Adam ran with the strides of a giant. And he came up to a man, ragged
and dirty, crawling wearily along, dragging a canteen through the sand.
“Say, hold on!” called Adam, loudly.
The man halted, but did not lift his head. Adam bent down to peer at
him.
“What ails you?” queried Adam, sharply.
“Huh!” ejaculated the man, stupidly. Adam’s repeated question,
accompanied by a shake, brought only a grunt.
Adam lifted the man to his feet and, supporting him, began to lead
him over the sand. His equilibrium had been upset, and, like all men
overcome on the desert, he wanted to plunge off a straight line. Adam
persevered, but the labor of holding him was greater than that of
supporting him.
At length Adam released the straining fellow, as much out of curiosity
to see what he would do as from a realization that time could not
be wasted in this manner. He did not fall, but swayed and staggered
around in a circle, like an animal that had been struck on the head.
The texture of his ragged garments, the cut of them, the look of the
man, despite his soiled and unkempt appearance, marked him as one not
commonly met with in the desert.
The coppery sun stood straight overhead and poured down a strong and
leaden heat. Adam calculated that they were miles from camp and would
never reach it at this rate. He pondered. He must carry the man.
Suiting action to thought, he picked him up and, throwing him over his
shoulder, started to plod on. The weight was little to one of Adam’s
strength, but the squirming and wrestling of the fellow to get down
made Adam flounder in the sand.
[Illustration: 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]
“You poor devil!” muttered Adam, at last brought to a standstill.
“Maybe I can’t save your life, anyway.”
With that he set the man down and, swinging a powerful blow, laid him
stunned upon the sand. Whereupon it was easy to lift him and throw him
over a shoulder like an empty sack. Not for a long distance over the
sand did that task become prodigious. 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. He laid the unconscious man down while
he recovered breath and strength. Then he picked him up and went on.
After that he plodded slower, rested oftener, weakened more
perceptibly. Meanwhile the hours passed, and when he reached the huge
gateway in the red iron mountain wall the sun was gone and purple
shadows were mustering in the valley. When he reached the more level
field where the thick-strewn bowlders lay, all before his eyes seemed
red. A million needles were stinging his nerves, running like spears of
light into his darkened sight.
The limit that he had put upon his endurance was to reach the shack. He
did so, and he was nearly blind when the woman’s poignant call thrilled
his throbbing ears. He saw her--a white shape through ruddy haze. Then
he deposited his burden on the sand.
“Oh!” the woman moaned. “He’s dead!”
Adam shook his head. Pity, fear, and even terror rang in her poignant
cry, but not love.
“Ah!... You’ve saved him, then.... He’s injured--there’s a great
bruise--he breathes so heavily.”
While Adam sat panting, unable to speak, the woman wiped her husband’s
face and worked over him.
“He came back once--and fell into a stupor like this, but not so deep.
What can it be?”
“Poison--air,” choked Adam.
“Oh, this terrible Death Valley!” she cried.
Adam’s sight cleared and he saw the woman, clad in a white robe
over her gray dress, a garment clean and rich, falling in thick
folds--strange to Adam’s sight, recalling the past. The afterglow of
sunset shone down into the valley, lighting her face. Once she must
have been beautiful. The perfect lines, the noble brow, the curved
lips, were there, but her face was thin, strained, tragic. Only the
eyes held beauty still.
“You saved him?” she queried, with quick-drawn breath.
“Found him--miles and miles--up the--valley--crawling on--his hands and
knees,” panted Adam. “I had--to carry him.”
“You carried him!” she exclaimed, incredulously. Then the large eyes
blazed. “So that’s why you were so livid--why you fell?... Oh, you
splendid man! You giant!... He’d have died out there--alone. I thank
you with all my heart.”
She reached a white worn hand to touch Adam’s with an exquisite
eloquence of gratitude.
“Get water--bathe him,” said Adam. “Have you ammonia or whisky?” And
while he laboriously got to his knees the woman ran into the shack.
He rose, feeling giddy and weak. All his muscles seemed beaten and
bruised, and his heart pained. Soon the woman came hurrying out, with
basin and towel and a little black satchel that evidently contained
medicines. Adam helped her work over her husband, but, though they
revived him, they could not bring him back to intelligent consciousness.
“Help me carry him in,” said Adam.
Inside the little shack it was almost too dark to see plainly.
“Have you a light?” he added.
“No,” she replied.
“I’ll fetch a candle. You watch over him while I move my camp up here.
You might change his shirt, if he’s got another. I’ll be back right
away, and I’ll start a fire--get some supper for us.”
