THE WHITE SANDS
Steven and Juan were lost in the world of vast sand dunes; yellow dunes
that rose like titanic anthills, while they were the ants, to labor up
one side and down the other. In order to make speed and if possible to
overtake Bragdon, they had descended the Rio Grande from a point just
below Albuquerque in a bull boat, a canoe made of scraped buffalo hide
drawn taut over willow boughs. On the wide muddy stream, burdened with
tons of the erosive soil through which it flowed, they wound southward
at the rate of thirty, sometimes forty, miles a day, swirling between
low wooded banks beyond which blue mountains lay always in sight.
They were forced to portage around one beaver dam after another. Every
moment afloat demanded the watchful care of both Steven and Juan.
Countless branches imbedded in the viscous, sandy bottoms, reached out
to pierce their hide-covered boat. Eddies and whirlpools caught at them
at unexpected turns in the current, which swung its channel erratically
from left to right of the river’s course. Sometimes they were stranded
on sand bars, for the shallows could not be seen through the muddy
water. Steven had twice sunk into quicksands when he got out to lighten
the boat and push off from a bar. Only through Juan’s skill and prompt
action could he have gotten free.
In between these delays they flew south with the stream. The river was
almost never used by the Pueblos, Juan said. Only an occasional trapper
who was used to shooting rapids and handling a canoe dared launch his
bull boat on the treacherous Rio Grande. On the second night it rained
heavily all night and they slept beneath their boat, which made a very
good tent. Steven had never thought of his illness since the night he
had left Santa Fe. The open air had apparently aided nature in restoring
him completely. After the rain the river was so swollen with the deluge
that had cascaded down the hillsides that the water rolled in great
combers. It meant that they could go very fast, yet they were in
constant danger of capsizing. They strapped their guns tightly across
their backs and fastened their ammunition belts securely so that these
should not be lost. Steven carried also a money belt filled with silver
delivered him by Juan from Consuelo in case they should overtake the
paid murderers.
Toward dusk they were looking for a good landing spot where they could
go ashore and make a fire on some wooded bank, when a greater danger
than the river threatened. Rounding a sharp curve in the stream they saw
a great dark form breasting the combers ahead. As they were swept nearer
they saw the massive head and shoulders of a great grizzly rising high
from the river. His coat was heavy with the muddy water, yet he split
the waves as though their current were nothing. They were nearly abreast
of the beast when he struck shallows and rose in his height beside them
for a moment; then began to sink.
“Quicksand!” shouted Steven, and the Indian paddled violently across
current and away from the grizzly. The bear with a mighty effort lunged
free from the sand, but there was not enough depth for him to swim in,
and he made straight for the canoe, floundering, but gaining ground. His
paws reached the stern of the bull boat. Juan beat at them in the
gathering darkness. The canoe tipped and the prow rose under the
pressure of the great bear of the Rockies. Steven seized a small hatchet
and, leaning back as far as he dared, he chopped at the paws which were
inundating them. There was a roar of rage and pain, and the bear dropped
back, sinking below the surface for a moment. _Gracias a Dios_ they had
struck the main channel again! The current bore them on to the far side
of the river and in the darkness they left the bear behind.
But dangerous as it was to be swept along by night on that black and
swollen stream, Juan would not attempt a landing for another half hour.
When they had drawn their canoe up on a small strip of sandy beach and
lit a fire, they saw the giant claws of the grizzly imbedded in the
blood-stained thwart of the boat. Steven wondered if they would ever
survive to find Doren and his father. To Juan their progress was not
unusual or eventful; he pointed out how much better time they were
making, with no Indians to attack them on the way, than the Yankee
possibly could, traveling overland with mules.
It seemed as though every four-footed creature of the Rocky Mountain
country came to the banks of the river, and wild fowl of all kinds were
there for the shooting--duck, geese, swan, bittern, crane, heron. On the
third day Juan pointed to a certain peak rising from a low-lying range
east of the river. That was where they were bound. The river had now
become unnavigable, for the deep channels disappeared at times and they
were forced to make portages in midstream, so to speak. Great
dun-colored hills, bare and without a sign of vegetation, closed them
in.
