Dust of the Desert

by Robert Welles Ritchie

Morning brought him the chance to study the men chained with him who, during the night hours, had been just so many disembodied shadows marching in a nightmare. The one ahead of him was a shrivelled little Chinaman, whose legs were so short he was forced to a skipping step to keep slack on his segment of the chain; his breath came in asthmatic pipings and wheezes like the noise of a leaky valve in some midget engine. Behind him was a giant of an Indian, almost the colour of teak. With a timed regularity this Indian spat noisily all through the dark hours and until the sun rose to dry up his throat. The rest were in character with Grant’s nearer companions—just flotsam.

The guards were typical of their class; Mexican peons brutalized even beyond the inheritance of their mixed bloods by their small taste of power. The quarter-blood Indian south of the Line, whose ancestry is devious as his own starved dog’s, knows but a single law of life and that the law of fear. Lift him by ever so little from the station of the one who fears to that of the one to be feared and he has no counterpart for studied cruelty anywhere on earth.

The one who rode to the right of the line in which Grant’s position was fourth from the front, had commenced with the dawn a calculated campaign of nasty tortures. He would suddenly swerve his horse against Grant, threatening his feet with trampling hoofs. He held his lighted cigarette low at his side with elaborate air of carelessness, then pressed in close for the burning tip to eat through the white man’s shirt. Once he aimed a vicious backward kick at his victim; his heavy spur left a line of red through the torn sleeve from elbow to shoulder.

At each of these refinements of humour the rurale’s snickering laughter was met by the American’s wordless grin. Just a tense spreading of lips and baring of teeth, which carried to the guard’s savage perception a taunt and a threat. Always in Grant’s twisted grin lay the unspoken promise of retribution once the odds against him were lightened.

The desert under sun at the meridian flexed its harsh hand to pinch the crawling caterpillar of chained men. Heat waves made all the ragged summits of the Sierras pulsate. A dust tasting of desert salts spread a low cloud about the marching column. Thirst that was a poignant agony was made all the more unendurable by the tactics of the guards. From time to time one of them would unhitch a canteen from the pack mule’s burden and in the sight of the eight helpless sufferers tilt his head and guzzle noisily. Even he would allow some of the water to slop from his mouth and be wasted in the sand.

When the little Chinaman marching before Grant sighed and dropped, the line was halted for half an hour. First the yellow man was revived, then the canteen at which he had sucked so noisily was passed down the line to the rest of the prisoners. It was their first taste of water since the prison gate was passed. After the canteen circulated, black strips of jerked beef, sharp with salt, were distributed. Grant never had seen the “jerky” of the Southwest; the leathery stuff would have revolted him did his body not cry out for food. He tore at the tough substance after the manner of his fellows while the guards brewed themselves some more complicated mess over a fire of greasewood sticks.

Then the march again. Dragging hour after dragging hour. Clink-clank of the swinging chain. Pad-pad of feet in time. Snuffle and wheeze—snuffle and wheeze of the asthmatic Chinaman’s breathing. All in an unvarying synchronism which tore at the nerves. All the world—Grant’s world of a great city—was reduced to this dreadful monotony of movement and sound.

He tried to think. Came to his mind a picture of his office in the Manhattan skyscraper—his desk with the mounted bit of shrapnel for a paperweight, its clear greeny-white glass top, the two wire baskets which held his correspondence. He saw the squash court at the club—men in sleeveless shirts straining after a white ball. Henry’s bar in the little side street off the Rue D’Anou in Paris; Henry selling stolen American cigarettes for five times their value at the commissary. St. Mihiel and the old woman who knitted lace. Then the girl—Benicia O’Donoju. Grant called to his mind the vivid glory of her hair, the trick of her short upper lip in curling outward like the petal of a tea rose, a something roguish always lurking deep down in the warm pools of her eyes.

“Not Mexican. We are Spanish folk.” That was her sharp reproof when he, blundering, had asked her if she was of Mexican blood. That night on the train—it seemed a year back. “Not Mexican.” Now he understood why the girl had corrected him so pointedly. Thank God she was not of that breed!

Near dusk the line was halted and one of the guards dismounted. Grant saw him fumble in his shirt and bring out a bright bit of metal, saw him approach the head of the line and tinker with the first fellow’s wrist shackle. He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him and, turning, caught the stamp of terror on the giant Indian’s face. Something was going forward which he could not comprehend, something to shake the stoicism of this Indian. Within five minutes the steel band about his wrist was unlocked and he stood free of the chain with the rest of the prisoners. He saw on the faces of all of them that same terror mask the Indian wore.