Munsey's Magazine/Volume 79/Issue 4/Spell of the Desert

by Raymond S. Spears

Spell of the Desert

A ROMANCE OF THE SUN-BATHED LAND OF WIDE DISTANCES AND FLAMING COLORS

By Raymond S. Spears

{[di|A]} MASS of gray bare rock loomed ahead of Henry Howard, as he shaded his eyes to search a forbidding, creviced slope. Between the Hill Bottoms, who gathered from the neighborhood of One Hundred and Third Street along Lexington Avenue, and the Murphins, on the eminence of One Hundred and Second Street, up the Lexington Avenue hill, was war. In those days the gangs fought for those rocks, and this was in the campaign of 1889.

Howard was neat and natty, straight-backed, sharp-faced, and so slender that the gangsters called him Skimp. His watchfulness was neither pretense nor purposeless. He was a shining mark in his white waist, his flowing blue tie, his shapely knickerbockers, his jaunty cap, his undarned, holeless stockings, and his polished shoes. If Kip Murphin, leader of his rivals, had suspected the truth, there would have been double reason for Skimp Howard's extreme caution.

A girl awaited him just over the brim of the rocks, in a depression that would hide them from their respective clans. For only a moment he was silhouetted against the sky line, and then he greeted her eagerly:

"Hello, May!"

"Hello, Henry!" she returned.

May Murphin was a girl who was almost a boy—angular, exceedingly thin, tousle-haired, and much freckled. Henry sat awkwardly in the contentment of her attention.

"They'd pound you all up if they found us here," she suggested.

"I'd rather catch that than be afraid to come!" he replied, in frank admission. "You know I like you a lot."

"You must!" She smiled, and shivered deliciously.

For more than two years the two had been meeting on that dangerous peak, sometimes in the evening, sometimes in rain or snow, and often in broad day. They would find each other under the stone railway arch on Fourth Avenue, and even in Central Park, beyond Fifth Avenue.

Their boldness covered their clandestine rendezvous. Kip Murphin angrily refused even to suspect his sister of her double allegiance. Skimp fought down the rumor of his misalliancing, proving with his cutting knuckles that the truth was an utter lie. His victories were due more to his wrath than to strength.

Henry Howard gave May Murphin marshmallows bought with the profits of selling the evening papers. Demurely she accepted his homage. In an ecstasy of boldness, he pleaded for a kiss, but she sternly resented his timid suggestion. She puckered her bright red lips with utter scorn, which radiated from the crinkle of her nostrils through her freckles to her ears.

"I didn't mean nothing!" he gasped in alarm, adding, with hopeless insistence: "Just a little mite of one!"

Suddenly she relaxed from her tense denial. With a quick, unexpected presentation she allowed him the bold, sweet token of her condescending esteem. For a time he sat staring at her, awed, astonished, happy beyond words. Oddly wise, watchful and cautious, she fixed Skimp with the poniards of her eyes, warning him of her rising temper. However grateful, he remained humble.

One day Kip Murphin heard that Skimp Howard had been seen going alone toward Central Park. With four others, Kip trailed him, and was struck dumb to find the Hill Bottom youth feeding May chocolate drops. Then, while two held the writhing May, Kip and the others pulled Skimp down, mauling and pounding him. They left him lying in the path as they fled, dragging May away.

Weeks later she heard that Skimp was still yellowish blue under his eyes, and she wept for him. That evening he found her in the granite top rendezvous. She started up at his eager hail. She crouched, pretending surprise and resentment.

"They'll murder you next time. G'way—quick!" she whispered.

"I don't care!" he replied, undaunted. "I'd take a licking any time—for you!"

"Honest, Skimp, ain't you 'fraid?" she demanded.

"Naw!" he declared valiantly. "Been looking for you all around. I didn't never find you nowheres."

"I never thought you'd want to see me ever again!"

"Well, I did," he replied. "What 'd I care about them? All I cared about was you!"

He dragged a bag of large, soft gum drops from his pocket. As May ate one of the sweetest lemon-flavored morsels she had ever tasted, Skimp went on, his voice hesitant:

"We're goin' to move."

"Aw—where?" she exclaimed, letting fall the candy hand from her lips.

"’Way out West," he said, shaking his head, morosely.

"Not—not out of New York?" she cried.

"Yes," he nodded.

She blinked. They sat for a long time in silence. With an effort he answered her appeal for the reason.

