heated argument, and Helen May had not felt
sure of coming out of it a victor.
"No, I didn't, and you'd better get back to work or the rest will be
gone, too," she called down to him petulantly. "It's bad enough to lose
nine, without letting the rest go."
"Aw, 's matter with yuh, anyway?" Vic retorted in a tone he thought would
not reach her ears. "By gosh, you don't want a feller to cool off, even!
By gosh, you'd make a feller _sleep_ with them darned goats if you could
get away with it! Bu-lieve _me_, anybody can have my job that wants it.
'S hot enough to fry eggs in the shade, and she thinks, by hen, that I
oughta stay out there--"
"Yes, I do. And if you want anything to eat to-night, Vic Stevenson, you
get right back there with those goats! They're going over the hill this
minute. Hurry, Vic! For heaven's sake, are you trying to take a _bath_ in
that can? Climb up that ridge and cut across and head them off! That old
Billy's headed for town again--hurry!"
"Aw for gosh sake!" grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the old
hoe-handle he used for a staff. "What ridge?" He paused to thunder up at
her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last
word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when he
needs it most.
"That ridge before your face, chump," Helen May informed him crossly. "If
it comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I'll take the goats! And if
there's any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I'd like to
know where it is. The idea of expecting people to live in such a country!
It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon's surface.
And," she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, "it's here, and I'm
here. I can't get away from it--that's the dickens of it." Then, because
Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed
at the incongruity of it all. "Me--me, here in the desert trying to
raise goats! Can you beat that?"
She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavish
dependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again. "You'd think,"
she told the scenery for want of other companionship, "you'd think Vic
was seventy-nine years old at the very least. Makes a difference whether
he's after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts to
the top of Mount Wilson! I don't believe that kid ever did wear his legs
out having fun, and it's a sure thing he'll never wear them out working!
Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps."
Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring. Lower down, where the
ridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that had
cost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped out
briskly at the head of the band. Helen May wondered what new depravity
was in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in and
confront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always to
possess that animal.
Helen May did not know how vitally important it is to have a good dog at
such work. She did not know that Billy and his band felt exactly like
boys who have successfully eluded a too lax teacher, and that they would
have yielded without argument to the bark of a trained sheep dog. She had
set Vic a harder task than she realized; a task from which any
experienced herder would have shrunk. In her ignorance she blamed Vic,
and called him lazy and careless and a few other sisterly epithets which
he did not altogether deserve.
She watched now, impatient because he was so long in crossing the gully;
telling herself that he was trying to see how slow he could be, and that
he did it just to be disagreeable and to irritate her--as if she were
there of her own desire, and had bought those two hundred miserable
goats to spite him. Harmony, as you must see, did not always dwell in
Sunlight Basin.
Eventually Vic toiled up the far side of the gully, which was deep and as
hot as an oven, and followed it down within rock-throwing distance of the
goats. A well-aimed pebble struck Billy on the curve of one horn and
halted him, the band huddling vacant-eyed behind him. Vic aimed and threw
another, and Billy, turning his whiskered face upward, stared with
resentful head-tossings and a defiant blat or two before he swerved back
into the Basin, his band and Vic plodding after.
"Well, for a wonder!" Helen May ejaculated ungraciously, grudging Vic
the small tribute of praise that was due him. But she was immediately
ashamed of that, and told herself that it was pretty hard on the poor
kid, and that after all he must hate the country worse than she did,
even, which would certainly mean a good deal; and that she supposed he
missed his boy chums just as much as she missed her friends, and found it
just as hard to fit himself comfortably into a life for which he had no
liking. Besides, it wasn't his health that had shunted them both out here
into the desert, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for treating him
the way she did.
After that she decided that it was her business to find the nine goats
that were lost. Vic certainly could not do both at once; and deep down in
her heart Helen May knew that she was terribly afraid of Billy and would
rather trudge the desert for hours under the hot sun than stay in the
Basin watching the main flock. She wished that she could afford to hire a
herder, but she shrunk from the expense. It seemed to her that she and
Vic should be able to herd that one band, especially since there was
nothing else for them to do out there except cook food and eat it.