* * * * *
By the time Adam had packed and moved his effects darkness had settled
down between the slopes of the mountains. After he had unpacked near
the shack, his first move was to light a candle and take it to the door.
“Here’s a light, ma’am,” he called.
She glided silently out of the gloom, her garments gleaming ghostlike
and her white face with its luminous eyes, dark and strange as
midnight, looking like a woman’s face in tragic dreams. As she took the
candle her hand touched Adam’s.
“Thank you,” she said. “Please don’t call me ma’am. My name is
Magdalene Virey.”
“I’ll try to remember.... Has your husband come to yet?”
“No. He seems to have fallen into a stupor. Won’t you look at him?”
Adam followed her inside and saw that she marked his lofty height. The
shack had not been built for anyone of his stature.
“How tall you are!” she murmured.
The candle did not throw a bright light, yet by its aid Adam made out
the features of the man whose life he had saved. It seemed to Adam to
be the face of a Lucifer whose fiendish passions were now restrained by
sleep. Whoever this man was, he had suffered a broken heart and ruined
life.
“He’s asleep,” said Adam. “That’s not a trance or stupor. He’s worn
out. I believe it’d be better not to wake him.”
“You think so?” she replied, with quick relief.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps if you watch him awhile you can tell.... I’ll
get some supper and call you.”
* * * * *
Adam’s habitual dexterity over camp tasks failed him this evening.
Presently, however, the supper was ready, and he threw brush on the
fire to make a light.
“Mrs. Virey,” he called at the door, “come and eat now.”
When had the camp fire of his greeted such a vision, except in his
vague dreams? Tall, white-gowned, slender, and graceful, with the
poise of a woman aloof and proud and the sad face of a Madonna--what
a woman to sit at Adam’s camp fire in Death Valley! The shadowed and
thick light hid the ravages that had by day impaired her beauty. Adam
placed a canvas pack for her to sit upon, and then he served her, with
something that was not wholly unconscious satisfaction. Of all men, he
of the desert could tell the signs of hunger; and the impression had
come to him that she was half starved. The way she ate brought home to
Adam with a pang the memorable days when he was starving. This woman
sitting in the warm, enhancing glow of the camp fire had an exquisitely
spiritual face. She had seemed all spirit. But self-preservation was
the first instinct and the first law of human nature, or any nature.
“When have I eaten so heartily!” she exclaimed at last. “But, oh! it
all tasted so good.... Sir, you are a capital cook.”
“Thank you,” replied Adam, much gratified.
“Do you always fare so well?”
“No. I’m bound to confess I somewhat outdid myself to-night. You see, I
seldom have such opportunity to serve a woman.”
She rested her elbows on her knees, with her hands under her chin, and
looked at him with intense interest. In the night her eyes seemed very
full and large, supernaturally bright and tragic. They were the eyes
of a woman who still preserved in her something of inherent faith in
mankind. Adam divined that she had scarcely looked at him before as an
individual with a personality, and that some accent or word of his had
struck her singularly.
“It was that miner, Dis--Dis----”
“Dismukes,” added Adam.
“Yes. It was he who sent you here. Are you a miner, too?”
“No. I care little for gold.”
“Ah!... What are you, then?”
“Just a wanderer. Wansfell, the Wanderer, they call me.”
“They? Who are they?”
“Why, I suppose they are the other wanderers. Men who tramp over the
desert--men who seek gold or forgetfulness or peace or solitude--men
who are driven--or who hide. These are few, but, taken by the years,
they seem many.”
“Men of the desert have passed by here, but none like you,” she
replied, with gravity, and her eyes pierced him. “_Why_ did you come?”
“Years ago my life was ruined,” said Adam, slowly. “I chose to fight
the desert. And in all the years the thing that helped me most was
not to pass by anyone in trouble. The desert sees strange visitors.
Life is naked here, like those stark mountain-sides.... Dismukes is
my friend--he saved me from death once. He is a man who knows this
wasteland. He told me about your being here. He said no white woman
could live in Death Valley.... I wondered--if I might--at least advise
you, turn you back--and so I came.”
His earnestness deeply affected her.
“Sir, your kind words warm a cold and forlorn heart,” she said. “But I
cannot be turned back. It’s too late.”
“No hour is ever too late.... Mrs. Virey, I’ll not distress you with
advice or importunities. I know too well the need and the meaning
of peace. But the fact of your being here--a woman of your evident
quality--a woman of your sensitiveness and delicate health--why, it is
a terrible thing! This is Death Valley. The month is April. Soon it
will be May--then June. When midsummer comes you cannot survive here.
I know nothing of _why_ you are here--I don’t seek to know. But you
cannot stay. It would be a miracle for your husband to find gold here,
if that is what he seeks. Surely he has discovered that.”
