July! At last the endlessly long, increasingly hot June days brought
the leaden-hazed month of July, when no sane man ever attempted to
cross Death Valley while the sun was high.
In all hours, even in the darkness, the bold, rugged slopes of the
Panamints reflected sinister shades of red. And the valley was one of
gray swirling shadows and waving veils of heat like transparent smoke.
Beyond that vast, strange, dim valley rose the drab and ocher slopes
of the Funeral Mountains, sweeping up to the bronze battlements and
on to the lilac and purple peaks blurred in the leaden-hued haze that
obscured the sky. The sun was sky-broad, an illimitable flare, with a
lurid white heart into which no man could look.
* * * * *
Adam was compelled to curtail his activities. He did not suffer greatly
from the heat, but he felt its weakening power. Ever his blood seemed
at fever heat. Early in the mornings and late in the evenings he
prepared simple meals, which, as the days dragged on, were less and
ever less partaken of by his companions and himself. During the midday
hours, through the terrible heat, he lay in the shade, sweltering and
oppressed, in a stupor of sleep. The nights were the only relief from
the immense and merciless glare, the bearing down of invisible bars
of red-hot iron. Most of these long hours of darkness Adam lay awake
or walked in the gloom or sat in the awful stillness, waiting for he
knew not what. But that he waited for something he knew with augmenting
dread.
When the full blast of this summer heat came, Virey changed physically
and mentally. He grew thin. He walked with bowed shoulders. His
tongue protruded slightly and he always panted. Every day he ate less
and slept less than on the day before. He obeyed no demands from Adam
and took no precautions. His sufferings would have been less and his
strength would have been greater had he refrained from exposing himself
to the sun. But he reveled in proofs of the nature of Death Valley.
And if Virey had ever worn a mask in front of Adam he now dropped it.
Indeed he ignored Adam, no longer with scorn or indifference, but as
if unaware of his presence. Whenever Adam wanted to be heard by Virey,
which desire diminished daily, he had to block his path, confront him
forcefully. Virey was given over wholly to his obsession. His hate
possessed him body and soul. And if it had ever been a primitive hate
to destroy, it had been restrained, and therefore rendered infinitely
cruel, by the slow, measured process of thought, of premeditation.
Often when Adam absented himself from camp, Virey had a trick of
climbing the weathered slope to roll down rocks. He seemed mad to
do this. Yet when Adam returned he would come clambering down, wet
and spent, a haggard, sweating wretch not yet quite beyond fear. In
vain had Adam argued, pleaded, talked with him; in vain had been the
strident scorn of a man and the curses of rage. Virey, however, had
a dread of Adam’s huge hands. Something about them fascinated him.
When one of these, clenched in an enormous fist, was shoved under
his nose with a last threat, then Virey would retire sullenly to the
shack. In every way that was possible he kept before Magdalene Virey
the spectacle of his ruin and the consciousness that it was her doing.
These midsummer days soon made him a gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed
wretch. Miserable and unkempt he presented himself at meals, and sat
there, a haggard ghost, to mouth a little food and to stare at his
wife with accusing eyes. He reminded her of cool, shaded rooms, of
exquisite linen and china, of dainty morsels, of carved-glass pitchers
full of refreshing drink and clinking ice. Always he kept before her
the heat, the squalor, the dirt, the horror of Death Valley. When he
could present himself before her with his thin, torn garments clinging
wet to his emaciated body, his nerves gone from useless exertions, his
hands bloody and shaking as if with palsy, his tongue hanging out--when
he could surprise her thus and see her shrink, then he experienced
rapture. He seemed to cry out: Woman! behold the wreck of Virey!
But if that was rapture for him, to gloat over the doom of her seemed
his glory. Day by day Death Valley wrought by invisible lines and
shades a havoc in Magdalene Virey’s beauty. To look at her was to
have striking proof that Death Valley had never been intended for a
woman, no matter how magnificent her spirit. The only spirit that could
prevail here was the one which had lost its earthly habiliments. Like a
cat playing with a mouse, Virey watched his wife. Like Mephistopheles
gloating over the soul of a lost woman, Virey attended to the slow
manifestations of his wife’s failing strength. He meant to squeeze
every drop of blood out of her heart and still keep, if possible,
life lingering in her. His most terrible bitterness seemed to consist
of his failure to hide her utterly and forever from the gaze of any
man save himself. Here he had hidden her in the most desolate place
in the world, yet another man had come, and, like all the others,
had been ready to lay down his life for her. Virey writhed under
this circumstance over which he had no control. It was really the
only truth about the whole situation that he was able to grasp. The
terrible tragedy of his hate was that it was not hate, but love. Like a
cannibal, he would have eaten his wife raw, not from hunger, but from
his passion to consume her, incorporate her heart and blood and flesh
into his, make her body his forever. Thought of her soul, her mind, her
spirit, never occurred to Virey. So he never realized how she escaped
him, never understood her mocking scorn.
