The second meeting between Adam and the prospector Dismukes occurred at
Tecopah, a mining camp in the Mohave Desert.
The mining camp lay in a picturesque valley where green and gray
growths marked the course of the gravel-lined creek, and sandy benches
spread out to dark, rocky slopes, like lava, that heaved away in the
bleak ranges.
It was in March, the most colorful season in the Mohave, that Adam
arrived at Tecopah to halt on a grassy bench at the outskirts of the
camp. A little spring welled up here and trickled down to the creek. It
was drinking water celebrated among desert men, who had been known to
go out of their way to drink there. The telltale ears of Adam’s burros
advised him of the approach of some one, and he looked up from his camp
tasks to find a familiar figure approaching him. He rubbed his eyes.
Was that strange figure the same as the one so vividly limned on his
memory? Squat, huge, grotesque, the man coming toward him was Dismukes!
His motley, patched garb, his old slouch hat, his boots yellow with
clay and alkali, appeared the same he had worn on the memorable day
Adam’s eyes had unclosed to see them.
Dismukes drove his burros up to the edge of the bench, evidently having
in mind the camp site Adam occupied. When he espied Adam he hesitated
and, gruffly calling to the burros, he turned away.
“Hello, Dismukes!” called Adam. “Come on. Plenty room to camp here.”
The prospector halted stolidly and slowly turned back. “You know me?”
he asked, gruffly, as he came up.
“Yes, I know you, Dismukes,” replied Adam, offering his hand.
“You’ve got the best of me,” said Dismukes, shaking hands. He did not
seem a day older, but perhaps there might have been a little more
gray in the scant beard. His great ox eyes, rolling and dark, bent a
strange, curious glance over Adam’s lofty figure.
“Look close. See if you can recognize a man you befriended once,”
returned Adam. The moment was fraught with keen pain and a melancholy
assurance of the changes time had made. Strong emotion of gladness,
too, was stirring deep in him. This was the man who had saved him and
who had put into his mind the inspiration and passion to conquer the
desert.
Dismukes was perplexed, and a little ashamed. His piercing gaze was
that of one who had befriended many men and could not remember.
“Stranger, I give it up. I don’t know you.”
“Wansfell,” said Adam, his voice full.
Dismukes stared. His expression changed, but it was not with
recognition.
“Wansfell! Wansfell!” he ejaculated. “I know that name.... Hell, yes!
I’ve heard of you all over the Mohave!... I’m sure glad to meet you....
But, I never met you before.”
The poignancy of that meeting for Adam reached a climax in the absolute
failure of Dismukes to recognize him. Last and certain proof of
change! The desert years had transformed Adam Larey, the youth, into
the man Wansfell. For the first moment in all that time did Adam feel
an absolute sense of safety. He would never be recognized, never be
apprehended for his crime. He seemed born again.
“Dismukes, how near are you to getting all your five hundred thousand?”
queried Adam, with a smile. There seemed to be a sad pleasure in thus
baffling the old prospector.
“By Gad! how’d you know about that?” exclaimed Dismukes.
“You told me.”
“Say, Wansfell! Am I drunk or are you a mind reader?” demanded the
prospector, bewildered. “Comin’ along here I was thinkin’ about that
five hundred thousand. But I never told anyone--except a boy once--an’
he’s dead.”
“How about your white-faced burro Jinny--the one that used to steal
things out of your pack?” asked Adam, slowly.
“Jinny! Jinny!” ejaculated Dismukes, with a start. His great ox eyes
dilated and something of shock ran through his huge frame. “That burro
I never forgot. I gave her away to a boy who starved on the desert. She
came back to me. Tracked me to Yuma.... An’ you--you--how’d you know
Jinny?... Man, who are you?”
“Dismukes, I was the boy you saved--down under the Chocolates--ninety
miles from Yuma. Remember ... it was Jinny saw me wandering in a
circle, mad with thirst. You saved me--gave me Jinny and a pack--told
me how to learn the desert--sent me to the Indians.... Dismukes, I was
that boy. I am now--Wansfell.”
The prospector seemed to expand with the increased strain of his gaze
into Adam’s eyes, until the instant of recognition.
