The burro got well and throve. Gard devoted the period of her convalescence to teaching her the essential arts of the higher companionship. Her first lesson in burden-bearing was to bring ocotilla-stalks from the valley. With these she saw the oat patch fenced in from her own depredations, and lifted up her voice in remonstrance when she found herself barred out of that delectable ground. Gard explained the matter to her.
“This is a world, Jinny,” he said, “where we have to wait till the things we want are ripe. I’m waiting myself, Jinny, for my time to come. It will, some day, ah—some day!”
He was thinking of Westcott, but the curses that he was wont to call upon his enemy’s head died upon his lips. It was not that his hatred had died, but there seemed, somehow, to be other things than hate, even in his tiny world.
He hunted up a palo-verde thorn with which to mark his day, Jinny keeping him company. He still kept the record on the willow branch, removing the thorns and putting them away whenever he had ten. There were that number this morning.
Spring was well advanced, now. The air was soft, and sweet with the scent of manzanita in the chaparral. For days past hundreds of wild bees had been hovering about the pool, and the underbrush. Gard had a line on them, and thought he knew where the bee-tree was located. His oats were nearly ready for harvest; a century plant in the valley was sending up a long bloom-stalk, and the sound of water leaping down the cañon mingled with the voices of birds in the chaparral.
As Gard put back his shell, with its contents of thorns and turned toward the pool sudden recognition came to him of a heretofore unsuspected truth.
“By the great face of clay, Jinny,” he said, drawing a long breath, “We’re not so bad off, after all!”
Again his eyes ranged the green circle of the glade; at the farther side, where the growth was sparse, he could see the valley with its yellow sands and rose-tinted air. The bright red of blossoming cacti made vivid patches here and there in the waste; even the great barren felt the touch of spring.
“God may have forgot this country,” the man said, after a long silence, “But He sure made it, if He made the rest. It’s got the same brand, when you come to see it.
“I guess, Jinny,” he continued, still gazing afar, “that the best of one thing’s about as good as the best of another. What do you think about it?”
As Jinny did not commit herself he sat down upon a rock and reached out to scratch the shaggy gray head.
“If I’d got back to Iowa when I wanted to,” he went on, “I’d most likely be dead by now.”
Jinny’s head drooped till her nose rested upon his knee, and she nodded off to sleep. Gard let her stay and sat looking off across the valley, his mind full of new emotion.
“A man might think,” he slowly mused, considering the mystery of his coming to this place, “that ’twas what old Deacon Stebbins used to call a ‘leading’.”
He turned the thought over in his mind.
“Why not?” he asked.
His eyes rested upon one toil hardened hand as it lay upon Jinny’s back. He held it up, surveying it curiously.
“Rather different, from what it was,” he thought, clenching it into a great fist. “Yah—” with sudden anger, “It’ll be different for Ashley Westcott if ever he comes to feel it.”
His mind dwelt upon that possibility.
“If ever I do get hold of him,” he muttered, and then paused, as half-forgotten memories of that faithful teacher came flocking to the front.
“The deacon ’d be down on that idea,” he reflected. “Wonder how he’d work his pet hobby o’ forgiveness here. He couldn’t judge of everything,” his thought still ran on. “The deacon he never got so near Hell as Arizona. If he had he’d have found it a place his God of Mercy hadn’t got on His map.”
He put Jinny aside and set to work fashioning himself a new cup. He had broken his only one the night before.
“I guess I was wrong about that last notion.” His brain took up the question again as he shaped the red clay. “I guess He must have this place on the map. Looks like His mercy’d been trailing me here, so to speak.”
He paused to contemplate the proportions of his new cup, staring, half startled, at its rounded surface. Phrases from the old psalm that mothers love to teach were beating upon his brain.
“Goodness and mercy,” he murmured, feeling his stumbling way among the words, “goodness and mercy shall follow me.”
The familiar glade grew new and strange to his sight, as though he saw it for the first time.
“Why!” he cried, a sudden light dawning, “Is that what it means?”
Almost mechanically he went on patting and pressing the clay.
“I guess it does mean that,” whispered he at last, pinching up a handle for his cup. “I didn’t think I’d be alive till now when I came up here. I’ve wanted to die, many a time; but I’m glad, now, I didn’t. I may get out of here some day, too. I may live to get Westcott yet!”
