“Isn’t what beautiful?” I asked.
“The desert, of course!” he said.
The Land of Painted Rocks
I. Dreams
I rubbed my eyes the first time I saw him, because he didn’t have any business being where he was. Not that some strange people didn’t come out of Bessie Crayton’s place. We get used to that in the desert. Bess ran a lunch counter restaurant, looked the world in the eyes, and served it meals. She didn’t talk. She was a good listener, though.
Lots of people couldn’t figure Bessie at all; but I could. She had a heart as big as the desert, steady eyes the color of moonlit sand, and an abiding faith in human nature. Girls from the dance hall would walk across the stretch of sandy street to have dinner at Bessie’s place, and Bessie would treat ’em like sisters. She’d listen to their troubles, give ’em a word of encouragement, and throw in an extra cup of coffee.
Gamblers from the joint a couple of hundred yards down toward the mill would come strolling in for a late cup of coffee, and tell Bess about their hopes and secret ambitions. As for the mining men, they just worshipped her.
She was straight as a string, steady-eyed and calm, with a natural talent for mothering people, even if she was only twenty-five. “We’re all just people,” she used to say, “livin’ here together, and not quite sure what it’s all about. Just because some of ’em make their livin’ in funny ways, don’t be so sure they ain’t just as good as you are.”
Which was all right; but when I saw this man walking out of Bessie’s place I rubbed my eyes, looked again, and rubbed ’em some more. For this man was a Navajo, and his clothes were of buckskin, with silver coins for buttons. You could see where he’s had hard luck and had pulled the dimes off, here and there, to use for cash.
I waited until he’d gone down the sandy street, and then I sauntered over to Bess’s place. I needed a little Mocha anyhow, and I was curious.
She handed me the coffee, looked at me with steady eyes, and smiled. “Curious, Bob?” she asked.
She’d called the turn. I grinned at her and nodded.
“I saw him go out,” I said. “He’s ’way off the reservation. He should have been out in the Painted Desert, not over here in the Mojave.”
She let the smile light die out of her eyes. “Did I ever tell you about Hoste-Ne-Bega?” she asked.
“Don’t be funny,” I told her. “You never told anybody about anything. You’re the champion listener.”
The smile light was back in her eyes. “I’m going to tell you something, Bob Zane, because you’ve got to be in on it. I want somebody I can trust; a man who can point a six-gun if he has to.”
“What’s the matter with Ed Kaplin?” I asked her.
She nodded her head slowly. “Yes. I think Ed Kaplin, too. I need you both.”
I stirred my coffee, and waited.
“Hoste-Ne-Bega was a Navajo who had troubles,” she said, “and he told me about them. — He wasn’t the same Indian that you saw coming out of here a little while ago, but he sent that man to me as a messenger.”
I nodded, wise as a tree full of owls. A girl who could make gamblers confide in her could make an Indian open up without any trouble at all.
“He got to dreaming dreams,” she continued, and her own eyes were dreamy.
She drew up a stool back of the counter, and started to talk. Outside was the desert, the sun beating against the walls of the little shack as though it was trying to dissolve it in sunlight. Flies droned around the screens outside. The heat was like a blanket that had folded itself around everything in a suffocating pall.
“His name was Hoste-Ne-Bega, and he had been banished from the tribe,” said Bess in a dreamy voice. “He didn’t have anything to eat. They’d put him out of the Navajo country, and he came to me, tired, hungry, almost ready to fall. He didn’t have any money. The silver coins that they use for buttons were gone from his clothes. He’d held the buckskin together with bits of wire and old nails. He was too proud to beg, and he was Indian, and wouldn’t work for his food. He preferred to starve if he had to — which was what he was doing.
“When I heard about him he was camped outside the mining camp, sitting down with his face to the west, waiting for the end. I went out to him with some hot soup, but he was too proud to eat. I had to talk to him. I made him understand that I wanted him to eat.
“After a while he took the soup. It was cold by that time, but it had nourishment that gave him new strength. The next morning I took him more food, and finally he came into the place here and let me feed him.
“He’d been here for three days before he began to talk, then he told me of his dreams. Always he’d dream of an old life before the coming of the white man. The Indians were plentiful then, and strong, but the tribe had sickness, and then came the warriors of the other tribes, and there was a big battle, and the Indians were almost all killed.
“An eagle flew overhead, and a feather came drifting down from its wing.
“The medicine men decided it was an omen that the tribe should move to a new ground. They were to begin all over, entirely anew.
“The tribe was not like the Hopis. They lived chiefly by hunting. But they had some crops, and they took enough seed to plant. The other things they left behind. There were big earthenware water pots and cooking pots and a great store of treasure. He told me particularly of the treasure. It was made from a deposit of yellow metal which had been discovered many years before by one of the braves. They made their ornaments from it, and at first the gold had made them prosperous. Then it had proven to be a curse. It had attracted other tribes, who had come in search of the source of the treasure, had come to do battle over the ornaments of yellow metal.
“So the high priests of the tribe decided that all of the misfortunes of the Indians came from this yellow metal. They closed up the place where the mine had been, a place that had been so cunningly hidden that no one had ever found it, and they took just the bare necessities of life, their bows and their arrows, their stock and their little store of seed, and they migrated to a new dwelling place.”
She stopped and looked at me with her level gray eyes. She was so convincing that the Indian’s dreams almost sounded logical.
I lit a cigarette and finished the cup of coffee. “This was all a dream?” I said. “The dream of an old Indian who had suffered the pangs of hunger, and whose mind had probably become affected?”
She nodded her head.
I was impatient. I’d have liked it better if she’d argued that maybe it wasn’t a dream after all, or that it might have been founded on fact.
“That was a dream of something that must have happened, not when he was a little boy, but something that happened long before he was born.” I went on. “I know something of the Navajos. They had trouble with other tribes. But what this man tells about must have been years and years before he was born. There was a great invasion...”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “he admits that. You see, he remembers his childhood perfectly. It was always spent in the one place. What I’m telling you about was a dream. He’s had that dream again and again, ever since he can remember. And in it he lives over the old days of his tribe.”
“Probably something that his father told him when he was a very little boy. His memory played tricks on him when he got old and hungry, and he got to remembering those stories vaguely, and thought they were dreams. He’s absorbed the legends of the tribe.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
“It couldn’t be anything else,” I told her, impatient at her docile acquiescence.