That night in the dead late hours Adam suddenly awoke. The night
seemed the same as all the desert nights--dark and cool under the
mesquites--the same dead, unbroken silence. Adam’s keen intentness
could not detect a slightest sound of wind or brush or beast. Something
had pierced his slumbers, and as he pondered deeply there seemed to
come out of the vagueness beyond that impenetrable wall of sleep a
voice, a cry, a whisper. Had Margarita, sleeping or waking, called to
him? Such queer visitations of mind, often repeated, had convinced Adam
that he possessed a mystic power or sense.
When Adam awoke late, in the light of the sunny morning, unrealities
of the night dispersed like the gray shadows and vanished. He arose
eager, vigorous, breathing hard, instinctively seeking for action.
The day was Sunday. Another idle wait, fruitful of brooding moods!
But he vowed he would not go to the willow brakes, there to hide from
Guerd and Collishaw. Let them have their say--do their worst! We would
go up to Picacho and gamble and drink with the rest of the drifters.
Merryvale’s words of desert-learned wisdom rang through Adam’s head. As
for Margarita, all Adam wanted was one more look at her face, into her
dusky eyes, and that would forever end his relation to her.
At breakfast Arallanes presented a thoughtful and forbidding
appearance, although this demeanor was somewhat softened by the few
times he broke silence. The señora’s impassive serenity lacked its
usual kindliness, and her lowered eyes kept their secrets. Margarita
had not yet arisen. Adam could not be sure there was really a shadow
hovering over the home, or in his own mind, coloring, darkening his
every prospect.
After breakfast he went out to stroll along the river bank and then
around the village. He ascertained from Merryvale that Collishaw,
Guerd, and their associates had found lodgings at different houses for
the night, and after breakfast had left for the mining camp. As usual,
Merryvale spoke pointedly: “You’re brother said they were goin’ to
clear out the camp. An’ I reckon he didn’t mean greasers, but whisky
an’ gold. Son, you stay away from Picacho to-day.” For once, however,
the kind old man’s advice fell upon deaf ears. Adam had to fight his
impatience to be off up the canyon; and only a driving need to see
Margarita held him there. He walked to and fro, from village to river
and back again. By and by he espied Arallanes and his wife, with their
friends, dressed in their best, parading toward the little adobe
church. Margarita was not with them.
Adam waited a little while, hoping to see her appear. He did not
analyze his strong hope that she would go to church this Sunday as
usual. But as no sign of her was forthcoming he strode down to the
little brown house and entered at the open door.
“Margarita!” he called. No answer broke the quiet. His second call,
however, brought her from her room, a dragging figure with a pale face
that Adam had never before seen pale.
“Señor Ad-dam,” she faltered.
The look of her, and that voice, stung Adam out of the gentleness
habitual with him. Leaping at her, he dragged her into the light of the
door. She cried out in a fear that shocked him. When he let go of her,
abrupt and sharp in his motions, she threw up her arms as if to ward
off attack.
“Do you think I would hurt you?” he cried, harshly. “No, Margarita! I
only wanted to see you--just once more.”
She dropped her arms and raised her face. Then Adam, keen in that
poignant moment, saw in her the passing of an actual fear of death.
It struck him mute. It betrayed her. What had been the dalliance of
yesterday, playful and passionate in its wild youth, through the night
had become dishonor. Yesterday she had been a cat that loved to be
stroked; to-day she was a maimed creature, a broken woman.
“Lift your face--higher,” said Adam, hoarsely, as he put out a shaking
hand to touch her. But he could not touch her. She did lift it and
looked at him, denying nothing, still unashamed. But now there was soul
in that face. Adam felt it limned on his memory forever--the stark
truth of her frailty, the courage of a primitive nature fearing only
death, yearning for brutal blows as proof of the survival of jealous
love, a dawning consciousness of his honesty and truth. Terrible was it
for Adam to realize that if she had been given that choice again she
would have decided differently. But it was too late.
“_Adios_, señorita,” he said, bowing, and backed out of the door. He
stopped, and the small pale face with its tragic eyes, straining,
unutterably eloquent of wrong to him and to herself, passed slowly out
of his sight.