“By God! I know you now!” he boomed, and locked his horny hands on Adam
in a gladness that was beyond the moment and had to do, perhaps, with
a far-past faith in things. “I thought you died on the desert. Jinny’s
comin’ back seemed proof of that.... But you lived! You--that boy, tall
as a mescal plant--with eyes of agony.... I never forgot.... An’ now
you’re Wansfell!”
“Yes, my friend. Life is strange on the desert,” replied Adam. “And
now unpack your burros. Make camp with me here. We’ll eat and talk
together.”
A sunset, rare on the Mohave, glowed over the simple camp tasks of
these men who in their wanderings had met again. Clouds hung along the
mountain tops, colored into deeper glory as the sun sank. The dark
purples had an edge of silver, and the fleecy whites turned to pink
and rose, while golden rays shot up from behind the red-hazed peaks.
Over the valley fell a beautiful and transparent light, blending and
deepening until a shadow as blue as the sea lay on Tecopah.
While the men ate their frugal repast they talked, each gradually
growing used to a situation that broke the desert habit of
silence. There was an unconscious deference of each man toward the
other--Wansfell seeing in Dismukes the savior of his life and a teacher
who had inspired him to scale the heights of human toil and strife;
Dismukes finding in Wansfell a development of his idea, the divine
spirit of man rising above the great primal beasts of the desert,
self-preservation and ferocity.
“Wansfell, have you kept track of time?” asked Dismukes, reflectively,
as he got out a black, stumpy pipe that Adam remembered.
“No. Days and weeks glide into years--that’s all I can keep track of,”
replied Adam.
“I never could, either. What is time on the desert? Nothin’.... Well,
it flies, that’s sure. An’ it must be years since I met you first down
there in the Colorado. Let’s see. Three times I went to Yuma--once to
Riverside--an’ twice to San Diego. Six trips inside. That’s all I’ve
made to bank my money since I met you. Six years. But, say, I missed a
year or so.”
“Dismukes, I’ve seen the snows white on the peaks eight times. Eight
years, my friend, since Jinny cocked her ears that day and saved me.
How little a thing life is in the desert!”
“Eight years!” echoed Dismukes, and wagged his huge shaggy head. “It
can’t be.... Well, well, time slips away.... Wansfell, you’re a young
man, though I see gray over your temples. And you can’t have any more
fear because of that--that crime you confessed to me. Lord! man, no one
would ever know you as that boy!”
“No fear that way any more. But fear of myself, Dismukes. If I went
back to the haunts of men I would forget.”
“Ah yes, yes!” sighed Dismukes. “I understand. I wonder how it’ll be
with me when my hour comes to leave the desert. I wonder.”
“Will that be long?”
“You can never tell. I might strike it rich to-morrow. Always I dream
I’m goin’ to. It’s the dream that keeps a prospector nailed to the
lonely wastes.”
Indeed, this strange man was a dreamer of dreams. Adam understood him
now, all except that obsession for just so much gold. It seemed the
only flaw in a great character. But the fidelity to that purpose was
great as it was inexplicable.
“Dismukes, you had a third of your stake when we met years ago. How
much now?”
“More than half, Wansfell, safe in banks an’ some hid away,” came the
answer, rolling and strong. What understanding of endless effort abided
in that voice!
“A quarter of a million! My friend, it is enough. Take it and
go--fulfill your cherished dream. Go before it’s too late.”
“I’ve thought of that. Many times when I was sick an’ worn out with the
damned heat an’ loneliness I’ve tempted myself with what you said. But,
no. I’ll never do that. It’s the same to me now as if I had no money at
all.”
“Take care, Dismukes,” warned Adam. “It’s the gaining of gold--not what
it might bring--that drives you.”
“Ah! _Quien sabe_, as the Mexicans say?... Wansfell, have you learned
the curse--or it may be the blessing--of the desert--what makes us
wanderers of the wastelands?”
“No. I have not. Sometimes I feel it’s close to me, like the feeling
of a spirit out there on the lonely desert at night. But it’s a great
thing, Dismukes. And it is linked to the very beginnings of us. Some
day I’ll know.”
