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WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND
[Illustration]
* * * * * *
BOOKS BY ZANE GREY
WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND
TALES OF LONELY TRAILS
TO THE LAST MAN
THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER
THE MAN OF THE FOREST
TALES OF FISHES
THE DESERT OF WHEAT
THE U. P. TRAIL
WILDFIRE
THE BORDER LEGION
THE RAINBOW TRAIL
THE LONE STAR RANGER
THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS
DESERT GOLD
THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE
THE YOUNG FORESTER
THE YOUNG PITCHER
THE YOUNG LION HUNTER
KEN WARD IN THE JUNGLE
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LTD.
_Publishers_
* * * * * *
[Illustration: THE GIRL’S RED LIPS CURLED IN POUTED SCORN]
WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND
by
ZANE GREY
Author of
“The Man of the Forest,” “To the Last Man,”
“Riders of the Purple Sage,” Etc.
With Illustrations by W. Herbert Dunton
[Illustration]
Toronto: the Musson Book Company Ltd.
New York: Harper & Brothers
WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND
Copyright, Canada, 1923
by the Musson Book Company, Ltd.
Printed in Canada
Dedicated to my wife
LINA ELISE GREY
Without whose love, faith, spirit
and help I never could have
written this novel
ZANE GREY
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I 1
CHAPTER II 11
CHAPTER III 18
CHAPTER IV 27
CHAPTER V 39
CHAPTER VI 52
CHAPTER VII 64
CHAPTER VIII 79
CHAPTER IX 92
CHAPTER X 102
CHAPTER XI 118
CHAPTER XII 134
CHAPTER XIII 151
CHAPTER XIV 156
CHAPTER XV 172
CHAPTER XVI 195
CHAPTER XVII 212
CHAPTER XVIII 231
CHAPTER XIX 252
CHAPTER XX 262
CHAPTER XXI 285
CHAPTER XXII 295
CHAPTER XXIII 309
CHAPTER XXIV 329
CHAPTER XXV 348
CHAPTER XXVI 358
CHAPTER XXVII 370
CHAPTER XXVIII 393
CHAPTER XXIX 403
CHAPTER XXX 413
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GIRL’S RED LIPS CURLED IN POUTED SCORN _Frontispiece_
THEN THE GUN BOOMED WITH MUFFLED REPORT--AND GUERD LAREY,
UTTERING A CRY OF AGONY, FELL AWAY FROM ADAM 58
BUT AT LENGTH THE BURDEN OF A HEAVY WEIGHT, AND THE DRAGGING
SAND, AND THE HOT SUN BROUGHT ADAM TO A PASS WHERE REST
WAS IMPERATIVE 172
WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND
CHAPTER I
Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current
of the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert.
The Rio Colorado was no river to trust. It chafed at its banks as if
to engulf them; muddy and thick it swirled and glided along in flood,
sweeping in curves back and forth from Arizona to California shore.
Majestic and gleaming under the hot sky, it swung southward between
wide green borders of willow and cottonwood toward a stark and naked
upflung wilderness of mountain peaks, the red ramparts of the unknown
and trackless desert.
Adam rushed down the bank and threw his pack into a boat. There his
rapid action seemed checked by the same violence that had inspired his
haste. He looked back, up at the dusty adobe town of Ehrenberg, asleep
now under the glaring noonday heat. It would not wake out of that
siesta till the return of the weary gold diggers, or the arrival of the
stagecoach or the steamer. A tall Indian, swarthy and unkempt, stood
motionless in the shade of a wall, watching stolidly.
Adam broke down then. Sobs made his utterance incoherent. “Guerd is
no brother--of mine--any more!” he burst out. His accent was one of
humiliation and cheated love. “And as for--for _her_--I’ll never--never
think of her--again.”
When once more he turned to the river, a spirit wrestled with the
emotion that had unnerved him. Adam Larey appeared to be a boy of
eighteen, with darkly tanned, clear-cut, and comely face, and a
lofty stature, straight and spare and wide. Untying the boat from
its mooring, he became conscious of a singular thrill. Sight of the
silent river fascinated him. If it had been drink that had fortified
his reckless resolve, it was some strange call to the wildness in him
that had stirred exaltation in the prospect of adventure. But there
was more. Never again to be dominated by that selfish Guerd, his
brother who had taken all and given nothing! Guerd would be stung by
this desertion. Perhaps he would be sorry. That thought gave Adam a
pang. Long habit of being influenced, and strength of love fostered in
playmate days, these made him waver. But the tide of resentment surged
up once more; and there flowed the red Colorado, rolling away to the
southwest, a gateway to the illimitable wastes of desert land, with its
mystery, its adventure, its gold and alluring freedom.