But through his thick and heat-hazed brain there must have pierced
some divination of his failing powers to torture her. The time came
when he ceased to confront her like a scarecrow, he ceased accusing
her, he ceased to hold before her the past and its contrast with the
present, he gave up his refinement of cruelty. This marked in Virey
a further change, a greater abasement. He reverted to instinct. He
retrograded to a savage in his hate, and that hate found its outlet
altogether in primitive ways.
Adam’s keen eye saw all this, and the slow boil in his blood was
not all owing to the torrid heat of Death Valley. His great hands,
so efficient and ruthless, seemed fettered. A thousand times he had
muttered to the silence of the night, to the solemn, hazed daylight,
to the rocks that had souls, and to the invisible presence ever beside
him: “How long must I stand this? How long--how long?”
One afternoon as he awoke late from the sweltering siesta he heard Mrs.
Virey scream. The cry startled him, because she had never done that
before. He ran.
Adam found her lying at the foot of the stone bench in a dead faint.
The brown had left her skin. How white the wasted face! What dark
shadows under the hollow eyes! His heart smote him remorselessly.
As he knelt and was about to lift her head he espied a huge, black,
hairy spider crawling out of the folds of her gray gown. It was a
tarantula, one of the ugliest of the species. Adam flipped it off with
his hand and killed it under his boot.
Then with basin of water and wetted scarf he essayed to bring Mrs.
Virey back to consciousness. She did not come to quickly, but at last
she stirred, and opened her eyes with a flutter. She seemed to be
awakening from a nightmare of fear, loathing, and horror. For that
instant her sight did not take in Adam, but was a dark, humid, dilated
vision of memory.
“Magdalene, I killed the tarantula,” said he. “It can’t harm you
now.... Wake up! Why, you’re stiff and you look like--like I don’t know
what!... You fainted and I’ve had a time bringing you to.”
“Oh!” she cried. “It’s you.” And then she clung to him while he lifted
her, steadying her upon her feet, and placed her on the stone bench.
“So I fainted?... Ugh! That loathsome spider! Where is it?”
“I covered it with sand,” he replied.
“Would it have--bitten me?”
“No. Not unless you grasped it.”
Slowly she recovered and, letting go of him, leaned back in the seat.
Crystal beads of sweat stood out upon her white brow. Her hair was wet.
Her sensitive lips quivered.
“I’ve a perfect horror of mice, bugs, snakes, spiders--anything that
crawls,” she said. “I can’t restrain it. I inherited it from my
mother.... And what has mind got to do with most of a woman’s feelings?
Virey has finally found that out.”
“Virey!... What do you mean?” rejoined Adam.
“I was leaning back here on the bench when suddenly I heard Virey
slipping up behind me. I knew he was up to something. But I wouldn’t
turn to see what. Then with two sticks he held the tarantula out over
me--almost in my face. I screamed. I seemed to freeze inside. He
dropped the tarantula in my lap.... Then all went black.”
“Where--is he now?” asked Adam, finding it difficult to speak.
“He’s in the shack.”
Adam made a giant stride in that direction, only to be caught and
detained by her clinging hands. Earnestly she gazed up at him, with
melancholy, searching eyes.
He uttered a loud laugh, mirthless, a mere explosion of surcharged
breath. “No!... I can’t get angry. I can’t be a man any more. This
Death Valley and the sun--and you--have worked on my mind.... But I’ll
tell you what--nothing can stop me from beating Virey--so he’ll never
do that again.”
“Ah!... So I’ve worked on your mind? Then it’s the only great deed I
ever did.... Wansfell, I told you Virey has threatened to shoot you.
He’s meant to more than once, but when you have come he has been
afraid. But he might.”
“I wish to heaven he’d try it,” responded Adam, and, loosing the
woman’s hold upon his hands, he strode toward the shack.
“Virey, come out!” he called, loudly, though without any particular
feeling. There was no reply, and he repeated the call, this time
louder. Still Virey remained silent. Waiting a moment longer, Adam
finally spoke again, with deliberate, cold voice. “Virey, I don’t want
to mess up that room, with all your wife’s belongings in there. So come
outside.”