Dismukes smoked in silence, thoughtful and sad. The man’s forceful
assurance and doggedness seemed the same, yet Adam sensed a subtle
difference in him, beyond power to define. The last gold faded from the
bold domes of the mountains, the clouds turned gray, the twilight came
on as a stealthy host. And from across the creek came discordant sounds
of Tecopah awakening to the revelry of a gold diggings by night.
“How’d you happen along here?” queried Dismukes, presently.
“Tecopah was just a water hole for me,” replied Adam.
“Me, too. An’ I’m sure sayin’ that I like to fill my canteens here.
Last year I camped here, an’ when I went on I kept one of my canteens
so long the water spoiled.... Found some gold trace up in the Kingston
range, but my supplies ran low an’ I had to give up. My plan now is
to go in there an’ then on to the Funeral Mountains. They’re full of
mineral. But a dry, hard, poison country for a prospector. Do you know
that country?”
“I’ve been on this side of the range.”
“Bad enough, but the _other_ side of the Funerals is Death Valley. That
gash in summer is a blastin’, roarin’ hell. I’ve crossed it every month
in the year. None but madmen ever tackle Death Valley in July, in the
middle of the day. I’ve seen the mercury go to one hundred and forty
degrees. I’ve seen it one hundred and twenty-five at midnight, an’,
friend, when them furnace winds blow down the valley at night sleep
or rest is impossible. You just gasp for life.... But strange to say,
Wansfell, the fascination of the desert is stronger in Death Valley
than at any other place.”
“Yes, I can appreciate that,” replied Adam, thoughtfully. “It must be
the sublimity of death and desolation--the terrible loneliness and
awfulness of the naked earth. I am going there.”
“So I reckoned. An’ see here, Wansfell, I’ll get out my pencil an’ draw
you a little map of the valley, showin’ my trails an’ water holes.
I know that country better than any other white man. It’s a mineral
country. The lower slope of the Funerals is all clay, borax, soda,
alkali, salt, niter, an’ when the weather’s hot an’ that stuff blows on
the hot winds, my God! it’s a horror! But you’ll want to go through it
all an’ you’ll go back again.”
“Where do you advise me to go in?”
“Well, I’d follow the Amargosa. It’s bad water, but better than none.
Go across an’ up into the Panamints, an’ come back across again by
Furnace Creek. I’ll make you a little map. There’s more bad water than
good, an’ some of it’s arsenic. I found the skeletons of six men near
an arsenic water hole. Reckon they’d come on this water when bad off
for thirst an’ didn’t know enough to test it. An’ they drank their
fill an’ died in their tracks. They had gold, too. But I never could
find out anythin’ about these men. No one ever heard of them an’ I was
the only man who knew of the tragedy. Well, well, it’s common enough
for me, though I never before run across so many dead men. Wansfell,
I reckon you’ve found that common, too, in your wanderings--dried-up
mummies, yellow as leather, or bleached bones an’ grinnin’ skull, white
in the sun?”
“Yes, I’ve buried the remains of more than one poor devil,” replied
Adam.
“Is it best to bury them? I let them lay as warnin’ to other poor
devils. No one but a crazy man would drink at a water hole where there
was a skeleton.... Well, to come back to your goin’ to Death Valley.
I’d go in by the Amargosa. It’s a windin’ stream an’ long, but safe.
An’ there’s firewood an’ a little grass. Now when you get across the
valley you’ll run into prospectors an’ miners an’ wanderers at the
water holes. An’ like as not you’ll meet some of the claim jumpers
an’ robbers that live in the Panamints. From what I hear about you,
Wansfell, I reckon a meetin’ with them would be a bad hour for them,
an’ somethin’ of good fortune to honest miners. Hey?”
“Dismukes, I don’t run from men of that stripe,” replied Adam, grimly.
“Ahuh! I reckon not,” said Dismukes, just as grimly. “Well, last time I
was over there--let’s see, it was in September, hotter ’n hell, an’ I
run across two queer people up in a canyon I’d never prospected before.
Didn’t see any sign of any other prospectors ever bein’ in there....
Two queer people--a man an’ a woman livin’ in a shack they’d built
right under the damnedest roughest slope of weathered rock you ever saw
in your life. Why, it was a plain case of suicide, an’ so I tried to
show them! Every hour you could hear the crack of a rollin’ bowlder or
the graty slip of an avalanche, gettin’ oneasy an’ wantin’ to slide.
