“Why, your curios. This German, Fechtig, come along; he’d been buying up
a lot of Indian things out here, and he bought your whole outfit and
paid four thousand dollars down for it. The transaction made quite a
stir here in Tarpin. I’m not kicking. I made a good thing out of it. My
mules were busy three weeks packing the stuff out of there on their
backs, and I held the Dutchman up for a fancy price. He had packing
cases made at the wagon shop and took ’em up to the mesa full of straw
and sawdust, and packed the curios out there. I lost one of my mules,
too. You remember Jenny? Well, they were leading her down with a big box
on her, and right there where the trail runs so narrow around a bump in
the cliff above Black Canyon, she lost her balance and fell clean to the
bottom, her load on her. Pretty near a thousand feet, I guess. We never
went down to hold a post-mortem, but Fechtig paid for her like a
gentleman.”
I remember I sat down on the sofa in Hook’s office because I couldn’t
stand up any longer, and the smell of the horse blankets began to make
me deathly sick. In a minute I went over, like a girl in a novel. Hook
pulled me out on the sidewalk and gave me some whisky out of his pocket
flask.
When I felt better I asked him how long this German had been gone, and
what he had done with the things.
“Oh, he cleared out three weeks ago. He didn’t waste no time. He treated
everybody well, though; nobody’s sore at him. It’s your partner they’re
turned against. Fechtig took the stuff right along with him, chartered a
freight car, and travelled in the car with it. I reckon it’s on the
water by now. He took it straight through into Old Mexico, and was to
load it on a French boat. Seems he was afraid of having trouble getting
curiosities out of the United States ports. You know you can take
anything out of the City of Mexico.”
I had heard all I wanted to hear. I went to the hotel, got a room, and
lay down without undressing to wait for daylight. Hook was to drive me
and my trunk out to the mesa early the next morning. All I’d been
through in Washington was nothing to what I went through that night. I
thought Blake must have lost his mind. I didn’t for a minute believe
he’d meant to sell me out, but I cursed his stupidity and presumption. I
had never told him just how I felt about those things we’d dug out
together, it was the kind of thing one doesn’t talk about directly. But
he must have known; he couldn’t have lived with me all summer and fall
without knowing. And yet, until that night, I had never known myself
that I cared more about them than about anything else in the world.
At the first blink of daylight I jumped up from my damnable bed and went
round to the stable to rout Hook out of his bunk. We had breakfast and
got out of town with his best team. On the way to the mesa we had a
break-down, one of the old dry wheels smashed to splinters. Hook had to
unhitch and ride back to Tarpin and get another. Everything took an
unreasonably long time, and the afternoon was half gone when he put me
and my trunk down at the foot of the Black Canyon trail. Every inch of
that trail was dear to me, every delicate curve about the old piñon
roots, every chancy track along the face of the cliffs, and the deep
windings back into shrubbery and safety. The wild-currant bushes were in
bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a narrow ravine, the scent
of them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to
lie down and sleep. I wanted to see and touch everything, like home-sick
children when they come home.
When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell
slantingly through the little twisted piñons,--the light was all in
between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once
again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else, the
feeling of being on mesa, in a world above the world. And the air, my
God, what air!--Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it,
full of the smell of piñons--it was like breathing the sun, breathing
the colour of the sky. Down there behind me was the plain, already
streaked with shadow, violet and purple and burnt orange until it met
the horizon. Before me was the flat mesa top, thinly sprinkled with old
cedars that were not much taller than I, though their twisted trunks
were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black
shadow going ahead.
I made straight for the cabin, it was about three miles from the spot
where the trail emerged at the top. I saw smoke rising before I could
see the hut itself. Blake was in the doorway when I got there. I didn’t
look at his face, but I could feel that he looked at mine.
“Don’t say anything, Tom. Don’t rip me up until you hear all about it,”
he said as I came toward him.
“I’ve heard enough to about do for me,” I blurted out. “What made you do
it, Blake? What made you do it?”
“It was a chance in a million, boy. There wasn’t any time to consult
you. There’s only one man in thousands that wants to buy relics and pay
real money for them. I could see how your Washington campaign was coming
out. I know you’d thought about big figures, so had I. But that was all
a pipe dream. Four thousand’s not so bad, you don’t pick it up every
day. And he bore all the expenses. Why, it was a terrible expensive job,
getting all that frail stuff out of here. Who else would have bought it,
I want to know? We’d have had to pack it around at Harvey Houses,
selling it at a dollar a bowl, like the poor Indians do. I took the best
chance going, for both of us, Tom.”
I didn’t say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood
outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came
out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the
swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs.
It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from
weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for
supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the
lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn’t go into the bunk-room,
for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me
as you hear people talking when you are asleep.
“Who else would have bought them?” he kept saying. “Folks make a lot of
fuss over such things, but they don’t want to pay good money for them.”
When I at last told him that such a thing as selling them had never
entered my head, I’m sure he thought I was lying. He reminded me about
how we used to talk of getting big money from the Government.
I admitted I’d hoped we’d be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of
some kind, for our discovery. “But I never thought of selling them,
because they weren’t mine to sell--nor yours! They belonged to this
country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like
you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You’ve gone
and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of relics of its own.
You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus.”
“That man was innocent. It was a frame-up,” Blake murmured. It was a
point he would never pass up.
