Indian Creek stood lonely and isolated in the flat, treeless,
sun-smitten desert. Only in the south was the unbroken flatness
relieved by a low-lying ridge of barren brown hills, their sides cut
as by erosion into steep, stratified cliffs. Even these bleak hills
looked to be twenty miles away, and were in reality fifty. Beyond
them, softened and blurred by the distance, was a blue-gray line where
the mountains were.
"Of all the wretched holes in the world!" fumed Hapgood.
But Conniston didn't hear him. The girl had stepped down from the
train, and, without casting a glance behind her, walked swiftly across
the wriggling thing which stood for a street in Indian Creek. There
was a saloon with a long hitching-pole in front of it, to which a
couple of saddle-horses were tied, and a buckboard with two fretting
two-year-olds in dust-covered harness. A man, a swarthy half-breed,
with hair and eyes and long, pointed mustaches of inky blackness, was
on the seat, handling the jerking reins. He called a soft "_Adios,
compadre_" to the man lounging in the doorway, and swung his colts out
into the road, making a sweeping half-circle, bringing them to a
restless halt, pawing and fighting their bits, at the girl's side.
While with one brown hand he held them back, with the other he swept
off his wide, black hat.
"How do, Mess!" he cried, softly, his teeth flashing a white greeting.
She answered him with a "Hello, Joe!" as she climbed to his side.
Joe loosened his reins a very little, called sharply to his horses,
and in a whirlwind of dust the buckboard made an amazingly sharp turn
and shot rattling down the road and out toward the mountains in the
south.
"And now what?" grinned Hapgood, maliciously. "Even your country girl
has gone!"
Greek Conniston gazed a moment after the flying buckboard, a vague,
wavering, unreal thing, through the dust of its own making, and,
hiding his disappointment under a shrug, turned to Hapgood.
"Now for a hotel somewhere, if the place has one. Come on, Roger.
We're in for it now, so let's make the best of it."
Carrying his suit-case, he strode off toward the saloon, Roger
following silently. The lanky, sunburned individual in the doorway
watched their approach idly for a moment and then turned his lazy eyes
to a cow and calf trudging past toward the watering-trough.
"Hello, friend!" called Conniston.
The lanky individual drew his eyes from the cow and calf, bestowed a
long look and a fleeting nod upon the two strangers, and turned again
toward the trough, little impressed, little interested in the
Easterners.
"I say!" went on Conniston, brusquely. "Where'll a man get a room
here?"
"Down to the hotel."
"So you do have a hotel? Where is it?"
The lazy individual ducked his head toward the east end of the
street, cast a last look at the cow and calf, and, turning, went back
into the saloon.
"Nice sort of people," grunted Hapgood.
Conniston laughed. "Buck up, Roger," he grinned, his own spurt of
irritation lost in his enjoyment of Hapgood's greater bitterness.
"It's different, anyhow, isn't it? Come on. Let's see what the hotel
looks like."
The hotel was a saloon with a long bar at the front, a little room
just off, containing a couple of tables covered with red oil-cloth.
Beyond were half a dozen six-by-six rooms separated from one another
by partitions rising to within two feet of the unceiled roof. The
proprietor, busy with some local friends in the card-room, saw the two
young men come in and yelled, lustily:
"Mary!"
Mary, a stout and comfortable-looking woman, appeared from the
kitchen, wiping her hands upon her blue apron, and with a sharp glance
at the newcomers bobbed her head at them and said, briefly, "Howdy."
Conniston took off his hat and came into the bar-room. Roger, with a
careless glance at the woman, came in without taking off his hat and
dropped into one of the rickety chairs against the wall. And there he
sat until Conniston had negotiated for two rooms for the night. Then
he got jerkily to his feet and stalked after his friend and their
hostess to the back of the house. A moment later he and Conniston,
left alone, sat upon their two beds and stared at each other through
the doorway connecting their rooms. Conniston studied the bare floors,
the bare walls of rough, unplaned twelve-inch boards set upright with
cracks between them ranging from a quarter of an inch to an inch in
width, and, rumpling up his hair, sat back and grinned into Hapgood's
woebegone face. And Hapgood after the same examination and a sight of
the rough beds covered with patchwork comforters, groaned aloud.