* * * * *
Swiftly Adam strode up the canyon, his fierce energy in keeping with
his thoughts. He overtook the Irishman, Regan, who accosted him.
“Hullo, Wansfell, ould fri’nd!” he called. “Don’t yez walk so dom’
fast.”
“Wansfell! Why do you call me that?” asked Adam. How curiously the name
struck his ear!
“Ain’t thot your noime?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Wal, all right. Will yez hev a dhrink?” Regan produced a brown bottle
and handed it to Adam.
They walked on up the canyon, Regan with his short, stunted legs being
hard put to it to keep up with Adam’s long strides. The Irishman would
attach himself to Adam, that was evident; and he was a most talkative
and friendly fellow. Whenever he got out of breath he halted to draw
out the bottle. The liquor in an ordinary hour would have befuddled
Adam’s wits, but now it only heated his blood.
“Wansfell, if yez ain’t the dom’dest foinest young feller in these
diggin’s!” ejaculated Regan.
“Thank you, friend. But don’t call me that queer name. Mine’s Adam.”
“A-dom?” echoed Regan. “Phwat a hell of a noime! Adom an’ Eve, huh? I
seen yez with thot black-eyed wench. She’s purty.”
They finished the contents of the bottle and proceeded on their way.
Regan waxed warmer in his regard for Adam and launched forth a strong
argument in favor of their going on a prospecting trip.
“Yez would make a foine prospector an’ pard,” he said. “Out on the
desert yez are free an’ happy, b’gorra! No place loike the desert,
pard, whin yez come to know it! Thar’s air to breathe an’ long days wid
the sun on yer back an’ noights whin a mon knows shlape. Mebbe we’ll
hev the luck to foind Pegleg Smith’s lost gold mine.”
“Who was Pegleg Smith and what gold mine did he lose?” queried Adam.
Then as they plodded on up the canyon, trying to keep to the shady
strips and out of the hot sun, Adam heard for a second time the story
of the famous lost gold mine. Regan told it differently, perhaps
exaggerating after the manner of prospectors. But the story was
impelling to any man with a drop of adventurous blood in his veins. The
lure of gold had not yet obsessed Adam, but he had begun to feel the
lure of the desert.
Adam concluded that under happier circumstances this Regan would be a
man well worth cultivating in spite of his love for the bottle. They
reached the camp about noon, had a lunch at the stand of a Chinaman,
and then, entering the saloon, they mingled with the crowd, where Adam
soon became separated from Regan. Liquor flowed like water, and gold
thudded in sacks and clinked musically in coins upon the tables. Adam
had one drink, and that incited him to take another. Again the throb
and burn of his blood warmed out the coldness and bitterness of his
mood. Deliberately he drank and deliberately he stifled the voice of
conscience until he was in a reckless and dangerous frame of mind.
There seemed to be a fire consuming him now, to which liquor was only
fuel.
He swaggered through the crowded hall, and for once the drunken
miners, the painted hags, the cold-faced gamblers, did not disgust
him. The smell of rum and smoke, the feel of the thick sand under his
feet, the sight of the motley crowd of shirt-sleeved and booted men,
the discordant din of music, glasses, gold, and voices--all these
sensations struck him full and intimately with their proof that he was
a part of this wild assembly of free adventurers. He remembered again
Merryvale’s idea of a man equipped to cope with this lawless gang and
hold his own. Suddenly when he espied his brother Guerd he shook with
the driving passion that had led him there.
Guerd sat at table, gambling with Collishaw and MacKay and other men of
Picacho well known to Adam. Guerd looked the worse for liquor and bad
luck. When he glanced up to see Adam, a light gleamed across his hot
face. He dropped his cards, and as Adam stepped near he rose from the
table and in two strides confronted him, arrogant, menacing, with the
manner of a man dangerous to cross.
“I want money,” demanded Guerd.
Adam laughed in his face.
“Go to work. You’re not slick enough with the cards to hide your
tricks,” replied Adam, in deliberate scorn.
Temper, and not forethought, actuated Guerd then. He slapped Adam, with
the moderate force of an older brother punishing an impertinence. Swift
and hard Adam returned that blow, staggering Guerd, who fell against
the table, but was upheld by Collishaw. He uttered a loud and piercing
cry.
