A SHEPHERD OF THE SILENT WASTES
“TO be hung. To be hung by the neck until dead.”
Over and over I say it to myself as I sit here in my room in the hotel, trying to think connectedly of the events which have led to the culmination of this awful thing that, in so short a time, is to deprive me of life.
At eleven o’clock I am to die; to go out of the world of sunshine and azure seas, of hills and vales of living green, of the sweet breath of wild flowers and fruit bloom, of light and laughter and the music of Life, to——what? Where? How far does the Soul go? What follows that awful moment of final dissolution?
At eleven o’clock I shall know; for I must die. There is no hope, no help; though my hand has never been raised against mortal man or woman—never have I taken a human life.
At the stroke of the hour a great crowd will stand in the prison yard, and gape at the scaffold, and see the drop fall, and—fascinated and frowning—gaze with straining eyes at the Thing dangling at the end of a hempen rope. A Soul will go out into immeasurable space. A purple mark on my throat will tell the story of death by strangulation. Two bodies will lie stark and dead tonight—his and mine. His will be laid in the pine box that belongs to the dishonored dead; while mine will be housed in rosewood, and satin, and silver.
You do not understand?
Listen, let me tell you! Let me go back to the first time we ever met—he and I.
After college days were over, I left the Atlantic coast and all that Life there meant to me, and came out to the West of the sagebrush, and the whirlwinds, and the little horned toads. And there in the wide wastes where there is nothing but the immensity of space and the everlasting quiet of the desert, I went into business for myself. Business there? Oh, yes! for out there where men go mad or die, cattle and sheep may thrive. I, who loved Life and the association of bright minds, and everything that such companionship gives, invested all I had (and little enough it was!) in a business of which I knew nothing, except that those men who went there with a determination to stick to the work till success should find them, brought away bags full of gold—all they could carry—as they came back into the world they had known before their self-banishment.
So I, too, went there, and bought hundreds of sheep—bleating—blear-eyed, stupid creatures that they are! I, essentially a man of cities and of people, began a strange, new life there, becoming care-taker of the flocks myself.
A lonely life? Yes; but remember there was money to be made in sheep-raising in the gray wastes; and I was willing to forego, for a time, all that civilization could give. So I dulled my recollections of the old life and the things that were dear to me, and went to work with a will in caring for the dusty, bleating, aimlessly-moving sheep. I wanted to be rich. Not for the sake of riches, but to be independent of the toil of bread-winning. I longed with all my soul to have money, that I might gratify my old desires for travel away to the far ends of the earth. All my life I had dreamed of the day I was to turn my face to those old lands far away, which would be new lands to me. So I was glad to sacrifice myself for a few years in the monstrous stillness of the gray plains so that I might the sooner be free to go where I would.
Friends tried to dissuade me from the isolated life. They declared I was of a temperament that could not stand the strain of the awful quiet there—the eternal silence broken only by some lone coyote’s yelp, or the always “Baa! Baa!” of the sheep. They told me that men before my time had gone stark mad—that I, too, would lose my mind. I laughed at them, and went my way; yet, in truth, there was many a day through the long years I lived there, when I felt myself near to madness as I watched the slow-moving, dust-powdered woolly backs go drifting across the landscape as a gray fog drifts in from the sea. It seemed the desert was the emptier by reason of the sheep being there, for nothing else moved. Never a sign of life but the sheep; never a sound but the everlasting “Baa! Baa! Baa!” Oh! I tell you I was very near to madness then, and many another man in my place would have broken under the tension. But not I. I was strong because I was growing rich. I made money. I took it eastward to the sea, and watched the ships go out. It was a fine thing to see the great waste of waters move, as the desert waste never had. There was the sea, and beyond lay far lands! Still, I said to myself:
“No; not yet will I go. I will wait yet a little longer. I will wait until I hold so much gold in my hands that I need never return—need never again look upon the desert and its ways.”
So—though I watched the ships sail away to waiting lands beyond—the time was not yet ripe for me to go. Back to the money-making a little longer—back for a while to the stupid, staring-eyed sheep—then a final good-bye to the desert’s awful emptiness, and that never-ceasing sound that is worse than silence—the bleating of the flocks!