“It is there, to the Mescalero, where the Apaches are,” said Juan, “that
we must go. By this time the Señor Yankee may have reached that country,
and as he sought gold and silver, it is in the mountains that we will
find him, not in the river valley. His pursuers cannot have overtaken
him yet, unless he stopped by the way, in which case we would have been
too late, anyway. As it is, we are ahead of them at least.”
To Steven this appeared like a monstrous valley of death. Not a living
thing was to be seen, except the leering faces of carp poking their evil
heads, with whiskers like tentacles, from the muddy waters. On the land
where they abandoned the bull boat a few small lizards scurried away.
High in a turquoise vaulted heaven soared those scavengers of death, the
buzzards. Underfoot stirred one living thing that rattled as Steven
passed. It too spelled death.
And then they entered those baffling dunes, carrying enough game and
water to last for that day and the next, and Steven became one with the
desert in another of its forms. Again and again Juan would climb to the
summit of the highest foothill to locate some blue peak, and would
descend to thread those deceptive winding ways at their feet.
Miraculously, it seemed to Steven, they emerged from the dunes at the
end of the second day just as Juan had said they would, and thereafter
they bore eastward, directing their footsteps toward a pass in the
nearer range, which, because of the height of the dunes, could not be
seen at all before.
Here they came upon a tiny village of Pueblo Indians, nestling beside a
clear stream upon the sloping side of the mountain. Juan found that he
could speak their tongue; they were of Queres stock, as was his pueblo.
They made inquiries for Bragdon and Doren, but the Indians said that the
two had not passed that way. The Pueblos were a friendly, farming people
and there was no reason to doubt that they were speaking the truth.
For a small bar of pure silver Steven and Juan took their fill of the
best of corn cakes, of savory kid stew cooked with little wild onions
and green beans of native raising, and rode away upon two frisky mares,
saddled and bridled with rope and blanket only, it is true, but worth
ten bars of silver to Steven’s blistered feet. Over the mountain passes
they rode, through a pretty winding canyon filled with flowers and small
pine, and came out upon a wide flat plain, across which they cantered as
upon a level table. Gleaming sand and hard yellow clay gave back like
castanets the sound of their mares’ unshod hooves. And as they trotted
ahead the mountains rose before them, up and up from the mesa till they
towered even above the foothills that came rippling graciously down to
the plain. They slept on the desert and went on at dawn.
The tents of the Apaches clustered thick upon the grassy slopes of the
mountain-side. The chiefs of the Apaches welcomed them with tobacco and
with the white meat of fish that a short time before had been leaping in
the sunlight from the crystal-clear streams of Mescalero. With signs,
and with his few words of Apache, Juan of Santo Domingo made clear the
purpose for which they had come. To find a white man and child. An
Apache chieftain who came forward to listen nodded and, speaking and
gesticulating rapidly, gave Juan to understand that a white man and a
boy child had passed that way, had lingered along their streams, shaking
the basin which yields gold and silver, and had departed but yesterday.
Where had he gone, and why? The chieftain said they had forced the man
to give them half the dust which he had found with his placer mining,
and that, not being content with this arrangement, he had gone off to a
place where he thought he would find more silver and have to part with
none of it. This seemed to provoke much amusement among the staid
Apaches; the younger braves rocked with merriment. Taking Steven and
Juan to a high point of rock upon the mountain-side, the interpreter
pointed their gaze across the plain south and westward, where a shining
space was seen upon the desert. He spoke rapidly.
Juan turned to Steven. “He says that below lie the White Sands. They are
a place of death. Naught grows there, naught dwells there, but the
spirits of the departed and of the desert. There is a legend that the
shining sands are half silver; that if sifted they would yield pure
silver dust. See how they shine from here, he says, and on windy days
the white grains have been borne clear across the desert and up into the
mountains, where they have lain thick on the tepees of the Apache. It is
the spirits of the desert seeking to return home to the mountains, many
say.”
