Cuthbertson, urging his jaded horse over the last of the weary miles
from the mines to Los Santos, always pulled up at old Juana’s hut. He
had pulled up one day when new to the work and the land, deathly
sunsick; and Juana had dragged him into the shadow of the wall, and
given him water, and finally tramped into the town for the
superintendent’s buggy and mules. Cuthbertson never found out why she
had done this, but he was grateful, in the silent way he had early
learned of the desert. Since then she always had cool water for him, and
a skin spread in the shade. And sometimes she would talk to him in brief
Spanish. He was the only white man to whom she ever spoke; and she spoke
to him because she thought him like the Rainmaker.
If you asked anyone in Los Santos how long Juana had been there, they
said, “God knows.” Cuthbertson thought it quite likely that God did
know, and kept account of it.
There were peach-orchards round Los Santos, and the sound of running
water, and a pleasant acreage of alfalfa fields. But green life stopped
where the water stopped; and westward of the last irrigation ditch lay
the desert, oldest of all things save the sea. When the east wind blew
by day across Los Santos, the scent and bloom of the orchards was
breathed out into the sands. But at sunset, when the west wind brought
the bitterness of the alkali-wastes, the little town seemed to cower and
shrink beleaguered in the heart of the vast night. Only the steady sound
of running water, like the footfall of a sentry, stood between Los
Santos and the eternal threat of the sand.
The road ran through the town and out into the desert. It paused at the
mines, then went on and was lost in the coloured hills of the far
distance. No rain fell on these hills, which were like great jewels worn
brittle and thin with ceaseless wind and sun. If a man had business with
the desert, he went by that road; sometimes he returned by it. Between
the town and the mines, beside a tiny pool that dried to white dust in
the heats, was Juana’s hut.
When there was water in the pool, she grew a few melons and a patch of
corn. When it dried, she carried water from the tanks, miles away. She
had a pot hanging under the roof of her hut to keep cool, and in the
drip of it, gray lizards and snakes and earth-coloured birds would
gather silently. They were voiceless creatures of the voiceless waste,
but not more dumb than old Juana.
Every evening she climbed to the crest of a long wave of sand and
watched the sun going down at the end of the desert road. She saw the
night sweeping inwards visibly with a movement that was as a sound, the
sound of great wings trailed along the sand. Then the stars glowed out
in the transparent heights of darkness, the lights of Los Santos,
twinkling within their defences, were answered over the curve of the
world by the one high light from the mines. Then she went home and
slept, knowing that that day no word would come from the Rainmaker.
Once, looking at Cuthbertson with her grave eyes, she said, in the
speech he but half understood, “Hate is more patient than day or night,
the sand is more patient than hate, and love waits longer than the
sand.”
Cuthbertson leaned his head back in the shadow. Westward a mirage danced
in the heat, and the crumbling dry hills seemed to lift from blue water
and green reeds. He said, “I don’t like the sand, Juana.”
Old Juana laid her hand on her breast. “It takes youth and strength, wit
and the memory of many gods. I’m only an old woman of the sands.” Her
eyes glinted at him like a snake’s. “Only an old woman. . . But the
desire of the heart is stronger than the sand.”
Cuthbertson sighed, thinking of the machinery abandoned at Lost Mesa
when the water dried. “We’ve found nothing stronger than the sand,” he
said grimly, “but tell me about it, anyway.” He had a queer liking for
the old woman, and he was grateful; besides, if she would talk, he might
profit to the extent of a paper for the Smithsonian.
Juana looked out over the desert. After a time she said, “It is a long
time since I was a girl, and the young men fluted to me in the cool of
the evening, and in the maize-dance my shadow was blest. Like a shadow
at midday was the Rainmaker to me. He was my husband.”
Cuthbertson shifted in the shadow so that he faced her, and his long
boots creaked.
“There was no town then, and no mines. Only the cuttings of the Lost
People in the mesas, and this little pool. We came here, my man and I,
together. He said, ‘Stay here and rest, it is a good place. I am going
to look for turquoise in the hills, and when I find another good place,
I will send word. Then follow.’ He touched my long black hair and smiled
upon me, and went. I watched him as he walked down the road into the
wings of the sunset. Then I went back to my water-jars and waited.”
She was silent so long that Cuthbertson said, lazily, “Well, Juana,
what’s the rest of it?”
“There is no more. I am waiting still for that word that tells me to
follow. But it does not come. Somewhere between here and there”—she
pointed to the vacant glare,—“the sand took him.”
“The sand. . . ?”
“Yes. Perhaps. The wind blew and the moving sand took him while he
slept. Or perhaps the water had gone. I do not know. But if he lived, I
should have seen his face, heard his voice. And I see him only in
dreams, hear him only when the wind blows on the Lost Tombs of the
mesas. There are many such.”
“And—you’re still waiting for word from him?”
