Zane Grey

“ Merryvale seemed galvanized from age to youth.
“Your brother’s grave!... Guerd Larey’s grave? By heaven! I wish I could take you to it!... Adam, you’re out of your head. You are desert mad.... Bless you, lad, you’ve made a terrible mistake! You’re not what you think you are. You’ve hid in the desert fourteen years—you’ve gone through hell—you’ve become Wansfell—all for nothin’!... My God! to think of thet!... Adam, you’re no murderer. Your brother is not dead. He wasn’t even bad hurt. No—no—Guerd Larey’s alive—alive—alive!” ”

“ Adam understood now why a noble Indian, unspoiled by white men, reverenced a debt which involved life. The paying of that debt was all of unity and brotherhood there existed in the world. If it was great to feel gratitude for the saving of his life, it was far greater to remember he had saved the life of his savior. Adam, deeply agitated, watched Dismukes stride down the barren trail, behind his bobbing burros, watched him stride on into the lonely, glaring desert, so solemn and limitless and mysterious, until he vanished in the gray monotony. ”

“ What a ghastly fantasy the struggle for life in Death Valley! What mockery of wind and desert and avalanche!
“Wansfell—listen,” whispered the woman. “Do you hear—it passing on?”
“Yes,” replied Adam, bending lower to see her eyes. Did she mean that the roar of wind was dying away?
“The stormy blast of hell—with restless fury—drives the spirits onward!” she said, her voice rising.
“I know—I understand. But you mustn’t speak such thoughts. You must not give up to the wandering of your mind. You must fight,” implored Adam.
“My friend—the fight is over—the victory is mine.... I shall escape Virey. ”

“ Adam remembered how Dismukes had loved to travel alone. If he had any selfishness in his great heart, it had been to gloat over the lonely places by himself. Even with Adam he seldom shared those moments of watching and listening. Always, some part of every day, he would spend alone on a ridge, on a height, or out on the sage, communing with this strange affinity of the desert. Adam had known Dismukes, at the end of a hard day’s travel, to walk a mile and climb to a ledge, there to do nothing at all but watch and listen. ”

“ Adam had his chance to live awhile in one of the desert’s fruitful and blossoming spots. Only a desert man could appreciate the rest, the ease, the joy, the contrast of that opportunity. He could befriend an unfortunate child. But as refreshing and splendid as were these things, they were as naught compared to the blessing that would be breathed upon his head by a dying mother. Adam, lifting up his face to the starlight, felt that all his intense and passionate soul could only faintly divine what the agony of that mother had been, what now would be her relief. ”

“ Passionate love of life, to see, to hear, to feel, to touch, had come to him with its saving grace, after the ruthless and violent strife of the desert had taught him to survive. But these were not the soul of nature. This was not nature’s secret. He was a man, a creature of inherited instincts that the desert had intensified. In nature’s eyes he was no different from the lonely desert bird or beast seeking its mate. The law was not wrong, but all the progress of mankind as represented in Adam’s revolt made that law wrong. ”

“ Adam’s final conception of Magdalene Virey was that she had been hideously wronged by life, by men; that in younger days of passionate revolt she had transgressed the selfish law of husbands; that in maturer years, with the storm and defeat and disillusion of womanhood, she had risen to the heights, she had been true to herself; and with mockery of the man who could so underestimate her, who dared believe he could make her a craven, whimpering, guilty wretch, she had faced the desert with him. She had seen the great love that was not love change to terrible hate. ”

“ The beasts of the desert and the birds recognized it—strength—speed—ferocity—tenacity of life. The Indians worshiped greatness so that they looked up and prayed to their gods. They worshiped stature, and power and skill of hand, and fleetness of foot, and above all—endurance. More, they endowed their great chieftains with wisdom. But above all—to endure pain, heat, shock, all of the desert hardships, all of the agonies of life—to endure—that was their symbol of greatness.
Adam asked no other for himself or for any man. To endure and to surmount the ills of life! Any man could be great. ”