Speaking of food, it seemed to take an enormous quantity to satisfy the
hunger of two persons. Helen May was appalled at the insatiable appetite
of Vic, who seemed never to have enough in his stomach. As for
herself--well, she recalled the meal she had just eaten, and wondered how
it could be possible for hunger to seize upon her so soon again. But even
so, food could not occupy all of their time, and a two-room cabin does
not take much keeping in order. They would simply be throwing away money
if they hired a herder, and yet, how they both did loathe those goats!
She climbed back down the pinnacle, watching nervously for snakes and
lizards and horned toads and such denizens of the desert. With a
certain instinct for preparing against the worst, she took a two-quart
canteen, such as soldiers carry, to the spring, and filled it and slung
it over her shoulder. She went to the cabin and made a couple of
sandwiches, and because she was not altogether inhuman she cut two
thick slices of bread, spread them lavishly with jam, and carried them
to Vic as a peace offering.
"I'm going to hunt those nasty brutes, Vic," she cried from a safe
distance. "Come here and get this jam sandwich, and lend me that stick
you've got. And if I don't get back by five, you start a fire."
"Where you going to look? If you couldn't see 'em from up there, I don't
see the use of hunting." Vic was taking long steps towards the sandwich,
and he stretched his sunburned face in that grin which might have made
him famous in comedy had fate not set him down before his present ignoble
task. "Yuh don't want to go far," he advised her perfunctorily. "We ought
to have a couple of saddle horses. Why don't yuh--"
"What would we feed them on? Besides we've got to save what money we've
got, Vic. We can walk till these insects grow wool enough to pay for
something to ride on."
"Hair, you mean. I can get a gentle horse from that Mexican kid, Luis. He
good as offered us the one--that I borrowed--" Vic was giving too much
attention to the jam sandwich to argue very coherently.
"There's that old Billy starting off again; you watch him, Vic. Don't let
him get a start, or goodness knows where he'll head for next. We can't
keep a horse, I tell you. We need all this grass for the goats."
"Oh, darn the goats!"
In her heart Helen May quite agreed with the sentiment, but she could not
consistently betray that fact to Vic. She therefore turned her back upon
him, walking down the trail that led out of the Basin to the main trail a
mile away, the trail which was the link connecting them with civilization
of a sort.
Here passed the depressed, dust-covered stage three times a week. Here,
in a macaroni box mounted on a post, they received and posted their
mail. Helen May had indulged herself in a subscription to the Los
Angeles daily paper that had always been left at their door every
morning, the paper which Peter had read hastily over his morning mush.
Every paper brought a pang of homesickness for the flower-decked city of
her birth, but she felt as though she could not have kept her sanity
without it. The full-page bargain ads she read hungrily. The weekly
announcements of the movie shows, the news, the want columns--these were
at once her solace and her torment; and if you have ever been exiled,
you know what that means.
Here, too, she left her shopping list and money for the stage driver, who
bought what she needed and left the goods at the foot of the post, and
what money remained in a buckskin bag in the macaroni box.
An obliging stage driver was he, a tobacco chewing, red-faced,
red-whiskered stage driver who nagged at his four horses incessantly and
never was known to beat one of them; a garrulous, soft-hearted stage
driver who understood very well how lonely these two young folks must be,
and who therefore had some moth-eaten joke ready for whoever might be
waiting for him at the macaroni box. Whenever Helen May apologized for
the favor she must ask of him--which was every time she handed him a
list--the stage driver invariably a nasal kind of snort, spat far out
over the wheel, and declared pettishly:
"It ain't a mite uh trouble in the world. That's what I'm _fur_--to help
folks out along my rowt. Don't you worry a mite about that." Often as he
said it, he yet gave it the tone of sincerity and of convincing
freshness, as though he had never before given the matter a thought.
Helen May did not know what she would have done without that stage driver
to bridge the gulf between Sunlight Basin and the world.