"It's me," he sighed. "The old doc gimme the once over. I ain't no good. He said a dry country might save me. Throat trouble, mebby lung trouble. You know, I was sick last winter—sick every winter. Now there ain't no time to waste, he says."

"You want to go?" she inquired, with her face away from him.

"All I wish is you was out there, for me to go to," he said. "Seems like I ain't fit for here. 'Ceptin' for you, I've always wanted to go back where we used to be, when I was just a little kid, a baby."

"When you goin'?"

"Nex' week."

"Oh!" she cried, trembling.

Once more the two met. They stood on top of the great granite rock, where she wept, as he held her in his arms. To these children—he was fourteen and she twelve years of age—this was tragedy.

 

II

So the Howards hurried westward. Henry was tense with eager impatience, and aching with the vague misery that memory of May Murphin left in his heart. His mother petted, babied, watched him. His father sat scowling in his seat, refusing to look at the son for whom he was giving up the ambition and hope he had been about to realize in the metropolis.

They crossed the fruit belts, the Mississippi basin, the wide grain land, the sage and alkali prairies, into the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. They entered deep cañons, roared along the faces of precipices, ascended to the passes, and crossed the Continental Divide. Henry Howard followed the miles on the time-table. He was gasping for breath in the high altitudes, but he turned a beatific face to his parents.

"We're nine thousand feet above the sea level!" he whispered, in the tone of a child who speaks an unbelievable truth.

They left the train at a settlement on the sunny side of the Rockies, journeyed out on the range, and entered a cabin among the juniper cedars. The timber line was behind them, up the slope of the Continental Divide. The desert stretched away below them. A spring, heading in a clear, deep pool at a rock in the wilderness, was their great possession.

The boy walked into the open. He shaded his eyes with his hand. He saw the Continental Divide, a wall topped by jagged peaks and knife-edge lines in rich, dark blue, fringed with white pearl against the sky. Beneath him he looked into distances of descending slopes gorgeous with the bright desert hues. In no direction could he see any house, any sign of habitation, any suggestion of human neighbors.

He loved the loneliness that fell upon his soul. He cringed before the enormous crags that reminded him of the tiny height of rock on Lexington Avenue. He seemed to see everywhere the sharp features and great, dreamy eyes of the girl who, in his mind, was indelibly associated with the earth's eternal granite.

To please his parents, he need do but one thing—find health and strength. At first he would lie at ease in the purple shade of the nearest gnarled and twisted juniper, dreaming. Soon he was restless, walking to some other trees. He went out on a promontory, to look at distant ranges. He went up into the forests, scrambling over fallen trees; he went down into the dry, bare fastnesses of the desert below.

He entered the Stone Age of life. He grew savage, crafty, and, alas, bloodthirsty. Part of his parents' slender outfit was a rifle, with a fair stock of ammunition. He trapped White Ear, a scoundrel lobo wolf with three hundred dollars reward on his scalp. He shot rifles, revolvers, and pistols with supreme accuracy and speed. He read game tracks and fur tracks. He brought his mother a thousand beautiful flowers, and stacked up heaps of radiant stones, quartz and obsidian and fossils.

Then the youth took to wandering away, for days at a stretch. His mother began to fear for his soul. His father began to doubt him. Bare of people as the desert slope seemed to be, nevertheless rumors were heard.

One day Kid Curry and Butch Cassidy passed down the line, and over the Howard's hospitable dinner table remarked that they were going south, "where the climate would fit their clothes better." The following day Howard disappeared, and months later he returned from down in the Blue Mountains, a high-thrown range known to few, but the refuge of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Howard had gone into that savage retreat with the bandits.

The father was rigid with anger; the mother was sick with sorrow. Their son seemed a vagabond, at best—an associate of desperadoes and a potential bandit, at least. With difficulty the parents restrained their bitter impulse. They had been through the horror of seeing their son's life in the balance; better if he had died than that he should go into crime!

That evening the father walked with his son. They sauntered out upon the ranch mesa. The sun set before their eyes, the evening glowed with rose and gold, the stars assembling in their places. The sand maidens, conjured and ravished by the desert wind, ceased from their dancing to fall as dust again. A mirage appeared, and they saw in the twilight, where the desert had been, a blue and troubled sea, its waves rushing toward them and breaking into masses of foam—all the varied spectacle and color of an ocean, but with utter silence brooding across the vast basin.

When the glow of the rising moon fringed the sky line of the Continental Divide with golden mist and silvery flames along the edged peaks, the father said, with a sad catch of lost ambitions in his voice:

"Henry, I put that barrier between me and my career—for your sake!"