But the woman was deathly afraid of her husband an’ he was a skunk an’
a wolf rolled into a man, if I ever saw one. I couldn’t do anythin’
for the poor woman, an’ I couldn’t learn any more than I’m tellin’
you. That’s not much. But, Wansfell, she wasn’t a common sort. She’d
been beautiful once. She had the saddest face I ever saw. I got two
feelin’s, one that she wasn’t long for this earth, an’ the other that
the man hated her with a terrible hate.... I meet with queer people
an’ queer situations as I wander over this desert, but here’s the beat
of all my experience. An’, Wansfell, I’d like to have you go see that
couple. I reckon they’ll be there, if alive yet. He chose a hidden
spot, an’ he has Shoshone Indians pack his supplies in from the ranches
way on the other side of the Panamints. A queer deal, horrible for that
poor woman, an’ I’ve been haunted by her face ever since. I’d like you
to go there.”
“I’ll go. But why do you say that, Dismukes?” asked Adam, curiously.
“Well--you ought to know what your name means to desert men,” replied
Dismukes, constrainedly, and he looked down at the camp fire, to push
forward a piece of half-burnt wood.
“No, I never heard,” said Adam. “I’ve lived ’most always alone. Of
course I’ve had to go to freighting posts and camps. I’ve worked in
gold diggings. I’ve guided wagon trains across the Mohave. Naturally,
I’ve been among men. But I never heard that my name meant anything.”
“Wansfell! I remember _now_ that you called yourself Wansfell. I’ve
heard that name. Some of your doings, Wansfell, have made camp-fire
stories. See here, Wansfell, you won’t take offense at me.”
“No offense, friend Dismukes,” replied Adam, strangely affected. Here
was news that forced him to think of himself as a man somehow related
to and responsible to his kind. He had gone to and fro over the trails
of the desert, and many adventures had befallen him. He had lived
them, with the force the desert seemed to have taught him, and then
had gone his way down the lonely trails, absorbed in his secret. The
years seemed less than the blowing sand. He had been an unfortunate boy
burdened with a crime; he was now a matured man, still young in years,
but old with the silence and loneliness and strife of the desert, gray
at the temples, with that old burden still haunting him. How good to
learn that strange men spoke his name with wonder and respect! He had
helped wanderers as Dismukes had helped him; he had meted out desert
violence to evil men who crossed his trail; he had, doubtless, done
many little unremembered deeds of kindness in a barren world where
little deeds might be truly overappreciated; but the name Wansfell
meant nothing to him, the reputation hinted by Dismukes amazed him,
strangely thrilled him; the implication of nobility filled him with
sadness and remorse. What had he done with the talents given him?
“Wansfell, you see--you’re somethin’ of the man I might have been,”
said Dismukes, hesitatingly.
“Oh no, Dismukes,” protested Adam. “You are a prospector, honest and
industrious, and wealthy now, almost ready to enjoy the fruits of
your long labors. Your life has a great object.... But I--I am only a
wanderer of the wasteland.”
“Aye, an’ therein lies your greatness!” boomed the prospector, his
ox eyes dilating and flaring. “I am a selfish pig--a digger in the
dirt for gold. My passion has made me pass by men, an’ women, too, who
needed help. Riches--dreams!... But you--you, Wansfell--out there in
the loneliness an’ silence of the wastelands--you have found God!... I
said you would. I’ve met other men who had.”
“No, no,” replied Adam. “You’re wrong. I don’t think I’ve found God.
Not yet!... I have no religion, no belief. I can’t find any hope out
there in the desert. Nature is pitiless, indifferent. The desert is but
one of her playgrounds. Man has no right there. No, Dismukes, I have
not found God.”
“You have, but you don’t know it,” responded Dismukes, with more
composure, and he began to refill a neglected pipe. “Well, I didn’t
mean to fetch up such talk as that. You see, when I do fall in with a
prospector once in a month of Sundays I never talk much. An’ then it’d
be to ask him if he’d seen any float lately or panned any color. But
you’re different. You make my mind work. An’, Wansfell, sometimes I
think my mind has been crowded with a million thoughts all cryin’ to
get free. That’s the desert. A man’s got to fight the desert with his
intelligence or else become less than a man. An’ I always did think a
lot, if I didn’t talk.”