“Virey does not seek gold,” the woman said.
“Does he know that a white woman absolutely cannot live here in Death
Valley? Even the Indians abandon it in summer.”
“He knows. There are Shoshone Indians up on the mountains now. They
pack supplies to us. They have warned him.”
Adam could ask no more, yet how impossible not to feel an absorbing
interest in this woman’s fate. As he sat with bowed head, watching the
glowing and paling of the red embers, he felt her gaze upon him.
“Wansfell, you must have a great heart--like your body,” she said,
presently. “It is blessed to meet such a man. Your kindness, your
interest, soften my harsh and bitter doubt of men. We are utter
strangers. But there’s something in this desert that bridges time--that
bids me open my lips to you ... a man who traveled this ghastly valley
to serve me!... My husband, Virey, knows that Death Valley is a hell on
earth. So do I. That is why he brought me ... that is why I came!”
“My God!” breathed Adam, staring incredulously at her. Dismukes had
prepared him for tragedy; the desert had shown him many dark and
terrible calamities, misfortunes, mysteries; he had imagined he could
no longer be thrown off his balance by amaze. But that a sad-eyed,
sweet-voiced woman, whose every tone and gesture and look spoke of
refinement and education, of a life infinitely removed from the wild
ruggedness of the desert West--that she could intimate what seemed in
one breath both murder and suicide--this staggered Adam’s credulity.
Yet, as he stared at her, realizing the tremendous passion of will,
of spirit, of something more than emanated from her, divining how in
her case intellect and culture had been added to the eternal feminine
of her nature, he knew she spoke the truth. Adam had met women on the
desert, and all of them were riddles. Yet what a vast range between
Margarita Arallanes and Magdalene Virey!
“Won’t your husband leave--take you away from here?” asked Adam, slowly.
“No.”
“Well--I have a way of forcing men to see things. I suppose I----”
“Useless! We have traveled three thousand miles to get to Death
Valley. Years ago Elliot Virey read about this awful place. He was
always interested. He learned that it was the most arid, ghastly,
desolate, and terrible place of death in all the world.... Then,
when he got me to Sacramento--and to Placerville--he would talk with
miners, prospectors, Indians--anyone who could tell him about Death
Valley.... Virey had a reason for finding a hell on earth. We crossed
the mountains, range after range--and here we are.... Sir, the hell of
which we read--even in its bottommost pit--cannot be worse than Death
Valley.”
“You will let me take you home--at least out of the desert?” queried
Adam, with passionate sharpness.
“Sir, I thank you again,” she replied, her voice thrilling richly.
“But no--no! You do not understand--you cannot--and it’s impossible to
explain.”
“Ah! Yes, some things are.... Suppose you let me move your camp higher
up, out of this thick, dead air and heat--where there are trees and
good water?”
“But it is not a beautiful and a comfortable camp that Virey--that we
want,” she said, bitterly.
“Then let me move your shack across the wash out of danger. This spot
is the most forbidding I ever saw. That mountain above us is on the
move. The whole cracked slope is sliding like a glacier. It is an
avalanche waiting for a jar--a slip--something to start it. The rocks
are rolling down all the time.”
“Have I not heard the rocks--cracking, ringing--in the dead of night!”
she cried, shuddering. Her slender form seemed to draw within itself
and the white, slim hands clenched her gown. “Rocks! How I’ve learned
to hate them! These rolling rocks are living things. I’ve heard them
slide and crack, roll and ring--hit the sand with a thump, and then
with whistle and thud go by where I lay in the dark.... People who live
as I have lived know nothing of the elements. I had no fear of the
desert--nor of Death Valley. I dared it. I laughed to scorn the idea
that any barren wild valley, any maelstrom of the sea, any Sodom of a
city could be worse than the chaos of my soul.... But I didn’t know.
I am human. I’m a woman. A woman is meant to bear children. Nothing
else!... I learned that I was afraid of the dark--that such fear had
been born in me. These rolling rocks got on my nerves. I wait--I listen
for them. And I pray.... Then the silence--that became so dreadful.
It is insupportable. Worse than all is the loneliness.... Oh, this
God-forsaken, lonely Death Valley! It will drive me mad.”
As Adam had anticipated, no matter what strength of will, what sense
of secrecy bound this woman’s lips, she had been victim to the sound
of her own voice, which, liberated by his sympathy, had spoken, and a
word, as it were, had led to a full, deep, passionate utterance.
“True. All too terribly true,” replied Adam. “And for a woman--for
you--these feelings will grow more intense.... I beg of you, at least
let me move your camp back out of danger.”