It was on one of these trips to the Atlantic coast that I saw, for the first time, him of the Half-a-Soul.
The hour was late afternoon of a hot mid-summer day. The sun was red as blood and seemed quadrupled in size where it hung on the horizon with its silent warning of another terrible day on the morrow. Block-pavements and cobbles radiated heat, and the sidewalks burned my feet painfully as I stepped on their scorching surfaces coming out of my friend Burnham’s office. The hot air stifled me, and I flinched at the dazzling light. Then I stepped in with the throng, and in a moment more was part of the great surging mass of heat-burdened humanity. Drifting with the pulsating stream, I was for the time listlessly indifferent to what might be coming except that I longed for the night, and for darkness. It might not, probably would not, bring any welcome cool breeze, but at least in the shadows of the night there would be a respite from the torturing white glare that was now reflected from every sun-absorbing brick, or square of granite or stone. I was drifting along the great current of Broadway life when——
There was a sudden clutching at my heart—a tension on the muscles that was an acute pain—a reeling of the brain—and I found myself gazing eagerly into two eyes that as eagerly gazed back into mine. Dark eyes they were, smoldering with evil passions and the light of all things that are bad. The eyes of a man I had never known—had never seen; yet between whom and myself I felt existed a kinship stronger than any tie that my life had hitherto admitted. For one instant I saw those strange black eyes, blazing and baleful, the densely black hair worn rather long, the silky mustache brushed up from the corners of the mouth, the gleam of the sharp white teeth under a lifted lip, the smooth heavy eyebrows slightly curving upward at the outer edges, giving the face the expression we give to the pictures we make of Satan. These I saw. Then he was lost in the crowd.
Where had I seen him before that these details should all seem so familiar? I knew (and my blood chilled as I confessed it to myself) that in all my life I had never seen or known him in the way I had seen and known others. And, more, I knew that we were linked by some strange, unknown, unnamed, unnatural tie. It was as though a hand gloved in steel had clutched my heart in a strangling grip as he moved past. I gasped for breath, staggered, caught myself, and—staggering again—fell forward on the pavement.
“Sunstroke,” they said. “Overcome by the heat.”
And then——
Long afterward I saw him again.
I was traveling in far lands. Going over from Stamboul to Pera I stood on the Galata bridge watching the great flood of living, pulsing human life—those people of many races.
There was a fresh breeze from the North that day, and it set dancing the caiques and barcas where they threaded their way among the big ferry-boats and ships of many strange sails, and all the craft of summer seas. There was a sparkle on the Bosphorus under the golden sunshine and a gleam on the Golden Horn. A violet-hued haze hung over the wide expanse, and through it one could see the repeated graces of mosque and minaret, the Seven Towers and the rounded whiteness of Santa Sophia. Higher, there was the green of laurel and lime, of rose-tree and shrubbery in profusion—terrace upon terrace—and now and again darker shadows made by the foliage of cypress or pine. All the morning I had reveled in Nature’s great color scheme; had feasted eye and sense on the amethyst, and emerald, and sapphire of water, and sky and shore. And then I went to the Galata bridge.
There I stood and watched that medley of races moving by. Arab and Ethiopian, Moslem and Jew; the garb of modern European civilization, and the flowing robes of the East; Kurds, Cossacks and Armenians; the gaudy red fez and the white turban of the Turk; dogs lean and sneaking-eyed; other eyes that looked out from under the folds of a yashmak. And always the babel of voices speaking many tongues. Greeks and Albanians; the flowing mantle of Bedouins and the Tartar in sheepskins. Ebbing and flowing—ebbing and flowing, the restless human tide at the great Gateway of the East.
As I stood looking and listening, there came again without warning that clutching at my heartstrings—that sharp pain in my left side—that same dizzying whirl of thoughts—that sickening fear of something (I knew not what) which I could not control; and out of the flowing tide of faces I saw one not a stranger—he whom I did not know. His eyes held mine again; and in that moment something seemed to tell me that he was my everlasting curse. Through him would come things dread and evil; from him there was no escape. I looked long—my eyes starting in their sockets. I gasped—caught at the air—and lost consciousness.
