The morning light did not confirm Gard’s impression that he was in the deep woods. Beyond the thin region of growth fed by the pool the little valley into which he had been led lay sandy and cactus-grown, like the desert. The stream that should have watered it, that had probably, at some time, made its way down the dry wash which he had traversed, now found some underground outlet, and was swallowed up by the vampire plain below.
Above the glade was a steep, rockbound ravine, down which the stream still flowed. The pool seemed to be its last stand against the desert. Gard, tentatively exploring the lower end of this ravine for fuel, found a few blackberries, drying upon the bushes, and ate them, eagerly, with appetite still unsated by his breakfast of mesquite beans. The mesquite grew here, too; with manzanita and scrub oak, arrow-weed, and black willow.
The man’s chief sensation was a vague surprise at finding himself still alive. He was too sick—too weak—after his exertion and his rages of the day before, to consider the problem of keeping himself alive. He was chilled to the marrow, and yearned like a fire-worshipper toward the warmth of his camp-glow. He tended the fire carefully. He dared not let it go out; for that meant the sacrifice of another precious match.
The elemental appetite awoke when, stooping to drink from the pool, he saw fish darting about in its clear depths. He worked with the cunning of a pre-historic man until, by means of the feed bag, which he emptied of its contents, he succeeded in catching two of these.
A long thorn of palo-verde served him for a knife in dressing them, and he cooked them in the earth, with hot stones, laying each fish between the split halves of broad lobes of the prickly pear. They were insipid, and full of bones, but they served to satisfy his hunger.
He decided to keep a record of the days that he should spend in this place; by sticking palo-verde thorns into an out-reaching branch of willow, near the pool. He would stick in a thorn for each day. He cursed the first one, as he thrust it against the wood; because he felt powerless to do anything else.
Following, half sullenly, a mere human instinct to be busy about something, he set about making a knife from the smallest plate of the buggy-spring. He heated it in his fire till the paint came off, broke it in two and spent the day working one thin end down to a cutting edge, on a big, rough boulder. By night he had six inches of blade with one rounded, sharp end.
He used this, next day, to cut ocotilla-stalks, to make a bed, scraping away the thorns with sharp stones. He worked all day; less because he wanted a bed than because he dimly realized that sanity lay in occupation. That night he set a snare, and before morning managed to catch a cotton-tail which he dressed and roasted for his breakfast.
He was getting over the feeling of being hunted. They would not search for him now, he reasoned; they must feel satisfied that he had died in the cloudburst. He bathed in the pool that day, when the sun was high, and set about constructing a fireplace against the big boulder. This would make fire-keeping easier.
The days slipped into weeks. Little by little the man was adapting himself to his environment. He learned to dry the mesquite beans and grind them between stones into a coarse flour. This he made into little cakes, which he baked upon a flat stone before the fire. Later, he turned over a patch of earth, watered it, and sowed it with the oats he had saved from the storm. Now, however, his food was the mesquite, the prickly pear, the century plant, and the fish and small game that he managed to catch.
As he grew stronger he fashioned himself a bow of oak, shaping and smoothing it with his rough knife, and stringing it with fibres from the century plant. His shafts were those of the desert Indians, the arrow weeds growing close at hand, and he tipped them with the cruel, steel-hard dagger-points of the yucca.
With this primitive weapon he gradually grew skilful; and at last he shot a buck, as the creature came down to the pool one night, to drink. He dried the meat, and used the skin, when he had made it ready, as a covering for his bed.
Twice, during the winter, the camel came back to the pool. The creature went as it came, silent, inscrutable. Whither it went Gard did not know; the pool was evidently one of its ports of call while going to and fro on the mysterious business of being a camel. It accepted the man as a matter of course, and left him, when ready, with the indifference of fate, though Gard could have begged it on bended knees, to remain.
He was horribly lonely, with nothing but his hate, and a sick longing for vengeance upon life, to bear him company. There were days when he cursed the chance that had kept his worthless hulk alive, while sending Arnold, in all his strength, down to death. He had no doubt but that the deputy had perished. Nothing could ever have come, alive, through the rush of water into which he had been flung.
The weeks became months. His oats were coming up, a little patch of cool green on the yellow sand, and he had occupation to fend the field from the small desert creatures that coveted it. He also worked at times at making various utensils of the red clay that he found in the valley, baking them in a rude kiln of his own fashioning.
He came by degrees to love this work, and took great pleasure in it. He even tried to contrive a potter’s wheel, but was balked by lack of material. He had to content himself, therefore, with modeling the clay into such shapes of use and beauty as his untaught hands could achieve. In time he came to ornament his work as well, graving designs on the edges of his plates and bowls. The camel’s counterfeit presentment figured on one or two of the larger pieces, and upon the others, as the impulse prompted, he put inscriptions, until the homely articles of his daily use came to be a sort of commentary, seen by no eyes save his own, of his moods, and the longing for their expression.