“No! Not a single foot!” she blazed, as if confronted with something
beyond his words. After that she hid her face in her hands. A long
silence ensued. Adam, watching her, saw when the tremble and heave
of her breast subsided. At length she looked up again, apparently
composed. “Perhaps I talked more than I should have. But no matter.
It was necessary to tell you something. For you came here to help an
unknown woman. Not to anyone else have I breathed a word of the true
state of my feelings. My husband watches me like a hawk, but not yet
does he know my fears. I’ll thank you, when you speak to him, if you
stay here so long, not to tell him anything I’ve said.”
“Mrs. Virey, I’ll stay as long as you are here,” said Adam, simply.
The simplicity of his speech, coupled with the tremendous suggestion
in the fact of his physical presence, his strength and knowledge to
serve her despite her bitter repudiation, seemed again to knock at the
heart of her femininity. In the beginning of human life on the earth,
and through its primal development, there was always a man to protect
a woman. But subtly and inevitably there had been in Adam’s words an
intimation that Magdalene Virey stood absolutely alone. More, for with
spirit, if not with body, she was fighting Death Valley, and also some
terrible relation her husband bore to her.
“Sir--you would stay here--on a possible chance of serving me?” she
whispered.
“Yes,” replied Adam.
“Virey will not like that.”
“I’m not sure, but I suspect it’ll not make any difference to me what
he likes.”
“If you are kind to me he will drive you away,” she went on, with
agitation.
“Well, as he’s your husband he may prevent me from being kind, but he
can’t drive me away.”
“But suppose I ask you to go?”
“If that’s the greatest kindness I can do you--well, I’ll go.... But do
you ask me?”
“I--I don’t know. I may be forced to--not by _him_, but by my pride,”
she said, desperately. “Oh, I’m unstrung! I don’t know what to say....
After all, just the sound of a kind voice makes me a coward. O God!
if people in the world only knew the value of kindness! I never did
know.... This desert of horrors teaches the truth of life.... Once I
had the world at my feet!... Now I break and bow at the sympathy of a
stranger!”
“Never mind your pride,” said Adam, in his slow, cool way. “I
understand. I’ve a good deal of a woman in me. Whatever brought you
to Death Valley, whatever nails you here, is nothing to me. Even if
I learn it, what need that be to you? If you do not want me to stay
to work for you, watch over your husband--why, let me stay for my own
sake.”
She rose and faced him, with soul-searching eyes. She could not escape
her nature. Emotion governed her.
“Sir, you speak nobly,” she replied, with lips that trembled. “But I
don’t understand you. Stay here--where I am--for your sake! Explain,
please.”
“I have my burden. Once it was even more terrible than yours. Through
that I can feel as you feel now. I have lived the loneliness--the
insupportable loneliness--of the desert--the silence, the heat, the
hell. But my burden still weighs on my soul. If I might somehow help
your husband, who is going wrong, blindly following some road of
passion--change him or stop him, why that would ease my burden. If I
might save you weariness, or physical pain, or hunger, or thirst, or
terror--it would be doing more for myself than for you.... We are in
Death Valley. You refuse to leave. We are, right here, two hundred
feet below sea level. When the furnace heat comes--when the blasting
midnight wind comes--it means either madness or death.”
“Stay--Sir Knight,” she said, with a hollow, ringing gayety. “Who shall
say that chivalry is dead?... Stay! and know this. I fear no man. I
scorn death.... But, ah, the woman of me! I hate dirt and vermin.
I’m afraid of pain. I suffer agonies even before I’m hurt. I miss so
unforgettably the luxuries of life. And lastly, I have a mortal terror
of going mad. Spare me that and you will have my prayers in this
world--and beyond.... Good night.”
“Good night,” replied Adam.
She left him to the deepening gloom and the dying camp fire. Adam soon
grew conscious of extreme fatigue in mind and body. Spreading his
blankets on the sands, he stretched his weary, aching body without even
an upward glance at the stars, and fell asleep.
* * * * *
Daylight again, as if by the opening of eyelids! The rose color was
vying with the blue of the sky and a noble gold crowned the line of
eastern range which Adam could see through the V-shaped split that
opened into the valley.
He pulled on his boots, and gave his face an unusual and detrimental
luxury in the desert. Water was bad for exposed flesh in arid country.
The usual spring and buoyancy of his physical being was lacking this
day. Such overstrain as yesterday’s would require time to be remedied.
So Adam moved slowly and with caution.