Sharply the din ceased. The crowd slid back over the sand, leaving
Adam in the center of a wide space, confronting Guerd, who still leaned
against Collishaw. Guerd panted for breath. His hot face turned white
except for the red place where Adam’s fist had struck. MacKay righted
the table, then hurriedly drew back. Guerd’s fury of astonishment
passed to stronger controlled passion. He rose from Collishaw’s hold
and seemed to tower magnificently. He had the terrible look of a man
who had waited years for a moment of revenge, at last to recognize it.
“You hit me! I’ll beat you for that--I’ll smash your face,” he said,
stridently.
“Come on,” cried Adam.
At this instant the Irishman, Regan, staggered out of the crowd into
the open circle. He was drunk.
“Sic ’em, Wansfell, sic ’em,” he bawled. “I’m wid yez. We’ll lick
thot--loidy face--an’ ivery dom’----”
Some miner reached out a long arm and dragged Regan back.
Guerd Larey leaned over to pound with his fist on the table. A leaping
glow radiated from his face, as if a genius of hate had inspired some
word or speech that Adam must find insupportable. His look let loose
a bursting gush of blood through Adam’s throbbing veins. This was no
situation built on a quarrel or a jealous rivalry. It was backed by
years, and by some secret not easily to be divined, though its source
was the very soul of Cain.
“So that’s your game,” declared Guerd, with ringing passion. “You want
to fight and you make this debt of yours a pretense. But I’m on to you.
It’s because of the girl I took from you.”
“Shut up! Have you no sense of decency? Can’t you be half a man?” burst
out Adam, beginning to shake.
“Ha! Ha! Ha! Listen to Goody-Goody!... Mother’s nice boy----”
“By Heaven, Guerd Larey, if you speak of my--my mother--here--I’ll tear
out your tongue!”
They were close together now, with only the table between them--Cain
and Abel--the old bitter story plain in the hate of one flashing face
and the agony of the other. Guerd Larey had divined the means to
torture and to crucify this brother whose heart and soul were raw.
“Talk about the fall of Saint Anthony!” cried Guerd, with a voice
magical in its steely joy. “Never was there a fall like Adam
Larey’s--the Sunday-school boy--too sweet--too innocent--too pure to
touch the hand of a girl!... Ha-ha! Oh, we can fight, Adam. I’ll fight
you. But let me talk--let me tell my friends what a damned hypocrite
you are.... Gentlemen, behold the immaculate Saint Adam whose Eve was a
little greaser girl!”
There was no shout of mirth. The hall held a low-breathing silence.
It was a new scene, a diversion for the gamblers and miners and their
painted consorts, a clash of a different kind and spirit. Guerd paused
to catch his breath and evidently to gather supreme passion for the
delivery of what seemed more to him than life itself. His face was
marble white, quivering and straining, and his eyes blazed with a
piercing flame.
Adam saw the living, visible proof of a hate he had long divined. The
magnificence of Guerd’s passion, the terrible reality of his hate, the
imminence of a mortal blow, locked Adam’s lips and jaws as in a vise,
while a gathering fury, as terrible as Guerd’s hate, flooded and dammed
at the gates of his energy, ready to break out in destroying violence.
“She told me!” Guerd flung the words like bullets. “You needn’t bluff
it out with your damned lying white face. She told me!... You--you,
Adam Larey, with your pure thoughts and lofty ideals ... the _rot_ of
them! _You_--damn your milksop soul!--you were the slave of a dirty
little greaser girl who fooled you, laughed in your face, left you for
me--for me at the snap of my fingers.... And, by God! my cup would be
full--if your mother could only know----”
[Illustration: THEN THE GUN BOOMED WITH MUFFLED REPORT--AND GUERD
LAREY, UTTERING A CRY OF AGONY, FELL AWAY FROM ADAM]
It was Collishaw’s swift hand that knocked up Adam’s flinging arm and
the gun which spouted red and boomed heavily. Collishaw grappled
with him--was flung off--and then Guerd lunged in close to save
himself. A writhing, wrestling struggle--quick, terrible; then the gun
boomed with muffled report--and Guerd Larey, uttering a cry of agony,
fell away from Adam, backward over the table. His gaze, conscious,
appalling, was fixed on Adam. A dark crimson spot stained his white
shirt. Then he lay there with fading eyes--the beauty and radiance and
hate of his face slowly shading.
