Desert Gold

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DESERT GOLD

A ROMANCE OF THE BORDER BY ZANE GREY
AUTHOR OF RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, WILDFIRE, ETC., ETC.

CONTENTS

Prologue

I. Old Friends
II. Mercedes Castaneda
III. A Flight Into The Desert
IV. Forlorn River
V. A Desert Rose
VI. The Yaqui
VII. White Horses
VIII. The Running of Blanco Sol
IX. An Interrupted Siesta
X. Rojas
XI. Across Cactus and Lava
XII. The Crater of Hell
XIII. Changes at Forlorn River
XIV. A Lost Son
XV. Bound In The Desert
XVI. Mountain Sheep
XVII. The Whistle of a Horse
XVIII. Reality Against Dreams
XIX. The Secret of Forlorn River
XX. Desert Gold

D E S E R T G O L D

PROLOGUE

Chapter I

A face haunted Cameron--a woman's face. It was there in the white
heart of the dying campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered
over the flickering light; it drifted in the darkness beyond.

This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set
in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged
with memories of a time long past--of a home back in Peoria, of a
woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector
for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed
infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember.

A sound disturbed Cameron's reflections. He bent his head listening.
A soft wind fanned the paling embers, blew sparks and white ashes
and thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle of blackness. His
burro did not appear to be moving about. The quiet split to the
cry of a coyote. It rose strange, wild, mournful--not the howl
of a prowling upland beast baying the campfire or barking at a
lonely prospector, but the wail of a wolf, full-voiced, crying out
the meaning of the desert and the night. Hunger throbbed in
it--hunger for a mate, for offspring, for life. When it ceased,
the terrible desert silence smote Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul.
He and that wandering wolf were brothers. Then a sharp clink of metal on
stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron to reach for his gun,
and to move out of the light of waning campfire. He was somewhere
along the wild border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the
prospector who dared the heat and barrenness of that region risked
other dangers sometimes as menacing.

Figures darker than the gloom approached and took shape, and in
the light turned out to be those of a white man and a heavily
packed burro.

"Hello there," the man called, as he came to a halt and gazed
about him. "I saw your fire. May I make camp here?"

Cameron came forth out of the shadow and greeted his visitor, whom
he took for a prospector like himself. Cameron resented the breaking
of his lonely campfire vigil, but he respected the law of the desert.

The stranger thanked him, and then slipped the pack from his burro.
Then he rolled out his pack and began preparations for a meal. His
movements were slow and methodical.

Cameron watched him, still with resentment, yet with a curious and
growing interest. The campfire burst into a bright blaze, and by
its light Cameron saw a man whose gray hair somehow did not seem to
make him old, and whose stooped shoulders did not detract from an
impression of rugged strength.

"Find any mineral?" asked Cameron, presently.

His visitor looked up quickly, as if startled by the sound of a
human voice. He replied, and then the two men talked a little.
But the stranger evidently preferred silence. Cameron understood
that. He laughed grimly and bent a keener gaze upon the furrowed,
shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom
there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold!
Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle
affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that
here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper,
an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A
long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long
forgotten that he could recognize it. But it was akin to pain.

Chapter II

When he awakened he found, to his surprise, that his companion had
departed. A trail in the sand led off to the north. There was no
water in that direction. Cameron shrugged his shoulders; it was
not his affair; he had his own problems. And straightway he forgot
his strange visitor.

Cameron began his day, grateful for the solitude that was now unbroken,
for the canyon-furrowed and cactus-spired scene that now showed no
sign of life. He traveled southwest, never straying far from the
dry stream bed; and in a desultory way, without eagerness, he hunted
for signs of gold.

The work was toilsome, yet the periods of rest in which he indulged
were not taken because of fatigue. He rested to look, to listen,
to feel. What the vast silent world meant to him had always been
a mystical thing, which he felt in all its incalculable power, but
never understood.

That day, while it was yet light, and he was digging in a moist
white-bordered wash for water, he was brought sharply up by hearing
the crack of hard hoofs on stone. There down the canyon came a man
and a burro. Cameron recognized them.

"Hello, friend," called the man, halting. "Our trails crossed again.
That's good."

"Hello," replied Cameron, slowly. "Any mineral sign to-day?"

"No."

They made camp together, ate their frugal meal, smoked a pipe, and
rolled in their blankets without exchanging many words. In the
morning the same reticence, the same aloofness characterized the
manner of both. But Cameron's companion, when he had packed his
burro and was ready to start, faced about and said: "We might
stay together, if it's all right with you."

"I never take a partner," replied Cameron.

"You're alone; I'm alone," said the other, mildly. "It's a big
place. If we find gold there'll be enough for two."

"I don't go down into the desert for gold alone," rejoined Cameron,
with a chill note in his swift reply.