First Adam went to the spring. He found a bubbling gush of
velvet-looking water pouring out of a hole and running a few rods to
sink into the sand. The color of it seemed inviting--so clear and soft
and somehow rich. The music of its murmur, too, was melodious. Adam was
a connoisseur of waters. What desert wanderer of years was not? Before
he tasted this water, despite its promise, he knew it was not good. Yet
it did not have exactly an unpleasant taste. Dismukes had said this
water was all right, yet he seldom stayed long enough in one locality
to learn the ill effects of the water. Adam knew he too could live on
this water. But he was thinking of the delicate woman lost here in
Death Valley with an idiot or a knave of a husband.
The spring was located some two hundred yards or more from the shack
and just out of line of the rock-strewn slope. Spreading like a fan,
this weathered slant of stones extended its long, curved length in
the opposite direction. Adam decided to pitch his permanent camp,
or at least sleeping place, here on the grass. Here he erected a
brush-and-canvas shelter to make shade, and deposited his effects under
it. That done, he returned to the shack to cook breakfast.
There appeared to be no life in the rude little misshapen hut. Had the
man who built it ever been a boy? There were men so utterly helpless
and useless out in the wilds, where existence depended upon labor of
hands, that they seemed foreign to the descendants of Americans. Adam
could not but wonder about the man lying in there, though he tried hard
to confine his reflections to the woman. He did not like the situation.
Of what avail the strong arm, the desert-taught fierceness to survive?
If this man and woman had ever possessed instincts to live, to fight,
to reproduce their kind, to be of use in the world, they had subverted
them to the debasements of sophisticated and selfish existence. The
woman loomed big to Adam, and he believed she had been dragged down by
a weak and vicious man.
Leisurely Adam attended to the preparation of breakfast, prolonging
tasks that always passed swiftly through his hands.
“Good morning, Sir Wansfell,” called a voice with something of mockery
in it, yet rich and wistful--a low-pitched contralto voice full of
music and pathos and a pervading bitterness.
It stirred Adam’s blood, so sluggish this morning. It seemed to carry
an echo from his distant past. Turning, he saw the woman, clad in
gray, with a girdle of cord twisted around her slender waist. Soft and
clean and fleecy, that gray garment, so out of place there, so utterly
incongruous against the background of crude shack and wild slope,
somehow fitted her voice as it did her fragile shape, somehow set her
infinitely apart from the women Adam had met in his desert wanderings.
She came from the great world outside, a delicate spark from the solid
flint of class, a thoroughbred whom years before the desert might have
saved.
“Good morning, Mrs. Virey,” returned Adam. “How are you--and did your
husband awake?”
“I slept better than for long,” she replied, “and I think I know
why.... Yes, Virey came to. He’s conscious, and asked for water. But
he’s weak--strange. I’d like you to look at him presently.”
“Yes, I will.”
“And how are you after your tremendous exertions of yesterday?” she
inquired.
“Not so spry,” said Adam, with a smile. “But I’ll be myself in a day or
so. I believe the air down in the valley affected me a little. My lungs
are sore.... I think it would be more comfortable for you if we had
breakfast in your kitchen. The sun is hot.”
“Indeed yes. So you mean to--to do this--this camp work for me--in
spite of----”
“Yes. I always oppose women,” he said. “And that is about once every
two or three years. You see, women are scarce on the desert.”
“Last night I was upset. I am sorry that I was ungracious. I thank
you, and I am only too glad to accept your kind service,” she said,
earnestly.
“That is well. Now, will you help me carry in the breakfast?”
Unreality was not unusual to Adam. The desert had as many unrealities,
illusions, and specters as it had natural and tangible things. But
while he sat opposite to this fascinating woman, whose garments exuded
some subtle fragrance of perfume, whose shadowed, beautiful face shone
like a cameo against the drab wall of the brush shack, he was hard put
to it to convince himself of actuality. She ate daintily, but she was
hungry. The gray gown fell in graceful folds around the low stone seat.
The rude table between them was a box, narrow and uneven.
“Shall I try to get Virey to eat?” she asked, presently.
“That depends. On the desert, after a collapse, we are careful with
food and water.”
“Will you look at him?”
Adam followed her as she swept aside a flap of the canvas partition.
This room was larger and lighter. It had an aperture for a window.
Adam’s quick glance took this in, and then the two narrow beds of
blankets raised on brush cots. Virey lay on the one farther from the
door. His pallid brow and unshaven face appeared drawn into terrible
lines, which, of course, Adam could not be sure were permanent or the
result of the collapse in the valley. He inclined, however, to the
conviction that Virey’s face was the distorted reflection of a tortured
soul. Surely he had been handsome once. He had deep-set black eyes, a
straight nose, and a mouth that betrayed him, despite its being half
hidden under a mustache. Adam, keen and strung in that moment as he
received his impressions of Virey, felt the woman’s intensity as if
he had been studying her instead of her husband. How singular women
were! How could it matter to her what opinion he formed of her husband?