That was where James Bragdon, the Yankee, had gone with his little boy.
Why bother to kill the white man? The desert would attend to him; and if
he escaped its embracing sands--two of the half-bloods from the northern
town Indians, they who had mingled with the Spanish, would find him.
These two had come but a few hours after the white man left and had
followed on his trail. Footsore and angry, for they had thought to
overtake him within a day or two days of their starting, and they had
been after him now for nearly a moon.
Blood silver they sought to gain, but they could not lay it across their
itching palms until they had the white man’s scalp to show in proof of
his death. Yes, the half-breed Mexicans had told the Apache chieftain
all about it, offering turquoise and wampum for this same information of
the white man’s course.
As Steven stood upon the mountain-side, looking out over that vast
plain, seventy-five leagues from one mountain range to another, his
imagination pictured the face of the boy Doren rising in the shimmering
heat waves. He gave the Apache the silver beads which he wore beneath
his deerskin shirt, and he and Juan turned back down the mountain trail.
They could not hope to reach that far place of gleaming death until
another day had dawned, nevertheless they kept their horses moving
steadily until dark fell. They ate, and rode again, until the bright
moon sank behind the mountains and the mesa was plunged into darkness.
The sun had been up for several hours and the desert was already a
little heady in its palpitating warmth when Steven and Juan stood beside
the bank of gleaming gypsum that rose sheer fifty feet from the plain--a
desert within a desert. A light breeze blew off a thin mist-like spray
from the wind-carved edges of the sands, so that their mystery was
veiled, dazzling. Before them the tracks of feet, human feet both big
and little, showed in the trail of burros’ hooves, went on to the edge
of a gradual slope ascending the sands, and were lost, while the tracks
of the burros turned about and went away back over the desert.
Juan stooped, and with his eyes close to the ground examined the tracks
intently. When he rose he spread his hands in an eloquent gesture, then
folded his blanket tightly about him and stood with uncovered head.
“Juan,” Steven demanded, “what do you find? Do you think----?”
Juan drew his blanket over his head and spoke solemnly: “The breeds have
taken the mules and returned whence they came. That means--no hope. The
man? Gone. The child? _Quien sabe!_”
Steven threw down his mare’s bridle and, taking the gourd of water from
the Indian, he threw it over his own shoulder. “Come.” He strode toward
the raised desert before them. “We must find out.”
Juan shook his head and sat down with an air of finality. He would not
venture upon that cursed place; the evil spirits of the desert inhabited
it. It was abhorred by man and beast. If the white man would enter, it
must be alone. Perhaps the spirits of the sands would not speak to him
with the words that led to madness. Juan would wait on the desert’s
brink until Estevan came out. He would need some one then to take his
hand and lead him on.
Steven saw that to remonstrate was futile. He plunged ahead up the
incline and entered the white deadliness alone. He found himself upon a
plain that shone like snow and that seemed by the strange magic of
mirage to stretch away to the very horizon, to lift to meet the
turquoise sky and the azure mountains, so that Juan and the horses and
the desert below passed out of the picture; might not have existed. All
the world was white and blue enamel, and the air swimming sunlight.
Steven tucked under his wide-brimmed hat a dark bit of cambric torn from
his sash to shield his eyes from the glare. His gaze swept the expanse
before him. Not a footstep marred the snowy whiteness. He looked back
suddenly for his own tracks. There were none. He stood alone in his own
footsteps and not a sign remained of the way he had come. This filled
him with horror. He planted his feet deeply and walked on the sheltered
side of ridges that he might leave some trace of his own progress.
Hours passed and it seemed that he must have gone further than a man
with a boy could have walked in a day. The sun was high overhead. It
must be well past midday. He was standing on a little dune when he
caught a glimpse of a dark object some distance away. By planting his
feet one straight before the other he was able to make directly toward
what he had seen. It took a long time. Then he was upon it--a man,
Bragdon, lying face down, and beside him a smaller shape. Steven turned
Bragdon over; he was dead. Whether he had been killed by violence or not
Steven did not stop to see, nor note whether he had been scalped before
or after death. He tore at the red-and-black serape which covered the
smaller shape, uncovering Doren, who lay limp and pale.
