The shadowy bulk of distant mountains changed to pale blue as the purple of night slowly lightened. The stars faded, one by one, and a spectral moon slipped wearily down the sky. Beyond the scant mesquite fringing the arroyo the desert lay still and gray, like a leaden sea.
The man woke, and moved slightly, groaning as his wrenched and stiffened body protested. Consciousness strengthened, and he struggled to his knees to stare about him. The chill of early morning had him by the bones, and he shook in its grip. After a little he got to his feet and tried, painfully, to swing his arms.
Away westward a subtle hint of color crept across the pale sky, heralding a coming radiance in the east; but it brought no sense of comfort.
“There’s no one left alive but me,” the man whispered, as his gaze took in the awful solitude. “No one but me, Gabriel Gard!”
The sound of that name, spoken all unconsciously, made him start, and look furtively about. The loneliness of the plain had betrayed his jealously guarded secret. Then his mood changed.
“I’ve a right to die with it, at least,” he muttered. “They can’t steal that from me. Barker’s dead, already. Gabriel Gard goes next. Hear that, Gabriel? You go next. Y-a-a-h.... God!”
A sudden agony of pain shook him as he began to cough. Every muscle in his body was sore. Then, as the racking grew less, he stood transfixed, staring across the desert.
A crimson glow from the coming sunrise flushed far across the eastern sky, and coming toward him, touched by its glory, was a figure that his astonished brain sought to define.
It was no mirage. He knew the marks of that supreme cheat of the desert. This was no trick of refraction or of reflection. He saw, as a man sees, this creature silently, steadily drawing near.
It was a strangely familiar shape; vague, uncouth, incredible, it seemed; yet he recognized it. He recognized the slender, shuffling legs, the swinging gait, the mis-shapen body, the ungainly, crooked neck and high held head; but why, in the name of reason, should a camel be coming to him, out of nowhere?
Nearer and nearer the creature drew, the uncouth form now a wonder of azure and crimson, as the light became stronger, and still the man gazed, his bewildered mind refusing to accept the testimony of his eyes.
He was filled with awe. It was true, then, what old prospectors had lately declared, that this solitary wanderer was still in the desert, sole survivor of the old Jeff Davis caravan.[1] Old man Dickson, and again young Bennett, swore they had seen it. Dickson told, indeed, of having had the creature about his camp for nearly a week.
1. When Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War he imported a caravan of camels into the desert, to carry supplies for the army. The creatures stampeded the army mules, whenever they appeared, and the soldiers took to shooting them, on the sly. In time so many were killed that not enough remained to form a caravan, so the survivors were turned loose in the desert. Here they were hunted by tourists, who shot them for “sport,” until it was supposed that all had perished. It is known now, however, that one, at least, survives. This solitary one still wanders about the desert, and the writer knows of more than one prospector who has encountered it, very recently.
On came the camel, looking neither to the right nor the left, its shuffling stride getting it over the ground with curious swiftness. When it was very near it stopped, under the mesquites, and seemed to wait for the man to approach. Recovered somewhat from his amazement, Gabriel Gard drew nearer and, reaching out a tentative hand, touched the creature’s neck.
The animal neither started nor flinched, but began cropping beans from the mesquite trees, quite as if the man were not there. Gard, noting the action, became aware that he was himself faint with hunger.
On the desert, where he had thrown it in rising, lay the deputy’s coat, and tangled with it Gard found his own canteen. He took this as a good omen.
“I may need you, yet,” he whispered, as he took it up.
In one pocket of the coat was a nickle watch, made fast by a leather thong, to a buttonhole. Another contained the deputy’s pipe, some loose tobacco, and a water-tight box, in which were fourteen matches. Gard counted them, carefully.
He turned to the other side-pocket, with but faint hope that the flask which he had scorned the day before would be in it yet.
It was there, however, and beside it, in a greasy, crushed packet, a big beef sandwich. The deputy, accustomed to provide against long rides in the desert, had secured this before leaving the hotel.
The man ate it eagerly, and took a swallow from the flask. The food, and the fiery liquor, warmed him, and revived his courage.
In the coat’s inner pocket were papers, a worn memorandum book, an envelop covered with figures, another, longer one, containing a document. As Gard turned them over a postal-card fell to the desert.
He picked it up. On the back were a picture, and some printing. The man read the latter through before he realized what the card was for. It published his escape from jail, and the fact that five hundred dollars reward was offered for his capture.
Now he remembered the deputy’s unfinished sentence, and knew why Westcott had betrayed him.
Westcott had got that reward! He had sold him back to death as he had sold him before. God! Why could he not have had his fingers upon that lying throat just once? He would have found strength for the job that needed doing!