At that Adam heard a quick, panting breath. Then Virey appeared--came
to the door of the shack. Adam could not have told what the man’s
distorted face resembled. He carried a gun, and his heart was ferocious
if his will was weak.
“Don’t you--lay one of your--bloody hands on me,” he panted.
Adam took two long strides and halted before Virey, not six feet
distant.
“So you’ve got your little gun, eh?” he queried, without any particular
force. Adam had been compelled to smother all that mighty passion
within him, or he could not have answered for his actions. “What are
you going to do with it?”
“If you make a--move at me--I’ll kill you,” came the husky, panting
response.
“Virey, I’m going to beat you within an inch of your worthless life,”
declared Adam, monotonously, as if he had learned this speech by rote.
“But I’ve got to talk first. I’m full of a million things to call you.”
“Damn you, I’ll not listen,” replied Virey, beginning to shake with
excitement. The idea of using the gun had become an intent and was
acting powerfully upon him. “You leave my--camp--you get out--of this
valley!”
“Virey, are you crazy?” queried Adam. The use of his voice had changed
that deadlock of his feelings. He must not trust himself to bandy
speech with Virey. The beating must be administered quickly or there
would be something worse. Yet how desperately hard not to try to awaken
conscience or sense in this man!
“No, I’m not crazy,” yelled Virey.
“If you’re not crazy, then that trick of throwing a tarantula on your
wife was damnable--mean--hellish--monstrous.... My God! man, can’t you
see what a coward you are? To torture her--as if you were a heathen!
That delicate woman--all quivering nerves! To pick on a weakness, like
that of a child! Virey, if you’re not crazy you’re the worst brute I’ve
ever met on the desert. You’ve sunk lower than men whom the desert has
made beasts. You----”
“Beast I am--thanks to my delicate wife,” cried Virey, with exceeding
bitter passion. “Delicate? Ha-ha! The last lover of Magdalene Virey
can’t see she’s strong as steel--alive as red fire! How she clings to
memory! How she has nine lives of a cat--and hangs on to them--just
to remember!... And you--meddler! You desert rat of a preacher! Get
out--or I’ll kill you!”
“Shoot and be damned!” flashed Adam, as with leap as swift as his voice
he reached a sweeping arm.
Virey’s face turned ashen. He raised the gun. Adam knocked it up
just as it exploded. The powder burned his forehead, but the bullet
sped high. Another blow sent the gun flying to the sand. Then Adam,
fastening a powerful grip on Virey, clutching shirt and collar and
throat at once, dragged him before the stone bench where Mrs. Virey
sat, wide eyed and pale. Here Adam tripped the man and threw him
heavily upon the sand. Before he could rise Adam straddled him, bearing
him down. Then Adam’s big right hand swept and dug in the sand to
uncover the dead tarantula.
“Ah! here’s your spider!” he shouted. And he rubbed the hairy,
half-crushed tarantula in Virey’s face. The man screamed and wrestled.
“Good! you open your mouth. Now we’ll see.... Eat it--eat it, damn your
cowardly soul!” Then Adam essayed to thrust the spider between Virey’s
open lips. He succeeded only partly. Virey let out a strangling,
spitting yell, then closed his teeth as a vise. Adam smeared what was
left of the crushed tarantula all over Virey’s face.
“Now get up,” he ordered, and, rising himself, he kicked Virey. Adam,
in the liberation of his emotions by action, was now safe from himself.
He would not kill Virey. He could even hold in his enormous strength.
He could even think of the joy of violence that was rioting inside him,
of the ruthless fierceness with which he could have rent this man limb
from limb.
Virey, hissing and panting in a frenzy, scrambled to his feet. Fight
was in him now. He leaped at Adam, only to meet a blow that laid him
on the sand. It had not stunned him. Up he sprang, bloody, livid, and
was at Adam again. His frenzy lent him strength and in that moment he
had no fear of man or devil. The desert rage was on him. He swung his
fists, beat wildly at Adam, tore and clawed. Adam slapped him with
great broad hands that clapped like boards, and then, when Virey lunged
close, he closed his fist and smashed it into Virey’s face. The man
of the cities went plowing in the sand. Then on his hands and knees
he crawled like a dog, and, finding a stone, he jumped up to fling
it. Adam dodged the missile. Wildly Virey clutched for more, throwing
one after another. Adam caught one and threw it back, to crack hard
on his opponent’s shin. Virey yelled no more. His rage took complete
possession of him. Grasping up a large rock, he held it as a mace and
rushed upon Adam to brain him. That action and intent to kill was the
only big response he had made to this wild environment. He beat at
Adam. He lunged up to meet his foe’s lofty head. He had no fear. But he
was mad. No dawning came to him that he was being toyed with. Strong
and furious at the moment, he might have succeeded in killing a lesser
man. But before Adam he was powerless to do murder. Then the time came
when Adam knocked the rock out of his hand and began to beat him, blow
on blow to face and body, with violence, but with checked strength,
so that Virey staggered here and there, upheld by fists. At last,
whipped out of rage and power to retaliate, Virey fell to the sands.
