"THE thing is
impossible."
"Yes--but there’s
the pot; you can see for yourself."
"Oh, that’s likely
enough. You can’t strike down to bed rock anywhere in this country without
getting colors. The impossibility is that you should find the place it came
from, or, finding it, that it should be profitable to work."
"I wasn’t thinking
of working it."
"Well, what do you
want with it?"
"Oh, to
sell!"
The map maker laugher.
"Ferrol," he said, "you haven’t a rudiment of conscience; not a
trace."
"Oh, come, it’s
not so bad as that. People always bite at these stories of buried treasure and
lost mines. They like to be fooled that way. And as for finding it, there is no
great difficulty about that, I take it. A pot like this won’t outlast a
generation, and these fellows get the material for their artifacts from the
same places time out of mind. And gold has to be thick where an Indian can’t
scoop up a handful of clay to make him a cooking pot without getting it. Why,
man, the thing fairly reeks with gold, good yellow gold."
The map maker did not
speak. He bent above his instruments; his lips moved softly as he worked. The
expedition was camped in the swale of the Dripping Spring, where its waters
gathered in a rock basin under the wild almonds. The desert fell away towards
Death Valley. A blanket stretched upon tent stakes stood between them and the
sky. Behind a hill shoulder Chio kept the camp for his women folk, beginning to
be incredibly busy, like ants, with seeds and roots, dried grasshoppers, and
the flesh of chuckwallas.
Ferrol had found a cooking
pot of an old, crude sort, shot through with grains of yellow gold, in Chio’s
cooking camp.
"I will not sell
the pot," said Chio to all his chaffering.
"Come, now, what
will you do one of these days when the pot is broken? With the money I will give,
you can buy iron pots that will outlast you many such."
"It has lasted
since my father’s time. Will the pots of the white man last longer than
that?"
"Confound the old
rascal!" said Ferrol to himself. "But tell me, Chio, you who know so
much, was the pot made by your own people, or came it from the south?"
"Of my own people,
surely; what should I do with a pot of the Arizonas?"
"And made
hereabouts? I should like to know. Perhaps, since you will not sell, I shall
make me a pot for myself."
Tuyomai looked up from
the fire she was stirring and laughed.
"Tuyomai, go into
the house," said her father.
Ferrol knelt on the
sand, sketching rapidly with his finger. "Look, Chio, here is the desert;
here is Armagossa; here the Dripping Spring. These are the mountains. Is it
here you make pots?"
"I think so; I no
know," said Chio, relapsing from his own speech into broken English, after
the manner of Indians who do not wish to understand.
Ferrol gave him a cigar
and began again. "Is it here towards the getting up of the sun?
Here?"
"Maybe so--I think
so, long time my people not make um. I no know."
Ferrol, sweeping his
map out with his hand, got up, laughing. As he stood, the day lapsed suddenly.
The alpen-glow flowed in evenly across the dead levels of burnt earths, and the
round browed, shouldering hills. "A rainbow land," he said, and
laughed again a whimsical assent to his own conceit. "A rainbow land, and
a pot of gold at the end of it!"
Going back by the way
he came, Fer- rol met the bright, regardful glance of Tuyomai from the chinks
of the thin, twig woven walls of the wickiup. "The women," he said,
struck by a sudden thought. "The women, of course; they are the pot
makers. I’ll go for the girl."
The expedition had
finished its work, and was for returning by way of Pilot Knob, and thence
across the Valley of Salt Wells to the stage road going south. Ferrol, it was
given out by the map maker, would forge north and east to the unnamed purple
barrows touching the desert rim, on the trail of some prehistoric ruins of
which he had word from Chio.
"If you must
go," said the map maker, "for goodness’ sake, don’t let the
expedition know what wild goose’s feather has set you off. If this should get
to headquarters, it would spoil your chance of getting on the Peruvian
expedition, and you know you’ve set your heart on that."
"Oh, that’s all
right! Besides, it is really true--about the ruins, I mean. Tuyomai says they
did not make the pot, but found it near an ancient pottery. The old man lied,
it seems. And Tuyomai says that there are ruins there of hewn stone with
pictures on them. Besides, I can hardly help finding something in this country;
why, man, it’s in the air. Tuyomai says--"
"Does the girl go
with you?" asked the map maker brutally.
Ferrol laughed. He had
a quick insight and facility, and a merry temper, that made him invaluable in
difficult expeditions. He had done some notable things, too, but the
adventurous blood of the Celt stood him in evil stead. He liked the credit
which his work brought him, but government expeditions have limitations, and
more than anything else Ferrol desired a fortune, that he might go adventuring
upon his own account. Clear through the soul of him he loved a happy chance
better than the price of conscious toil; so now he would be off to the
impossible borders of a barren land, on the edge of the dry season, seeking a
rainbow end. But the map maker was wrong about the girl. Ferrol had no notion
of burdening a difficult way with woman’s gear.
