Overland Part 40

Perched among the rocks, some under projecting strata and others in shadowy niches between huge b.u.t.tresses, they discovered at first three or four, then a dozen, and finally twenty wretched cabins. They scarcely saw before they were seen; a hideous old squaw dropped a bundle of fuel and ran off screeching; in a moment the whole den was in an uproar. Startling yells burst from lofty nooks in the mountain flanks, and scarecrow figures dodged from ambush to ambush of the sombre gully. It was as if they had invaded the haunts of the brownies.

The Hualpais, a species of Digger Indians, dwarfish, miserable, and degraded, living mostly on roots, lizards, and the like, were nevertheless conscious of scalps to save. In five minutes from the discovery of the strangers they had formed a straggling line of battle, squatting along a ledge which crossed the canon. There were not twenty warriors, and they were no doubt wretchedly armed, but their position was formidable.

Sweeny, looking like an angry rat, his nose twitching and eyes sparkling with rage, offered to storm the rampart alone, shouting, "Oh, the nasty, lousy nagurs! Let 'em get out of our way."

"Guess we'd better talk to the cusses," observed Glover. "Tain't the handiest place I ever see for fightin'; an' I don't keer 'bout havin' my ears 'n' nose bored any more at present."

"Stay where you are," said Thurstane. "I'll go forward and parley with them."

CHAPTER x.x.x.

Thurstane had no great difficulty in making a sort of let-me-alone-and-I'll-let-you-alone treaty with the embattled Hualpais.

After some minutes of dumb show they came down from their stronghold and dispersed to their dwellings. They seemed to be utterly without curiosity; the warriors put aside their bows and lay down to sleep; the old squaw hurried off to pick up her bundle of fuel; even the papooses were silent and stupid. It was a race lower than the Hottentots or the Australians.

Short, meagre, badly built, excessively ugly, they were nearly naked, and their slight clothing was rags of skins. Thurstane tried to buy food of them, but either they had none to spare or his b.u.t.tons seemed to them of no value. Nor could he induce any one to accompany him as a guide.

"Do ye think G.o.damighty made thim paple?" inquired Sweeny.

"Reckon so," replied Glover.

"I don't belave it," said Sweeny. "He'd be in more ris.p.a.ctable bizniss.

It's me opinyin the divil made um for a joke on the rest av us. An' it's me opinyin he made this whole counthry for the same rayson."

"The priest'll tell ye G.o.d made all men, Sweeny."

"They ain't min at all. Thim crachurs ain't min. They're nagurs, an' a mighty poor kind at that. I hate um. I wish they was all dead. I've kilt some av um, an' I'm goin' to kill slathers more, G.o.d willin'. I belave it's part av the bizniss av white min to finish off the nagurs."

Profound and potent sentiment of race antipathy! The contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages. It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has ent.i.tled "the survival of the fittest," and Darwin, "natural selection."

The party continued to ascend the canon. At short intervals branch canons exhibited arid and precipitous gorges, more and more gloomy with twilight.

It was impossible to choose between one and another. The travellers could never see three hundred yards in advance. To right and left they were hemmed in by walls fifteen hundred feet in height. Only one thing was certain: these alt.i.tudes were gradually diminishing; and hence they knew that they were mounting the plateau. At last, four hours after leaving Diamond Creek, wearied to the marrow with incessant toil, they halted by a little spring, stretched themselves on a sc.r.a.p of starveling gra.s.s, and chewed their meagre, musty supper.

The scenery here was unearthly. Barring the bit of turf and a few willows which had got lost in the desert, there was not a tint of verdure. To right and left rose two huge and steep slopes of eroded and ragged rocks, tortured into every conceivable form of jag, spire, pinnacle, and imagery.

In general the figures were grotesque; it seemed as if the misshapen G.o.ds of India and of China and of barbarous lands had gathered there; as if this were a place of banishment and punishment for the fallen idols of all idolatries. Above this coliseum of monstrosities rose a long line of sharp, jagged needles, like a vast _chevaux-de-frise_, forbidding escape.

Still higher, lighted even yet by the setting sun, towered five cones of vast proportions. Then came cliffs capped by shatters of tableland, and then the long, even, gleaming ledge of the final plateau.

Locked in this bedlam of crazed strata, unable to see or guess a way out of it, the wanderers fell asleep. There was no setting of guards; they trusted to the desert as a sentinel.

At daylight the blind and wearisome climbing recommenced. Occasionally they found patches of thin turf and clumps of dwarf cedars struggling with the rocky waste. These bits of greenery were not the harbingers of a new empire of vegetation, but the remnants of one whose glory had vanished ages ago, swept away by a vandalism of waters. Gradually the canon dwindled to a ravine, narrow, sinuous, walled in by stony steeps or slopes, and interlocking continually with other similar chasms. A creek, which followed the chasm, appeared and disappeared at intervals of a mile or so, as if horrified at the face of nature and anxious to hide from it in subterranean recesses.