He left his son to think about it. By and by the youth entered the cabin, kissed his father on the cheek and his mother on her quivering lips.

"I see, folks," the boy said. "It's all right. I'm all right. You've done everything for me. Go to town, you folks! You'll hear from me."

He picked up his saddle, blanket, bridle—a few odds and ends to tie in a bag, and went out. They heard him saddle a horse—his own, one that he had raised, as they knew by the tread of its hoofs. They heard him riding away over the dry, hard earth.

The parents sold out. They went to town. Their son had been raised. He was now away out yonder, somewhere, proving himself.

The mother could not forget that he had ridden away westward, down the spring-run gulch. In that direction, beyond the shattered rocks, was a miles-long valley, growing more and more bare till at last it emptied into a poison lake of alkali. Her son had gone into that deep to fight out his own destiny.

 

III

Henry Howard, as he rode, gave sober thought to his condition. He was enduring the loneliness that now, for years, had abided in his heart. May Murphin had written to him. He had written to her. She said almost nothing about herself, reminding him always in her little letters of the "old days," while he poured out to her the things he did, the country in which he lived, and the immense glory of the land. Neither one ever mentioned those unforgetable kisses. He dared not betray so sweet and delicate a secret, even to a sheet of paper meant only for her eyes. She would not speak of such a thing.

Howard stopped down at the desert edge, where a devoted agent kept a railroad station. Borrowing some paper and ink, he wrote a letter. In it he said:

 

I've been writing you a long time, May, all the time making out I am somebody. Now I am nobody. I rode away from the home ranch three days ago, and came down here to the rim of the desert, where I tell you this. All I have is my horse and saddle. I am riding, swinging wide, on my own now. I'm no good, May—just a cowboy. I can ride, rope, and cut, but only owners and foremen do any cutting, not leaving to a cowboy to pick shippers for them. I have no cows of my own.

Father knows I'm no good, and mother's sick about me. I'm crossing the tracks, to-morrow, to go down into the desert, which I know. All I know is alkali and rocks, dancing sand maidens and the mirage. I don't have any post office address any more. If I get one some day, I'll write you then.

You know, I take your picture with me. They will find it under my shirt out there. I never saw any other girl. I sure wish I could see those freckles and blue eyes again! I'm too far away, though.

You been mighty kind, writing me so much. I don't deserve it any more. You keep writing me on better and better paper, while I take this off a friend of mine. Here goes, May! I'm on my way to-night, in the cool of the day. Out there, to-morrow, I'll be in the sunshine, with the dust dancing high around me. That's where I belong.

 

Henry Howard sealed the envelope, to mail it, and rode away, as he had said he would. The bitter feeling of wasted years was in his soul. He knew enough to realize his ignorance. All his life he had loved the desert. Now he went to the end of all trails, to enter the untracked waste. Mirages became his visions in the desolate land.

A passion was in his heart. He denied it, and quieted the storm in his soul.

The desert does not mock those who love in it, or jeer those who seek its privileges. Those who seek its glories, with singleness of heart, find treasure.

Henry Howard saw the beauty of the colored precipices, and knew that in such places the prophets of old were inspired. He dared not even wish for insight into his own problems. No voice but those of tormenting regrets came to his ears. He was grateful beyond measure when he found a thick cactus that yielded him a drink of sap, and another cactus which, when he cooked it, appeased his appetite, Then he found a clear pool, with sweet water, where he could see a hundred miles, and could discern the Pilot Peak, at the foot of which was the home of his parents.

He knew they were sitting by a bright red fire of juniper blazing in the hearth as twilight swept into the land. They were loving him, while they mistrusted him. Their worst thought was praise compared to what he felt toward himself. In his heart and soul were accusations and surging aspirations. He did not know himself what he wanted. He longed unspeakably, but he had no words to express what he desired. His thoughts were formless, seemingly futile, and yet overwhelming.

Some men may dwell content in that open land, bare and silent as it is, because it satisfies some hope in their souls, but not Henry Howard—not the man who had gone desperately into that most dangerous of places, hating his own life, despising all that he was, struggling as with a burden, with an invisible, intangible antagonist, with a spirit that was unrest. And yet he loved the desert, and he endured hunger, thirst, and silence.

A sweet spring of cold water quenched his thirst. Some grass, or herbage, fed his horse. He knelt down to look at a single beautiful flower, not touching it, much less plucking it. He just loved it. He emptied into it the sorrow of his heart, wishing he had been born and raised a desert plant, harming no one, but perhaps a comfort to some one traveling across this desert of woe. Then he laughed at his own absurdity, denying any mystery in his vain sorrows and aching regrets.