“‘Goodness and mercy shall follow me.’” Was that so he could live to see his dream of vengeance fulfilled?
Ah! He could not give that up! It could never mean that he must give that up! Else where were the good of remaining alive?
No; no; it did not mean that! Even the old deacon wouldn’t have thought he must forgive what he, Gabriel Gard, had borne.
“Oh, Lord,” Gard said aloud, “It can’t mean that! It ain’t in human nature that it should mean that!”
The cup in his hand was crushed again to formless clay. He tore and kneaded it viciously, great drops of sweat beading his forehead.
“It’s against human nature,” he groaned as he sought to bring the plastic stuff again into shape. “I can’t do it! But—” The words rose to an agonized wail as his spirit recognized the inexorableness of this demand upon its powers—“I’ve got to. I’ve got to!”
His mind went back to the day upon the mountain-ridge, when he had seen the quail, and he remembered his wish, the wish that had been almost a prayer; remembered it with a hushed feeling of awe.
“If I’d sensed it,” he said in a voice tense with his soul’s pain, “If I’d sensed that this is what comes of knowing there’s a God, I guess I wouldn’t have dared wish that.”
Hour after hour the battle was fought over the wet, red clay, and the day was far spent before the cup was ready for the kiln. When at last Gard, weary, but at peace, brought it for the final perfecting of the fire, he paused, ere he thrust it in, to read once more the rude letters graven deep in its fabric.
THE CUP OF FORGIVENESS
“We’ll see how it comes out,” he muttered, grimly, but already the hope grew in his heart that the clay would stand the test.
Throughout the spring Gard busied himself with building a cabin. He needed a place in which to keep his stores from prowling creatures. A brown bear had secured a good part of the last deer he had shot—secured it while it was drying on branches of the mesquite—and the birds and small beasts of the chaparral took toll of all his scanty supplies. Then, too, he took a man’s delight in construction, and the building of the cabin had come to be a labor of love, as well as of necessity.
The walls of the structure were of desert stones laid up in mud. For the roof he brought skeleton stalks of suhuaro. Later he meant to plaster these with adobe, into which he should work straw, and the coarse gramma grass of the region.
He worked upon the building at odd times, as the summer went on, taking increasing joy in bringing it to completeness. He mascerated prickly-pear cactus in water and soaked the earthen floor with the resulting liquor, pounding it down afterwards until it was hard and smooth as cement. He made his door of ocotilla-stalks laid side by side and woven with willow-withes. In the same way he contrived a shutter for the window, and he constructed a second, smaller, fireplace, within the cabin.
“When we have distinguished visitors, Jinny,” he told the little burro, “We’ll kindle a fire for them here.”
He still used the larger hearth outside. He had learned, after many trials, to kindle a fire with the aid of flint and steel, and was no longer dependent upon matches.
When his shelter was complete he contrived furniture for it, for the sheer pleasure of construction. Lacking boards, or the means to manufacture them, he wove his table-top of arrow-weed and tough grasses from the cañon. It was beginning to be a source of delight to him to contrive solutions for each new problem of his hard existence.
One night, in the early autumn, Gard was wakened by a fearful crash of thunder. He sprang from his bed, to find Jinny already huddled against him. All about them was the roar of the sudden storm.
The pool had overflowed, and swept across the glade in a broad stream, pouring down the defile in a whelming tide. The heavens seemed to have opened, torrentially; Gard’s bed was beaten down, and the fire was flooded. Gard himself was almost thrown to earth by the thrashing rain ere he could reach the cabin, into which he darted, Jinny close at his heels.
The shelter was built against huge boulders, out of the track of the flood from the pool, but the mud and thatch roof leaked like a sieve. It served, however, to break the fierce violence of the storm, and they huddled there miserably till the worst should be over.
The sounds without were like those of a battle: the echoing rattle of thunder down the cañon; the rending of rocks; the crash of falling trees; the screaming of the wind—all mingled in a fierce, wild tumult.
A flash of lightning revealed a great scrub oak, torn from its anchorage above, crashing down into the glade. The next instant the whole place seemed filled with some giant thing that raged and snarled, hurling itself from side to side in mighty struggle.
It dashed against the fireplace, flinging the great stones of it in every direction, and fell upon the uprooted tree in a frenzy of titanic rage.
