"Them. I call it the Lonesome Bell."
"What is the Lonesome Bell?" We found ourselves whispering too.
"You hear it. It's a bell. It rings regular, far off. Sometimes you hear it all night. It sounds like the bell on a burro. But it ain't nothing. Once I had a young feller for a partner, and when he heard it he got up and made coffee for the outfit that was coming. He wouldn't believe me when I told him it wasn't nothing but the Lonesome Bell. He waited and waited and nobody came. And the next morning he packed up and beat it."
Old Johnnie's eyes glittered with unnatural brightness. He was telling his own secret. Very vividly he made us see a man alone in the blue night, dim sand spreading away, dark-blue mountains on blueness. Not a sound, not even the breath of the night stirring the sagebrush. Through white, empty days and blue, empty nights he is always alone. He listens to his own heart beating. Then, far off, the faint sound of a bell. Then again. He listens intently because it is the only sound for such a long time. It comes again. It grows louder. He strains to hear. A bell belongs on a burro—he hears the tramp of burros' feet.
With awe we looked at those bright, intent eyes and that thin body bent tensely forward. Some night the Lonesome Bell will be true, but "Old Johnnie" will not hear it. A belated traveler with his pack-train will find a dead camp-fire and an old man asleep forever beside it. "Old Johnnie" has outwitted the valley so long that he thinks he can always do it, but she will get him in the end.
After dinner "Old Johnnie" unlocked the mill and showed us the costly machinery inside, explaining in careful detail the processes of milling gold. The canyon behind Keane Wonder is narrow and precipitous as though it had been gouged out by a giant's trowel. High up on the mountain-side the dumps of iridescent rock around the mine-pits shimmered. We sat with him on a beam of the ruined mill while he pointed things out in the valley. He showed us where Furnace Creek Ranch lies on the sand by the opening of the canyon between the Funeral Range and the Black Mountains, but we could not see it because of the heat-shimmer and the misty veil. He said that the stern, red mass opposite was called Tucki Mountain, an Indian word for sheep, because the Panamint Indians used to hunt wild mountain-sheep in its fastnesses. The smooth, bare slope beyond the Mesquite Valley, he said, was really very rough, cut by deep water-channels and covered with brush; and rose in that gradual way nearly 3,000 feet before it reached the mountains. The curious streak in the bottom of the Mesquite Valley was the swamp of Salt Creek, where the water was so bad you could not drink it. It joined the morass in the bottom of Death Valley. There were quicksands there, that you could not get out of if you got in. Men and burros had been lost that way. He pointed out little, white heaps down by Salt Creek and said they were sand-dunes a hundred feet high.
While we sat there a storm swept down the big slope and around on the face of the high Panamints above Death Valley. First the wind lifted the sand in the tall whirling wraiths that fled before the pursuing host of the rain. It came on like an army of giants in bright armor, dust-clouds swirling before their horses' galloping feet, the sun gleaming on their million spears that reached higher than the mountain-tops. In the midst of blazing sunshine the shadow of their passing was dark on the valley; for a few moments they obliterated the mountains.
"Surely," Charlotte said, "it is pouring rain over there, yet they told us it never rains in Death Valley."