He knew the desert, all its stones and crumbling earth, all its flowers and insects, all its clawed and poisonous creatures, its winds, lights, colors, and mirages; and he felt the spirit of the dry and thirsty land. For years he had been around and in it. He had fled to it in his disappointment, for he saw only waste, idleness, and vagabondage in his life. Of what use was he to any one? Why had his parents been so extravagant, when they gave up his father's career to save the life of so trifling and useless a son?

He left the spring, went on over the mountains, and worked a while on a cattle ranch. One day he sold his horse, to go down into a gracious valley and to enter a city—the first he had been in since that long-gone day when his father and mother fled with him into the far Rockies. He carried his saddle into a garage, and went to work scrubbing the floor and washing dust from the wheels, bodies, and running boards of cars. The menial toil suited his humble frame of mind.

What led him to do this he did not know. The pride of the cattle range was his. The independence of the princes of the earth was in his soul. Shame and dejection accompanied him in the least of tasks; but this seemed to be his destination. He had struck westward toward the setting sun, that night when he left home, and the pathless desert had led him to this.

He toiled in the garage for the appointed hours, and beyond them. He was anxious to work. None had toiled harder than he had in the dust of the round-up, in the drive of blizzard and sand storm, on the trail and in the pastures, but it all had been odd-jobbing. This was a steady work. Faith in it held him.

From sweeping and wiping he became a filler, privileged to put in five or ten gallons, and a quart of "light" or "medium." He filled tires with air, and then began to make minor adjustments of cars. He learned to use a monkey wrench, and that universal tool, a pair of long-handled side-cutting pliers.

Just along the street, in the next block but one, he had noticed, within a week, a curious institution with a sign proclaiming its wares as "literary junk." Here, on an outside stand, were hundreds of old, worn books, for sale at ten cents apiece.

One of these was "The Prospector's Handbook." He bought it. He carried it to the garage, and upstairs to the room where he now slept. The book named a hundred things he knew, and a thousand that he did not know. He read it till he knew those other things.

He returned to the literary junk shop, looking for another book that would tell him more about the land that he loved. He found "Desert Flora," illustrated with line drawings, and he recognized the cactus that he had eaten, and the species from which he had often drunk. He paid a quarter for this volume. For weeks it amused and entertained him.

As he worked, he turned over in his mind the names, the descriptions, all the things that he learned from his books, and he fitted his own observations among the statements in the desert botany.

The books in the store never alarmed him. They were worn, used, often somewhat tattered; few were wholly clean. The genial old dealer welcomed his customer with a smile, and before Howard had made many purchases he knew that this garage helper was interested in the land of naked stone, of mocking pictures, and of a spirit that grips the human soul. He showed Howard the works of men who had gone into deserts to study them, who had named their thistles, solved the organizations of their wild life, and analyzed their rocks.

One by one, Henry Howard took these desert records into the garage. After a time he set them on shelves, or stacked them along the wall on the floor, returning, after reading each book, for another.

Where he worked, he met drivers who had come across the deserts, rancher and tourist, commercial traveler and migrant laborer. As he grew expert with tools, he managed to ply the customers with questions, and heard from their lips the latest news of the deserts, what they had seen, and more especially what they had not seen.

He heard of the sand hills, of salt lakes, of the Panamints, the Calico Range, and the Funereals. He could look at the dust on a car and tell by what trail it had come into the city. He knew the accumulations from the Lincoln Highway, the national trails. He picked tiny bits of crushed stone out of layers of oil tar, and knew from them that the car had come through freshly oiled roads where Trenton limestone or Adirondack granites had been used to surface highways. By the pebbles he knew Illinois water wash gravel out of the glacial drift, as well as red clay from the Ozarks or the western Cumberlands.

His work was automobile repairing. He grew expert at that, having ingenuity, patience, flexible fingers, and strong arms. He was soon a good mechanic.

In letters to his parents he did not dilate on his work. He did not even tell what it was, directly. What did it matter? He had odd-jobbed over the cow country. He feared their feeling of regret, or shame, that their son was washing cars and messing around flivvers. His father had been a good attorney, his mother a splendid school-teacher; both were educated in colleges. They could but sorrow over the son whose chance of learning had been destroyed by the necessity of saving his health.