“I’ll go,” he declared, passionately, and with a shove he sent the boat
adrift and leaped over the bow to the rowing seat. The boat floated
lazily, half circling, till it edged into the current; then, as if
grasped by unseen power, it glided downstream. Adam seemed to feel the
resistless current of this mysterious river take hold of his heart.
There would be no coming back--no breasting that mighty flood with puny
oars. The moment was sudden and poignant in its revelation. How swiftly
receded the cluster of brown adobe huts, the somber, motionless Indian!
He had left Ehrenberg behind, and a brother who was his only near
relative, and a little sum of love that had failed him.
“I’m done with Guerd forever,” he muttered, looking back with hard dry
eyes. “It’s his fault. Mother always warned me.... Ah! if she had lived
I would still be home. Home! and not here--in this awful desert of heat
and wastelands--among men like wolves and women like....”
He did not finish the thought, but from his pack he took a bottle that
glittered in the sunlight, and, waving it defiantly at the backward
scene of glare and dust and lonely habitation, he drank deeply. Then he
flung the bottle from him with a violent gesture of repulsion. He had
no love for strong drink. The bottle fell with hollow splash, rode the
muddy swirls, and sank. Whereupon Adam applied himself to the oars with
long and powerful sweep.
* * * * *
In that moment of bitter soliloquy there had flashed through Adam
Larey’s mind memories and pictures of the past--the old homestead back
East, vivid and unforgetable--the sad face of his mother, who had
loved him as she had never loved his brother Guerd. There had been a
mystery about the father who had died in Adam’s childhood. Adam thought
of these facts now, seeing a vague connection between them and his
presence there alone upon that desert river. When his mother died she
had left all her money to him. But Adam had shared his small fortune
with Guerd. That money had been the beginning of evil days. If it had
not changed Guerd it had awakened slumbering jealousy and passion.
Guerd squandered his share and disgraced himself in the home town.
Then had begun his ceaseless importunity for Adam to leave college, to
see life, to seek adventures, to sail round the Horn to the California
gold fields. Adam had been true to the brother spirit within him and
the voice of the tempter had fallen upon too thrilling ears. Yearning
to be with his brother, and to see wild life upon his own account,
Adam yielded to the importunity. He chose, however, to travel westward
by land. At various points _en route_ Guerd had fallen in with evil
companions, among whom he seemed to feel freer. At Tucson he launched
himself upon the easy and doubtful career of a gambler, which practice
did not spare even his brother. At Ehrenberg, Guerd had found life to
his liking--a mining and outfitting post remote from civilization,
where he made friends compatible with his lately developed tastes,
where he finally filched the favor of dark eyes that had smiled first
upon Adam.
* * * * *
It was a June sun that burned down upon the Colorado desert and its red
river. Adam Larey had taken to rowing the boat with a powerful energy.
But the fiery liquor he had absorbed and the intense heat beating down
upon him soon prostrated him, half drunk and wholly helpless, upon the
bottom of the leaky boat, now at the mercy of the current.
Strangest of all rivers was the Rio Colorado. Many names it had borne,
though none so fitting and lasting as that which designated its color.
Neither crimson nor scarlet was it, nor any namable shade of red,
yet somehow red was its hue. Like blood with life gone from it! With
its source at high altitude, fed by snow fields and a thousand lakes
and streams, the Colorado stormed its great canyoned confines with a
mighty torrent; and then, spent and leveled, but still tremendous and
insatiate, it bore down across the desert with its burden of silt and
sand. It was silent, it seemed to glide along, yet it was appalling.
The boat that carried Adam Larey might as well have been a rudderless
craft in an ocean current. Slowly round and round it turned, as if
every rod of the river was an eddy, sweeping near one shore and then
the other. The hot hours of the afternoon waned. Sunset was a glaring
blaze without clouds. Cranes and bitterns swept in lumbering flight
over the wide green crests of the bottom lands, and desert buzzards
sailed down from the ruddy sky. The boat drifted on. Before darkness
fell the boat had drifted out of the current into a back eddy, where
slowly it rode round and round, at last to catch hold of the arrowweeds
and lodge in a thicket.
* * * * *
At dawn Adam Larey awoke, sober enough, but sick and aching, parched
with thirst. The eastern horizon, rose-flushed and golden, told him of
the advent of another day. He thrilled even in his misery. Scooping
up the muddy and sand-laden water, which was cold and held a taste of
snow, he quenched his thirst and bathed his hot face. Then opening his
pack, he took out food he had been careful to bring.
Then he endeavored to get his bearings. Adam could see by the stain on
the arrowweeds that the flood had subsided a foot during the night.