Adam knew he had been powerfully prejudiced against this man, but he
had held in stern abeyance all judgment until he could look at him.
For long years Adam had gazed into the face of the desert. Outward
appearance could not deceive him. As the cactus revealed its ruthless
nature, as the tiny inch-high flower bloomed in its perishable but
imperative proof of beauty as well as life, as the long flowing sands
of the desert betrayed the destructive design of the universe--so
the face of any man was the image of his soul. And Adam recoiled
instinctively, if not outwardly, at what he read in Virey’s face.
“You’re in pain?” queried Adam.
“Yes,” came the husky whisper, and Virey put a hand on his breast.
“It’s sore here,” said Adam, feeling Virey. “You’ve breathed poisoned
air down in the valley. It acts like ether.... You just lie quiet for a
while. I’ll do the work around camp.”
“Thank you,” whispered Virey.
The woman followed Adam outside and gazed earnestly up at him,
unconscious of herself, with her face closer than it had ever been
to him and full in the sunlight. It struck Adam that the difference
between desert flowers and the faces of beautiful women was one of
emotion. How much better to have the brief hour of an unconscious
flower, wasting its fragrance on the desert air!
“He’s ill, don’t you think?” queried the woman.
“No. But he recovers slowly. A man must have a perfect heart and
powerful lungs to battle against the many perils in this country. But
Virey will get over this all right.”
“You never give up, do you?” she inquired.
“Come to think of that, I guess I never do,” replied Adam.
“Such spirit is worthy of a better cause. You are doomed here to
failure.”
“Well, I’m not infallible, that’s certain. But you can never tell.
The fact of my standing here is proof of the overcoming of almost
impossible things. I can’t make Death Valley habitable for you, but I
can lessen the hardships. How long have you been here?”
“Several months. But it’s years to me.”
“Who brought you down? How did you get here?”
“We’ve had different guides. The last were Shoshone Indians, who
accompanied us across a range of mountains, then a valley, and last
over the Panamints. They left us here. I rode a horse. Virey walked
the last stages of this journey to Death Valley--from which there will
be no return. We turned horse and burros loose. I have not seen them
since.”
“Are these Shoshones supposed to visit you occasionally?”
“Yes. Virey made a deal with them to come every full moon. We’ve
had more supplies than we need. The trouble is that Virey has
the inclination to eat, but I have not the skill to prepare food
wholesomely under these rough conditions. So we almost starved.”
“Well, let me take charge of camp duties. You nurse your husband
and don’t neglect yourself. It’s the least you can do. You’ll have
hardship and suffering enough, even at best. You’ve suffered, I can
see, but not physically. And you never knew what hardship meant until
you got into the desert. If you _live_, these things will cure you of
any trouble. They’ll hardly cure Virey, for he has retrograded. Most
men in the desert follow the line of least resistance. They sink. But
_you_ will not.... And let me tell you. There are elemental pangs of
hunger, of thirst, of pain that are blessings in disguise. You’ll learn
what rest is and sleep and loneliness. People who live as you have
lived are lopsided. What do they know of life close to the earth? Any
other life is false. Cities, swarms of men and women, riches, luxury,
poverty--these were not in nature’s scheme of life.... Mrs. Virey, if
anything _can_ change your soul it will be the desert.”
“Ah, Sir Wansfell, so you have philosophy as well as chivalry,” she
replied, with the faint accent that seemed to be mockery of herself.
“Change my soul if you can, wanderer of the desert! I am a woman, and
a woman is symbolical of change. Teach me to cook, to work, to grow
strong, to endure, to fight, to look up at those dark hills whence
cometh your strength.... I am here in Death Valley. I will never leave
it in body. My bones will mingle with the sands and molder to dust....
But my soul--ah! that black gulf of doubt, of agony, of terror, of
hate--change _that_ if you can.”
These tragic, eloquent words chained Adam to Death Valley as if they
had been links of steel; and thus began his long sojourn there.
* * * * *
Work or action was always necessary to Adam. They had become second
nature. He planned a brush shelter from the sun, a sort of outside
room adjoining the shack, a stone fireplace and table and seats, a low
stone wall to keep out blowing sand, and a thick, heavy stone fence
between the shack and the slope of sliding rocks. When these tasks were
finished there would be others, and always there would be the slopes to
climb, the valley to explore. Idleness in Death Valley was a forerunner
of madness. There must be a reserve fund of long work and exercise,
so that when the blazing, leaden-hazed middays of August came, with
idleness imperative, there would be both physical force and unclouded
mind to endure them. The men who succumbed to madness in this valley
were those who had not understood how to combat it.