He stretched forth his wasted, jail-bleached hands, and regarded them, snarling. Then he raised them, shaking them at the sky.
“I’ll live to do it yet! Do you hear?” he shrieked, “I say I will live!”
He beat the desert air with his clenched fists.
“God—devil—whatever you are that runs this hellish world, you’ve got to let me live. I’ll make that infernal side-winder wish he could hide in hell’s mouth, before I die!”
The torrent of his rage was stemmed by a vicious attack of that racking cough. It tore his chest, and flecked his lips with blood. When it was over he lay upon the sand for a long time, sobbing the dry, anguished sobs of a man’s helpless woe.
The sun, rising above the distant mountains, shone red upon him. The camel left the mesquite’s thin shade for the warmer light and the pad of its soft feet aroused Gard. He must not let the creature get away.
He rose, painfully, and went to it, considering the brute carefully. A plan was dawning in his brain. He took the strap that served him for a belt, and buckled it around the camel’s neck. The animal followed him, docile as a sheep, when he led it back to the mesquite. Then he bethought himself of the oats, in the horse’s bag, below.
Going to the edge of the arroyo he could see it in the wreck of the road-wagon, and he made his way painfully down to it. As he was clambering back he noticed that the back spring of the light rig still clung to it by a single bolt. A slight wrench brought it away, and he secured it, with a vague feeling that it might prove useful.
The full horror of his position was becoming clear to him. He was alone in the desert, without food or weapons. He put the thought away, summoning all his faculties for the need of the moment.
The camel was indifferent to the oats, turning from them to the mesquite, after a tentative investigation. With his belt and the harness rein, Gard proceeded to fashion a sort of rude hackamore, which he put over the creature’s head. The great beast, as soon as it was adjusted, settled itself, as by instinct, in an attitude of waiting, while Gard proceeded to fill his canteen and to gather quantities of mesquite beans, bestowing them in the feed bag, and in the pockets of Arnold’s coat.
He threw the coat across the camel’s back, the buggy-spring and the bag secured by its knotted sleeves. Then he took the leading strap in his hand, spoke to the animal, and they moved out upon the desert.
Gard had no idea in which direction it was best to go, but he argued that the camel knew the plain, and its fastnesses. For himself, he had but one thought—to hide, to rest, to gather strength for vengeance. At that thought he stifled the cough that rose in his throat.
Once they were started he let the strap hang loose and gradually fell behind. The camel went forward a few paces in the direction ahead of them, but feeling no guidance, gradually deflected its course toward the west. Gard followed every movement eagerly, until presently they were going forward at a steady pace, as travelers with a definite aim.
The sun was well up now, and its beams warmed the man’s chilled, sore body. The desert was no longer gray, but a glowing yellow. Even the air was warm-hued, suffusing the landscape with a roseate loveliness that yet seemed less of life than of death.
Everywhere were the desert growths, travesties of vegetation, twisted, grotesque, ghostly gray and pale green in hues. A profound stillness, insistent, oppressive, was upon everything. The yellow sand, the glowing air, the cloudless dome of the sky, the far-off mountains, all seemed to soak up sound. The world lay hushed in fierce, tense quiet, as though waiting the appearance of some savage portent.
The camel did not hasten. Gard, walking beside it, had a feeling that the creature was very old. Its eyes were bright, its coat silky and fine, but deep under the hair’s soft luxuriance the man’s fingers felt the skin, wrinkled and folded over shrunken muscles.
But there was neither feebleness nor hesitation in the forward progress of the desert pilot. It moved forward with a sort of inexorableness, its padded feet making no sound on the hard sand, its gaze bent steadily ahead, its inscrutable visage wearing ever, a look of centuries-old scorn for all things made.
They passed a huge bull-snake sunning upon a rock, and here and there a silent bird flitted to or from its home in some thorn-guarded cholla. Once a coyote tossed lightly across their vision, a blown gray feather along the horizon, but no other signs of animal life stirred the death-like plain.
The sand grew warmer in the sun’s rays, till permeating heat radiated from it and hung over it everywhere, a palpable, shimmering mist of lavender and gold, between earth and air. By mid-forenoon the sun’s rays were oppressive, and they halted in the shadow of a giant suhuaro.
The camel, when the man released the leading-strap, lowered itself slowly to rest, doubling down its legs like the shutting of a jack-knife, and settling upon the sand with the curious, sighing grunt of old age.
Gard, in the meantime, set about the preparation of a meal. He shelled a handful of tree beans and crushed them between two stones, mixing them with water from his canteen into a sort of paste, which he ate. The suhuaro’s fruit was yet hanging upon its great branches, dried, somewhat, by the autumn sun and wind, but palatable and nutritious still. Gard found a long pole, once part of the frame of another giant cactus, and with this succeeded in knocking down some of the fig-like growths.