When I recovered myself I was sitting in a little café whither a young lad had assisted me. I gave him a few piasters and told him to leave me. He took them, said:
“Pek eyi!” and went away.
Left alone at the café table, after motioning the attendant also away, I sat and pondered. Where would this haunting dread end? The basilisk eyes I so loathed had borne me a message which I could not yet translate. Not yet. But he would pass me again some day, and once more his eyes would speak a message. What was it? Something evil, I knew. But what?
So I went away; went away from the Galata bridge; away from Pera and Stamboul.
And then——
Then from the deck of a dahabeeyeh on the Nile!
I was with the Burnhams. We were eight in the party. Lucille Burnham (Joe’s sister) and I were betrothed. Betrothed after months and months of playing at love, and the making and unmaking of lovers’ quarrels. Each had thought the other meant nothing more than what makes for an idler’s pastime, until drifting on the current of old Nilus we read the true love in each other’s heart, and the story (old as Egypt is old) was told over again there where it was told centuries before by men and women who loved in the land of the lotus.
Joe and his wife, and the Merrills (brother and sister), Colonel Lamar and his pretty daughter, and my dear girl and I. What a happy, care-free party we were! My most precious dreams were coming true; and now I went up and down the earth’s highways as I willed.
Under the awning that day I was lying at Lucille’s feet, half-asleep, half-awake and wholly happy. I remember how, just there above Luxor, I noticed two women on the river bank, the dull-blue dress of the one, and the other carrying a water-skin to be filled. A boy, naked and brown-skinned, sprawled in the sand. Moving—slow moving with the current—we came drifting out of that vast land that is old as Time itself reckons age.
Then between my vision and the banks beginning the level which reached far and away to the hills beyond, came the shadow of a lateen sail not our own. A dahabeeyeh was slipping by, going against the current. I raised myself on my elbow, and there—unfathomable, dark as Erebus, and gazing out of deep sockets—were the eyes of a man who drew me to him with a power I was unable to resist; a power fearful as——
The thin, sneering lips seemed to whisper the word “Brother!” and “Brother——” I whispered back.
The sight of that face under the shadow of the lateen sail—like a shadow cast by a carrion bird where it slowly moves above you in the desert—coming as it did, in the midst of my days of love and new-found joy, left me unnerved and wrecked both mentally and physically.
“Come, come! this won’t do,” said Joe; “I am afraid you are going to have the fever!”
“It is nothing,” I declared, shrinking from his scrutiny, “I——I have these attacks sometimes.”
“Who is he? What is he?” I asked myself the question hourly. And there in the silence of those nights under the stars of the East, while we breathed the soft winds blowing across the sands the Pharaohs had trod, the answer came to me:
He was my other Half-Self—the twin half of my own Soul. This brother of mine—this being for whom I had a loathing deep and intense—was one in whom there lived an incomplete Soul (a half that was evil through and through) and mine was the other half. I was beginning now to understand. We had been sent into this world with but one Soul between us; and to me had been apportioned the good. But evil or good—good and evil—we were henceforth to be inseparable in our fate.
But always I cried out in my helpless, hopeless agony, “Yet why—why—why?” It is the cry of the Soul from the first day of creation.
I turned my back on the far East, and set my face towards America.
Then——
Then I started on a trip through California and old Mexico. My health was broken. My marriage with Lucille was postponed.
On the Nevada desert our train was side-tracked early one morning to allow the passing of the eastbound express which was late. A vast level plain stretched its weary way in every direction. Only the twin lines of steel and the dark-red section house showed that the White Man’s footsteps had ever found their way into the stillness of the dreary plains.
We had fifteen minutes to wait. I got out with others and walked up and down the wind-blown track, smoking my cigar and spinning pebbles, which I picked up from the road-bed, at a jack-rabbit in the sagebrush across the way. The wind made a mournful sound through the telegraph wires, but a wild canary sang sweetly from the top of a tall greasewood—sang as if to drown the wind’s dirge. Dull grays were about us; and we were hemmed in by mountains rugged, and rough, and dull gray, with here and there touches of dull reds and browns. On their very tops patches of snow lay, far—far up on the heights. Miles down the valley we could see the coming train. A few minutes later the conductor called to us “All aboard!” and I swung myself up on the steps of the last sleeping-car as we began to move slowly down toward the western end of the switch.