That day passed swiftly, and the twilight hour seemed to have less of
gloom and forbidding intimations. That might well have been due to his
eternal hope. Mrs. Virey showed less gravity and melancholy, and not
once did she speak with bitterness or passion. She informed Adam that
Virey had improved.
Two more days slipped by, and on the third Virey got up and came forth
into the sunlight. Adam happened to be at work near by. He saw Virey
gaze around at the improvements that had been made and say something
about them to his wife. He looked a man who should have been in
the prime of life. Approaching with slow gait and haggard face, he
addressed Adam.
“You expect pay for this puttering around?”
“No,” replied Adam, shortly.
“How’s that?”
“Well, when men are used to the desert, as I am, they lend a hand where
it is needed. That’s not often.”
“But I didn’t want any such work done round my camp.”
“I know, and I excuse you because you’re ignorant of desert ways and
needs.”
“The question of excuse for me is offensive.”
Adam, rising abreast of the stone wall he was building, fixed his
piercing eyes upon this man. Mrs. Virey stood a little to one side,
but not out of range of Adam’s gaze. Did a mocking light show in her
shadowy eyes? The doubt, the curiosity in her expression must have
related to Adam. That slight, subtle something about her revealed to
Adam the inevitableness of disappointment in store for him if he still
entertained any hopes of amenable relations with Virey.
“We all have to be excused sometimes,” said Adam, deliberately. “Now I
had to excuse you on the score of ignorance of the desert. You chose
this place as a camp. It happens to be the most dangerous spot I ever
saw. Any moment a stone may roll down that slope to kill you. Any
moment the whole avalanche may start. That slope is an avalanche.”
“It’s my business where I camp,” rejoined Virey.
“Were you aware of the danger here?”
“I am indifferent to danger.”
“But you are not alone. You have a woman with you.”
Manifestly, Virey had been speaking without weighing words and looking
at Adam without really seeing him. The brooding shade passed out of
his eyes, and in its place grew a light of interest that leaped to the
crystal-cold clearness of a lens.
“You’re a prospector,” he asserted.
“No. I pan a little gold dust once in a while for fun, because I happen
across it.”
“You’re no miner, then--nor hunter, nor teamster.”
“I’ve been a little of all you name, but I can’t be called any one of
them.”
“You might be one of the robbers that infest these hills.”
“I might be, only I’m not,” declared Adam, dryly. The fire in his
depths stirred restlessly, but he kept a cool, smothering control over
it. He felt disposed to be lenient and kind toward this unfortunate
man. If only the woman had not stood there with that half-veiled
mocking shadow of doubt in her eyes!
“You’re an educated man!” ejaculated Virey, incredulously.
“I might claim to be specially educated in the ways of the desert.”
“And the ways of women, are _they_ mysteries to you?” queried Virey,
with scorn. His interrogation seemed like a bitter doubt flung out of
an immeasurable depth of passion.
“I confess that they are,” replied Adam. “I’ve lived a lonely life. Few
women have crossed my trail.”
“You don’t realize your good fortune--if you tell the truth.”
“I would not lie to any man,” returned Adam, bluntly.
“Bah! Men are all liars, and women make them so.... You’re hanging
round my camp, making a bluff of work.”
“I deny that. Heaving these stones is work. _You_ lift a few of them in
this hot sun.... And my packing you on my back for ten miles over the
floor of Death Valley--was that a bluff?”
“You saved my life!” exclaimed the man, stung to passion. There
seemed to be contending tides within him--a fight of old habits of
thought, fineness of feeling, against an all-absorbing and dominating
malignancy. “Man, I can’t thank you for that.... You’ve done me no
service.”
“I don’t want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost
me.”
“As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you--which is a courtesy
due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I
didn’t want, why do you linger here?”
“I wish to help your wife.”
“Ah! that’s frank of you. That frankness is something for which I
really thank you. But you’ll pardon me if I’m inclined to doubt the
idealistic nature of your motive to help her.”
Adam pondered over this speech without reply. Words always came
fluently when he was ready to speak. And he seemed more concerned over
Virey’s caustic bitterness than over his meaning. Then, as he met the
magnificent flash in Magdalene Virey’s eyes, he was inspired into
revelation of Virey’s veiled hint and into a serenity he divined would
be kindest to her pride.
“Go ahead and help her,” Virey went on. “You have my sincere
felicitations. My charming wife is helpless enough. I never knew how
helpless till we were thrown upon our own resources. She cannot even
cook a potato. And as for baking bread in one of those miserable black
ovens, stranger, if you eat some of it I will not be long annoyed by
your attentions to her.”
“Well, I’ll teach her,” said Adam.
