From his stand by the long troughs where all the mountain cattle watered in Summer, the disconsolate old stag watched the felling of the tree curiously; then after an interval of dreary contemplation, he racked his hide-bound skeleton over to the place and began to browse. Presently the rocks began to clatter on the upper trail, and an old cow that had been peering over the brow of the hill came back to get her share. Even her little calf, whose life had been 383 cast in thorny ways, tried his new teeth on the tender ends and found them good. The orehannas drifted in one after the other, and other cows with calves, and soon there was a little circle about the tree-top, munching at the soft, brittle twigs.
“Well, that settles it,” said Creede. “One of us stays here and cuts brush, and the other works around Hidden Water. This ain’t the first drought I’ve been through, not by no means, and I’ve learned this much: the Alamo can be dry as a bone and Carrizo, too, but they’s always water here and at the home ranch. Sooner or later every cow on the range will be goin’ to one place or the other to drink, and if we give ’em a little bait of brush each time it keeps ’em from gittin’ too weak. As long as a cow will rustle she’s all right, but the minute she’s too weak to travel she gits to be a water-bum––hangs around the spring and drinks until she starves to death. But if you feed ’em a little every day they’ll drift back to the ridges at night and pick up a little more. I’m sorry for them lily-white hands of yourn, pardner, but which place would you like to work at?”
“Hidden Water,” replied Hardy, promptly, “and I bet I can cut as many trees as you can.”
“I’ll go you, for a fiver,” exclaimed Creede, emulously. “Next time Rafael comes in tell him to bring me up some more grub and baled hay, and 384 I’m fixed. And say, when you write to the boss you can tell her I’ve traded my gun for an axe!”
As Hardy turned back towards home he swung in a great circle and rode down the dry bed of the Alamo, where water-worn bowlders and ricks of mountain drift lay strewn for miles to mark the vanished stream. What a power it had been in its might, floating sycamores and ironwoods as if they were reeds, lapping high against the granite walls, moving the very rocks in its bed until they ground together! But now the sand lay dry and powdery, the willows and water-moodies were dead to the roots, and even the ancient cottonwoods from which it derived its name were dying inch by inch. A hundred years they had stood there, defying storm and cloudburst, but at last the drought was sucking away their life. On the mesa the waxy greasewood was still verdant, the gorged sahuaros stood like great tanks, skin-tight with bitter juice, and all the desert trees were tipped with green; but the children of the river were dying for a drink.
A string of cattle coming in from The Rolls stopped and stared at the solitary horseman, head up against the sky; then as he rode on they fell in behind him, travelling the deep-worn trail that led to Hidden Water. At the cleft-gate of the pass, still following the hard-stamped trail, Hardy turned aside from his course and entered, curious to see his 385 garden again before it succumbed to the drought. There before him stood the sycamores, as green and flourishing as ever; the eagle soared out from his cliff; the bees zooned in their caves; and beyond the massive dyke that barred the way the tops of the elders waved the last of their creamy blossoms. In the deep pool the fish still darted about, and the waterfall that fed it was not diminished. The tinkle of its music seemed even louder, and as Hardy looked below he saw that a little stream led way from the pool, flowing in the trench where the cattle came to drink. It was a miracle, springing from the bosom of the earth from whence the waters come. When all the world outside lay dead and bare, Hidden Water flowed more freely, and its garden lived on untouched.
Never had Hardy seen it more peaceful, and as he climbed the Indian steps and stood beneath the elder, where Chupa Rosa had built her tiny nest his heart leapt suddenly as he remembered Lucy. Here they had sat together in the first gladness of her coming, reading his forgotten verse and watching the eagle’s flight; only for that one time, and then the fight with the sheep had separated them. He reached up and plucked a spray of elder blossoms to send her for a keep-sake––and then like a blow he remembered the forget-me-not! From that same garden he had fetched her a forget-me-not for repentance, 386 and then forgotten her for Kitty. Who but Lucy could have left the little book of poems, or treasured a flower so long to give it back at parting? And yet in his madness he had forgotten her!
He searched wistfully among the rocks for another forget-me-not, but the hot breath of the drought had killed them. As he climbed slowly down the stone steps he mused upon some poem to take the place of the flowers that were dead, but the spirit of the drought was everywhere. The very rocks themselves, burnt black by centuries of sun, were painted with Indian prayers for rain. A thousand times he had seen the sign, hammered into the blasted rocks––the helix, that mystic symbol of the ancients, a circle, ever widening, never ending,––and wondered at the fate of the vanished people who had prayed to the Sun for rain.
The fragments of their sacrificial ollas lay strewn among the bowlders, but the worshippers were dead; and now a stranger prayed to his own God for rain. As he sat at his desk that night writing to Lucy about the drought, the memory of those Indian signs came upon him suddenly and, seizing a fresh sheet of paper, he began to write. At the second stanza he paused, planned out his rhymes and hurried on again, but just as his poem seemed finished, he halted at the last line. Wrestle as he would he 387 could not finish it––the rhymes were against him––it would not come right. Ah, that is what sets the artist apart from all the under-world of dreamers––his genius endures to the end; but the near-poet struggles like a bee limed in his own honey. What a confession of failure it was to send away––a poem unfinished, or finished wrong! And yet––the unfinished poem was like him. How often in the past had he left things unsaid, or said them wrong. Perhaps Lucy would understand the better and prize it for its faults. At last, just as it was, he sent it off, and so it came to her hand.