ALTAR TAKES ITS TOLL
Dawn marched over the mountains like a phalanx of Alexander: spear
points of light on long hafts, which drove at the zenith in solid
bundles. Then the mercenaries of the sun trooped across the vacant
desert floor wave on wave and strength following strength. All the dead
world of Altar stirred and set itself for the ordeal of a new day.
The figure of a man that had been Doc Stooder, cynical tinker of life’s
rusts and corrodings, stirred under the trampling of the light--stirred
and stretched its members in dull protest of unconsciousness. Finally
when the arrows of the new day drove at his eyelids the man opened them
and lay staring up into the sky’s opalescence. For a long minute they
probed the marbled colour depths uncomprehendingly, then turned to find
the rim of the iron mountains to the east. Comprehension came at last;
with it a distorted memory image of hours of madness and wandering,
agony of thirst, despair pressing upon footsteps that carried nowhere.
Sleep which had put a period to all this nightmare had also mercifully
rallied the man’s nervous forces to a new effort of self-saving. Men
die hard because the instinct locked up in their sub-conscious minds
always prevails over surrender of the conscious will.
The Doc lifted an arm to shield his eyes and felt something sinuous
slide off his body. An instant his heart was chilled, for the feeling
was of a desert serpent trailing over his form. He dared lift his head
ever so little and let his eyes rove down his body. A queer something,
not snake, lay in a curve by his side; a pallid, root-like thing the
size of a man’s wrist at one end and tapering to a stringy point. He
raised himself on his elbow and drew the vegetable serpent to him. Just
as he did so his eyes discovered the prints of a man’s feet in the sand
by where he lay.
“Glory be!” came the croak from stiffened lips, and the Doc
concentrated all his scattered wits on an examination of the prodigy.
Yes, footprints. They came from behind him; they were printed in a
semi-circle about him to mark where one had stood hesitantly looking
down at him while he slept; they marched off in line with their
approach straight toward the tawny mountains ringing the northern
horizon.
Guadalupe’s footprints--the trail he had followed and lost the day
before! So Stooder thought.
A great sense of security pushed through the daze in his brain. Here,
at last, lay the way to salvation. That thought having been duly
relished, he turned his attention once more to the mysterious vegetable
whip by his side. He never had seen its like. How it came to be there
he had no notion. The thing was unlike any desert growth in his
experienced observation, wherefore it seemed to represent some prodigy
of the desert god dropped by him for a purpose.
He gripped the heavier end of the root between his hands and gave it
a twist. The thing broke like an over-ripe radish and a thin spurt of
water shot from the severed ends. Greedily he thrust one stump into
his mouth and clamped his jaws upon it. Gracious fluid, mildly acrid,
drenched the parchment-like membranes of his throat. The Doc sighed
once, then wolfed the whole stub of the root he had broken off. As the
pulp was swallowed he felt immediate access of strength and sanity.
From somewhere deep in the corroded heart of him welled an emotion
whose like he had not known during all the years of his warped and
weathered manhood. As if a child prompted him the gaunt, half-naked
creature on the sands lifted his eyes to the glowing blue.
“Thanks, dear God!”
So the sardonic genius of the waste places permitted the cloak of
divinity to fall upon Ygnacio, fugitive and murderer, for that a
surprising charity had prompted him to pause in the night by a raving
man, divide with him his slender store of insurance against death, then
pass on.
The root-of-the-sands which Stooder half devoured quickly restored him
to something like the normal. Gone were the deliriums that had dogged
him those hours of horror. He heard no longer the ghost bells of the
Lost Mission summoning him to treasure buried in the bleak mountains
yonder. Rational thought was his after all the wanderings in Bedlam. He
mapped his strategy against the ever-present menace of the desert.
Here were Guadalupe’s tracks--the Papago hound; wait till he could get
hands on the devil! Of course they would lead to the village of the
Sand People on the edge of El Infiernillo. Well and good; but that
might still be a long way ahead. Could he make it just on what was
left of this mysterious root? About one chance in ten; and the old Doc
wasn’t taking any more chances. What then?
Why, follow the tracks back to the stalled auto. Water might be there.