His companion's deep-set, luminous eyes emitted a singular flash.
It moved Cameron to say that in the years of his wandering he had
meant no man who could endure equally with him the blasting heat,
the blinding dust storms, the wilderness of sand and rock and lava
and cactus, the terrible silence and desolation of the desert.
Cameron waved a hand toward the wide, shimmering, shadowy descent
of plain and range. "I may strike through the Sonora Desert. I
may head for Pinacate or north for the Colorado Basin. You are
an old man."

"I don't know the country, but to me one place is the same as
another," replied his companion. for moments he seemed to forget
himself, and swept his far-reaching gaze out over the colored gulf
of stone and sand. Then with gentle slaps he drove his burro in
behind Cameron. "Yes, I'm old. I'm lonely, too. It's come to me
just lately. but, friend, I can still travel, and for a few days
my company won't hurt you."

"Have it your way," said Cameron.

They began a slow march down into the desert. At sunset
they camped under the lee of a low mesa. Cameron was glad his
comrade had the Indian habit of silence. Another day's travel found
the prospectors deep in the wilderness. Then there came a breaking
of reserve, noticeable in the elder man, almost imperceptibly
gradual in Cameron. Beside the meager mesquite campfire this
gray-faced, thoughtful old prospector would remove his black pipe
from his mouth to talk a little; and Cameron would listen, and
sometimes unlock his lips to speak a word. And so, as Cameron
began to respond to the influence of a desert less lonely than
habitual, he began to take keener note of his comrade, and found
him different from any other he had ever encountered in the wilderness.
This man never grumbled at the heat, the glare, the driving sand,
the sour water, the scant fare. During the daylight hours he was
seldom idle. At night he sat dreaming before the fire or paced to
and fro in the gloom. He slept but little, and that long after
Cameron had had his own rest. He was tireless, patient, brooding.

Cameron's awakened interest brought home to him the realization
that for years he had shunned companionship. In those years only
three men had wandered into the desert with him, and these had
left their bones to bleach in the shifting sands. Cameron had
not cared to know their secrets. But the more he studied this
latest comrade the more he began to suspect that he might have
missed something in the others. In his own driving passion to
take his secret into the limitless abode of silence and desolation,
where he could be alone with it, he had forgotten that life dealt
shocks to other men. Somehow this silent comrade reminded him.

One afternoon late, after than had toiled up a white, winding wash
of sand and gravel, they came upon a dry waterhole. Cameron dug
deep into the sand, but without avail. He was turning to retrace
weary steps back to the last water when his comrade asked him to
wait. Cameron watched him search in his pack and bring forth
what appeared to be a small, forked branch of a peach tree. He
grasped the prongs of the fork and held them before him with the
end standing straight out, and then he began to walk along the
stream bed. Cameron, at first amused, then amazed, then pitying,
and at last curious, kept pace with the prospector. He saw a
strong tension of his comrade's wrists, as if he was holding hard
against a considerable force. The end of the peach branch began to
quiver and turn. Cameron reached out a hand to touch it, and was
astounded at feeling a powerful vibrant force pulling the branch
downward. He felt it as a magnetic shock. The branch kept turning,
and at length pointed to the ground.

"Dig here," said the prospector.

"What!" ejaculated Cameron. Had the man lost his mind?

Then Cameron stood by while his comrade dug in the sand. Three feet
he dug--four--five, and the sand grew dark, then moist. At six
feet water began to seep through.

"Get the little basket in my pack," he said.

Cameron complied, and saw his comrade drop the basket into the deep
hole, where it kept the sides from caving in and allowed the water
to seep through. While Cameron watched, the basket filled. Of all
the strange incidents of his desert career this was the strangest.
Curiously he picked up the peach branch and held it as he had seen
it held. The thing, however, was dead in his hands.

"I see you haven't got it," remarked his comrade. "Few men have."

"Got what?" demanded Cameron.

"A power to find water that way. Back in Illinois an old German used
to do that to locate wells. He showed me I had the same power.
I can't explain. But you needn't look so dumfounded. There's
nothing supernatural about it."

"You mean it's a simple fact--that some men have a
magnetism, a force or power to find water as you did?"

"Yes. It's not unusual on the farms back in Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania. The old German I spoke of made money traveling round
with his peach fork."

"What a gift for a man in the desert!"

Cameron's comrade smiled--the second time in all those days.