"Maybe it's funny," he muttered. "But if it is, I don't see it."
"What are you going to do about it?" chuckled Conniston. "You can't
fling out and go to the rival hotel, because there isn't any! You
can't sleep outdoors very well. And you can't catch a train until a
train comes. Which, I believe, will be sometime to-morrow morning."
It was already late afternoon. That day Roger Hapgood got no farther
than the bar-room at the front of the house. There he sat in one of
the rickety chairs, brooding, sullen, and silent, smoking cigarettes,
drinking high-balls, and cursing the whole God-forsaken West. And
there Conniston left him.
In spite of his naturally buoyant spirits, in spite of the fact that
he knew he had only to swing upon the next train which came through,
Conniston felt suddenly depressed. The silence was a tangible thing
almost, and he felt shut out from the world, lost to his kind,
marooned upon a bleak, inhospitable island in an ocean of sand. The
few men whom he met upon the sun-baked street eyed him with an
indifference which was worse than actual hostility. When he spoke they
nodded briefly and passed on. It was clear that if he looked upon them
as aliens, they looked upon him as a being with whom and whose class
they had nothing in common, no desire to have anything in common. For
a moment his good nature died down before a flash of anger that these
beings, with little, circumscribed existences, should feel and
manifest toward him the same degree of contempt that he, a visitor
from a higher plane of life, experienced toward them. But in Greek
Conniston good humor was a habit, and it returned as he assured
himself that what these desert-dwellers felt was worth only his
amusement.
At the store he bought some tobacco for his pipe and engaged the
storekeeper in trifling conversation. The talk was desultory and for
the most part led nowhere. But the little, brown, wizened old man,
contemplatively chewing his tobacco like a gentle cow ruminating over
her cud, answered what scattering questions Conniston put to him. The
young man learned that the town took its name from the stream which
crept rather than ran through it to spread out on the thirsty sands a
few miles to the north, where it was absorbed by them. That the creek
came from the hills to the south, and from the mountains beyond them.
When one crossed the brown hills he came to the Half Moon country and
into a land of many wide-reaching cattle-ranges.
"I saw a team drive out that way after the train came in," said
Conniston, carelessly. "Headed for one of the cattle-ranges, I
suppose?"
The old man spat and nodded, wiping his scanty gray beard with his
hand.
"That was Joe from the Half Moon. Took the ol' man's girl out."
"I did see a young lady with him. She lives out there?"
"Uh-uh." The old man got up to wait upon a customer, a cowboy, from the
loose, shaggy black "chaps," the knotted neck handkerchief, the
clanking spurs and heavy, black-handled Colt revolver at his hip. He
bought large quantities of smoking-tobacco and brown cigarette-papers,
"swapped the news" with the storekeeper, and clanked his way across to
the saloon. He did not appear to have seen Conniston.
"The girl's father run a cattle-range out there?"
"Uh-uh. The Half Moon an' three or four smaller ranges. He's old man
Crawford--p'r'aps you've heard on him?"
Conniston shook his head, suppressing a smile.
"I don't think I have. Far out to his place?"
"Oh, it ain't bad. Let's see. It's fifty mile to the hills, an' he's
about forty mile fu'ther on." He stopped for a brief mental
calculation. "That makes it about ninety mile, huh?"
"How does a man get out there? A narrow-gauge running from somewhere
along the main line?"
"Darn narrow, stranger. You can walk if you're strong for that kind of
exercise. Mos' folks rides. Goin' out?"
"It's rather a long walk," Conniston evaded. And shortly afterward,
hearing a clanging bell up the street in the direction of the hotel,
he strolled away to his dinner.