But the boy was sleeping. He slept, and the traces of tears coursed
grimily down the thin childish cheeks. Steven was dizzy. The whole
gruesome world seemed unreal. He raised a tiny tepee over the sleeping
boy, with the blanket and a stick he had carried with him into the
desert. Then with his hands he scooped a shallow grave for Bragdon and
buried him where he lay. He lifted Doren in his arms, but remembered to
give the child a drink lest he should perish of thirst. He opened his
gourd, took a drink of the tepid water himself, and slowly poured a
generous amount down Doren’s throat. The boy gulped and swallowed
automatically without opening his eyes.
Steven made, by instinct, toward the spot where he had ascended the
sands; that would be the nearest point at which to leave them, surely.
He found a few footsteps here and there, but they brought him no nearer
the edge of the white desert. Everywhere it seemed to turn up its rim
toward the sky and he would turn back baffled and try a bit further
along. Some instinct within told him that just beyond were water, shade,
rest, where he could lay the burden to which he clung. The gourd slipped
unnoticed from his back as he plodded on. Long after all conscious
reason had left him, instinct persisted through the delirium of heat and
thirst, and he kept on and on, trying to reach the crest beyond which
lay a lower, more friendly desert.
He fell often to his knees, rested a moment, rose, tumbled again, and so
often as he fell staggered up once more. Again and again he turned back
from the very edge of the drift, blinded, and then retraced his steps.
But everywhere he turned a white curtain seemed to hang before him, and
in its misty film he saw Consuelo’s face as she had looked up at him
that night, so whitely in the moonlight of her garden.
* * * * *
A small cavalcade came with leisurely paced gait through the desert,
making toward a cool spring which welled in the shade of mesquite
shrubbery at the foot of the great table of White Sand. There were
perhaps a dozen men and twice as many mules and burros. Don Tiburcio
himself rode at the head. His eyes searched the surrounding country,
picking out in the mountains beyond certain peaks beneath which lay
silver, or so he had been told on his trip north. He wanted to see
again, too, the phenomenon of this high white desert, where his men had
found water and shade after noon under the low desert palms.
For a long time as his cavalcade approached the sands Don Tiburcio was
troubled by a dark object which seemed to move about the gypsum desert’s
edge, back and forth. He remembered the strange effect of mirage which
had so impressed him before and dismissed the apparition as a trick of
sun spots, directing his gaze instead eastward. When he looked again
with rested eyes the black moving spot was gone and he made a mental
note never again to believe one’s eyes on the desert.
The sun was sinking lower, yet the heat of the day was little abated.
Soon a swift darkness would fall over mountain and plain. Then nothing
could be seen. The moon would rise early, however, and they would be on
their way to yon mountains in the cool of the night. The white desert
before him glowed rose in the dying sun. It seemed stained in blood. The
sun lingered a moment over the peaks that bound the plain to the west
and then sank below the jagged monoliths with great speed. Yet the
moment before it sank there appeared on the rim of the desert above a
figure so clear that before it too sank out of sight Don Tiburcio had
halloo’d to his men and was halfway up the slope.
* * * * *
“Estevan, _amigo_; Estevan!” It seemed to Steven Mercer that he had
heard a familiar voice commanding him sharply for a long time to wake
up, to rouse himself. His eyeballs burned like fire in their sockets.
His mouth hurt inside. His skin felt as though every drop of moisture or
oil had been burned out of it. Intermittently he felt thus, for cooling
streams of water played over his brow. Was that, too, part of the
mirage? he wished it might continue. At length he found strength to pull
himself together; with an effort he sat up and by the light of a tula
fire he recognized Don Tiburcio. This dazed him and for a moment he
grappled with memory, then asked rather, wildly, “Where is the boy?”
“There.” Don Tiburcio pointed. Doren lay not far from the fire, which
showed him dozing, fresh and placid. Juan sat beside him. “He woke,”
said Don Tiburcio, “after we had laved him and poured water down him. We
have given him burro’s milk, wafers. He fell asleep again immediately.