The travellers stumbled on until the ravine became a gully and the gully a fissure. They stepped out of it; they were on the rolling surface of the tableland; they were half a mile above the Colorado.

Here they halted, gave three cheers, and then looked back upon the northern desert as men look who have escaped an enemy. A gigantic panorama of the country which they had traversed was unrolled to their vision. In the foreground stretched declining tablelands, intersected by numberless ravines, and beyond these a lofty line of bluffs marked the edge of the Great Canon of the Colorado. Through one wide gap in these heights came a vision of endless plateaux, their terraces towering one above another until they were thousands of feet in the air, the horizontal azure bands extending hundreds of miles northward, until the deep blue faded into a lighter blue, and that into the sapphire of the heavens.

"It looks a darned sight finer than it is," observed Glover.

"Bedad, ye may say that," added Sweeny. "It's a big hippycrit av a counthry. Ye'd think, to luk at it, ye could ate it wid a spoon."

Now came a rolling region, covered with blue gra.s.s and dotted with groves of cedars, the earth generally hard and smooth and the marching easy.

Striking southward, they reached a point where the plateau culminated in a low ridge, and saw before them a long gentle slope of ten miles, then a system of rounded hills, and then mountains.

"Halt here," said Thurstane. "We must study our topography and fix on our line of march."

"You'll hev to figger it," replied Glover. "I don't know nothin' in this part o' the world."

"Ye ain't called on to know," put in Sweeny. "The liftinant'll tell ye."

"I think," hesitated Thurstane, "that we are about fifty miles north of Cactus Pa.s.s, where we want to strike the trail."

"And I'm putty nigh played out," groaned Glover.

"Och! _you_ howld up yer crazy head," exhorted Sweeny. "It'll do ye iver so much good."

"It's easy talkin'," sighed the jaded and rheumatic skipper.

"It's as aisy talkin' right as talkin' wrong," retorted Sweeny. "Ye've no call to grunt the curritch out av yer betthers. Wait till the liftinant says die."

Thurstane was studying the landscape. Which of those ranges was the Cerbat, which the Aztec, and which the Pinaleva? He knew that, after leaving Cactus Pa.s.s, the overland trail turns southward and runs toward the mouth of the Gila, crossing the Colorado hundreds of miles away. To the west of the pa.s.s, therefore, he must not strike, under peril of starving amid untracked plains and ranges. On the whole, it seemed probable that the snow-capped line of summits directly ahead of him was the Cerbat range, and that he must follow it southward along the base of its eastern slope.

"We will move on," he said. "Mr. Glover, we must reach those broken hills before night in order to find water. Can you do it?"

"Reckon I kin jest about do it, 's the feller said when he walked to his own hangin'," returned the suffering skipper.

The failing man marched so slowly and needed so many halts that they were five hours in reaching the hills. It was now nightfall; they found a bright little spring in a gra.s.sy ravine; and after a meagre supper, they tried to stifle their hunger with sleep. Thurstane and Sweeny took turns in watching, for smoke of fires had been seen on the mountains, and, poor as they were, they could not afford to be robbed. In the morning Glover seemed refreshed, and started out with some vigor.

"Och! ye'll go round the worrld," said Sweeny, encouragingly. "Bones can march furder than fat anny day. Yer as tough as me rations. Dried grizzly is nothin' to ye."

After threading hills for hours they came out upon a wide, rolling basin prettily diversified by low spurs of the encircling mountains and bluish green with the long gra.s.ses known as _pin_ and _grama_. A few deer and antelopes, bounding across the rockier places, were an aggravation to starving men who could not follow them.

"Why don't we catch some o' thim flyin' crachurs?" demanded Sweeny.

"We hain't got no salt to put on their tails," explained Glover, grinning more with pain than with his joke.

"I'd ate 'em widout salt," said Sweeny. "If the tails was feathers, I'd ate 'em."

"We must camp early, and try our luck at hunting," observed Thurstane.

"I go for campin' airly," groaned the limping and tottering Glover.

"Och! yees ud like to shlape an shnore an' grunt and rowl over an' shnore agin the whole blissid time," snapped Sweeny, always angered by a word of discouragement. "Yees ought to have a dozen o' thim nagurs wid their long poles to make a fither bed for yees an' tuck up the blankets an' spat the pilly. Why didn't ye shlape all ye wanted to whin yees was in the boat?"

"Quietly, Sweeny," remonstrated Thurstane. "Mr. Glover marches with great pain."

"I've no objiction to his marchin' wid great pain or annyway G.o.damighty lets him, if he won't grunt about it."