“Whether he’s guilty or not, you are! If there was only anybody in
Washington I could telegraph to, and have that German held up at the
port!”
“That’s just it. If there was anybody in Washington that cared a damn, I
wouldn’t have sold ’em. But you pretty well found out there ain’t.”
“We could have kept them, then,” I told him. “I’ve got a strong back.
I’m not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to
my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago. I made all my plans on the
train, coming back.” (It was a lie, I hadn’t.) “I meant to get a job on
the railroad and keep our find right here, and come back to it when I
had a lay-off. I think a lot more of it now than before I went to
Washington. And after a while, when that Exposition is over and the
Smithsonian people get home, they would come out here all right. I’ve
learned enough from them so that I could go on with it myself.”
Blake reminded me that I had my way to make in the world, and that I
wanted to go to school. “That money’s in the bank this minute, in your
name, and you’re going to college on it. You’re not going to be a
day-labourer like me. After you’ve got your sheepskin, then you can
divide with me.
“You think I’d touch that money?” I looked squarely at him for the first
time. “No more than if you’d stolen it. You made the sale. Get what you
can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was
digging those things up for what I could sell them for?”
Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of
them, but he’d always supposed I meant to “realize” on them, just as he
did, and that it would come to money in the end. “Everything does,” he
added.
“If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and
offered me four million instead of four thousand, I’d have refused him.
There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its
people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved
through the ages by a miracle, and handed on to you and me, two poor
cow-punchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to
keep a trust. I’d as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother
Eve--I’d have sold any living woman first.”
“Save your tears,” said Roddy grimly. “She refused to leave us. She went
to the bottom of Black Canyon and carried Hook’s best mule along with
her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded Jenny out an
inch or so too far from the canyon wall.”
This painful interview went on for hours. I walked up and down the
kitchen trying to make Blake understand the kind of value those objects
had had for me. Unfortunately, I succeeded. He sat slumping on the
bench, his elbows on the table, shading his eyes from the lantern with
his hands.
“There’s no need to keep this up,” he said at last. “You’re away out of
my depth, but I think I get you. You might have given me some of this
Fourth of July talk a little earlier in the game. I didn’t know you
valued that stuff any different than anything else a fellow might run on
to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise.”
“I suppose you gave him my diary along with the rest?”
“No,” said Blake, his voice growing gloomier and darker, “that’s in the
Eagle’s Nest, where you hid it. That’s your private property. I supposed
I had some share in the relics we dug up--you always spoke of it that
way. But I see now I was working for you like a hired man, and while you
were away I sold your property.”
I said again it wasn’t mine or his. He took something out of the pocket
of his flannel shirt and laid it on the table. I saw it was a bank
passbook, with my name on the yellow cover.
“You may as well keep it,” I said. “I’ll never touch it. You had no
right to deposit it in my name. The townspeople are sore about the
money, and they’ll hold it against me.”
“No they won’t. Can’t you trust me to fix that?”
“I don’t know what I can trust you with, Blake. I don’t know where I’m
at with you,” I said.
He got up and began putting on his coat. “Motives don’t count, eh?” he
said, his face turned away, as he put his arm into the sleeve.
“They would in anything of our own, between you and me,” I told him. “If
it was my money you’d lost gambling, or my girl you’d made free with, we
could fight it out, and maybe be friends again. But this is different.”
“I see. You make it clear.” He was quietly stirring around as he spoke.
He got his old knap-sack off its nail on the wall, opened his trunk and
took out some underwear and socks and a couple of shirts. After he had
put these into the bag, he slung it over one shoulder, and his canvas
water-bag over the other. I let these preparations go on without a word.
He went to the cupboard over the stove and put some sticks of chocolate
into his pocket, then his pipe and a bag of tobacco. Presently I said
he’d break his neck if he tried riding down the trail in the dark.
“I’m not riding the trail,” he replied curtly. “I’m going down the quick
way. My horse is grazing in Cow Canyon.”
“I noticed the river’s high. It’s dangerous crossing,” I remarked.
“I got over that way a few days ago. I’m surprised at you, using such
common expressions!” he said sarcastically. “_Dangerous crossing_; it’s
painted on signboards all over the world!” He walked out of the cabin
without looking back. I followed him to the V-shaped break in the rim
rock, hardly larger than a man’s body, where the spliced tree-trunks
made a swinging ladder down the face of the cliff. I wanted to protest,
but only succeeded in finding fault.
“You’ll catch your knap-sack on those forks and come to grief.”
“That’s my look-out.”
By this time my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and I could
see Blake quite clearly--the stubborn, crouching set of his shoulders
that I used to notice when he first came to Pardee and was drinking all
the time. There was an ache in my arms to reach out and detain him, but
there was something else that made me absolutely powerless to do so. He
stepped down and settled his foot into the first fork. Then he stopped a
moment and straightened his pack, buttoned his coat up to the chin, and
pulled his hat on tighter. There was always a night draught in the
canyon. He gripped the trunk with his hands. “Well,” he said with grim
cheerfulness, “here’s luck! And I’m glad it’s you that’s doing this to
me, Tom; not me that’s doing it to you.”
His head disappeared below the rim. I could hear the trees creak under
his heavy body, and the chains rattle a little at the splicings. I lay
down on the ledge and listened. I could hear him for a long way down,
and the sounds were comforting to me, though I didn’t realize it. Then
the silence closed in. I went to sleep that night hoping I would never
waken.