THE next morning the whinnying of my saddle-horse in the shed roused me.
I took him down to the foot of the trail where I’d left my trunk, and
packed my things up to the cabin on his back. I sat up late that night,
waiting for Blake, though I knew he wouldn’t come. A few days later I
rode into Tarpin for news of him. Bill Hook showed me Roddy’s horse. He
had sold him to the barn for sixty dollars. The station-master told me
Blake had bought a ticket to Winslow, Arizona. I wired the
station-master and the dispatcher at Winslow, but they could give me no
information. Father Duchene came along, on his rounds, and I told him
the whole story.
He thought Blake would come back sometime, that I’d only miss him if I
went out to look for him. He advised me to stay on the mesa that summer
and get ahead with my studies, work up my Spanish grammar and my Latin.
He had friends all along the Santa Fé, and he was sure we could catch
Blake by advertising in the local papers along the road; Albuquerque,
Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams, Los Angeles. After a few days with him, I
went back to the mesa to wait.
I’ll never forget the night I got back. I crossed the river an hour
before sunset and hobbled my horse in the wide bottom of Cow Canyon. The
moon was up, though the sun hadn’t set, and it had that glittering
silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies
look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do
from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay
down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the
valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around
me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed
flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze
against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only
the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could
still see the copper glow in the piñons along the edge of the top
ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale
yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped
into perfectly clear water.
I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I
was ever really on the mesa at all--the first night that all of me was
there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came
together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you
begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that
made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process,
going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession.
The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to
this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious
emotion. I had read of filial piety in the Latin poets, and I knew that
was what I felt for this place. It had formerly been mixed up with other
motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.
What that night began lasted all summer. I stayed on the mesa until
November. It was the first time I’d ever studied methodically, or
intelligently. I got the better of the Spanish grammar and read the
twelve books of the _Æneid_. I studied in the morning, and in the
afternoon I worked at clearing away the mess the German had made in
packing--tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for
the right explorer. I can scarcely hope that life will give me another
summer like that one. It was my high tide. Every morning, when the sun’s
rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow,
I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of
having lost everything. Nothing tired me. Up there alone, a close
neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct
way. And at night, when I watched it drop down behind the edge of the
plain below me, I used to feel that I couldn’t have borne another hour
of that consuming light, that I was full to the brim, and needed dark
and sleep.
All that summer, I never went up to the Eagle’s Nest to get my
diary--indeed, it’s probably there yet. I didn’t feel the need of that
record. It would have been going backward. I didn’t want to go back and
unravel things step by step. Perhaps I was afraid that I would lose the
whole in the parts. At any rate, I didn’t go for my record.
During those months I didn’t worry much about poor Roddy. I told myself
the advertisements would surely get him--I knew his habit of reading
newspapers. There are times when one’s vitality is too high to be
clouded, too elastic to stay down. Hurrying from my cabin in the morning
to the spot in the Cliff City where I studied under a cedar, I used to
be frightened at my own heartlessness. But the feel of the narrow
moccasin-worn trail in the flat rock made my feet glad, like a good
taste in the mouth, and I’d forget all about Blake without knowing it. I
found I was reading too fast; so I began to commit long passages of
Virgil to memory--if it hadn’t been for that, I might have forgotten how
to use my voice, or gone to talking to myself. When I look into the
_Æneid_ now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and
another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with
flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a
rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and
courage--behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.
Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it.
Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and
blue, a life in itself.
Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O’Briens again,
working on the section and studying with Father Duchene and trying to
get some word of Blake. Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I
couldn’t fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I
questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible
way, had all the Santa Fé operatives and the police and the Catholic
missionaries on the watch for him, offered a thousand dollars reward for
whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchene and our
friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I
understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites
faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I’m not very
sanguine about good fortune for myself. I’ll be called to account when I
least expect it.
In the spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here
and walked into your garden, and the rest you know.