His practical response irritated Virey excessively. It was as if
he wished to insult and inflame, and had not considered a literal
application to his words.
“Who are you? What’s your name?” he queried, yielding to a roused
curiosity.
“Wansfell,” replied Adam.
“Wansfell?” echoed Virey. The name struck a chord of memory--a
discordant one. He bent forward a little, at a point between curiosity
and excitement. “Wansfell?... I know that name. Are you the man who in
this desert country is called Wansfell the Wanderer?”
“Yes, I’m that Wansfell.”
“I heard a prospector tell about you,” went on Virey, his haggard face
now quickened by thought. “It was at a camp near a gold mine over here
somewhere--I forget where. But the prospector said he had seen you kill
a man named Mc something--McKin--no, McKue. That’s the name.... Did he
tell the truth?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to say. I killed Baldy McKue--or rather, to speak as I
feel, I was the means by which the desert dealt McKue the death justly
due him.”
Virey now glowed with excitement, changing the man.
“Somehow that story haunted me,” he said. “I never heard one like
it.... This prospector told how you confronted McKue in the street of a
mining camp. In front of a gambling hell, or maybe it was a hotel. You
yelled like a demon at McKue. He turned white as a sheet. He jerked his
gun, began to shoot. But you bore a charmed life. His bullets did not
hit you, or, if they did, to no purpose. You leaped upon him. His gun
flew one way, his hat another.... Then--then you killed him with your
hands!... Is that true?”
Adam nodded gloomily. The tale, told vividly by this seemingly
galvanized Virey, was not pleasant. And the woman stood there,
transfixed, with white face and tragic eyes.
“My God! You killed McKue by sheer strength--with your bare hands!...
I had not looked at your hands. I see them now.... So McKue was your
enemy?”
“No. I never saw him before that day,” replied Adam.
Virey slowly drew back wonderingly, yet with instinctive shrinking.
Certain it was that his lips stiffened.
“Then why did you kill him?”
“He ill-treated a woman.”
Adam turned away as he replied. He did not choose then to show in
his eyes the leaping thought that had been born of the memory and of
Virey’s strange reaction. But he heard him draw a quick, sharp breath
and step back. Then a silence ensued. Adam gazed up at the endless
slope, at the millions of rocks, all apparently resting lightly in
their pockets, ready to plunge down.
“So--so that was it,” spoke up Virey, evidently with effort. “I always
wondered. Wild West sort of story, you know. Strange I should meet
you.... Thanks for telling me. I gather it wasn’t pleasant for you.”
“It’s sickening to recall, but I have no regrets,” replied Adam.
“Quite so. I understand. Man of the desert--ruthless--inhuman sort of
thing.”
“Inhuman?” queried Adam, and he looked at Virey, at last stung. Behind
Virey’s pale, working face and averted eyes Adam read a conscience in
tumult, a spirit for the moment terrorized. “Virey, you and I’d never
agree on meanings of words.... I broke McKue’s arms and ribs and legs,
and while I cracked them I told him what an inhuman dastard he had
been--to ruin a girl, to beat her, to abandon her and her baby--to
leave them to die. I told him how I had watched them die ... then I
broke his neck!... McKue was the inhuman man--not I.”
Virey turned away, swaying a little, and his white hand, like a
woman’s, sought the stone wall for support, until he reached the shack,
which he entered.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Virey, that story had to come up,” said Adam,
confronting her with reluctance. But she surprised him again. He
expected to find her sickened, shrinking from him as a bloody monster,
perhaps half fainting; he found, however, that she seemed serene,
controlling deep emotions which manifested themselves only in the
marble whiteness of her cheek, the strained darkness of her eye.
“The story was beautiful. I had not heard it,” she said, and the rich
tremor of her voice thrilled Adam. “What woman would not revel in such
a story?... Wansfell the Wanderer. It should be Sir Wansfell, Knight
of the Desert!... Don’t look at me so. Have you not learned that the
grandest act on earth is when a man fights for the honor or love or
happiness or life of a woman?... I am a woman. Many men have loved
me. Virey’s love is so strong that it is hate. But no man ever yet
thought of _me_--no man ever yet heard the little songs that echoed
through my soul--no man ever fought to save _me_!... My friend, I dare
speak as you speak, with the nakedness of the desert. And so I tell
you that just now I watched my husband--I listened to the words which
told his nature, as if that was new to me. I watched you stand there--I
listened to you.... And so I dare to tell you--if you come to fight
my battles I shall have added to my life of shocks and woes a trouble
that will dwarf all the others ... the awakening of a woman who has
been blind!... The facing of my soul--perhaps its salvation! A crowning
agony--a glory come too late!”