little streaks and ridges seemed to race along the boat; strange
gurglings rose from under the bow. Shefford stood on tiptoe to see the
break in the river below. Swiftly it came into sight--a wonderful, long,
smooth, red slant of water, a swelling mound, a huge back-curling wave,
another and another, a sea of frothy, uplifting crests, leaping and
tumbling and diminishing down to the narrowing apex of the rapid. It was
a frightful sight, yet it thrilled Shefford. Joe worked the steering-oar
back and forth and headed the boat straight for the middle of the
incline. The boat reached the round rim, gracefully dipped with a heavy
sop, and went shooting down. The wind blew wet in Shefford's face. He
stood erect, thrilling, fascinated, frightened. Then he seemed to feel
himself lifted; the curling wave leaped at the boat; there was a shock
that laid him flat; and when he rose to his knees all about him was roar
and spray and leaping, muddy waves. Shock after shock jarred the boat.
Splashes of water stung his face. And then the jar and the motion, the
confusion and roar, gradually lessened until presently Shefford rose to
see smooth water ahead and the long, trembling rapid behind.
“Get busy, bailer,” yelled Joe. “Pretty soon you'll be glad you have to
bail--so you can't see!”
There were several inches of water in the bottom of the boat and
Shefford learned for the first time the expediency of a shovel in the
art of bailing.
“That tarpaulin worked powerful good,” went on Joe. “And it saves the
women. Now if it just don't bust on a big wave! That one back there was
little.”
When Shefford had scooped out all the water he went forward to see how
Fay and Jane and Lassiter had fared. The women were pale, but composed.
They had covered their heads.
“But the dreadful roar!” exclaimed Fay.
Lassiter looked shaken for once.
“Shore I'd rather taken a chance meetin' them Mormons on the way out,”
he said.
Shefford spoke with an encouraging assurance which he did not himself
feel. Almost at the moment he marked a silence that had fallen into the
cañon; then it broke to a low, dull, strange roar.
“Aha! Hear that?” The Mormon shook his shaggy head. “Reckon we're in
Cataract Cañon. We'll be standing on end from now on. Hang on to her,
boys!”
Danger of this unusual kind had brought out a peculiar levity in the
somber Mormon--a kind of wild, gay excitement. His eyes rolled as he
watched the river ahead and he puffed out his cheek with his tongue.
The rugged, overhanging walls of the cañon grew sinister in Shefford's
sight. They were jaws. And the river--that made him shudder to look down
into it. The little whirling pits were eyes peering into his, and they
raced on with the boat, disappeared, and came again, always with the
little, hollow gurgles.
The craft drifted swiftly and the roar increased. Another rapid seemed
to move up into view. It came at a bend in the cañon. When the breeze
struck Shefford's cheeks he did not this time experience exhilaration.
The current accelerated its sliding motion and bore the flatboat
straight for the middle of the curve. Shefford saw the bend, a long,
dark, narrow, gloomy cañon, and a stretch of contending waters,
then, crouching low, he waited for the dip, the race, the shock.
They came--the last stopping the boat--throwing it aloft--letting
it drop--and crests of angry waves curled over the side. Shefford,
kneeling, felt the water slap around him, and in his ears was a
deafening roar. There were endless moments of strife and hell and flying
darkness of spray all about him, and under him the rocking boat. When
they lessened--ceased in violence--he stood ankle-deep in water, and
then madly he began to bail.
Another roar deadened his ears, but he did not look up from his toil.
And when he had to get down to avoid the pitch he closed his eyes. That
rapid passed and with more water to bail, he resumed his share in the
manning of the crude craft. It was more than a share--a tremendous
responsibility to which he bent with all his might. He heard Joe
yell--and again--and again. He heard the increasing roars one after
another till they seemed one continuous bellow. He felt the shock, the
pitch, the beating waves, and then the lessening power of sound and
current. That set him to his task. Always in these long intervals of
toil he seemed to see, without looking up, the growing proportions
of the cañon. And the river had become a living, terrible thing. The
intervals of his tireless effort when he scooped the water overboard
were fleeting, and the rides through rapid after rapid were endless
periods of waiting terror. His spirit and his hope were overwhelmed by
the rush and roar and fury.
