Harold Bell Wright

“ As men through the ages had braved the dangers and endured the hardships of desert and mountains to gain the yellow wealth from the Cañada del Oro, so men braved dangers and endured hardships everywhere. Every dream of man was a dream of gold. Every effort was an effort for gold. Every hope was a hope for gold. For gold was life and honor and power and love and happiness. And gold was death and dishonor and murder and hatred and misery.
It was gold that had led Marta’s father to purchase the rich mining property from the ignorant owners, for a price that was little more than nothing. ”

“ Hugh Edwards drew back from the edge of the cliff. For a single instant he was sick with horror. Then the blood of his race surged through his veins with tingling strength. In that moment it meant nothing to him that the man bound to the rock down there was an Indian. It made no difference that the red man, with cunning cruelty, had for weeks ingeniously tortured him to gratify a savage thirst for revenge against all white people. He did not, at the moment, even remember Marta and his need of Natachee’s help. ”

“ You, a white woman, shall hear an Indian. I, Natachee, will speak.
“It would be easier to number the drops of water that fell in the storm to-night than to tell the years of these mountains that look down upon the Cañada del Oro and the desert beyond. They have seen the ages pass as the cloud shadows that race across their foothills when the spring winds blow. Before the beginnings of what you white people call history they had watched many races of men rise to the fullness of their strength and pride, and fall as the flowers of the thistle poppies fall in the desert dust. ”

“ Every morning from his own cabin door he had looked for the chimney smoke as a wretched castaway watches for a signal of hope and cheer. Every night in his loneliness he had looked for the lights as one lost in the desert looks at a guiding star. He could not bear the thought now of those dark windows and empty rooms.
As the Pardners were climbing out of the creek bed where the trail leaves the cañon for the higher levels they heard the thundering roar of the coming flood.
“Thank God, we know that won’t git her anyhow,” gasped old Thad. “That there run jest about winded me.” ”

“ Beyond the garden there was a rude barn or shelter, built as the Indians build, of sahuaro poles and mud, with a small corra made of thorny ocotillo, and the place as a whole was roughly inclosed by an old fence of mesquite posts and barbed wire. On every side the mountains rose—ridge and dome and peak—into the sky, and night and day, through summer droughts and winter rains, the cañon creek murmured or sang or roared on its way from the woodsy heart of the Catalinas to lose itself in the sandy wastes of the desert below. ”

“ For gold, your people destroy the forests—tear down the mountains—dry up or poison the streams—lay waste the grass lands and bring death to all life. For gold they would rob, degrade, enslave and kill every race that is not of white blood. For gold they rob, degrade, enslave and kill their own white brothers. Even the natural mating love of their men and women they have made into a thing to buy and sell for gold. In this lust for gold their children are begotten, and born to live for gold, and of gold to perish. ”

“ That freedom—the freedom from the thing that had driven him to hide in the Cañada del Oro—the freedom to tell her his love, could only be had in the gold for which he toiled in the sand and gravel and rocks beside the cañon creek.
As men, through all the years, have sought gold for love, so he had worked in that place of broken hopes and vanished dreams. Every day when she was with him he had sternly forced himself to wait. Every night he had dreamed, in his lonely cabin, of the time when he should be free. ”

“ Marta knew now with terrifying certainty that she loved Hugh Edwards—not, indeed, with the love that she gave Saint Jimmy and, which, until Edwards came, was the only kind of love she knew, but with that other love—the love that a woman gives to the one man she chooses above all others to be her man for all time to come, in the lives of her children—their children. Her happiness that morning had been born of the certainty that the man she had chosen wanted her. ”

“ Natachee said slowly:
“When everybody believed that the woman Hugh Edwards loved was one who had no real right to even the name she bore, then he could ask her to become his wife. Now that the woman is the daughter of honor and wealth, how can the convict expect her to go with him? Hugh Edwards is not blind. He sees it is now more fitting that the woman he loves become the wife of his friend, Saint Jimmy, upon whose name there is no shadow.” ”

“ THE CAÑON OF GOLD
And yet—those who look for it still find “color” in the Cañada del Oro. Romance and adventure still live in the Cañon of Gold. The treasures of life are not all hidden in a lost mine behind an iron door.
FROM every street and corner in Tucson we see the mountains. From our places of business, from our railway depots and hotels, from our University campus and halls, and from the windows and porches of our homes we look up to the mighty hills. ”

“ WHEN Hugh Edwards left Saint Jimmy and the Indian, he was beside himself with grief and rage. He had prepared himself, in a measure, to lose Marta. He had told himself that his love was strong enough to endure even that test, but to give her up because she proved to be the daughter of the man who, by making him a convict, had robbed him of the right to keep her, was more than he could endure. ”

“ And it was this—this bit of worthless yellow dirt—that brought the first white man to the Indians. For gold, the white adventurers braved the dangers of an unknown ocean and forced their way into an unknown land. For gold, they have robbed and killed the people whose homeland they invaded, until to-day we are as dead grass and withered leaves in the pathway of the fire of the white man’s greed. We are as a handful of desert dust in the whirlwind of your civilization.”
He threw the piece of quartz aside with a gesture of loathing, and stood for a moment with his head lowered in sorrow. ”

“ No one but Hugh Edwards and Natachee knows that. No one shall know until you, Donald Payne, are revenged for all that this man Clinton has made you suffer. When you have trapped this Clinton coyote—when you have made him pay for your shame—your imprisonment—your mother’s death—when he has paid for everything your heart holds against him—then I, Natachee, will have paid my debt to you. ”