The trail, straight
away to the Borax Marsh, and north to the red hill that the Defiance twisted
through, and east again by the California Girl, would bring him to the end of the
mining country, and thence across to the nameless hills as best he might. The
landmarks the girl had given him were sure: a white, wind sculptured chalk
cliff, the tilted beds of vermilion earth, and the black, cleaving outcrop
between two beds of clay--coal, perhaps. Well, that might be worth while also.
Ferrol counted two months to his hazard, and made dry camp by starlight, having
walked on into the gentle night wide eyed with the first fever of his
enterprise. In the dark behind him a coyote howled, and he could hear the soft
push, push, of the burrowing owls clearing out of the trail, and the crisping
of sand under human foot. Ferrol drew his revolver and dropped it again,
catching the stir of a woman’s dress.
"Who?" he
called across the gloom.
"Tuyomai--I have
brought you the pot." She put it down from her head and stooped beside it,
still and wearied.
"Oh, yes, the pot.
So the old man changed his mind, did he?"
"My father does
not know. He is an old man--and the pot would be mine."
"Quite so. Well,
this is awkward; I have only a little silver with me. Will this do?"
The girl did not move.
"Why should I take money?" she said. "I have brought my father’s
pot. And I cannot go back."
The sky filled and
filled with unwinking stars, and the soft gloom grew into sound in the love
notes of the burrowing owls. Ferrol remembered, in the night, to be grateful
that the expedition had traveled well away from Dripping Spring the day before.
Waking, it fell in with his desert mood to see Tuyomai moving softly, and not
without grace, between him and the kindling fire. Well, she knew, if any knew,
where were the beds of golden sand, and the time was past when the tribe would
arise hot on his path for the theft of a girl and a cooking pot.
When they came to the
Borax Marsh, the girl had wit enough to turn out of the trail and wait for him
on the other side; and again when they came to the Defiance, where Ferrol
replenished his store; but by the time they came to the California Girl, he was
past caring.
The thing began to take
the color of a lotus eating dream; a man and a woman free of all things in a
big new land, a woman of shining, gold colored limbs and black, deep lighted
eyes, who loved him dearly; a strong young life that trod the hills with him,
resourceful, tireless, and unafraid. Ferrol thought how good the days of the
first pair must have been. He thought once of the women he had known, and
forgot them utterly.
Tuyomai had the wisdom
of her people in foodful roots and berries and the flesh of wild things. The
days broke softly luminous upon rayed blossomings, and the dewless nights were
deep and sweet with sleep.
All this time they had
not found the golden sands. Old potteries they found, and strewn shards, clay
beds of surpassing qualities, mineral earths, chrome and vermilion, and huge
outcroppings of wasteful ore, but never the thing they sought.
At the end of eight
weeks Ferrol found, at the Defiance, a letter from the map maker, calling him
several kinds of a fool, for the Peruvian expedition had been made up suddenly
without him. Ferrol sent in a report on the deposits of mineral earths, and
went back to the hills and Tuyomai.
In golden noons, under
the almond bushes, he taught her to write upon the sands, and began to explore
the lore of her people, and to learn how many things a man may drop out of his
life without making himself unhappy. So they fared along the rim of the aching
sand wastes, exploring the washes of forgotten streams, until they came again
to the Dripping Spring, where Tuyomai built him a wattled hut; and while Ferrol
dozed, she sat under the creosote brushes, pondering, and writing upon the
sand. Ferrol came upon one of these scrawls one day--his own name written
large, and aside and falteringly "Mrs. Ferrol." He wiped it out
hastily with his foot, Tuyomai accepting the omen silently as becomes a woman
of her race.
When the heat began to
beat down the hollow of the valley, insistent and palpable, they got them up to
the high ridges and the scant shadows of the fox-tail pines, and, when the heat
was past, back to the spring. Here Ferrol built a hut such as miners use in the
rainless hills, for by this time he knew all that was in the mind of Tuyomai
when she wrote upon the sand.
He meant, when he had
made all safe for her, to go back to his own; but when the fire was lit and the
stars burned in the velvet void, and Tuyomai huddled against his feet, silent
as he was silent, glowing when he glowed, he found that the taste of life was
good. And always the cooking pot pricked him towards the golden quest. The
desert wantoned with his intimate desires, kindled, and promised, and withheld.
In the next luminous hollow, the farther hidden hills--everywhere the secret
pressed and warmed him. And the message of the imperturbable hills is that one
must take no account of mere days.
The mail came up from
Minton, and supplies in the ore wagon of the Defiance. Prospectors hailed him
in his wanderings; gipsy bands of Indians shifted from Panniment to Pilot Knob,
and back by way of the Dripping Spring, and Tuyomai made friends with their
women against her time of need. By the time the almonds flowered again, one
came and dwelt by them in a little leafy hut, and Tuyomai, gone back in time of
stress to the habit of her kind, bore him a son lying under the wattles by the
rill of the spring.
Ferrol showed his pot
to the miners he met. The things he knew about it and the things he hoped were
blown about in the common talk, even as far as Angustora, and came back to him
as a thing long established and believed, of a forgotten treasure in a hidden
hill. It would have been better for Ferrol in those days if the little horned
snake of the desert had bitten him, for there is more wealth in that unstinted
land than a man can look upon and keep perfectly sane. So in the end Ferrol
went mad, stark, desert mad; in all else orderly of speech and judgment, but
mad. And Tuyomai made him very comfortable.