Its horrible roaring shook the cabin, and Jinny, pressing against Gard, was almost beside herself with terror. Gard himself, peering through the window of the hut, could make out nothing definite, until another flash suddenly showed him a huge grizzly, reared upon its hind legs, striking madly at the empty air.
The storm had moderated, now, and he could hear, as he strained to listen, the fearful snarls of the bear rising above the roar of the wind. The threshing tumult of its plunging had ceased, however, and even the snarling had grown weaker.
The rain ceased, but the wind still swept the glade, and the pool had become a lake. Gard was chilled to the bone, but dared not venture without. He had not heard the grizzly for some time, but Jinny still cowered against him, trembling.
At dawn he looked from the window upon a scene of devastation. The ground was strewn with debris. Great boulders had been hurled down by the torrent’s force, and beside one ragged block of granite lay the grizzly, terrible, even in death. One side of its savage head was crushed in, and a shoulder shattered.
Jinny was still too terrified to venture outside the hut, but Gard went out and set to work to restore some semblance of order about the place.
The roof of the shack was a wreck. Gard had to clear away a part of it that had fallen, before he could find his precious matches and get a fire. There were nine of the matches left, and it took two to start a blaze with the soaked wood. He breakfasted upon dried venison, which he shared with Jinny, grown catholic in her tastes, and then set about skinning and dressing the bear.
He stretched and scraped the great hide, and pinned it out upon the earth, (it meant warmth and comfort to him through the coming winter nights,) and cut the meat into long strips, to dry. It would be a welcome change, later, from venison and rabbit.
It was noon before his toil was completed and the traces of it so far removed as to ease Jinny’s perturbation. He was obliged to bathe in the enlarged pool before she seemed comfortable when near him.
As he dressed, after his ablutions, his eye caught a broken bit of rock lying at the water’s edge. He picked it up, a curious tightening in his throat.
There is something about the glitter of a streak of yellow in a bit of rock that would set the heart of the last man on the last unsubmerged point of earth to beating fast. The piece of float was freshly severed and the flecks of yellow showed plainly in its split surface. Gard scrutinized the mud round about, and beyond the pool found another bit of float.
Forgetful of all else, he sprang up the cañon. It, too, was full of debris, witness to the mighty power of the storm. He hardly knew the place as he climbed along, making a new way for himself; for the swollen stream roared wildly where but the day before he had been able to walk.
The cañon walls on either side were wrought and twisted by the action of ancient heat, scarred and eroded by the force of ancient waters, but they revealed no fresh break, though he scanned them eagerly.
He kept on, however; for a quarter of a mile above the pool another bit of float pointed the way. It was a savage climb, but mounting, circling and crawling past heaped up boulders and masses of earth, he presently found progress checked by a landslip, beneath which the rushing water was already cutting a channel.
Here lay the vein, uncovered, the gleaming particles in the cloven rock making the man’s breath come thick as he studied them.
There was no doubt about it: he had discovered pay rock of the richest sort. How rich it was he had no means of determining, nor did he then dream; but he knew that right in sight was more gold than he should be able to get out with any tool at his command, and hope was already high within him.
He stooped and picked up small fragments of broken rock that lay among the debris. How heavy they were! What power they represented! What dreams might come true, by the aid of their yellow shine!
Here was his ticket east. Here was a ticket to the uttermost parts of the earth. With it he could go away, stand rehabilitated among his fellows. Golden vistas of power and pleasure spread out before him as he stood gazing long at the cleft, yellow-flecked rock before him.
“Whoever runs this outfit,” he whispered, “has remembered it, after all.”
It was long before he could bring himself back to reality. Only the gathering autumn gloom, coming early, in the cañon’s depth, finally recalled him. He began turning over in his mind the means he must contrive with which to meet this emergency. If only he had the tools!
“It’s up to me to make some,” he said aloud, and at the words he suddenly turned and looked back at the golden vein he was leaving.
“You’re great!” he shouted; “You’re bully to have; but you ain’t all there is to it!”
He spread out his hard hands. “These that can make the things to get you out with are better yet,” he said, speaking more slowly.
For he suddenly remembered the pit from which he was digged, and the man’s heart yearned to his fire beside the clean pool, and for the life there that he had wrested from nothing.