old señora offering the sentry a glass of wine. Was she trying to hold
him at the far end of his post? Now in the opposite doorway, tipping a
little weakly, hatless, without coat, but fully booted, Bart Leadley
showed himself, a cool laugh on the dark face. Elbert darting a glance
down the corridor, saw the back of the rurale’s head. He thrust out his
hand to steady Bart across the corridor.
‘... Era la que me miraba
Diciendo adios--’
They had crossed the empty room; Elbert outside the window, was helping
Bart through--the rurale still held to the patio-end of the corridor
by the señora--or was it by the song? Even in the fierce drum of his
excitement, words of old Bob Leadley flashed to Elbert’s mind: ‘...
like the Virgin speaking to them.’ Yes, he could understand being held
by that song; a wonder above everything, that Bart could leave at all.
‘Qui es mir persona
Cuentale tus amores--’
They had crossed the grounds to Mamie’s tether; Bart’s left ankle was
in his hand for a lift. He swung up behind on the spacious saddle-tree;
Mamie darting off in the dark toward high country with her double
burden. Hauntingly from behind:
‘Me la han matado
Me la han matado--’
And from Bart:
‘That there song, Mister, has followed me all the way!’
* * * * *
Miles back among the hills, they picked up the sorrel; still no sound
of pursuit. Then it was northward among the foothills--the north star
for Elbert’s eyes. At any moment he half expected to hear, ‘No, I’m not
going to fall, Mister,’ but to-night it was: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m
sittin’ easy.’
Before daybreak they followed a little stream up higher--less volume
but more noise all the way, and came to rest in the deep privacy of a
sunless ravine.
The second night, long after midnight, they heard the far scream of a
train from the north.
‘The Mexican Pacific,’ suggested Elbert.
‘Where?’ said Bart.
‘That train--’
‘The Mexican Pacific cuts north through San Isidro Gorge ten miles
southeast of here. Ask old Mallet-head, that’s where we dragged him out
of his Pullman--’
‘You think we’ve crossed the Border--that this is a U.S.
Transcontinental?’
‘The States is a large place, but I sure thought you’d know home when
you got there, Doc.’
But Elbert could hardly believe. A little later they caught a glimpse
of the crawling serpent of coaches, faint lights for scales. Finally in
the first daylight the two horses crossed the tracks--‘Safety First,’
authoritative like an Eleventh Commandment on a big water tank in the
dusk of morning.
XXIX
HIGH COUNTRY
THEY found the highway north of the railroad and turned their horses
west.
Bart looked a bit white and shaky but made no sign to stop.
‘Don’t you think we’d better lay up for a day or two in one of these
towns, so you can rest, Bart?’ Elbert asked.
‘I’m not sleepy,’ said the other. ‘I’m gettin’ what I need outdoors,
and aboard old Mallet-head. I always did need the outside of a horse to
pull myself together.’
As it began to get hot in the morning, they veered into the hills and
found shade, resting several hours.
‘How far west of Nogales do you think we are right now?’ Elbert asked.
‘About a hundred miles, I’d say. You see Fonseca lay a long ways west
of the main road south from Nogales, and we’ve kept pushin’ west
through the mountains since then. We can find out by askin’ along the
railroad--’
‘I’m figurin’ we might not have to go to San Forenso first to get to
the cabin,’ Elbert said. ‘You see, San Forenso is still farther west
from here than your father’s mine--’
All through the recent weeks in Mexico, Elbert had felt his mission
would end when he safely crossed the Border with Bart, but now he knew
a secret restless urge actually to reach the cabin, before letting even
Mort Cotton know.
‘You see, everything we need is there,’ he added.
‘Lead the way, Doc.’
The second morning afterward, Elbert looked up into a range of hills,
remarking that he thought the Dry Cache was up there. ‘San Forenso is
twenty miles ahead, and we’d have to circle back, if we went there.
The mine must be straight up from here. Yes, I think those are our
mountains, all right,’ he added. ‘I remember your father said you could
look over into California and back into Sonora from just above the
mine--’
‘It’s giddap with me. Persuade yourself--’
But the mountains that had looked so feasible from the railroad turned
sinister and rebellious as they climbed. Forty miles around would
have been simple to the twenty they had made before sundown that
day--a waterless fight all the way. They were in the big timber of the
altitudes again in the lengthening shadows, and Elbert looked at the
man beside him, riding on hard gray nerve; then at the drooping head of
his own mare in front. He had given in to a sort of mania to get into
high country. It had been getting clearer for hours that he should
have gone straight to San Forenso, from where he could have been sure
of his way to the claim. It might be best to turn back to the railroad
now--while there was a bit of light.... Just at this instant Mamie’s
ears pricked; her body came to life under the saddle. The sullen eye of
the gelding caught a flash of her new fire.