There was a roar and a clatter—a flash of faces at the windows—a rush of wind and dust whirled up by the whirling wheels—and, as the Eastern Express shot by, I saw (on the rear platform of the last car) him, between whom and myself a Soul was shared.
The conductor stepped up on the platform where I stood, and caught me by the arm as I reeled.
“The high altitude,” he said, “makes a good many folks get dizzy. You’d better go inside and sit down.”
Then again.
On a ferry-boat crossing the bay from the Oakland pier to San Francisco. I had just returned that morning from a four-months’ tour of Mexico. It was raining dismally, and everything about the shipping on the bay was dripping and dreary. Gray-white sea gulls circled and screamed; darting and dipping, they followed our wake, or dropped down into the foam churned up by the wheels. Winds—wet and salty, and fresh from the sea—tugged at our mackintoshes; and flapped the gowns and wraps of the women where—huddled together away from the rail—we stood under shelter. Sheets of flying fog—dense, dark and forbidding—went by; gray ghosts of the ocean’s uneasy dead. And back of the curtain of falling waters and fog, whistles shrieked shrilly, and the fog horns uttered their hideous sounds. Bellowing—moaning; moaning—bellowing; suddenly still.
The city seemed but an endless succession of terraced, water-washed houses under an endless rain. The storm lashed the waves in the harbor into running ridges of foam, and on the billows the ferry-boat (falling and rising, rising and falling) pushed her way through gray skeleton-ships at anchor, and into her slip at the wharf. The drivers of wagons and trucks on the lower deck, wrapped in oilskins yellow or black and all dripping with wet, drove down the echoing planks. Then the people began to descend the stairways. With my right hand steadying me, I had taken three downward steps when the gripping at my heart told me who was passing at my left (always at the left, it had been; at the left, always) and he of the smoldering eyes that burned into mine like live embers passed me quickly, and went on down the stairway and into the rain-wetted crowd.
And again——
It happened when, with a guide and some Club friends, we went through the Chinatown slums of the city.
It was Saturday night; the night of all others for hovels and evil haunts to disgorge their hives of human bees to swarm through passage and alley, or up and down the dark and wretched stairways.
We had begun at the Joss Houses—gaudy with tinsel, and close and choking from the incense of burning tapers. We had gone to restaurant and theater. At the one, going in through the back way and on through their cooking rooms where they were preparing strange and repulsive looking food; at the other, using the stage entrance and going on the stage with the players. Into opium joints our guide led the way, where the smokers in their utter degradation lay like the dead, as the drug carried the dreamers into a land of untranslatable dreams. We had looked at the pelf in the pawn-shops, and at the painted faces of Chinese courtesans looking out through their lattices.
Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”—through “Ross Alley,” where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged. Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved; and once I passed a little child—a half-caste—toddling through the alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he stumbled and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and laughed.
“Again the sirocco passed.”—Page [79]
Then, somewhere between high walls that reached to the open air, I found myself alone—left behind by the others. I could see the guide’s light burning—a tiny red spark—far ahead in the darkness, but my own candle had gone out. Away up in the narrow slit showing the sky, shone the cold, still stars. Under my feet crunched clinkers and cinders wet with a little stream from some sewer running over the ground.
Then in the dark wall a door opened, and as the light from within lit up the inky blackness without I saw him again. Again the sirocco passed, burning—scorching the life-blood in my veins.
They came back and found me lying in the wet of the noisome alley. For weeks, in the hotel, I lay ill; then, as soon as I was able to walk unassisted, I took passage for Japan, intending to extend my trip to Suez, and through Europe, on home. I said to myself that I would never again set foot in San Francisco. I feared that horrible something, the power of which seemed stronger over me there than elsewhere. Six times we had met and passed. I shrank from the seventh. Each time that we had come face to face—met—passed—drifted apart, I heard a voice saying that my life was being daily drawn closer and closer into his, to be a part of the warp and woof of his own. And the end? It would be——when? Where? In what way? What would be that final meeting of ours? How far off was it? What would that fatal seventh meeting mean for us both?