“I’m that way, too,” replied Adam. “But a man should talk when he gets
a chance. I talk to my burros, and to myself, just to hear the sound of
my voice.”
“Ah! Ah!” exclaimed Dismukes, with deep breath. He nodded his shaggy
head. Adam’s words had struck an answering chord in his heart.
“You’ve tried for gold here?” queried Adam.
“No. I was here first just after the strike, an’ often since. Water’s
all that ever drew me. I’d starve before I’d dig for gold among a pack
of beasts. I may be a desert wolf, but I’m a lone one.”
“They’re coyotes and you’re the gray wolf. I liken ’most every man I
meet to some beast or creature of the desert.”
“Aye, you’re right. The desert stamps a man. An’, Wansfell, it’s
stamped you with the look of a desert eagle. Ha-ha! I ain’t flatterin’
to either of us, am I? Me a starved gray wolf, huntin’ alone, mean an’
hard an’ fierce! An’ you a long, lean-headed eagle, with that look
of you like you were about to strike--_pong!_... Well, well, there’s
no understandin’ the work of the desert. The way it develops the
livin’ creatures! They all have to live, an’ livin’ on the desert is a
thousand times harder than anywhere else. They all have to be perfect
machines for destruction. Each seems so swift that he gets away, yet
each is also so fierce an’ sure that he catches his prey. They live
on one another, but the species doesn’t die out. That’s what stumps
me about the desert. Take the human creatures. They grow fiercer than
animals. Maybe that’s because nature did not intend man to live on the
desert. An’ it is no place for man. Nature intended these classes of
plants an’ these species of birds an’ beasts to live, fight, thrive,
an’ reproduce their kind on the desert. But men can’t thrive nor
reproduce their kind here.”
“How about the Indians who lived in the desert for hundreds of years?”
asked Adam.
“What’s a handful of Indians? An’ what’s a few years out of the
millions of years that the desert’s been here, just as it is now?
Nothin’--nothin’ at all! Wansfell, there will be men come into the
desert, down there below the Salton Sink, an’ in other places where
the soil is productive, an’ they’ll build dams an’ storage places for
water. Maybe a lot of fools will even turn the Colorado River over
the desert. They’ll make it green an’ rich an’, like the Bible says,
blossom as a rose. An’ these men will build ditches for water, an’
reservoirs an’ towns an’ cities, an’ cross the desert with railroads.
An’ they’ll grow rich an’ proud. They’ll think they’ve conquered it.
But, poor fools! they don’t know the desert! Only a man who has lived
with the desert much of his life can ever know. Time will pass an’ men
will grow old, an’ their sons an’ grandsons after them. A hundred an’
a thousand years might pass with fruitfulness still in the control of
man. But all that is only a few grains of time in all the endless sands
of eternity. The desert’s work will have been retarded for a little
while. But the desert works ceaselessly an’ with infinite patience.
The sun burns, the frost cracks, the avalanche rolls, the rain
weathers. Slowly the earth crust heaves up into mountains an’ slowly
the mountains wear down, atom by atom, to be the sands of the desert.
An’ the winds--how they blow for ever an’ ever! What can avail against
the desert winds? They blow the sand an’ sift an’ seep an’ bury....
Men will die an’ the places that knew them will know them no more. An’
the desert will come back to its own. That is well, for it is what God
intended.”
“God and nature, then, with you are one and the same?” queried Adam.
“Yes. Twenty years sleepin’ on the sand with the stars in my face has
taught me that. Is it the same with you?”
“No. I grant all that you contend for the desert and for nature. But I
can’t reconcile nature and God. Nature is cruel, inevitable, hopeless.
But God must be immortality.”
“Wansfell, there’s somethin’ divine in some men, but not in all, nor
in many. So how can that divinity be God? The immortality you speak
of--that is only your life projected into another life.”
“You mean if I do not have a child I will not have immortality?”
“Exactly.”
