Starr, of the Desert Page 6

  CHAPTER SIX

  "DARN SUCH A COUNTRY!"

  Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the headof Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert andthe forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretchedaway and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope,every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to herunfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled itsbarrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply,intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cottonfloating aimlessly here and there. In a big, wild, unearthly way it wasbeautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined.

  Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, thoughthe beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes. Shefelt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped lifeof the town resented both, because she had no previous experience bywhich to measure any part of it. Also, she summed up all her resentmentand her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehementsentence that lacked only one word of being a curse.

  "Darn such a country!" is what she said, gritting the words betweenher teeth.

  "See anything of 'em?" bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he wasengaged in dipping up water with a tomato can and pouring it over hishead, shivering ecstatically as the cold trickles ran down his neck.

  Helen May glanced down at him with no softening of her eyes. Vic had lostnine goats out of the flock he had been set to herd, and he failed tomanifest any great concern over the loss. On the contrary, he had toldHelen May that he wished he could lose the whole bunch, and that he hopedcoyotes had eaten them up, if they didn't have sense enough to stay withthe rest. There had been a heated argument, and Helen May had not feltsure of coming out of it a victor.

  "No, I didn't, and you'd better get back to work or the rest will begone, too," she called down to him petulantly. "It's bad enough to losenine, without letting the rest go."

  "Aw, 's matter with yuh, anyway?" Vic retorted in a tone he thought wouldnot reach her ears. "By gosh, you don't want a feller to cool off, even!By gosh, you'd make a feller _sleep_ with them darned goats if you couldget away with it! Bu-lieve _me_, anybody can have my job that wants it.'S hot enough to fry eggs in the shade, and she thinks, by hen, that Ioughta stay out there--"

  "Yes, I do. And if you want anything to eat to-night, Vic Stevenson, youget right back there with those goats! They're going over the hill thisminute. Hurry, Vic! For heaven's sake, are you trying to take a _bath_ inthat can? Climb up that ridge and cut across and head them off! That oldBilly's headed for town again--hurry!"

  "Aw for gosh sake!" grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the oldhoe-handle he used for a staff. "What ridge?" He paused to thunder up ather, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the lastword, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when heneeds it most.

  "That ridge before your face, chump," Helen May informed him crossly. "Ifit comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I'll take the goats! And ifthere's any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I'd like toknow where it is. The idea of expecting people to live in such a country!It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon's surface.And," she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, "it's here, and I'mhere. I can't get away from it--that's the dickens of it." Then, becauseHelen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughedat the incongruity of it all. "Me--me, here in the desert trying toraise goats! Can you beat that?"

  She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavishdependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again. "You'd think,"she told the scenery for want of other companionship, "you'd think Vicwas seventy-nine years old at the very least. Makes a difference whetherhe's after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts tothe top of Mount Wilson! I don't believe that kid ever did wear his legsout having fun, and it's a sure thing he'll never wear them out working!Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps."

  Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring. Lower down, where theridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that hadcost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped outbriskly at the head of the band. Helen May wondered what new depravitywas in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in andconfront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always topossess that animal.

  Helen May did not know how vitally important it is to have a good dog atsuch work. She did not know that Billy and his band felt exactly likeboys who have successfully eluded a too lax teacher, and that they wouldhave yielded without argument to the bark of a trained sheep dog. She hadset Vic a harder task than she realized; a task from which anyexperienced herder would have shrunk. In her ignorance she blamed Vic,and called him lazy and careless and a few other sisterly epithets whichhe did not altogether deserve.

  She watched now, impatient because he was so long in crossing the gully;telling herself that he was trying to see how slow he could be, and thathe did it just to be disagreeable and to irritate her--as if she werethere of her own desire, and had bought those two hundred miserablegoats to spite him. Harmony, as you must see, did not always dwell inSunlight Basin.