But this was not stage day. That is to say, the stage had passed to the
far side of its orbit, and would not return until to-morrow. From San
Bonito it swung in a day-long journey across the desert to Malpais,
thence by a different route to San Bonito again, so that Helen May never
saw it returning whence it had come.
A cloud of desert dust always heralded its approach from the east.
Sometimes after the first dust signal, it took him nearly an hour to top
the low ridge which was really one rim of the Basin. Then Helen May would
know that he carried passengers or freight that straightened the backs of
the straining four horses in the long stretch of sand beyond the ridge
and made their progress slow.
But to-day there was no dust signal, and the macaroni box was but a
dismal reminder of her exile. The world was very far away, behind the
violet rim of mountains, and she was just a speck in the desert. Her high
laced boots were heavy, and the dust settled in the creases around her
slim ankles, that could be perfectly fascinating in silken hose and
dainty slippers. Her khaki skirt, of the divided kind much affected by
tourists, had lost two big, pearl buttons, and she had no others to
replace them. Her shirt-waist had its collar turned inside for coolness,
and the hollow of her neck was sun-blistered and beginning to peel. Also
her nose and her neck at the sides were showing a disposition to grow new
skin for old. So much had the desert sun done for her.
But there was something else which the desert had done, something which
Helen May did not fully realize. It had put a clear, steady look into her
eyes in place of the glassy shine of fever. It was beginning to fill out
that hollow in her neck, so that it no longer showed the angular ends of
her collar bones. It had put a resilient quality into her walk, firmness
into the poise of her head. It had made it physically possible, for
instance, for Helen May to trudge out into the wild to hunt nine goats
that had strayed from the main band.
Though she did not know it, a certain dream of Peter's had very nearly
come true. For here were the vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in
their magnificent calm. At night the stars seemed to come down and hang
just over Helen May's head. There was the little cottage of which Peter
had dreamed--only Helen May called it a miserable little shack--hunched
against a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars;
sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrill
insistence of the coyotes. Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and so
hopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm. And here was Helen May
coming through the sunlight--Peter never dreamed how hot it would
be!--with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind and with the little red
spots gone from her cheeks and with health in her eyes that were the
color of ripe chestnuts. When her skin had adjusted itself to the rigors
of the climate, she would no doubt have freckles on her nose, just as
Peter had dreamed she might have. And if she were walking, instead of
riding the gentle-eyed pony which Peter had pictured, that was not
Peter's fault, nor the fault of the dream. There was no laugh on her
lips, however. Dreams are always pulling a veil of idealism over the face
of reality, and so Helen May's face was not happy, as Peter had dreamed
it might be, but petulant and grimly determined; her ripe-red lips were
moving in anathemas directed at nine detested goats.
Peter could never have dreamed just that, but all the same it is a pity
that, in order to make the dream a reality, Peter had been forced to deny
himself the joy of seeing Helen May growing strong in "Arizona, New
Mexico, or Colorado." It would have made the price he paid seem less
terrible, less tragic.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOONLIGHT, A MAN AND A SONG
Just out from the entrance to a deep, broad-bottomed arroyo where an
automobile had been, Starr came upon something that surprised him very
much, and it was not at all easy to surprise Starr. Here, in the first
glory of a flaming sunset that turned the desert to a sea of unearthly,
opal-tinted beauty, he came upon Helen May, trudging painfully along with
an old hoe-handle for a staff, and driving nine reluctant nanny goats
that alternately trotted and stood still to stare at the girl with
foolish, amber-colored eyes.
Starr was trained to long desert distances, but his training had made it
second nature to consider a horse the logical means of covering those
distances. To find Helen May away out here, eight miles and more from
Sunlight Basin, and to find her walking, shocked Starr unspeakably;
shocked him out of his shyness and into free speech with her, as though
he had known her a long while.
"Y' _lost_?" was his first greeting, while he instinctively swung Rabbit
to head off a goat that suddenly "broke back" from the others.