Meanwhile the child
grew and arrived at the age of speech. At first the bright blackness of its
eyes and hair, so much darker against the mitigated blackness of its skin, was
an offense to Ferrol; but the clinging of its hands went through and through
him.
By the time the boy
could pull himself up babbling by his father’s knee, Ferrol understood that
this was a son of his own begetting, and required to be named. "Light on
the Mountain," Tuyomai called him, "Sweetwater," "Little
Coyote," and the like foolish women’s phrases, but as yet he had no name
by which a man might be known.
"And what will you
be called, sonny?" said Ferrol, giving the child a finger to hold by.
"Very good,"
laughed Tuyomai. "As thou art the great sun of all my days, so he shall be
Sunny, my little sun." Tuyomai’s English lapsed in those days, since
Ferrol had a fancy for speaking her own speech.
So Sonny he was called,
and when he could run at his father’s heels for the better part of a day,
Ferrol found no fault with his life, though his fortune was not yet made, and
he had not yet begun his great work upon mineral deposits, with the promise of
which he sopped the promptings of an old ambition.
Upon a day when the
light broke rayed and luminous from every blossoming herb, and the creosote,
spreading down into the swale of the spring, fretted the soft air with new
leafage, Ferrol set forth across the hills, and the child got up unbidden from
his play to follow. Tuyomai, plaiting a basket under the wattles, saw them go.
About noon the mail
carrier from Minton called to her from the road that he had seen the child
straying alone on the Argus trail, going further away from home. Tuyomai knew
instantly what had happened. Ferrol had not seen the child following, or,
seeing, had bidden him home, and Sonny had turned out of the trail to explore
on his own account.
Tuyomai filled a
canteen and the pitch smeared wicker water bottle that her people use, took
food, and bethought herself how she might let Ferrol know, if he returned and
found them gone. "Sonny Ferrol passed this way," she wrote upon the
door, for so Ferrol had taught her to mark their trail when they two journeyed
out towards Armagossa in an unforgotten spring. Then, her English failing, she
filled up the space with crude sketches, and cast about from the beaten path to
pick up the boy’s trail with the native craft and patience that wins against
all speed.
Ferrol, coming home
about the time the twilight purple began to fill between the hollow of the
desert and the hollow sky, found the writing on the door, and understood. He
looked at the embers dead upon the hearth and the day dying along the hills; he
ran to the spring for water, and ate as he ran, knowing what was before him.
Seeing the water bottle gone, he cast about for another vessel that might hold
water, and there, on the chimneypiece, stood the cooking pot, in the net
Tuyomai had made to carry it by. He caught it up as he ran, and thrust it
gurgling into the spring.
Ferrol found and
followed the double trail until the night closed. He spent the dark hours
fruitlessly, going down to the cabin of a man he knew for help, and finding
none. At dawn he picked up the trail where Tuyomai had marked it, Indian
fashion, as she went. Ferrol had the explorer’s instinct for topography, could
make straight away to a given landmark, and keep direction clear, but he had
not the Indian’s trained faculties for tracking, and in stony ground he was
baffled. It takes a strong man to deal with a barren land and the madness that
lies in the heart of it. If he knows no landmarks, and cannot pick up his back
tracks, he is not like to see his starting point again, and none but a skilled
tracker, following fast, shall find him. Consider now if it be a child that is
lost, with the mother following, and the father hard upon the trail of both.
Ferrol followed the
woman’s trail, understanding by its windings that she followed some trace of
the child that he lacked wit to see. But there were traces later which he could
understand, body prints where it had stumbled, blood upon the cutting edges of
the black rocks, and crushed twigs where the child had thrust his face in the
midst of the thorns to be free of the burning sun.
So he came at last,
quite spent, and with little water, to a place where all trace of the child
failed, and the woman had lain down and mourned over it. From thence a strong,
steady trail ran down across a limitless, wind beaten sand flat. Under all the
sky nothing moved to the eye, nor any speck showed that might be a living
thing; but that way the woman had gone, grief crazed or moved by some swift
certain hope, and that way went Ferrol, for the woman had been to him as his
wife, and the child was his child.
The desert has taken
many men in its time, and the thirst consumes like fire. Ferrol was already far
spent when he came to the plain. In the night a wind arose and covered all the
trails with drifted sand.
The cabin stood by the
Dripping Spring until the sun warped it asunder, and a miner from Panniment way
carried off the timbers to patch his own dwelling; and there, when the door
swings outward and the light is strong, one might read a penciled scrawl,
"Sonny Ferrol passed this way." In one of the wandering Indian tribes
that drift about the desert rim are a dull, withered woman, neither young nor
old, and a half white boy who answers to the name of Sonny.
Somewhere out in the
plain of Bitter Waters are the bones of a man, and away on the sand flat, where
he cast it from him when he ran in madness, and the hills mocked him as he
ran--somewhere in that rainbow land lies the pot of gold.