Then, as he worked, there came a change--a rest to deafened ears--a
stretch of river that seemed quiet after chaos--and here for the first
time he bailed the boat clear of water.
Jane and Fay were huddled in a corner, with the flapping tarpaulin now
half fallen over them. They were wet and muddy. Lassiter crouched like
a man dazed by a bad dream, and his white hair hung, stained and
bedraggled, over his face. The Indian and the Mormon, grim, hard, worn,
stood silent at the oar.
The afternoon was far advanced and the sun had already descended below
the western ramparts. A cool breeze blew up the cañon, laden with a
sound that was the same, yet not the same, as those low, dull roars
which Shefford dreaded more and more.
Joe Lake turned his ear to the breeze. A stronger puff brought a heavy,
quivering rumble. This time he did not vent his gay and wild defiance to
the river. He bent lower--listened. Then as the rumble became a strange,
deep, reverberating roll, as if the monstrous river were rolling huge
stones down a subterranean cañon, Shefford saw with dilating eyes that
the Mormon's hair was rising stiff upon his head.
“Hear that!” said Joe, turning an ashen face to Shefford. “We'll
drop off the earth now. Hang on to the girl, so if we go you can go
together.... And, pard, if you've a God--pray!”
Nas Ta Bega faced the bend from whence that rumble came, and he was the
same dark, inscrutable, impassive Indian as of old. What was death to
him?
Shefford felt the strong, rushing love of life surge in him, and it was
not for himself he thought, but for Fay and the happiness she merited.
He went to her, patted the covered head, and tried with words choking in
his throat to give hope. And he leaned with hands gripping the gunwale,
with eyes wide open, ready for the unknown.
The river made a quick turn and from round the bend rumbled a terrible
uproar. The current racing that way was divided or uncertain, and it
gave strange motion to the boat. Joe and Nas Ta Bega shoved desperately
upon the oar, all to no purpose. The currents had their will. The bow of
the boat took the place of the stern. Then swift at the head of a curved
incline it shot beyond the bulging wall.
And Shefford saw an awful place before them. The cañon had narrowed to
half its width, and turned almost at right angles. The huge clamor of
appalling sound came from under the cliff where the swollen river had to
pass and where there was not space. The rapid rushed in gigantic swells
right upon the wall, boomed against it, climbed and spread and fell
away, to recede and gather new impetus, to leap madly on down the
cañon.
Shefford went to his knees, clasped Fay, and Jane, too. But facing this
appalling thing he had to look. Courage and despair came to him at the
last. This must be the end. With long, buoyant swing the boat sailed
down, shot over the first waves, was caught and lifted upon the great
swell and impelled straight toward the cliff. Huge whirlpools raced
alongside, and from them came a horrible, engulfing roar. Monstrous
bulges rose on the other side. All the stupendous power of that mighty
river of downward-rushing silt swung the boat aloft, up and up, as the
swell climbed the wall. Shefford, with transfixed eyes and harrowed
soul, watched the wet black wall. It loomed down upon him. The stern of
the boat went high. Then when the crash that meant doom seemed imminent
the swell spread and fell back from the wall and the boat never struck
at all. By some miraculous chance it had been favored by a strange
and momentary receding of the huge spent swell. Then it slid back, was
caught and whirled by the current into a red, frothy, up-flung rapids
below. Shefford bowed his head over Fay and saw no more, nor felt nor
heard. What seemed a long time after that the broken voice of the Mormon
recalled him to his labors.
The boat was half full of water. Nas Ta Bega scooped out great sheets
of it with his hands. Shefford sprang to aid him, found the shovel, and
plunged into the task. Slowly but surely they emptied the boat. And then
Shefford saw that twilight had fallen. Joe was working the craft toward
a narrow bank of sand, to which, presently, they came, and the Indian
sprang out to moor to a rock.
The fugitives went ashore and, weary and silent and drenched, they
dropped in the warm sand.
But Shefford could not sleep. The river kept him awake. In the distance
it rumbled, low, deep, reverberating, and near at hand it was a thing of
mutable mood. It moaned, whined, mocked, and laughed. It had the soul of
a devil. It was a river that had cut its way to the bowels of the earth,
and its nature was destructive. It harbored no life. Fighting its way
through those dead walls, cutting and tearing and wearing, its heavy
burden of silt was death, destruction, and decay. A silent river, a
murmuring, strange, fierce, terrible, thundering river of the desert!