Helen May looked up at him with relief struggling through the apathy of
utter weariness. "No, but I might as well be. I'll never be able to get
home alive, anyhow." She shook the hoe-handle menacingly at a hesitating
goat and quite suddenly collapsed upon the nearest rock, and began to
cry; not sentimentally or weakly or in any other feminine manner known to
Starr, but with an angry recklessness that was like opening a safety
valve. Helen May herself did not understand why she should go along for
half a day calmly enough, and then, the minute this man rode up and spoke
to her sympathetically, she should want to sit down and cry.
"I just--I've been walking since one o'clock! If I had a gun, I'd shoot
every one of them. I just--I think goats are simply _damnable_ things!"
Starr turned and looked at the animals disapprovingly. "They sure are,"
he assented comfortingly. "Where you trying to take 'em--or ain't you?"
he asked, with the confidence-inviting tone that made him so valuable to
those who paid for his services.
"Home, if you can call it that!" Helen May found her handkerchief and
proceeded to wipe the tears and the dust off her cheeks. She looked at
Starr more attentively than at first when he had been just a human being
who seemed friendly. "Oh, you're the man that stopped at the spring.
Well, you know where I live, then. I was hunting these; they wandered off
and Vic couldn't find them yesterday, so I--it was just accident that I
came across them. I followed some tracks, and it looked to me as if
they'd been driven off. There were horse tracks. That's what made me keep
going--I was so mad. And now they won't go home or anywhere else. They
just want to run around every which way."
Starr looked up the arroyo, hesitating. On the edge of San Bonito he had
picked up the track of Silvertown cord tires, and he had followed it to
the mouth of this arroyo. From certain signs easy for an experienced man
to read, he had known the track was fairly fresh, fresh enough to make it
worth his while to follow. And now here was a girl all tired out and a
long way from home.
"Here, you climb onto Rabbit. He's gentle when he knows it's all right,
and I won't stand for him acting up." Starr swung off beside her. "I'll
help get the goats home. Where's your dog?"
"I haven't any dog. The man we bought the goats from wanted to sell me
one, to help herd them, he said. But he asked twenty-five dollars for
it--I suppose he thought because I looked green I'd stand for that!--and
I wouldn't be held up that way. Vic and I have nothing to do but watch
them. You--you mustn't bother," she added half-heartedly. "I can get them
home all right. I'm rested now, and there's a moon, you know. Really, I
can't let you bother about it. I know the way."
"Put your foot in the stirrup and climb on. You, Rabbit, you stand still,
or I'll beat the--"
"Really, you mustn't think, because I cried a little bit--"
"Pile on to him now, while I hold him still. Or shall I pick you up and
_put_ you on?" Starr smiled while he said it, but there was a look in his
eyes and around his mouth that made Helen May yield suddenly.
By her awkwardness Starr and Rabbit both knew that she had probably never
before attempted to mount a horse. By the set of her lips Starr knew that
she was afraid, but that she would break her neck before she would
confess her fear. He liked her for that, and he was glad to see that
Rabbit understood the case and drew upon his reserve of patience and good
nature, standing like a rock until Helen May was settled in the saddle
and Starr had turned the stirrups on their sides in the leather so that
they would come nearer being the right length for her. Starr's hand
sliding affectionately up Rabbit's neck and resting a moment on his jaw
was all the assurance Rabbit needed that everything was all right.
"Now, just leave the reins loose, and let Rabbit come along to please
himself," Starr instructed her quietly. "He'll follow me, and he'll pick
his own trail. You don't have to do a thing but sit there and take it
easy. He'll do the rest."
Helen May looked at him doubtfully, but she did not say anything. She
braced herself in the stirrups, took a firm grip of the saddlehorn with
one hand, and waited for what might befall. She had no fear of Starr, no
further uneasiness over the coming night, the loneliness, the goats, or
anything else. She felt as irresponsible, as safe, as any sheltered woman
in her own home. I did not say she felt serene; she did not know yet how
the horse would perform; but she seemed to lay that responsibility also
on Starr's capable shoulders.