“But what of my soul?” demanded Adam, solemnly.
Dismukes drooped his shaggy head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve
gone so deep, but I can’t go any deeper. That always stumps me. I’ve
never found my soul! Maybe findin’ my soul would be findin’ God. I
don’t know.... An’ you, Wansfell--once I said you had the spirit an’
mind to find God on the desert. Did you?”
Adam shook his head. “I’m no farther than you, Dismukes, though I
think differently about life and death.... I’ve fought to live on
this wasteland, but I’ve fought hardest to think. It seems that always
nature strikes me with its terrible mace! I have endless hours to
look at the desert and I see what you see--the strange ferocity of it
all--the fierce purpose. No wonder you say the desert stamps a man!”
“Aye! An’ woman, too! Take this she-devil who runs a place here in
Tecopah--Mohave Jo is the name she bears. Have you seen her?”
“No, but I’ve heard of her. At Needles I met the wife of a miner,
Clark, who’d been killed here at Tecopah.”
“Never heard of Clark. But I don’t doubt the story. It’s common
enough--miners bein’ killed an’ robbed. There’s a gang over in the
Panamints who live on miners.”
“I’m curious to see Mohave Jo,” said Adam.
“Well, speakin’ of this one-eyed harridan reminds me of a man I met
last trip across the Salton flats, down on the Colorado. Met him at
Walters--a post on the stage line. He had only one eye, too. There was
a terrible scar where his eye, the right one, had been. He was one of
these Texans lookin’ for a man. There seems to be possibilities of a
railroad openin’ up that part of the desert. An’ this fellow quizzed
me about water holes. Of course, if any one gets hold of water in that
country he’ll strike it rich as gold, if the country ever opens up.
It’s likely to happen, too. Well, this man had an awful face. He’d been
a sheriff in Texas, some one said, an’ later at Ehrenberg. Hell on
hangin’ men!... Of course I never asked him how he lost his eye. But
he told me--spoke of it more than once. The deformity had affected his
mind. You meet men like that--sort of crazy on somethin’. He was always
lookin’ for the fellow who’d knocked out his eye. To kill him!”
“Do you--recall his--name?” asked Adam, his voice halting with a thick
sensation in his throat. The past seemed as yesterday.
“Never was much on rememberin’ names,” responded Dismukes,
scratching his shaggy head. “Let’s see--why, yes, he called himself
Collis--Collis--haw. That’s it--Collishaw. Hard name to remember. But
as a man he struck me easy to remember.... Well, friend Wansfell, I’ve
had enough talkin’ to do me for a spell. I’m goin’ to bed.”
While Adam sat beside the fire, motionless, pondering with slow,
painful amaze over what he had just heard, Dismukes prepared for his
night’s rest. He unrolled a pack, spread a ragged old canvas, folded
a blanket upon it, and arranged another blanket to pull up over him,
together with the end of the canvas. For a pillow he utilized an old
coat that lay on his pack. His sole concession to man’s custom of
undressing for bed was the removal of his old slouch hat. Then with
slow, labored movement he lay down to stretch his huge body and pull
the coverlets over him. From his cavernous breast heaved a long, deep
sigh. His big eyes, dark and staring, gazed up at the brightening
stars, and then they closed.
Adam felt tempted to pack and move on to a quiet and lonely place
off in the desert, where he could think without annoyance. Keen and
bitterly faithful as had been his memory, it had long ceased to revive
thoughts of Collishaw, the relentless sheriff and ally of Guerd. How
strange and poignant had been the shock of recollection! It had been
the blow Adam had dealt--the savage fling of his gun in Collishaw’s
face--that had destroyed an eye and caused a hideous disfigurement.
And the Texan, with that fatality characteristic of his kind, was ever
on the lookout for the man who had ruined his eyesight. Perhaps that
was only one reason for his thirst for revenge. Guerd! Had Collishaw
not sworn to hang Adam? “You’ll swing for this!” he had yelled in
his cold, ringing voice of passion. And so Adam lived over again the
old agony, new and strange in its bitter mockery, its vain hope of
forgetfulness. Vast as the desert was, it seemed small now to Adam, for
there wandered over it a relentless and bloodthirsty Texan, hunting to
kill him. The past was not dead. The present and the future could not
be wholly consecrated to atonement. A specter, weird and grotesque
as a yucca tree, loomed out there in the shadows of the desert night.