She broke into a trot, starting down-grade. They crossed a sloping
bench of big timber and checked down into a valley open to the western
light.
‘I don’t see any trail, but she’s sure got an idea!’ Elbert called.
‘She sure has,’ Bart panted, ‘and I’m for it--’
In the open, she veered swiftly to the left, making for a cañon mouth,
and then in letters writhing a little before Elbert’s dazed eyes: ‘Are
You Doomed?’ on its white rock! The living fact of the Flats broke upon
him.
‘Why, we’re home, Bart!’ he gasped. ‘The cabin’s back a ways. She’s
makin’ for the last water--’
‘First water I’ve seen in some time,’ came from the other, as Elbert
helped him down.
* * * * *
There was dusk and wood-smoke; the grinding of the coffee-mill,
the sputter of bacon oil for flapjacks, a deadlock on the matter
of whether a can of Michigan pears should be opened or Hawaiian
pineapple--finally both, for it was a fiesta night at the Dry Cache
mine, and the stores were endless. They had fared slim for some days
and ridden hard. Few words, because Elbert felt a bulge in his throat
from the pressure of unfamiliar joys. After supper, he left Bart and
led the two horses, in their ‘cooling’ blankets, down to the last water
to finish their deep drink for the night, also to refill canteens. Bart
came out of the cabin, as he returned, and they sat down in the clean
straw when grain was fed, leaning their backs against the fence.
That astonishing sense of unity crept over Elbert that he had known
once or twice before. He remembered Bob Leadley’s story of when he was
a little chap, leaving the supper table where there was a fight on
between his father and mother, and going out into the barnyard where
the cattle ruminated, and there was peace. Yes, he must have listened
deeply to all Bob Leadley’s words. It was almost as if he had been
that little boy; almost as familiar to him as that night of tequila
in Cienaga, in his own experience, when he had sat with Cal and Slim
(Chester and the Indian and Mamie grinding at their sun-parched corn).
A warm breeze fanned his face now with a smell of sunlit rocks and
pine bark and that carried him back to the night of that warm wind at
Heaslep’s ranch, when Cal and Slim asked him to join them in a ride
south, where he was going anyway. Exquisite ease in the very fatigue
that closed in, delight of relaxation complete for the first time in
his life.
The next day they didn’t stir far from the claim, only moving about the
different patches of sun and shade to stretch out in the deep languor
that followed days of strain.
‘Pretty near everything a man could want here--don’t you think?’ said
Bart.
‘Pretty near,’ said Elbert.
‘The old man made it all to suit himself, didn’t he?’ the voice drawled
on. ‘Always a great hand for keeping things up, Dad was. Left his mark
on everything. I can see it now. A kid wouldn’t--’
‘I think he was making it for you all the time,’ Elbert said, ‘just as
if he was writing a letter to you, when he built those cabinets and
stored them. I know he was--always thinking you would come back like
this.’
‘A lot of work in that tunnel for one man to do alone,’ said Bart.
‘Must have taken him a year--’
‘More,’ said Elbert.
The next morning at breakfast a curious quiet settled between the two
men. The spell was breaking, a different gleam in the eyes of the big
fellow across the table. In a wordless fashion, Elbert sat for a time.
Another sentence of old Bob Leadley’s cleared with deep meaning. ‘I’d
get lonesome for him when he was right in the same room--’
‘We’d better not wait any longer before letting Mort Cotton know,’
Elbert finally said. ‘I’ll ride down to the Slim Stake and get him on
the telephone--’
He was back within four hours and Mort reached the claim before
sundown. It took two days for everything to be settled, and Elbert
was tired in an altogether different way at the end. He had done more
talking in those two days than in all the weeks in Sonora.
‘Bart,’ he said, when they were finally alone once more, ‘there’s
nothing I’d like better than to work that gold tooth with you, but I’ll
have to be away for a few weeks.’
‘Which way you headin’, Doc?’
‘East. Been away from home for a long time. I’ve got to see my
father--’ Elbert caught that strange gleam again in the eyes of the
other. ‘And my sisters,’ he added.
‘I’m ridin’, too, Mister. For a while--’
‘You’re not going--you’re not going back?’
‘Back into Mexico?’ the other laughed.
‘I thought, perhaps--’
‘Why, you don’t seem to believe I like it here,’ Bart chuckled.