Adam dragged him into the shack and left him prostrate and moaning, an
abject beaten wretch who realized his condition.
Most difficult of all for Adam then was to face Mrs. Virey. Yet the
instant he did he realized that his ignorance of women was infinite.
“Did the bullet--when he fired--did it hit you?” she queried, her large
eyes, intense and glowing, wonderfully dark with emotion, flashing over
him.
“No--it missed--me,” panted Adam, as with heavy breaths he sank upon
the stone bench.
“I picked up the gun. I was afraid he’d find it. You’d better keep it
now,” she said, and slipped it into his pocket.
“What a--dis--gusting--sight for you--to have--to watch!” exclaimed
Adam, trying to speak and breathe at once.
“It was frightful--terrible at first,” she returned. “But after the
gun went flying--and you had stopped trying to make him eat the--the
spider--uggh! how sickening!... After that it got to be-- Well,
Wansfell, it was the first time in the years I’ve known my husband that
I respected him. He meant to kill you. It amazed me. I admired him....
And as for you--to see you tower over him--and parry his blows--and
hit him when you liked--and knock him and drag him--oh, that roused a
terrible something in me! I never felt so before in my whole life. I
was some other woman. I watched the blood flow, I heard the thuds and
heavy breaths, I actually smelled the heat of you, I was so close--and
it all inflamed me, made me strung with savage excitement--I had almost
said joy.... God knows, Wansfell, we have hidden natures within our
breasts.”
“If only it’s a lesson to him!” sighed Adam.
“Then it were well done,” she replied, “but I doubt--I doubt. Virey
is hopeless. Let us forget.... And now will you please help me search
in the sand here for something I dropped. It fell from my lap when I
fainted, I suppose. It’s a small ivory case with a miniature I think
all the world of. Last and best of my treasures!”
Adam raked in the sand along the base of the bench, and presently found
the lost treasure. How passionately, with what eloquent cry of rapture,
did she clutch it!
“Look!” she exclaimed, with wonderful thrill in her voice, and held the
little case open before Adam’s eyes.
He saw a miniature painting of a girl’s face, oval, pure as a flower,
with beautiful curls of dark bronze, and magnificent eyes. In these
last Adam recognized the mother of this girl. The look of them, the
pride and fire, if not the color, were the same as Magdalene Virey’s.
“A sweet and lovely face,” said Adam.
“Ruth!” she whispered. “My daughter--my only child--my baby that I
abandoned to save her happiness!... Oh, mockery of life that I was
given such a heart to love--that I was given such a perfect child!”
* * * * *
The midsummer midnight furnace winds began to blow.
They did not blow every night or many nights consecutively; otherwise
all life in the valley would soon have become extinct. Adam found the
hot winds heretofore, that he had imagined were those for which the
valley was famed, were really comfortable compared with these terrible
furnace blasts. In trying to understand their nature, Adam concluded
they were caused by a displacement of higher currents of cool air.
Sometime during the middle of the night there began a downward current
of cool air from the mountain heights; and this caused a disturbance
of the vast area of hot air in the burning valley below sea level. The
tremendous pressure drove the hot air to find an outlet so it could
rise to let the cool air down, and thus there came gusts and gales of
furnace winds, rushing down the valley, roaring up the canyons.
The camp of the Vireys, almost in the center of one of these outlets
and scarcely a quarter of a mile from the main valley, lay open to the
full fury of these winds.
* * * * *
The 1st of August was a hazy, blistering day in which the valley
smoked. Veils of transparent black heat--shrouds of moving white
transparent heat! The mountains’ tops were invisible, as if obscured in
thin, leaden-hued fog; their bases showed dull, sinister red through
the haze. Nothing moved except the strange veils and the terrible
heaven-wide sun that seemed to have burst. It was a day when, if a man
touched an unshaded stone with his naked hand, he would be burned as by
a hot iron. A solemn, silent, sulphurous, smoky, deadly day, inimical
to life!