A reasonable calculation was that he had drifted a good many miles.
“I’ll row till it gets hot, then rest up in a shady place,” he decided.
Pushing away from the weeds, he set the oars and rowed out to meet the
current. As soon as that caught him the motion became exhilarating.
By and by, what with the exercise and the cool breeze of morning on
his face and the sweet, dank smell of river lowlands, he began to wear
off the effects of the liquor and with it the disgust and sense of
unfitness with which it had left him. Then at length gloom faded from
his mind, though a pang abided in his breast. It was not an unfamiliar
sensation. Resolutely he faced that wide traveling river, grateful
for something nameless that seemed borne on its bosom, conscious of
a strange expansion of his soul, ready to see, to hear, to smell, to
feel, to taste the wildness and wonder of freedom as he had dreamed it.
The sun rose, and Adam’s face and hands felt as if some hot material
thing had touched them. He began to sweat, which was all that was
needed to restore his usual healthy feeling of body. From time to time
he saw herons, and other long-legged waterfowl, and snipe flitting over
the sand bars, and somber, gray-hued birds that he could not name. The
spell of river or desert hovered over these birds. The fact brought to
Adam the strange nature of this silence. Like an invisible blanket it
covered all, water and brush and land.
“It’s desert silence,” he said, wonderingly.
When he raised the oars and rested them there seemed absolutely no
sound. And this fact struck him overpoweringly with its meaning and
with a sudden unfamiliar joy. On the gentle wind came a fragrant hot
breath that mingled with the rank odor of flooded bottom lands. The
sun, hot as it was, felt good upon his face and back. He loved the sun
as he hated cold.
“Maybe Guerd’s coaxing me West will turn out well for me,” soliloquized
Adam, with resurging boyish hope. “As the Mexicans say, _Quien sabe?_”
At length he espied a sloping bank where it appeared safe to risk
landing. This was a cove comparatively free of brush and the bank
sloped gradually to the water. The summit of the bank was about forty
or fifty feet high, and before Adam had wholly ascended it he began to
see the bronze tips of mountains on all sides.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Adam. “No sign of man! No sign of life!”
Some distance from the river bank stood a high knoll. Adam climbed to
the top of it, and what he saw here made him yearn for the mountain
peaks. He had never stood at any great elevation. Southward the
Colorado appeared to enter a mountain gateway and to turn and disappear.
When he had refreshed himself with food and drink he settled himself
into a comfortable position to rest and sleep a little while. He had
plucked at the roots of love, but not yet had he torn it from his
heart. Guerd, his brother! The old boyhood days flashed up. Adam
found the pang deep in his heart and ineradicable. The old beautiful
bond, the something warm and intimate between him and Guerd, was gone
forever. For its loss there could be no recompense. He knew every hour
would sever him the farther from this brother who had proved false.
Adam hid his face in the dry grass, and there in the loneliness of that
desert he began to see into the gulf of his soul.
“I can fight--I can forget!” he muttered. Then he set his mind to the
problem of his immediate future. Where would he go? There were two
points below on the river--Picacho, a mining camp, and Yuma, a frontier
town--about both of which he had heard strange, exciting tales. And
at that moment Adam felt a reckless eagerness for adventure, and a
sadness for the retreating of his old dream of successful and useful
life. At length he fell asleep.
When he awoke he felt hot and wet with sweat. A luminous gold light
shone through the willows and there was vivid color in the west. He had
slept hours. When he moved to sit up he heard rustlings in the willows.
These unseen creatures roused interest and caution in Adam. In his
travels across Arizona he had passed through wild places and incidents.
And remembering tales of bad Indians, bad Mexicans, bad white men, and
the fierce beasts and reptiles of the desert, Adam fortified himself to
encounters that must come.
When he stepped out of the shady covert it was to see river and valley
as if encompassed by an immense loneliness, different somehow for the
few hours of his thought and slumber. The river seemed redder and the
mountains veiled in ruby haze. Earth and sky were bathed in the hue of
sunset light.
He descended to the river. Shoving the boat off, he applied himself to
the oars. His strong strokes, aided by the current, sent the boat along
swiftly, perhaps ten miles an hour. The rose faded out of the sky, the
clouds turned drab, the blue deepened, and a pale star shone. Twilight
failed. With the cooling of the air Adam lay back more powerfully
upon the oars. Night fell, and one by one, and then many by many, the
stars came out. This night ride began to be thrilling. There must have
been danger ahead. By night the river seemed vast, hurrying, shadowy,
and silent as the grave. Its silence wore upon Adam until it seemed
unnatural.