‘Pretty near everything a man could want--’
Just words, perhaps, Elbert thought. He didn’t see how Bart could
forget. He couldn’t have, if he had been in Bart’s place.
‘Oh, yes, I like to look and listen around here,’ the big fellow went
on, ‘and back in that tunnel there’s a message for you and me all
right, but no hurry, as you say. We’ll wait a little longer for that. A
whole lot of times down in Sonora I’ve wondered just how it would feel
to turn loose in an American town--Tucson, for instance.’
‘I’ll be stopping off in Tucson,’ Elbert allowed.
* * * * *
That day they rode down to San Forenso and left the horses at Mort
Cotton’s ranch. Elbert planned to take the night train.
‘I’ll stay on with Mort for a day or so,’ Bart said. ‘I might hunt you
up in Tucson, if I get there before you leave. They say there’s a hotel
there--’
‘The Santa Clara,’ said Elbert.
He looked back toward Mort’s corral, as the old cattleman was bringing
the rig to take him to the station. He moved to the gate and let
himself in. Mamie walked toward him, but halted with lifted head, in
the afternoon light, as he had seen her the first day, only now her
coat was faded by many sweats and suns. Her head lifted higher. She
was listening for something no one else could possibly hear--
‘One more listening mare,’ Elbert whispered.
Her forehead presently bumped his shoulder. Farther off the sorrel
stake-horse was sniffing at the cracks in Mort’s hay-shed.
‘I’ll be coming back, Mamie. Oh, yes, I’ll be coming back--’
XXX
TUCSON AGAIN
IT wasn’t a dappled gray this time, but one of the same breed. Elbert
was abroad in the streets of Tucson, long before the city was astir,
his train having set him down at an unseemly hour. He passed a harness
shop and peered in through the window, where his eye encountered the
cocked ears and pointed head of a wooden horse. Evidently its place was
the sidewalk, daytimes, being wheeled into the shop at closing-hour on
castors.
It was as if he were in the Plaza at Los Angeles again. It was more:
like a man coming back to find his old nursery unchanged. Elbert’s lips
moved.
‘Wouldn’t Mamie shy if she passed that palfrey on a lonely road?’
* * * * *
His hand pained. He was clutching the arm of a rocking-chair. He had
left a network of invisible foot-tracks over two sections, at least,
of the city of Tucson. The day was now advanced to eight-thirty in the
morning, and he was back in his room at the Santa Clara. His strong,
blackened fingers relaxed on the oak. He arose and pulled down both
outer windows. He went to the hall-door to feel that it was locked. He
took off coat and vest, wiped the sweat from his forehead, called a
number at the telephone.
‘May I speak with Miss Gertling?’
‘Miss Gertling--why, she doesn’t live here any more--’
‘Does she--where?’
‘She’s only here part of the day--some days--’
‘Could you give me her address?’
‘Who is it, please?’
‘Mr. Sartwell--’
‘Oh.’
‘Elbert Sartwell--’
‘Oh,--you’re--wait a moment, please!... Yes, Mr. Sartwell, you may
call--’ the snappy tone had softened.
Elbert’s mind fumbled the number, but he got it down.... His second
call was entered. A man’s tone advised him respectfully not to
disconnect. Then out of the smothering stillness:
‘Hello?’
‘Mary Gertling!’
‘Yes.... Oh, I know ... and where are you?’
‘At the Santa Clara.’
‘Will you come over?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, wait! I know better. I’ll come for _you_! In the street in front
of the hotel--in ten--fifteen minutes.’
He bathed a third time. He was below watching the street both ways.
Crowds were passing, by this time--on the way to work. Elbert’s
feelings were torturingly divided. Sometimes he pitied all these people
going to work; sometimes he envied their calm matter-of-fact seizure
of life. As for himself, he seemed dangling in space, having lost his
clutch entirely.
The crowd jostled him back against the entrance. It must be a half
hour. Could there have been a mistake? His eye verified the fact that
it was the Santa Clara hotel he was standing against. Many faces coming
from the right, as many more from the left. He would hold his eyes one
way, until he felt she must be standing at his back. Yet it was from
neither right nor left that her call came--from the throng of cars in
the street, a roadster pressing in toward the curb. She was alone. She
had opened the door. Like that day in the flowered room, he had been
listening and watching toward the hall and she had come from the porch.
‘I gave you a ring at the Finishing School,’ he said, as if he had been
waiting months to say just that.
‘I finished last June, but stayed on part-time for other work there.’
‘Post-graduate work?’
‘I’ve been learning to ride a horse. I thought you might come there
first.’