But at last the sunset of red hell ended that day and merciful darkness
intervened. The fore part of the night was hot, yet endurable, and
a relief compared to the sunlit hours. Adam marked, however, or
imagined, a singular, ominous, reddish hue of the dim stars, a vast
still veil between him and the sky, a waiting hush. He walked out
into the open, peering through the dimness, trying to comprehend. The
color of the stars and heavens, and of the dull black slopes, and of
the night itself, seemed that of a world burned out. Immense, dim,
mysterious, empty, desolate! Had this Death Valley finally unhinged
his mind? But he convinced himself that it was normal. The unreality,
the terror, the forbidding hush of all the elements, the imminence of
catastrophe--these were all actually present. Anything could happen
here. Exaggeration of sense was impossible. This Death Valley was only
a niche of the universe and the universe only a part of the infinite.
He felt his intelligence and emotion, and at the same time the
conviction that only a step away was death. The old wonder arose--was
death the end? Not possible! Yet the cruelty, the impassivity of
nature, letting the iron consequences fall--this seemed to crush him.
For the sake of a woman who suffered agony of body and mind, Adam was
at war with nature and the spirit of creation. Why? The eternal query
had no answer. It never would be answered.
As the hours wore away the air grew hotter, denser. Like a blanket
it seemed to lie heavily on Adam. It was the hottest, stillest, most
oppressive, strangest night of all his desert experience. Sleep was
impossible. Rest was impossible. Inaction was impossible. Every breath
seemed impossible of fulfillment. A pressure constricted Adam’s lungs.
The slow, gentle walk that he drove himself to take, which it was
impossible to keep from taking, brought out a hot flood of sweat on his
body, and the drops burned as they trickled down his flesh.
“If the winds blow to-night!” he muttered, in irresistible dread.
Something told him they would blow. To-night they would blow harder
and hotter than ever before. The day of leaden fire had promised that.
Nature had her midnight change to make in the elements. Time would not
stand still. The universe prevailed on its inscrutable course; the
planets burned; the suns blazed upon their earths; and this ball of
rock on which Adam clung, groaning with the other pygmies of his kind,
whirled and hurtled through space, now dark and then light, now hot and
then cold, slave to a blazing master ninety million miles away. It was
all so inconceivable, inscrutable, unbelievable.
There came a movement of air fanning his check, emphasizing the warmth.
He smelled anew the dry alkali dust, the smoky odor, almost like
brimstone. The hour was near midnight and the deathlike silence brooded
no more. A low moan, as of a lost soul, moved somewhere on the still
air. Weird, dismal, uncanny, it fitted the spectral shadows and shapes
around him, and the night with its mystery. No human sound, though it
resembled the mourn of humanity! A puff of hot wind struck Adam in the
face, rushed by, rustling the dead and withered brush, passed on to
lull and die away. It seemed to leave a slow movement in the still air,
a soft, restless, uneasy shifting, as of an immense volume becoming
unsettled. Adam knew. Behind that sudden birth of life of dead air
pressed the furious blasts of hell--the midnight furnace wind of Death
Valley.
Adam listened. How strange, low, sad the moan! His keen ears, attuned
to all varieties of desert sound, seemed to fill and expand. The moan
swelled to a low roar, lulling now, then rising. Like no sound he had
ever heard before, it had strange affinity with the abyss of shadows.
Suddenly the air around Adam began a steady movement northward. Its
density increased, or else the movement, or pressure behind, made it
appear so. And it grew swift, until it rustled the brush. Down in the
valley the roar swelled like the movement of a mighty storm through a
forest. When the gale reached the gateway below Adam it gave a hollow
bellow.
The last of the warm, still air was pressed beyond Adam, apparently
leaving a vacuum, for there did not appear to be air enough to breathe.
The roar of wind sounded still quite distant, though now loud. Then
the hot blast struck Adam--a burning, withering wind. It was as if
he had suddenly faced an open furnace from which flames and sparks
leaped out upon him. That he could breathe, that he lived a moment,
seemed a marvel. Wind and roar filled the wide space between the
slopes and rushed on, carrying sand and dust and even shadows with it.
That blast softened in volume and had almost died away when another
whooped up through the gateway, louder and stronger and hotter than its
predecessor. It blew down Adam’s sun shelter of brush and carried the
branches rustling away. Then stormed contending tides of winds until,
what with burning blasts and whirling dust devils and air thick with
powdered salt and alkali, life became indeed a torment for Adam, man of
the desert as he was.
In the face of these furnace winds, tenacity of life had new meaning
for Adam. The struggle to breathe was the struggle of a dying man to
live. But Adam found that he could survive. It took labor, greater even
than toiling through a sandstorm, or across a sun-scorched waste to a
distant water hole. And it was involuntary labor. His great lungs were
not a bellows for him to open when he chose. They were compelled to
work. But the process, in addition to the burn and sting, the incessant
thirst, the dust-laden air, the hot skullbone like an iron lid that
must fly off, and the strange, dim, red starlight, the somber red
varying shadow, the weird rush and roar and lull--all these created
heroic fortitude if a man was to endure. Adam understood why no human
being could long exist in Death Valley.