Every day the contrast was brought home to him. Patrons of the garage were of all kinds—some shabby and ignorant, others trained and educated. He took cars out to show customers how they ran. Sometimes he demonstrated for a professional man, an attorney, a physician, or a university professor.

Sometimes, worse yet, a beautiful woman would sit beside him, drawing her pretty garments away from him. That taught him something. He made sure that the steering wheel was always wiped clean, and he had a new pair of overalls to wear when trying out repaired cars.

Some were great folk. Their language and behavior, their gentleness and finish—the universal touch that proved their type—won his admiration. He studied them. He knew their faces and names. Now and then a customer would discover in him some interesting quality.

Professor William Wells was one of these.

Wells was at the head of the State School of Mines. He drove a little old car that required much attention, and Howard seemed to have the knack of keeping it adjusted. He first astonished the professor by remarking that the car had been over at Bakersfield, in the oil country. He proved it by oil and sand.

"You know deserts, don't you?" Wells remarked.

"I lived more than ten years in them," Howard explained. "They are hard to forget. I suppose I ought not to think of anything else but gears and—"

"You are entitled to your pleasures," the professor interrupted, with an odd smile.

Thus began an acquaintance. Wells sought out Howard, to talk to him. They talked of stones and dust, of mountain range and alkali playa, of the salts in desert lakes, and of minerals in intruded veins. Howard, in off hours, took his friend to the comfortable quarters he now had over the garage, in one corner of the great storeroom upstairs. The visitor looked with seeming casualness at that collection of desert books, and listened to the young man's talk.

Lacking white man words for some of the things he knew, Howard was obliged to fall back on Indian, old Spanish, the dog Latin of desert prospectors, and the lingo of tramps. Wells took Howard out into the mountains, where each could instruct the other, one explaining what was to be had from science, the other what he had found through observation and experience. Together, they uncovered what none had ever known before.

"You do not realize what you have gathered," Wells exclaimed one day. "You see with desert inspiration!"

Howard chuckled. He often covered his embarrassment thus. Wells was friendly, kind of heart, to say such things. The garage mechanic knew better, however, than to misunderstand. Daily, in such associations, Howard felt the lack of his training, the certainty that for himself there was no hope of securing the solid framework of education that comes only when one is grounded in theory as well as in practice.

No need to tell Wells that! The learned man must realize it as he gave the real, the scientific names to the things that Howard brought to his attention.

 

IV

Early one morning, before any customers arrived at the garage, Howard threw wide the doors for business. A car swept around the corner and up to the filling curb. As it stopped at the pump, a slender young woman slipped out of the fore door, and faced the man coming to ask her pleasure.

"Gas and oil," she said, looking him squarely in the face with her gem-blue eyes, dark and radiant.

As he looked at her, Howard stopped short, confused. His heart thundered. He was conscious of utter helplessness. He knew those eyes, and even some of the features of that countenance. For a moment he was staggered.

With utmost effort he recovered himself. The young woman's eyes twinkled, but her face remained grave, impersonal, and even severe.

He filled the gasoline tank, poured in two quarts of oil, and drew away, afraid. At that moment Henry Howard knew the depths of dejection, misery, and regret. May Murphin had come!

He had not written to her for three years. His parents had forwarded three letters from her to him in that time. He had kept them, but had not opened them.

He felt sure that she did not recognize him. How could she, after all these years? He had changed, not at all for the better.

But who could describe the change that had come over her? The freckles, alas, were all gone. Her complexion was clear rose and Arabian pearl. She was tall, slender, and tense with graceful personality. She was beautiful. She was driving a four-thousand-dollar automobile, wearing a three-hundred-dollar suit, and her jewels would bring five thousand in any hock shop in the land. So much Howard recognized, or divined.

"When I back up," she said, "there's a squeak. Can you find it?"

"I think so," he replied, going for a pressure oiling can.

He swung under the car. When he emerged, he asked her to try it. She let in the reverse and jerked the car back swiftly. There was no squeak.

"I heard you knew this car here," she said. "I want you to take care of it for me. I am Paula Carlon."

"What?" Howard gasped. "Why, I thought—"

"What did you think?" she demanded. "Am I telling the truth?"

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I thought—for a moment—you were some one else."

She gave him an odd, amused glance, then rolled away. What a fool, what a poor business man he was, he thought! He should have recognized Paula Carlon, the famous star of the films, when she came to have her car taken care of. How silly to imagine that she resembled May Murphin, of the rocky height on Lexington Avenue! A chance similarity of their eyes had beguiled him. He went on preparing the garage for the day's work.