Collishaw leaned over him. Then with hard, grim gesture he shouted,
hoarsely: “Dead, by God!... You’ll hang for this!”
A creeping horror was slowly paralyzing Adam. But at that harsh speech
he leaped wildly, flinging his gun with terrific force into the
sheriff’s face. Like an upright stone dislodged Collishaw fell. Then
Adam, bounding forward, flung aside the men obstructing his passage and
fled out of the door.
Terror lent wings to his feet. In a few moments he was beyond the
outskirts of the camp. Even here, fierce in his energy, he bounded
upward, from rock to rock, until he reached the steep jumble of talus
where swift progress was impossible. Then with hands and feet working
in unison, as if he had been an ape, he climbed steadily.
From the top of the first rocky slope he gazed back fearfully. Yes, men
were pursuing him, strung out along the road of the mining camp; and
among the last was a tall, black-coated, bareheaded man that Adam took
to be Collishaw. This pursuer was staggering along, flinging his arms.
Adam headed straight up the ascent. Picacho loomed to the right, a
colossal buttress of red rock, wild and ragged and rugged. But the
ascent that had looked so short and easy--how long and steep! Every
shadow was a lie, every space of slope in the sunlight hid the truth
of its width. Sweat poured from his hot body. He burned. His breath
came in labored bursts. A painful stab in his side spread and swelled
to the whole region of his breast. He could hear the mighty throb of
his heart, and he could hear it in another way--a deep muffled throb
through his ears.
At last he reached the height of the slope where it ended under a wall
of rock, the backbone of that ridge, bare and jagged, with no loose
shale on its almost perpendicular side. Here it took hard labor of
hand and foot to climb and zigzag and pull himself up. Here he fell
exhausted.
But the convulsion was short lived. His will power was supreme and his
endurance had not been permanently disabled. He crawled before he could
walk, and when he recovered enough to stagger erect he plodded on,
invincible in his spirit to escape.
From this height, which was a foothill to the great peak, he got his
bearings and started down.
“They can’t--trail me--here,” he whispered, hoarsely, as he looked back
with the eyes of a fugitive. “And--down there--I’ll keep off the road.”
After that brief moment of reasoning he became once more victim to fear
and desperate passion to hurry. He had escaped, his pursuers could
not see him now, he could hide, the descent was tortuous; yet these
apparent facts, favorable as they were, could not save him. Adam pushed
on, gaining strength as he recovered breath. As his direction led him
downhill, he went swiftly, sometimes at a rapid walk, again sliding
down here and rushing there, and at other places he stepped from rock
to rock, like a balancing rope walker.
The descent here appeared to be a long, even slant of broken rocks,
close together like cobblestones in a street, and of a dark-bronze hue.
They shone as if they had been varnished. And a closer glance showed
Adam the many reddish tints of _bisnagi_ cactus growing in the cracks
between the stones.
His misgivings were soon verified. He had to descend here, for the
afternoon was far gone, and whatever the labor and pain, he must reach
the road before dark. The rocks were sharp, uneven, and as slippery as
if they had been wet. At the very outset Adam slipped, and, falling
with both hands forward, he thrust them into a cactus. The pain stung,
and when he had to pull hard to free himself from the thorns, it was as
if his hands had been nailed. He could not repress moans as he tried to
pull out the thorns with his teeth. They stuck tight. The blood ran in
little streams. But he limped on, down the black slope.
The white road below grew closer and closer. It was a goal. This slope
of treacherous rocks and torturing cacti was a physical ordeal that
precluded memory of the past or consideration of the present. When Adam
at last reached the road, there to fall exhausted and wet and burning
upon a flat rock, it seemed that he had been delivered from an inferno.