  Eventually Vic toiled up the far side of the gully, which was deep and ashot as an oven, and followed it down within rock-throwing distance of thegoats. A well-aimed pebble struck Billy on the curve of one horn andhalted him, the band huddling vacant-eyed behind him. Vic aimed and threwanother, and Billy, turning his whiskered face upward, stared withresentful head-tossings and a defiant blat or two before he swerved backinto the Basin, his band and Vic plodding after.

  "Well, for a wonder!" Helen May ejaculated ungraciously, grudging Victhe small tribute of praise that was due him. But she was immediatelyashamed of that, and told herself that it was pretty hard on the poorkid, and that after all he must hate the country worse than she did,even, which would certainly mean a good deal; and that she supposed hemissed his boy chums just as much as she missed her friends, and found itjust as hard to fit himself comfortably into a life for which he had noliking. Besides, it wasn't his health that had shunted them both out hereinto the desert, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for treating himthe way she did.

  After that she decided that it was her business to find the nine goatsthat were lost. Vic certainly could not do both at once; and deep down inher heart Helen May knew that she was terribly afraid of Billy and wouldrather trudge the desert for hours under the hot sun than stay in theBasin watching the main flock. She wished that she could afford to hire aherder, but she shrunk from the expense. It seemed to her that she andVic should be able to herd that one band, especially since there wasnothing else for them to do out there except cook food and eat it.

  Speaking of food, it seemed to take an enormous quantity to satisfy thehunger of two persons. Helen May was appalled at the insatiable appetiteof Vic, who seemed never to have enough in his stomach. As forherself--well, she recalled the meal she had just eaten, and wondered howit could be possible for hunger to seize upon her so soon again. But evenso, food could not occupy all of their time, and a two-room cabin doesnot take much keeping in order. They would simply be throwing away moneyif they hired a herder, and yet, how they both did loathe those goats!

  She climbed back down the pinnacle, watching nervously for snakes andlizards and horned toads and such denizens of the desert. With acertain instinct for preparing against the worst, she took a two-quartcanteen, such as soldiers carry, to the spring, and filled it and slungit over her shoulder. She went to the cabin and made a couple ofsandwiches, and because she was not altogether inhuman she cut twothick slices of bread, spread them lavishly with jam, and carried themto Vic as a peace offering.

  "I'm going to hunt those nasty brutes, Vic," she cried from a safedistance. "Come here and get this jam sandwich, and lend me that stickyou've g
ot. And if I don't get back by five, you start a fire."

  "Where you going to look? If you couldn't see 'em from up there, I don'tsee the use of hunting." Vic was taking long steps towards the sandwich,and he stretched his sunburned face in that grin which might have madehim famous in comedy had fate not set him down before his present ignobletask. "Yuh don't want to go far," he advised her perfunctorily. "We oughtto have a couple of saddle horses. Why don't yuh--"

  "What would we feed them on? Besides we've got to save what money we'vegot, Vic. We can walk till these insects grow wool enough to pay forsomething to ride on."

  "Hair, you mean. I can get a gentle horse from that Mexican kid, Luis. Hegood as offered us the one--that I borrowed--" Vic was giving too muchattention to the jam sandwich to argue very coherently.

  "There's that old Billy starting off again; you watch him, Vic. Don't lethim get a start, or goodness knows where he'll head for next. We can'tkeep a horse, I tell you. We need all this grass for the goats."

  "Oh, darn the goats!"

  In her heart Helen May quite agreed with the sentiment, but she could notconsistently betray that fact to Vic. She therefore turned her back uponhim, walking down the trail that led out of the Basin to the main trail amile away, the trail which was the link connecting them with civilizationof a sort.

  Here passed the depressed, dust-covered stage three times a week. Here,in a macaroni box mounted on a post, they received and posted theirmail. Helen May had indulged herself in a subscription to the LosAngeles daily paper that had always been left at their door everymorning, the paper which Peter had read hastily over his morning mush.Every paper brought a pang of homesickness for the flower-decked city ofher birth, but she felt as though she could not have kept her sanitywithout it. The full-page bargain ads she read hungrily. The weeklyannouncements of the movie shows, the news, the want columns--these wereat once her solace and her torment; and if you have ever been exiled,you know what that means.