They entered a region where mineral abounded, and their march became
slower. Generally they took the course of a wash, one on each side,
and let the burros travel leisurely along nipping at the bleached
blades of scant grass, or at sage or cactus, while they searched
in the canyons and under the ledges for signs of gold. When they
found any rock that hinted of gold they picked off a piece and gave
it a chemical test. The search was fascinating. They interspersed
the work with long, restful moments when they looked afar down the
vast reaches and smoky shingles to the line of dim mountains.
Some impelling desire, not all the lure of gold, took them to the
top of mesas and escarpments; and here, when they had dug and picked,
they rested and gazed out at the wide prospect. Then, as the sun
lost its heat and sank lowering to dent its red disk behind far-distant
spurs, they halted in a shady canyon or likely spot in a dry wash and
tried for water. When they found it they unpacked, gave drink to the
tired burros, and turned them loose. Dead mesquite served for the
campfire. While the strange twilight deepened into weird night they
sat propped against stones, with eyes on the dying embers of the
fire, and soon they lay on the sand with the light of white stars
on their dark faces.

Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more
drawn to this strange man. He found that after hours of burning
toil he had insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. He reflected
that after a few weeks in the desert he had always become a different man.
In civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest
and gloom. but once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely
world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness.
Did not the desert magnify men? Cameron believed that wild men
in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness,
facing the elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded,
descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere
brutes. Likewise he believed that men wandering or lost in the
wilderness often reversed that brutal order of life and became
noble, wonderful, super-human. So now he did not marvel at a slow
stir stealing warmer along his veins, and at the premonition that
perhaps he and this man, alone on the desert, driven there by life's
mysterious and remorseless motive, were to see each other through
God's eyes.

His companion was one who thought of himself last. It humiliated
Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him
from doing more than an equal share of the day's work. The man
was mild, gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness
he seemed to be mad of the fiber of steel. Cameron could not
thwart him. Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron,
not for himself. Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning
of rock that promised gold; he had enough of the prospector's
passion for fortune to thrill at the chance of a strike. But the
other never showed the least trace of excitement.

One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon. They day had
been exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat
from the rocks persisted. A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy
note from a dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully.
The stars shone white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their
whiteness. And on this night Cameron watched his comrade, and
yielded to interest he had not heretofore voiced.

"Pardner, what drives you into the desert?"

"Do I seem to be a driven man?"

"No. but I feel it. Do you come to forget?"

"Yes."

"Ah!" softly exclaimed Cameron. Always he seemed to have known
that. He said no more. He watched the old man rise and begin
his nightly pace to and fro, up and down. With slow, soft tread,
forward and back, tirelessly and ceaselessly, he paced that beat.
He did not look up at the stars or follow the radiant track of the
moon along the canyon ramparts. He hung his head. He was lost in
another world. It was a world which the lonely desert made real.
He looked a dark, sad, plodding figure, and somehow impressed
Cameron with the helplessness of men.

Cameron grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of
the fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his passion-driven
soul. He had come into the desert to remember a woman. She
appeared to him then as she had looked when first she entered his
life--a golden-haired girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped,
tall and slender and beautiful. He had never forgotten, and an old,
sickening remorse knocked at his heart. He rose and climbed out
of the canyon and to the top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro
and looked down into the weird and mystic shadows, like the darkness
of his passion, and farther on down the moon track and the glittering
stretches that vanished in the cold, blue horizon. The moon soared
radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene. The vault of heaven
seemed illimitable and divine. The desert surrounded him, silver-streaked
and black-mantled, a chaos of rock and sand, silent, austere,
ancient, always waiting. It spoke to Cameron. It was a naked
corpse, but it had a soul. In that wild solitude the white stars
looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly. They had shone
upon a desert that might once have been alive and was now dead,
and might again throb with life, only to die. It was a terrible
ordeal for him to stand along and realize that he was only a man
facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure.
Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness,
somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something
indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay,
something perishable and changeable and growing under all the
fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there
was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined
to be phantoms of peace.

He returned to camp and sought his comrade.

"I reckon we're two of a kind," he said. "It was a woman who drove
me into the desert. But I come to remember. The desert's the only
place I can to that."

"Was she your wife?" asked the elder man.

"No."

A long silence ensued. A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the
sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering
heat. The campfire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.

"I had a daughter," said Cameron's comrade. "She lost her mother
at birth. And I--I didn't know how to bring up a girl. She was
pretty and gay. It was the--the old story."

His words were peculiarly significant to Cameron. They distressed
him. He had been wrapped up in his remorse. If ever in the past
he had thought of any one connected with the girl he had wronged
he had long forgotten. But the consequences of such wrong were
far-reaching. They struck at the roots of a home. Here in the
desert he was confronted by the spectacle of a splendid man, a
father, wasting his life because he could not forget--because
there was nothing left to live for. Cameron understood better now
why his comrade was drawn by the desert.

"Well, tell me more?" asked Cameron, earnestly.

