_ CHAPTER I. THE PROSPECTOR
For five years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desert station on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paid scant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed with the idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He bought supplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew his name.
The prospector was much younger than he appeared to be. The desert sun had dried his sinews and warped his shoulders. The desert wind had scrawled thin lines of age upon his face. The desert solitude had stooped him with its awesome burden of brooding silence.
Slowly his mind had been squeezed dry of all human interest save the recurrent memory of a child's face--that, and the poignant memory of the child's mother. For ten years he had been trying to forget. The last five years on the desert had dimmed the woman's visioned face as the child came more often between him and the memory of the mother, in his dreams.
Then there were voices, the voices of strange spirits that winged through the dusk of the outlands and hovered round his fire at night.
One voice, soft, insistent, ravished his imagination with visions of illimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it would whisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and draw nearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as a child, fearfully certain of a reply.
Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand, would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And in the indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. The vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities as his desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in its extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his feet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.
Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility of the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....
The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or wracking him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day and night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume of a woman's hair.
Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.
The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening bitter on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewed his shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.
He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their accumulated burdens. He realized that the dream was all--its fulfillment nothing. He knew himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness of his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed from afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment. He found Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging man foothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to consume his years in dust.
A narrow canon held his secret. He had wandered into it, panned a little black sand, and found color. Finally he discovered the fountainhead of the hoarded yellow particles that spell Power. There in the fastness of those steep, purgatorial walls was the hermitage of the two voices--voices that no longer whispered of hope, but left him in the utter loneliness of possession and its birthright, Fear.
He cried aloud for the companionship of men--and glanced fearfully round lest man had heard him call.
He again journeyed to the town beside the railroad, bought supplies and vanished, a ragged wraith, on the horizon.
Back in the canon he set about his labors, finding a numbing solace in toil.
But at night he would think of the child's face. He had said to those with whom he had left the child that he would return with a fortune. They knew he went away to forget. They did not expect him to return. That had been ten years ago. He had written twice. Then he had drifted, always promising the inner voice that urged him that he would find gold for her, his child, that she might ever think kindly of him. So he tried to buy himself--with promises. Once he had been a man of his hands, a man who stood straight and faced the sun. Now the people of the desert town eyed him askance. He heard them say he was mad--that the desert had "got him." They were wrong. The desert and its secret was his--a sullen paramour, but
his nevertheless. Had she not given him of her very heart?
He viewed his shrunken body, knew that he stooped and shuffled, realized that he had paid the inevitable, the inexorable price for the secret. His wine of dreams had evaporated.... He sifted the coarse gold between his fingers, letting it fall back into the pan. Was it for
this that he had wasted his soul?
* * * * *
In the desert town men began to notice the regularity of his comings and goings. Two or three of them foregathered in the saloon and commented on it.
"He packed some dynamite last trip," asserted one.
There was a silence. The round clock behind the bar ticked loudly, ominously.
"Then he's struck it at last," said another.
"Mebby," commented the first speaker.
The third man nodded. Then came silence again and the absolute ticking of the clock. Presently from outside in the white heat of the road came the rush of hoofs and an abrupt stop. A spurred and booted rider, his swarthy face gray with dust, strode in, nodded to the group and called for whiskey.
"Which way did he go, Saunders?" asked one.
"North, as usual," said the rider.
"Let's set down," suggested the third man.
They shuffled to a table. The bartender brought glasses and a bottle. Then, uninvited, he pulled up a chair and sat with them. The rider looked at him pointedly.
"Oh, I'm in on this," asserted the bartender. "Daugherty is the Wells-Fargo man here. He won't talk to nobody but me--about
business."
"What's that got to do with it?" queried the rider.
"Just what you'd notice, Saunders. Listen! The rat left a bag of dust in the Company's safe last trip. Daugherty says its worth mebby five hundred. He says the rat's goin' to bring in some more. Do I come in?"
"You're on," said the rider. "Now, see here, boys, we got to find out if he's filed on it yet, and what his name is, and then--"
"Mebby we'd better find out
where it is first," suggested one.
"And then jump him?" queried the rider over his glass.
"And then jump him," chorused the group. "He's out there alone. It's easy." And each poured himself a drink, for which, strangely enough, no one offered to pay, and for which the bartender evidently forgot to collect.
Meanwhile the prospector toiled through the drought of that summer hoarding the little yellow flakes that he washed from the gravel in the canon. _