Two days later, she returned again.

"Harry," she said, "try this car. It doesn't steer right."

He drove down Spring Street, and found that the head was loose. He set up the burr and lock nut.

"Now try it," he suggested.

She calmly drove ten miles down the Long Beach road, turning and bringing him back to the garage.

"I think it will serve very nicely now," she approved. "Thank you, Harry!"

 

V

Professor Wells hesitated to inquire into the past of the garage mechanic, and Howard never told him any details. The saddle which hung on a peg in the garage, and which Howard kept well soaped with saddle grease, was a beauty. Wells recognized the limitations imposed on so chance an acquaintance as himself, but he picked up enough to know the former cowboy's regret that he had no formal education. That made the geologist smile.

One day Howard burst out with the whole story, from the vacant lots on Manhattan Island, out over the Rockies, down through the desert basin, over the Sierras, and down to the Pacific Coast.

"My mind was starving," he said. "What could I feed it with? I climbed the mountain peaks, went down into the bare alkali, and ran with the Hole-in-the-Wall gang. I lived with the Indians. I ranged from ranch to ranch, from water hole to water hole. I wanted something mighty much, but all I poured into my head was sucked up like water in sand."

"I dare say you have something in it," Wells chuckled. "Considering those books and your own observations, you must have at least a modicum of information."

Henry Howard had never told even himself what he now revealed to William Wells, a man used to probing the minds of young men.

Wells had never heard of just such a man as Howard. He smiled sympathetically when Henry, laughing at himself, told of his start on seeing Paula Carlon. Surely, the famous Paula must have been nonplused to find that she was, even for a moment, mistaken for some other woman! Millions knew her features, but not this garage worker!

"Her eyes are exactly like the eyes of a skinny, freckle-faced girl I knew in New York fifteen or eighteen years ago," Howard said frankly.

Wells made no comment. He was not surprised, however, when Paula Carlon demanded that the garage should send Howard into the Colorado Desert sand hills, to take care of her automobile. No one else was able to keep it running so well as he did, she said. She wanted, on location, the same workman who looked after her car in town.

No one, least of all garage keepers and other purveyors, refused Paula any demand, however impertinent or unreasonable it might seem. Harry must obey, however embarrassing it might be to him.

Out in the desert with the caravan tribe, he climbed, one evening, to the crest of a shifting dune, to see the sun set. Nowhere is the twilight glow more beautiful than over the Salton Sink. That dry bed of an ancient sea was, for this desert lover, a chance to study the wind drifts, the mesquite, the water wash, and the color of shadows.

"Harry," Paula Carlon asked, "what do you know about these waste lands? You have an armful of books."

"I lived in them for a dozen years," he replied. "A desert cowman, a hunter—I trapped two or three winters."

"Do you ride?" she cried, looking at him curiously. "I thought you were some Eastern mechanic who had drifted out here, the way the rest of us do."

"I drifted—a little earlier than most," he admitted.

"Dick!" she called to a man strolling along the main street of the little location village. "Saddle a horse, will you? I want to see this man ride!"

Dick Albrey, hard-eyed, sun-wrinkled, and thin-lipped, nodded with a smile of assent. He brought Daub, an ill-favored cross between race track and range breed blood. Daub's ears were laid partly back, and his eyes were as mean as Albrey's own.

"Let me see you ride him!" Paula turned to her chauffeur mechanic. "Make good, Harry!"

Henry had not been up for more than three years. He did not at all like the animal's look. He had said he was a cowman, however, and had implied that he could ride. In a hundred trifles of gesture and quickness of speech, Paula Carlon awakened memories in his still boyish heart.

He started toward the horse, slowly the first two or three steps, but with increasing strides and faster, and with a swinging leap he forked the animal. Daub shrank, winced, and raced away. The animal didn't do any funny business at all. He knew better. He preferred to carry that kind of a rider far and fast.

"You do ride!" Paula laughed, when Harry brought the animal back, sweating even in that arid atmosphere.

The rider dropped lightly to the ground, while Dick Albrey eyed him with an odd admiration.

"Yas, suh!" Dick assented. "Harry rides—he shore does!"

"Who are you, Harry?" Paula demanded. "What else do you do, besides riding and tinkering automobiles? What about those mountains over there?"