“ It was realization that a man needed.
A crescent beautiful moon soared up over the dark bulk of the mountain. Adam paced to and fro in a sandy glade of the oasis. All the immensity of desert and infinity of sky seemed to be at work to overwhelm him. The stars—so white, wonderful, watching, eyes of heaven, remorseless and wise! Not a sigh of wind stirred under the palms, not a quiver of a leaf. Nature seemed so strange, beautiful, waiting. All waited! Was it for him? The shadows on the white sand wrote Adam’s story of wild youth and crime and flight and agony and passion and love. ”

“ A specter, weird and grotesque as a yucca tree, loomed out there in the shadows of the desert night. Death stalked on Adam’s trail. The hatred of men was beyond power to understand. Work, fame, use, health, love, home, life itself, could be sacrificed by some men just to kill a rival or an enemy. Adam remembered that Collishaw had hated him and loved Guerd. Moreover, Collishaw had that strange instinct to kill men—a passion which grew by what it fed on—a morbid mental twist that drove him to rid himself of the terrible haunting ghost of his last victim by killing a new one. ”

“ A strong man’s farewell to life, out there on the lonesome desert, would be elemental and natural. But the hour of facing death—how sad, lonely, tragic! Yet it had been bravely met by countless men over all the desolate deserts of the dreary world. All men did not feel alike. Perhaps the strongest, bravest, calmest, would suffer the least. Still, it was Adam’s conviction that to look up at the indifferent heavens and to send a hopeless cry out across the desert, realizing the end, remembering with anguish the faces of loved ones, would indeed be a bursting of the heart. ”

“ Then came a low, grating roar. The avalanche of endless broken rocks had slipped an inch. It left an ominous silence. Adam stirred restlessly in his blankets. There was a woman in the lee of that tremendous sliding slope—a woman of delicate frame, of magnificent spirit, of a heart of living flame. Every hour she slept or lay wide eyed in the path of that impending cataclysm was one of exceeding peril. Adam chafed under the invisible bonds of her will. Because she chose to lie there, fearless, beyond the mind of man to comprehend, was that any reason why he should let her perish? ”

“ Life might be eternal, but not for him. Soon the seeping sand would nestle round his bleached bones and fill the sockets where once his eyes had burned. Genie was a gift of chance. He had wandered down into this valley, and now his life should never be lonely again. Lover of beauty and worshiper of nature, he had but to extend his arms to receive a treasure far greater than the gold of the desert, more beautiful than its flaming flowers, more mysterious than its fierce and inevitable life. A girl whose white body, like a transparent opal, let the sunshine through! ”

“ From this vantage point Adam looked back over the silver sea of sand dunes; and such was the sight of it that even in his precarious condition he was stirred to his depths. The huge oblong silver moon hung low over that vast heaving stretch of desert. It was a wasteland, shimmering with its belts and plains of moonlit sand, blank and mysterious in its shadows, an abode of loneliness. An inexplicable sadness pervaded Adam’s soul. This wasteland and he seemed identical. How strange to feel that he did not want to leave it! Life could not be sustained in this sepulcher of the desert. ”

“ Heart and blood and pulse and nerve burst red hot to the fight, and to passionate love of liberty, of life. He was in the grasp of a giant of the ages. He fought as he had fought thirst, starvation, loneliness—as he had fought the desert and the wild beasts and wilder men of that desert. The deep and powerful instinct which he had conquered for Genie’s sake—the noble emotion of love and bliss that he had overcome for Ruth’s sake—what were these compared to the hell in his heart now? It was love of life that made him a fierce wild cat of the desert. ”

“ He turned his face to the cool, sweet, sage-scented breeze, and then he lifted it to the afterglow of sunset. Ah! the new, strange joy of life—the incalculable force of the natural man!
The luminous desert stretched before him, valley and mountain, and beyond them was other range and other valley, leading to the sea, and across its heaving bosom were other lands; and above him was the vast, deep-blue sky with its pale evening star, and beyond them began the infinite.
Adam felt himself a part of it all. His ecstasy was that he lived. Nature could not deny him. ”