Death stalked on Adam’s trail. The hatred of men was beyond power to
understand. Work, fame, use, health, love, home, life itself, could
be sacrificed by some men just to kill a rival or an enemy. Adam
remembered that Collishaw had hated him and loved Guerd. Moreover,
Collishaw had that strange instinct to kill men--a passion which grew
by what it fed on--a morbid mental twist that drove him to rid himself
of the terrible haunting ghost of his last victim by killing a new one.
Added to that was a certain leaning toward the notorious.
“We’ll meet some day,” soliloquized Adam. “But he would never recognize
me.”
The comfort of that fact did not long abide in Adam’s troubled mind. He
would recognize Collishaw. And that seemed to hold something fatalistic
and inevitable. “When I meet Collishaw I’ll tell him who I am--and I’ll
kill him!” That fierce whisper was the desert voice in Adam--the desert
spirit. He could no more help that sudden bursting flash of fire than
he could help breathing. Nature in the desert did not teach men to meet
a threat with forgiveness, nor to wait until they were struck. Instinct
had precedence over intelligence and humanity. In the eternal strife
to keep alive on the desert a man who conquered must have assimilated
something of the terrible nature of the stinging _cholla_ cactus, and
the hard, grasping tenacity of the mesquite roots, and the ferocity of
the wildcat, and the cruelty of the hawk--something of the nature of
all that survived. It was a law. It forced a man to mete out violence
in advance of that meant for him.
“To fight and to think were to be my blessings,” soliloquized Adam, and
he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember
that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and
terrible duty to himself!
So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the
composure of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his
eyes, as it had upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was
not tired. He never tired any more. There seemed to be no task of a
single day that could weary his strength. And for long he lay awake,
listening to the deep breathing of his companion, and the howl of the
coyotes, and the sounds of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the
desert. A sadness weighed heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to
have met Dismukes, but now he was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed
to have been rent. The years had not really changed the relation of his
crime, nor materially the nature of his sin. But they had gradually,
almost imperceptibly, softened his ceaseless and eternal remorse. By
this meeting with Dismukes he found that time effaced shocks, blows,
stains, just as it wore away the face of the desert rock. That, too,
was a law; and in this Adam divined a blessing that he could not
deny. Dismukes had unleashed a specter out of the dim glow of the
past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days! There
were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold mountains
that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep-blue sky above and
in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face, floating, fading,
reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling--a face partaking
of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of perfect
manhood--the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam, and
the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in
his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the
sleepless hours--these were Adam’s again, as keen as in the first days
of his awakening down on the Colorado Desert, where from the peaks of
the Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to
the purple peak--Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother’s
grave. “Some day I’ll go back!” whispered Adam, as if answering to an
imperative and mysterious call.
The long night wore on with the heavens star-fired by its golden train,
and the sounds at last yielding to the desert silence. Adam could see
Dismukes, a wide, prone figure, with dark face upturned to the sky,
a man seemingly as strange and strong as the wastelands he talked so
much about, yet now helpless in sleep, unguarded, unconscious, wrapped
in his deep dreams of the joy and life his gold was to bring him.
Adam felt a yearning pity for this dreamer. Did he really love gold
or was his passion only a dream? Whatever that was and whatever the
man was, there rested upon his ragged, dark face a shadow of tragedy.
Adam wondered what his own visage would reflect when he lay asleep,
no more master of a mind that never rested? The look of an eagle? So
Dismukes had said, and that was not the first time Adam had heard
such comparison. He had seen desert eagles, dead and alive. He tried
to recall how they looked, but the images were not convincing. The
piercing eye, clear as the desert air, with the power of distance in
the gray depths; the lean, long lines; the wild poise of head, bitter
and ruthless and fierce; the look of loneliness--these characters
surely could not be likened to his face. What a strange coincidence
that Dismukes should hit upon the likeness of an eagle--the winged
thunderbolt of the heights--the lonely bird Adam loved above all desert
creatures! And so Adam wandered in mind until at last he fell asleep.