toward Black Mesa and the wide desert beyond—somehow reminiscent of the eloquent gesture of an Indian.
“An’ you reckon all this heah will ease you?” he queried.
Paul nodded. Ease him! He gazed down into the shallow gulch with its banks scarred by avalanches, its jumble of huge boulders, at the green-bordered pool shining yet strangely dark under the sun, at the mossy cliff with its streaks of gray, at the dark-portaled trading post among the cedars on the knoll, at the frowning black front of the mesa, wild in its magnificence of ruin, with its bleak rim reaching skyward. Then his eyes swept farther out to the gray desert, and once again he felt the strange, vague kinship with this desolation that had prompted his rash and inexplicable step.
“Quién sabe?” muttered the Texan, simply, as if he were alone. “Bitter water, hard as the hinges on the gates of hell. Stunted cedar an’ sage. Rocks forever an’ thet wasteland oot there. A black mountain with the face of the devil. A tradin’ post over the reservation line. A wretched lot of Indians, stuck for life in this ghastly hole. Haw, haw. . . ! Thet’s the ticket, an’ my friend wants to live heah!”
It seemed beyond the Texan’s comprehension. “Manning,” he went on, “I’ve rode this country. The human bein’s who live oot heah don’t count. Nature rules heah. This desert will be locked in snow an’ ice in winter, the coldest, dreariest, hardest place on earth. In spring when the thaw comes you’ll wade in ’dobe mud for weeks. Then the dust an’ sandstorms, shore the bane of a cowboy’s life. A yellow wall of flyin’ sand, thick as a curtain, swoops down on you, an’ you pile off yore hoss an’ cover yore face, an’ suffocate. Then comes the blastin’ hot summer with its turrible lightnin’ an’ thunder. Why, Texas hasn’t got anythin’ on this country for thet. An’ altogether, it’s jest one hell-bent range, fit only for rattlesnakes an’ coyotes.”
“Wess, you’re way off if you are trying to discourage me. All that you say only strengthens my desire to come.”
“Wal, by Gawd!” ejaculated Kintell, with a snatch at a cedar branch close by. “I get you now. Yore lookin’ to help some more pore devils, red or white, jest as you helped me.”
“No! I hadn’t thought of that,” replied Paul hastily.
“Shore, it’s in the back of yore mind,” declared the cowboy, as he arose to his lean height. “Wal, I reckon you’re gonna need me powerful bad. . . . Let’s go down an’ look the place over.”
“You go. Talk to the trader. You’re a cattleman. Find out all you think I should know. Then come back and we’ll decide how best to carry out my plan.”
“Good idee, boss. I reckon I’ll heah a hell of a lot an’ see more.”
Paul watched the lithe rider stride down the rock-strewn slope. “That cowboy will be good for me, if anyone could be,” he said with a nod of his head. “He gave me a hunch. ‘Looking to help some more poor devils. . . !’ It sounds good. But I’m not out of the woods myself, so why should I bother my head about helping anyone else? Misery loves company, they say. Not mine. But are loneliness, solitude, desolation all I want? For God’s sake, what do I want? What do I imagine I see here?”
Again he turned his gaze toward the desert, first the section near at hand and then to the gray horizon line. He failed to see what Kintell had pointed out. The early spring sunshine, pale and without heat, shone steelily down upon the little valley of the seeping spring. The place appeared abandoned. Red and gray boulders, slopes of weathered earth, scrubby brush and dwarfed cedars spread tortured, naked branches, like arms, to the sky. A forlorn garden patch with a broken fence of poles, a bare plot of sand which soon swallowed up the stream of water from the gleaming pool, the stained bluff glistening with its wet seepings and white residue, the long, low mud-roofed cabin with its gaping door, and above it all the stupendous slope of splintered cliff and jumble of rock and massed tangle of cedars, up and up in wild and ragged ruin to the black unscalable wall—all these passed in slow review before Paul’s absorbed gaze, and instead of revulsion he felt only a strange sense of attraction, as if these evidences of nature’s havoc had formed their counterpart in the abyss of his soul.
Black Mesa sheered up abruptly to the east behind the post; and far away, high on the rolling slope to the north, appeared the lofty lines of green poplar trees and the white walls and red roofs which marked the site of the government school and station, Walibu. Paul reflected that this nearest outpost of civilization encroached but little upon Bitter Seeps.
Farther northward the broken mesa wall loomed in lonely magnificence, until seventy miles away its battlements ended in a black crown against the blue sky. Below it and to the west spread the desert, so vast as to be staggering to the senses of man. Streaked by the black and suggestive lines of canyon, it reached to the dim, upflung plateau, topped by bands of purple and white.
This expanse held Paul Manning’s gaze until at last it began to mean something for him. Somehow this melancholy waste had begun to give him the first illusive sense of peace. It rested him. The littleness of man, his futile despair, his brief span of life—what were they to this indefinite breadth of sage, broad as the dome of sky above it? For millions of years live creatures of some kind had eked out their short existences out on that lonely waste, and their bones had gone to nourish the roots of the sage.
In the foreground, just beyond the red knoll on which stood the trader’s cabin, a band of goats dotted the sage, shepherded by an Indian boy mounted on a burro. The lonely figure of the boy lent the only visible sign of life to the scene and somehow made it real. Beyond waved the gray sea of bleached grass and seared sage. Red rocks, like sentinels, stood up at intervals but they were blended into the universal grayness. This sameness extended for leagues on leagues, the long rolling swell of the desert. But keen sight and long study discovered real or miraged changes out there in the lonely gray sea. Ghosts of ruined walls and fallen castles showed dimly through the curtain of haze. Areas of flood-worn rock checkered the long levels that verged on the blue canyons. Farther on pale specters of mesas, domes, bluffs rose through the sweeping gray, until they appeared to end in blank space, beyond which the plateau, like a mirage in the sky, hung foundationless and unreal.
This dead sea of melancholy gray and its myriad manifestations of ruin possessed for Paul Manning a growing absorption. Under the brow of the ridge he would build a cabin with a little porch facing this scene and there he would gaze until the strength of the wasteland had entered into him, or until his restless spirit was quieted forever.
The dark figure of a ragged mustang and a wild rider suddenly appeared silhouetted against the skyline above the knoll. Paul heard the strains of a weird chant carried on the solemn air. The Indian slowed his horse’s easy lope to head down toward the trading post. And presently Paul espied Kintell emerging from the post with a burly white man, no doubt the trader. The man was making forceful gestures and appeared reluctant to let the cowboy leave. The Indian rider dismounted before them to untie a pelt of some kind from his saddle. He went into the post, followed by the trader. Kintell headed for the ridge where Paul awaited him. When he had ascended to within speaking distance, he shouted: “No laigs—will ever take—place of a hawse with Wess Kintell.” He found a seat, and removing his sombrero, he mopped his brow with a soiled scarf. “Wal, boss, you don’t ’pear powerful curious.”
“No. And that worries me. I can’t stick to an idea any more than I seem to be able to stay in one place,” replied Paul.
“Ah-huh. Thet last is a damn good habit—so far as Bitter Seeps is concerned. . . . Trader’s name is Belmont. Guy I didn’t like on sight. He fell for my line pronto an’ I seen through him aboot as quick. Says he hails from Utah. I seen a sour-faced woman an’ a slip of a girl, sorta big-eyed an’ sad. An’ I heahed a kid cryin’.