He found Hapgood scowling into his high-ball glass and dragged him
away to the little dining-room. Both the tables were set. At one of
them the cowboy whom he had seen at the store was already eating with
two of his companions. Conniston and Hapgood were shown to the other
table by the stout Mary. Hapgood cast one glance at the stew and
coarse-looking bread put before him, and pushed his plate away.
Conniston, who had had fewer high-balls and more fresh air, actually
enjoyed his meal. The men at the other table glanced across at them
once and seemed to take no further interest.
Hapgood waited, bored and conventional, until Conniston had finished,
and then the two went back into the bar-room. The sun had gone down,
leaving in the west flaring banners of brilliant, changing colors. The
heat of the day had gone with the setting of the sun, a little lost,
wandering breeze springing up and telling of the fresh coolness of the
coming night. And it was still day, a day softened into a gray
twilight which hung like a misty veil over the desert.
From the card-room came the voices of the proprietor and the men with
whom he was still playing. They had not stopped for their supper,
would not think of eating for hours to come.
"If you feel like excitement--" began Conniston, jerking his head in
the direction of the card-room.
Hapgood interrupted shortly. "No, thanks. I've got a magazine in my
suit-case. I suppose I'll sit up reading it until morning, for I
certainly am not going to crawl into that cursed bed! And in the
morning--"
"Well? In the morning?"
"Thank God there's a train due then!"
Conniston left him and went out into the twilight. He passed by the
store, by the saloon, along the short, dusty street, and out into the
dry fields beyond. He followed the road for perhaps a half-mile and
then turned away to a little mound of earth rising gently from the
flatness about it. And there he threw himself upon the ground and let
his eyes wander to the south and the faint, dark line which showed him
where the hills were being drawn into the embrace of the night
shadows.
The utter loneliness of this barren world rested heavy upon his
gregarious spirit. Sitting with his back to Indian Creek, he could see
no moving, living thing in all the monotony of wide-reaching
landscape. He was enjoying a new sensation, feeling vague, restless
thoughts surge up within him which were so vague, so elusive as to be
hardly grasped. At first it was only the loneliness, the isolation and
desolation of the thing which appalled him. Then slowly into that
feeling there entered something which was a kind of awe, almost an
actual fear. A man, a man like young Greek Conniston, was a small
matter out here; the desert a great, unmerciful, unrelenting God.
First loneliness, then awe tinged with a vague fear, and then
something which Conniston had never felt before in his life. A great,
deep admiration, a respect, a soul-troubling yearning toward the very
thing from which his city-trained senses shrank. He was experiencing
what the men who live upon its rim or deep in its heart are never free
from feeling. For all men fear the desert; and when they know it they
hate it, and even then the magic of it, brewed in the eternal
stillness, falls upon them, and though they draw back and curse it,
they love it! The desert calls, and he who hears must heed the call.
It calls with a voice which talks to his soul. It calls with the dim
lure of half-dreamed things. It beckons with the wavering streamers of
gold and crimson light thrown across the low horizon at sunrise and
sunset.
Greek Conniston was not an introspective man. His life, the life of a
rich man's son, had left little room for self-examination of mood and
purpose and character. He had done well enough during his four years
in the university, not because he was ambitious, but simply because
he was not a fool and found a mild satisfaction in passing his
examinations. Nature had cast him in a generous physical mold, and he
had aided nature on diamond and gridiron. He had taken his place in
society, had driven his car and ridden his horses. He had through it
all spent the money which came in a steady stream from the ample
coffers of William Conniston, Senior. His had been a busy life, a life
filled with dinners and dances and theaters and races. He had not had
time to think. And certainly he had not had need to think.