And you, _amigo_, how goes it? The glare of that desert has ever driven
men mad.” Don Tiburcio smiled.
They made Steven sleep again for a few hours. It was decided to cross
the mesa that night and to start from the western mountains in the
morning, crossing another mesa to the river valley that lay beyond.
Twenty-four hours later brought them to a fertile valley, where, it was
decided, they would part. Don Tiburcio had decided to return to Santa
Fe, after all, and Steven therefore determined to confide Doren to his
care. Steven knew that it would please the Mexican greatly to be able to
return the boy to his sister. He himself would continue on down to
Mexico, where he would join the movement of Pedraza’s sympathizers about
which Don Tiburcio had confided to him the details as they rode along
together. Perhaps he would make toward the coast, and would fight, a
soldier of fortune, with Santa Anna near the coast. From there he could
return, across the Gulf to his home, should he survive.
Don Tiburcio tried to discourage this determination. “Do you realize
that only in companies do travelers find any safety on this trail? It is
a three to four months’ journey to Chihuahua and you would travel
alone.”
“The trappers hunt alone for months at a time and survive for years.”
Steven shrugged.
“But not down through Chihuahua,” Don Anabel insisted. “If you must do
it, however, cling close to the Cordilleras, for in the mountains there
is always refuge.”
Steven was now so removed by time and distance from all hope of the love
of Consuelo that to plunge into wars that did not concern him seemed a
fine thing. It never occurred to Steven that Consuelo had not meant
exactly what she said. He pondered Don Tiburcio’s remark, that women did
not always mean the firmest thing they said. He wondered if Don Tiburcio
were returning with Doren because he wanted to see Hope Bragdon again,
because he still had hopes of her, or to find out if the caravan had
come with arms and ammunition. He proposed a rendezvous with Don
Tiburcio in Vera Cruz six months from that date, but Don Tiburcio
replied that he had an idea their meeting would be much sooner than that
and not so far away.
They parted, nevertheless, to go in opposite directions. Doren kissed
Steven and clung to him, brushing away his tears. Doren had never spoken
of his father but once, and when they had told him why Bragdon was not
with them he had turned silently away, his lip quivering. That was all.
He could remember nothing that had happened after they had gone up on
the White Sands, and did not care to talk about the rest of the trip. He
did say once to Steven, “My father thought that if a young boy was with
a man Indians would not kill him. They would want to take the boy for an
Indian brave when he grew up and they would let the father come along.
Don Tiburcio told me so long ago when we were in Santa Fe, and that is
why my father would not let me leave him.”
And so they parted, waving Steven good-by to the south and hastening
their own journey back to Santa Fe.
Some three weeks later the little cavalcade came clattering down the red
trail into Santa Fe, and with little acclaim made haste to the plaza.
Halting before the church, Don Tiburcio uncovered his head, as did his
men, and it was thus that Father Filemon saw them. Hope Bragdon was not
at the ranchito, he told Don Tiburcio, but here in town, staying with
the wife of Don Anabel Lopez and the Señorita Consuelo. She had been
very ill; was but just able to sit up now after two months in bed.
They took Doren in to see her, Consuelo herself having broken the news
gently. Don Tiburcio begged the privilege of taking the boy in, and led
Doren up to the bed, brown and rosy as he had never been. Hope opened
her arms with a cry and Consuelo ran out, leaving the three together.
She almost tumbled over Luis at the door, and pushed him back. “You
shan’t see her. You shan’t see her now.”
Luis made no protest. He slunk back unhappily. He had seen that the
returning party brought Doren, and Doren only. Luis was different. Since
Hope’s illness in his father’s house he had grown nervous, furtive.
There was a time when they thought that Hope would not get well at all.
She might die at any moment; the doctor bled her once and seriously
considered doing it again if she did not revive, but Felicita,
protesting violently, rushed out and brought an old Indian woman who
gave the girl a brew which brought her out of her swoon, and thereafter
fed her on broths made of the liver of young veal.