He wrote thus upon other things as well. Lacking paper or implements charcoal and sharpened sticks became his tools; the rocks and trees; his broad earthen hearth; the plastic clay; even the yellow sand of the desert, his tablets, and little by little all these became eloquent of his lonely thoughts.
He put them down upon whatever served, for the mere comfort of seeing them; scraps of lessons conned in the old brick school-house; sums; fragments of the multiplication table; roughly drawn maps and sketches of boyhood scenes; lines from half-remembered poems and hymns; familiar Bible verses that his mother had taught him. They came back to him bit by bit, in his solitude. And one and all his soul found them camps by the way on its long journey up from despair.
From one of his excursions into the valley he brought home the empty shell of a desert turtle. This he split, and fashioned the upper half into a bowl to contain the palo-verde thorns of his record. They were already crowding the willow branch, and but for them he could scarcely have realized the passage of days.
There were a hundred and forty-seven thorns on the day that he transferred them to the new receptacle. Gard could not be sure that he had one for each day in the desert, but he knew that each one there actually represented a day.
“I’ve had every one of that lot,” he told himself, talking aloud, as a solitary man gets to do. “Had ’em in the open, in spite of the law sharks.”
He still lived from day to day, however, despite his vows, and his threats of vengeance. He had known, when he sought Ashley Westcott, begging the price of a ticket east, that he was a doomed man.
“It’s all borrowed time,” he muttered, shaking the turtle-shell.
His face darkened.
“’T ain’t either,” he cried. “It’s time won back. They stole it from me down there. They robbed me of three years, the filthy thieves! What’s a hundred and forty-seven days against that?”
He remembered an occasion when to get away from the wood-pile that was his special charge, in his boyhood, he had heaped a scant supply of split wood over a pile of chunks yet untouched by the axe, and exhibiting the result as his finished task had escaped with his fellows upon some expedition of pleasure. He had meant to return in time to complete his work before the cheat should be discovered, but he forgot it.
His father had first thrashed him well for his wickedness, then lectured him tenderly about it. The wicked, he had told him, would not live out half their days. Gard’s laugh as he recalled the words was more nearly a snarl.
“He was a good man all right,” he said, “but he didn’t know it all; not by an eternal lot.”
He tormented himself with other boyish memories: the broad grassy stretches of the prairie came up before him; the woods that neighbored his father’s farm; the pleasant fields, and occasional low hills that had seemed to him so high, before he had seen mountains; the swimming-pool where he and the fellows played in summer; the skating-pond where they raced and built forts and fought mimic battles in winter; the red brick school-house at “The Corners”; the white church at “The Centre,” where he had gone to Sunday school; the little shed chamber with its creaking stairs that his mother had climbed, how many cold nights! to see if he were warmly covered. She was gone from earth now, but the old boyhood places were left, and he yearned for them all, with yearning unspeakable.
“I thought I was going to get back to it,” he groaned, through his set teeth. “I trusted that poison-snake to help me; God! If I could get these hands on him, just once!”
But the quiet of his hundred and forty-seven days, and the balm of the healing air, had wrought within him more than he knew. His excursions afield grew longer, day by day, and in the gray of one beautiful morning he started out to explore the mountain.
He had traversed the cañon before now, climbing over rocks, and around mighty boulders washed down by ancient avalanches, or torn from above by titanic storms, until he came to where the mountain stream took a leap of some seventy feet, and the sheer face of the cliff barred his way. This time, however, he followed the cañon’s edge, to which the trees clung precariously, sycamores, oaks, and, to his delight, some walnuts. He marked the spot where they grew, as a place to be visited in the nut season.
The morning was far spent when he reached this point, so he lingered to rest, to eat the jerked venison and mesquite bread he had brought with him. Then he resumed his climb until he was well beyond the timber growths and had to fight his way through chaparral.
He crawled among this on hands and knees, now and then, frightening birds, and other small game, from their hiding-places, and at last came out upon the rocky open, and the broad spaces where the large creatures of the mountains make their homes. He noted more than one faint trail leading over the wastes, and now and again he caught sight of deer in the distance.
Higher still he climbed, into the regions of white sunlight, until the cold, pure air of the snowy ranges blew through his hair, and he began to feel the altitude. In spite of this he pressed on, and at last reached a ridge where grew a few scattered heralds of the great pine belt above him. Here, quite unexpectedly, the vast waste of the desert suddenly met his gaze, far, far below.
There was a strange, horrible unreality about it. The far gray plain; the mountain’s bare, brown bones; the wind-distorted trees; the solemn, snowy sierras, even the blue arch of the sky, seemed but components of some fearful nightmare.
“I’m not asleep,” he muttered; “and it’s no dream; I’ve died, and gone to hell!”