“ Midnight was haunting. Somehow the desert with its mustering shadows, dark and vast and strange, resembled his soul and his destiny and the mystery of himself. How sweet the loneliness and solitude of the oasis! There under the palms he could walk and be himself, with only the eye of nature and of spirit on him in this final hour of his extremity.
Happiness was not imperative; self-indulgence was not essential to life. Adam realized he had done wonderful things—perhaps noble things. But nothing great! Perhaps all his agony had been preparation for this supreme ordeal. ”

“ Morning broke swiftly and relentlessly, a gray, desert dawning. Dim columns of smoke scarce a mile away showed him that Yuma was close. Fields and cattle along the road, and then an Indian hut, warned him that he was approaching the habitations of men and sooner or later he would be seen. He must hide by day and travel by night. Bordering the road to his left was a dense thicket of arrowweed, indicating that he had reached the bottom lands of the river. Into this Adam crawled like a wounded and stealthy deer. Hunger and thirst were slight, but his whole body seemed a throbbing ache. ”

“ Adam’s thought halted with the seeming sacrilege of associating Magdalene Virey with memory of the Mexican girl. This Virey woman had complexity—she had mind, passion, nobility, soul. What had she done to earn her husband’s hate? She had never loved him—that was as fixed in Adam’s sight as the North Star. Nor had she loved another man, at least not with the passion and spirit of her wonderful womanhood. Adam divined that with the intensity of feeling which the desert loneliness and solitude had taught him. ”

“ And Adam began to doubt that he would ever come. And the hope of Genie’s, that he never would come began insidiously to enter into Adam’s thought. Again the loneliness, the solitude and silence, and something more he could not name, began to drag Adam from duty, from effort of mind. The desert never stopped its work, on plant, or rock, or man. Adam knew that he required another shock to quicken his brain, to stir again the spiritual need, to make him fight the subtle, all-pervading, ever-present influence of the desert. ”

“ The thing that struck Adam so singularly was that these ants did not recognize defeat. They could not give up. Failure was a state unknown to their instincts. And so they performed marvelous feats. What was the spirit that actuated them? The mighty life of nature was infinitely strong in them. It was the same as the tenacity of the lichen that lived on the desert rocks, or the eyesight of the condor that could see its prey from the invisible heights of the sky, or the age-long destructive movements of the mountain tops wearing down to the valleys. ”

“ Had not Adam heard from many prospectors how no white woman could live in Death Valley? He had been there only a day, yet he felt that he could understand why it must be fatal to women. But it was not so because of heat and poison wind and cataclysms of nature, for women could endure those as well as men. But no woman could stand the alterations of terror and sublimity, of beauty and horror. That which was feminine in Adam shuddered at a solitude that seemed fitting to a burned-out world. ”

“ Adam could sleep no more. This silence belied the blinking of the stars. It disproved the solidarity of the universe. Nothing lived, except his soul, that seemingly had departed from his body in a dream, and now with his vague thoughts and vaguer feelings wandered over the wastelands, a phantom in the night. Silence of utter solitude—most intense, dead, dreaming, waiting, sepulcher-like, awful! Where was the rustle of the wings of the bats? The air moved soundlessly, and it seemed to have the substance of shadows. A dead solitude—a terrible silence! A man and the earth! ”

“ Ruth was coming under the oaks. She liked the cool shade and hated the glare. She was nineteen, with a woman’s form and her mother’s eyes—proud, sweet, aloof.
“Desert man, I am lonesome,” she said. “My grandfather has gone again. He is chasing some new will-o’-the-wisp. Gold and mines, cattle and land—and now it’s water. He has an ear for every man.”
“Lonesome? You! What do you know of loneliness?” asked Adam.
“There’s a loneliness of soul.”
“Ah! but you are young. Go help Genie plan her home.”
“Genie and Gene! Two people with but one voice! They cannot hear or see anyone but themselves. ”

“ Long the trail had been overgrown and dim, and cattle tracks were scarce. The wide willow and mesquite flat, with its groves of cottonwoods, had grown denser, wilder, no more crisscrossed by trails. Adam had slowed down now, and he skirted the edge of the thicket till he reached the bank of bronze rock that had flowed down from the peaks in ages past. The ocatillas, so pearly gray, softly green, and vividly scarlet, grew there just the same as long ago when he had plucked a flower for the dusky hair of Margarita. ”