“ I can see now that I have always been like our cañon creek in summer, just playing along any old way, taking things as they are, without even caring whether I stopped or not, but now—now I feel like the creek is to-day, with its springtime life, boiling and roaring and leaping—I won’t—I won’t be like the creek though—that for all its strength and fuss and fury just fades away at last into nothing, out there in the desert. ”

“ They are the lights that come and go in the cañon depths when the frightened moon tries to hide in the pines of Mount Lemmon. They are the voices that we hear in the nighttime, whispering,{117} murmuring, moaning. Weary spirits that cannot rest, troubled souls that find no peace—the disappointed ones.
“And you who dare to dream and hope and labor here in the Cañon of Gold to-day as those thousands who dared to dream and hope and labor here before you—what are you but living ghosts among these restless spirits of the dead? ”

“ Hugh Edwards gazed at the Indian, bewildered, amazed, wondering.
“What on earth do you mean, Natachee?”
“Do you not understand? Listen.”
“The girl, who does not know what her father did, will go with you. Good!—Take her. Let there be a pretense of marriage. Then, when her shame is accomplished, send her to her father. Let George Clinton, who made Donald Payne a convict, beg that convict to give his daughter a name for her children. The shame that he heaped upon your name—the dishonor that he compelled you to suffer—you will give back to him through his daughter.” ”

“ The Indian rose to his feet and stood looking down upon the white man and something in his face—a shadow of a cruel smile, a gleam of savage light in his dark eyes—something—made Edwards rise and draw back a step.
“I do enjoy the company of Doctor Burton,” said the red man. “He is suffering. He is dying slowly. He is in torment. I am Natachee the Indian, why should I not enjoy the company of any white man who is like your Saint Jimmy or who can be made to suffer in any way?” ”

“ Again that quick light of savage pleasure flashed across the dark face of the red man.
“An Indian has no right to dream of love,” he answered, “for love to an Indian means children. Why should an Indian wish to have children?”
When the girl hid her face in her hands, he continued with cruel purpose:
“Is it so hard for Marta Hillgrove to understand that there might be circumstances under which it would become a duty to deny one’s self the happiness of loving? If it is there are two men who could, I am sure, make it clear to her.” ”

“ From plans that had failed and hopes that were buried, Jimmy himself turned to the grandeur of the mountains and the beauty of tree and bush and flower—to the limitless spaces of the desert and the peace of the quiet stars. The life of the great eastern city, with its hunger for fame, its struggle for riches, its endless tumult and its restless longings, faded farther and farther away. The simple, more primitive, more peaceful life of God’s great unimproved world became every day more satisfying. ”

“ In every life there are the ashes of fires that have burned out or, by some cold fate, have been extinguished. For every living one of us, I believe, there is a Cañada del Oro—a Cañon of Gold—there is a lost mine that will never be found—there are iron doors that may never be opened. ”

“ Sonora Jack would have burned the heart out of the Indian’s breast but he never would have heard from the Indian’s lips the secret of the Mine with the Iron Door. It is not a new thing for an Indian to be tortured for gold. I, Natachee, would have died as so many of my fathers have died, without a word. But you, a white man, obedient to your strange white man’s nature, offered your own life to save the life of Natachee the Indian, who had for months been torturing you. The trail of hatred and revenge that lay so clear before the red man is lost in the strange desert of the white man’s ways. ”

“ And, while Marta herself had been wholly unconscious of the true meaning of those emotions which so disturbed her, her teacher had understood that the womanhood of his child pupil was beginning to assert itself. He was too wise not to know also that the time was approaching when Marta herself would understand.
Through all her girlhood she had been no more conscious of herself than were the wild creatures that she knew so much better than she knew her own humankind. She had lived and accepted life without a thought of the part that, as a woman, she would some day be called upon to play in it. ”

“ Against a sky of liquid gold, melting into the deeper blue above, wreaths of flaming crimson cloud mists were flung with the careless splendor of the Artist who paints with the brush of the wind and the colors of light on the canvas of the heavens. The man bared his head and, with face uplifted, watched.
He felt the soft breath of the spring on his cheek and caught the perfume of cedar and pine. He heard the birds singing among the blossoms on the mountain side. He saw the mighty peaks and crags towering high. ”

“ From the peaks of these mountains Natachee the Indian can see far. From the place where the sun rises in the east, to the mountains behind which he goes down in the west, and from the farthest range that lies like a soft blue shadow in the north, to that line in the south where the desert and the sky become one, this land was the homeland of my Indian fathers. Since the God of all life placed us here it has been our home. ”

“ The two old prospectors, who had spent the greater part of their lives amid scenes of hardship and danger and whose years had been years of disappointment and failure in their vain search for treasure of gold, had given themselves without reserve to the child that chance had so strangely placed in their keeping. Lacking the home love and the fatherhood that spurs the millions of toiling men to their tasks, and glorifies the burden of their labors, Bob and Thad had spent themselves in their love for their partnership daughter. ”

“ But on other occasions, when Natachee and Edwards were alone, the red man would, for the moment, cast aside every mark of his training in the schools, and, with the voice, words, and gestures peculiar to his race, express thoughts and emotions that were purely Indian. Much of the time, however, he would sit silently watching the white man at his work. Often he would come and go without a word. He would sometimes appear, too, when Marta and Edwards were together, and on these occasions, save for a courteous greeting, he was rarely more than a silent observer. ”

“ Invariably, when he saw that the white man was nearing the limit of his endurance, the Indian would hold before him the promise of the future—the love and happiness that would be his when he should find the gold—the gold that he would perhaps strike—to-morrow. ”