Books: The Long Chance
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Peter B. Kyne >> The Long Chance
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"A sore heel, a mean soul and no spunk have killed more men than
whisky" the Desert Rat commented whimsically, as he pulled the weak
brother out of a cluster of catclaw. "Boston, you're an awful nuisance
--you are, for a fact. You've had water three times to our once, and yet
you go to work and peter out with Chuckwalla Tanks only five miles
away. Why, I've often covered that distance on my hands and knees.
Come, now, buck up. Hang on to the rear cross of one of the pack
saddles and let the jack snake you along."
"I can't, I'm exhausted. I'll die if I don't have a drink."
"No, you'll not die. No such luck. And there isn't any more water.
However, you've been spoiled in the raising, so I suppose we'll have to
defer to you--particularly since it's my fault that we're short of
water. What can't be cured must be endured, and I can't let you die."
He spoke to the Indian, who took two canteens and departed into the
night.
"He's going to hike on ahead to Chuckwalla Tanks and bring back some
water for you, Boston" the Desert Rat explained. "He'll return about
daylight, and we'll wait here until he arrives. It's dangerous, but the
jacks aren't in a bad way yet. They can make it to the Tanks, even
after sunrise."
"Thanks" murmured the sufferer.
The Desert Rat grinned. "You're getting on" he commented.
"Where is Chuckwalla Tanks?" The tenderfoot sat up and stared after the
figure of the departing Indian, still visible in the dim moonlight.
"In a little gorge between those low hills. You can just make out their
outlines."
"Yes, I see them. And after that the closest water is where?"
"The Colorado river--forty miles due south. But we're headed northwest
and must depend on tanks and desert water-holes. It's hard to tell how
close one is to water on that course. But it doesn't matter. We'll
refill the kegs at Chuckwalla Tanks. There's most always water there."
"And you say the Colorado river is forty miles due south."
"Well, between forty and fifty."
"Much obliged for the information, I'm sure."
He straightened suddenly and drew back his arm. The Desert Rat saw that
he was about to hurl a large smooth stone, and simultaneously he dodged
and reached for his gun. But he was a fifth of a second too slow. The
stone struck him on the side of the head, rather high up, and he
collapsed into a bloody heap.
On the instant the footsore man from Boston developed an alacrity and
definiteness of purpose that would have surprised the Desert Rat, had
he been in condition to observe it. He seized the gad which the mozo
had dropped, climbed upon the lightest laden burro and, driving the
others before him, set off for Chuckwalla Tanks. The Indian had
disappeared by this time, and there was little danger of overtaking
him; so with the two low hills as his objective point, the Easterner
circled a mile out of the direct course which he knew the Indian would
take, and when the dawn commenced to show in the east he herded the
pack-animals down into a swale between two sand-dunes. With remarkable
cunning he decided to scout the territory before proceeding further;
hence, as soon as there was light enough to permit of a good view, he
climbed to the crest of a high dune and looked out over the desert. As
far as he could see no living thing moved; so he drove the pack train
out of the swale and headed for the gorge between the hills. The
thirsty burros broke into a run, hee-hawing with joy as they sniffed
the water, and within a few minutes man and beasts were drinking in
common at Chuckwalla Tanks.
The man permitted them to drink their fill, after which they fell to
grazing on the short grass which grew in the draw. While he realized
the necessity for haste if he was to succeed in levanting with the
gold, the tenderfoot had been too long a slave to his creature comforts
to face another day without breakfast. He abstracted some grub from one
of the packs and stayed the pangs of hunger. Then he bathed his
blistered feet, filled the water kegs, rounded up his pack train and
departed up the draw. After traveling a mile the draw broadened out
into the desert, and the man from Boston turned south and headed for
the Rio Colorado. He was walking now and appeared to have forgotten
about his blistered heel, for at times he broke into a run, beating the
burros, screaming curses at them with all the venom of his wolfish
soul, for he was pursued now by the fragments of his conscience. His
attack upon the Desert Rat had been the outgrowth of a sudden murderous
impulse, actuated fully as much by his hatred and fear of the man as by
his desire to possess the gold. One moment he would shudder at the
thought that he had committed murder; the next he was appalled at the
thought that after all he had only stunned the man--that even now the
Desert Rat and his Indian retainer were tracking him through the waste,
bent on wreaking summary vengeance.