“She will not live through the night,” muttered Adam. “But if she does,
I think I’ll take her away.”
While in the unearthly starlit gloom, so dimly red, Adam slowly plodded
across to the Virey camp, that idea grew in his mind. It had augmented
before this hour, only to faint at the strength of her spirit, but
to-night was different. It marked a climax. If Magdalene Virey showed
any weakening, any change of spirit, Adam knew he would have reached
the end of his endurance.
She would be lying or sitting on the stone bench. It was not possible
to breathe inside the shack. Terrible as were the furnace winds, they
had to be breasted--they had to be fought for the very air of life. She
had not the strength to walk up and down, to and fro, through those
endless hours.
Adam’s keen eyes, peering through the red-tinged obscurity, made out
the dark shape of Virey staggering along back and forth like an old
man driven and bewildered, hounded by the death he feared. The sight
gave Adam a moment of fierce satisfaction. Strong as was the influence
of Magdalene Virey, it could not keep down hate for this selfish and
fallen man. Selfish beyond all other frailty of human nature! The
narrow mind obsessed with self--the I and me and mine--the miserable
littleness that could not forgive, that could not understand! Adam had
pity even in his hate.
He found the woman on the bench, lying prone, a white, limp, fragile
shape, motionless as stone. Sitting down, he bent over to look into
her face. Her unfathomable eyes, wide and dark and strained, stirred
his heart as never before. They were eyes to which sleep was a
stranger--haunted eyes, like the strange midnight at which they gazed
out, supernaturally bright, mirroring the dim stars, beautiful as the
waking dreams never to come true--eyes of melancholy, of unutterable
passion, of deathless spirit. They were the eyes of woman and of love.
Adam took her wasted hand and held it while waiting for the wind to
lull so that she could hear him speak. At length the hot blast moved
on, like the receding of a fire.
“Magdalene, I can’t stand this any longer,” he said.
“You mean--these winds--of hell?” she panted, in a whisper.
“No. I mean your suffering. I might have stood your spiritual ordeal.
Your remorse--your agony of loss of the daughter Ruth--your brave
spirit defying Virey’s hate.... But I can’t stand your physical
torment. You’re wasting away. You’re withering--burning up. This hand
is hot as fire--and dry as a leaf. You must drink more water....
Magdalene, lift your head.”
“I--cannot,” she whispered, with wan smile. “No--strength left.”
Adam lifted her head and gave her water to drink. Then as he laid her
back another blast of wind came roaring through the strange opaque
night. How it moaned and wailed around the huge bowlders and through
the brush! It was a dance of wind fiends, hounding the lost spirits of
this valley of horrors. Adam felt the slow, tight tide of his blood
called stingingly to his skin and his extremities, and there it burned.
It was not only his heart and his lungs that were oppressed, but the
very life of his body seemed to be pressing to escape through the pores
of his skin--pressed from inward by the terrible struggle to survive
and pressed back from outside by the tremendous blast of wind! The
wind roared by and lulled to a moan. The wave of invisible fire passed
on. Out there in the dim starlight Virey staggered back and forth
under the too great burden of his fate. He made no sound. He was a
specter. Beyond the gray level of gloom with its strange shadows rose
the immense slope of loose stones, all shining with dim, pale-red glow,
all seemingly alive, waiting for the slide of the avalanche. And on
the instant a rock cracked with faint ring, rolled with little hollow
reports, mockingly, full of terrible and latent power. It had ominous
answer in a slight jar of the earth under Adam’s feet, perhaps an
earthquake settling of the crust, and then the whole vast slope moved
with a low, grating sound, neither roar nor crash, nor rattle. The
avalanche had slipped a foot. Adam could have pealed out a cry of dread
for this woman. What a ghastly fantasy the struggle for life in Death
Valley! What mockery of wind and desert and avalanche!
“Wansfell--listen,” whispered the woman. “Do you hear--it passing on?”
“Yes,” replied Adam, bending lower to see her eyes. Did she mean that
the roar of wind was dying away?
“The stormy blast of hell--with restless fury--drives the spirits
onward!” she said, her voice rising.
“I know--I understand. But you mustn’t speak such thoughts. You must
not give up to the wandering of your mind. You must fight,” implored
Adam.