"They are the Chocolate Mountains," he replied. "They are burned and melted stone, a flood of lava from volcanoes now long dead. If you go into them, you must carry water. Once in five or ten years rain falls on them, and on this desert. Then you would not know the land, for it blossoms like a rose. Once, in Death Valley, they had a rainy summer. The seeds long dormant in the bare sand, or among the greasebush and cactus, became a weed patch that covered the valley with flowers and a jungle of tall stalks. In those dark mountains, which have almost no springs or water, you see what was once a land of fire, the melted rock blazing in the night like slag from an unimaginable furnace. They are full of minerals—silver, gold, platinum, probably, and perhaps precious stones. Certainly beautiful crystals were formed in the immeasurable heat when the earth split open and the fluid rock poured out."

"You know those things?" she asked. "How did you know? Have you been in that range?"

"I read about them. All I know is the desert."

"Desert plants, desert stones, desert life!" she said.

"Dry learning!" he laughed, shrugging his shoulders.

"I love the desert," she mused. "Professor Wells is a friend of mine. He told me that you knew much about deserts. Your name is Howard—Henry Howard, I believe?"

"Yes."

She smiled, nodding her head. After a time, when the first star began to shine above where the sun had gone down, a bright bluish sparkle in the pale sky, she asked:

"Ever think of going into the movies?"

"Me?" He laughed. "What a picture I would make!"

"That might be, too." She refused to laugh. "But that wasn't exactly what I had in mind. You take Professor Wells into the high places. You show him things that even he had never seen. Yesterday, you saw that overhanging wave lip of sand, which not one of us ever noticed, though it was right before our eyes—a perfectly beautiful sand dune breaker. Now you show me the lines of flow, the whirlpools, the lava falls, the flood mass, of the Chocolate Mountains. You have wonderful eyes!"

"You say that—with yours—" he exclaimed, and stopped short.

"I meant what you see," she said tartly.

"I beg your pardon," he whispered, choking over his involuntary impudence to his employer.

She allowed him to think of his sins for a time, and left him, to go to her tent under the stars. He raged through the mesquite, along the edge of the creeping sand dunes.

What a fool he was! She stirred memories in his heart. She swept his guards away. She reminded him of the girl he had known in those old days, when it would have been better if he had died. May Murphin had occupied his heart all those years. Paula Carlon was crowding her in his thoughts, leaving him in the misery of impossible adoration.

 

VI

Sammis, the director, took notice of Paula's chauffeur mechanic. He asked about mountains and arroyos, cut-bank draws and rim rocks, the shapes of wind-cut sedimentary rocks, and the angles of talus slopes. In Henry Howard's replies he visualized the drama of the mountain range, of the storm winds and the casual cloudbursts that have shaped the face of the earth.

Howard read the story of an enormous flood of ages long gone in the petrified woods of the Painted Desert, and told it to Sammis.

"The drift, covered with silt by the sweep of the tide, turned to stone," Howard remarked. "Over in the Chocolates, there, long ago, a lava flood carried drift, too, if we could see it. That stone froze in every shape of wave and flow, splash and eddy."

"I want an overhanging, smooth-faced bluff a hundred feet high, bending out like the upper half of a wave," Sammis said. "I want a scene against a dark, polished background."

"An obsidian cliff?" Howard suggested. "There's one over there."

He had by chance noticed, through his binoculars, such a wave formation. Sammis went over to see, close up.

"You have the idea," he observed. "Better hook up with us—a hundred a week, hunting locations."

Howard hesitated. That was twice his earnings. He did not especially need more money, for he saved half of his wages. He felt disturbed by the thought of leaving his steady job for another. Was he going to be an odd-jobber all his life?

He vainly endeavored to stand against the tempting urge. He succumbed with a feeling of acute distress, amid the jeering of his conscience.

"Hear you've gone into the movies," Paula Carlon greeted him that evening. "Sammis says you have a picture eye, after all."

"I feel like a quitter," he admitted.

"The first time, isn't it?" she asked.

"No," he denied. "I've jumped so many jobs that I can't remember them all. I thought I should hang fast, but I couldn't!"

"Then you are feeling wicked, just because now you must find places where I can do my best?"

"For you?" He turned, amazed. "Finding scenes—for you?"

"Didn't you use to do that once?" she inquired, watching the toe of her shoe roll up the sand.

"Didn't I use to do that?" he repeated wonderingly.

She turned her face squarely toward him, over her shoulder. She transfixed him with the full power of her dark blue eyes. She mocked him with the radiance of their bright humor, while her lips smiled till the joy of appreciation in his heart made it ache.

"These desert stones," she said. "Don't they ever make you think of anything but granite and obsidian and sedimentary rocks?"

