THE DESERT
It was only recently that Clint Wadley had become a man of wealth, and
life in the Panhandle was even yet very primitive according to
present-day standards. There was no railroad within one hundred and
fifty miles of the A T O ranch. Once in two weeks one of the cowboys
rode to Clarendon to get the mail and to buy small supplies. Otherwise
contact with the world was limited to occasional visits to town.
As a little girl Ramona had lived in a one-room house built of round
logs, with a stick-and-mud chimney, a door of clapboards daubed with mud
at the chinks, and a dirt floor covered with puncheons. She had slept in
a one-legged bedstead fitted into the wall, through the sides and ends
of which bed, at intervals of eight inches, holes had been bored to
admit of green rawhide strips for slats. She had sat on a home-made
three-legged stool at a home-made table in homespun clothes and eaten a
dish of cush[8] for her supper. She had watched her aunt make soap out
of lye dripping from an ash-hopper. The only cooking utensils in the
house had been a Dutch oven, a three-legged skillet, a dinner-pot, a
tea-kettle, a big iron shovel, and a pair of pot-hooks suspended from an
iron that hung above the open fire.
But those were memories of her childhood in southern Texas. With the
coming of prosperity Clint had sent his children to Tennessee to school,
and Ramona had been patiently trained to the feebleness of purpose
civilization in those days demanded of women of her class and section.
She had been taught to do fancy needlework and to play the piano as a
parlor accomplishment. It had been made plain to her that her business
in life was to marry and keep the home fires burning, and her schooling
had been designed, not to prepare her as a mate for her future husband,
but to fit her with the little graces that might entice him into
choosing her for a wife.
Upon her return to the ranch Ramona had compromised between her training
and her inheritance. She took again to horseback riding and to shooting,
even though she read a good deal and paid due attention to her
pink-and-white complexion.
So that when she looked up from the cavern in which she was buried and
caught a gleam of a star in the slit of blue sky above, she was not so
helpless as her schooling had been designed to make her. The girl was
compact of supple strength. Endurance and a certain toughness of fiber
had come to her from old Clint Wadley.
She began the climb, taking advantage of every bit of roughness, of
every projection in the almost sheer wall. A knob of feldspar, a stunted
shrub growing from a crevice, a fault in the rock structure, offered
here and there toe-or hand-holds. She struggled upward, stopped more
than once by the smooth surface against which her soft warm body was
pressing. On such occasions she would lower herself again, turn to the
right or the left, and work toward another objective.
Ramona knew that the least slip, the slightest failure of any one of her
muscles, would send her plunging down to the bottom of the crevasse. The
worst of it was that she could not put any dependence upon her injured
leg. It might see her through or it might not.
It was within a few feet of the top, just below the arrowweed bush, that
she came to an _impasse_. The cold wall offered no hand-hold by which
she could gain the few inches that would bring her within reach of the
bunched roots. She undid her belt, threw one end of it over the body of
the bush, and worked it carefully down until she could buckle it. By
means of this she went up hand over hand till she could reach the
arrowweed. Her knee found support in the loop of the belt, and in
another moment she had zigzagged herself inch by inch over the edge to
the flat surface above.
No sign of the Apaches was to be seen. 'Mona recovered her belt and
began to move up the rock spur toward the summit of the hill. A sound
stopped her in her tracks. It was the beating of a tom-tom.
She knew the Indians must be camped by the lake. They were probably
having a feast and dances. In any case she could not strike direct for
home. She must keep on this side of the hill, make a wide circuit, and
come in from the west.
Already her leg was paining her a good deal. Since five o'clock in the
morning she had eaten nothing. Her throat was parched with thirst. But
these were details that must be forgotten. She had to tramp more than
twenty miles through the desert regardless of her physical condition.
The girl went at it doggedly. She limped along, getting wearier every
mile of the way. But it was not until she discovered that she was lost
to all sense of direction that she broke down and wept. The land here
was creased by swales, one so like another that in the darkness she had
gone astray and did not know north from south.
After tears came renewed resolution. She tried to guide herself by the
stars, but though she could hold a straight course there was no
assurance in her mind that she was going toward the A T O. Each step
might be taking her farther from home. A lime kiln burned in her throat.
She was so worn out from lack of food and the tremendous strain under
which she had been carrying on that her knees buckled under her weight
as she stumbled through the sand. The bad ankle complained continuously.
In this vast solitude there was something weird and eerie that shook her
courage. Nor was the danger all fantastic imaginings. The Indians might
yet discover her. She might wander far from beaten trails of travel and
die of thirst as so many newcomers had done. Possibilities of disaster
trooped through her mind.
She was still a child, on the sunny side of seventeen. So it was natural
that when she sat down to rest her ankle she presently began to sob
again, and that in her exhaustion she cried herself to sleep.
When her eyes opened, the sun was peeping over the desert horizon. She
could tell directions now. The A T O ranch must be far to the northeast
of where she was. But scarcely a mile from her ran a line of straggling
brush. It must be watered by a stream. She hobbled forward painfully to
relieve the thirst that was already a torment to her.
She breasted the rise of a little hill and looked down a gentle slope
toward the thicket. For a moment her heart lost a beat. A trickle of
smoke was rising from a camp-fire and a man was bending over it. He was
in the clothes of a white man. Simultaneously there came to her the
sound of a shot.
From her parched throat there came a bleating little cry. She hurried
forward, and as she went she called again and still again. She was
pitifully anxious lest the campers ride away before they should discover
her.
A man with a gun in his hand moved toward her from the creek. She gave a
little sobbing cry and stumbled toward him.
[Footnote 8: Cush is made of old corn bread and biscuits in milk, beaten
to a batter and fried in bacon grease with salt.]