I fled from the city as one does from the touch of a leper. I dared not stay.
But the third day out on the ocean there suddenly came over me a knowledge that a greater force than my own will would compel me to return. Something bade me go back. I fought with it; I battled with the dread influence the rest of the voyage. It was useless. I was a passenger on the ship when it returned to San Francisco. There I found the whole city talking and horrified, over a murder hideous, foul, revolting. Carmen de la Guerra, a young Spanish woman, had been brutally murdered—butchered by her lover. I was sick—chilled, when I heard. A foreboding of the truth came to me as I listened. I feverishly read the papers; they told of the tragedy in all its frightful details. I went to the public libraries for the back files. Then I went to the jail to look at the face of the fiend who had killed her. I knew whom I should see behind the bars. It was he. And it was the seventh meeting.
His eyes bade me go and get him release.
“Go!” they said, “Call to your aid all the angels of your heaven, and the help of the demons who are one with me in hell, that you may save me from the gallows. My Soul is your Soul; if I die, you also must die with me. Keep the rope from me; for you are fighting for your own life. Go!”
I went out of the chill jail corridors a madman. I raved against the hellish destiny. What use? I must save him, or I must die with him. No one understood. I told no one my secret. Early and late; day and night I worked unceasingly to get him pardoned. God! how I worked to save him. I tried every conceivable means to secure him his life. I exhausted all methods known to the law. I spent money as a mill-wheel runs water.
“You believe him innocent?—this fiend!” my friends cried aghast—amazed at my mad eagerness to get him acquittal.
“No! not that!” I answered in my agony, “but he must not die—shall not hang! Shall not! Do you hear? Innocent or guilty—what do I care? Only he must live, that I shall not die.”
But no one understood.
It has been in vain. At eleven o’clock he is to be hung. The death-watch is with him. And the death-watch is here, too, with me. Two are here; and the name of one is Horror, and the other’s name is Fear. Down below I hear the rattle of traffic on the streets, and in the hotel corridors I hear the voices of people talking—just now I heard one laugh. They do not know. And Lucille—— Ah, my poor Lucille!
The tide of life is running out, and the end is drawing nigh. I have come to find at last that evil is always stronger than good; and in that way he draws me after him. I cannot hold the half of his Soul back. Closer and closer together we come. A Divided Soul—his and mine. His body has housed the evil half—mine the good. His is all that is vile, and bestial, and bloodthirsty; mine has always striven after the best. Yet because of his sin I, too, must die.
At the hour of eleven he will hang for the murder of Carmen de la Guerra. At eleven I, too, must die. As the sheriff cuts the rope, and the evil Divided Soul swings out eternity-ward from the body which has housed it evilly, so will I die at that instant—death by strangulation. For a Divided Soul may not live when its twin is gone. Death. And then one body in the rosewood casket, and one in its box of pine.
At eleven——
“Baa! Baa!” I hear the sheep—— No; it is—— What is it? I cannot see—— Something is being pressed down over my eyes, shutting out the light. My arms—my feet are being tied—I cannot move. Help! Something is closing on my neck—I cannot breathe. It is tightening—choking—— I hear the bleating of the sheep—— God! God! I am strangling! The rope—— It is the rope—and Death.
May God have mercy on my Soul!
BY THE OIL SEEP UNDER THE BLUFF
JON LANDIS turned the bit of black rock over and over in his hand as he held it under the searching Nevada sunlight. The lids of his light blue eyes narrowed as he looked, and he chewed nervously at the corner of his long upper lip under its cropped reddish mustache. Finally, as though wholly satisfied with the close scrutiny he had given it, he nodded his head slowly.
“You think he good? All same like that other kin’ you show um me?”
The young Paiute was peering into his palm, too.
“I guess so, Nick,” answered Landis; “Anyway, you no tell um ’nother man ’bout this. Savvy?”
