The Heritage of the Desert

IX THE SCENT OF DESERT-WATER

 SOON the shepherds were left to a quiet unbroken by the whistle of wild mustangs, the whoop of hunters, the ring of iron-shod hoofs on the stones.  The scream of an eagle, the bleating of sheep, the bark of a coyote were once more the only familiar sounds accentuating the silence of the plateau.  For Hare, time seemed to stand still.  He thought but little; his whole life was a matter of feeling from without.  He rose at dawn, never failing to see the red sun tip the eastern crags; he glowed with the touch of cold spring-water and the morning air; he trailed Silvermane under the cedars and thrilled when the stallion, answering his call, thumped the ground with hobbled feet and came his way, learning day by day to be glad at sight of his master.  He rode with Mescal behind the flock; he hunted hour by hour, crawling over the fragrant brown mats of cedar, through the sage and juniper, up the grassy slopes.  He rode back to camp beside Mescal, drove the sheep, and put Silvermane to his fleetest to beat Black Bolly down the level stretch where once the gray, even with freedom at stake, had lost to the black.  Then back to camp and fire and curling blue smoke, a supper that testified to busy Piute's farmward trips, sunset on the rim, endless changing desert, the wind in the cedars, bright stars in the blue, and sleep--so time stood still.

Mescal and Hare were together, or never far apart, from dawn to night. Until the sheep were in the corral, every moment had its duty, from camp-work and care of horses to the many problems of the flock, so that they earned the rest on the rim-wall at sundown.  Only a touch of hands bridged the chasm between them.  They never spoke of their love, of Mescal's future, of Jack's return to hearth; a glance and a smile, scarcely sad yet not altogether happy, was the substance of their dream. Where Jack had once talked about the canyon and desert, he now seldom spoke at all.  From watching Mescal he had learned that to see was enough.  But there were moments when some association recalled the past and the strangeness of the present faced him.  Then he was wont to question Mescal.

"What are you thinking of?" he asked, curiously, interrupting their silence.  She leaned against the rocks and kept a changeless, tranquil, unseeing gaze on the desert.  The level eyes were full of thought, of sadness, of mystery; they seemed to look afar.

Then she turned to him with puzzled questioning look and enigmatical reply.  "Thinking?" asked her eyes.  "I wasn't thinking," were her words.

"I fancied--I don't know exactly what," he went on.  "You looked so earnest. Do you ever think of going to the Navajos?"

"No."

"Or across that Painted Desert to find some place you seem to know, or see?"

"No."

"I don't know why, but, Mescal, sometimes I have the queerest ideas when I catch your eyes watching, watching. You look at once happy and sad. You see something out there that I can't see.  Your eyes are haunted. I've a feeling that if I'd look into them I'd see the sun setting, the clouds coloring, the twilight shadows changing; and then back of that the secret of it all--of you--Oh! I can't explain, but it seems so."

"I never had a secret, except the one you know," she answered.  "You ask me so often what I think about, and you always ask me when we're here." She was silent for a pause.  "I don't think at all till you make me. It's beautiful out there.  But that's not what it is to me.  I can't tell you.  When I sit down here all within me is--is somehow stilled.  I watch--and it's different from what it is now, since you've made me think.  Then I watch, and I see, that's all."

It came to Hare afterward with a little start of surprise that Mescal's purposeless, yet all-satisfying, watchful gaze had come to be part of his own experience.  It was inscrutable to him, but he got from it a fancy, which he tried in vain to dispel, that something would happen to them out there on the desert.

And then he realized that when they returned to the camp-fire they seemed freed from this spell of the desert.  The blaze-lit circle was shut in by the darkness; and the immensity of their wild environment, because for the hour it could not be seen, lost its paralyzing effect. Hare fell naturally into a talkative mood.  Mescal had developed a vivacity, an ambition which contrasted strongly with her silent moods; she became alive and curious, human like the girls he had known in the East, and she fascinated him the more for this complexity.

The July rains did not come; the mists failed; the dews no longer freshened the grass, and the hot sun began to tell on shepherds and sheep.  Both sought the shade.  The flowers withered first--all the blue-bells and lavender patches of primrose, and pale-yellow lilies, and white thistle-blossoms.  Only the deep magenta of cactus and vermilion of Indian paint-brush, flowers of the sun, survived the heat.  Day by day the shepherds scanned the sky for storm-clouds that did not appear.  The spring ran lower and lower.  At last the ditch that carried water to the corral went dry, and the margin of the pool began to retreat.  Then Mescal sent Piute down for August Naab.

He arrived at the plateau the next day with Dave and at once ordered the breaking up of camp.

"It will rain some time," he said, "but we can't wait any longer.  Dave, when did you last see the Blue Star waterhole?"

"On the trip in from Silver Cup, ten days ago.  The waterhole was full then."

"Will there be water enough now?"

"We've got to chance it.  There's no water here, and no springs on the upper range where we can drive sheep; we've got to go round under the Star."

"That's so," replied August.  His fears needed confirmation, because his hopes always influenced his judgment till no hope was left. "I wish I had brought Zeke and George.  It'll be a hard drive, though we've got Jack and Mescal to help."

Hot as it was August Naab lost no time in the start.  Piute led the train on foot, and the flock, used to following him, got under way readily. Dave and Mescal rode along the sides, and August with Jack came behind, with the pack-burros bringing up the rear.  Wolf circled them all, keeping the flanks close in, heading the lambs that strayed, and, ever vigilant, made the drive orderly and rapid.

The trail to the upper range was wide and easy of ascent, the first of it winding under crags, the latter part climbing long slopes.  It forked before the summit, where dark pine trees showed against the sky, one fork ascending, the other, which Piute took, beginning to go down.  It admitted of no extended view, being shut in for the most part on the left, but there were times when Hare could see a curving stream of sheep on half a mile of descending trail.  Once started down the flock could not be stopped, that was as plain as Piute's hard task.  There were times when Hare could have tossed a pebble on the Indian just below him, yet there were more than three thousand sheep, strung out in line between them.  Clouds of dust rolled up, sheets of gravel and shale rattled down the inclines, the clatter, clatter, clatter of little hoofs, the steady baa-baa-baa filled the air.  Save for the crowding of lambs off the trail, and a jamming of sheep in the corners, the drive went on without mishap.  Hare was glad to see the lambs scramble back bleating for their mothers, and to note that, though peril threatened at every steep turn, the steady down-flow always made space for the sheep behind.  He was glad, too, when through a wide break ahead his eye followed the face of a vast cliff down to the red ground below, and he knew the flock would soon be safe on the level.

A blast as from a furnace smote Hare from this open break in the wall. The air was dust-laden, and carried besides the smell of dust and the warm breath of desert growths, a dank odor that was unpleasant.

The sheep massed in a flock on the level, and the drivers spread to their places.  The route lay under projecting red cliffs, between the base and enormous sections of wall that had broken off and fallen far out.  There was no weathering slope; the wind had carried away the smaller stones and particles, and had cut the huge pieces of pinnacle and tower into hollowed forms.  This zone of rim merged into another of strange contrast, the sloping red stream of sand which flowed from the wall of the canyon.

Piute swung the flock up to the left into an amphitheatre, and there halted.  The sheep formed a densely packed mass in the curve of the wall. Dave Naab galloped back toward August and Hare, and before he reached them shouted out: "The waterhole's plugged!"

"What?" yelled his father.

"Plugged, filled with stone and sand."

"Was it a cave-in?"

"I reckon not.  There's been no rain."

August spurred his roan after Dave, and Hare kept close...