Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

At last as he wandered, he saw above him a gash or chimney in the cliff. He scrambled to its very foot and looked up it. There was a percolation of water down the side, which he tasted and found sweet. The rock was very rotten, but he saw that it was a way up this cliff. As it was a possible means of getting back to his course, he set himself to climb it. It took him an hour to reach the top, and as he scrambled up to safety above it, the thongs of his ollas broke, and both jars dropped to the bottom of the chimney and smashed to pieces there.

He found himself on a great heave of rocky mountain which went on to a pine forest. Beyond the pine forest the main crags of the Sierra rose, covered with snow. They were blindingly bright in front of him, rocks as blue as steel and ice as white as death, a wall between him and the sea, which he would have to climb.

At about sunset, when he was entered into the pine forest, he smelled suddenly a smell of smoke. It was the smoke of burning pine-cones or pine-needles. He judged that it came from a little fire, because he so easily lost the scent. He turned towards it, thinking that even the most savage of mountain Indians would be less terrible than that loneliness. Sometimes he lost the scent, then he cast about like a dog, until he picked it up again. Presently he was almost certain that he heard a moan. It seemed the fitting speech for such a place. He went towards it, and soon heard the moaning pass into something much more savage, a cursing and a calling down of vengeance. After a minute of violence, it died again into grief and mourning and lamentation.

He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest. Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang. It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.

The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine trees.

“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.

“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.

“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.

“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”

“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that will take me there?”