  Here, too, she left her shopping list and money for the stage driver, whobought what she needed and left the goods at the foot of the post, andwhat money remained in a buckskin bag in the macaroni box.

  An obliging stage driver was he, a tobacco chewing, red-faced,red-whiskered stage driver who nagged at his four horses incessantly andnever was known to beat one of them; a garrulous, soft-hearted stagedriver who understood very well how lonely these two young folks must be,and who therefore had some moth-eaten joke ready for whoever might bewaiting for him at the macaroni box. Whenever Helen May apologized forthe favor she must ask of him--which was every time she handed him alist--the stage driver invariably a nasal kind of snort, spat far outover the wheel, and declared pettishly:

  "It ain't a mite uh trouble in the world. That's what I'm _fur_--to helpfolks out along my rowt. Don't you worry a mite about that." Often as hesaid it, he yet gave it the tone of sincerity and of convincingfreshness, as though he had never before given the matter a thought.Helen May did not know what she would have done without that stage driverto bridge the gulf between Sunlight Basin and the world.

  But this was not stage day. That is to say, the stage had passed to thefar side of its orbit, and would not return until to-morrow. From SanBonito it swung in a day-long journey across the desert to Malpais,thence by a different route to San Bonito again, so that Helen May neversaw it returning whence it had come.

  A cloud of desert dust always heralded its approach from the east.Sometimes after the first dust signal, it took him nearly an hour to topthe low ridge which was really one rim of the Basin. Then Helen May wouldknow that he carried passengers or freight that straightened the backs ofthe straining four horses in the long stretch of sand beyond the ridgeand made their progress slow.

  But to-day there was no dust signal, and the macaroni box was but adismal reminder of her exile. The world was very far away, behind theviolet rim of mountains, and she was just a speck in the desert. Her highlaced boots were heavy, and the dust settled in the creases around herslim ankles, that could be perfectly fascinating in silken hose anddainty slippers. Her khaki skirt, of the divided kind much affected bytourists, had lost two big, pearl buttons, and she had no others toreplace them. Her shirt-waist had its collar turned inside for coolness,and the hollow of her neck was sun-blistered and beginning to peel. Alsoher nose and her neck at the sides were showing a disposition to grow newskin for old. So much had the desert sun done for her.

  But there was something else which the desert had done, something whichHelen May did not fully realize. It had put a clear, steady look into hereyes in place of the glassy shine of fever. It was beginning to fill outthat hollow in her neck, so that it no longer showed the angular ends ofher collar bones. It had put a resilient quality into her walk, firmnessinto the poise of her head. It had made it physically possible, forinstance, for Helen May to trudge out into the wild to hunt nine goatsthat had strayed from the main band.

  Though she did not know it, a certain dream of Peter's had very nearlycome true. For here were the vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable intheir magnificent calm. At night the stars seemed to come down and hangjust over Helen May's head. There was the little cottage of which Peterhad dreamed--only Helen May called it a miserable little shack--hunchedagainst a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars;sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrillinsistence of the coyotes. Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and sohopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm. And here was Helen Maycoming through the sunlight--Peter never dreamed how hot it wouldbe!--with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind and with the little redspots gone from her cheeks and with health in her eyes that were thecolor of ripe chestnuts. When her skin had adjusted itself to the rigorsof the climate, she would no doubt have freckles on her nose, just asPeter had dreamed she might have. And if she were walking, instead ofriding the gentle-eyed pony which Peter had pictured, that was notPeter's fault, nor the fault of the dream. There was no laugh on herlips, however. Dreams are always pulling a veil of idealism over the faceof reality, and so Helen May's face was not happy, as Peter had dreamedit might be, but petulant and grimly determined; her ripe-red lips weremoving in anathemas directed at nine detested goats.

  Peter could never have dreamed just that, but all the same it is a pitythat, in order to make the dream a reality, Peter had been forced to denyhimself the joy of seeing Helen May growing strong in "Arizona, NewMexico, or Colorado." It would have made the price he paid seem lessterrible, less tragic.