Over the Pass Part 52

Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging words to P.D. His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the effect of his leanness. The moonlight on his face, which had lost its tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with the surroundings. You would have said that he could ride on forever without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even seeing any danger sign. He had never been like this in all Firio's memory. The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity.

If Jack would not talk Firio would. Yes, he would ask a question, just to hear the sound of a voice.

"We go to fight?"

"No, Firio."

"Not to fight Prather?"

"No."

"To fight Leddy?"

"I hope not."

"Why we go? Why so--why so--" he had not the language to express the strange, brooding inquiry of his mind.

"I go to save Little Rivers."

"_Si_!" said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question.

"I go to get the end of a story, Firio--my story!" continued Jack. "I have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from John Prather."

"_Si, si_!" said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves of a pack of cards through its fingers. "And then?"

At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be the same to him until it was tanned.

"Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a siege--a siege in the open, without parallels or mines! A siege in the open!"

Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind.

"But you must fight Leddy! _Si, si_! You must fight Leddy first!"

"Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently. "All things in their turn and time."

"_Si_!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal Painter himself.

Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding, plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight, while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light.

Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great, red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of human life.

But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving.

Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a white sail on a green sea.

"Very thick sand there--five or six miles of it. It make this the long way," said Firio. "They call it the ap.r.o.n of h.e.l.l to fools who ride at noon."

"And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?"

"Five or six."

But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of their ponies.

"How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked.

Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he wanted to be exact.

"Almost as many hours as miles," he said.

Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers.

Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the sliver of ear--the baton with which he conducted his orchestra--because this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of G.o.d was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off his body.

"Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household cavalry! You, Wrath of G.o.d, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the faster when the heat of the day is past!"

While Prather and Nogales were riding over h.e.l.l's ap.r.o.n, their pursuers had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of G.o.d and Jag Ear stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down.

"Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time to start."

"And you--you no sleep?" asked Firio.

"I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story--my story--Firio!" And he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead.

It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue.

The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather and Nogales had again become only a speck.

"Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack.

"Very near," Firio answered.

"Their ponies had a whole night's rest--we must not forget that," said Jack; "and they must be in a hurry, for certainly Nogales had sense enough to rest over noon."

"_Quien sabe_!" answered Firio. "But we catch them--_si, si_!"

Leading the way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the tail of Wrath of G.o.d, who was bound to make up the time he had lost in pursuit of the horizon. Another hypothesis of Jack's as to the cause of Wrath of G.o.d's melancholy was that solemn Covenanter's inability to get any nearer to the edge of the earth. Once he could poke his nose through the blue curtain and see what was on the other side, the satisfaction of his eternal curiosity might have made him a rollicking comedian. As for Jag Ear, his baton was once more conducting his orchestra in spirited tempo.

He, who was nearest of all three in heart to Firio, might well have been saying to himself: "I knew! I knew we were not going through the sand!

Firio and I knew!"

So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up with Prather and Nogales. Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather, after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the lead. He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken.

Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on alone. But Prather's horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait.

As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near. A neigh by P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of G.o.d, and Firio was saying to Nogales:

"You went right through the sand!"

"_Si_!" answered Pedro, with a grin.

Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack, nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing.

Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain.

Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided for bringing his faculties under control.