“There is nothing else to do.” Juana would say no more.
Cuthbertson rode into Los Santos silently that night, thinking of many
things, and the Smithsonian was not one of them. He went to bed early at
the superintendent’s house, where he stayed; the superintendent’s
daughter had found him an inattentive listener to her songs; he slept to
the faint whispering of blown sand on the iron roof. Sand and yellowed
peach-leaves rustled on the floor of his room. And he dreamed all night
of a nameless Indian who had gone to look for turquoise in the hills,
years and years ago. He dreamed too of Juana. “Is there anyone,” he
found himself crying with a kind of passion to the night, “who’d wait
like that for me. . . ?” And he rode on his way before breakfast without
saying good-bye to the superintendent’s daughter. Somehow, old Juana had
set him a new standard of the soul.
After that, as he rode into the hills in the endless search for water
and wealth, he thought very much of Juana and the Rainmaker. Old Juana
being an established fact, his thoughts went chiefly to the nameless
dead man who still lived for one old woman. Riding up the stony Arroyos,
through the wine-red gateways of the hills, the sun blistering his
bridle-hand and the hot southwest drying his lungs, he began to
reconstruct the Rainmaker’s journey from the pool beside Los Santos. It
amused him to map it out mentally and in time this mental map grew to be
a very minute and logical thing. Then, after the manner of men who lead
lonely lives in places where the wind gives death and the sun madness,
he began to see his own imaginings.
The first time this happened, he rode to Mesa City for a case of
assorted medicines. He dosed himself variously; but the doses did not
affect whatever obscure brain-cells or nerve centres were thrown out of
balance. They went on busily at their work of building for Cuthbertson
the bodily likeness of the Rainmaker.
As the thing went on, and his mind remained otherwise unshaken,
Cuthbertson began to regard it scientifically, as befitted one who kept
Smithsonian Reports in his packing-case of a room at the mines. He had
methodical notes in a diary:—
“April 7. Found reputed spring near Presidio Pass. Water strongly
impregnated mineral salts. (Cf. Analyst’s report on sample). Horse would
not drink of it. Saw Rainmaker again. Hallucination commenced 11.45,
continued until 12.4. He walked parallel with me at a distance of about
25 feet. Headband of antelope skin, circlets of copper or gold, large
turquoise on right wrist. Appearance very vivid, as it has been from the
beginning. Thought at first it was real Indian, like the one I rode down
last week thinking he was an apparition, and had to pacify with 2 dols.
(Mexican). Noticed at last that the hair, which is very long did not
move in the wind. Face seemed turned away as usual, or somehow
indistinct. Letter from Macnamara re sale of machinery at Lost Mesa. Bay
pony injured.
“April 18. Sale of machinery fallen through; advised scrapping for old
iron. Mac too thrifty make money here. Rode out to the Presidio pools
again. Saw Rainmaker suddenly, walking along sand on parallel course as
usual. Exceptional that he really does walk instead of sliding along
like a magic-lantern picture. Have an idea that the face is not turned
so far aside as it was. Don’t like this. Apparition somewhat indistinct
otherwise against violent stratification. Had to shoot bay pony. Ordered
new safety razor.
“April 25. During hallucinations, which are becoming more frequent,
pulse and respiration remain normal. It must be overwork. Rainmaker
joined us to-day three miles east of the pools. Very vivid, but only
lasted ten minutes. Face undoubtedly being turned towards me.
Apparitions coincide remarkably with supposed route of journey. (Logical
effect of conscious on sub-conscious ideas or vice versa). Sand moving
badly in prevalent winds, lower end of Presidio drifting up. Should I
tell Juana?”
But he kept silence, as a lonely child keeps silence over the
visualization of his imaginary play-fellows. He was keenly interested,
and only at times a little afraid. The apparition always came after a
day of unusual fatigue, and in exactly the same way. He began to watch
for it as for a friend. . . Turning some rock wall or corner of desert,
he would find himself riding parallel with an Indian, who walked through
the sand about twenty-five feet away as a tired man walks. Then
Cuthbertson would say to his pony “There’s the Rainmaker,” and watch.
The pony never paid any attention, and the moving figure never came any
nearer. Through it there always ran a certain flicker of uncertainty, as
through a mirage. And, like a mirage, it shook and thinned and went out.
Perhaps it was the lonely child, coming to the surface in the lonely man
that made Cuthbertson, as the vision passed, lift his hand to the brim
of his Stetson with a soft “Vaya con Dios,—go with God.”
The machinery at Lost Mesa found a purchaser at last, and Cuthbertson,
through three blinding hot weeks, had to see it taken apart and numbered
and packed on mule-back to the Los Santos line. Mules died and men
sickened, heads grew light and tempers uncertain. For these three weeks,
Cuthbertson lived at the mines; he had no thought to spare by day or
night for the Rainmaker.