He need not have worried so prematurely. A low range of black malpais
buttes stretched between him and the man he had despoiled, and as yet
the direction of his flight could not be observed. He drifted rapidly
south and presently disappeared into one of those long swales which
slope gradually to the river.
Here, weaving his way among the ironwood that grow thickly in this
section of the desert, for the first time since the commission of his
crime he felt safe.
CHAPTER II
It was still dark when the Desert Rat regained consciousness. He lay
for quite a while thereafter, turning things over in his befuddled
brain, striving to gather together the tangled thread of the events of
the night. Eventually he succeeded in driving his faculties into line.
He rolled over, got to his hands and knees and paused a minute to get a
fresh grip on himself. His aching head hung low, like that of a dying
horse; in the silence of the night he could hear the drip, drip of his
blood into the sand.
Presently he began to move. Round and round in the sage he crawled,
like some weary wounded animal, breaking off the rotten dead limbs
which, lie close to the base of the shrub. Three piles of sage he
gathered, placing the piles in a row twenty feet apart. Then he set
fire to them and watched them burst into flame.
It was the desert call for help: three fires in a row by night, three
columns of smoke against the horizon by day--and the Cahuilla Indian,
coming down the draw from Chuckwalla Tanks five miles away, saw flaming
against the dawn this appeal of the white man he loved, for whom he
lived and labored. Straight across the desert he ran, with the long
tireless stride that was the heritage of his people. His large heavy
shoes retarded him; he removed them, tucked them under his arm and with
a lofty disdain of tarantulas and side-winders fled barefooted. Three-
quarters of an hour from the time he had first seen the signal-fires,
the mozo was kneeling beside the stricken Desert Rat, who lay
unconscious close to one of the fires. The water from the mozo's
canteen revived him, however, and presently he sat up, while the
Cahuilla washed the gash in his head and bound it up with his master's
bandanna handkerchief.
As the Indian worked, the white man related what had occurred and how.
He recalled his conversation with his assailant, and shrewdly surmised
that he would head for the Colorado river, after having first secured a
supply of water at Chuckwalla Tanks. The Desert Rat's plan of action
was quickly outlined.
"You will help me to get to the Tanks, where I'll have water and a
chance to rest for a day or two until I'm able to travel; then I'll
head for the Rio Colorado and wait for you in Ehrenburg. I'll keep one
canteen and you can take the other; I have matches and my six-shooter,
and I can live on quail and chuckwallas until I get to the river. You
have your knife. Track that man, if you have to follow him into hell,
and when you find him--no, don't kill him; he isn't worth it, and
besides, that's my work. It's your job to run him down. Bring him to me
in Ehrenburg."
It was past noon when they arrived at the Tanks, and the Indian was
carrying the Desert Rat on his back. While the man was quite conscious,
he was still too weak from the effect of the blow and loss of blood to
travel in the heat.
At the Tanks the Indian picked up the trail of four burros and a man.
He refilled his canteen, took a long drink from the Tank, grunted an
"_Adios, senor,_" and departed up the draw at the swift dog-trot
which is typical of the natural long-distance runner.
The Desert Rat gazed after him. "God bless your crude untutored soul,
you best of mozos" he murmured. "You have one virtue that most white
men lack--you'll stay put and be faithful to your salt. And now, just
to be on the safe side, I'll make my will and write out a detailed
account of this entire affair--in case."
For half an hour he scribbled haltingly in an old russet-covered note-
book. This business attended to, he crawled into the meager shade of a
_palo verde_ tree and fell asleep. When he awoke an hour or two
later and looked down the draw to the open desert, he saw that another
sandstorm was raging.
"That settles it" he soliloquized contentedly. "The trail is wiped out
and the best Indian on earth can't follow a trail that doesn't exist,
But that wretched little bandit is out in this sandstorm, and the jacks
will stampede on him and he'll pay _his_ bill to society--with
interest. When the wind dies down the pack outfit will drift back to
this water-hole, and when Old Reliable finds out that the trail is
lost, _he'll_ drift back too. Anyhow, if the burros don't show
we'll trail _them_ by the buzzards and find the packs. Ah, you
great mysterious wonderful desert, how good you've been to me! I can
sleep now--in peace."