He drew back, staring at her. She stood in the full glory of her young but mature womanhood. Through her blazed the flames of personality. In her figure was grace, in her face beauty, in her eyes burning pleasure. Never had she presented to the camera lens so wonderful a picture as the one she now gave to Henry Howard for his very own.

As he looked at her, the splendid figure changed, fading out, while in its place he saw the tense, skinny, bursting eyes of a girl whom he had known long ago, who had lurked amid the perils of the battleground of the Murphins and the Hill Bottoms.

With an effort, he saw again the picture which had challenged him.

"Yes," he admitted. "I remember—I never forget—a girl. We played, then, upon the Lexington Avenue rocks in New York. Every pebble, every rock, every mountain, makes me think of her. I couldn't forget!"

"Could she?" Paula Carlon asked. "Have you never heard from her since?"

"Yes!" He nodded miserably. "We wrote—corresponded—for a little while."

"For a little while?" she asked, with a blistering edge in her tone.

"For years; but I was no good—I couldn't go on. What could I offer her—a cattle hand, a desert tramp, a friend of desperadoes?"

"And a lover of the deserts," she added. "I suppose she stopped writing to you, didn't she?"

"No." He shook his head.

"What? You cut her?"

"She didn't know—she couldn't imagine what I had become."

"So that's the way you treat women!" She stood indignantly at her full, imperious height. "You dropped her! I suppose you regard it as your masculine privilege to treat all of us so!"

"Miss Carlon, don't!" he begged. "There never was any other. I thought—that time when I first saw you—those eyes—I thought for a minute—"

"So you thought I was May Murphin!" she demanded sharply.

"Yes," he nodded.

"And so Paula Carlon wasn't—didn't mean anything, did she?"

"Not much," he said. Then, with a gasp of horror at his unhappy admission: "But, you see—I didn't know—I never paid much attention—"

"Just remembered that Skimp and May played on those Lexington Avenue rocks," she mused. "You couldn't think of anything else!"

"Skimp—Skimp!"

He grew rigid, staring at her, afraid to believe that he had heard that incredible nickname out of the past.

"Yes, Skimp," she nodded. "You had the nerve to cut me. Oh, but I was hot! I could have torn you limb from limb. I humbled my pride; I wrote to your mother and I wrote to you. I was without shame. Even then you didn't remember that I told you, in my last letter, that I was Paula Carlon—the actress they write so much about!"

He reached into his shirt bosom and drew out a thin packet sewed in oiled silk, which hung around his neck. He slit the threads, and held three letters toward her. They had never been opened.

"You didn't read them?" she wondered, taking them.

"I was afraid." He looked away.

"Oh!" She saw the torture that had been in his heart—defeat, hopelessness, dejection, misery at his feeling of worthlessness. "Harry!" She came to him. "I never forgot; I never could forget. I'm shameless, about you! Your mother showed me all your letters. They told me all about you. Your father and mother promised not to tell you about me. I knew where you were. Both of us have worked. You'll never know what a help it has been to me, knowing the singleness of your heart, the steadfastness of your effort to hold that garage job. And all the time you wanted the desert, the mountains—remembering them, studying them, reading about them. I've been jealous of the lava and the cactus, of the rim rock and the sage. You loved them!"

She would have torn the unopened letters, but he begged for them, and put them back into their case.

"May!" He dared to speak at last. "I never should have loved anything, but for my love for you. You were the inspiration that breathed life into every solitude, made real the heart of the wilderness and the spirit of the desert. You were—you are—all the world to me!"

"Oh, yes—I know!" she nodded, with a gay toss of her head. "I know! I used to cry, I was so skinny, so graceless! I knew I'd lose you if I wasn't good-looking! So I just made up my mind. Harry, you did recognize me, but—"

"Yes!" He nodded gravely. "But I missed the freckles!"

"How I hated them!" she sighed, for they had hurt a young and tender consciousness. "Oh, what doesn't it mean to find that you are what you are—my dreams better than realized! Think, brave heart, if I had disappointed you!"

"How much worse to disappoint you!" he exclaimed.

"The luck of faith and toil!" She smiled bewitchingly, glancing at the tents, now glowing in the starlit dark of the desert. "Have you forgotten that evening on the rocks? We stood—do you remember?—like this, and then—in the gloom—with nobody anywhere around—you—you—"

"Ah, sweet!" he whispered. "May I—really—bridge the years?"

She shivered tensely, stepping into the embrace that spanned their lives to their just reward.