On the last day he rode back from Lost Mesa to the mines, alone and
tired out, sitting his tired pony like a sack. The hills reeled in the
afternoon heat, the desert was a grayish glare under a sky so hot it had
no colour in it. Cuthbertson was waiting thirstily for the hour when the
mesas would suddenly stand up in the evening like the foundations of
some apocalyptic city forgotten of God, and the dark sweep in on the
world like a wave foamed with stars. He looked about him as he rode, as
though half-consciously waiting for something. He was waiting for the
Rainmaker. Presently, as he turned down a shallow arroyo grown with
mummied yuccas, he saw the little white dazzle of the eyes that preceded
the vision.
“There’s the Rainmaker,” he said as usual, the man clear in his brain.
“But I didn’t think he’d been so far west.” The Rainmaker was walking
through the sand as a tired man walks. With a little jump of the pulses,
Cuthbertson saw that the face of the apparition was turned fully towards
him.
He sickened for one strange instant, fearing, with a fear as old as the
desert, the shadow of his own dream. But the face, seen uncertainly
through the flicker of the heat, was only that of a young Indian of the
sands; lean, grave, watchful. The headband gleamed with copper or gold,
the hair fell long and straight. And beneath it the eyes were directed,
not at Cuthbertson, but intently beyond him to the east, along the
desert road.
“I know,” said Cuthbertson, quick as thought, “you’re looking for
Juana. . .”
He reined in. But the figure moved on, still looking to the east.
Against an outcrop of honey-yellow rock it broke and went out.
Cuthbertson shook up his horse and followed slowly.
The rock was surrounded with great waves of loose sand that drifted
perpetually before the prevailing winds. Sometimes it was buried, then
in a few days, bared to the sky. Now as Cuthbertson stooped from the
saddle, he saw that the wind had uncovered a little worn hollow in the
rock, and in it a pale glitter of colour. He dismounted. The glitter of
colour was a piece of turquoise veined with gold.
He had it in his hand. Then, slowly, he stooped and took out what else
there was from the keeping of the desert. These things he tied in his
handkerchief and fastened to the saddle, and his brown fingers shook a
little over the knot. Mounting he rode on. But at the foot of the arroyo
he looked back gravely, his hand at the hat-brim.
“Rest with God,” said Cuthbertson.
It was late before he stopped at old Juana’s hut. She sat just within,
her chin on her knees, staring out at the low steady stars.
“Juana.” Cuthbertson’s voice was very tired.
“Come in, señor.” Her eyes gleamed in the dusk, alert and watchful as a
snake’s. Her face slowly puckered into wrinkles of kindness. But
Cuthbertson would not enter.
“It’s the sand, Juana,” he said, and now his voice was not quite steady.
“It has given up something,—something it had hidden for a long, long
time under a yellow rock beyond the last pools. It has spoken, Juana.
Perhaps the word is for you, perhaps for someone else. I don’t know. You
told me once the sand gripped hard as the grave.”
Old Juana raised her head. “But the hold of the heart is stronger,” she
said, in the language Cuthbertson scarcely understood. But her eyes
commanded him. Silently he stooped across the hut’s threshold, laying
the beautiful veined turquoise at her feet. And with it what had once
been a man’s hand.
The sand had dealt with it so long that it was no more terrible than a
child’s toy of bone and leather. The night-wind moved it as it lay,
lightly as the yellowed leaves of the peach-orchards, on Juana’s mat. A
small square agate, bound in gold wire, shifted on the forefinger.
Cuthbertson showed it silently.
“It is the Rainmaker’s ring,” said Juana at last. “The word has come.”
Cuthbertson bent his head. “There was nothing more. Just the turquoise
in a little hollow and the curved hand,—kind of keeping it. . .”
“He was keeping it for me,” said old Juana quietly.
“There was nothing else. The rest had been taken by the sand, long ago.”
His horse shifted restlessly outside, and he moved to leave. He was
deadly tired in body and soul, lonely of heart.
The old woman sat motionless, but her eyes glowed. “It is the word,” she
said again contentedly. “I have waited a long time. Now I can go.”
“Go with God,” answered Cuthbertson in deep Spanish as he mounted and
rode on to Los Santos.
And when he was out of hearing, Juana wept. She placed her water-jug
where the lizards might reach it, and scattered her ground corn on the
sand. What the desert had restored to her she hid in her bosom with
little murmured words. Behind her the lights of Los Santos twinkled
within the guarding water, and ahead the lonely light from the mines
shone across the curve of the world. But as she went down the desert
road her face was to the stars. Before her the clear dusk parted as in
welcome, it closed behind her like a tender barrier to be passed no
more. Above her was the infinite heaven and the hosts of it. Under her
feet the sand that took all things, youth and strength and the works of
all men’s hands, but might not wholly take love.
Old Juana was going at last to join the Rainmaker in a good place.