Any one could see she had driven a car for a long time--queer ease of
her own, no thought. She straightened her dress and thrust her wrap
back from her shoulders, as if ready for all day. The small boot poured
gas with mathematical accuracy and steadiness.
They were out of heavy traffic now; passing through an end of town
increasingly familiar to Elbert.
‘Everything has seemed tangled and lonesome during this last week,’ she
was saying. ‘But before that, it all grew clearer and clearer.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘For three weeks, just before this last, everything seemed to get
clearer and clearer.’
‘Why, those were the weeks I spent in the mountains,’ he said. ‘I
was alone all the time, and high up. It sure was a change coming
down, though. Last few days, it seemed my mind was trying to make up
something that never really happened. Hardest of all, just before I got
you on the ’phone this morning.’
Yes, it was the Border Highway they were on. She was at his left.
Gradually he was breathing better. At first he had thought she would
have to hurry back, but that thought was slipping away. She wasn’t
speeding, but pressed the car forward steadily, as if making a day’s
passage. It was a white dress she had on, a sort of linen--like a
handkerchief. The white road stretched ahead, very straight, but gently
rolling. The sense of on and on came to him. He had always felt like
fighting when with a girl before--except in that flowered room--but
there wasn’t a fight in the world to-day. The wide empty road stretched
ahead for miles; a film of dull shining vapor gleamed over the top
of each rise, but always as they rolled up to it, the film vanished,
showing up presently above the next. They never arrived, always
approaching, as to a mirage.
‘Sometime we’ll get to know it down here on the roads and even in the
midst of the city,’ she said.
‘You mean that sense of clearness--I spoke of having in the
mountains--?’
‘Yes, we must not lose it anywhere--as we did last week. Why, I thought
some of the time you weren’t coming back--’
‘I thought some of the time, you weren’t expecting me to come back,’ he
said with a shiver.
They were running through Harrisburg of trucking days. Evidently she
had no mind to return--Heaslep’s beyond. It would break in upon their
day to stop, yet she had chosen the way. He couldn’t tell her to go
back. He had wanted to see Cal and Slim, but not to-day. Still, she
kept on, the ranch-houses finally showing ahead.
‘I know ’em there--we’ll have to call, since we’re going by. That’s
where Cal and Slim are. At least--’
‘Shall I turn in?’ she asked strangely.
‘Yes.’
He saw the faces jerking out from the farrier’s and the cook-house, one
or two Chinese. Elbert nodded and gestured, but not an eye turned to
him, all cooling upon the one at his side.
‘Drive on to that door marked “Office,”’ he whispered.
Frost-face appeared in the doorway. Elbert’s fixed smile of greeting
had not yet registered for a return glance. Frost-face began lifting
off his wide hat. Elbert couldn’t remember ever having seen before that
hard white head, uncovered.
‘She’s some--car,’ Frost-face said suddenly.
‘We were just ridin’ by. Thought I’d--’ Elbert began, but the foreman
wasn’t paying attention. Finally in the strain Elbert pursued:
‘Any sick cattle?’
‘No, but we’re on the watch. Is she a six?’
‘No, an eight--straight eight. Thought we’d like to see Cal and Slim--’
‘Up in Wyoming--when I heard last--playin’ the round-ups and the
rodeos.’
‘We were just ridin’ by,’ Elbert said.
‘I hear Slim sat Poison-face for twenty-five seconds at Cheyenne.’
‘Are they coming back?’
‘Ain’t likely. They--you see, we’re using tourin’ cars mostly to ride
range and keep up fences.’
Now Elbert received his first direct glance. ‘I see you’re wearin’
everything but your likker this morning,’ Frost-face remarked.
‘I’m starting East,’ said Elbert.
‘Round by Panama?’
Elbert chuckled. ‘I mean, I’m startin’ East to-morrow night.’
‘Takin’--the filly?’
‘No, she’s back in San Forenso. You’ll sure remember me to the boys,
won’t you?’
The roadster was rolling quietly out of the ranch driveway. Mary turned
the car south toward the Border. No word about it.
* * * * *
Twilight--Nogales--they were having supper in a little Yaqui restaurant
There were paper-thin leaves of corn-bread baked in the sun. He was
looking away toward the South.
‘Sometime we must go clear down to the señora’s house in Nacimiento
where we first met,’ he said.
‘I don’t know. We can’t ever find what we’re looking for by going
_back_ to any place. It’s always ahead.’
‘What we’re looking for,’ he repeated, but not as a question.
