Spawn of the Desert

by W. C. Tuttle

On a rocky plateau of this painted range stood a town—one street of adobe shacks, paved with the solid rock of the mountain. Even the houses were tinted with fantastic colors, where the clay had been mixed with the muck of the silver mines.

At the upper end of the street the cliffs arose sheer for several hundred feet, like gaudy drapes of calico. At the lower end was a succession of broken ledges, which sloped off to the desert, where the winding trails came in from the rest of the world.

To the left of the town was a deep, rocky gorge, so grotesque in formation that it did not appear to be a work of nature. There were natural stone bridges, caves, barriers—unreal in color and design, as though a child-minded giant had modeled them in colored clay and left them to harden in the blistering sun.

This was the residence section of Calico Town, and was known as Sunshine Alley. Just below where the Alley opened onto the desert, on a slight rise of ground, full in the glare of the sun, and with no protection from the ever-sifting sand, was the graveyard, which was known as Hell’s Depot. Not a blade of grass, not even a spray of sage grew here. The ground was a mass of small stones, seemingly laid close together like tiles, but showing patterns in colors that would put any man-made mosaic to shame.

One foot deep was the limit of the graves, as the rock below that depth was glass-like flint, but what the graves lacked in depth was made up in height. The mounds of rock were piled until one might believe that the corpse had been of gigantic proportions, or that the sexton wished to preclude any chance of the dead coming back in material form.

Such was Calico in the early ’fifties, when men were gold- and silver-mad. A town of thirty-five hundred population—a population which lived in caves, hollowed places in Sunshine Alley, or picked a corner in the rock and builded a rock barrier around them. This gave a roofless dwelling, but rain did not come to Calico, so there was no need for roofs. Water was worth more than whiskey, and morals were as scarce as orchids.

Just now a funeral was in progress, or rather, had been in progress. The corpse was there in the rough casket; the grave was dug and the pall-bearers stood aside, reverently holding their hats in their hands. Clustered around was a cosmopolitan mining-camp audience. Frock-coated, tall-hatted gamblers rubbed elbows with muck-stained miners. Calico-clad wives of miners, children, dogs, and even a group of burros poked onto the flat to add their faces to the mournful proceedings.

Up the desert trail came two men and a lightly-packed burro; all of them gray with the dust and heat. The one who led the caravan was a mighty, weatherbeaten man, with a long, white beard. In appearance he might have been a saint. Surely he could not be a sinner, with the eyes of a dreamer, the nose of a prophet and the beard of a saint; but nature does queer things to disappoint students of physiognomy.

The other man was also tall. His face showed him to be about thirty years of age—a face seemingly hewed from stone, although handsome in its stern mold. His hair was black and he wore it low between his cheek and ear. There was the free, easy swing to his walk, like the half-lope of a desert wolf.

The patriarch halted the caravan on the trail, just short of the street end, and gazed across at the funeral. The younger man glanced over there, with little show of interest.