He slept. When he awoke again, he discovered to his surprise that he
had been walking in his sleep. He had an empty canteen over his
shoulder and he was bareheaded. His head ached and throbbed, his tongue
and throat felt dry and cottony; he seemed to have been wandering in a
weary land for a long time, for no definite reason, and he was thirsty.
He glanced around him for the water-hole beside which he had lain down
to sleep and await the mozo and the burros. On all sides the vast
undulating sea of sand and sage stretched to the horizon, and then the
Desert Rat understood. He had been delirious. With the fever from his
wound and the thought of the fortune of which he had been despoiled,
uppermost even in his subconscious brain, he had left Chuckwalla Tanks
and started in pursuit. How far or in what direction he had wandered he
knew not. He only knew that he was lost, that he was weak and thirsty,
that the pain and fever had gone out of his head, and that the Night
Watchman walked beside him in the silent waste.
It came into his brain to light three fires--to flash the S. O. S. call
of the desert in letters of smoke against the sky--and he fumbled in
his pocket for matches. There were none; and with a sigh, that was
almost a sob the dauntless Argonaut turned his faltering footsteps to
the south and lurched away toward the Rio Colorado.
Throughout the long cruel day he staggered on. Night found him close to
the mouth of a long black canyon between two ranges of black hills,
whose crests marked them as a line of ancient extinct volcanoes.
"I'll camp here to-night," he decided, "and early tomorrow morning I'll
go up that canyon and hunt for water. I might find a 'tank.'"
He lay down in the sand, pillowed his sore head on his arm, and, God
being merciful and the Desert Rat's luck still holding, he slept.
At daylight he was on his way, stiff and cramped with the chill of the
desert night. Slowly he approached the mouth of the canyon, crossing a
bare burnt space that looked like an old "wash."
Suddenly he paused, staring. There, before him in the old wash, was the
fresh trail of two burros and a man. The trail of the man was not well
defined; rather scuffed in fact, as if he had been half dragged along.
"Hanging to the pack-saddle and letting the jack drag him" muttered the
lost Desert Rat. "I'll bet it's little Boston, after all, and I'm not
yet too late to square accounts with that _hombre._"
In the prospect of twining his two hands around the rascal's throat
there was a certain primitive pleasure that added impetus to the
passage of the Desert Rat up the lonely canyon. The thought lent new
strength to the man. Dying though he knew himself to be, yet would he
square accounts with the man who had murdered him. He would--
He paused. He had found the man with the two burros. There could be no
mistake about that, for the canyon ended in a sheer cliff that towered
two hundred feet above him, and in this horrible _cul de sac_ lay
the bleached bones of two burros and a man.
Here was a conundrum. The Desert Rat had followed a fresh trail and
found stale bones. Despite his youth, the desert had put something of
its own grim haunting mystery into this man who loved it; to him had it
been given to understand much that to the layman savored of the occult;
at birth, God had been very good to him, in that He had ordained that
during all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how to
die, and meet the issue unafraid. For the Desert Rat was a philosopher,
and even at this ghastly spectacle his sense of humor did not desert
him. He sat down on the skull of one of the burros and laughed--a dry
cackling gobble.
"What a great wonderful genius of a desert it is!" he mumbled. "It's
worth dying in after all--a fitting mausoleum for a Desert Rat. Here I
come staggering in, with murder in my heart, stultifying my manhood
with the excuse that it would be justice in the abstract, and the Lord
shows me an example of the vanity and littleness of life. All right,
Boston, old man. You win, I guess, but I've got an ace coppered, and
even if you do get through, some day you'll pay the price."
He sat there on the bleached skull, his head in his hands, trembling,
pondering, yet unafraid in the face of the knowledge that here his
wanderings must end. He was right. It was a spot eminently befitting
the finish of such a man. It was at least exclusive, for the vulgar and
the common would never perish here. In all the centuries since its
formation no human feet, save his own and those of the man whose
skeleton lay before him, had ever awakened the echoes in its silent
halls. Pioneers, dreamers both, men of the Great Outdoors, each had
heard the call of the silent places--each had essayed to fight his way
into the treasure vaults of the desert; and as they had begun, so had
they finished--in the arms of Nature, who had claimed the utmost of
their love.
