picking his way after him in leisurely fashion. So they crossed the
arroyo mouth and climbed the ragged lip of its western side and traveled
straight toward the flaming eye of the sun that seemed now to have winked
itself nearly shut. The goats for some inexplicable reason showed no
further disposition to go in nine different directions at once. Helen
May relaxed from her stiff-muscled posture and began to experiment a
little with the reins.
"Why, he steers easier than an automobile!" she exclaimed suddenly. "You
just think which way you want to go, almost, and he does it. And you
don't have to pull the lines the least bit, do you?"
Starr delayed his answer until he had made sure that she was not
irritating Rabbit with a too-officious guidance. When he saw that she
was holding the reins loosely as he had told her to do, and was merely
laying the weight of a rein on one side of the neck and then on the
other, he smiled.
"I guess you've rode before," he hazarded. "The way you neck-rein--"
"No, honest. But my chum's brother had a big six, and Sundays he used to
let me fuss with it, away out where the road was clear. It steered just
like this horse; just as easy, I mean. I--why, see! I just _wondered_ if
he'd go to the right of that bush, and he turned that way just as if I'd
told him to. Can you beat that?"
Starr did not say. Naturally, since she was a girl, and pretty, and since
he was human, he was busy wondering what her chum's brother was like. He
picked up a small rock and shied it at a goat that was not doing a thing
that it shouldn't do, and felt better. He remembered then that at any
rate her chum's brother was a long way off, and that he himself had
nothing much to complain of right now. Then Helen May spoke again and
shifted his thoughts to another subject.
"I believe I'd rather have a horse like this," she said, "than own that
big, lovely take-me-to-glory car that was pathfinding around like a
million dollars, a little while ago. I'll own up now that I was weeping
partly because four great big porky men could ride around on cushions a
foot thick, while a perfectly nice girl had to plough through the sand
afoot. The way they skidded past me and buried me in a cloud of dust made
me mad enough to throw rocks after them. Pigs! They never even stopped to
ask if I wanted a ride or anything. They all glared at me through their
goggles as if I hadn't any business walking on their desert."
"Did you know them?" Starr came and walked beside her, glancing
frequently at her face.
"No, of course I didn't. I don't know anybody but the stage driver. I
wouldn't have ridden with them, anyway. From what I saw of them they
looked like Mexicans. But you'd think they might have shown some
interest, wouldn't you?"
"I sure would," Starr stated with emphasis. "What kinda car was it, did
you notice? Maybe I know who they are."
"Oh, it was a great big black car. They went by so fast and I was so
tired and hot and--and pretty near swearing mad, I didn't notice the
number at all. And they were glaring at me, and I was glaring at them,
and then the driver stepped on the accelerator just at a little crook in
the road, and the hind wheels skidded about a ton of sand into my face
and they were gone, like they were running from a speed cop. I'd much
rather have a nice little automatic pony like this one," she added
feelingly. "You don't have to bundle yourself up in dusters and goggles
and things when you take a ride, do you? It--it makes the bigness of the
country, and the barrenness of it, somehow fit together and take you into
the pattern, when you ride a horse over it, don't you think?"
"I guess so," Starr assented, with an odd little slurring accent on the
last word which gave the trite sentence an individual touch that
appealed to Helen May. "It don't seem natural, somehow, to walk in a
country like this."
"Oh, and you've got to, while I ride your horse! Or, have you got to? Is
it just movie stuff, where a man rides behind on a horse, and lets the
girl ride in front? I mean, is it feasible, or just a stunt for
pictures?"
"Depends on the horse," Starr evaded. "It's got the say-so, mostly,
whether it'll pack one person or two. Rabbit will, and when I get tired
walking, I'll ride."
"Oh, that makes it better. I wasn't feeling comfortable riding, but men
are so queer about thinking they must give a woman all the choice bits of
comfort, and a woman has to give in or row about it. If you'll climb up
and ride when you feel like it, I'll just settle down and enjoy myself."