The Paiute nodded. It was evident that he “savvied.” He had shown Landis a copper ledge off in the mountains, two years before, and Landis had given him a hundred dollars. It was Indian Nick’s opinion that Landis was “heap pretty good man;” and he now recognized the value of silence until such a time as Landis would let him speak. Other white men had, before this, got him to show them prospects upon promises, and—without an exception—had cheated him out of his due. But Jon Landis was different. This big, quiet man who talked but little, and never laughed at all—him he would be “partner” with, and show him the place down by the river where the black rock sample came from, and the bluffs where—underneath—a queer little spring (that wasn’t water) oozed forth, and lost itself a dozen feet away in the muddy current of the greater stream.
Indian Nick didn’t know what that stream—a very, very little stream—was; and he didn’t care to know. Indians as a rule are not inquisitive. He only knew it looked “heap greasy;” and if the black rock on the sandy mesa above was like the piece that Landis showed him, saying it was from California—then Nick was to have another hundred dollars.
Now that Landis had “guessed” that the rock sample was the same sort, Nick (seeing a hundred dollars easily earned) looked furtively about him as they stood on the railroad track—where the section house and the freight house were sole evidence of a station—to discover if they had been observed talking together. For even a Paiute knows that precaution may prevent a secret from being suspected. No, no one had seen them together. The section foreman was out on the road with his men, and the telegraph operator had not come out of his office in the freight house since he had reported the train that had just brought Landis back to Nevada. No one from the town (as the mining camp up in the foothills was called) had come down to the station that day. The Indian was satisfied; no one would guess that he and Landis were “partners.”
“You come now; I show you that place. He not far—can walk.”
“How far?”
“Maybe two mile, I think. You see. You come now?”
Landis deliberated. Presently he asked:
“You got a shovel, Nick? Got a pick at your wick-i-up?”
“I got um ol’ one—not much good.”
“Well, never mind; they’ll do for today. You go get ’em, and trot on ahead. Where is it?”
Nick pointed in the direction of the river bluffs; and when Landis had reached the mesa the Paiute—with pick and shovel—was already there.
“The ol’ man—my father—asked um me where I go. I no tell um. He ask what for I take pick—take um shovel—what I do. I no say nothin’.”
“That’s right, Nick! Don’t tell anybody. By an’ by, when I get the business all fixed, then we’ll talk. Savvy?”
And again Nick “savvied.”
All about them was the black rock from which Nick had got the sample. Not much of it, but enough to demonstrate the value of what it indicated. It was undoubtedly asphaltum; the indication for oil was good—more than good. Landis was interested. The Paiute was moving off through the stunted greasewood to the bluffs near the river edge, and Landis followed.
The face of the bluffs—eroded and uneven—rose high above the river level; leaving but a narrow footway between their base and the stream, here at this point. Across by the other bank, was a growth of rabbit-wood and sage. A twisted, leafless buck-bush stood lonely and alone at the rim of a dry slough. The carcass of a dead horse—victim of some horse-hide hunter—furnished a gruesome feast for a half dozen magpies that fluttered chattering away as the two figures appeared on the top of the bluffs; and a coyote that had been the magpies’ companion, slipped away into the thicket of rabbit-wood. The river was deep here, and dirty with the debris brought down by its rising waters. Froth, and broken twigs, and sticks swirled around in the eddies. To Landis, there was something unspeakably depressing about the place, though he was well used to the country in all its phases. Its very stillness seemed today to weigh on him.
The two men began the descent; the Indian slipping quickly down the face of the bluffs, and Landis clambering after.
There—at the foot—in a gully so narrow it would escape any but the keenest eye, a tiny, slow-moving, dark thread of a stream oozed from beneath the bluffs of clay, and following the bottom of the narrow cut that ran at right angles to the river—slipped down into the roily waters that bore it away. Landis squatted down by it for closer inspection. He rubbed it between his fingers. He smelt of it. Yes, it was oil!
“All right, Nick! You’ll get your hundred dollars!”
Nick grinned delightedly; but the face of Landis—from the high cheek bones down to the square set jaws that were burned as red as the skin of an Indian is supposed to be—was a mask of immobility. This find meant many thousands of dollars to him, but he only said:
“Here, boy! Pitch in now, and dig out under that bank!” as he pointed out a part of the bluff at the very edge of the gully. And Nick—strong, and young, and keen as himself to know how much of the “greasy” stream was dammed up behind the bluffs that the pick could disclose, swung it with strong strokes that ate into the clay in a way that did Landis good to see.