"It was the old, old story. My girl was pretty and free. The
young bucks ran after her. I guess she did not run away from them.
And I was away a good deal--working in another town. She was in love
with a wild fellow. I knew nothing of it till too late. He was engaged
to marry her. But he didn't come back. And when the disgrace became
plain to all, my girl left home. She went West. After a while I heard
from her. She was well--working--living for her baby. A long
time passed. I had no ties. I drifted West. Her lover had also
gone West. In those days everybody went West. I trailed him,
intending to kill him. But I lost his trail. Neither could I find
any trace of her. She had moved on, driven, no doubt, by the hound
of her past. Since then I have taken to the wilds, hunting gold
on the desert."

"Yes, it's the old, old story, only sadder, I think," said Cameron;
and his voice was strained and unnatural.

"Pardner, what Illinois town was it you hailed from?"

"Peoria."

"And your--your name?" went on Cameron huskily.

"Warren--Jonas Warren."

That name might as well have been a bullet. Cameron stood erect,
motionless, as men sometimes stand momentarily when shot straight
through the heart. In an instant, when thoughts resurged like
blinding flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying,
quivering, terror-stricken man. He mumbled something hoarsely and
backed into the shadow. But he need not have feared discovery,
however surely his agitation might have betrayed him. Warren sat
brooding over the campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in
the past.

Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming
thick in his ears, whispering over and over:

"Merciful God! Nell was his daughter!"

Chapter III

As thought and feeling multiplied, Cameron was overwhelmed. Beyond
belief, indeed, was it that out of the millions of men in the world
two who had never seen each other cold have been driven into the desert
by memory of the same woman. It brought the past so close. It showed
Cameron how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had
happened long ago. That which made life significant to him was a wandering
in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret. Some fateful
chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had wrecked.
It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one thing
of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both father
and lover would have found unendurable.

Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death
that put Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be
afraid. It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering
man. All at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's
trouble, or let him stain his hands with blood. He would tell the
truth of Nell's sad story and his own, and make what amends he could.

Then Cameron's thought shifted from father to daughter. She was
somewhere beyond the dim horizon line. In those past lonely hours
by the campfire his fancy had tortured him with pictures of Nell.
But his remorseful and cruel fancy had lied to him. Nell had
struggled upward out of menacing depths. She had reconstructed a
broken life. And now she was fighting for the name and happiness
of her child. Little Nell! Cameron experienced a shuddering ripple
in all his being--the physical rack of an emotion born of a new and
strange consciousness.

As Cameron gazed out over the blood-red, darkening desert suddenly
the strife in his soul ceased. The moment was one of incalculable
change, in which his eyes seemed to pierce the vastness of cloud
and range, and mystery of gloom and shadow--to see with strong vision
the illimitable space before him. He felt the grandeur of the desert,
its simplicity, its truth. He had learned at last the lesson it
taught. No longer strange was his meeting and wandering with Warren.
Each had marched in the steps of destiny; and as the lines of their
fates had been inextricably tangled in the years that were gone,
so now their steps had crossed and turned them toward one common
goal. For years they had been two men marching alone, answering
to an inward driving search, and the desert had brought them together.
for years they had wandered alone in silence and solitude, where
the sun burned white all day and the stars burned white all night,
blindly following the whisper of a spirit. But now Cameron knew
that he was no longer blind, and in this flash of revelation he
felt that it had been given him to help Warren with his burden.

He returned to camp trying to evolve a plan. As always at that
long hour when the afterglow of sunset lingered in the west,
Warren plodded to and fro in the gloom. All night Cameron lay
awake thinking.

In the morning, when Warren brought the burros to camp and began
preparations for the usual packing, Cameron broke silence.

"Pardner, your story last night made me think. I want to tell you
something about myself. It's hard enough to be driven by sorrow
for one you've loved, as you've been driven; but to suffer sleepless
and eternal remorse for the ruin of one you've loved as I have
suffered--that is hell. . . .Listen. In my younger days--it seems
long now, yet isn't not so many years--I was wild. I wronged the
sweetest and loveliest girl I ever knew. I went away not dreaming
that any disgrace might come to her. Along about that time I fell
into terrible moods--I changed--I learned I really loved her. Then
came a letter I should have gotten months before. It told of her
trouble--importuned me to hurry to save her. Half frantic with
shame and fear, I got a marriage certificate and rushed back to her town.
She was gone--had been gone for weeks, and her disgrace was known.
Friends warned me to keep out of reach of her father. I trailed her--
found her. I married her. But too late!...She would not live with me.
She left me.--I followed her west, but never found her."

Warren leaned forward a little and looked into Cameron's eyes, as
if searching there for the repentance that might make him less
deserving of a man's scorn.

Cameron met the gaze unflinchingly, and again began to speak:

"You know, of course, how men out here somehow lose old names, old
identities. It won't surprise you much to learn my name really isn't
Cameron, as I once told you."

Warren stiffened upright. It seemed that there might have been a
blank, a suspension, between his grave interest and some strange
mood to come.

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