“My friend--the fight is over--the victory is mine.... I shall escape
Virey. He possessed my body--poor weak thing of flesh!... but he wanted
my love--my soul.... My soul to kill! He’ll never have either....
Wansfell, I’ll not live--through the night.... I am dying now.”
“No--no!” cried Adam, huskily. “You only imagine that. It’s only the
oppression of these winds--and the terror of the night--this awful,
unearthly valley of death. You’ll live. The winds will wear out soon.
If only you fight you’ll live.... And to-morrow--Magdalene, so help me
God--I’ll take you away!”
He expected the inflexible and magnetic opposition of her will, the
resistless power of her spirit to uplift and transform. And this time
he was adamant. At last the desert force within him had arisen above
all spiritual obstacles. The thing that called was life--life as it had
been in the beginning of time. But no mockery or eloquence of refusal
was forthcoming from Magdalene Virey. Instead, she placed the little
ivory case, containing the miniature painting of her daughter Ruth, in
Adam’s hand and softly pressed it there.
“But--if I should die--I want you to have this picture of Ruth,” she
said. “I’ve had to hide it from Virey--to gaze upon it in his absence.
Take it, my friend, and keep it, and look at it until it draws you
to her.... Wansfell, I’ll not bewilder you by mystic prophecies. But
I tell you solemnly--with the clairvoyant truth given to a woman who
feels the presence of death--that my daughter Ruth will cross your
wanderer’s trail--come into your life--and love you.... Remember what I
tell you. I see!... You are a young man still. She is a budding girl.
You two will meet, perhaps in your own wastelands. Ruth is all of
me--magnified a thousand times. More--she is as lovely as an unfolding
rose at dawn. She will be a white, living flame.... It will be as if
I had met you long ago--when I was a girl--and gave you what by the
nature of life was yours.... Wansfell, you wakened my heart--saved my
soul--taught me peace.... I wonder how you did it. You were just a
man.... There’s a falseness of life--the scales fell from my eyes one
by one. It is the heart, the flesh, the bursting stream of red blood
that count with nature. All this strife, this travail, makes toward
a perfection never to be attained. But effort and pain, agony of
flesh, and victory over mind make strength, virility.... Nature loves
barbarian women who nurse their children. I--with all my love--could
not nurse my baby Ruth. It’s a mystery no longer. Death Valley and a
primitive man have opened my eyes. Nature did not intend people to live
in cities, but in forests, as lived the Aryans of India, or like the
savages of Brazilian jungles. Like the desert beasts, self-sufficient,
bringing forth few of their kind, but better, stronger species. The
weak perish. So should the weak among men.... Ah! hear the roar!
Another wind of death!... But I’ve said all.... Wansfell, go find
Ruth--find me in her--and--remember!”
The rich voice, growing faint at the last, failed as another furnace
blast came swooping up with its dust and heat. Adam bowed his head
and endured. It passed and another came. The woman lay with closed
eyes and limp body and nerveless hands. Hours passed and the terrible
winds subsided. The shadow of a man that was Virey swaying to and fro,
like a drunken specter, vanished in the shack. The woman slept. Adam
watched by her side till dawn, and when the gray light came he could
no more have been changed than could the night have been recalled. He
would find the burros and pack them and saddle one for Magdalene Virey
to ride; he would start to climb out of Death Valley and when another
night fell he would have her safe on the cool mountain heights. If
Virey tried to prevent this, it would mean the terrible end he merited.
Adam gazed down upon the sleeping woman. How transparent, how frail a
creature! She mystified Adam. She represented the creative force in
life. She possessed that unintelligible and fatal thing in nature--the
greatest, the most irresistible, the purest expression of truth, of
what nature strove so desperately for--and it was beauty. Her youth,
her error, her mocking acceptance of life, her magnificent spirit, her
mother longing, her agony and her physical pangs, her awakening and
repentance and victory--all were written on the pale face and with the
indestructible charm of line and curve and classic feature constituted
its infinite loveliness. She was a sleeping woman, yet she was close to
the angels.
Adam looked from her to the ivory case in his hand.
“Her daughter Ruth--for me!” he said, wonderingly. “How strange if we
met! If--if-- But that’s impossible. She was wandering in mind.”
He carried the little case to his camp, searched in his pack for an
old silk scarf, and, tearing this, he carefully wrapped the gift and
deposited it inside the leather money belt he wore hidden round his
waist.
“Now to get ready to leave Death Valley!” he exclaimed, in grim
exultance.