The Desert Rat was a true son of the desert. To him the scowl of the
sun-baked land at midday had always turned to a smile of promise at
dawn; to him the darkest night was but the forerunner of another day of
glorious battle, when he could rise out of the sage, stretch his young
legs and watch the sun rise over his empire. He knew the desert--he saw
the issue now, but still he did not falter.
"Poor little wife," he mumbled; "poor little unborn baby! You'll hope,
through the long years, waiting for me to come back--and you'll never
know!"
His faltering gaze wandered down the canyon where his own tracks and
those of the dead shone gray against the brown of the sun-swept wash.
He had followed a trail that might have been ten years old; perhaps, in
the years to come, some other wanderer would see _his_ tracks,
halting, staggering, uncertain, blazing the ancient call of the desert:
"Come to me or I perish." And following the trail, even as the Desert
Rat had followed this other, he, too, in his own time, would come at
length to the finish--and wonder.
The Desert Rat sighed, but if in that supreme moment he wept it was not
for himself. He had many things to think of, he had much of happiness
to renounce, but he was of that breed that dares to approach the end.
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch.
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
For him the trail had ended here, as it had for this other remnant
of vanished life that lay before him now with arms outstretched.
The Desert Rat stared at the relic. A cross! The body formed a
cross! Here again was The Promise--
A thought came to the perishing wanderer. "I'll leave a message" he
gobbled. He could not forbear a joke. "To be delivered when called for"
he added. "This other man might have done the same, but perhaps he
didn't care--perhaps there wasn't anybody waiting at home for him."
From his shirt pocket he drew the stub of a lead pencil and the note-
book in which he had written his will and the record of his betrayal.
He added the story of his wanderings since leaving Chuckwalla Tanks,
and the postscript:
The company in which I will be found was not of my own seeking.
He was here before me by several years and I found nothing
whereby he might be identified.
He tore the leaves out of the note-book, stuffed them inside his empty
canteen and screwed the cap on tight; after which he cast about for a
prominent place where he might leave his last message to the world.
At the head of the canyon stood an extinct volcano, its precipitous
sides forming the barrier at the western end of the canyon. Away back
in the years when the world was young, a stream of thin soupy lava,
spewed from this ancient crater, had flowed down the canyon out onto
the desert. It was this which the Desert Rat had at first taken for an
old "wash." Owing to the pitch of the canyon floor, most of the lava
had run out, but a thin crust, averaging in thickness from a quarter to
three quarters of an inch, still remained. Originally, this thin lava
had been a creamy white, but with the passage of centuries the sun had
baked it to a dirty brown and the lava had become disintegrated and
rotten. As the hot lava had hardened and dried it had cracked, after
the fashion of a lake bed when the water has evaporated, but into
millions and millions of smaller cracks than in the case where water
has evaporated from mud. As a result of this peculiar condition, the
entire lava capping in the canyon was split into small fragments, each
fragment fitting exactly into its appointed place, the whole forming a
marvelous piece of natural mosaic that could only have been designed by
the Master Artist.
With the point of his pocket knife the Desert Rat pried loose one of
these sections of lava. Where it had been exposed to the sun on top it
was brown, but the under side was the original creamy white.
The mystery of the phantom trail was solved at last. In fact, not to
state a paradox, there had been no mystery at first--at least to the
Desert Rat. The moment he saw the bones he guessed the answer to that
weird puzzle.
The tracks were easily explained. When one walked on the surface of
this thin lava crust it broke beneath him and crumbled into dust. The
brown dust on top mingled with the underlying white, the blend of
colors on the whole forming a slate-colored patch with creamy edges,
marking the boundaries of the footprints; and here, in this horrible
canyon, where rains would never erode nor winds obliterate, the tracks
would show for years until the magic of the desert had again wrought
its spell on the landscape and the ghostly white tracks had faded and
blended again into the all-prevailing brown.