As the stars multiplied and brightened, the deep cut where the river
wound changed its character, becoming dark and clear where it had been
gloomily impenetrable. The dim, high outlines of the banks showed,
and above them loomed the black domes of mountains. From time to
time he turned the boat and, resting upon his oars, he drifted with
the current, straining his eyes and ears. These moments of inaction
brought the cold, tingling prickle of skin up and down his back. It was
impossible not to be afraid, yet he thrilled even in his fear. In the
clear obscurity of the night he could see several rods ahead of him
over the gleaming river. But the peril that haunted Adam seemed more
in the distant shadows, round the bends. What a soundless, nameless,
unintelligible river! To be alone on a river like that, so vast, so
strange, with the grand and solemn arch of heaven blazed and clouded
white by stars, taught a lesson incalculable in its effects.
The hour came when an invisible something, like a blight, passed across
the heavens, paling the blue, dimming the starlight. The intense purity
of the sky sustained a dull change, then darkened. Adam welcomed the
first faint gleam of light over the eastern horizon. It brightened.
The wan stars faded. The mountains heightened their clearness of
silhouette, and along the bold, dark outlines appeared a faint rose
color, herald of the sun. It deepened, it spread as the gray light
turned pink and yellow. The shadows lifted from the river valley and it
was day again.
“Always I have slept away the great hour,” said Adam. An exhilaration
uplifted him.
He drifted round a bend in the river while once more eating sparingly
of his food; and suddenly he espied a high column of smoke rising to
the southwest. Whereupon he took the oars again and, having become
rested and encouraged, he rowed with a stroke that would make short
work of the few miles to the camp.
“Picacho!” soliloquized Adam, remembering tales he had heard. “Now what
shall I do?... I’ll work at anything.” He carried a considerable sum of
money in a belt round his waist--the last of the money left him by his
mother, and he wanted to keep it as long as possible.
Adam was not long in reaching the landing, which appeared to be only a
muddy bank. A small, dilapidated stern-wheel steamer, such as Adam had
seen on the Ohio River, lay resting upon the mud. On the bow sat a
gaunt weather-beaten man with a grizzled beard. He held a long crooked
fishing pole out over the water, and evidently was fishing. The bank
sloped up to fine white sand and a dense growth of green, in the middle
of which there appeared to be a narrow lane. Here in a flowing serape
stood a Mexican girl, slender and small, with a single touch of red in
all her darkness of dress.
Adam ran the boat ashore. Lifting his pack, he climbed a narrow bench
of the bank and walked down to a point opposite the fisherman. Adam
greeted him and inquired if this place was Picacho.
“Mornin’, stranger,” came the reply. “Yes, this here’s the gold
diggin’s, an’ she’s hummin’ these days.”
“Catching any fish?” Adam inquired, with interest.
“Yep; I ketched one day before yestiddy,” replied the man, complacently.
“What kind?” went on Adam.
“I’ll be doggoned if I know, but he was good to eat,” answered the
angler, with a grin. “Where you hail from, stranger?”
“Back East.”
“So I reckoned. No Westerner would tackle the Colorado when she was in
flood. I opine you hit the river at Ehrenberg. Wal, you’re lucky. Goin’
to prospect for gold?”
“No, I’d rather work. Can I get a job here?”
“Son, if you’re as straight as you look you can get a good job. But a
husky lad like you, if he stayed sober, could strike it rich in the
diggin’s.”
“How about a place to eat and sleep?”
“Thet ain’t so easy to find up at the camp. It’s a few miles up the
canyon. But say, I’m forgettin’ about the feller who stayed here with
the Mexicans. They jest buried him. You could get his place. It’s the
’dobe house--first one. Ask Margarita, there. She’ll show you.”
Thus directed, Adam saw the Mexican girl standing above him. Climbing
the path to the top of the bank, he threw down his pack.
“_Buenas dias_, señor.” The girl’s soft, liquid accents fitted a dark,
piquant little face, framed by hair as black as the wing of a raven,
and lighted by big eyes, like night.
Adam’s Spanish was not that of the Mexicans, but it enabled him to talk
fairly well. He replied to the girl’s greeting, yet hesitated with the
query he had on his lips. He felt a slight shrinking as these dark
eyes reminded him of others of like allurement which he had willed to
forget. Yet he experienced a warmth and thrill of pleasure in a pretty
face. Women invariably smiled upon Adam. This one, a girl in her teens,
smiled with half-lowered eyes, the more provocative for that; and
she turned partly away with a lithe, quick grace. Adam’s hesitation
had been a sudden chill at the proximity of something feminine and
attractive--of something that had hurt him. But it passed. He had done
more than boldly step across the threshold of a new and freer life.