V
TONIGHT the wind rose with sunset, sweeping across the desert in strong gusts. The white drifts of sand were disposed anew, in fresh designs. The sand, carried in level strata, cut at Northrup's face and hands, stinging him unmercifully like fine particles of heated glass.
Within an hour the wind dropped. The sparse grass here and there was motionless. It was stifling hot for another hour. Then came sudden cold through which Northrup made swifter progress. At dawn he thought that the mountains were not ten miles away, that he could come to them long before noon.
But as the sun rose, the wind came up with it, blowing again in mighty gusts, then settling into a steady storm from the north. Every step of the way now Northrup fought hard. The wind whipped the moisture out of his body until his skin seemed to be on fire.
Bend his head as he might, the sand found its way under his hat-brim, cutting his face, driving through his shirt-collar, slipping everywhere into his clothing, running into his boots. An hour after sun-up it was fearfully hot; the sun was a small ball looking very far away yet smoldering with an intense red heat.
He hoarded his water, but again and again his dry throat drove him to lift his canteen to his lips. He sought to see the mountains ahead of him and could not make out the dimmest outline.
The flying sand would have hidden them had they been less than a tenth of the ten miles distant. It had smothered the world; it was choking, stifling him. He tied a handkerchief about his face and threw himself to the ground. He could make no progress against that fierce, raging storm from the north. He knew the folly of matching his strength against it. At this rate he would have exhausted his force, drunk his water in an hour, and then the piling, drifting, flying sand would work its grim way with him.
He began to think the storm would never end. The darkness into which mid-day was plunged grew thicker; the sun was a terrible, unearthly thing, dim and red.
Until far in the afternoon the sand-storm swept upon him, racing away into the south with a sound of distant booming, with the whistle of dry sand upon dry wind. Little by little it subsided, the air thinned, a vague blur looking at the end of the world marked the mountains.
Northrup lifted his canteen. He had only a little water, perhaps two cupfuls, left. He drank sparingly and, fearful lest the wind might rise again, blowing for many days as he knew it did at times, he forced his heavy way northward.
He moved like a ghost through a mist of sand all that day. The wind came and went in gusts, dying down utterly toward sunset. The air cleared then, the mountains rose steeper, came marching to meet him. He drank the last drop of water and pushed on.
Moonrise found him, beaten and grimy, at the mouth of the great cañon toward which he had journeyed. He hurried on into the cañon. There were black shadows everywhere about him. But slowly as he went on the shadows drew into themselves as the moon climbed higher.
Here, on each side of him, were the walls of the cañon, lifted up in sheer cliffs. Already the cliffs were a hundred feet high; ahead he could see that they stood up into the sky seven hundred, a thousand feet. The cañon where he stood was perhaps fifty yards in width; a little further on it widened out to three times fifty yards, narrowing again rapidly.
But now Northrup's eyes were concerned not with the walls of rock but with the floor of the cañon. He wanted water, wanted it badly. All day he had been stinted for it; now he must have it, and soon. His throat ached and burned; his tongue felt thick and stiff in his mouth; his whole body cried to him for water.
He believed that he had come to the right cañon; it was as the Hopi had described it, lying due north of the last water-hole, with the tallest peak towering above it. If in the sand-storm he had lost his bearings, why then so much the worse for a foolhardy adventurer.
FOR an hour he sought water and found none. His thirst was tormenting him, driving him mad. The moonlight glistening from a white slab of granite tricked him; he hurried stumbling to it only to twist his lips into a silent curse when he saw clearly.
He sucked at his canteen and in sudden wrath threw it from him. A moment of terror came upon him in which he ran here and there blindly. He jerked himself together with anger at himself.
He went to the flat-topped boulder and sat down. He needed rest almost as badly as he needed water. And he must get himself in hand.
The orb of the moon silvered the cliffs above him. Northrup sent his eyes questing everywhere, even up the cliffs. He saw something move, a wolf he supposed. He wasn't interested in wolves; it was water he wanted.
But his eyes remained a moment with the sign of life, hundreds of feet above him. The moving thing came out from a blotch of shadow and stood upon the edge of the cliff. It was not a wolf, it was a man, or else the trickery of the moon was building another taunting vision for him.