Adam’s burros seldom strayed far from camp. This morning, however,
he did not find them near the spring nor down in the notches of the
mountain wall. So he bent his steps in the other direction. At last,
round a corner of slope, out of sight of camp, he espied them, and soon
had them trotting ahead of him.
He had traversed probably half the distance he had come when the burro
Jennie halted to shoot up her long ears. Something moving had attracted
her attention, but Adam could not see it. He drove her on. Again she
stopped. Adam could now see the shack, and as he peered sharply there
seemed to cross his vision a bounding gray object. He rubbed his eyes
and muttered. Perhaps the heat had affected his sight. Then between
him and the shack flashed a rough object, gray-white in color, and
it had the bounding motion of a jack rabbit. But it could not have
been a rabbit, because it was too large, and, besides, there were
none in the valley. A wild cat, perhaps? Adam urged Jennie on, and it
struck him that she was acting queerly. This burro never grew contrary
without cause. When she squealed and sheered off to one side Adam knew
something was amiss. That vague shock returned to his consciousness,
stronger, more certain and bewildering. Halting so as to hear better,
he held his breath and listened. Crack and roll of rock--slow sliding
rattle--crack! The mystery of the bounding gray objects was solved.
Virey had again taken to rolling rocks down the slope.
Adam broke into a run. He was quite a distance from the shack, though
now he could see it plainly. No person was in sight. More than once,
as he looked, he saw rocks bound high above the brush and fall to puff
up dust. Virey was industrious this morning, making up for lost time,
taking sure advantage of Adam’s absence. Adam ran faster. He reached
a point opposite the fanlike edge of the great slant of loose stones,
and here he seemed to get into a zone of concatenated sounds. The wind,
created by his run, filled his ears. And his sight, too, seemed not
to be trusted. Did it not magnify a bounding rock and puff of dust
into many rocks and puffs? Streaks were running low down in the brush,
raising little dusty streams. He saw clumps of brush shake and bend. If
something queer, such as had affected Jennie, did not possess his sight
and mind, then it surely possessed Death Valley. For something was
wrong.
Suddenly Adam’s ears were deafened by a splitting shock. He plunged in
his giant stride, slowed and halted. He heard the last of a sliding
roar. The avalanche had slipped. But it had stopped. Bounding rocks
hurtled in front of Adam, behind him, and puffs and streaks of dust
were everywhere. He heard the whiz and thud of a rolling rock passing
close behind him. As he gazed a large stone bounded from the ground
and seemed to pass right through the shack. The shack collapsed.
Adam’s heart leaped to his throat. He was riveted to the spot. Then,
mercifully it seemed, a white form glided out from the sun shelter. It
was the woman, still unharmed. The sight unclamped Adam’s voice and
muscle.
“Go across! Hurry!” yelled Adam, with all the power of his lungs. He
measured the distance between him and her. Two hundred yards! Rocks
were hurtling and pounding across that space.
The woman heard him. She waved her white hand and it seemed she was
waving him back out of peril. Then she pointed up the slope. Adam
wheeled. What a thrilling sight! Rocks were streaking down, hurtling
into the air, falling to crack powder from other rocks, that likewise
were set in motion. Far up the long gray slope, with its million facets
of stones shining in the sunlight, appeared Virey, working frantically.
No longer did he seek to frighten his wife. He meant to kill her. His
insane genius had read the secret of the slope, and in an instant he
would have the avalanche in motion. The cracking clamor increased. Adam
opened his lips to yell a terrible threat up at Virey, but a whizzing
bowlder, large as a bucket, flashing within a foot of his head,
awakened him to his own peril. He saw other rocks bounding down in line
with him, and, changing his position, stepping, leaping, dodging, he
managed to evade them. He had no fear for himself, but terror for the
woman, and for Virey deadly rage possessed his heart.
Then a piercing split, as of rocks rent asunder, a rattling crash, and
the lower half of the great gray slope was in motion. The avalanche!
Adam leaped at the startling sound, and, bounding a few yards to a huge
bowlder, high as his head and higher, he mounted it. There, unmindful
of himself, he wheeled to look for Magdalene Virey. Too late to reach
her! She faced that avalanche, arms spread aloft, every line of her
body instinct with the magnificent spirit which had been her doom.
“_Run! Run! Run!_” shrieked Adam, wildly.
Lost was his piercing shriek in the swallowing, gathering might of the
crashing roar of the avalanche. A pall of dust, a gray tumbling mass,
moved down ponderously, majestically, to hide from Adam’s sight the
white form of Magdalene Virey. It spread to where Adam stood, enveloped
him, and then, in boom and thunder and crash as of falling worlds, the
bowlder was lifted and carried along with the avalanche.