Whether it was genuine love and distress that he felt as Hope lay dying,
or merely frustration, the situation was a potent worker of change in
Luis. Even Don Anabel could not fail to note the difference in his son.
He meditated bitterly upon the irony of both his children being
infatuated with these blond foreigners. It had been an act of charity to
take the girl from the ranch house. Consuelo had ridden out one day to
see the Yankee girl and had found her tossing on the bed with fever,
thin to the point of emaciation. Doña Katarina had tried earlier to
induce Hope to come in to town and stay with her, but she would not
leave the place. She had an idea that Doren might return, might get away
somehow and find his way back, and would not know where to look for her.
If he came he would be tired out; perhaps ready to die of exhaustion.
Doña Katarina had gone with Consuelo, and together they secured an ox
cart and with Doña Gertrudis’s permission had installed the unconscious
girl in Consuelo’s own room.
Hope had passed the crisis of her fever, but had been slow and reluctant
to convalesce. She did not care whether she lived or died. At times she
seemed touchingly grateful for the care and attention given her, and at
other times she accepted it indifferently. Luis came in once to bring
her yellow roses. She turned her mournful eyes, made huge with illness
and the dark smudges beneath, hopefully toward him. She seemed to
remember the evening they had spent together as one of the few bright
spots of her new life, and asked him if he would not find her little
brother for her. Doña Gertrudis did not realize what a tender heart her
son had; with a sob of agony he ran out of the house and disappeared for
hours. Hope would never get well; she was grieving her heart out.
Yet in a week after Doren’s return the alchemy of happiness had not only
raised her from her bed, but had filled out her cheeks, brought a little
color to the sweetly curved but prim lips. Then she seemed more alive
than she had ever been. It was as though it had taken this terrible
anxiety, and the consequent overwhelming happiness of Doren’s restoral
to her, to break down the cold barriers in her nature. In her gratitude
she turned to Don Tiburcio, and scarcely two weeks after Doren’s return
Hope went with the courtly don to the cathedral, where they were married
by Father Filemon Hubert. The padre then gave them as splendid a dinner
as his kitchen could encompass, and when they had paid their respects to
Don Anabel and Doña Gertrudis they took Doren and departed southward to
select a site for a new hacienda on lands belonging to Don Tiburcio’s
father within the state of New Mexico.
In parting with Don Anabel, Don Tiburcio informed him that as an
evidence of his gratitude to them for their kindness to Hope, he wished
to present Don Anabel with a picture which, while it would not take the
place of the old master stolen from him, would still be some
consolation. It was a Goya, he said, that master of modern Spanish art
who had died in Spain only the year before, but whose work was prized
highly. Don Tiburcio’s father possessed two examples, one of which
should be sent to Don Tiburcio on next year’s caravan.
Consuelo looked after them, departing so happily, with the feeling that
if her happiness had been given for theirs, it had been done by the hand
of God through her. And although the man Bragdon had died, Hope and the
boy were in reality far better off now. Don Tiburcio was radiantly
happy, and the sister and brother were content in the possession of each
other.
Though each day Consuelo awoke with a feeling of great loss, she tried
not to weep at the thought of Steven, traveling over the ugly parched
plains to Chihuahua, perhaps to death. Perhaps the Indians had already
taken him. Against this her heart cried out in disbelief, for youth
believes mainly what it wishes most to believe. With her tears prayers
were said each day for Steven’s safety, and for his return. She knelt
longer and more often before the crucifix and little altar in her room
than ever before.
Had all her life not been so arrogant, so assured of worship that she
could brook no rivalry, no crossing of her will, Consuelo told herself,
Estevan should not have departed with no word of appreciation, no sign
of love from herself, for this tremendous deed which she had asked of
him and upon which he had embarked so unhesitatingly. How could he have
done otherwise than he had on the night of their appointed meeting? He
could not abandon his countrymen.--Father Filemon prayed with Consuelo
that the life of the Americano would be spared and that he might return
to Santa Fe.