The moving form, coming to the very edge, stood still. Northrup saw the man distinctly, almost straight up above him. The face was in profile, etched clear against the sky. It was the face of an Indian, Hopi perhaps, but handsomer than the Hopi Northrup had known, the nose prominent, the features sharply cut and clear. The Indian was naked save for the white loin-cloth and the band about his head. His arms were flung out toward the moon as if in supplication, his body rigid a moment, his head lifted.
Northrup sought to call out, and a dry whisper in his tortured throat fell hissingly upon his own ears. He sprang up, striving again to call. But the form above him was gone. The man had drawn back from the cliff-edge; the moonlight silvered the rock where he had been.
Hastily Northrup sought the way up there, knowing that he must come upon this man before he was beyond call. He might have used his gun to attract attention—he thought of that now—but already his feet had found the first of the rude steps in the cliff and he was climbing rapidly. When he came to the top, then if the man were not to be seen he would use the gun.
As Northrup's head rose slowly above the edge of the cliff he stopped suddenly, a little gasp in his throat. Here was a great shelf against the precipice, the cliffs falling abruptly to the desert below, rising sheer another five hundred feet back of the level space. The space, itself some hundred feet in length and half of that in width, appeared to him like some mighty stage set for one of the desert's wild extravaganzas.
He saw not one man but fifty, a hundred; he could not estimate how many. All were like the first, gaunt-bodied, clothed in the loin-cloth of pure white, their bodies glistening in the moonlight like polished bronze. They were moving about in a slow, stately procession, their arms lifted to the moon, their faces upturned, their forms swaying rhythmically as they circled about a form standing above them upon a flat boulder. Along the cliff wall upon the far side of the level space Northrup saw other forms, these in the shadow, clothed in white robes, whether of native cotton or buckskin he could not tell, the forms of matrons and maidens, scores of them.
Not a sound had come to him. The feet moving in the wide circle were bare feet falling lightly upon a floor of rock. He saw lips opened, moving in unison as if some mighty chant were bursting from them. And yet no sound of singing came to him. It was as still here as it was out ten miles across the sands.
The form standing upon the boulder about which the others circled, was that of an old man. Northrup saw the hooked beak of a nose like a hawk's, the hair falling about the shoulders, silver under the moon, the black eyes filled with a strange ecstasy. And then the black eyes saw him.
Just Northrup's head coming up slowly from the void below, a great head of yellow, disheveled hair, a great yellow beard, unkempt and made over into gold by the night light, great blue eyes looking fierce as a wolf's from the thirst upon him. And yet the ceremonial dance, if such it were, went on with no pause. The old man stood still, his arms outflung, his lips moving as the lips of the others moved. He had seen Northrup, he had seemed then to have forgotten him.
Northrup came slowly up to the ledge, his big body seeming unnaturally large when at last he stood upon a level with the others.
"Water!" he cried hoarsely. "I want water."
He had spoken in English. His voice cut rudely into the silence. Those who had not seen him before saw him now. A hundred looks turned upon him, swift and startled. For a moment the swaying bodies and moving lips grew as still as the rocks. Then again the bodies swayed, the lips moved, the silent circle continued as if he had not broken into it.
"Water!" cried Northrup again, moving toward them heavily like some great tawny-maned lion, wrath in his eyes. And in half a dozen tongues, dialects of the southwest he hurled the word at them:
"Water. I want water!"
A fierce anger surged into Northrup's heart. Would these copper-bodied devils of silence keep on with their mad dance while Sax Northrup was dying of thirst?
He bore down upon them, the voice in his throat harsh and savage. They gave back before him, moving but a little to the side, their bodies still swaying, their lips still moving. But he saw that the scores of eyes were turned upon him wonderingly.
So he came almost to the boulder upon which the old man stood. He saw that this one was clad differently from the others, a long robe hanging from his shoulders, girted about by a broad band of red, a chain of glass beads—or were they turquoises?—about the forehead, holding the hair back. He had come almost to this man, thinking him to be the one in authority here, when he found another of the bronze bodies in his path.