“ They transcended men in love, in sacrifice, in that living flame of soul, turbulent and unquenchable as the fire of the sun.
“I’ll hide no more!” burst from Adam, and the whisper startled him, like those soundless whispers in the shadows.
He could live no longer a life in hiding. He must stand, in his own consciousness, if only for a moment, free to look any man in the face, free to be worthy to love Ruth Virey, free as the eagle of his spirit. He would no longer hide from man, from punishment. ”

“ At sight of his hard, craggy, bronze face, serried and seamed with the lines of years, it seemed that a bolt shot back in Adam’s heart, opening a long-closed door.
“Charley Jim!” he ejaculated, in startled gladness.
“How, Eagle!” His deep voice, the familiar yet forgotten name, the lean brown hand, confirmed Adam’s sight.
“Chief, the white man has not forgotten his Indian friend,” replied Adam.
“Eagle no same boy like mescal stalk. Heap big! Many moon! Snows on the mountain!” said Charley Jim, with a gleam of a smile breaking the bronze face. ”

“ Adam’s keen eyes, peering through the red-tinged obscurity, made out the dark shape of Virey staggering along back and forth like an old man driven and bewildered, hounded by the death he feared. The sight gave Adam a moment of fierce satisfaction. Strong as was the influence of Magdalene Virey, it could not keep down hate for this selfish and fallen man. Selfish beyond all other frailty of human nature! The narrow mind obsessed with self—the I and me and mine—the miserable littleness that could not forgive, that could not understand! Adam had pity even in his hate. ”

“ These intermittent blasts resembled the midnight furnace winds, except for the strange fact that they were not so hot, so withering. Every few minutes the canyon would be obscured in sweeping, curling streaks and sheets of dust. Then, as the gale roared away, the dust settled and the air again cleared. But high up, the dull, yellow pall hung, apparently motionless, with that weird sun, like a red-orange moon seen through haze, growing darker.
The fury of the elements seemed to favor Adam. Heat and gale and obscurity could tend only to relax the vigilance of men. ”

“ Conscience then must be the great factor in human progress—the difference between savage and civilized man. Terribly strange for Adam to look at his brawny hands and remember what they had done to men! Over him, then, gushed the hot blood, over him quivered the muscular intensity, over him waved the fierce passion which, compared with that of his boyhood, was as the blaze of sun to a candle. He had killed men in ruthless justice, in strife of self-defense, but always afterward he had regretted. ”

“ But for the most part of the still, hot, waking hours, Adam, when he was not working or sleeping, devoted himself to Genie. The girl changed every day—how, he was unable to tell. Most wondrous of all in nature was human life, and beyond all sublimity was the human soul!
Every morning at sunrise Genie knelt by her mother’s grave with bowed head and clasped hands, and every evening at sunset or in the golden dusk of twilight she again knelt in prayer. ”

“ Only a man in whom intellect was supreme, who could look upon life resignedly as not the ultimate end, who knew not the delights of sensation, who had no absorbing passion for the gray old desert or the heaving sea, or the windy heights and the long purple shadows, who never burned and beat with red blood running free—only a martyr living for the future, or a man steeped in religion, could endure this blight of consumption. When Adam considered life in nature, he could understand this disease. ”

“ Then that desert instinct, like the bursting of a flood, moved Adam to the violence of strife, the ruthlessness of nature, the blood-spilling of men. Madness of hate seized him. The torrid heat of that desert sun boiled in his blood, the granite of the slope hardened in his heart, the red veils of smoky shadows colored his sight. Loneliness and solitude were terrible forces of nature—primitive as the beginnings of life. For years the contending259 strife of the desert had been his. For months desolation, death, decay of Death Valley! ”

“ Tired and sleepy as he was, when he lay down in his bed he felt a striking dissimilarity of this place to any other he had known on the desert. How profound the silence! Had any sound ever pervaded it? All was gloom and shadow below, with black walls rising to star-fretted sky as blue as indigo. The valley seemed to be alive. It breathed, yet invisibly and silently. Indeed, there was a mighty being awake out there in the black void. Adam could not believe any man and woman lived up this canyon. Dismukes had dreamed. ”