Settling down and enjoying herself seemed to consist of gazing out over
the desert and the hills and up at the sky that was showing the deep
purple of dusk. It was what Starr wanted most of all, just then, for it
left him free to study what she had told him of the big black automobile
with four coated and goggled men who had looked like Mexicans; four men
who had glared at her and then had speeded up to get away from her
possible scrutiny.
For the first time since she had seen it from the spring seat of a
jolting wagon from the one livery stable in Malpais, Helen May discovered
that this wild, strange land was beautiful. For the first time she
gloried in its bigness and its wildness, and did not resent its
barrenness. The little brown birds that fluttered close to the ground and
cheeped wistfully to one another in the dusk gave her an odd, sweet
thrill of companionship. Jack rabbits sitting up on their hind legs for
a brief scrutiny before they scurried away made her laugh to herself. The
reddened clouds that rimmed the purple were the radiant shores of a
wonderful, bottomless sea, where the stars were the mast lights on ships
hull down in the distance. She lifted her chest and drew in long breaths
of clean, sweet air that is like no other air, and she remembered all at
once that she had not coughed since daylight. She breathed again, deep
and long, and felt that she was drawing some wonderful, healing ether
into her lungs.
She looked at Starr, walking steadily along before her, swinging the
hoe-handle lightly in his right hand, setting his feet down in the
smoothest spots always and leaving nearly always a clear imprint of his
foot in the sandy soil. There was a certain fascination in watching the
lines of footprints he left behind him. She would know those footprints
anywhere, she told herself. Small for a man, they were, and well-shaped,
with the toes pointing out the least little bit, and with no blurring
drag when he lifted his feet. She did not know that Starr wore riding
boots made to his measure and costing close to twenty dollars a pair; if
she had she would not have wondered at the fine shape of them, or at the
individuality of the imprint they made. She conceived the belief that
Rabbit knew those footprints also. She amused herself by watching how
carefully the horse followed wherever they led. If Starr stepped to the
right to avoid a rock, Rabbit stepped to the right to avoid that rock;
never to the left, though the way might be as smooth and open. If Starr
crossed a gully at a certain place, Rabbit followed scrupulously the
tracks he made. Helen May considered that this little gray horse showed
really human intelligence.
She realized the deepening dusk only when Starr's form grew vague and
she could no longer see the prints his boots made. They were nearing the
brown, lumpy ridge which hid Sunlight Basin from the plain, but Helen
May was not particularly eager to reach it. For the first time she
forgot the gnawing heart-hunger of homesickness, and was content with
her present surroundings; content even with the goats that trotted
submisively ahead of Starr.
When a soft radiance drifted into the darkness and made it a luminous,
thin veil, Helen May gave a little cry and looked back. Since her hands
moved with the swing of her shoulders, Rabbit turned sharply and faced
the way she was looking, startled, displeased, but obedient. Starr
stopped abruptly and turned back, coming close up beside her.
"What's wrong?" he asked in an undertone. "See anything?"
"The moon," Helen May gave a hushed little laugh. "I'd
forgotten--forgotten I was alive, almost. I was just soaking in the
beauty of it through every pore. And then it got dark so I couldn't see
your footprints any more, and then such a queer, beautiful look came on
everything. I turned to look, and this little automatic pony turned to
look, too. But--isn't it wonderful? Everything, I mean. Just
everything--the whole world and the stars and the sky--"
Starr lifted an arm and laid it over Rabbit's neck, fingering the
silver-white mane absently. It brought him quite close to Helen May, so
that she could have put her hand on his shoulder.
"Yes. It's wonderful--when it ain't terrible," he said, his voice low.
After a silent minute she answered him, in the hushed tone that seemed
most in harmony with the tremendous sweep of sky and that great stretch
of plain and bare mountain. "I see what you mean. It is terrible even
when it's most wonderful. But one little human alone with it would be--"
"Sh-sh." he whispered. "Listen a minute. Did you ever _hear_ a big
silence like this?"