The bitterness of desolation was upon him. His very soul lay bare in the bright, white sunlight of the heights, and he cowered, like a child afraid of the dark.
As he stood thus, from out the silence a soft, clear whistle rose upon the air. It was repeated, then taken up, farther away. The man quivered as though the sound had struck him. Then his tense muscles relaxed; he saw the whistlers to be a covey of quail, moving along the rocks a little below him.
They came nearer, walking in single file, full of curiosity about him, alert, speculative, keeping up a murmur of little ornithological remarks among themselves, the while. The gentle fearlessness of the small, pretty creatures filled all that grim place with an ineffable grace. A sob strained at the man’s throat.
“Just as if they were in a garden!” he whispered.
Long he stood watching the birds, who presently, as if satisfied that no harm dwelt in him, scattered about the rocky waste in search of food. One only remained on watch, guarding the flock from a little eminence where he stood motionless save for his pretty crest, which the wind blew from side to side. Gard watched him, fairly hushing his own breath lest he alarm the small sentinel, who in turn regarded him, with bright, innocent eyes.
“To think of it,” the man murmured, “the little, little things, so fearless, up here in this—this—secret—place—of—the—Most—High!”
He stopped, in vague surprise at his own speech. He had not meant to say that, but from some neglected recess of his boyhood’s memory the words had sprung, vital with meaning.
“I wish,” he finally began, after a long pause, and ceased speaking as a wave of sickening despair swept over his soul. The idleness of the phrase mocked him; the folly of wishing anything, helpless there in the bitterness of desolation, came home to him with cruel force. Then the ache of his spirit’s yearning drew his clenched hands up toward the blue vault.
“I wish,” he breathed, his heart pounding, his brain awhirl with a sudden vision of the infinite wonder of things, “I wish that—if there is such a thing as God in the world I might come to know it.”
Slowly his hands came down to his sides. The sentinel of the rocks gave a soft little call of reassurance to the flock, which had halted, observant of the gesture, and the birds resumed their feeding. Gard turned for another look at the snowy ramparts on high; at the vast plain below. All their horror was gone, for him, and he began the descent of the mountain with the peaceful visage of one who has been in a good place.
Far into the night he awoke with the feeling of something stirring near him. In the dim firelight he could make out a shadowy figure on the hearth, and he sprang up in haste. A second glance, however, as he sat upon his ocotilla bed, showed him that there was no harm in the visitor shivering there by the coals.
It was a burro, and the listless pose, the drooping ears and the trembling knees proclaimed a sick burro. It was too miserable even to move, when Gard threw an armful of brush on the fire and speedily had a blaze by which he could see the intruder plainly. His first glance revealed a jagged, dreadful sore on the shoulder next to the light.
Speaking very gently, he drew nearer to the burro and though the little creature trembled violently, it let him bend down and examine the wound.
A great spike of the long, tough crucifixion-thorn had somehow become imbedded in the flesh, and the whole surface of the shoulder was swollen and inflamed. Gard made a little sound of pity in his throat, and the burro, turning, tried to lick the sore.
“No use to do that yet, Jinny,” the man said. “That thorn’s got to come out first.”
The burro had probably never before been touched by hands; but not for nothing was Jinny wide between the ears. She scrutinized her would-be helper closely, for a moment, through her long lashes, and drooped her wise-looking little gray head still lower. Gard threw another armful of light stuff on the fire and when the blaze was brightest attacked the thorn, using one of his sharp arrows as a probe.
Once or twice the creature flinched. Once she snapped her strong teeth at the hurting side; but Gard worked steadily and quickly, and presently had the offender out.
“Look a’ that, Jinny,” he cried, triumphantly. It was a joy to hear himself speaking to something alive.
“Look a’ that!” he repeated, “Ain’t you glad you found the doctor in?”
He dipped warm water from an earthen pot in the ashes, and washed the wound carefully, talking all the while to the still trembling patient, silently regarding him. When the place was quite clean he made a poultice of prickly pear and bound it on with a strip of deer-skin.
“Lucky I shot another buck, Jinny,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have that nice bandage.”
The little burro expressed no thanks; only stared solemnly at the fire. Gard strode out into the darkness and pulled, recklessly, an armful of his precious, growing oats. He threw the green stuff down before her and she sniffed it curiously before she began, ravenously, to eat it.
“Hungry, weren’t you?” the man said, sympathetically. “Been too sick to eat. Well, well, make yourself at home.”
He threw a big stick upon the fire and went back to his bed, leaving the burro chewing, meditatively, before the blaze.
He was just falling asleep when he felt something warm fumbling about him, and he awoke with a start, and an exclamation that quickly turned to something very like a laugh. The grateful little burro was licking his hands.
“Why, Jinny!” he cried, sitting up. “Well, well, Jinny! Well, I’ll be jiggered!”
He slipped an arm over the rough little neck and the two watched the fire till dawn.