But now, under the calm gaze of the desert, he found himself turning
his thoughts inward. He had been driven out of his father's house. He
had been called a dawdler and a trifler and a do-nothing. He had been
told by a stern old man who was a _man_ that he was a disgrace to his
name. He had never done anything but dance and smoke and drink and
make pretty speeches which were polite lies and which were accepted as
such. And now a minor note, as thin as a low-toned human voice heard
faintly through the deep music of a cathedral organ, something seemed
to call to him telling him again of these things.
The darkening line where the far-away hills in the south were dragged
deeper and deeper into the night drew his wandering thoughts away from
himself and sent them skimming after the girl he had seen that day.
Somewhere out there she was moving across the desert, plunged into the
innermost circle of the grim solitude. He remembered her eyes and the
look he had seen in them. He could see her again as she jerked in her
plunging horse, as she caught the step of the swiftly moving train.
The desert had called her; and she, purposeful, strong, as clean of
soul, he felt, as she was of body, had answered the call. With the
compelling desire to know her springing full-grown from his first
swift interest in her, his fancies, touched by the subtle magic of the
desert, showed her to him out yonder with the dusk and the silence
about her. He got to his feet and stood staring into the gathering
gloom as though he would make out across the flat miles the flying
buckboard.
"After all," he told himself, with a restless, half-reckless little
laugh, "why not?"
He turned and went back toward the town. On his way he overtook a boy,
a little fellow of eight or nine, driving a milk-cow ahead of him. He
found him the shy, wordless child he had expected, but chatted with
him none the less, and by the time they had reached the first of the
scattered buildings the boy had thawed a little and responded to
Conniston's talk. After the brief, somewhat uncomfortable lonesomeness
of a moment ago Conniston found himself glad of any company. And upon
leaving the boy at a tumbled-down house a bit farther on he found a
half-dollar in his pocket and proffered it.
"Here, Johnny," he said, smiling. "This is for some candy."
The boy put his hands behind his back. "My name's William," he said,
with a quiet, odd dignity. "An' I don't take money off'n no one 'less
I work for it!"
"My name's William, too, my boy," Conniston answered, much amused;
"but you and I have very different ideas about taking money!"
"Proud little cuss," he told himself, as he strode on along the
street. "Wonder who taught him that?"
Here and there in the dull dome above him the stars were beginning to
come out. On either hand the pale-yellow rays from kerosene-lamps
straggled through windows and doors, making restless shadows
underfoot. From the door of the saloon the brightest light crept out
into the night. And with it came men's voices. Having a desire for
companionship, and not craving that of Hapgood in his present mood,
Conniston stepped in at the low door, and, going to the bar, called
for a glass of beer. There were half a dozen men, among whom he
recognized the proprietor of the "hotel" and the men with whom he had
been playing cards, and also the cowboys who had eaten at the other
table. In the center of the room, under a big nickeled swinging-lamp,
a man was dealing faro while the others standing or sitting about him
made their bets. A glance told Conniston that the hotel man was
playing heavily, his chips and gold stacked high in front of him.
"The strange part of it," he thought, as he watched the bartender open
his bottle of beer, "is where they get so much money! Do they make it
out of sand?"
He invited the bartender to drink with him, chatted a moment, and then
strolled over to the table. The dealer, a thick-set, fat-fingered,
grave-eyed man who moved like a piece of machinery, glanced up at him
and back to his game. There was no "lookout." A man whom he had not
seen before, deft-fingered and alert, was keeping cases. The
proprietor of the hotel, the three cowboys, and one other man were
playing.
Familiar with the greater number of common ways of separating oneself
from his money, Conniston was no stranger to the ways of faro. He
watched the fat fingers of the banker as they slipped card after card
from the box, and smiled to himself at the fellow's slowness. And
before half a dozen plays were made his smile was succeeded by a
little shock of surprise. It certainly did not do to judge people out
here in a flash and by external signs. What seemed awkwardness a
moment ago was now perfected, automatic skill.