"No," she breathed eagerly. "Sh-sh--"
At first there was nothing save the whisper of a breeze that stirred the
greasewood and then was still. Full in their faces the moon swung clear
of the mountains behind San Bonito and hung there, a luminous yellow ball
in the deep, star-sprinkled purple. Across the desert it flung a faint,
straight pathway in the sand. Rabbit gave a long sigh, turned his head to
look back at his master, and then stood motionless again. Far on a
hilltop a coyote pointed his nose to the moon and yap-yap-yapped, with a
shrill, long-drawn tremolo wail that made the girl catch her breath.
Behind them the nine goats moved closer together and huddled afraid
beside a clump of bushes. The little breeze whispered again. A night bird
called in a hurried, frightened way, and upon the last notes came the
eerie cry of a little night owl.
The girl's face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes
shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may
not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid
sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out
there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically
while it slept.
Her eyes turned to Starr, whose name she did not know; who had twice come
riding out of the distance to do her some slight service before he rode
on into the distance that seemed so vast. Who was he? What petty round of
duties and pleasures made up his daily, intimate life? She did not know.
She did not feel the need of knowing.
Standing there with his thin face turned to the moon so that she saw,
clean-cut against the night, his strong profile; with one arm thrown
across the neck of his horse and his big hat tilted back so that she
could see the heavy, brown hair that framed his fine forehead; with the
look of a dreamer in his eyes and the wistfulness of the lonely on his
lips, all at once he seemed to be a part of the desert and its mysteries.
She could picture him living alone somewhere in its wild fastness, aloof
from the little things of life. He seemed to epitomize vividly the
meaning of a song she had often sung unmeaningly:
"From the desert I come to thee,
On my Arab shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire."
While she looked--while the words of that old _Bedouin Love Song_
thrummed through her memory, quite suddenly Starr began to sing, taking
up the song where her memory had brought her:
"Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!"
Softly he sang, as though he had forgotten that she was there. Softly,
but with a resonant, vibrating quality that made the words alive and
quivering with meaning.
Helen May caught her breath. How did he know she was thinking that song?
How did he chance to take it up just at the point where her memory had
carried it? Had he read her mind? She stared at him, her lips parted;
wondering, a little awed, but listening and thrilling to the human
sweetness of his tones. And when he had sung the last yearning note of
primitive desire, Starr turned his head and looked into her eyes.
Helen May felt as though he had taken her in his arms and kissed her
lingeringly. Yet he had not moved except to turn his face toward her. She
could not look away, could not even try to pull her eyes from his. It was
as though she yielded. She felt suffocated, though her breath came
quickly, a little unevenly.
Starr looked away, across the desert where the moon lighted it whitely.
It was as though he had released her. She felt flustered, disconcerted.
She could not understand herself or him, or the primary forces that had
moved them both. And why had he sung that _Bedouin Love Song_ just as she
was thinking it as something that explained him and identified him? It
was mysterious as the desert itself lying there so quiet under the moon.
It was weird as the cry of the coyote. It was uncanny as spirit rappings.
But she could not feel any resentment; only a thrill that was part
pleasure and part pain. She wondered if he had felt the same; if he knew.
But she could not bring herself to face even the thought of asking him.
It was like the night silence around them: speech would dwarf and cheapen
and distort.
Rabbit lifted his head again, perking his ears forward toward a new sound
that had nothing weird or mysterious about it; a sound that was
essentially earthly, material, modern, the distant purr of a high-powered
automobile on the trail away to their right. Starr turned his face that
way, listening as the horse listened. It seemed to Helen May as though he
had become again earthy and material and modern, with the desert love
song but the fading memory of a dream. He listened, and she received the
impression that something more than idle curiosity held him intent upon
the sound.
The purring persisted, lessened, grew louder again. Starr still looked
that way, listening intently. The machine swept nearer, so that the clear
night air carried the sounds distinctly to where they stood. Starr even
caught the humming of the rear gears and knew that only now and then does
a machine have that peculiar, droning hum; Starr studied it, tried to
impress the sound upon his memory.