Presently he sat up to look around him. A wonderful light showed upon
the world--the afterglow of sunset. Picacho bore a crown of gold. All
the lower tips of ranges were purpling in shadow. To the southward a
wide gray barren led to an endless bleak plateau, flat and dark, with
dim spurs of mountains in the distance. Desolate, lifeless, silent--the
gateway to the desert! Adam felt steal over him a sense of awe. The
vastness of seen and suggested desert seemed flung at him, as if nature
meant to reveal to him the mystery and might of space. The marvelous
light magnified the cacti and the rocks, and the winding ranges and
the bold peaks, and the distances, until all were unreal. Adam felt
that he had overcome a great hardship, accomplished a remarkable feat,
had climbed and descended a range as sharp toothed as jagged lava. But
to what end! Something in the bewildering light of the west, in the
purple shadows growing cold in the east, in the tremendous oppression
of illimitable space and silence and solitude and desolation--something
inexplicable repudiated and mocked his physical sense of great
achievement.
All at once, in a flash, he remembered his passion, his crime, his
terror, his flight. Not until that instant had intelligence operated in
harmony with his feelings. He lifted his face in the cool, darkening
twilight. The frowning mountains held aloof, and all about him seemed
detached, rendering his loneliness absolute and immutable.
“Oh! Oh!” he moaned. “What will become of me?... No family--no
friends--no hope!... Oh, Guerd--my brother! His blood on my hands!...
He ruined my life! He’s killed my soul!... Oh, damn him, damn him! he’s
made me a murderer!”
Adam fell face down on the rock with breaking heart. His exceeding
bitter cries seemed faint and lost in the midst of the vastness of
desert and sky. The deepening of twilight to darkness, the cold black
grandeur of the great peak, the mournful wail of a desert wolf, the
pure pale evening star that pierced the purple sky, the stupendous
loneliness and silence of that solitude--all these facts seemed
Nature’s pitiless proof of her indifference to man and his despair.
His hope, his prayer, his frailty, his fall, his burden and agony and
life--these were nothing to the desert that worked inscrutably through
its millions of years, nor to the illimitable expanse of heaven,
deepening its blue and opening its cold, starry eyes. But a spirit as
illimitable and as inscrutable breathed out of the universe and over
the immensity of desert space--a spirit that breathed to the soul of
the ruined man and bade him rise and take up his burden and go on down
the naked shingles of the world.
Despair and pride and fear of death, and this strange breath of life,
dragged Adam up and drove him down the desert road. For a mile he
staggered and plodded along, bent and bowed like an old man, half
blinded by tears and choked by sobs, abject in his misery; yet even
so, the something in him that was strongest of all--the instinct to
survive--made him keep to the hard, gravelly side of the road, that his
tracks might not show in the dust.
And that action of blood and muscle, because it came first in the order
of energy, gradually assumed dominance of him, until again he was
an escaping fugitive, mostly concerned with direction and objective
things. The direction took care of itself, being merely a matter of
keeping along the edge of the road that gleamed pale in front of him.
Objects near at hand, however, had to be carefully avoided. Rocks were
indistinct in the gloom; _ocatilla_ cacti thrust out long spectral
arms; like the tentacles of an octopus; and shadows along the road took
the alarming shape of men and horses and wagons. All around him, except
to the west, was profound obscurity, and in that direction an endless
horizon, wild and black and sharp, with sweeping bold lines between the
spurs, stood silhouetted against a pale-blue, star-fired sky. Miles and
miles he walked, and with a strength that had renewed. He never looked
up at the heavens above. Often he halted to turn and listen. These
moments were dreaded ones. But he heard only a faint breeze.
Morning broke swiftly and relentlessly, a gray, desert dawning. Dim
columns of smoke scarce a mile away showed him that Yuma was close.
Fields and cattle along the road, and then an Indian hut, warned him
that he was approaching the habitations of men and sooner or later he
would be seen. He must hide by day and travel by night. Bordering the
road to his left was a dense thicket of arrowweed, indicating that he
had reached the bottom lands of the river. Into this Adam crawled like
a wounded and stealthy deer. Hunger and thirst were slight, but his
whole body seemed a throbbing ache. Both mind and body longed for the
oblivion that came at once in sleep.