Even in the dark it seemed to wear the hue of blood.
All night long Shefford heard it, and toward the dark hours before dawn,
when a restless, broken sleep came to him, his dreams were dreams of a
river of sounds.
All the beautiful sounds he knew and loved he heard--the sigh of the
wind in the pines, the mourn of the wolf, the cry of the laughing-gull,
the murmur of running brooks, the song of a child, the whisper of a
woman. And there were the boom of the surf, the roar of the north wind
in the forest, the roll of thunder. And there were the sounds not of
earth--a river of the universe rolling the planets, engulfing the stars,
pouring the sea of blue into infinite space.
Night with its fitful dreams passed. Dawn lifted the ebony gloom out
of the cañon and sunlight far up on the ramparts renewed Shefford's
spirit. He rose and awoke the others. Fay's wistful smile still held its
faith. They ate of the gritty, water-soaked food. Then they embarked.
The current carried them swiftly down and out of hearing of the last
rapid. The character of the river and the cañon changed. The current
lessened to a slow, smooth, silent, eddying flow. The walls grew
straight, sheer, gloomy, and vast. Shefford noted these features, but
he was listening so hard for the roar of the next rapid that he scarcely
appreciated them. All the fugitives were listening. Every bend in the
cañon--and now the turns were numerous--might hold a rapid. Shefford
strained his ears. He imagined the low, dull, strange rumble. He had it
in his ears, yet there was the growing sensation of silence.
“Shore this 's a dead place,” muttered Lassiter.
“She's only slowed up for a bigger plunge,” replied Joe. “Listen! Hear
that?”
But there was no true sound, Joe only imagined what he expected and
hated and dreaded to hear.
Mile after mile they drifted through the silent gloom between those
vast and magnificent walls. After the speed, the turmoil, the whirling,
shrieking, thundering, the never-ceasing sound and change and motion
of the rapids above, this slow, quiet drifting, this utter, absolute
silence, these eddying stretches of still water below, worked strangely
upon Shefford's mind and he feared he was going mad.
There was no change to the silence, no help for the slow drift, no
lessening of the strain. And the hours of the day passed as moments,
the sun crossed the blue gap above, the golden lights hung on the upper
walls, the gloom returned, and still there was only the dead, vast,
insupportable silence.
There came bends where the current quickened, ripples widened, long
lanes of little waves roughened the surface, but they made no sound.
And then the fugitives turned through a V-shaped vent in the cañon.
The ponderous walls sheered away from the river. There was space and
sunshine, and far beyond this league-wide open rose vermilion-colored
cliffs. A mile below the river disappeared in a dark, boxlike passage
from which came a rumble that made Shefford's flesh creep.
The Mormon flung high his arms and let out the stentorian yell that had
rolled down to the fugitives as they waited at the mouth of Nonnezoshe
Boco. But now it had a wilder, more exultant note. Strange how he
shifted his gaze to Fay Larkin!
“Girl! Get up and look!” he called. “The Ferry! The Ferry!”
Then he bent his brawny back over the steering-oar, and the clumsy craft
slowly turned toward the left-hand shore, where a long, low bank of
green willows and cottonwoods gave welcome relief to the eyes. Upon the
opposite side of the river Shefford saw a boat, similar to the one he
was in, moored to the bank.
“Shore, if I ain't losin' my eyes, I seen an Injun with a red blanket,”
said Lassiter.
“Yes, Lassiter,” cried Shefford. “Look, Fay! Look, Jane! See!
Indians--hogans--mustangs--there above the green bank!”
The boat glided slowly shoreward. And the deep, hungry, terrible rumble
of the remorseless river became something no more to dread.
XX. WILLOW SPRINGS
Two days' travel from the river, along the saw-toothed range of Echo
Cliffs, stood Presbrey's trading-post, a little red-stone square house
in a green and pretty valley called Willow Springs.
It was nearing the time of sunset--that gorgeous hour of color in the
Painted Desert--when Shefford and his party rode down upon the post.