The trail looped around the head of a sandy draw and wound over the crest
of a low ridge before it straightened out for a three-mile level run in
the direction of San Bonito, miles away. In walking, Starr had cut
straight across that gully and the loop, so that they had crossed the
trail twice in their journey thus far, and were still within half a mile
of the head of the loop. They should have been able to see the lights, or
at least the reflection of them on the ridge when they came to the draw.
But there was no bright path on sky or earth.
They heard the car ease down the hill, heard the grind of the gears as
the driver shifted to the intermediate for the climb that came after.
They heard the chug of the engine taking the steep grade. Then they
should have caught the white glare of the headlights as the car topped
the ridge. Starr knew that nothing obstructed the view, that in daylight
they could have seen the yellow-brown ribbon of trail where it curved
over the ridge. The machine was coming directly toward them for a short
distance, but there was no light whatever. Starr knew then that whoever
they were, they were running without lights.
"Well, I guess we'd better be ambling along," he said casually, when the
automobile had purred its way beyond hearing. "It's three or four miles
yet, and you're tired."
"Not so much." Helen May's voice was a little lower than usual, but that
was the only sign she gave of any recent deep emotion. "I'd as soon walk
awhile and let you ride." She shrank now from the thought of both riding.
"When you've ridden as far as I have," said Starr, "you'll know it's a
rest to get down and travel afoot for a few miles." He might have added
that it would have been a rest had he not been hampered by those
high-heeled riding boots, but consideration for her mental ease did not
permit him to mention it. He said no more, but started the goats ahead of
him and kept them moving in a straight line for Sunlight Basin. As
before, Rabbit followed slavishly in his footsteps, nose dropped to the
angle of placid acceptance, ears twitching forward and back so that he
would lose no slightest sound.
Helen May fell again under the spell of the desert and the moon. Starr,
walking steadily through the white-lighted barrenness with his shadow
always moving like a ghost before him, fitted once more into the desert.
Again she repeated mentally the words of the song:
Let the night-winds touch thy brow
With the breath of my burning sigh,
And melt thee to hear the vow
Of a love that shall not die!
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
And now the lines sung themselves through her brain with the memory of
Starr's voice. But Starr did not sing again, though Helen May, curious to
know if her thoughts held any power over him, gazed intently at his back
and willed him to sing. He did not look back at her, even when she
finally descended weakly to the more direct influence of humming the air
softly--but not too softly for him to hear.
Starr paid no attention whatever. He seemed to be thinking deeply--but he
did not seem to be thinking of Helen May, nor of desert love songs. Helen
May continued to watch him, but she was piqued at his calm indifference.
Why, she told herself petulantly, he paid more attention to those goats
than he did to her--and one would think, after that song and that
look.... But there she stopped, precipitately retreating from the thought
of that look.
He was a queer fellow, she told herself with careful tolerance and a
little condescension. A true product of the desert; as changeable and as
sphynxlike and as impossible from any personal, human standpoint. Look
how beautiful the desert could be, how terribly uplifting and calm
and--and big. Yet to-morrow it might be either a burning waste of heat
and sand and bare rock, or it might be a howling waste of wind and sand
(if one of those sand storms came up). To herself she called him the Man
of the Desert, and she added the word mysterious, and she also added two
lines of the song because they fitted exactly her conception of him as
she knew him. The lines were these:
From the desert I come to thee,
On my Arab shod with fire.
This, in spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an
Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused
of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with
velvet would have come nearer describing him.
So Helen May, who was something of a dreamer when Life let her alone long
enough, rode home through the moonlight and wove cloth-of-gold from the
magic of the night, and with the fairy fabric she clothed Starr--who was,
as we know, just an ordinary human being--so that he walked before her,
not as a plain, ungrammatical, sometimes profane young man who was
helping her home with her goats, but a mysterious, romantic figure
evolved somehow out of the vastness in which she lived; who would
presently recede again into the mysterious wild whence he had come.
