WHERE THE DESERT HAD BEEN
Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of Sulphur
Falls, nestled in the flats below the canyon of the Serpentine, with a
feeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild,
frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate and
lawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurious
hotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been in
New York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place with
the building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the war
factories which belched smoke back at the foot of the canyon. She did
not realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothing
but limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferry
and a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in a
dozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousand
souls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon the
possible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.
Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was
accustomed to. Comfort and even luxury surrounded her, and the law
stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman.
That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held
sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had
imagined it to be. Only De Launay's careless gibe as he had left her
at the hotel held promise of performance. "To-morrow we'll start our
private butchery," he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted
at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.
De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for
the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him
like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved
sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He
had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless
ranges of his youth and this was what he found.
He had turned and looked back at the frowning canyon through which the
train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest
clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava
gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was
changed.
Smoke hung above the canyon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and
smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests
the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the
timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white
ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change,
where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of
masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the canyon held a
vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the
dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge
ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down
below.
Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the
Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and
gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with
cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and
mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the
effulgence of limitless electricity.
Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls,
stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding
bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long
trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.
The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in
evening clothes.
Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with
alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches
of farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the
settlers.
But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the
desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven
and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It
was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda
range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed
and uncivilized.
He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that
his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving
restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained
to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.
The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and
that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the
shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with
disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.
With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he
hunted up a "livery and feed barn." He found one on a side street,
near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of
a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a
cheap automobile standing in front of the place.
But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a dropped
hip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddles
hanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches.
If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, he
forgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of an
outer coat.
MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of more
consequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at the
side of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a look
about him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when he
was asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he had
to deal with one who knew what he was about.
The horse was MacGregor's, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sell
it. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fair
price. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the front
of the barn it was late afternoon.
Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on the
sloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shaded
their faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings were
cool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned up
at the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles of
their boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles around the
heels, where spurs had dented them.
One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. His
hair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.
The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.
The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shock
of recollection. "Roll on, my little doggy!"
Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No one
spoke for several minutes.
Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobody
in particular.
"They's sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town."
The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.
"They don't teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos,
neither."
De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.
"You'd think some of them'd sense it that a gent has got a right to be
private when he wants to be."
"It's a ---- of a town, nohow."
"People even run around smellin' of liquor--which is plumb illegal,
Sucatash."
"Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on wood
alcohol, Dave."
Silence settled down on them once more. It was broken this time by De
Launay, who spoke as impersonally as they.
"They had real cow hands hereaways, once."
A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.
"I reckon the sheep eat 'em outa range and they done moved down to
Arizona."
The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:
"Them pilgrims is sure smart on g'ography an' history."
"An' sheep--especially," said the one called Dave.
"_Ca ne fait rien!_" said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like
"sinferien" as he had heard the linguists of the A. E. F. do. The two
men slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware of
his existence for the first time.
Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath his habiliments,
though the small mustache puzzled them.
"You-all been to France?" asked Dave. De Launay did not answer
direct.
"There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin' mules overseas," he
mused. "Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see 'em."
"We didn't dry nurse no mules, pilgrim," said Sucatash. "When did you
lick Hindenburg?"
De Launay condescended to notice them. "In the battle of _vin rouge_,"
he said. "I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with the _vin_
sisters, yourselves."
"You're sure a-sayin' something, old-timer," said Dave, with emotion.
For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay's buttonhole. "You
done a little more'n café fightin' though, to get that?"
De Launay shrugged his shoulders. "They give those for entertainin' a
politician," he answered. "Any cow hands out of a job around here?"
Both of the men chuckled. "You aimin' to hire any riders?"
"I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. More
exactly, there's a lady, aimin' to head into the mountains and she'll
need a couple of packers."
"This lady don't seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none
whatever," was the comment.
"Which she hasn't, bein' troubled with notions about gold mines and
such things. She needs taking care of."
"Ridin' the Esmeraldas this time o' year and doin' chores for Pop all
winter strikes me as bein' about a toss-up," said the man called
Sucatash. "I reckon it's a certainty that Pop requires considerable
labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won't. If the wages is
liberal----"
"We ought to see the lady, first," said Dave. "There's some lady
pilgrims that couldn't hire me with di'monds."
"The pay's all right and the lady's all right. She's French."
"A mad'mo'selle?" they echoed.
"It's a long story," said De Launay, smiling. "You'd better see her
and talk it over. Meantime, this prohibition is some burdensome."
"Which it ain't the happiest incumbrance of the world," agreed
Sucatash. "They do say that the right kind of a hint will work at the
Empire Pool Rooms."
"If they have it, we'll get it," asserted De Launay, confidently.
"You-all point the way."
The three of them rose by the simple process of straightening their
legs at the knees, and walked away.