Northrup plunged toward him, but this man did not move aside. He was taller than the others, Northrup noted, gaunt-bodied like them, but with mighty sinews standing out upon shoulders and arms and thighs, a man as tall as Northrup.
Northrup threw out his arm to thrust this man aside, his one thought to come to the old man. But his arm struck a body hard like rock, unyielding.
" you!" shouted Northrup. "Stand aside. I want water!"
The man's body was swaying gently with the other swaying bodies, his lips moving with the other moving lips, his eyes fearless and stubborn and filled with threat. Northrup's two hands shot out, gripping the bare shoulders.
Until now he had seen no sign of a weapon among these people. But suddenly a knife had leaped out in this man's right hand, the moonlight running down the thin, keen blade. And still no sound save Northrup's heavy breathing and scuffling feet and angry, snarling voice.
Northrup's rage was like the rage of a mad desert animal. As the knife-blade swept upward, preparatory for the downward blow, Northrup struck. His big fist hammered straight into the Indian's face, the knife clattered to the rocks, the Indian staggering back.
In an instant Northrup was upon him, had caught the lean body in his hungering hands, had dragged it to the cliff's edge, had lifted it high in air until the bronzed limbs stood out against the sky.
Then, his savage blood-lust gone as swiftly as it had come, he had cast the man down upon the ledge at his feet, turning swiftly toward the other forms which had ceased swaying at last. And as he turned he heard a burst of laughter, the soft, tinkling laughter of a woman. Out of silence he had drawn this thing, a woman's laugh bubbling over with mirth like the overflow of a sparkling fountain. And then he saw her.
Beyond the stone where the old man stood was a narrow rift in the wall of rock. Deep in the rift was a blazing fire, throwing into relief the form which had come out from it. The form of a girl, her left arm and shoulder bare and brown, a single stone or bead gleaming upon her forehead, her slender form clad in a long, loose robe of white, her feet encased in moccasins of white buckskin.
And her eyes under her dusky hair laughed, her red lips laughed. And as if an echo of her laughter came the laughter of the gaudy-plumaged parrot perched upon her round wrist.
Northrup stared at her in amazement, thinking himself staring at some soft maiden of the Orient. He forgot the others, forgot the man at his feet who had rolled over, his dark hand going swiftly to the knife upon the rock. He thought of it in time because of what he saw in the girl's eyes.
No sound after the laughter had died away, no single word. But in her eyes was a language which was not to be misunderstood. There was anger there now, a wrath which blazed as brightly as Northrup's had. And there was a command. Her eyes, passing beyond Northrup, were upon the man with the knife.
She lifted her hand as if putting a cup of water to her lips. Then she nodded briefly at the man who stood so close to Northrup with the knife shaking in his hand. Northrup, turning, saw again the picture of anger there, but an anger sullen and hesitant.
He again looked to the girl. Her hand, pointing at this man, made again the swift gesture of lifted cup, then swept in a wide arc, pointing into the rift in the rock walls through which the fire gleamed.
Northrup found himself watching as he might have done were this in reality some extravaganza and he in his seat in the audience. He read the command in the girl's furious eyes, the hesitation and sullen rage in the man's, the wonder in other eyes, and something that looked like fear, a look of baffled fury in the eyes of the old man in the long robe. And then he was following the man with the knife, passing through a long lane of silent, watchful figures, going after his guide through the narrow passage-way into the cliffs.
For an instant, as he was passing close to where the girl stood at the mouth of the cleft, Northrup paused, his eyes turned curiously upon her. Her eyes met his steadily, eyes whose color was elusive there in the moonlight. He could only tell that they were big, dark and lustrous.
A word of thanks upon his lips was checked by what he read in her quick expression. The girl's gaze had swept him from the top of his tousled yellow hair to the sole of his dusty boots. Her look, meeting his again, was filled with admiration; her thought stood out plainly, with no attempt at concealment. It was as if she had opened her red mouth and said softly, wonderingly:
"You are the biggest man, the most wonderful, the most handsome I have ever looked upon!"
Northrup's face reddened suddenly and he went on, merely bowing deeply as he passed. He saw the face of the man with the knife; this man too had read the girl's expression and his features were twisted with malicious rage.