The hotel man won and lost, his face always inscrutable, tilted
sidewise as he closed one eye against the up-curling smoke from the
cigar which he turned round and round between his pursed lips. He had
in front of him a stack of ten or twelve twenty-dollar gold pieces
which his fingers continually moved and shifted, breaking them into
several smaller stacks, bringing them together again, slipping one
over another, gathering them into one stack, breaking them down again,
so that the golden disks gave out the low musical clink which rose at
all times faint and clear through the few short-spoken words. And
meanwhile his eyes never left the table and the box.
At the end of the sixth deal he coppered his bet and leaned back to
light a fresh cigar. He stood already a hundred dollars to the good.
One of the cowboys was winning, having taken in something like twenty
or thirty dollars since Conniston came in. The other two were playing
recklessly and with little skill, and were losing steadily. The fifth
man contented himself with small bets.
Presently the younger of the two cowboys, the fellow whom Conniston
had seen at the store in the afternoon, shoved his last two dollars
and a half onto the table, lost, and got to his feet, shrugging his
shoulders.
"Cleaned," he grunted, laconically. "Gimme a drink, Smiley."
He went to the bar with one lingering look behind him. And in another
play or two his companion followed him.
"No kind of luck, Jimmie," he said to the first to be "cleaned."
"Ain't it sure enough hell how steady a man can lose?"
"Bein' as my luck took a day off six months ago an' ain't showed up
yet," retorted Jimmie, "I guess I'd ought to had sense to leave
inves'ments like the bank alone. Only I ain't got the gumption. An'
I'm always figgerin' it's about time for my luck to git over her
vacation an' come back to work. How much did you drop, Bart?"
"Forty bucks," returned Bart, reaching for the whisky-bottle. "Which
same forty was all I had. Here's how."
"How," repeated his companion.
"I'm laying you a bet," said Conniston, quietly, coming toward them
from the table.
Jimmie put down his glass, stared reminiscently at it for a moment,
and then, lifting his eyebrows, turned to Conniston. "Evenin',
stranger. You might have made a remark?"
"If your luck has been working for other people for six months it's my
bet that it's on the way home to you right now! I don't mean any
offense, and I am not sure of your customs out here. But I'll stake
you to five dollars and take half what you win."
Jimmie grinned and put out his hand. "Which I call darn good custom,
East _or_ West!"
For a few minutes it looked as though Conniston's money were going to
retrieve the cowboy's losses. Jimmie had already twenty dollars in
front of him. And then a gambler's "hunch," a staking of everything on
one play, and Jimmie sat back with nothing to do but roll a cigarette.
"I might have giv' back your fiver a minute ago, but now--"
He ended by licking his brown cigarette-paper together. But his credit
was good with the bartender, and Conniston and Bart joined him in
having a drink.
"It looks like my luck had started back toward the home corrals all
right," said Jimmie, with a meditative smile. "Only she wasn't strong
enough to make it all the way. She got weak in the knees an' went to
sleep on the road. Now, if I had a fist full of money--" He sighed the
rest into his glass.
"If the stranger," put in Bart, studying his own brown paper and
tobacco-sack, "has got any more money he wants to--"
Conniston laughed. "Much obliged. I think I'll quit with five
to-night."
Suddenly Jimmie got another of his "hunches." He cast a swift,
apprising glance at Conniston, and then, tugging Bart's sleeve, drew
him to the door. Conniston could hear their voices outside, and,
although he could not catch their words, he knew from the tone that
Jimmie was urging, while Bart demurred. They came back and had another
drink at the bartender's invitation, after which they stepped to the
table and watched the play for five minutes.
"I'd 'a' won twice runnin'," grunted Jimmie. "We ought to make a try."
Bart hesitated, watched another play, and said, shortly: "Go to it.
If you can put it across I'm with you."
Whereupon Jimmie returned to Conniston and made him a proposition. And
ten minutes later, when Conniston went smiling back to the hotel,
Jimmie and Bart were playing again, each with a hundred dollars in
front of him.