When he had eaten them he stretched himself upon the sand, filled the deputy’s pipe, and lighted it with one of the precious matches. The unwonted luxury brought him comfort, and ease of mind. He smoked slowly, making the most of it in delicious relaxation, his head in the shade, his weary, sick body basking in the heat of desert and sunlight.
Lying thus there presently spread out before his eyes the sudden vision of a great, island-dotted sea. The surface of the water dimpled and sparkled in the sun; the islands shone jewel-like with verdure, an exquisite suggestion of rich color was over it all.
His eye was not deceived, though his mind half accepted the vision. He knew that it was a mirage, but he lay for a long time watching its changing beauty, a half-amused sense of superiority to illusion ministering pleasantly to his pride. The scene was so very like what it seemed to be.
Suddenly, from the surface of the sea rose a monstrous thing, huge, formidable, portentous, and endowed with motion. Gard turned upon his side, with a gasp. The mystic sea still wavered in the distance, but the shape was no part of it.
An instant he studied it, then sank back with a sigh of relief. The apparition, upon scrutiny, had resolved itself into a little wild burro, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, passing across the face of the mirage. It was such a germane little shape, this familiar of the desert, that he was cheered by the sight of it. The next instant he noted a tarantula, hairy, vicious, glaring at him from a tiny eminence of sand.
Acting upon impulse, Gard hurled at it the rounded stone with which he had crushed the mesquite beans. The missile struck the sand close beside the tarantula and the huge spider sprang upon it in a frenzy of stupid ferocity. The man laughed silently, a laugh not good to see.
A shadow floated across the plain, and then another. The man glanced upward, to see three or four great black forms circling against the blue.
“You would, eh?” he shrieked, springing to his feet. “Yah! Not yet, you devils! I’m not dead yet!”
He shook his fist skyward at the huge, waiting birds.
“I’m alive yet!” he yelled. “You don’t get me yet; not till I’ve had my meat.”
The cough seized him, and ere it let go its hold the disappointed vultures, with never a stroke of their wide wings, faded into the skyey depths.
But Gard had no heart to linger further. The sight of the desert scavengers had shaken him sorely, he hastened to rouse his strange fellow, and soon the pair were again threading that weary way from nowhere to the unknown.
All day they had moved steadily mountainward, and now they began to draw nearer the range that ever since dawn had reared a jagged line along the horizon. Gard had not known whether they would reach the mountains that day. One does not predicate distances in the desert. They may be long, or short; the lying air gives no clue.
But as the afternoon shadows were turning to mauve and blue, what had for hours looked like sloping foothills, leading gently toward further heights, suddenly reared itself before them in a long stretch of high, perpendicular wall.
Straight toward it the camel went, never pausing or looking around at the man beside him, and when another forward step would have found their progress barred, the creature swerved to the left, to enter a narrow pass that appeared as if by magic in the seemingly unbroken wall.
Now the way wound upward along a dry wash, climbing almost imperceptibly, at first, growing steeper, by degrees, though at no time a sharp ascent. The shadows closed in upon them, and the air grew chill, but still the camel walked on, and beside him, clinging, now, in his weakness, to the animal’s long hair, toiled the man.
More and more often he paused for breath, his lungs tortured by the pace. He was faint with fatigue, chilled by the shadow-cooled air, but a drink from the flask gave him brief strength, and he struggled on.
An hour, and they were well within the mountains. The way wound now among greasewood and scrub oaks, with only here and there a cactus. The chaparral drew dense, and Gard could hear birds calling in its depths.
The trail began to widen, and patches of coarse grasses cropped out, here and there. The altitude was not particularly great, but it was beginning to tell upon the man when his strange guide halted in a little open glade, where the wash ended abruptly.
Night was falling, and Gard could make out very little save that the forest growth closed in the glade on all sides. Overhead he could just get a glimpse of the purpling sky, where the stars were already out. Off at one side he could see these reflected in water, and he could hear, as well, the gentle splash of a stream.
The camel stood beside him, wearily patient until, lifting a hand, he removed its load and slipped the hackamore from its head. Freed, the creature turned away, and presently Gard heard him drinking, not far off.
He followed the sound until he reached water, and passing beyond the camel, knelt to drink his fill from a clear, cold fountain.
Later he gathered such dry sticks as he could find and kindled a fire, as much for protection as for warmth. He was too weary to think of food, but crouched before the cheering blaze, alternately dozing, and rousing to feed the flame.
As often as he did the latter he could see, in the darkness beyond the blaze, the gleaming eyes of small forest-prowlers, come to stare in wonder at the strange thing by the pool. Nothing molested him, however, and toward dawn he fell into a profound, restful slumber.