Surely were cans of tomatoes--about a dozen of ’em. A dozen tomato cans
would carry him a hundred miles on foot; he knew because he’d drunk
uncooked canned tomatoes many a time--food and drink in small compass.
All right; follow the tracks back to the auto, rest up a bit and then
get a fresh start back over those same tracks and straight into the
Sand People’s rancheria.
Stooder wrapped the precious remains of his giant radish in a strip of
his shirt and started back over the line of blue shadow cups in the
sand. As he laboured through the heavy going he reviewed all he could
remember of yesterday’s terrors, and a great fear began to build in
the back of his mind. Fear of the leagues upon leagues of blank space
about him--land unchanged by time since the waters of a great sea were
withdrawn into a shallow cup now called the Gulf. Fear of latent forces
which lurked in the naked mountains all about, in the ghostly mirage
which stretched vain beauties before his eyes. Over-mastering all was a
corroding fear of his own body.
The Doc’s trained intelligence was functioning with deadly precision.
It separated his mind from the rest of his being, counting the mind as
a rider and the body the beast it rode. The rider willed that the beast
carry it to a certain destination; did that beast stumble and fall the
rider could cry out never so furiously but it would be lost. And that
burden-bearer of the mind was capable of just so much. Its tissues
and sinews were kept functioning by water and food. So much water and
so much food gave so many foot-pounds of energy; no more. Inexorable
mathematics!
When sweat began to trickle down into his eyes Stooder could not
repress a shudder. Lost! Water lost from his body. The desert
greasewood is wise enough to coat all its leaves and little stems with
creosote to trick evaporation; the big _sahuaro_ shows only the edges
of its accordion flutings to the sun and greases them with paraffin;
man yields water like a stranded jellyfish.
Better take another chew on that water-root dingus to make up for sweat
lost. Better give the old pulse a feel to see how it’s runnin’.
The sun swam dizzily at meridian so that the footprints the Doc
followed were hard to see--mere shallow spoon marks. On and on towards
the south!
What was that thing moving over yonder in that bunch of saltbush? Yes,
sir, moving!--A coyote, by th’ eternal!--Naw, coyotes weren’t white
like this animal; coyotes were a mangy yellow.--But, by criminy! this
thing had the looks of a coyote--sharp nose and baggy tail half way
’tween its hind legs, skulkin’ like.--An albino coyote! Lookit! Eyes
pinky like a white rabbit.--Whoever heard of an albino coyote?
No phantom of the imagination that slinking, dirty-white creature which
matched its pace to the Doc’s on parallel course through the low lying
scrub. The desert Ishmael trotted along with a foolish air of being
strictly about its own business, as if no other creature were in sight.
When Stooder stopped to bawl curses at it the albino thing halted and
made a great pretence of snouting at a flea bite, utterly oblivious
to his presence. A fragment of dead bush-stock was hurled at it; the
coyote lifted a corner of his lip in a deprecatory smile but did not
abate his casual trot.
“Huh, you mangy bag o’ bones! Think you’re goin’ have a feed off’n me,
do you? Well, I’m tellin’ you, you got a mighty long tromp ahead!”
On through the desert slogged the man and on trotted the freaky animal
whose colour made him outcast even from his own kind. These twain alone
under the hot sky: two mites of life in a land of death, each blindly
following the call of every life cell in him to live--live!
What had been a piled-up cloud of blue and faint rose to the south
when the Doc started his hike had unfolded hour by hour into definite
form. Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from a
mountain mass and detached mountains with their tops blown off stood
against the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here were
the mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness of
lava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred and
forbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only the
big-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how.
The undeviating trend of the trail southward towards this ragged mass
had perplexed Stooder when first he became conscious of it. The auto
should be lying somewhere off to eastward if he didn’t miss his guess;
those mountains ahead were strange to him. But he could not know how
far nor where he had wandered the day before; even though he thought
long since he should have come upon a second line of footprints--his
own--running along with those of the Papago, yet there was no denying
he was following the right trail back to the auto and the cached
tomatoes. There sure could not be two lines of footprints here in this
least-travelled part of Altar.
So ran the mind of him whom the mocking Gog and Magog of the desert’s
diarchy had put on a false trail to desolation. Deeper and deeper into
a waterless scrap-heap of forgotten ages his steps took him. And the
albino coyote was his aloof companion.