‘It would seem so easy to find; it would seem so easy to keep,’ she
went on, ‘but I don’t know any one who has kept it. Certainly none of
my girl friends who have married. I don’t even know what it is exactly.’
‘It’s something that’s kept on building. Really started when I was in
the hospital--no, before that--at the explosion.’
‘No, before that,’ she said.
‘Did it?’
‘Yes, at the barefooted woman’s, where you were so firm. And then
something really happened to us in that ride back from San Pasquali,
when we were not in our heads.’
‘I had your letter in the hospital.’
‘And then, that day you came to the Finishing School.’
‘That was a great room to me,’ he said.
‘Every day has been different, but it has kept right on building.’
‘Especially in the mountains.’
‘Yes, wonderfully then--until last week when I spoiled everything, by
getting so nervous and expectant.’
‘It’s been building all day to-day--with me,’ said Elbert.
‘Yes,’ she helped, ‘differently from ever before. And to-morrow night
you are starting East--’
‘It will keep right on, won’t it?’
‘It must, but it’s so easy to spoil--that’s what frightens me. You
wouldn’t think it could, only you see so many others who do--who have.’
‘It couldn’t be with us.’
‘I think everybody says that at first. You won’t let me spoil it, will
you?’
‘I was going to ask you that.’
‘But you are so firm. You must always be like that. Why, it’s all
because you were so firm that first night.’
The day was passing fast as a theater scene, but in the last moments
of Nogales, he kept thinking of the seventy miles back to Tucson. At
least, they had that much left to-day.
‘Won’t you drive back?’ she said at last.
‘Not unless you’re tired?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think about it.’
‘Then you--’
Sixty miles still to go. She was driving slightly under ‘thirty,’ but
the minutes were racing by. She didn’t go any slower. Fifty miles.
The roadster kept its pace, the meter staying around twenty-eight
or twenty-nine, always between twenty-five and thirty. Forty miles;
then half way. She didn’t cheat.... Stars, sage, warm wind, early
evening.... A thoroughbred, always different.... What could possibly be
spoiled, if two kept on and on like this? But she knew something; and
others, he knew, certainly had spoiled it.... Twenty-five miles.
The night suddenly opened for him. He was nearer to her than ever
before, though he had not changed position. He could not feel himself
or her, but there was a white ball of light between his eyes--like all
the stars of the gray haze fusing into one, like all the perfumes of
the air fusing into one, all the stillnesses he had ever known fusing
into one.
‘You--’ from her.
‘Yes, I’m here--’
‘You know something--I must know!’
‘_You are something--I must be_,’ he went on, as if finishing a magic
formula which she had begun.
‘Oh, what has happened to us?’ she cried suddenly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you suppose--the others--ever know anything like that--like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elbert.
‘If they did--I don’t see how they could ever go apart.’
* * * * *
Lights of Tucson, streets. The amazement that he knew now, was that she
had kept on steadily driving.... ‘_You are something--I must be--_’ Had
she said that, or had he? Had it really been spoken at all? And the
car hadn’t halted a moment.
‘But we must never stop--no matter how wonderful it is--and say “This
is it,”’ she repeated. ‘We must always keep on and on--’
‘It’s so very much--right now--’
‘I know--I know it is--but don’t ever let me stop and say: “We’ve found
it.”’
The car drew up at the curb of the Santa Clara.
‘To-morrow. Luncheon. I’ll come at twelve--right here.’
Then he stood upon the pavement, differently alone.
* * * * *
It was after 11.30, next morning. Elbert had sent a telegram to his
father that he was starting East to-night. Passing the desk he saw a
paper in his box.
‘Friends of yours in Suite 14,’ it read. No signature. Writing he
hadn’t seen before.
He stood still for a moment. It wouldn’t be necessary to go up right
now. She would be in front in fifteen or twenty minutes. He might let
the message wait until afternoon. But after that, perhaps they would
be going out somewhere. Better now, yet the hush he was in was hard to
break. It was like a spell, yet the elevator door stood open.
It wasn’t Bart who opened the door of the upper room but the old
don of El Relicario, and graciously behind him, biding her time, the
señora. Then from an inner room (was the crucifix there, too, and the
white flower?) came the corn-dust maiden.
‘Ah, Señor, you were so brave--it was all because you were so brave!’
And behind her sounded the easy flowing laugh--words from Bart:
‘Everybody here but the rurales!’
‘Only--’ said Elbert, ‘only my friend--a girl--I’ll get her now--and
bring her up.’
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Minor, silent changes have been made to regularize punctuation and
hyphenation.
Archaic spelling, slang and dialect have been retained as typeset.