Overland Red | Page 3

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 ca?on 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 ca?on.
CHAPTER II
WATER
All round him for miles each way the water-holes had gone dry. The little ca?on stream still wound down its shaded course, disappearing in a patch of sand at the ca?on's mouth, so the prospector felt secure. None had ridden out to look for him through that furnace of burning sand that stretched between the hills and the desert town.
The stream dwindled slowly, imperceptibly.
One morning the prospector noticed it, and immediately explored the creek clear to its source--a spurt of water springing from the roof of a grotto in the cliff. Such a supply, evidently from the rocky heart of the range itself, would be inexhaustible.
A week later he awoke to find the creek-bed dry save in a few depressions among the rocks. He again visited the grotto. The place was damp and cool, glistening with beads of moisture, but the flow from the roof-crevice had ceased. Still he thought there must be plenty of water beneath the rocks of the stream-bed. He would dig for it.
Another week, and he became uneasy. The stream had disappeared as though poured into a colossal crevice. A few feet below the gravel he struck solid rock. He tried dynamite unsuccessfully. Then he hoarded the drippings from the grotto crevice till he had