The scene lacked the wildness characteristic of Kayenta or Red Lake.
There were wagons and teams, white men and Indians, burros, sheep,
lambs, mustangs saddled and unsaddled, dogs, and chickens. A young,
sweet-faced woman stood in the door of the post and she it was who first
sighted the fugitives. Presbrey was weighing bags of wool on a scale,
and when she called he lazily turned, as if to wonder at her eagerness.
Then he flung up his head, with its shock of heavy hair, in a start of
surprise, and his florid face lost its lazy indolence to become wreathed
in a huge smile.
“Haven't seen a white person in six months!” was his extraordinary
greeting.
An hour later Shefford, clean-shaven, comfortably clothed once more,
found himself a different man; and when he saw Fay in white again, with
a new and indefinable light shining through that old, haunting shadow in
her eyes, then the world changed and he embraced perfect happiness.
There was a dinner such as Shefford had not seen for many a day, and
such as Fay had never seen, and that brought to Jane Withersteen's eyes
the dreamy memory of the bountiful feasts which, long years ago, had
been her pride. And there was a story told to the curious trader and
his kind wife--a story with its beginning back in those past years, of
riders of the purple sage, of Fay Larkin as a child and then as a wild
girl in Surprise Valley, of the flight down Nonnezoshe Boco an the
cañon, of a great Mormon and a noble Indian.
Presbrey stared with his deep-set eyes and wagged his tousled head and
stared again; then with the quick perception of the practical desert man
he said:
“I'm sending teamsters in to Flagstaff to-morrow. Wife and I will go
along with you. We've light wagons. Three days, maybe--or four--and
we'll be there.... Shefford, I'm going to see you marry Fay Larkin!”
Fay and Jane and Lassiter showed strangely against this background
of approaching civilization. And Shefford realized more than ever the
loneliness and isolation and wildness of so many years for them.
When the women had retired Shefford and the men talked a while. Then Joe
Lake rose to stretch his big frame.
“Friends, reckon I'm all in,” he said. “Good night.” In passing he laid
a heavy hand on Shefford's shoulder. “Well, you got out. I've only a
queer notion how. But SOME ONE besides an Indian and a Mormon guided you
out!... Be good to the girl.... Good-by, pard!”
Shefford grasped the big hand and in the emotion of the moment did not
catch the significance of Joe's last words.
Later Shefford stepped outside into the starlight for a few moments'
quiet walk and thought before he went to bed. It was a white night. The
coyotes were yelping. The stars shone steadfast, bright, cold. Nas Ta
Bega stalked out of the shadow of the house and joined Shefford. They
walked in silence. Shefford's heart was too full for utterance and the
Indian seldom spoke at any time. When Shefford was ready to go in Nas Ta
Bega extended his hand.
“Good-by--Bi Nai!” he said, strangely, using English and Navajo in what
Shefford supposed to be merely good night. The starlight shone full upon
the dark, inscrutable face of the Indian. Shefford bade him good night
and then watched him stride away in the silver gloom.
But next morning Shefford understood. Nas Ta Bega and Joe Lake were
gone. It was a shock to Shefford. Yet what could he have said to either?
Joe had shirked saying good-by to him and Fay. And the Indian had gone
out of Shefford's life as he had come into it.
What these two men represented in Shefford's uplift was too great for
the present to define, but they and the desert that had developed them
had taught him the meaning of life. He might fail often, since failure
was the lot of his kind, but could he ever fail again in faith in man or
God while he had mind to remember the Indian and the Mormon?
Still, though he placed them on a noble height and loved them well,
there would always abide with him a sorrow for the Mormon and a
sleepless and eternal regret for that Indian on his lonely cedar slope
with the spirits of his vanishing race calling him.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Willow Springs appeared to be a lively place that morning. Presbrey was
gay and his sweet-faced wife was excited. The teamsters were a jolly,
whistling lot. And the lean mustangs kicked and bit at one another. The
trader had brought out two light wagons for the trip, and, after the
manner of desert men, desired to start at sunrise.
Far across the Painted Desert towered the San Francisco peaks,
black-timbered, blue-canyoned, purple-hazed, with white snow, like the
clouds, around their summits.
Jane Withersteen looked at the radiant Fay and lived again in her
happiness. And at last excitement had been communicated to the old
gun-man.