It was foolish. She knew that it was foolish. But she had been living
rather harshly and rather materially for some time, and she hungered for
the romance of youth. Starr was the only person who had come to her
untagged by the sordid, everyday petty details of life. It did not hurt
him to be idealized, but it might have hurt Helen May a little to know
that he was pondering so earthly a subject as a big, black automobile
careering without lights across the desert and carrying four men who
looked like Mexicans.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOLMAN SOMMEKS, SCIENTIST
Helen May, under a last year's parasol of pink silk from which the sun
had drawn much of its pinkness and the wind and dust its freshness, sat
beside the road with her back against the post that held the macaroni
box, and waited for the stage. Her face did not need the pink light of
the parasol, for it was red enough after that broiling walk of yesterday.
The desert did not look so romantic by the garish light of midday, but
she stared out over it and saw, as with eyes newly opened to
appreciation, that there was a certain charm even in its garishness. She
had lost a good deal of moodiness and a good deal of discontent,
somewhere along the moonlight trail of last night, and she hummed a tune
while she waited. No need to tell you that it was: "_Till the sun grows
cold, till the stars are old_--" No need to tell you, either, of whom she
was thinking while she sang.
But part of the time she was wondering what mail she would get. Her chum
would write, of course; being a good, faithful chum, she would probably
continue to write two or three letters a week for the next three months.
After that she would drop to one long letter a month for awhile; and
after that--well, she was a faithful chum, but life persists in bearing
one past the eddy that holds friendship circling round and round in a
pool of memories. The chum's brother had written twice, however;
exuberant letters full of current comedy and full-blooded cheerfulness
and safely vague sentiment which he had partly felt at the time he wrote.
He had "joshed" Helen May a good deal about the goats, even to the extent
of addressing her as "Dear Goat-Lady" in the last letter, with the word
"Lady" underscored and scrawled the whole width of the page. Helen May
had puzzled over the obscure meaning of that, and had decided that it
would have sounded funny, perhaps, if he had said it that way, but that
it "didn't get over" on paper.
She wondered if he would write again, or if his correspondence would
prove as spasmodic, as easily interrupted as his attentions had been when
they were both in the same town. Chum's brother was a nice, big, comfy
kind of young man; the trouble was that he was too popular to give all
his interest to one girl. You know how it is when a man stands six feet
tall and has wavy hair and a misleading smile and a great, big,
deep-cushioned roadster built for two. Helen May appreciated his writing
two letters to her, he who hated so to write letters, but her faith in
the future was small. Still, he might write. It seemed worth while to
wait for the stage.
Just when she was telling herself that the stage was late, far over the
ridge rose the dust signal. Her pulse quickened expectantly; so much had
loneliness done for her. She watched it, and she tried not to admit to
herself that it did not look like the cloud kicked up by the four
trotting stage horses. She tried not to believe that the cloud was much
too small to have been made by their clattering progress. It must be the
stage. It was past time for it to arrive at the post. And it had not gone
by, for she had sent for a can of baking powder and a dozen lemons and
fifty cents worth of canned milk (the delicatessen habit of buying in
small quantities still hampered her) and, even if the stage had passed
earlier than usual, the stuff would have been left at the post for her,
even though there was no mail. But it could not have passed. She would
have seen the dust, that always hung low over the trail like the drooping
tail of a comet, and when the day was still took half an hour at least to
settle again for the next passer-by. And besides, she had come to know
the tracks the stage left in the trail. It _could not_ have passed. And
it had to come; it carried the government mail. And yet, that dust did
not look like the stage dust. (Trivial worries, you say? Then try living
forty miles from a post office, ten from the nearest neighbor, and
fifteen hundred from your dearly beloved Home Town. Try living there, not
because you want to but because you must; hating it, hungering for human
companionship. Try it with heat and wind and sand and great, arid
stretches of a land that is strange to you. Honestly, I think you would
have been out there just after sunrise to wait for that stage, and if it
were late you would have walked down the trail to meet it!)