He had been working but a short time when the pick point caught into something other than lumps of clay; caught at it—clawed at it—and then dragged out (one—two—half a dozen) bones stripped of all flesh.
Nick stopped.
“What are you stopping for?” Landis asked sharply. “Go on! It’s only some horse or a cow that’s died here.” But already he himself had seen the thigh bone of a human being. Nick hesitated; still staring at what lay there.
“Damn you, go on! What’s the matter with you?”
The steady strokes recommenced. Little by little there was uncovered and dragged out the skeleton of someone Who Once Was. Nick looked sullen and strange, but he did not falter. He worked steadily on until they lay—an indistinguishable heap—beside the narrow gully. Landis said nothing, and the pick strokes ate farther and farther into the bank.
Suddenly there was a terrible sound—half a shriek and half a gurgle that died away in the throat—which startled them; and swinging around, Landis saw an old Indian tottering along the narrow ledge that bordered the river there. He was stumbling and blindly staggering toward them, waving his arms above his head as he came. A bareheaded, vilely dirty and ragged old man—how old no one might be able to say. As his bleared eyes found the skeleton heap, he shrieked forth in the Indian tongue something (though Landis knew no word of what he might say) that sent a chill over him of prescient knowledge of what was to come. He turned his back on the old man, and addressed himself to Nick.
“What does he say?”
The younger Paiute looked old and gray with a horror that Landis refused to translate.
“My father——”
“Yes, I know. Your father. What does he say?”
“My father——” Nick’s words came slowly, “He say——them——bones——”
“For God’s sake, what? Why don’t you say what? Can’t you talk?”
“Them,” Nick’s teeth were chattering now, “my——my——mother.”
Landis caught his breath. Then a stinging pain shot through his left arm, and something fell to the ground. He swung around in time to see the old Paiute, with another stone in his raised hand, his face distorted with hate and fury.
“Quit that!” Landis yelled, and strode toward him. But the old man’s fury was now turned to fear as he saw this white giant bearing down on him, and the stone fell short of its mark. He started to flee before the strength he feared, but the narrow ledge that lay between the river and the bluff would have been but insecure foothold for steadier steps than his. He tripped—reeled—and then with a cry that Landis will remember so long as he lives—he went backward; and down into the muddy river the eddies sucked him—down and down—and so out of sight.
Then Jon Landis fought with the one who, with raised pick, stood ready to avenge the death of his father, and the desecration of his other dead. The struggle was not long, but they fought as men do who know that but one man shall live when the combat be done. Twice the pick descending almost struck the bared head of the white man; thrice his adversary forced him to the very water’s edge. Landis knew he was fighting for his life, and he watched his opportunity. It came. Eluding that rain of death-meant blows, he caught the Indian close to him, and with a quick movement flung the pick far out into the river. Then they clinched in the final struggle for life that to the white man or the brown man is equally dear. Back and forth, swaying and bending, the hot breath of each in the other’s face, they moved over the narrow confine. It was not for long; for—with one mighty final effort—Landis wrenched himself loose, caught at the other, shoved—flung him off, and it was over. Jon Landis stood there alone.
The fleshless skull grinned out at him from the heap of bones. Landis shivered; he felt cold. Overhead, clouds like swansdown were beautiful against the sapphire blue of the afternoon sky. A soft wind blowing down the valley brought him the sound of a locomotive’s whistle; and the breeze was sweet with the breath of spring flowers growing upon the banks, away from the bluffs. A little brown bird began to warble from the buck-brush across the river.
It must have been five minutes that Landis stood there without moving. Then he picked up the shovel and walked over to the Indian woman’s bones. It did not take him long to dump them into the little gully where the oil ran, and to cover them over with loose earth from the place she had lain for thirty years. Afterward, he scraped the earth about with the broken shovel, to destroy all footprints. Then he dropped it into the stream. He would never come here again; and now there was no evidence that he had ever been there.
Then he climbed the bluffs. Nor did he look back as he walked rapidly away.