“Shore we're goin' to live with Fay an' John, an' be near Venters an'
Bess, an' see the blacks again, Jane.... An' Venters will tell you, as
he did me, how Wrangle run Black Star off his legs!”
All connected with that early start was sweet, sad, hopeful.
And so they rode away from Willow Springs, through the green fields of
alfalfa and cotton wood, down the valley with its smoking hogans and
whistling mustangs and scarlet-blanketed Indians, and out upon the bare,
ridgy, colorful desert toward the rosy sunrise.
EPILOGUE
On the outskirts of a little town in Illinois there was a farm of
rolling pasture-land. And here a beautiful meadow, green and red in
clover, merged upon an orchard in the midst of which a brown-tiled roof
showed above the trees.
One afternoon in May a group of people, strangely agitated, walked down
a shady lane toward the meadow.
“Wal, Jane, I always knew we'd get a look at them hosses again--I shore
knew,” Lassiter was saying in the same old, cool, careless drawl. But
his clawlike hands shook a little.
“Oh! will they know me?” asked Jane Withersteen, turning to a stalwart
man--no other than the dark-faced Venters, her rider of other days.
“Know you? I'll bet they will,” replied Venters. “What do you say,
Bess?”
The shadow brightened in Bess's somber blue eyes, as if his words had
recalled her from a sad and memorable past.
“Black Star will know her, surely,” replied Bess. “Sometimes he points
his nose toward the west and watches as if he saw the purple slopes and
smelt the sage of Utah! He has never forgotten. But Night has grown deaf
and partly blind of late. I doubt if he'd remember.”
Shefford and Fay walked arm in arm in the background.
Out in the meadow two horses were grazing. They were sleek, shiny,
long-maned, long-tailed, black as coal, and, though old, still splendid
in every line.
“Do you remember them?” whispered Shefford.
“Oh, I only needed to see Black Star,” murmured Fay, her voice
quivering. “I can remember being lifted on his back.... How strange! It
seems so long ago.... Look! Mother Jane is going out to them.”
Jane Withersteen advanced alone through the clover, and it was with
unsteady steps. Presently she halted. What glorious and bitter memories
were expressed in her strange, poignant call!
Black Star started and swept up his noble head and looked. But Night
went on calmly grazing. Then Jane called again--the same strange call,
only louder, and this time broken. Black Star raised his head higher
and he whistled a piercing blast. He saw Jane; he knew her as he had
remembered the call; and he came pounding toward her. She met him,
encircled his neck with her arms, and buried her face in his mane.
“Shore I reckon I'd better never say any more about Wrangle runnin' the
blacks off their legs thet time,” muttered Lassiter, as if to himself.
“Lassiter, you only dreamed that race,” replied Venters, with a smile.
“Oh, Bern, isn't it good that Black Star remembered her--that she'll
have him--something left of her old home?” asked Bess, wistfully.
“Indeed it is good. But, Bess, Jane Withersteen will find a new spirit
and new happiness here.”
Jane came toward them, leading both horses. “Dear friends, I am happy.
To-day I bury all regrets. Of the past I shall remember only--my riders
of the purple sage.”
Venters smiled his gladness. “And you--Lassiter--what shall you
remember?” he queried.
The old gun-man looked at Jane and then at his clawlike hands and then
at Fay. His eyes lost their shadow and began to twinkle.
“Wal, I rolled a stone once, but I reckon now thet time Wrangle--”
“Lassiter, I said you dreamed that race. Wrangle never beat the blacks,”
interrupted Venters.... “And you, Fay, what shall you remember?”
“Surprise Valley,” replied Fay, dreamily.
“And you--Shefford?”
Shefford shook his head. For him there could never be one memory only.
In his heart there would never change or die memories of the wild
uplands, of the great towers and walls, of the golden sunsets on the
cañon ramparts, of the silent, fragrant valleys where the cedars and
the sago-lilies grew, of those starlit nights when his love and faith
awoke, of grand and lonely Nonnezoshe, of that red, sullen, thundering,
mysterious Colorado River, of a wonderful Indian and a noble Mormon--of
all that was embodied for him in the meaning of the rainbow trail.
THE END