The Desert Rat was something of a geologist, and had he not been dying,
an extended examination of this weird formation would have interested
him greatly. But he had his message to leave to his loved ones, and
time pressed. In the joy and pride of his strength and youth he had
dared the desert. He had dreamed of a fortune, and this--this was to be
the awakening...
He crawled out into a smooth undisturbed space and fell to work with
the point of his knife. Carefully he raised piece after piece of the
natural mosaic, inverted it and laid it back in its appointed place. At
the end of two hours he finished. There, in inlaid letters of creamy
white against the desert brown, his message flared almost imperishable:
Friend, look in my canteen and see that I get justice.
A century must pass before that message faded; as for the coming of the
messenger, he would leave that to the Almighty.
The Desert Rat was going fast now. He moved back a few feet, fearful
that at the end he might obliterate his message. With his fading gaze
fixed on the mouth of the canyon he lay waiting, hoping, praying, brave
to the last ... and presently help came.
It was the Night Watchman!
CHAPTER III
Serenely indifferent to the fact that but a few hours' average running
time intervenes between it and San Francisco on the north, and Los
Angeles on the south, the little desert station of San Pasqual has
always insisted upon remaining a frontier town.
One can pardon San Pasqual readily for this apparent apathy. Not to do
so would savor strongly of an application of the doctrine of personal
responsibility in the matter of a child with a club-foot. San Pasqual
isn't responsible. It has nothing to be proud of, nothing to incite
even a sporadic outburst of civic pride. It never had.
Here, in this story, occurs a description. In a narrative of human
emotions, descriptions are, perhaps, better appreciated when they are
dispensed with unless, as in the case of San Pasqual, they are worth
the time and space and trouble. Assuming, therefore, that San Pasqual,
for all its failings, is distinctive enough to warrant this, we will
describe the town as it appeared early in the present decade; and, for
that matter, will continue to appear, pending the day when they strike
oil in the desert and San Pasqual picks itself together, so to speak,
and begins to take an interest in life. Until then, however, as a
center of social, scenic, intellectual and commercial activity, San
Pasqual will never attract globe-trotters, folks with Pilgrim ancestors
or retired bankers from Kansas and Iowa seeking an attractive
investment in western real estate.
San Pasqual is such a weather-beaten, sad, abject little town that one
might readily experience surprise that the trains even condescend to
stop there. It squats in the sand a few miles south of Tehachapi pass,
hemmed in by mountain ranges ocher-tinted where near by, mellowed by
distance into gorgeous shades of turquoise and deep maroon. They are
very far away, these mountains, even though their outlines are so
distinct that they appear close at hand. The desert atmosphere has cast
a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into
lines of beauty in certain lights. It is well that this is so, for it
helps to dispel an illusion of the imaginative and impressionable when
first they visit San Pasqual--the illusion that they are in prison.
The basin that lies between these mountains is the waste known as the
Mojave desert. It stretches north and south from San Pasqual, fading
away into nothing, into impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions
of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it
seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play
tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the
midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and
withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while
warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death. There is
a bearing down of one's spirit in the midst of all this loneliness and
desolation that envelops everything; yet, despite the uncanny mystery
of it, the sense of repression it imparts, of unconquerable isolation
from all that is good and sweet and beautiful, there are those who find
it possible to live in San Pasqual without feeling that they are
accursed.
At the western boundary of the Mojave desert lies San Pasqual, huddled
around the railroad water tank. It is the clearing-house for the
Mojave, for entering or leaving the desert men must pass through San
Pasqual. From the main-line tracks a branch railroad now extends north
across the desert, through the eastern part of Kern county and up the
Owens river valley into Inyo, although at the time Donna Corblay enters
into this story the railroad had not been built and a stage line bore
the brunt of the desert travel as far north as Keeler--constituting the
main outlet from that vast but little known section of California that
lies east of the Sierra Nevada range.
Hence, people entering or leaving this great basin passed through San
Pasqual, which accounted for the town that grew up around the water
tank; the little row of so-called "pool parlors," cheap restaurants,
saloons and gambling houses, the post-office, a drug store, a tiny
school-house with a belfry and no bell and the little row of cottages
west of the main-line tracks where all the _good_ people lived--
which conglomerate mass of inchoate architecture is all that saved San
Pasqual from the ignominy of being classed as a flag station.
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